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 believed that totalitarianism, whether from the Left or Right, is the leading threat to democracy all over the world, and has argued that the differences between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were of degree, not kind. Bracher is opposed to the notion of generic fascism and has often urged scholars to reject "totalitarian" fascism theory as championed by the "radical-left" in favour of "democratic" totalitarian theory as a means of explaining the Nazi dictatorship. In particular, Bracher has argued that Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany possessed such fundamental differences that any theory of generic fascism is not supported by the historical evidence. He is pro-American and was one of the few German professors to support fully the foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War. However, Bracher was in no way sympathetic towards Fascist Italy, writing about Benito Mussolini's rise: "Appealing to all classes by a combination of conservative and progressive, anti-communist and state socialist, reactionary and revolutionary aims" and making much use of "direct action", Mussolini "went to war with liberal democracy" in 1919. Bracher was a consistent advocate of the values of the Federal Republic, and its American ally against the values of East Germany and its Soviet patron. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s he often attacked left-wing and New Left intellectuals in particular for comparing the actions of the United States in the Vietnam War and the West German state to Nazi Germany. For Bracher, these attacks were both an absurd trivialization of Nazi crimes and a sinister attempt to advance the cause of Communism. Bracher argued that the defeatist and uncertain mood of the 1970s-80s in West Germany was not unlike the mood of the 1920s-30s. In 1969-74, Bracher supported the Social Democratic-Free Democrat government of Chancellor Willy Brandt and his policy of "Ostpolitik", arguing that it long overdue that the Federal Republic recognize the Oder-Neisse Line. By the mid-1970s, Bracher turned against the Social Democrats, arguing that far too many people in West Germany were naïve and blithely dismissive of the threat by Soviet Communism. Bracher always saw himself as a liberal, opposed to totalitarianism of both left and right, a standpoint that led him to attack both conservatives and Communists.