What is Mittelwerk?

After the Allies bombed Wernher von Braun’s rocket factory at Peenemunde, the Nazis relocated operations underground to an abandoned gypsum mine that became Mittelwerk.

It took over a year to excavate, creating more than 5 miles of tunnels underground. This work was done by tens of thousand of slave laborers under brutal conditions.

My brother and I traveled to Germany in the summer of 2019, to retrace the steps of the 104th U.S. Infantry which liberated Mittelbau-Dora and captured Mittelwerk. We saw the site of the barracks, the parade grounds, the front gate, and the crematorium, a tiny two-room building that still stands. Then we entered the tunnels of Mittelwerk, to walk where Jack Waters would have gone on April 11, 1945. The tunnels still contain the partial remains of rusted V-2 rocket engines, gyroscopes and other detritus.

The summer of 2019 was also the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, powered by Wernher von Braun’s famous Saturn V rocket. Von Braun emerged in the 1950s as a Disney-fied all-American hero and a major force at NASA.

No doubt, von Braun was a great American. But he was also a Sturmbannführer in the SS. He designed the V-2 rockets that bombed London and Antwerp. He visited Mittelwerk more than a dozen times during the war. When he found progress lacking, he went to Buchenwald and requisitioned thousands of slave laborers, an almost certain death sentence. More than 20,000 slave laborers died in the making of the V-2 rockets at Mittelwerk; more than five times the number that were killed as a result of V-2 bombings.

Our book never answers the question as to whether the U.S. should have recruited Nazi scientists, but it is a parable of what can happen if you open that door. The characters and situations in the book are fictional, but Mittelwerk, T-Force, the Osenberg list, Operation Paperclip, the Venona Project are all real. For more than 30 years, the CIA and FBI employed former Nazis as spies and informants in the fight against communism.