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 the beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic was the coming of "presidential government" in 1930 as starting with government of Heinrich Brüning, Chancellors not sought to govern via the "Reichstag", instead using the "25/48/53 formula", which was legal, but violated the spirit of the constitution as Article 54 had explicitly stated the Chancellor and his cabinet were responsible to the "Reichstag". Bracher maintained that the end of German democracy was not inevitable, but instead was due to conscious choices coupled with "momentous errors and failures" made by Germany's leaders, especially President Paul von Hindenburg. In "Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik", Bracher argued the "collapse" of the republic went through several stages:
It should be noted that Bracher in writing of a "loss of power" and a "power vacuum" was referring to the decay of the democratic system, not a weakening of the state. Kolb noted in the years 1930-33, the "Reichswehr", the bureaucracy, the police and above all President von Hindenburg all saw a dramatic increase in their power, and what was happening in Germany in that period was the gradual collapse of the democratic system with policy decisions increasingly being made by the "Reichswehr" and the "Kamarilla" of President Hindenburg instead of the "Reichstag".