The camp commandants at Dora regularly tried to get rid of those prisoners too weak to work who had overwhelmed the infirmary. They were transferred to so-called “rest” camps where most of them died, if they did not die “in transit.” At Dora, three loads of 1,000 prisoners were sent in the first quarter of 1944, two to Majdanek and one to Bergen-Belsen.

In February 1945, the Boelcke barracks at Nordhausen began to receive transports of prisoners from Dora and its subcamps considered unfit for work. A very large number of them were gathered there when Nordhausen was bombed on April 3 and 4, 1945, and countless were injured or died. Survivors remained at the barracks until the arrival of the Americans on April 11.

The shocking discovery of the dead and the injured was terrible, even for the hardened troops in the US 3rd Armored Division. Huntsville’s John Rison Jones was one of the liberators of this site. The infantry treated the 405 survivors found in the ruins. They forced the inhabitants of Nordhausen to bury the 2,017 corpses in communal graves.