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 Upper Silesia.

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 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 for the Nazis in 1932, he took on the post of acting Gauleiter of Silesia on 1 May 1935.

After Gauleiter Josef Wagner, in whose shadow Bracht had been standing, fell out of favour with Adolf Hitler on 9 November 1941 and was removed from office and kicked out of the Party, Silesia was split into two Gaue, Upper and Lower Silesia. Bracht was appointed as the new Gauleiter of the former. From February 1941, he was moreover given the function 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 also promoted to the rank of SA Obergruppenführer. Within Bracht's jurisdiction was the extermination 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, he could not prevail upon the Armament Ministry to do so.