In mid-1943 Nazi Germany entered a crisis from which it was to emerge vanquished.
Michael Neufeld is curator of the Space History Division of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum..
He lives in Paris.
About the Author: Andr Sellier, historian and former diplomat, is the co-author (with his son, Jean) of The Atlas of the Peoples of Central Europe and The Atlas of the Peoples of the Orient, published in France.
Illustrated with 20 pages of photographs and drawings, and 24 maps.
He recounts the horrors of everyday life at Dora--prisoners dying by the hundreds and indescribable suffering--and the murderous "evacuation" of the Camp by railroad convoys and death marches, which took place in early 1945 and led to the death of thousands of prisoners.
He has utilized all available documents as well as unpublished testimony from several dozen fellow prisoners.
In this dispassionate but powerful account, Andr Sellier, himself a former prisoner at Dora, tells the dramatic Story of the camp, the tunnel factory, and the underground work sites.
There prisoners were put to work in a huge underground factory, building V-2 rockets, the secret weapon developed by German scientists in an attempt to reverse the course of the war, under the direction of Wernher von Braun.
Originally a mere Kommando attached to Buchenwald, it became one of the largest Nazi concentration camps.
The Dora Camp, located in the center of Germany, was one of the most notorious.
While the genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies continued at extermination camps, numerous outside "Kommandos" were set up in the vicinity of the large concentration camps.
Faced with a shortage of manpower in armaments factories, the Third Reich sent concentration Camp prisoners to work as slaves.
In mid-1943 Nazi Germany entered a crisis from which it was to emerge vanquished
