Shortly after three o’clock in the morning on the 1st February 1945 a V2 rocket fired from German occupied Holland slammed into Barnby Road, just behind West Ham Police Station. The ensuing explosion reduced most of the street to a heap of brick dust and rubble - something that was revealed by the headlights of police cars who illuminated the scene for rescue workers (Stratford Express, 16 Feb, 1945). Twenty nine people died including a fireman (Jim Chinnick) who lost his life in the ruins of No. 60 where five members of the Homewood family had been killed by the blast. Along the street two of my relatives also lost their lives - Matilda Curme (aged 44) and her son Dennis (aged 13) were asleep in bed when their home disintegrated around them. Ironically, Matilda's husband George Curme, was serving with the RASC on the Western Front at the time. He went on to live for 90 years, eventually passing away in July 1992.
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Barnby Street - Photo by Warden Ted Carter - After the Battle |
During the period October 1944 to March 1945, over 3,000 V2 rockets were fired and in respect of those that were targeted at London, 2,754 civilians were killed and over 6,500 were injured. The V-weapon programme took a heavy toll of Belgian, British, French and Dutch civilians. To this depressing figure, one must add the countless thousands of slave labourers who lost their lives at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp which served a huge network of underground factories near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains. Production had been moved to Nordhausen in 1944 after the RAF's Operation Hydra had rendered the V-Weapons development site at Peenemunde unviable in the summer of the previous year.
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The Site of Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp |
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Workers in the Tunnels |
On a road trip from Frankfurt to Hamburg earlier this year, my wife and I decided to make a detour having established that it is possible to get down into the tunnels at the Nordhausen Mittelwerk factory. The site is now a memorial to the victims of the Nazi regime, and there is a sensitively positioned information centre just inside the original camp entrance. The Concentration Camp buildings are long gone as are the nearby SS barracks and the busy railway siding that brought workers in and took completed rockets out. The site, which is not as mountainous as I'd imagined, is on a wide level plain adjacent to a large hill in which the production facilities were built.
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One of the Factory Entrances |
The operators of the site run two guided tours a day and we joined the afternoon session along with about forty or fifty other people. All the tours are conducted in the German language but there are information boards at some of the more important locations. It is staggering to think that over 10,000 slave labourers were operating on the site at peak production time, with perhaps 25,000 based in the wider local area. As well as V2s and V1s, the factories turned out engines for Me 262 and Ar 234 jet fighters. The scale of the underground facilities is staggering. The three tunnels which are open to visitors are vast and it is difficult to comprehend that another forty three exist - albeit not accessible to the public.
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A Schematic of the 46 Production Halls |
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One of the Tunnels - V1 Fuel Tank + Debris |
After an hour above ground, patiently waiting for the German narrated commentary to finish, our group moved towards one of the factory entrances. Once underground, I was surprised by how much recognisable debris littered the production areas. Fuel tanks, tail fins, holders for gyroscopes were amongst the components heaped on the floor. There were originally two floors in each production hall, but post-war Red Army demolitions had destroyed the upper level causing everything to collapse to the stone base level. The site was liberated by the US 3rd Armoured Division on April 11th 1945. Because Nordhausen was in the Soviet Sector, the area was handed over to the Red Army in July, two months later. By then of course almost all of the useful material and documents had been moved to the west along with the scientists who had developed these revolutionary weapons. The rest, is of course, history!
My Flickr collection of Nordhausen images -
hereA visit to Peenemunde -
hereAn Operation Hydra veteran -
here