ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 171
gave Speer and Kammler a head start in the construction program they
began and completed between 1943 and 1944.
The site consisted of two main tunnels running in parallel between the
northern and southern faces of the ridgeline. One of these, Tunnel B, the
main V-2 production line, was a kilometer and a half long.
Between the tunnels, like the rungs of an enormous ladder, were 50
"galleries," each between 100 and 200 meters long. Many had been
component manufacturing facilities for the giant rocket assembly line.
Some, such as those given over to the manufacture of jet engines, were
assembly lines in their own right.
Until the construction of concentration camp Dora nearby, the slave
workers who had prepared Nordhausen for the V-l and V-2 had lived in
situ.
Six thousand prisoners had crammed into three tunnels, Number 46
being one of them. Initially, they had slept on straw, their surroundings
lit only by a few carbide lamps. Then, they had been allowed to build
bunks, four-story affairs that touched the ceiling, but which still failed to
accommodate everyone. Since work went on around the clock, this did
not matter; the laborers went to work and slept in shifts.
Beyond Gallery 18, deep inside the mountain, there was no ventilation,
water or heating. Every explosion set off by the tunnelers filled the
galleries with blinding, choking dust and gases.
This, mixed with the smell of the open latrines—oil drums sawed in
half with two planks on top—made the air almost unbreathable. They
also made the tunnels a place of terrible disease and infection. It was a
privilege to be on the evening rota that loaded the latrines onto train
wagons and emptied them in the open air.
A little more than 50 years later, as I walked the galleries beneath the
Kohnstein, I found the silence deeply troubling. I'd wanted to concentrate
on the science and engineering, to look at the Mittelwerk as a
place that had been responsible for the most awesome piece of technology
to have come out of Europe during the war; to breathe the same air as
those who'd created the A-4 rocket's assembly line, to soak up that
atmosphere in the way that a profiler would use a murder scene to build
a picture of the killer. This place, after all, was one of the final staging
posts to Kammler's disappearance. I needed to think as he had thought.
But uppermost in my mind was the sheer scale of the crime that had been
committed down here and its unexpected proximity to my own ordered
existence. The people who'd toiled and died down here to create this
Dantean design from Kammler's notebook, the same one perhaps that