My son and I visited La Coupole on Wednesday, near Wizernes and Helfaut, just outside St Omer. The tranquil sunny day, with birds singing all around, was almost enough to fool us into thinking that this had always been a lovely semi-rural location with nothing more intrusive than some quarrying to spoil the scene, but the massive concrete dome gave a clue to a much more unpleasant past.
Although originally intended by the occupying German forces in 1943 purely as the site of a storage depot for V2 rockets (Vergeltungswaffe - Vengeance Weapon - 2, also known as the A4 Aggregat-4), which would be fired at London from a massive bunker at Éperlecques, some 7.5 miles away, the plan changed following the destruction of the Éperlecques site by Allied bombers on 27 August. The site at Wizernes was then chosen as the location of a heavily fortified complex where V2s could be both stored and launched, so late in 1943 construction began on the massive concrete dome, 5m thick, that remains to this day.
V2 rockets were to be stored in a series of tunnels cut into the chalk, with the explosive warheads being fitted in the area beneath the dome, before the rockets were then moved out, in a vertical position, to one of two launch pads in the hollowed out quarry (now occupied by the car park). A large contingent of forced labour was used to construct the complex (conscripted Frenchmen and Russian prisoners of war), as well as German miners and other skilled workers, but thankfully the site was rendered useless by heavy Allied bombing in June and July 1944, so was never completed.
The museum that is now housed within the area below the concrete dome gives a fascinating account of the site’s history, the appalling treatment of forced labourers not only at this site but also at the Mittelwerk site in the Kohnstein hill at Nordhausen in Germany where V2 rockets were constructed, and the role of Wernher von Braun in the development of rocket technology firstly in Germany and then from immediately after the Second World War in the USA. There is also now a 3d planetarium on the site, where we saw a film about our solar system and a film about the space race, in which von Braun’s Saturn V launch vehicle played such a prominent part.
I found myself pondering a number of things after this visit. One was how readily the Americans (and others) turned a blind eye to the fact that von Braun and many of the technicians from the V2 project were Nazi Party members and that von Braun himself was an SS officer. When politically and militarily (or economically) expedient, it’s interesting to note that one’s past matters not one iota.
I also found myself thinking about the terrible treatment of prisoners and, in parallel with that, of the Jews in concentration and labour camps. We rightly go to great lengths to ensure that these atrocities are remembered today, and the displays at La Coupole certainly won’t allow you to forget (and here’s a warning: some material there is totally unsuitable for young children). But how come there are times today when we do not intervene to prevent equally terrible things from happening between different ethnic groups or rival factions in some of the world’s hotspots? It comes back to political, military or economic expediency, does it not? When we stand to lose something (oil, for example) then our governments act. But if there is no direct impact on us then the politicians tell us that “it is not our policy to interfere in another country’s internal affairs”.
How can we be so concerned about the atrocities of the Nazis 70 years ago but fail to act when we hear of genocide, ethnic cleansing and other similar atrocities today?
Isn’t one of the reasons we remember the past to ensure that we don’t let such things happen again?
