“DORA: DISCOVERY & DESPAIR”
Jill Brown
Exhibition at Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust sheds light on little-known underground slave labor camp.
In 1948, Soviet forces blasted shut the entrance to the tunnels in the obscure Mittelbau-Dora labor camp in central Germany, sealing the secret underground facilities for decades. Only after the reunification of Germany were the tunnels reopened and made accessible to the public for the first time.
In 1994, when Alvin Gilens, a veteran photographer of Holocaust memorials and sites, was invited to document the remains of the camp and factory at Dora, he discovered that the remains of the underground factory were intact, just as they had been left forty years earlier. “Photographing in complete darkness, walking on the rubble of the factory and amongst the spirits that inhabit the tunnels, is not like anything else that I have ever experienced,” said Gilens.
His interpretive photographs, which were first exhibited in 1995 at the Meyenberg Museum in Nordhausen, Germany, are now part of a temporary exhibit at Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, “Dora: Discovery and Despair,” through March 29, 2019.
Work on the Mittelbau-Dora camp began in 1943, when the Nazis, concerned about Allied air raids on industrial complexes in Germany, sent Buchenwald prisoners to a nearby gypsum mine to construct a large underground complex for the purpose of producing V-1 missiles and V-2 rockets.