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 Dietrich Bracher
Bracher argued that the "one basic principle to which Hitler subscribed deeply, blindly and ruthlessly" was anti-Semitism. Bracher noted that the "Shoah" was so important to Hitler that during World War II, resources that might from a purely military point of view be better devoted to the war were instead turned towards genocide. In 1981, the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason in his essay 'Intention and explanation: A Current controversy about the interpretation of National Socialism' from the book "The "Fuehrer State" : Myth and reality" coined the term "Intentionist" as part of an attack against Bracher and Klaus Hildebrand, both of whom Mason accused of focusing too much on Hitler as an explanation for the Holocaust.