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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magnus von Braun | 5/8 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_von_Braun | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:10:46.729129+00:00 | kb-cron |
== 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." In the second case, an inmate named Guy Morand testified that while testing rocket servomotors, he tried to cover for another prisoner who had mislaid a chronometer, which brought the wrath of an enraged German civilian foreman down upon him. "Like the good Nazi he was," Morand remembered, "he immediately started shouting it was sabotage, when just at that point von Braun arrived accompanied by his usual group of people. Without even listening to my explanations, he ordered the Meister to have me given 25 strokes in his presence by an SS [man] who was there. Then, judging that the strokes weren't sufficiently hard, he ordered that I be flogged more vigorously, and this order was then diligently carried out." Morand went on to say that "following the floggings, von Braun made me translate that I deserved much more, that in fact I deserved to be hanged, which certainly would be the fate of the 'Mensch' (good-for-nothing) I was." Morand adds that the man was "one of the inventors of the V-2" and frequently made "rapid inspections" of his work area. This description of "von Braun" is closer to Magnus in his role at the rocket factory than that of Wernher, who visited only occasionally. Neufeld raises the possibility of an identity error in Morand's recollections: "In September 1944, Wernher assigned his younger brother Magnus, a chemical engineer and Luftwaffe pilot, as his special liaison to the Mittelwerk, particularly for servomotor production, which was afflicted with serious technical problems. Magnus von Braun stayed in the Nordhausen area full-time until the evacuation of April, 1945. In contrast, his older brother visited the Mittelwerk, by his estimates, twelve or fifteen times in total. Morand gives the time of the incident as the 'second half of 1944,' which corresponds to Magnus von Braun's assignment to the factory, and the testimonial never actually gives 'von Braun' a last name." In a footnote to this same 2002 article, Neufeld refers to another incident on the record. A Dora survivor named Robert Cazabonne reported "that a fellow prisoner witnessing a hanging in the tunnel pointed out one of the German onlookers and said, 'That's VON BRAUN!'" Neufeld concludes, "We know with near certainty that Wernher von Braun was not there; however, it might have been his brother Magnus, as civilian employees were expected to attend." Magnus was indeed there, as his son Curt confirmed in a March 2020 Los Angeles Times article. Neufeld continues, "Morand's story necessarily brings Jouanin's identification into question, as both deal with servomotors. Although Jouanin's first instinct on timing was early May 1944, when I wrote him about it, he was less than certain. The description of a man in his thirties he saw only once fits Wernher von Braun better than Magnus, however. In the end, it is impossible to say with certainty that Georges Jouanin's identification of Wernher von Braun can be accepted as meeting a reasonable standard of certainty, as believable as I find it personally. Nor can we conclude with assurance that Magnus von Braun was responsible."