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The figures born on this date span three centuries and several varieties of historical infamy. Wernher von Braun, the aerospace engineer whose V-2 rocket program relied on concentration camp labor, became the most consequential of them — a man whose ambitions carried him from the Third Reich to NASA's Apollo missions, leaving a contested legacy that defies simple categorization. Further back, Pieter Woortman built a career administering the Dutch Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, representing the institutional machinery that made mass human trafficking an ordinary commercial enterprise. The twentieth century contributes two figures of a more conventionally criminal character: Joseph Taborsky, whose Connecticut robbery-murder spree in the 1950s earned him the tabloid name "Mad Dog," and Soviet serial killer Aleksey Sukletin, executed in 1987.

March 23, 1943 - Aleksey Sukletin

Sukletin operated across several years in Soviet Tatarstan, committing a series of murders that involved both accomplices and cannibalism — a combination that placed him among the more unusual criminal cases documented in the late Soviet period. The involvement of co-conspirators, including Madina Shakirova and Anatoly Nikitin, distinguished his case from that of a solitary offender and raised questions about the social conditions under which such crimes could go undetected for so long.

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March 23, 1924 - Joseph "Mad Dog" Taborsky

What distinguishes Taborsky's case is less the body count than the trajectory: a first brush with the law that ended in near-execution, followed by release, and then a second spree of robberies and killings across Connecticut that left six people dead. He became the last person executed in Connecticut's electric chair, a distinction that places him at a specific hinge point in the state's — and ultimately the nation's — history of capital punishment.

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March 23, 1700 - Pieter Woortman

Woortman spent decades embedded in the administrative machinery of the Dutch West India Company, ultimately rising to the senior-most colonial post on the Gold Coast — a position whose core function was the management and export of enslaved Africans. His tenure as Director-General, spanning from 1767 until his death in 1780, made him one of the longest-serving figures to oversee Dutch slaving operations in West Africa during the trade's later period.

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March 23, 1912 - Wernher von Braun

His trajectory cuts an unusually stark line through twentieth-century history: the same technical genius that produced a weapon of terror for the Nazi war machine was later absorbed into the American space program and credited with reaching the Moon. The V-2 rockets he helped develop at Peenemünde killed thousands — both in their use against civilian targets and through the forced labor of concentration camp prisoners who built them. His postwar reinvention under Operation Paperclip, and the institutional willingness to set aside that record in pursuit of Cold War advantage, made him one of the more consequential and contested figures of the era.

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