Mittelbau-Dora: Making Visible – Remembering and Shaping

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The two-week international encounter project on the site of the former Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp has the motto ‘Making visible’ and is thus actively involved in the design of the site of today's memorial.

The work during the summer camp will consist of excavation work and the visualisation of a barrack foundation in the infirmary of the former prison camp. The work will take place outdoors, in a wooded area, and large and heavy stones will have to be cut. These stones are turned into flat Outline walls set. The work is part of a larger project: the remains of the foundations on the sites of former barracks are to be gradually made visible again so that visitors to the memorial site can recognise the camp structure, which barely exists any more. This year, work will continue on a foundation that has already been started.

The education and communication part of the project will focus on the history of the Nazi concentration camps and the use of concentration camp prisoners in the underground relocation of the armaments industry - using the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp as an example. Due to the location of the project, the focus will be on the so-called prisoner infirmary. The topic of medicine under National Socialism will therefore also be covered. This topic will be approached through tours, working with various sources, exchanging ideas with each other and joint digitally supported project work.

The ‘Dora labour camp’ was founded at the end of August 1943 as a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. As part of the underground relocation of German armaments production in the last two years of the Second World War, concentration camp prisoners had to develop a tunnel system in the Kohnstein mountain near Nordhausen into an underground rocket factory. Series production of the rocket propagated by the Nazi state as ‘Retaliation Weapon 2’ began in January 1944. During the first few months, the prisoners had to live and work in the tunnels. It was not until spring 1944 that an above-ground barracks camp was built and the Dora satellite camp became the Mittelbau concentration camp in its own right. More than 60,000 people from almost every country in Europe, mainly from the Soviet Union, Poland and France, had to perform forced labour for the German armaments industry in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp complex between 1943 and 1945. One in three of them died.