Mittelbau-Dora

Mittelbau-Dora - darkometer rating : 10 - Of all the large memorial sites of former Nazi concentration camps in Germany , Mittelbau-Dora stands out in a number of ways: the camp was the last one to be set up during the latter phase of WWII . It was also one of the deadliest. The forced labour here took place mostly in underground tunnels – where V1 and V2 missiles were assembled – and a stretch of these old tunnels has been made accessible to visitors. This adds to the historically dark theme of a concentration camp a literally dark underground component which is pretty much unique. This makes Mittelbau-Dora a top-notch dark tourism destination in more than one sense. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: Mittelbau-Dora is sometimes also called Dora-Mittelbau ... the two variants seem to be more or less freely interchangeable – even at the memorial site itself you encounter both! – but the one preferred here is somewhat more frequently used. The place started out originally as a satellite camp of the large Buchenwald concentration camp from summer 1943. Later, from October 1944, Mittelbau-Dora became a concentration camp in its own right, i.e. with its own independent administration and its own satellite camps (40 of them in total). The purpose of the camp was to have forced labourers dig out deep tunnels in the Kohnstein mountain, in an effort to move arms production underground to shelter it from the increasingly crippling air raids that Germany became subjected to as the fortunes in WWII turned against the Third Reich .