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Karel Margry, "Nordhausen Concentration Camp" (After the Battle, 2024)
Manage episode 464147110 series 2421437
In the history of Nazi concentration camps, and particularly labor camps, there is probably no place that bears the same stigma of wretchedness as 'Dora-Mittelbau' at Nordhausen. Located in the Harz mountains in central Germany, next to a quarry tunnel system in the Kohnstein mountain, it served to house thousands of slave workers for an underground factory known as the Mittelwerk, which produced three of Germany's best-known secret weapons: the V1 flying bomb, the V2 rocket and jet engines for the Me 262 and Ar 234 fighters. With over 20 kilometers of underground galleries, it was the largest underground factory in the world. Many of the inmates died in indescribable misery, being forced to extend the tunnels with meager equipment and under ghastly conditions, sometimes not seeing daylight for weeks on end. Started in August 1943, 'Dora-Mittelbau' in due course became the centre of a whole complex of underground factories in the Nordhausen area, with several subsidiary camps being set up. In all, of some 60,000 prisoners sent there between 1943 and 1945, 20,000 were driven to extinction to implement Nazi Germany's secret weapons program, but they labored late and in vain, for the products they yielded had little impact on the war. The V1 and V2 are the only weapons which cost more lives in production than in deployment: far more people died producing them than were killed from their impact in London, Antwerp and elsewhere.
The history of Nordhausen, already gruesome in itself, ended in a crescendo of violence when, in the final weeks of the war, the surviving inmates were evacuated from the camps in 'death marches'. One group of over a thousand men then became victim of one of the most horrendous of all Nazi atrocities. On April 13, 1945, just outside the town of Gardelegen, their SS camp guards, helped by local troops and Hitlerjugend, locked the prisoners in a big barn and set fire to the inside, burning those inside, killing them with hand-grenades, and shooting anyone who tried to escape from the burning, smoke-filled building. A total of 1,016 men died as a result. When discovered by American troops two days later, Gardelegen quickly became known as the site of one most notorious war crimes committed by the Nazis.
In this book, Karel Margry recounts the history of Nordhausen concentration camp and of the Gardelegen massacre in full detail. Both stories are illustrated with unique Then and Now comparison photographs.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
871 에피소드
Manage episode 464147110 series 2421437
In the history of Nazi concentration camps, and particularly labor camps, there is probably no place that bears the same stigma of wretchedness as 'Dora-Mittelbau' at Nordhausen. Located in the Harz mountains in central Germany, next to a quarry tunnel system in the Kohnstein mountain, it served to house thousands of slave workers for an underground factory known as the Mittelwerk, which produced three of Germany's best-known secret weapons: the V1 flying bomb, the V2 rocket and jet engines for the Me 262 and Ar 234 fighters. With over 20 kilometers of underground galleries, it was the largest underground factory in the world. Many of the inmates died in indescribable misery, being forced to extend the tunnels with meager equipment and under ghastly conditions, sometimes not seeing daylight for weeks on end. Started in August 1943, 'Dora-Mittelbau' in due course became the centre of a whole complex of underground factories in the Nordhausen area, with several subsidiary camps being set up. In all, of some 60,000 prisoners sent there between 1943 and 1945, 20,000 were driven to extinction to implement Nazi Germany's secret weapons program, but they labored late and in vain, for the products they yielded had little impact on the war. The V1 and V2 are the only weapons which cost more lives in production than in deployment: far more people died producing them than were killed from their impact in London, Antwerp and elsewhere.
The history of Nordhausen, already gruesome in itself, ended in a crescendo of violence when, in the final weeks of the war, the surviving inmates were evacuated from the camps in 'death marches'. One group of over a thousand men then became victim of one of the most horrendous of all Nazi atrocities. On April 13, 1945, just outside the town of Gardelegen, their SS camp guards, helped by local troops and Hitlerjugend, locked the prisoners in a big barn and set fire to the inside, burning those inside, killing them with hand-grenades, and shooting anyone who tried to escape from the burning, smoke-filled building. A total of 1,016 men died as a result. When discovered by American troops two days later, Gardelegen quickly became known as the site of one most notorious war crimes committed by the Nazis.
In this book, Karel Margry recounts the history of Nordhausen concentration camp and of the Gardelegen massacre in full detail. Both stories are illustrated with unique Then and Now comparison photographs.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
871 에피소드
모든 에피소드
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1 Gray Davidson Carroll, "Silent Spring," The Common magazine 42:02
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1 Tiziano Manca, "Before Sound: Re-Composing Material, Time, and Bodies in Music" (Transcript Verlag, 2023) 23:27
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1 Wan-Chuan Kao, "White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages" (Manchester UP, 2024) 1:11:14
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1 Matthew Hughes, "Britain's Pacification of Palestine" (Cambridge UP, 2019) 1:27:49
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1 Daniel Silverman, "Seeing Is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 46:08
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1 Alexander Smalls and Nina Oduro, "The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes from the Leading Chefs of Africa" (Phaidon Press, 2024) 24:33
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1 Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell, "Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene" (Routledge, 2024) 52:40
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1 Irina Rebrova, "Re-Constructing Grassroots Holocaust Memory: The Case of the North Caucasus" (de Gruyter, 2020) 55:45
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1 Material Religion, Assemblage, and the Agency of Things in South Asia 49:33
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1 Laureen D. Hom, "The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles" (U California Press, 2024) 1:26:07
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1 Sybil Derrible, "The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives" (Prometheus Books, 2025) 38:40
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1 Jeffrey Thomas Perry, "Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) 45:24
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