[2] She studied Jurisprudence at Heidelberg during the Great Depression in a period of socio-economic nemesis, political polarisation and parliamentary deadlock which led to the ending of democracy in Germany during 1933.
At Heidelberg she was one of the last pupils of the criminal lawyer, legal philosopher and former Minister of Justice, Gustav Radbruch, before his government mandated dismissal from his post.
A student contemporary who was also taught by Radbruch, and who subsequently became a life-long friend (and professional ally in the overwhelmingly male world of the West German criminal law) was Helga Einsele.
Brauneck took, instead, a mid-level post with the police service, passing a further exam qualifying her as a "Kriminalassistent" in 1939, and allowing her a modest promotion to a higher-level grade.
[6] This amounted to a set of rules, which to her astonishment Reichsführer Himmler, whose wide accumulation of responsibilities included the police service, signed off without requiring any amendments.
Brauneck herself attributed the respect and relative professional freedom that she felt she enjoyed in the police service by this time to nothing more remarkable than her gender: "All the male criminal officials belonged to the SS: we could not do that, because as women we lacked certain essential characteristics, and so we did indeed have to greet every uniformed colleague we came across appropriately, but we were then left to follow old-fashioned human behavioural principles undisturbed [unlike our male colleagues].
[2][7][9] The conventional path to a life-long career in university-level education in West Germany was through a "Habilitation" (post-doctoral) degree, and during her five years working as an assistant for Sieverts awareness of this gap in her qualifications became increasingly pressing.
She faced resistance to the idea both (she became convinced) on account of her gender and because Criminology, her speciality, had not yet been rehabilitated as an independent subject in its own right among the Hamburg academic community.
It dealt with "Criminal Law and Criminal Law Support" ("Strafrecht und strafrechtliche Hilfswissenschaften") and was based on a catamnesistic investigation of around 300 convicted young offenders, and she had secured from Sieverts - who was by this time a senior member of the university - an assurance that in return for this work she should expect to receive a "venia legendi" ("permission to teach at the university").
[2][7][10] After securing her habilitation there is a sense in which Anne-Eva Brauneck had outgrown her various roles at Hamburg, and though her gender may still have counted against her, in 1965 she was able to accept the newly created teaching chair in "Criminal Law and Criminology" ("Strafrecht und Kriminologie" - subsequently re-focused as the teaching chair in "Criminology and Criminal Policy" - "Kriminologie und Kriminalpolitik") at the University of Giessen.
Between 1945 and 1949 the western two thirds of what had previously been Germany were divided up into four occupation zones and administered by the military authorities of the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France.
If those post-war occupation zones are thought of as "Germany", then first female to become a full professor in a German university law faculty was Gertrud Schubart-Fikentscher (1896-1985), appointed in September 1948 to a teaching chair in civil law and legal history at the University of Halle, then in the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet-sponsored German Democratic Republic).
Kreuzer also commended, in particular, Brauneck's contributions over the years to the Monatsschrift für Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform, a specialist journal devoted to criminology and criminal law reform.