Magnus von Braun

Magnus "Mac" Freiherr von Braun (10 May 1919 – 21 June 2003) was a German chemical engineer, Luftwaffe aviator, rocket scientist and business executive.

In his 20s he worked as a rocket scientist at Peenemünde and the Mittelwerk.

At age 26, he emigrated to the United States via Operation Paperclip, where he worked for some years at Fort Bliss.

After completing boarding school at Hermann Lietz-Schule in Spiekeroog, he began his studies in 1937 at Technische Universität München.

There he remained after receiving his master's degree in organic chemistry, and became an assistant to Nobel laureate Hans Fischer.

Von Braun arrived at Peenemünde in July 1943 at the request of Wernher von Braun.

After massive Allied bombing disrupted the original V-2 development center in the Baltic town of Peenemünde in mid-1943, the majority of German rocket production was moved to the Mittelwerk.

Prisoners from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps provided slave labor for this huge endeavor.

Inmates were marched into the tunnels daily and compelled to work by the notorious Nazi SS, who handled all security issues.

The usual horrific methods were employed and over 20,000 slaves perished during this subterranean rocket factory's existence.

In March 1944 he was arrested with fellow rocket specialists Wernher von Braun, Klaus Riedel, Helmut Gröttrup, and Hannes Lüersen, but was later released.

In late summer 1944 he transferred to the Mittelwerk where he engineered V-2 rocket gyroscopes, servomotors, and turbopumps.

The Mittelwerk was an underground munitions factory dug into Germany's Harz Mountains in order to avoid aerial bombardment by British and American planes.

It consisted of two tunnels bored through the mountain range near the town of Nordhausen, each a mile long and connected by dozens of cross tunnels.

Railways laid through the main tunnels brought raw materials in and finished rockets out.

The entire cavity provided some 35 million cubic feet of space.

Magnus von Braun's involvement with the Mittelwerk began in the fall of 1944, soon after full production began.

The first V-2s produced earlier that year had a high failure rate and sabotage was suspected.

Concern about these problems prompted Wernher, who was still based at Peenemünde, to send his younger brother to the Mittelwerk in September.

While some minor sabotage did occur in the tunnels, it was relatively rare.

The real reason for the poor quality of early Mittelwerk missiles was the effort to take cutting-edge research technology and put it into mass production under slave labor conditions.

Tossed into this brutal environment, Magnus reported directly to the factory's chief of rocket production, Arthur Rudolph, who had an office in one of the main tunnels.

This work connection with Rudolph would span decades and continents.

In November 1944, Rudolph put Magnus in charge of rocket fin servomotors, which were the most troublesome V-2 component at that time.

During this period, concerns over sabotage were at their height.

In a notorious incident that winter, several Russian prisoners suspected of sabotage were executed by being hanged from cranes used to lift rocket parts and left dangling for a full work day, as an example to other inmates.

In this tense atmosphere, servomotors were at the heart of two abuse accusations leveled against Wernher von Braun by Mittelwerk prisoners after the war, one that may have actually involved Magnus.

After Germany surrendered in 1945, Rudolph was part of a group of Nazi scientists who emigrated with the von Braun brothers to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip.

The U.S. Army put them to work in New Mexico developing intercontinental ballistic missiles.

In 1955 he began a career as a senior executive with Chrysler's missile and later automotive divisions, retiring in 1975.

He lived for 58 years partially in the United States and partially in the United Kingdom until his death.

He was the brother of Sigismund and Wernher von Braun.

Von Braun was born in Greifswald, Pomerania, to Magnus Freiherr von Braun and Emmy von Quistorp.

Moving on to NASA in the 1960s, Rudolph continued to collaborate with Magnus, who by then was employed by the main contractor for the Saturn V lunar rocket, Chrysler Corporation.

As Nasa's project director for the Saturn V, Rudolph was publicly acclaimed after the Moon landing, but towards the end of his life, his wartime complicity in using slave labor at the Mittelwerk became more widely known.

These revelations then forced Rudolph to make a 1983 deal with the U.S. Justice Department in which he voluntarily relinquished his U.S. citizenship to avoid prosecution and possible loss of his government pension and Social Security benefits.

Rudolph then returned to Germany, where he died in 1996.

In a 2002 article about Wernher's potential culpability in Nazi slave labor at Mittelwerk and several other locations, Neufeld dismissed most claims that von Braun carried out direct sadistic behavior as spurious, easily disproved by tracking his known locations during the war.

However, Neufeld felt that there were two accusations in particular that merited further study, the second of which might have involved Magnus.

Michael Neufeld, a Smithsonian historian and author of a 2007 biography of Wernher, has tried to unravel claims by Dora prisoners that they personally witnessed brutality administered by the more famous von Braun brother.