Boelcke Barracks; also Nordhausen) was a subcamp of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp complex where prisoners were left to die after they became unable to work.

It was located inside a former Luftwaffe barracks complex in Nordhausen, Thuringia, Germany, adjacent to several pre-existing forced labor camps.

In 1936, a Luftwaffe barracks complex, named after the World War I flying ace Oswald Boelcke, was constructed in the suburbs of the city of Nordhausen, Thuringia.

[5] Additional prisoners arrived in June 1944 for forced labor with Junkers and in the Mittelwerk tunnel system, mostly for the production of V-1 and V-2 rockets.

[3][4] On 8 January 1945, the SS-Totenkopfverbände, which ran the concentration camp system, took over two two-storey garages of the Luftwaffe barracks to use as housing for 6,000 prisoners who were forced to work in the V-2 rocket production in nearby underground factories.

[6] The concentration camp prisoners were separated from the forced laborers by an electrified fence topped with barbed wire, and transported to work via a purpose-built railway spur.

[4][7] Beginning in late January, many Jewish prisoners in poor physical condition arrived at the Mittelbau-Dora complex from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen.

[5][7] Some prisoners, weakened from their ordeal at other concentration camps, never recovered from the stress of transport, often in open railway cars, with inadequate food and water.

[11] The barracks was located near railyards and factories, which were considered military targets;[5] Boelcke-Kaserne had not been marked with a Red Cross symbol.

[16] The American soldiers were outraged; one wrote, "No written word can properly convey the atmosphere of such a charnel house, the unbearable stench of decomposing bodies, the sight of live human beings... lying cheek by jowl with the ten-day dead..."[15] A 15 April report describes the camp as "the most horrifying example of Nazi terrorism imaginable".

According to some accounts, soldiers of the 104th Infantry Division killed German civilians in Nordhausen who denied knowledge of the atrocities, believing that they were partially responsible.

Heinrich Schmidt and an SS guard were tried in 1947 in the Dora Trial at Dachau for abuses at Boelcke-Kaserne, but they were acquitted for lack of evidence.

[4][12] According to Michael J. Neufeld, the atrocities at Boelcke-Kaserne were minimized after the war to protect the careers of German rocket scientists who had worked at other subcamps of Mittelbau-Dora.