The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure and Effects of National Socialism

Karl Dietrich Bracher was born in Stuttgart, Germany on March 13, 1922. He was educated at the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Stuttgart. During World War II, he fought with the German army. He was captured by American soldiers while serving in the Wehrmacht's Afrika Korps in Tunisia and held as a prisoner of war in Kansas. Returning to Germany show more after the war, he received a doctorate from the University of Tübingen in 1948 and studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. He taught at the Free University of Berlin before joining the faculty at the University of Bonn, where he taught politics and contemporary history from 1959 to 1987. As a historian, he argued that the German people had to take responsibility for the rise of Nazism because of their embrace of Hitler and his racist agenda. He wrote several books including The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure and Effects of National Socialism and The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century. He died on September 19, 2016 at the age of 94. (Bowker Author Biography) show less