Fritz Bracht

Fritz Bracht (18 January 1899 in Heiden, part of Lage near Detmold – 9 May 1945 in Bad Kudowa, now Kudowa Zdrój, Poland) was the Nazi Gauleiter of Gau Upper Silesia.

Fritz Bracht
Gauleiter of Upper Silesia
In office
27 January 1941  8 May 1945
Preceded byJosef Wagner
Succeeded byNone
Oberpräsident of the Province of Upper Silesia
In office
27 January 1941  8 May 1945
Preceded byJosef Wagner
Succeeded byNone
Personal details
Born(1899-01-18)January 18, 1899
Heiden, German Empire
DiedMay 9, 1945(1945-05-09) (aged 46)
Bad Kudowa, now Kudowa Zdrój, German Reich
Political partyNational Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP)

Career

Bracht (right) in 1941

After training as a gardener, Bracht entered military service in 1917, and was deployed at the front until the end of World War I. Thereafter, he found himself a prisoner of the British, until 1919.

On 1 April 1927, Bracht joined the Nazi Party with membership number 77,890 and was appointed leader of the NSDAP district of Sauerland in November 1928. He held the same position as of 1 March 1931 in Altena. Elected to the Prussian Landtag in 1932, he took on the post of acting Gauleiter of Silesia on 1 May 1935.

When Silesia was split into two Gaue, Upper Silesia and Lower Silesia on 27 January 1941, Bracht was appointed as the new Gauleiter of Upper Silesia. He was also given the position of High President (Oberpräsident) of the Province of Upper Silesia, and in November 1942 the office of Reich Defence Commissar in his Gau. In 1944, he was promoted to the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer. Within Bracht's jurisdiction was the concentration camp Auschwitz.

As the Red Army marched into Germany, Bracht and his wife both committed suicide by poisoning themselves with potassium cyanide. Bracht by then had long been pushed into the background and dominated by his predecessor Josef Wagner, who in the years leading up to World War II had been much esteemed and very influential. In 1944, when with war threatening, Bracht ordered that air defence facilities in his Gau be upgraded and made stronger, however, he could not prevail upon the Armament Ministry to do so.

Decorations and awards

Bibliography

  • Joachim Lilla (Bearbeiter): Statisten in Uniform. Die Mitglieder des Reichstags 1933–1945. Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4.
  • Joachim Lilla (Bearbeiter): Die stellvertretenden Gauleiter und die Vertretung der Gauleiter der NSDAP im „Dritten Reich“. Wirtschaftsverlag NW, Bremerhaven 2003, ISBN 3-86509-020-6 (= Materialien aus dem Bundesarchiv, Heft 13).
  • Gauleiter: The Regional Leaders Of The Nazi Party And Their Deputies, 1925-1945 (Herbert Albrecht-H. Wilhelm Huttmann)-Volume 1 by Michael D. Miller and Andreas Schulz R. James Bender Publishing, 2012.
  • Miller, Michael (2015). Leaders Of The Storm Troops Volume 1. England: Helion & Company. ISBN 978-1-909982-87-1.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Michael Rademacher: Handbuch der NSDAP-Gaue 1928–1945. Die Amtsträger der NSDAP und ihrer Organisationen auf Gau- und Kreisebene in Deutschland und Österreich sowie in den Reichsgauen Danzig-Westpreußen, Sudetenland und Wartheland. Lingenbrink, Vechta 2000, ISBN 3-8311-0216-3.
  • Wolfgang Stelbrink: Die Kreisleiter der NSDAP in Westfalen und Lippe. Versuch einer Kollektivbiographie mit biographischem Anhang. Nordrhein-Westfälisches Staatsarchiv, Münster 2003, ISBN 3-932892-14-3 (= Veröffentlichungen der staatlichen Archive des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Reihe C, Band 48).
  • Mirosław Węcki: Fritz Bracht (1899–1945). Nazistowski zarządca Górnego Śląska w latach II wojny światowej. Katowice 2014, ISBN 978-83-63031-24-4.

References

Media related to Fritz Bracht at Wikimedia Commons

  1. Miller 2015, p. 304.
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