Overshadowed by his brother Wernher von Braun, Magnus von Braun, however, had a crucial role to play.
Most people know about Wernher von Braun, the charismatic German engineer who led the Apollo Saturn V program and who, after the end of the war, moved to the U.S.
There he was to lead the development of the Saturn rockets that eventually would put a man on the moon. But what about Wernher’s younger brother, Magnus?
His technical accomplishments have always been overshadowed by those of his brother Wernher, though he did play a role. But his most important contribution, and one that undoubtedly did change the world, was no invention or engineering insight.
When it was obvious that Germany would lose the war, it was he who ensured that the V-2 program fell into the hands of the Americans rather than the Russians.
“My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2 rocket. We want to surrender.”
The first American Magnus von Braun encountered was a young private named Fred Schneikert. A German speaker, he shouted: “Halt! Komme vorwarts mit die Hände hoch!” (Stop! Come forwards and keep your hands up). Magnus answered in broken English: “My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2 rocket. We want to surrender.” And that is the beginning of the story about Wernher von Braun‘s younger brother.
Six months later, the Wernher and Magnus were on their way to the U.S., aboard the vessel S.S. Argentina and with several other key members of the V-2 rocket team.
Most of the V-2 team also moved – some 120 former V-2 rocket men took up residency in an old hospital at Fort Bliss. They shared their knowledge with the Americans, with the technical documents and blueprints which had been retrieved from the former mineshaft.
Wernher von Braun would eventually become director of the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, and take the U.S. to the moon and back. At the same time, Magnus began his career in industry.
He worked with the famous company Chrysler. First in the renowned company’s missile division and later in cars. That position took him to the U.K. for several years, where, as Chrysler’s U.K. export director, he was situated Coventry and London.
Following Magnus retirement in 1975, he returned to America, where he later died in 2003.
Quick Summary of Magnus von Braun
- Brother of Wernher Von Braun, also a rocket engineer during World War II. Fluid in French. Arrived in America under the historic Project Paperclip on November 16, 1945, aboard Argentina from La Havre. As of January 1947, working at Fort Bliss, Texas. Died at Phoenix, Arizona.
- Born: 1919-05-10. Died: 2003-06-21. Birth Place: Greifswald.
- German engineer in WW2, member of the Rocket Team in the United States after that.
Magnus von Braun’s Life
Magnus was born in 1919 in Greifswald, Germany. And his father, a minor noble and a politician had a variety of positions in the civil service culminating in a short spell as agriculture minister in the Weimar Republic. It was a post from which he was dismissed when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.
Von Braun’s mother, also a member of the German aristocracy, encouraged her sons to take an interest in science: Wernher’s gift on his confirmation was a telescope.
In 1937, Magnus von Braun traveled to Munich, the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, to study organic chemistry at Technische Universität München. There he stayed on for a few months after graduating to work with the Nobel laureate Hans Fischer. Later in October 1940, he was drafted into the German Luftwaffe (air force), completed his training and eventually became a flight instructor.
Magnus “Mac” Freiherr von Braun, May 10, 1919–June 21, 2003, was a Luftwaffe aviator.
He was later assigned to developing fuels for the Wasserfall surface-to-air missile project until, in October 1943, his brother requested he to join him at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea coast to work as his technical assistant on the V-2 rocket program.
Magnus “Mac” Freiherr von Braun, May 10, 1919–June 21, 2003, was a Luftwaffe aviator, chemical engineer, rocket scientist, and also a business executive. In his early 20s, he worked as a rocket scientist at Peenemünde and the Mittelwerk. Later age 26, Magnus migrated to the United States via Operation Paperclip, where he worked for some years at Fort Bliss.
In 1955 he started a career as a senior executive with Chrysler’s missile and later automotive divisions, retiring in 1975. He lived for 58 years in the United States and partly in the United Kingdom until his death. He was also the brother of Wernher von Braun and Sigismund.
Biography of Magnus von Braun
He was born in Greifswald, Pomerania, to Freiherr von Braun, also named Magnus and Emmy von Quistorp. And after finishing boarding school at Hermann Lietz-Schule in Spiekeroog, Magnus began his studies in 1937 at Technische Universität München. There he continued after receiving his master’s degree in organic chemistry and became an aide to Nobel laureate Hans Fischer
Magnus arrived at Peenemünde in July 1943 at the request of his brother Wernher. And in March 1944 he was arrested with fellow rocket experts
Klaus Riedel, Wernher von Braun, Helmut Gröttrup, and Hannes Lüersen, but was later discharged. In summer 1944, he transferred to the Mittelwerk, where he engineered V-2 rocket turbopumps, gyroscopes, and servomotors.
The Mittelwerk
The Mittelwerk was a subterrene munitions factory dug into Germany’s Harz Mountains to avoid aerial bombardment by American and British planes.
It consisted of two tunnels drilled through the mountain range near Nordhausen, each a mile long and joined by dozens of cross tunnels. Railroads laid through the main tunnels brought raw materials in and finished rockets out.
The whole cavity provided some 35 million cubic feet of space. After massive Allied bombing disrupted the first V-2 rocket development center in the Baltic town of Peenemünde in mid-1943, most German rocket production was moved to the Mittelwerk.
Furthermore, the prisoners from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps produced slave labor for this enormous endeavor. Prisoners were marched into the tunnels daily and forced to work by the notorious Nazi S.S., who managed all the security issues. And the usual horrific methods were employed, and over 20,000 workers died during this subterranean rocket factory’s existence.
Magnus’s involvement with the Mittelwerk began in the fall of 1944, soon after full production began. The first V-2 rocket produced earlier that year had a high failure rate, and sabotage was assumed. Concern about these problems prompted Wernher von Braun, who was still based at Peenemünde, to send his younger brother Magnus to the Mittelwerk in September.
Magnus von Braun reported straight to the factory’s chief of V-2 rocket production, Arthur Rudolph.
While some insignificant sabotage did occur in the tunnels, it was relatively rare. The real cause for the poor quality of new Mittelwerk missiles was the attempt to take cutting-edge research technology into mass production under slave labor conditions.
Thrown into this harsh environment, Magnus von Braun reported straight to the factory’s chief of V-2 rocket production, Arthur Rudolph, which had an office in one of the main tunnels. This work connection with Rudolph would traverse decades and continents. After Germany capitulated in 1945, Rudolph was part of a group of Nazi scientists who migrated with Magnus and Wernher to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip.
American Army put them to work in New Mexico.
The American Army put them to work in New Mexico, producing intercontinental ballistic rockets. Moving on to NASA in the 1960s, Arthus Rudolph proceeded to collaborate with Magnus von Braun, who was employed by the main contractor for the Apollo Saturn V rocket, Chrysler Corporation.
And as Nasa’s project director for the Saturn V rocket, Rudolph was publicly acclaimed after the lunar landing, but towards the end of his life, his wartime collusion in using slave labor at the Mittelwerk became more publicly known. And Those revelations then forced Rudolph to make a 1983 deal with the U.S. Justice Department in which he freely renounced his U.S. citizenship to avoid prosecution and potential loss of his pension and Social Security benefits. Arthur then returned to Germany, where he died in 1996.
Credit: Wikipedia.
Magnus von Braun in charge of rocket fin servomotors, which were the most difficult V-2 component.
In November 1944, Arthus Rudolph put Magnus von Braun in charge of rocket fin servomotors, which were the most difficult V-2 component. Throughout this period, concerns over sabotage were at their height. In an infamous incident that winter, several Russian prisoners suspected of sabotage were killed by being hanged from huge cranes used to lift rocket parts and left hanging for a full workday, as an example to other prisoners. In this agitated atmosphere, servomotors were at the heart of two abuse accusations leveled against Wernher by Mittelwerk prisoners after the war, which may have involved Magnus von Braun.
Michael Neufeld, a Smithsonian historian, and writer of a 2007 biography of Wernher von Braun have tried to reveal claims by Dora prisoners that they personally witnessed brutality administered by the more well-known von Braun brother.
A 2002 article about Wernher von Braun’s potential liability in Nazi slave labor at Mittelwerk and many other locations.
In a 2002 article about Wernher von Braun’s potential liability in Nazi slave labor at Mittelwerk and many other locations, Neufeld rejected most claims that Wernher carried out direct sadistic behavior spurious, easily disproved by tracking of his known locations during the war.
Still, Neufeld felt that there were two charges in particular that merited further study, the second of which might have involved Magnus. Reports that Wernher von Braun tended hangings, ordered hangings, attended hangings in S.S. uniform, etc., have barely been discussed in the literature because such statements lack credibility,” Neufeld wrote. “But in recent years, I have got two reports from French Dora survivors that merit more consideration.” In the first event, survivor Georges Jouanin, whose job was to climb into straight tail sections of the V-2 rocket to install cables to the servomotor, placed a wood shoe on one of the units.
He recorded that “someone has noticed my wooden-heeled clog atop such a frail organ, and I feel a hand tugging insistently on the end of my striped pants, forcing me out of the tail unit.
“That Was Saturn V. von Braun”
You, out of here, you’re committing sabotage. I was hit in the face twice, and my head bounces against the tail unit’s metal panels.
Cap in hand, I found myself in front of a man in his 30s who is rather well dressed, angry, and not allowed to explain. The seven or eight engineers in the group of which he came out seem disconcerted, astonished. I went back to my workspace, and the event seemed over, without consequences. My civilian foreman, Manger, returns from break, and tells me, ‘Our big boss boxed your ears! That was Saturn V. von Braun.
In the second case, a prisoner called Guy Morand testified that during testing rocket servomotors. He tried to cover for another inmate who had mislaid a unique chronometer, which brought the anger of an enraged foreman down. Morand remembered, “he instantly started shouting it was sabotage when just at that point von Braun came accompanied by his usual group of people.
Without listening to my explanations, he ordered the Meister to have me given 25 blows in his presence by an S.S. man who was there. Then, finding that the strokes weren’t sufficiently hard, he ordered that I be flogged more forcefully, and this was then diligently carried out.”
Guy Morand went on to say that “following the floggings, von Braun made me translate that I deserved much more, that I deserved to be hanged, which certainly would be the fate of the ‘Mensch’ (good-for-nothing) I was.” Guy adds that the man was “one of the inventors of the V-2 rocket” and often made “rapid inspections” of his workspace.
Magnus lived in the Nordhausen area full-time until the evacuation of April 1945.
This account of “von Braun” is closer to Magnus von Braun in his role at the rocket factory than that of Wernher von Braun, who occasionally visited. Neufeld suggests an identity error in Morand’s recollections: “In September 1944, Wernher von Braun assigned his younger brother, a chemical engineer and Luftwaffe pilot, as his special liaison to the Mittelwerk, especially for servomotor production, which was afflicted with severe technical problems. Magnus lived in the Nordhausen area full-time until the evacuation of April 1945.
In contrast to this, his older brother visited the Mittelwerk, by his estimates, around twelve or fifteen times in total. Guy Morand gives the time of the incident as the ‘second half of 1944,’ which corresponds to Magnus’s assignment to the factory. The testimonial never gives ‘von Braun’ a last name.”
“That’s Von Braun!” Neufeld concludes
In a note to this same 2002 article, Neufeld points to another event on the record. A Dora survivor called Robert Cazabonne reported “that a fellow prisoner observing a horrific hanging in the tunnel pointed out one of the German observers and said, “We know with quite a near certainty that Wernher was not there; yet, it might have been his younger brother, Magnus, as civilian employees were expected to visit.”
Neufeld continues, “Guy Morand’s story certainly brings Jouanin’s identification into question, as both deals with servomotors. Although Jouanin’s first instinct on timing was May 1944, when I wrote to him about it, he was less than certain. The depiction of a man in his thirties he saw only once fits Wernher better than Magnus.
It is difficult to say with confidence that Georges Jouanin’s identification of Wernher can be accepted as meeting a good standard of certainty, as believable as I find it personally. Nor can we conclude with confidence that Magnus was responsible”
U.S. Army files kept on all former Nazi specialists who worked in the United States.
Those prisoner memories of a sadistic scientist named von Braun stalking the Mittelwerk tunnels, particularly when it can be shown that Wernher von Braun could not have been there, is not final proof of Magnus’s guilt.
Nevertheless, the possibility of the younger brother’s involvement in such abuse needs consideration of an obnoxious facet of his personality documented in postwar U.S. Army files kept on all former Nazi specialists who worked in the United States.
Magnus von Braun was born almost a decade after his two older brothers. And unlike them, Magnus had a National Socialist adolescence. While the older von Braun brothers can be seen as having joined the Nazi party for reasons of professional advancement, Magnus von Braun signed on to fascism at a point in life before such concerns became important.
Credit: Wikipedia.
Sigismund von Braun, the eldest brother, became a well-known attaché for the German government in 1936.
His was an ideological commitment. He was thirteen when Adolf Hitler became chancellor and thus engaged in the Adolf Hitler Youth organization and experienced a secondary school environment adapted to fascism. His politicized early years directly influenced his character. Even after the war, Magnus von Braun stood apart from Wernher by his displays of aristocratic pretension and arrogance, duly noted by the U.S Army officers who kept the files on both after their 1945 immigration to the United States.
Sigismund von Braun, the eldest brother, became a well-known attaché for the German government in 1936 and was during the war years in Vatican City on consular work. Though a Nazi party member like his two brothers, he avoided direct cooperation with regime crimes such as slave labor and was then able to join the new West German foreign service after the war. He rose to become a renowned statesman for West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s.
Surrender at Reutte
After the evacuating from Nordhausen, Magnus was at the Behelfsheim in Weilheim when Wernher arrived there from Oberammergau on April 14, 1945. The next day, Magnus von Braun had come to the Haus Ingeborg in Oberjoch.
The production started well after, so Magnus von Braun’s claim that he was selected to transfer in October 1943 is inaccurate. And after hearing the radio report of Hitler’s death, Wernher von Braun announced to his group on the morning of May 3, 1945, that Magnus von Braun, who speaks English, has just left by his bicycle to establish contact with the American forces at Reutte.
Magnus von Braun’s Career with Chrysler
In 1955, Magnus began a career with Chrysler—first in the missile division and then in the automotive division.
After living in Michigan, von Braun relocated to the U.K., working in Coventry and London as Chrysler UK export director.
Magnus von Braun also resided in Huntsville, Alabama, for a while. He retired from Chrysler in 1975 and remained in Coventry for a couple of years before returning to the States, where he settled in Arizona and remained until his death.
That’s it. Thanks for reading this article About Magnus von Braun, and if you want to know more about his famous brother Wernher von Braun, then head over to this article named; A Guide to Wernher von Braun’s Life.