Magnus von Braun

Early life

von Braun was born in Greifswald, Pomerania, to Magnus Freiherr von Braun and Emmy von Quistorp. His politician father moved the family to Berlin in 1920, where the three boys "lived in a bubble of upper-class privilege, with a butler, servants, and a grand piano." Magnus attended primary school at Berlin's prestigious French Gymnasium prior to finishing his secondary education at the Hermann Lietz-Schule boarding school in Spiekeroog. He joined the Nazi party upon graduation and subsequently served as a Spiekeroog Hitler Youth leader. Magnus moved to Munich in 1937 to attend the Technical University of Munich. He studied chemistry and posted excellent grades, receiving his master's degree in 1940 in organic chemistry, and subsequently became an assistant to Nobel laureate Hans Fischer.

Unlike his older siblings, Magnus experienced a National Socialist adolescence. His brothers can be seen as having joined the Nazis for reasons of professional advancement; Magnus signed on for the ideology. His politicized early years naturally influenced his character. Even well after the war, Magnus stood apart from his friendly and gregarious brother Wernher by his displays of arrogance and aristocratic pretension. This was duly noted by Army officers who kept files on both von Brauns after their 1945 arrival in the United States. One Fort Bliss Counterintelligence Corps agent took such a dislike to Magnus that sometime in 1948 or 1949, he wrote in his file that the youngest von Braun was a "dangerous German Nazi", adding that "his type is a worse threat to security than a half a dozen discredited SS Generals."

The two younger von Braun brothers shared an enthusiasm for aviation, and like Wernher, Magnus also took up sailplane flying as a teenager. In October 1940, as the war entered its second year, the newly minted chemist and glider pilot was promptly drafted into the Luftwaffe. There he learned to fly multi-engine aircraft, and became proficient enough at instrument and night flying to be assigned as an instructor, temporarily avoiding frontline service. In mid-1943, as the Allied bombing campaign intensified and German aviator losses soared, Magnus received orders to train on fighter planes. At this point, Wernher stepped in and used his influence to get his younger sibling discharged from the air service and hired as a civilian chemical engineer at the Nazi rocket research center near Peenemünde. This move likely spared the younger von Braun's life, as German fighter pilots suffered staggering losses during the last two years of the war.

Peenemünde Army Research Center

Once he checked in at the secret base on the Baltic, Magnus was initially assigned to the propellant development section of the Wasserfall antiaircraft missile, due to his chemical expertise. His brother Wernher was then the wunderkind 31 year-old technical director of the entire facility, orchestrating hundreds of engineers and thousands of workers to produce the world's first liquid-fueled rocket able to reach outer space. Magnus arrived just before Operation Hydra, the first air raid against the installation carried out by British bombers during the night of 17–18 August. He and his brother survived unhurt. After the Peenemünde raid, and in light of other devastating 1943 attacks against German war factories, it became obvious to the Nazi leadership that serial production of their new rocket weapon, which the scientists called the A-4 but soon better known as the V-2, needed a location safe from enemy bombs. Addressing these concerns, Wernher von Braun chaired a meeting at Peenemünde on 25 August 1943, where underground tunnels were first considered to mass-produce the A-4/V-2.

The meeting notes still exist, and they also mention using concentration camp prisoners, thus providing the first documentary link of slave labor and the von Braun brothers. At this meeting, Wernher, his deputy Eberhard Rees, and five others debated the merits of using "caves" near Saarbrücken, Germany for missile production: "The workers for the middle and center section manufacture previously planned for VW [the pilot production plant in Peenemünde] can be drawn from the prisoner camp F1. The German supervisory personnel will go along with them." That same day, Magnus flew his brother and the rest of this group to Berlin in a Ju-52 to discuss the initiative further at the Reich Chancellery on 26 August, with top Nazi industrial officials Albert Speer and Hans Kammler in attendance. (Wernher served as co-pilot on the big three-motored transport plane, but he could not command it himself as he lacked a multi-engine rating.)

Immediately following this Berlin conclave, Magnus flew his brother to have a look at the Saarbrücken caves on 29 August, and then on to the town of Nordhausen in the Harz highlands of Thuringia the following day for a personal inspection of the future site of underground missile production. The brothers spent three full days at Nordhausen, returning to Peenemünde on 2 September. Although exactly what they did and whom they met with there is unknown, Wernher certainly must have entered the former gypsum mines located just three kilometers away for the first time. There, two enormous galleries had been bored into a large densely wooded hill that locals called the Kohnstein. Germans had been digging into the Kohnstein's limestone for gypsum since 1917, but in the 1930s these small mining affairs were connected into one big cavity, which the Nazis used to store strategic reserves of fuel, fats and oils. The barrels had now been removed, and the subterranean space stood temporarily empty.

Gestapo arrest

Right on the heels of the February trip, a dramatic and important event for the brothers took place. When Magnus flew the Ju-52 from Nordhausen back to Peenemünde on 21 February, there was an order awaiting Wernher to meet with SS leader Heinrich Himmler at Himmler's field headquarters near the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia. At this meeting, Wernher politely declined Himmler's proposal to inject additional funding into the missile program if the young professor would agree to a control transfer from the army to the SS. von Braun's bold rejection of the deal set in motion a power play by the Reichsführer-SS, who was not often refused something he wanted. One month later, Himmler ordered the arrest of Magnus, Wernher, and fellow rocket specialists Klaus Riedel and Helmut Gröttrup, and also Hannes Lüersen, owner of a Zinnowitz home near Peenemünde. The Stettin Gestapo carried out the arrest, probably on 22 March 1944. Charges included defeatism, sabotage, and a treasonous scheme-in-the-making by Wernher to fly off to England with the rocket plans!

The only evidence for these ostensible offenses against the regime was a secret report from an informer who had been watching Wernher for the SS security division, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), since October 1943. Notes from informer's report were made by General Alfred Jodl, operations chief of the army's high command. During Jodl's briefing by SD agents, he learned that the scientists had made unwise statements during an alcohol-saturated late night party at Hannes Lüersen's Zinnowitz home. Jodl kept notes during the briefing, which still survive in the documentary record. He recorded the SD informant's claims about what the tipsy scientists blurted out during incautious party talk. "Assertions[:] that the war will turn out badly, and regarding their weapon the main task is to create a spaceship. S.D. has assembled material. RF SS [Himmler] has been informed… S.D. wants to know what will happen when all three [Wernher, Riedel, and Gröttrup] are snapped up. The men were treated well, being held in Stettin’s police station holding cells rather than sent off to a harsh Gestapo prison. They were allowed to receive food parcels from Peenemünde engineers who drove over with packages.

Though disconcerting at the time, this arrest and brief imprisonment by the Gestapo would prove to be a boon for the brothers after the war. It became the basis for a widespread postwar mythology promoted by former "Peenemünders" that they were never really interested in helping Germany fight, but instead just played along with the Nazis to get the necessary money to perfect their space rocket. This story would be told many times to many people, and became canon among true believers. There is no doubt that dozens of the rocket specialists were genuinely interested in probing space, and Wernher showed courage by refusing to do what Himmler obviously wanted him to do. However, the actual rationale behind the arrest was typical hard-nosed Nazi bureaucratic infighting. Wernher himself admitted this more than once when relating his most honest versions of the tale. Himmler's intent all along was to use their detention to pressure the German army to turn over control of the rocket program to the SS. This endeavor was ultimately successful later that year.

The Mittelwerk

In September 1944, Magnus von Braun saw his life take another dramatic turn when his brother sent him to join the exodus from Peenemünde to the Mittelwerk. As noted previously, this was an underground munitions factory created by drilling two enormous tunnels through the Kohnstein. Each was 1.8 kilometers long, and they were connected by dozens of evenly spaced cross tunnels, like rungs on a ladder. Each cross tunnel had a length of about 160 meters. Full-sized railways had been laid down along the main tunnels; these brought raw materials in and finished rockets out. This colossal chamber provided some 35 million cubic feet of space.

Rudolph made Magnus his engineer in charge of the rocket's center section and tail assembly, where he served for his first three months in the Mittelwerk. By then, serial production had entered a predictable routine. Prisoners from Dora and its smaller satellite subcamps were marched by the SS into the tunnels each dawn to provide slave labor for this huge endeavor. They were mostly Polish, French and Russian, with smaller numbers of Belgians, Czechs, Roma people, and a smattering of other nationalities thrown in. Many were captured resistance fighters and their supporters; others were simply swept up in labor drafts and enslaved inside Dora. The SS handled overall security, assisted in this by German civilian workers who served as foreman on the shop floor. The SS guards of course employed their usual horrific methods. The death toll most frequently cited in the historical literature for Mittelbau-Dora and the Mittlewerk is 20,000, obviously an estimate. However, French historian André Sellier has recalculated this number by adding the devastating prisoner mortality incurred near war's end during forced "death marches" as the SS hastily evacuated the camps. Sellier concluded that "[f]or the whole [Mittelbau-Dora] concentration camp complex, which finally reached about 40,000 prisoners, the loss of human life during a period of about twenty months amounted to some 26,500 victims-—15,500 in the camp and the ‘transports’ and 11,000 at the time of the evacuations."

Magnus's time inside the sub-terrestrial manufactury matches its peak months of production. Prior to his arrival, there had been numerous problems with the still-experimental liquid-fueled rocket which required constant adjustments; many of these had been ironed out, although the troublesome servomotors and occasional air bursts of tested rockets continued. These matters aside, the factory was hitting its production stride as Magnus settled in. Between 1 October 1944, and 18 March 1945, more than 20 completed missiles daily moved out of the tunnels on special flatcars pulled by locomotives. They were then immediately sent west for action. Manufacture peaked during these five months before terminating entirely at the beginning of April, as the Nazi state entered final meltdown.

Accusations of abuse

Rudolph shifted Magnus to a new job in November 1944, chief of servomotor production. In the late 1970s, accusations emerged in France soon after Wernher’s 1977 death asserting that he had perpetrated dramatic acts of violence at the Mittelwerk. They accelerated yet further in the 1990s, when prominent Dutch-American astronomer Tom Gehrels published an influential 1994 article in the British journal Nature. Gehrels, who had been a teenager in the Dutch resistance during the war, used notarized statements from former Dora prisoners to assert that Wernher had personally slapped inmates, informed on them to the SS to get them hanged, and walked into the tunnels each morning with his female secretary, side-stepping around piles of dead bodies to reach their offices.

Michael Neufeld, a Smithsonian historian and author of a 2007 biography of Wernher, has tried to evaluate claims by Dora prisoners that they personally witnessed brutality administered by the most famous von Braun. In a 2002 article about Wernher's potential culpability in Nazi slave labor, Neufeld dismissed most claims that Wernher von Braun carried out direct sadistic behavior inside the Mittelwerk as spurious, easily disproven 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. "[R]eports that [Wernher] von Braun attended hangings, ordered hangings, attended hangings in SS uniform, etc., have scarcely been discussed in the literature because such testimonies lack credibility," Neufeld wrote. "But in recent years I have received two reports from French Dora survivors that deserve more consideration."

In the first incident, survivor Georges Jouanin, whose job was to climb into upright tail sections of the missiles to install cables to the servomotor, placed a wooden-soled shoe on one of the units. He later recorded that "someone has noticed my wooden-heeled clog atop such a fragile organ, and I feel a hand pulling insistently on the end of my striped pants, thus forcing me out of the tail unit. 'You, out of here, man, you're committing sabotage. You shouldn't step with your foot on this.' I get slapped in the face twice and my head bounces against the metal panels of the tail unit. Cap in hand, I find myself in front of a man in his 30s, rather well dressed, angry, to who I am not allowed to give an explanation. The seven or eight engineers or technicians in the group of which he came out seem disconcerted, astonished... I went back to my work space and the incident seemed over, without consequences. My civilian foreman, MANGER is his name, returns from break and tells me ... 'Our big boss boxed your ears! That was V. Braun.' I answer him: ‘I do not know him, Master! I have only seen him once.’ I never saw him again."

A mass hanging

In November, Rudolph switched Magnus to chief of rocket fin servomotor production. The servomotors were the most troublesome A-4/V-2 component at that time. During this period, concerns over sabotage were at their height, and accusations of deliberate damage became the engineering scapegoat for the servomotors’ technical difficulties. Summary execution was the prescribed punishment for anyone who got caught purposely or accidentally harming missiles. Nearly all resulting executions took place at the Dora camp, and out of view of non-prisoner Mittelwerk employees. However, Magnus witnessed a notorious exception in March 1945. The nine monstrous strangulations that he watched were precipitated when twenty to thirty Soviet prisoners at Dora assaulted an SS guard, briefly escaped, and then were all quickly recaptured by soldiers using tracking dogs. Every one was hanged within a week, but nine were chosen for a special show. They were to be gruesomely executed in Tunnel B near Hall 41, where the rockets were stacked vertically. This location was very close to where Rudolph and Magnus kept office.

The unfortunate men were placed down in the shallow subfloor of the vertical assembly area, while all enslaved laborers, engineers, managers, German civilian workers, and a few curious secretaries were gathered in formation around the pit to watch. French prisoner Charles Sadron described witnessing the impassive Soviets with "their hands tied behind their backs and heads uncovered. A piece of rough wood, like a bit, was shoved between their jaws and kept in place by an iron wire quickly twisted behind their necks. That day there were nine of them, lined up slightly below us, because the precaution was taken to have them go down into the excavation—a foot deep—where a rail switch was located. Hanging above their heads were nine steel ropes, carefully parallel, ending in slipknots while the upper ends were attached to a long horizontal rod used to handle the torpedos [rockets]. The rod was held up in the center by a cable that would—high up beneath the vault—coil around the drum of an electric winch." Sadron continued his grim and detailed remembrance: "Next, the executioner went to his post and grasped the motor’s control gears. Busta [the presiding SS guard] motioned. The motor droned. Gently the strangled men rose as they spun slowly around. The motor stopped when they were a foot off the ground. So that their feet were at the same level as ours. A few spasms barely shook their bodies in which we could imagine the terrible rigidity. but that was not the end: it required more than a minute to die in that way. The young German secretaries who came to watch got their money’s worth. We, on the other hand, had to parade past the skewer looking straight into the faces with their eyes rolled back—at the same height as our own. A fellow prisoner, who took his hat off in respect—received a serious thrashing." After their long death struggle ended, the corpses were left dangling for a full 24 hours, as an example to all shifts of what they could expect if they tried to deliberately damage missiles.

Surrender at Reutte

In the spring of 1945, Allied "big arrow" offensives drove into Germany from all sides, and everything fell apart. The raw materials flowing into the Kohnstein tunnels dwindled to a trickle, then stopped altogether. 617 completed missiles had left the Mittelwerk in February, roughly matching the peak rate of the previous four months; in March, production fell to 362, although no records past 18 March survive, so it is unclear how many missiles were actually put together that month. By 1 April, the assembly line had stopped entirely. That day, German civilians undertook a records-sanitizing effort inside their workplace before fleeing from the advancing American army. Prisoner Charles Sadron went into the tunnels on 1 April; he later wrote, "The civilians busied themselves with mysterious work. We were made to rip down notices and signs. We had to hand over written material we had on our persons." It was kindling for a bonfire. When André Ribault descended on 2 April to the office where he drafted technical drawings for the engineers, he saw that "all documents have been burned. Looks completely destroyed. Not a single ‘cigar’ left on the assembly line." This paperwork purge had some success; for example, we know from a wealth of testimony that hundreds of sabotage reports were written, but none has ever been found.

Unfortunately, the nightmare for the inmates was not yet over. Many German civilians employees began fleeing the area by 2 April, perhaps due to an attack by Allied fighter-bombers on Nordhausen the previous day that lasted an hour. Some feared that worse was yet to come. They were correct; Nordhausen was about to be incinerated. On the nights of 3 and 4 April, the British sent massive waves of four-engine heavy bombers to destroy the town. These experienced airman knew how to drop the perfect blend of marking flares, incendiary firebombs and high explosive to create a wind-driven self-sustaining firestorm. For two nights, they deployed their pyrotechnic art over Nordhausen to perfection, burning three-quarters of the town to cinders and killing 8,800 people, of which 1,500 were enslaved laborers at Dora. A few surviving prisoners were able to escape during the second raid, which partially smashed the camp's infrastructure and left a momentary absence of authority.

By the time Bomber Command heavies set Nordhausen afire, Magnus was already gone. On 1 April, Hans Kammler, the fanatical SS general who had taken over the rocket program, ordered an immediate evacuation of 500 key technicians from both Peenemünde and the Mittelwerk to the Bavarian Alps. His purported intent was that the scientists would continue their secret work further away from the front lines. However, the more logical conclusion, as the brothers’ army boss Walter Dornberger realized at the time, was to consolidate the engineers in one location as a bargaining chip, for Kammler to strike a deal that would grease his own final escape. The chosen rocket specialists left both places on the night of 2 April, with Wernher leading the Peenemünde group, and Kammler (plus 200 SD men) escorting his Mittelwerk employees, including Magnus. Their destination was Oberammergau, near the lovely Alpine resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Germany had staged the 1936 Winter Olympics.

Operation Paperclip and Fort Bliss

von Braun arrived in New York on 16 November 1945 aboard the SS Argentina and was soon at work at Fort Bliss, Texas and later at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Von Braun was interrogated as a witness for the Andrae war crimes trial in which Mittelwerk general manager Georg Rickhey was acquitted. Soon after his arrival, he was caught trying to sell a brick of platinum he'd stolen from the base to a jeweler in El Paso. The incident was quickly hushed up, though he was informally punished by means of a terrible beating given by his brother Wernher.

Career with Chrysler

In 1955, von Braun began a career with Chrysler—first in the missile division and then in the automotive division. He also resided in Huntsville, Alabama, for a while before moving to Michigan. After living in Michigan, he relocated to the UK, working in London and Coventry as Chrysler UK export director. von Braun retired from Chrysler in 1975 and returned to the States, where he settled in Arizona and resided until his death.