13. Spending most of his life as a Nazi politician, Fritz Bracht committed suicide the day after his government formally surrendered
Fritz Bracht (b. 1899) served as the Nazi Gauleiter (Regional Party Leader) of Upper Silesia. After training as a gardener Bracht was enlisted into military service in 1917, serving on the front lines until the end of the war and thereafter as a British prisoner of war until 1919. Joining the Nazi Party in 1927, by November of the following year Bracht had been appointed leader of the party’s district of Sauerland; he similarly held the same position for the district of Altena in March 1931. Elected to the Prussian Landstag in 1932, Bracht undertook the appointment of Gauleiter of Silesia in May 1935.
Following the removal of Josef Wagner, Gauleiter of Westphalia-South and High President of Silesia, in 1941 and subsequent expulsion from the Nazi Party in 1942, Silesia was divided in two and Bracht was appointed as Oberpräsident (High President) of Upper-Silesia and Gauleiter of Oberschlesien. In 1944 Bracht was promoted to the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer, and within his new purview was Auschwitz concentration camp. Despite his many influential positions, including also Reich Defense Commissar for his region from 1942, Bracht was unable to convince the Armaments Ministry to upgrade aerial defenses in Upper Silesia and the territory fell swiftly to the Red Army.
With the occupation of Germany by Soviet forces and its subsequent formal capitulation on May 8, Bracht and his wife committed suicide in Bad Kudowa, near the current Polish-Czech border, on May 9 by potassium cyanide.