44 Facts About Otto Braun

From 1920 to 1932, with only two brief interruptions, Braun was Minister President of the Free State of Prussia.

Otto Braun was born in Konigsberg, the capital and largest city of East Prussia.

Otto Braun's father was originally a self-employed master shoemaker who ended his working life as a railroad lineman, a position then considered considerably lower socially.

Otto Braun met her in the 1890s at a party function where he spoke, and they were married on 3 April 1894.

Otto Braun thought and acted in a matter-of-fact, sober manner but lacked both rhetorical skill and the ability to excite his listeners with a rousing speech.

Otto Braun was chairman of the Konigsberg Workers' Election Association, the local party's legal front, and later producer, editor and printer of various Social Democratic periodicals.

Otto Braun was co-founder of the German Agricultural Workers' Union, chairman of the local health insurance fund and a member of the Konigsberg City Council.

In 1892 Otto Braun received a two month prison sentence for lese-majeste.

Otto Braun was arrested, and in 1904 proceedings were instituted against him and eight other Social Democrats for high treason.

Otto Braun spent over five months in pretrial detention awaiting what came to be known as the "Konigsberg secret society trial".

Otto Braun was defended by fellow East Prussian Social Democrat Hugo Haase, who in the process revealed the cooperation of the Prussian police with the Russian secret service Okhrana.

The evidence against Otto Braun was not considered substantive by the court, and he was acquitted.

In 1898 Otto Braun became chairman of the East Prussian SPD and in 1905 assumed his first party office at the Reich level as a member of the Control Commission.

Otto Braun found their argumentation too unworldly, too theoretical and too little oriented toward practical and attainable goals.

Otto Braun once criticized Rosa Luxemburg for her "insufferable schoolmasterly manner".

Otto Braun participated in the organization of the strike of January 1918, in which 400,000 workers, primarily in munitions plants, unsuccessfully went on strike.

In 1919 and 1920 Otto Braun was a member of the Weimar National Assembly, which was both the new Republic's interim parliament and the body that drafted and adopted the Weimar Constitution.

Personal rivalries, especially between Braun and SPD party chairman Otto Wels, continued to worsen the climate and communications.

Otto Braun accused the SPD leadership of acting irresponsibly, and Wels thought that Otto Braun's behavior toward the party was reckless and that he lacked respect for Social Democratic principles.

In 1918, after the fall of the monarchy, Otto Braun became Prussia's Minister of Agriculture under Minister President Paul Hirsch.

Otto Braun opposed the breakup of Prussia that many were proposing following the war.

Otto Braun feared that the dissolution of Prussia, which covered about two-thirds of Germany in area but was very inhomogeneous in composition, would strengthen the annexation demands of the victorious powers.

Fierce resistance from large-scale agriculturalists, Hirsch's hesitant stance and the fact that Otto Braun's plans ran counter to law caused them for the most part to fail.

Otto Braun was Prussian Minister President from March 1920 to March 1921, November 1921 to January 1925, and April 1925 to May 1932.

The historian Hajo Holborn wrote that Otto Braun was not a social revolutionary but "a determined democratic reformer" and a shrewd coalition builder.

Otto Braun and Severing had replaced almost all Prussian governors, district presidents, district administrators and police chiefs.

Otto Braun was no more successful than Braun in appealing to conservative voters and lost to Paul von Hindenburg.

Otto Braun initially had a good relationship with President Hindenburg, something that was surprising both to observers and to the two men themselves.

The trust between the two men was lost for good in October 1929 after Otto Braun banned the Rhineland chapter of Der Stahlhelm, a veteran's organization that served as the paramilitary body of the right-wing DNVP.

Otto Braun remained in Berlin and prepared a legal complaint to the State Constitutional Court of the Reichsgericht on behalf of the Prussian state government.

Otto Braun then spent the summer on a recuperative vacation in Bad Gastein, Austria and Ascona in Switzerland.

Otto Braun was legally still Minister President of Prussia, but his only power lay in presiding over meaningless meetings of his cabinet, now called a "sovereign government", and in representing Prussia in the Reichsrat, while Reich Commissioner Papen was rapidly erasing the reforms of the previous twelve years.

Otto Braun's response was again limited to filing a complaint with the State Constitutional Court on 7 February 1933.

The events following the 27 February 1933 Reichstag fire and warnings that his life was threatened induced Otto Braun to flee Germany.

Otto Braun considered a more active approach futile in view of the political-military balance of power in 1932.

Otto Braun had been able to save most of his assets, but, confident that he would be paid his pension as Prussian Minister President, he had spent it on a plot of land with a house and even taken out a mortgage.

Otto Braun tried unsuccessfully to rent or sell his house, but fearing the bailiff, he finally left Switzerland.

Otto Braun's friends were able to persuade him to write his memoirs.

Otto Braun buried himself in documents, and by 1938 the manuscript for was completed.

Otto Braun was at that point able to rent out his house in Ascona at a good price.

Otto Braun's book did not bring in enough to even pay the mortgage interest on his house.

Otto Braun spent much of the time in bed suffering from attacks of rheumatism.

Otto Braun established contact with the Bavarian Social Democrat Wilhelm Hoegner and the former Reich Chancellor Joseph Wirth.

Otto Braun died in Locarno, Switzerland on 15 December 1955.