Responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, Werner Braune was a key figure in the Nazi regime. For a short time he was also head of the DAAD, exploiting the exchange organisation to promote his notions of racial ideology.
By Gemma Pörzgen

One of the darkest chapters in the history of the DAAD was the period when it was headed by Nazi opportunist Werner Braune. Previously in charge of the International Office of the Reich Student Leadership, Braune took over leadership of the DAAD in June 1943, from then on heading the two organisations in a dual capacity.
Career under National Socialism
Having originally trained as a lawyer, Braune joined both the NSDAP and the SA in 1931 at the age of 22 before advancing rapidly in his career within the Nazi organisations. As a staunch National Socialist, he began working for the Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS and the Gestapo in 1936, soon rising through the ranks and taking on leadership positions. In 1941/42 he was given command authority of a so-called Einsatzgruppe – these “task forces” were in fact death squads deployed as instruments of annihilation in the conquered “eastern territories” of the Soviet Union: here they perpetrated crimes against the civilian population.
Responsible for war crimes in Ukraine
As commander of special unit 11b of Einsatzgruppe D, whose mission was the murder of political opponents, Jews, Sinti/Sintize and Roma/Romnja, as well as people with disabilities, he was responsible for the massacre in Simferopol on the Crimea peninsula in December 1941. This involved the murder of 14,300 people within a period of three days. Braune was promoted to the senior position of SS Obersturmbannführer in 1943. The next station on his career ladder was to become head of the DAAD.
Guided by his Nazi ideology, he steered the DAAD into becoming a tool for promoting racial and nationalistic policy. From sources compiled for a DAAD chronicle, for example, it emerges that in the Baltic states, scholarships were only awarded to those whose racial profile made them suitable candidates for gradual assimilation into the German nation through special educational and selection methods.” In this way, the opportunity to study in Germany was redefined according to Nazi ideology and exploited as a catalyst for ethnically biased, nationalistic policy. The aim of the scholarship programme was to bring about a process of “re-Germanisation”. For the academic year 1944/45, all scholarship holders from Flanders, Wallonia, the Netherlands and Norway were to be transferred to a so-called Germanisches Begabtenwerk – a special SS organisation for the supposedly “genetically superior” – though this never happened due to developments in the war. The DAAD was only a brief posting for Braune, however: in February 1945 he was transferred to Norway, where he was commander of the Security Police and the Security Service in the capital Oslo.
Prosecution at the Nuremberg follow-up trials
Returning to Germany after the end of the war, Braune initially attempted to go into hiding with false papers and a new identity, but he was quickly unmasked and arrested in Mainz. At the trial of Einsatzgruppe members from 15 September 1947 to 10 April 1948 – one of the Nuremberg follow-up trials – Braune was one of 24 former SS leaders who were accused of committing serious war crimes. The number of people murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in the USSR between June 1941 and 1943 was estimated to be at least 600,000, but based on the Einsatzgruppen reports, the prosecution assumed that the number of victims must have exceeded one million.
Execution as a Nazi war criminal
In court, Braune placed the blame on Hitler and argued that he had no choice but to obey orders under duress – a defence strategy that was commonly used in the post-war era. When asked what had happened to the Jews arrested during the raids, Braune answered bluntly that they had all been shot. The statements he made in the course of the proceedings demonstrated no sense of wrongdoing.
All the defendants were found guilty on 8 and 9 April 1948: 14 of them were sentenced to death on 10 April, including Braune. He was held at the Allies’ “War Criminals Prison No. 1” in Landsberg am Lech until his execution on 7 June 1951.
The past as a cautionary reminder – the future as an opportunity
Under Werner Braune, the DAAD became a tool for the ideological manipulation of exchange programmes. Since its re-establishment, the DAAD has been committed to diversity and openness as fundamental, non-negotiable principles.