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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magnus von Braun | 6/8 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_von_Braun | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:10:46.729129+00:00 | kb-cron |
== 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. André Sellier has made an interesting observation about this late-war choice to hang Soviet prisoners down inside the tunnel. After all, hundreds of inmate executions by hanging were carried out at the Dora camp during 1943–45, with over 150 in March 1945 alone. Why do this particular one at the factory? The capital crime being punished was not even a sabotage offense. Sellier asserts that "[t]his choice was not necessary if the point was to make an impression on the prisoners. The gallows at the roll call [inside Dora] were more appropriate." Roll call at the concentration camp would obviously maximize the number of inmates who would be present for the grisly object lesson, and that is how it had always been done previously. However, Sellier holds that in the intended audience in March 1945 was different. "It seems that the desire was also to make an impression on the German civilians, whose loyalty to the regime was no longer assured." In Magnus's case, the deterrent had its intended effect. "He witnessed hangings," his son Curt von Braun told an interviewer in 2020. "He felt nauseated but he couldn’t back down or he would have been shot." Certainly, by March 1945, as the Nazi nightmare came crashing down in chaos and blood, such a fate for open refusal was entirely plausible.
== Surrender at Reutte ==