Planet Dora; A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age
Alvin Gilens (Cover Art) Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Second Printing [stated]. Trade paperback. xxviii, [10], 250, [2] pages. Sticker residue on back cover. An extraordinary memoir by a survivor of the Nazi camps, Yves Béon. Planet Dora is a recollection of life and death in a concentration camp like no other. Dora was a cavernous underground factory cut out of solid rock, where thousands of prisoners beaten, starved, killed, and living underground for weeks at a time. The purpose of all this brutality was to build the world’s first operational rockets: the V-1 and V-2 missiles, Hitler’s vengeance weapons. Some of Germany’s most brilliant engineers were involved with production at Dora, including Werner von Braun, who after the war went on to become the father of the American space program. It was his Saturn V rocket, designed with the help of his wartime comrades, that put the first man on the moon; while the Saturn V project was headed by the same man who had been the director of slave labor in Dora. In fact, some of the very rockets built in Dora were packed up after the war and shipped to New Mexico to serve as the seeds of the U.S. space program. The greatest technological achievement of the twentieth century had its origins in the enslavement and murder of thousands of innocent people, the down payment of a Faustian bargain that still tarnishes the foundation of our reach for the stars. Yves Beon, a slave laborer forced to build V1 and V2 rockets, discusses his former German masters who went on to run the NASA space project. A memoir by Yves Beon, a 71-year-old retired shipping merchant from Brittany, is about to challenge one of the United States' most powerful myths - the glorious record of a national space program that reaches to the stars and put man on the moon.
The American edition of his book is a raw account of death and survival in the Dora concentration camp. In the 20 months before it was liberated, an estimated 20,000 prisoners drafted in from nearby Buchenwald perished in atrocious conditions at the underground Mittelbau-Dora camp, the only SS camp formed explicitly for weapons production.
The V2's technical director, SS officer Wernher von Braun, led the Saturn booster programme for NASA. From Dora, where a third of inmates died of disease, exhaustion or were brutally killed, von Braun visited Buchenwald to select more inmates to work on the ballistic missile. Arthur Rudolph, production manager at Dora and Nazi party member as early as 1931, became manager of the Saturn V launch vehicle. He finally fled back to Germany rather than face a denaturalization hearing in the US in 1984. Michael Neufeld, curator of world war two history at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, has written that Rudolph "was not just the manager of slave labor but also an advocate of it". Another former SS member, Kurt Debus, was director of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. The whitewashing of the Nazi issue continued long after the official end of Operation Paperclip.
In his introduction to Planet Dora, Neufeld explains how an East German expose of von Braun's SS record and links to Dora in the early 1960s were ignored by the US press. "Only the efforts of French and Belgian Dora survivors in the late 1960s and 1970s brought this suppressed history back to light,'' he writes. Beon is discovering how different the perspective can be across the Atlantic. "The American edition of Planet Dora uses the word Nazis throughout - I only used Germans because that is who I was fighting. The US entered the war to fight the Nazis,'' he says. "On the jacket, they call the book a memoir of the Holocaust. Here, that means the mass murder of Jews - perhaps it's broader in the US." At Dora, there were no Jews as such, says Beon, who was imprisoned for activities in the French Resistance. But the biggest gulf is that between Beon's view of Dora scientists and the American view of the same men. "Our Dora prisoners' association has fought constantly but it's difficult because von Braun is a hero in the US - I went to Cape Canaveral: there, he's the Lord. It's very hard to get Americans to see that von Braun and other experts had brains but were not decent people."
Beon only became aware of what had really happened some years after the camps were liberated. But being sure they were used did not prepare him for the reality. "One day, I saw von Braun was a big shot in America, in charge of missiles. It was a shock." That was the start of Beon's efforts to reassert the suppressed history of Dora. The Dora prisoners' association had been a matter of regular reunions. Now it had another aim. Beon took charge of campaigning to expose his former tormenters in North America. "I found that these people were very influential in the US. They were old, retired but still had friends.'' Beon also found that the US Jewish lobby, so ready to mobilize on Holocaust issues, was not interested in a camp where there were no Jews. Neufeld and the Smithsonian Institution gave him encouragement and support. Raising a response in US universities proved harder. "What I want people there to understand is that although those Germans had really good brains, they used their brains the wrong way'', he explains. Condition: Very good.
Keywords: Holocaust, von Braun, Dora Concentration Camp, NASA, V2 Rocket, Slave Labor, Buchenwald, Arthur Rudolph, Saturn V, Kurt Debus, Forced Labor, V-2, V-1, Missiles, Aerospace, Technology Development
ISBN: 0813334926
[Book #72658]
Price: $37.50