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What Is Peenemünde?
The construction and production of A-4 missiles at Mittelwerk near Nordhausen
was perhaps one of the darkest and most tragic pages in the history of German
rocket technology. Foreign workers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp
prisoners were used to build and produce the missiles under the supervision of
German specialists and Gestapo overseers.
Before work began underground, the workers were brought to the Dora
concentration camp, which had been set up especially for this purpose next to a
picturesque wooded mountain. Inside the mountain factory, the most rigid
regime was established—the slightest violation of order and discipline was
punished by death. Smoke billowed from the chimney of the crematorium at the
Dora camp around the clock. Camp workers died from beatings, torture, diseases,
exhaustion, and execution for the slightest suspicion of sabotage.Very few of the
Dora prisoners who worked on the top-secret vengeance weapon would get out
alive. Nevertheless, an underground center of the anti-Nazi resistance was active
at the camp.
Nine thousand skilled German workers were sent to Mittelwerk as
conscripted workers by the companies AEG, Siemens, Rheinmetall Borsig,
Dynamit AG, Krupp, and Thiessen-Hitton.The Gestapo sent more than 30,000
prisoners from various concentration camps.The camp underground committee,
which consisted of Russians, Czechs, French, and communist Germans,
organized sabotage at the factory under the motto The Slower You Work,The
Closer to Peace! The prisoners found ways to make the most delicate rocket
assemblies useless.
The Gestapo managed to pick up the scent of the underground anti-Nazi
committee, which was led by German communist Albert Kuntz. Among those
arrested and thrown into the Gestapo torture chamber for interrogation were
French officers, Polish partisans, Czech scientists, German communists, and
Soviet prisoners of war. The names of these heroes of the rocket underground
remain unknown to us. But the sabotage continued in spite of the reprisals and
executions. There were also anti-Nazis among the German workers in the
subterranean factory. One of them, the skilled metal worker Joseph Zilinskiy,
who had worked at Peenemünde before being sent to Mittelwerk, managed to
establish contact with Soviet prisoners of war. He was seized by the Gestapo and
thrown into a cell in the Nordhausen barracks. He was to be hanged, but during
a British and American aviation attack the barracks was bombed. He managed
to escape and hid until the end of the war. People such as Zilinskiy, who by some
miracle survived, have enabled us to learn the terrible details of the Nazi’s
subterranean missile production.
In October 1992, I visited a memorial museum created on the territory of the
Dora camp.The young people working in this museum had gathered very interesting
material about the camp’s history, the construction of Mittelwerk, and the
heroes of the resistance.They were searching for the names of the heroes of sabotage
at Mittelwerk and Dora victims.
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