In November 1944, Rudolph put Magnus in charge of rocket fin servomotors, which were the most troublesome V-2 component at that time. During this period, concerns over sabotage were at their height. In a notorious incident that winter, several Russian prisoners suspected of sabotage were executed by being hanged from cranes used to lift rocket parts and left dangling for a full work day, as an example to other inmates. In this tense atmosphere, servomotors were at the heart of two abuse accusations leveled against Wernher von Braun by Mittelwerk prisoners after the war, one that may have actually involved Magnus. Michael Neufeld, a Smithsonian historian and author of a 2007 biography of Wernher, has tried to unravel claims by Dora prisoners that they personally witnessed brutality administered by the more famous von Braun brother. In a 2002 article about Wernher’s potential culpability in Nazi slave labor at Mittelwerk and several other locations, Neufeld dismissed most claims that von Braun carried out direct sadistic behavior as spurious, easily disproved 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 V-2s to install cables to the servomotor, placed a wood 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.'”
