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.

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.

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.

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.

"[7] 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 August 26, with top Nazi industrial officials Albert Speer and Hans Kammler in attendance.

)[9] Immediately following this Berlin conclave, Magnus flew his brother to have a look at the Saarbrücken caves on August 29, 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.

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.

As the A-4/V-2 rocket weapon transitioned from development to production in the latter part of 1943, key personnel from Peenemünde began migrating to the Mittelwerk, starting with Magnus's future supervisor Arthur Rudolph in September.

[14] There were many manufacturing problems at the Mittelwerk over the winter of 1943-1944 due to rushing cutting-edge technology into mass production, and Wernher needed to make frequent visits to the trouble-plagued assembly line.

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.

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.

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.

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 beloved space rocket.

There is no doubt that dozens of the rocket specialists were genuinely interested in probing space, and Wernher undoubtedly showed courage by refusing to do what the powerful and vindictive Himmler obviously wanted him to do.

[20] Himmler had made his point with this maneuver, and when the von Braun brothers’ army boss, General Walter Dornberger, pleaded with Albert Speer to seek Adolf Hitler’s personal intervention in the matter, the Nazi leader soon assented to the scientists’ provisional release after two weeks, with Magnus getting out a few days before the rest.

Thus, the von Braun brothers’ Faustian bargain with the Nazi state continued, yet after their sudden arrest, they must have had felt considerably less sanguine about the strength of their position in the waning days of the Third Reich.

[23] 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.

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.

[28] 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.

"[29] 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.

"[30] 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.

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.

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.

[36] 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.

On April 1, 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.

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 April 2, with Wernher leading the Peenemünde group, and Kammler (plus 200 SD men) escorting his Mittelwerk employees, including Magnus.

[46] Traveling at war's end through the rump of Nazi Germany awash in regime dead-enders was not for the faint-hearted, but both groups merged sometime after April 6, and then headed for the Bavarian ski resort at Oberjoch.

"[48] After hearing the radio report of Hitler's death, Wernher von Braun announced to his group early in the morning of 3 May 1945 that "Magnus, who speaks English, has just left by bicycle to establish contact with the American forces at Reutte.