Nordhausen Concentration Camp

The Nordhausen Concentration Camp, so-called after its location on the outskirts of the German city of Nordhausen, was one of several Nazi concentration camps that became death camps. It operated from summer of 1944 until the U.S. troops reached Nordhausen on April 11, 1945. Technically, the camp was a specialized slave labor camp, but in actuality, conditions were so harsh that it is reasonable to designate it as a death camp because a third of its inmates died (about 20,000 people in less than a year), and survivors were in dire condition by the time of its liberation. The labor force was forced to dig under the Kohnstein, a large mountain at Nordhausen, to create a large underground facility where V-2 missiles and other weapons were produced well away from aerial bombing by Allied forces. The brutal conditions of the camp at the time of its relief are documented in the Warfare History Network's article called "The Liberation of the Nordhausen Concentration Camp".

Wikipedia decision to rename the camp

Originally, the locations of Nazi death camps were used to refer to the camps by U.S. armed forces. The government-run National Archives at College Park, Maryland, holds records referring to several World War II Nazi concentration camps by location, including Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenberg, Nordhausen, and Mauthausen. The National Archives contains a warning page about the dreadful nature of some of the material it contains, including the following statement about why its archivists chose the names they did:

• Archivists choose what language to use when describing materials. Some of these descriptions were written many years ago, using language that was accepted at the time.
• Archivists often re-use language provided by creators or former owners of the material. This can provide important context, but it can also reflect biases and prejudices.
• Archivists often use a standardized set of terms, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, to describe materials. Some of these terms are outdated, offensive, or insensitive.
• In the past, the National Archives has not had standards or policies to help archivists avoid harmful language.

The National Archive contains death records for Nordhausen dating from Oct 16, 1943 until Mar 22, 1945.

"Dora" was one work camp within the Nordhausen complex. The National Archives contain a list of inmates working at the Dora sub-camp.

Despite its location squarely at Nordhausen, Wikipedia calls the Nordhausen Concentration Camp Dora-Mittelbau, and the camp and its horrors are documented in an article separate from the town where they occurred. At Wikipedia (or in Google, which indexes Wikipedia prominently), searching on "Nordhausen" no longer brings up the article about the Nordhausen Concentration Camp. This naming choice in Wikipedia has made it easier for the German city of Nordhausen to disassociate itself from the horrors that were perpetrated in the camp. Under a bland heading entitled "History: 1900 to present", Wikipedia's Nordhausen article has six short paragraphs, only one of which mentions the camp. That paragraph reads:

In the 1930s the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. It imposed discrimination against Jews, with increasing restrictions and violence such as Kristallnacht in 1938, when businesses and synagogues were destroyed. It deported Jews to concentration and death camps. The Mittelbau-Dora Nazi concentration camp, established in 1943 after the destruction of Peenemünde, was located on the outskirts of Nordhausen during World War II to provide labor for the Mittelwerk V-2 rocket factory in the Kohnstein. Over its period of operation, around 60,000 inmates passed through Dora and its system of subcamps, of whom around 20,000 died from bad working conditions, starvation, and diseases, or were murdered. Around 10,000 forced labourers were deployed in several factories within the city; up to 6,000 of them were interned at Boelcke Kaserne, working for a Junkers factory.

Other websites and archives, but not all, have adopted the Wikipedia naming convention for the Nordhausen Concentration Camp. This is an unfortunate example of social media (which Wikipedia arguably is, because its authors work anonymously) influencing history in the direction of sanitizing places from their unsavory past history. The same kind of phenomenon exists for almost all places documented in Wikipedia, including towns, cities and states in the U.S.--the history section, if it exists, is notably sparse on past atrocities such as removal/killing of natives, slavery, or racism.