Mittelbau-Dora (also
Dora-Mittelbau and
Nordhausen-Dora) was a German
Nazi concentration camp located near
Nordhausen in
Thuringia,
Germany. It was established in late summer 1943 as a subcamp of
Buchenwald concentration camp, supplying labour for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the
V-2 rocket and the
V-1 flying bomb. In the summer of 1944,
Mittelbau became an independent concentration camp with numerous subcamps of its own. In 1945, most of the surviving inmates were evacuated by the
SS. On 11 April 1945, US troops freed the remaining prisoners. Around one in three of the roughly 60,000 prisoners who were sent to Mittelbau did not survive.