Constructed as a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, Dora-Mittelbau, located near the town of Nordhausen in eastern Germany, became an independent camp in the fall of 1944. Beginning in 1943, thousands of prisoners were assigned to Dora to expand the tunnels of an old salt mine buried deep in the Harz Mountains. They built an underground factory that produced the secret V-1 and V-2 rockets. Human life meant nothing in the Nazis' quest to turn the tide of war and avoid defeat.

Even by concentration-camp standards, prisoners in Dora were treated brutally by their captors. They spent their lives with no glimpse of the sun and with no sanitary facilities, laboring until they dropped. Bodies, covered in lice and often weighing only 80 pounds, were returned to Buchenwald for burning at the rate of about 1000 a month.

Once completed, the factory that manufactured the rockets --the state-owned Mittelwerk GmbH--used thousands of prisoners as laborers, including many Jews. They too labored under dismal conditions, drinking their water from leaks in the pipes. Fear of sabotage provided the pretext for guards to employ extraordinary sadism, hanging prisoners or torturing them on a whim. Untold thousands died at Dora and on death marches from the camp in the closing days of the war.