Slave Labor Built V-Weapons

Published May 01, 2015

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Americans at the entrance to the captured Mittelwerk factory. (U.S. Air Force photo)

Germany did not have enough skilled labor to produce as many V-weapons as quickly as it wanted. Therefore, the Nazis used skilled prisoners as forced labor to build V-1s and V-2s. Most of this work was done in a huge underground complex known as the Mittelwerk, which the Nazis set up after Allied bombing disrupted V-2 operations at Peenemunde. The Mittelwerk occupied large tunnels underneath a mountain near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains in central Germany. When the Allies destroyed V-1 factories in bombing raids, Buzz Bomb production also moved to the Mittelwerk.

Some 60,000 prisoners -- Russians, Poles, French, Germans, Czechs, Hungarian Jews, Gypsies, Italians, Belgians, Yugoslavs, Dutch and others -- labored to build V-weapons. Twenty thousand of them died in the Mittelwerk's miserable conditions in about a year and a half, from the start of work in autumn 1943 to the end of the war in spring 1945.

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Slave Labor Built V-Weapons

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