Nordhausen Concentration Camp

The Nordhausen Concentration Camp, so-called after its location five miles from the town center of Nordhausen, Germany, was one of several Nazi death camps. In its official function, it was a specialized slave labor camp. Originally a subcamp of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Nordhausen became a full camp in October 1944, with large underground facilities where slave labor worked on V-2 missiles and other war production. The brutal conditions of the camp are documented in the Warfare History Network's article called "The Liberation of the Nordhausen Concentration Camp".

Rewriting of history by social media

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.

In 2023, Wikipedia calls the Nordhausen Concentration Camp Dora-Mittelbau instead, and this name has also been adopted by some other online sites. This naming choice in Wikipedia made it possible for the modern city of Nordhausen, Germany to disassociate itself from the horrors that were perpetrated in the camp. For many years, Wikipedia's long article on Nordhausen included only single sentence referring to the "Dora-Mittelbau" camp, and in a photo subtitle, the Wikipedia Nordhausen article designated the camp as an "underground factory". The situation has recently improved, as the Nordhausen article now includes a full paragraph, 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.