page_title: Mittelwerk
section_title: Other projects
hierarchical_section_title: Mittelwerk / Other projects
caption_attribution_description: English: See title
context_page_description: Mittelwerk was a German World War II factory built underground in the Kohnstein to avoid Allied bombing. It used slave labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp to produce V-2 ballistic missiles, V-1 flying bombs, and other weapons.
context_section_description: In July 1944, Hans Kammler ordered the North Works (Nordwerke) to use cross-tunnels 1–20 for a Junkers jet and piston engine factory, leaving cross-tunnels 21–46 for Mittelwerk GmbH. During February–April 1945, the Nordhausen plant built Taifun anti-aircraft missiles and Heinkel He 162 jet fighters and put into operation a liquid oxygen plant. The plant was the Eber project and used equipment evacuated from the Watten bunker and elsewhere to build Heylandt liquid oxygen generators; the 15 generators were nearly complete when the site was captured.  The Mittelwerk also contained equipment for producing jet fuel, and in an emergency 1944 decentralization program (named Geilenbergprogramm after Edmund Geilenberg) started the "Cuckoo" project, an underground oil plant to be "carved out of the Himmelsburg" North of the Mittelwerk.
  Additional plans for V-2 rocket plants (the Southern Works near Friedrichshafen and the Eastern Works near Riga) were never fulfilled.
  V-1 flying bomb assembly began during October/November 1944 in the South end of tunnel A. At the end of January 1945, 51 V-1s were shipped from a dispersed Fieseler factory in Upper Bavaria (code name Cham) to the Nordhausen plant for completion.  After a second V-1 factory at Burg was closed, the Mittelwerk Werk II in February 1945 was the only factory producing V-1 flying bombs, and a total of 2,275 V-1s were built by Werk II from September 1944 until April 1945.
  Although there has long been speculation about other "exotic" weaponry being constructed or stored at Mittelwerk, evidence of this is scarce. For example, Richard Overy notes in The Bombing War - Europe 1939-1945 (2013): "There is some evidence that small spherical bombs containing radioactive waste were stored in the Mittelbau-Dora works [...], but it is not conclusive."
caption: V-2 weapon in Mittelwerk after liberation
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