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 (consisting of the 3rd Armored Division, the 104th Infantry Division, and the 9th Infantry Division) 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 (about 20,000 people) died in the course of a single year, and most survivors were in extremely bad shape by the time of its liberation. The labor force was forced to dig under the Kohnstein, a large mountain at Nordhausen, to create large underground facility where V-2 missiles and other weapons were produced safe 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

The locations of Nazi death camps were originally used to refer to the camps, at least in the U.S.. The U.S. 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. Wikipedia, however, 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. This naming choice in Wikipedia makes it easier for the German city of Nordhausen to disassociate itself from the horrors that were perpetrated in the camp, since searching on "Nordhausen" no longer brings up the article about the camp. The Wikipedia Nordhausen article includes a single paragraph about the camp, which 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. 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.