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 often criticized the functionist-structuralist interpretation of the Third Reich championed by such scholars such as Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, and decried their view of Hitler as a “weak dictator”. In Bracher's view, Hitler was the “Master of the Third Reich”. However, though Bracher argues that the Führer was the driving force behind the Third Reich, he was one of the first historians to argue that Nazi Germany was less well organized than the Nazis liked to pretend. In a 1956 essay, Bracher noted "the antagonism between rival agencies was resolved solely in the omnipotent key position of the Führer", which was the result of "...the complex coexistence and opposition of the power groups and from conflicting personal ties". Unlike the functionists, Bracher saw this disorganization as part of a conscious “divide and rule” strategy on the part of Hitler, and argued at no point was Hitler ever driven by pressure from below or had his power limited in any way. One area where Bracher is in agreement with the functionists concerns the highly "ad hoc" nature of decision-making in the Third Reich. Bracher commented that the Nazi regime "remained in a state of permanent improvisation".