Continued directly from the number preceding: at first light the author goes into the Kohnstein with a carbide lamp, a Reichsbahn yardmaster, and seven soldiers, to bring out the last hundred rockets' worth of steering gear before the county changes hands. What he walked through to get it he tells in fewer words than he has spent on any dinner party in these Papers; the notes below supply what he does not. —Ed.
The lamp was carbide, a flame the size of a thumbnail with a tin reflector behind it, and Faber fed it water and trimmed it for me with the patience of a man instructing a slow apprentice. There were nine of us at the mouth of Tunnel B at seven in the morning: Faber with his ledger and the works plan, myself with Purcell's grease-pencil copy, and a Sergeant Kandel with six riflemen and two flat trolleys that ran on the plant's own rails. The Army's bulbs were strung the first four hundred yards, from the earlier removals; past the last bulb the mountain went on by lamplight, and it went on for better than a mile. The air came out at us the whole way, cold under the cold, oil and wet stone and the third thing, and a quarter mile in I had the answer to a fortnight of ringing. My nose gives two days' warning of a catastrophe, as the reader knows, and it had given me no date because there was no date left to give. Nothing was coming. The thing it smelled was finished, had been finished since the spring before, and the mountain was keeping the smell of it the way a cellar keeps cold.
I had been told the dimensions at the yard and did not believe them until the lamplight stopped finding the ceiling. Two main tunnels ran through the hill south to north, wide enough for double track, tall as a church nave, and between them the cross galleries ran off at intervals, forty-six by Faber's plan, every one of them a shop. Faber gave the measurements as we walked, a yardmaster's habit, so many meters driven, so many square, more floor under the one hill than under all the works his railroad served; I checked nothing and believed him. We went past a gallery of lathes standing in their own chips, past tail sections nested like cups, past fire doors and transformer cages and a wall of empty gas bottles racked to the roof. It was cold in there the way a vault is cold, one temperature the year round, and our breath climbed through the lamplight; the German fixtures hung dead overhead the whole way, wired for a city and switched off like one. In the assembly hall the line had simply stopped: rockets in the slings at every stage of their making, one with its skin half on and its frames showing, hand trucks where they had been let go of, a foreman's board still chalked with a shift a year gone. Kandel's men had been in twice before, after the motors. They walked up the middle of the tunnel, out from under everything, and nobody said much.
Our business lay deep, behind gallery forty-one, but the route went first past galleries that had held no machines. Bunks. Timber frames four tiers high, run along both walls and doubled down the middle, aisles between them a man's width; straw in some, blankets in a few, pressed flat and gone to felt; chalk numbers on the posts, four and five chalked to a berth that would have been narrow for one; steel drums at the gallery mouth that I did not require explained to me. I put my lamp along the lowest tier and gave up counting at the second rank of frames. On one bunk a bowl sat upside down. Under another was a wooden shoe, one only. "What slept here?" I said, and heard the verb only after it was out. "The camp," Faber said. "The prisoners. The first year they did not go above ground at all. They drove the galleries and they slept in the galleries. Later there were the huts outside." The crates were not in there, and we went on.1
Faber walked with the plan held against his chest. "I made up trains," he said after a while, to nobody who had asked him anything. "Outside. Wagons in, wagons out. I never came inside until the Americans brought me in." "Nobody's asking you now," I said. "No," he said, and put the plan under his arm, and that was the whole of the conversation for half a mile.
It was one of Kandel's men who asked the next question, a corporal from Dayton, at the place where a traveling crane crossed above the assembly line. He put his light up the beam and wanted to know what the marks were, rubbed through the grime along it, either side of the hook. "Rope," Faber said. "They hanged men from it. The crane lifted twelve at one time. The shifts were stopped and made to watch." "Hanged them for what?" "Sabotage," Faber said. "A weld filed thin. A wire bent the wrong way. Working slow was sabotage, if the tally said so." The corporal took his light down off the beam. My breakfast came up as far as the top of my throat and I sent it back where it belonged and read Purcell's plan by lamplight, four galleries to go, my thumbnail running along the fold it had worn soft since Thursday.2
The stores lay up a ramp behind forty-one, in a dead-end bore the width of a boxcar: crates to the roof, two hundred and forty-odd, stenciled in German where they were stenciled at all. This was the work I was billed for, and I will say plainly it came easier than the reputation it rested on deserved. Kowalczyk's bench had taught me, years before anyone in Texas heard of these articles, that an instrument declares itself if you give it light and let it; I had the men open one crate in ten and matched what lay in the straw against the stencils, and by noon had the bore sorted into sheep and goats. Steuergerät, the control gear itself. Kreiselgeräte, the platforms, machined like the inside of a good watch; those I knew the way you know a man's brother, their twin being wrapped in a sock in my billet, entered on no inventory in this world. Mixing amplifiers; servo gear; junction boxes I ruled out by weight without opening. Faber chalked the keepers and kept the tally, the riflemen ran the trolleys in relays back to the light, and I stood in the bore calling the sorts, with a manifest under my arm that I was careful never to touch with a pencil. Kandel kept two men and his carbine pointed up the tunnel north, where the bore ran on toward the far mouth and the lamplight quit. "Major says anything comes in wearing a red star, we load rocks and wave," he said. "Anything come in that end yet?" "Wind," I said, which was the truth, and neither of us thought much of it as an answer. The soldiers ate their ration at noon, standing in the main tunnel. I was not hungry. I mention it because I cannot remember another occasion.
Along in the afternoon my lamp starved and guttered out while I stood alone at the back of the bore, between the rock and the last rank of crates. I have been in the dark before; I have not been in that dark. It came in like water into a boot, and the cold with it. The trolley noise was off around the bend and might as well have been in Ohio, I could hear my own heart and a drip somewhere keeping time with it, and my legs proposed, on their own authority and in the strongest terms, to run me into a wall. I stood still, because running was not on offer, and the reader may enter that as the sum of my courage on the day. It was Faber's lamp that came around the crates, and Faber's hand that fed mine its water, and neither of us said a word about my face.
It was while the flame came up that I saw the wall, his light being on it at the height of a bunk tier. The bore had been a sleeping gallery before it was a store; the bolt holes still showed where the frames had been torn out to make room for shelving. Scratched into the rock with a nail, in letters an inch high: MASSON G. ROUEN. Under the name, strokes, cut in bundles of seven; three bundles and two over. Twenty-three. Days of something, weeks of something, men of something; I do not know, and the twenty-fourth was not begun. I read it twice while the lamp steadied. I write nothing down, the reader has my system by now, and I wrote nothing down in that mountain; I have the name all the same, and the count, and I have had both through fifty-five years in which nobody once asked me to produce them. The stencil tally came out right, and we took the last crates down the ramp on the second trolley.3
The push back was downhill by a grade you could feel and not see, and the mouth showed first as a grey coin, then a doorway, then the whole of a February evening, and I drank the moving air like the first drink of the day. From the apron at the mouth you look down on the camp: the long grey huts, the wire on its poles, the gates standing open. You look, if you look at all, at the slope south of it under the pines, where the ground lies in long raised rows, squared at the ends. I had driven under that slope twice a day for two weeks and had those rows down as garden allotments. Faber stood by me while the men chocked the trolleys for the grade to the yard. "It should go in a report," he said. "What is below. The galleries. The beam." "Not one of mine," I said. "This detachment was never in this county, Herr Faber. That is the entire art of the mission." He looked at the mountain for a while. "Then I will remember it," he said, in the voice of a man accepting freight, and I said that was his affair, and went down to see about the loading.4
Faber ruled off the master that evening in copperplate: control compartments, one hundred. Purcell read the line twice and grinned for the first time in a fortnight. "Bells and clappers both," he said. "Texas gets rockets that steer." The last cut went west at dusk behind the pilot engine, forty-one cars under seal, the surveyors' fires already burning up on the ridge road, and I stood at the yard throat and watched it out of sight exactly as I had watched all the others, in good professional temper, my name on nothing it carried. That was the whole of my instructions. I will not pretend it was not also the whole of my inclination.5
Bunny's Tuesday letter was on my cot at the billet: the club had got up The Mikado, the lake was frozen out past the pier, and Daddy asks are you finding good things. I answered it before the light went, three lines, the weather, the trains, and yes, tell Daddy, very good things. Then I ate a full dinner, and slept, I am obliged to report, soundly. The recall came up from Frankfurt inside the week, Considine wanting me out before the county changed flags over my billet; and the routing, by some clerk's economy I have never since troubled to believe in, ran through Berlin. The card in the valise had an address on it, and under the address, until the next war, then; and Berlin stood one night up the line.
The sleeping galleries the author walked through are cross-galleries 43 to 46. The Mittelwerk was driven out of an old anhydrite mine in the Kohnstein from late August 1943, after the Royal Air Force bombed Peenemünde and V-2 production was ordered underground; the labor came by truck from Buchenwald. Through that first winter the prisoners lived where they worked: four-tier bunks in the rock, no daylight, no water for washing, the blasting run around the shifts, dust that never settled, dysentery general; the dead were carried to the mouth by the morning shift and trucked to Buchenwald for burning until Dora built a crematorium of its own. The hut camp at the tunnel mouths, Dora, later the independent concentration camp Mittelbau, was not fully occupied until 1944; by then the tunnels had done a winter's killing on their own. Some sixty thousand prisoners passed through Dora and its subcamps between August 1943 and April 1945; about twenty thousand of them died. The author's count of the crates survives, in Faber's copperplate. His count of the bunks was given up, as he says, at the second rank. —Ed.
The marks on the beam are in the record. Executions for sabotage, so charged, were carried out in the tunnels by hanging from the traveling crane above the assembly line, the condemned gagged with wood so that they could not call out to the shifts halted to watch, and the crane lifting as many as twelve at a time, exactly as the yardmaster states. The pace rose as the front approached: in March 1945 men were hanged from it by the dozen at a session, and the executions at Mittelbau in its final half year ran into the hundreds. The charges Faber lists, the filed weld, the bent wire, the slow hand, are the charges in the surviving orders. —Ed.
The Dora registers are incomplete, part having been burned in April 1945, but they carry a Masson, Georges, born at Rouen in 1914, fitter by trade, seized at Rouen in the summer of 1943, to Buchenwald by way of Compiègne that August, to Dora with an October transport, assigned to the tunnel-driving details. His death is entered for 14 March 1944, cause Herzschwäche, heart weakness, a formula the Dora clerks used many hundreds of times that winter for men worked past use. He was twenty-nine. Twenty-three weeks lie between the arrival of his transport and the date entered for his death; the editor sets down the arithmetic without insisting on it. —Ed.
Nordhausen was taken by the American 3rd Armored and 104th Infantry Divisions on 11 April 1945. In the Boelcke-Kaserne barracks at the edge of town, used in the plant's last months as a dying place for prisoners no longer able to work, the soldiers found more than a thousand dead and some hundreds near it, and the Army ordered the male civilians of Nordhausen to carry the dead up the hill and bury them by hand; the raised rows under the pines are those graves. In the first days of that April the SS had marched and trained out some forty thousand prisoners toward Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück; thousands died on the roads, and at Gardelegen, on 13 April, more than a thousand who could go no farther were driven into a barn and burned. —Ed.
The reports of Special Mission V-2 enumerate cars, tonnages, part numbers, and dates, and mention the camp at the tunnel mouths nowhere. In that silence the author's paperwork is indistinguishable from everybody else's; the omission was the mission's practice, not his invention, and he is entitled to that much company. The arithmetic, however, is short. The V-2 killed something over five thousand people at the receiving end, in London and Antwerp and the towns around them. The building of it killed about twenty thousand of the prisoners made to build it. It is the distinction of this weapon, alone among the weapons of that war, that it killed more people in its making than in its use. The gear the author brought out of the mountain went with the rest to White Sands, New Mexico, where the first reassembled rocket rose from the desert, for science, in the spring of 1946. —Ed.