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[1] 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.[2] 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".[3]
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.[4] 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:Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag
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- ↑ 1.0 1.1 The U.S. troops involved in taking the Nordhausen camp included the 3rd Armored Division, the 104th Infantry Division, and the 9th Infantry Division. Commander Terry Allen of the 104th ordered all of his troops to enter the camp and witness its conditions.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Dora - Mittelbau/Nordhausen Concentration Camp, Holocaust Research Project
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 The Liberation of the Nordhausen Concentration Camp on the Warfare History Network website.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Holocaust Records: Records Relating to Concentration Camps at the National Archives website run by the U.S. Government.
- ↑ Case Number 000-50-37, Vol 8: A list of inmates at Work Camp Dora, [Blank; Category: Nordhausen Concentration Camp] at the National Archives, consisting of typewritten lists of names of workers at the Dora camp within the larger Nordhausen facility.
- ↑ Case Number 000-50-37, Vol 3: Death registers, Oct 16, 1943 - Feb 2, 1945; Category: Nordhausen Concentration Camp at the National Archives, consisting of 40 images of handwritten lists of those identified as having died in the Nordhausen camp.
- ↑ Case Number 000-50-37, Vols 1 and 2: Daily death certificates of inmates of the auxiliary camps, Dec 3, 1944 - Mar 22, 1945; Category: Nordhausen Concentration Camp at the National Archives, consisting of 822 images of handwritten records.
- ↑ Nordhausen, Thuringia article in Wikipedia accessed on May 10, 2023.
- ↑ Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp article in Wikipedia accessed on May 20, 2023.