Today I got confused with the sentence:
"When was he hung and they freed?"
How should it be said if I want to use only one auxiliary verb?
1) When was he hung and they freed?
2) When were he hung and they freed?
Please, explain this to me
When was he hung and they freed?
Unless this sentence is describing a man hung on a wall like a painting, the sentence should use hanged, not hung. (Although the other meaning is certainly conceivable, I doubt it's what is meant.)
Under the assumption that the author simply made a mistake, I will correct it to hanged.
✔ When was he hanged and they freed?
This sentence is grammatical as written. It is an elliptical version of:
When was he hanged and (when were) they freed?
The missing when were is assumed to exist in front of they freed.
✘ When were he hanged and they freed.
This is ungrammatical because you've provided an explicitly incorrect conjugation. It is was he hanged not were he hanged in this construction. (You can use were he hanged in a subjunctive construction—were he hanged overnight, he would die—but this isn't one.)
However, you could reverse the sentence, which would allow for the different conjugation:
✔ When were they freed and he hanged.
As with the previous comment about ellipsis, this would be assumed to be:
When were they freed and (when was) he hanged.
Note that—if you simply encountered this sentence—it's also possible that they is a typo. The author may have intended to write then rather than they:
When was he hanged and then freed?
This would make sense if the man had been hanged—but actually rescued before he strangled to death.
(Or, if he actually had been hung on the wall like a painting, then the rescue could have taken longer, since there would have been no imminent threat of death.)
This could only be determined from a larger context.
I'm guessing you're trying to say "when was he hung [correct: hanged] and when were they freed?" (but with only one auxiliary verb), but the full form is probably also the only clear way to say it.
Your option 1 is ok, shorter (good) but less clear (bad). Your option 2 just sounds wrong.
Sometimes rephrasing entirely avoids such problems. You need context for that, so I can't do this for your sentence. But something like "when did the hanging and the freeing occur?" is an example of what I'm thinking about, although this particular example isn't nice either.
Grammatically, they are all wrong. As i see it, the most correct way in this case is:
When was he hanged and when were they freed?
Otherwise, you cannot correctly match the numbers, whatever you do.
Note: initially, the sentence "When was he hung and they freed?" did not even make any sense to me, until I focused on what it could mean.
Dilemma: The sentence in the question suggests the idea that the two actions happened at the same time. The sentence in my solution suggests two independent actions, which may have happened at the same time, or at different moments in time.