Adventures of a Sea Hunter (24 page)

More than 400 feet beneath the Harz Mountains of Germany, we trudge through darkness, climbing over fallen rock and twisted metal, splashing through pools of stagnant scummy water. The darkness is as thick and oppressive as the silence that fills the tunnel. We interrupt both with flashes of light and the sound of our footsteps as we work our way deeper into the mountain. The chamber stretches on into blackness, and we can’t help feeling some dread as we continue into what we know once was literally the depths of hell itself.

Ahead of us lie 12 miles of tunnels and subterranean galleries, hewn from the rock by slave laborers. Hastily constructed by the Third Reich in the wake of the unrelenting Allied air war against Hitler’s Germany, this underground complex was once part of the Nazi concentration camp system. Buried deep within the mountain was a factory where inmates built jet engines and assembled
V
-1 and
V
-2 rockets. Abandoned by the Germans in April 1945, the complex was sealed shut in 1948 and disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, because it was in the Russian occupation zone.

Since 1964, the area above the former KZ
(Konzentrationslager
— concentration camp) Mittelbau-Dora has been the site of a memorial, and
in 1974 a museum was built on the grounds. The barracks, guard towers and barbed wire are gone—only broken concrete foundations, cracked and rutted streets, and the crematorium on the hill that rises above the camp are grim reminders of what happened here. But below the surface, inside the mountain, lies a moment trapped in time. To access that stark, unmitigated evidence of evil and suffering, a reunified Germany completed a new 500-foot tunnel that cut into Kohnstein Mountain in order to reopen some of the underground complex for visitors. Only 5 per cent of the tunnels are open to the public because when the Russians blasted it closed in 1948, they brought down rock and portions of the concrete and metal that divided the tunnels into a multilevel factory. Postwar quarrying of the mountain above also cracked and loosened the rock, so the tunnels are dangerous. Large rocks fall without warning, and some galleries, once open, are now choked shut. To move deeper into the mountain, and back into the untouched past, we are wearing the rig of hard-rock miners as we climb, slip and slide over huge boulders, gravel and mud. Even so, at least a third of the complex lies sealed beneath cold water that has seeped in and flooded the tunnels, along with their assembly lines, workshops and offices.

It’s December, and outside, the temperature is well below freezing, with snowflakes dancing in the wind. Inside the mountain, the temperature hovers just above freezing. Our breath fogs as we haul our dive equipment deep into the heart of the mountain. We will be among the first to slip beneath the water and explore the flooded depths of Mittelbau-Dora. Our goal is to venture into some of its forgotten rooms and bring back film footage to share with the world.

Our
Sea Hunters
team is now a close-knit band of brothers in the field, underwater, underground, on the decks of ships and in the studio. Producer and team leader John Davis, chief diver Mike Fletcher, his son Warren, our second underwater cameraman, Marc Pike and soundman John Rosborough make up the core team. Guided by our colleagues Dr. Willi Kramer, Torsten Hess (curator of KZ Mittelbau-Dora) and a mine safety engineer, we find ourselves in a unique situation,
diving into the depths of a flooded underground concentration camp to see what untouched evidence remains of Nazi crimes against humanity. Dr. Kramer, who is with Germany’s Department of Monuments and Culture, is the chief underwater archeologist for Northern Germany and the government’s only underwater archeologist to work with Germany’s hydrographic office and the military. That assignment has included diving to explore sunken warships and U-boats, downed aircraft and subterranean chambers. Willi was the first to dive here, and now he leads us into the darkness.

I turn to John Davis and say, “This looks like one of the rings of hell.” He replies, “Dante couldn’t have imagined this.” He’s right. The dark, the cold, the silence and the overwhelming sense of the horrors that took place here engulf us as we travel deeper into the tunnels.

The achievement of the age-old dream of human flight in the early twentieth century spawned a new dream of flight into space. Scientists in various countries experimented to perfect rocket designs through the 1920s and ’30s, with varying levels of success. In 1932, the new Nazi government set up a rocket program. Among the scientists who joined that program was Wernher von Braun, who, with full funding and Wermacht (Army) support, developed a series of rockets: the
A
1,
A
2 and
A
3. The Germans built and tested these first rockets at an artillery range outside Berlin. By 1935, they needed a new facility.

The island of Usedom, on the Baltic coast at the mouth of the Peene River, proved to be the ideal locale. Known as Peenemünde, this new test center, developed by both the Wermacht and the Luftwaffe (Air Force), opened in May 1937. There, in isolation, von Braun and his team began the design and testing of a new rocket, the
A
4. That weapon, designed to be a long-distance combat rocket, would later become notorious as the feared
V
-2. But the testing of the A4 was plagued by problems, because its twenty thousand individual parts required meticulous assembly. As
the Germans worked to improve the range and targeting of the
A
4, they also took steps to simplify its construction on an assembly line.

The first successful launch of an
A
4 rocket came only after Germany lost the Battle of Britain and at Hitler’s urging, as he wanted results after years of costly development and tests. On October 3, 1942, an A4 roared off the pad. The space age had begun, but with a deadly purpose. Hitler demanded that five thousand rockets be built for a mass attack on London. At the same time, the rocket scientists had designed a smaller but also deadly weapon, the Fi 103, later designated the
V
-1, to attack Britain. These small winged rockets were the world’s first cruise missiles.

The “V” designation came from Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who called the rockets
Vergeltungwaffe
(vengeance weapons). The
V
-2, a single-stage rocket, was 46 feet long, weighed 14 tons, carried a one-ton payload (two-thirds of which was the explosive charge) and traveled at a maximum velocity of 3,600 miles per hour, with a range of 200 miles. Facilities for constructing the rockets were built at Peenemünde, using prisoners from concentration camps as workers. The first assembly lines to build
V
-1 rockets started up in July 1943, and in early August, a new line was added to build
V
-2s. First fired at Paris in early September 1944,
V
-2s were also fired at London and Antwerp. In all, out of 4,600
V
-2s built, the Nazis fired about 3,200 in anger, most of them, despite popular belief, not at London but at Antwerp. The
V
-1 and
V
-2 rocket barrage against the Allies killed about five thousand people. Ironically, four times as many—nearly twenty thousand—died in slave labor camps constructing the rocket facilities and making the weapons themselves.

Located in the middle of Germany near the town of Nordhausen, about 35 miles from the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp, the Dora labor camp (later Mittelbau-Dora) became the primary center for the manufacture of
V
-1 and
V
-2 rockets after Allied bombing raids struck Peenemünde in August 1943. The bombers did not cause extensive damage, but Peenemünde’s work was not a secret and it was vulnerable to further attack. Production and assembly of the rockets
was taken over by the dreaded SS, which decided to relocate rocket production to underground factories built and manned by slave laborers from concentration camps. In late August 1943, the
SS
established a sub-camp of Buchenwald in an underground fuel storage facility at Kohnstein. A series of tunnels, originally excavated in the mountain for a gypsum mine, became the basis for a massive underground factory known as the Mittelwerk.

While scientific research and testing continued under von Braun at Peenemünde, the underground camp and complex were being hacked out of rock to serve as the primary production facilities for both the
V
-1 and
V
-2 rockets. From late August 1943 through to the end of the year, prisoners from Buchenwald lived in the tunnels, drilling, blasting and hauling rock in grueling twelve-hour shifts in the midst of incessant noise, dark and damp conditions that killed thousands. Jean Michel, a French resistance leader arrested by the Gestapo, who arrived at the Dora complex on October 14, 1943, described his first day as “terrifying”:

The Kapos [prisoner bosses] and
SS
drive us on at an infernal speed, shouting and raining blows down on us, threatening us with execution, the demons! The noise bores into the brain and shears the nerves. The demented rhythm lasts for fifteen hours. Arriving at the dormitory [in the tunnels]… we do not even try to reach the bunks. Drunk with exhaustion, we collapse onto the rocks, onto the ground. Behind, the Kapos press us on. Those behind trample over their comrades. Soon, over a thousand despairing men, at the limit of their existence and racked with thirst, lie there hoping for sleep which never comes; for the shouts of the guards, the noise of the machines, and explosions and the ringing of the bell reach them even there.

The prisoners worked twenty-four hours a day in alternating twelve-hour shifts. Tiers of wooden bunks in the dripping wet chambers served as their sleeping quarters, with oil drums cut in two serving as toilets. Very little water was available, save that which wept from the
rocks and soaked everyone. Disease broke out and added to the death toll caused by overwork, falling rock and exhaustion. In such hellish conditions, the casualties were high. French historian Andre Sellier, himself a former inmate of the complex, documented the arrival of 17,535 inmates between August 1943 and April 1944. In that period, 5,882 either died and were cremated in the ovens at the complex or Buchenwald, or were “transported.” Those prisoners too ill or too injured to work were shipped to Bergen-Belsen and the Majdanek camps in “liquidation transports.” As new inmates kept arriving, the death toll grew higher. In all, some 26,500 died at Dora, according to Sellier’s research: 15,500 in the camp or on “transports,” and 11,000 at the end of the war, when the
SS
marched many survivors out of the camp and most of those unfortunates were killed.

The prisoners at Dora were for the most part prisoners of war— Russians and Poles—as well as French resistance fighters, German prisoners of conscience, political prisoners and, later in the war, Jews and Gypsies, who were singled out for particularly brutal treatment by the ss. Other nationalities also joined the ranks of Dora’s inmates. After Italy’s withdrawal from the Axis, the Germans turned on their former allies with a vengeance. A group of Italian officers, sent to Dora to work as slave laborers, balked at entering the tunnels, so the Germans shot them all. A Greek inmate, Anton Luzidis, spoke for all the prisoners at the end of the war when he testified: “The meaning of Dora was fright. I cannot find the proper words to characterize the conditions there. If often happened to me that I asked myself whether I was still alive in the world, or whether I was brought into this hell after my decease.”

Production of Dora’s first rockets began in January 1944 when the prisoners started work on
V
-2s. That same month, 679 prisoners died in the camp. By August 1944, work had started on the first
V
-1 rockets in the tunnels and the death toll of prisoners mounted. The
V
-1 factory was set up by the
SS
and their industrial partners in the manufacture of the weapon, Volkswagen. By March 1945, reacting against what they termed “sabotage,” which could be something as simple as using a piece of scrap leather to make a belt to hold up a pair of pants that had grown
too large because of starvation, the
SS
began rounding up inmates and hanging them in groups from the cranes in the underground factory. The executions increased in the last month of the camp’s operation. When American forces began closing in, the
SS
evacuated the civilian support workers and the last remaining rocket scientists. Most of the inmates were shipped out to other camps for liquidation, while thousands were “death-marched” in the snow. At a barn in nearby Gardelegen, the
SS
locked 1,050 prisoners in a barn, set it on fire and machine-gunned those who made it out of the burning building. Only thirty-four men made it out alive.

The
SS
abandoned the camp on April 4, 1945, and the U.S. Army liberated Dora and its tunnels seven days later. Several hundred starving, dying inmates, all that remained of the approximately sixty thousand slave laborers who had filled the camp and built the rockets, greeted them. The Americans, well aware of the scientific and military value of the German rocket program, removed the parts of about a hundred
V
-2 rockets from the tunnels before the Russians arrived in July, because the camp and complex were within the recently established Russian zone of occupation. In October 1946, the Russians, too, removed rocket parts and equipment and shipped them to the Soviet Union. The Russians tried to destroy the tunnels with explosives but could not complete the job. In the summer of 1948, they blasted the entrances to the tunnels to seal them, supposedly forever.

The Sea Hunters
visit to Germany starts with a visit to Peenemünde, which, like Dora, was once locked away behind the Iron Curtain and was inaccessible, due to its use as a Soviet and East German fighter base. Peenemünde sits on the Baltic coast, at the end of long, low, sandy peninsula, surrounded by shallow marshes on one side and the open Baltic on the other. The cold wind blowing off the sea chills us to the bone as we drive through the largely intact base. Decades of harsh life under communist rule meant that little changed here, and as we pass
fences and grim brick and concrete buildings, it is easy to imagine Peenemünde “in its prime” as a top-level Nazi base. It is a surreal moment made all the more so when we visit the former Luftwaffe airfield on our way to the rocket-launching sites.