Karl Dietrich Bracher was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, he served in the Wehrmacht during World War II and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. He was then held as a POW in Camp Concordia, Kansas. He 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, Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn, where he was a professor of politics and contemporary history from 1959 to 1987. Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.