Friedrich Bran

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Friedrich Bran , also known as Fritz (born August 20, 1904 in Mannheim ; died December 11, 1994 in Calw ) was a German journalist and, during the Nazi era, a senior employee of the Nazi bureaucracy, especially for occupied France. In the Federal Republic he was a functionary of political education and teacher training .

Life

Friedrich Bran was the son of the publisher Friedrich Bran and Anna , geb. Trapp . In contrast to his father, he also called himself Fritz. After attending the Goethe-Gymnasium Karlsruhe, he did an apprenticeship as a bookseller and from 1924 studied Romance and German at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Heidelberg , where he joined the German Freischar group. He received his doctorate in 1929 with a thesis on Herder and worked as a journalist. He joined the Sohlbergkreis, which was trying to bring Germany and France closer together in the early 1930s, and in 1930 became editor of the Sohlbergkreis magazine and a close friend of Otto Abetz .

After the handover of power to the National Socialists, Bran joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 . As Oberstammführer (svw. Oberstleutnant) of the Hitler Youth he was the main consultant in the Foreign Office of the Reich Youth Leadership under Karl Nabersberg between 1933 and 1936 and was also the chief official of the National Socialist German Student Union . From 1935 he was employed in the " Ribbentrop Office " and was managing director of the Franco-German Society . After brief military service in the Drôle de Guerre in 1939/40 , he also became a research assistant in the Foreign Office , where he was head of department for cultural policy in the occupied countries of France, Belgium and the Netherlands as well as for Canada, the French colonies and Switzerland. According to his own information, because of his Jewish ancestors, he could not become an official in the AA.

Bran was part of a group of German Romanists and Francophiles , including from the Sohlberg district , who, under the leadership of the German Ambassador Abetz, wanted to promote the collaboration of the French with National Socialist Germany, including Karl Epting . Bran's main task was the editing of the Franco-German monthly magazine .

After the German conquest of France , Abetz went to Paris and Bran was his successor as head of the France Committee in the Foreign Office. He oversaw the German propaganda magazines for French prisoners of war, civilian workers and forced laborers in Germany, “Le Trait d'Union” and “Le Pont”, in order to use propaganda to make the French submissive to the German leadership and “as many French as possible to the German Getting used to leadership ”. To the outside world, the editor-in-chief of both newspapers was the collaborator Alain Laubreaux , but his work was under the control of Bran, insofar as that was necessary, because the anti-Semitic, anti-British and anti-American tones also came from French intellectuals willing to collaborate after the German attack on the Soviet Union also the anti-Soviet ones. Of the 1.5 million French prisoners of war, around half a million were released to France during the war, the others remained imprisoned in Germany and were to be blackmailed into work for the German Reich. It was also about their " replacement " ("relève"), since according to the Geneva Conventions they could only be obliged to work to a limited extent, or in the summer of 1943 about their conversion ("transformation") into civilian workers , thus "voluntarily" to be used in the German armaments industry . The need for foreign workers had increased enormously with the German losses in the Russian campaign from 1942 and Bran's France committee had to contribute its part to cover. In France itself, labor procurement was in the hands of the head of the military administration and his officers Julius Ritter and Alfons Glatzel .

Bran's tasks also included lecture tours through France in order to advertise the work in Germany, but he was able to delegate most of the lectures to Friedrich Grimm . During the tour of Germany by French writers in 1941 , he took Pierre Drieu la Rochelle for a walk through the Berlin zoo . On June 29, 1944, Bran gave an eulogy in Berlin for the collaborationist Philippe Henriot, who was murdered by the Resistance .

In November 1944, Bran handed over the leadership of the France Committee to the diplomat Peter H. Pfeiffer in order to dedicate himself to tasks of “ leading people” among the French in Germany.

After the war ended in 1945, Bran was interrogated by the Allies in connection with the investigation against Abetz. Abetz was sentenced to twenty years of forced labor, of which he served five years and the four years in pre-trial detention. Nothing is known about Brans and his denazification . He became a journalist and head of the Ettlingen local history museum and the local library. From 1957 he was local and school clerk in the non-partisan working group Der Bürger im Staat . In 1963 he became head of the State Academy for Teacher Training in Calw. In 1977 he co-founded the Hermann Hesse Colloquium in Calw . Bran continued to advocate Franco-German relations with idealism .

He and Gisela Brettschneider had married in 1935; she had been a party member of the NSDAP since 1929. Despite Bran's lack of proof of Aryan status , they were allowed to remain party members after 1941 thanks to the Fuehrer's pardon. They had two sons and a daughter, their son Helgo Bran became a member of the Greens in the state parliament of Baden-Württemberg in 1980 . In his second marriage he married Renate Bran (1928–2013), who was the founder of the state women's council in Baden-Württemberg and director of the Calw adult education center .

Honors

See also

Fonts

  • as editor: International Hermann Hesse Colloquium in Calw . Volume 1 (1977) to 6 (1990).
  • Maria Andreä , b. Moser: 1550-1632; d. exemplary Life of JV Andreäs mother , Bad Liebenzell: Gengenbach, 1989 ISBN 3-921841-39-9
  • Helmut Nagel, Friedrich Bran: 40 years of the State Academy for Teacher Training in Calw: Meeting point for schools and Research , Calw: The district of Calw. 6. 1988
  • A millennium of cultural tradition in the northern Black Forest: personalities - movements - institutions, etc. their significance for our time , Bad Liebenzell: Gengenbach, 1985 ISBN 3-921841-23-2
  • Franco-German understanding through the community and school: 2 cities overcome the borders , Ettlingen / Baden: Verl. D. German-French Community sponsorship 1954
  • Karl Fröhner with the participation of Friedrich Bran: The civil self-administration: Handbook fd community honorary office , Stuttgart: Jahrbuch-Verl. 1954
  • La Jeunesse allemande et l'avenir de l'Europe: Conference. Préambule de Jacques Schweizer , Paris: Groupe "Collaboration" 1942
  • Young team in the labor service: report and Call from Baden , Karlsruhe: Braun 1933
  • Herder and the German cultural view , Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt 1932

literature

  • Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 1: Johannes Hürter : A – F. Schöningh, Paderborn 2000, ISBN 3-506-71840-1
  • Barbara Unteutsch: From the Sohlbergkreis to the Collaboration group. A contribution to the history of Franco-German relations based on the "Cahiers franco-allemands / Deutsch-Französische Monatshefte" 1931 - 1944. Series: Munster Contributions to Romance Philology, 7th ed. In the series: Wolfgang Babilas , Wolf Dietrich, Horst Geckeler , Manfred Lentzen, Christoph Strosetzki. Kleinheinrich, Münster 1990, ISBN 3-926608-56-0 ISSN  0936-9724
  • Guido Müller: European social relations after the First World War. The Franco-German Study Committee and the European Cultural Association. Oldenbourg, Munich 2005, ISBN 3486577360 , p. 245

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Bran, quoted in: Barbara Unteutsch: Vom Sohlbergkreis zur Gruppe Collaboration , p. 150
  2. ^ François Dufay : Die Herbstreise , Siedler, Berlin 2001, p. 113 ISBN 3-88680-735-5
  3. Barbara Unteutsch: Vom Sohlbergkreis zur Gruppe Collaboration , p. 151
  4. She did not see herself as a role model. In: Black Forest Messenger . , August 29, 2013. Retrieved October 25, 2015.