Karl Dietrich Bracher
Karl Dietrich Bracher (13 March 1922 – 19 September 2016) was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. He was then held as a POW in Camp Concordia, Kansas. Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951 Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had two children.
Karl Eschweiler
Karl Eschweiler was born at Euskirchen, Cologne on September 5, 1886. He entered the city’s Catholic seminary before studying for a Doctorate of Philosophy (D. Phil) at Munich (awarded 1909). He wrote his dissertation on the aesthetic elements in St Augustine's philosophy of religion. On completion of his doctoral studies, Eschweiler returned to the seminary, and was ordained priest in the Archdiocese of Cologne in 1910. He served initially as a parish priest before pursuing full-time doctoral studies in theology at Bonn University. At the time of the Weimar Republic, Bonn was a centre for ‘progressive’ Catholic scholarship, and a number of those studying with Eschweiler would go on to become critics of Hitler and the Nazi regime.