Here's Yves, Béon, survivor of Dora labor camp, where the death rate was 1 in 3, and the V-1s and V-2s were built. From his book, Planet Dora, 1985, originally in French.
“But these men at Dora, Ellrich, Harzungen, in the small kommandos or during the evacuation, had held on.
Even dead, burned, or thrown upon a pile of human trash, they were victors. They had shown and proved with their martyred bodies that human beings must never give in, never surrender, never submit to tyranny.
They had proved it our after hour through agonized weeks, months, and centuries.
Many years have passed since Dora ended. You would think that its story was over and done with. It isn’t. At the end of the war, the great powers shared the engineers, the creators, and the fathers of the V-1s and V-2s.
Far from punishing them, they supplied them with laboratories, study offices, and factories. They were also showered with praise and with money, honors, and glory. Nothing was too good for them, and some were shown off as good examples to schoolchildren.
These men took up their work, which the misfortunes of war had forced them to abandoned. And they have succeeded beyond all expectations.
Today, throughout the world, there are silos in place and ready to launch.
And in these silos, there are rockets, the direct descendants of the V-2s of Dora. The fruits of modern science and technology, these fantastic machines can, within a few minutes, destroy all that exists on the surface of the Planet Earth."
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