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
In Bracher's view, Hitler's rise was not inevitable, and the primary responsibility for the Chancellorship being given to Hitler on 30 January 1933 rested with the "Kamarilla" of President Paul von Hindenburg. Bracher wrote that had Hindenburg chosen differently from that the path that he did chose by appointing Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933 that German history would easily gone in a completely different direction, thus meaning that even through Hindenburg died in 1934, he must bear ultimate responsibility for everything that happened between 1933–45, for the appointment of Hitler was a purely a gratuitous act on Hindenburg's part that he did not have to do. However, Bracher argued that once Hitler had obtained power, he used his authority to carry out a comprehensive revolution that politically destroyed both Hitler's opponents such as the SPD and his allies such as the DNVP who sought to “tame” the Nazi movement. Bracher argued that because Hitler was so central to the Nazi movement that it led to the fate of National Socialism being so intertwined with Hitler's fate that it is right, as noted above, to speak of National Socialism as Hitlerism, and hence justifying Hitler's place in history as a person who by their actions decisively brought about events that otherwise would not had occurred. In addition, Bracher maintained that the importance of Hitler derived from his being the most effective exponent of an extremely radical type of racist German nationalism, which allowed for ideas that otherwise would be ignored by historians coming to a terrible fruition.