He replaced many monarchist officials with supporters of the Weimar Republic, strengthened and democratized the Prussian police, and made attempts to fight the rise of the Nazi Party.

On 20 July 1932, in the Prussian coup d'état (Preußenschlag), Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen ousted Braun's government from power following its loss of a parliamentary majority to the Nazis and the Communist Party of Germany.

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

Influenced by anarcho-syndicalism[citation needed] – a view that revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism was a way for workers to gain control of a capitalist economy – he initially belonged to the party's left wing.

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

[2]Braun was also co-founder of the German Agricultural Workers' Union, chairman of the local health insurance fund and a member of the Königsberg City Council.

"[4] After the party rejected the draft, he said, "So let us leave our program, which has already helped us over many a mountain and led to many a victory, completely untouched for the time being, and let us not tinker around with it so much; that can lead to no good results.

[1] When the left wing of the SPD split off in 1917 to form the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), Braun stayed with the majority in the MSPD.

At the end of the war and the start of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, he became a representative of the MSPD on the Berlin Workers' and Soldiers' Council, which was set up on the pattern of Russian soviets.

Its majorities often changed, its composition was highly dependent on chance, and the discussions frequently did not revolve around practical issues but got lost in ideological debates about principles.

He also feared that the dissolution of Prussia, which covered about two-thirds of Germany in area but was very inhomogeneous in composition,[5] would strengthen the annexation demands of the victorious powers.

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

During most of the period, it could have broken with the SDP and formed a right-wing coalition with the DNVP and the German People's Party (DVP), as it did several times at the Reich level.

Conservative and bourgeois parties in particular strongly opposed political reassignments, although both the DDP and the DVP were awarded an above-average number of posts in the administration's governing bodies.

Hindenburg viewed Braun as a politician who thought not so much in terms of ideological subtleties but instead, within certain basic convictions, was open and pragmatically oriented toward day-to-day politics.

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

As a result, Braun and his cabinet, after formally submitting their resignations, remained in office on a caretaker basis in accordance with Article 59 of the state constitution.

When it became clear that his government would remain in office, he turned the handling of day-to-day affairs over to Heinrich Hirtsiefer, the Centre Party Minister of Public Welfare, and withdrew to rest and recuperate.

In an attempt to break the parliamentary stalemate and remove the Braun government from office, Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen, with the approval of President Hindenburg, initiated the 1932 Prussian coup d'état on 20 July.

In the SPD's poor election results and Braun's ill health, Papen had found an opportunity to eliminate the most important power centre of the republican parties in Germany.

It provided the rationale for a Reichsexekution, a constitutionally sanctioned intervention by the federal government against a member state, to be presented as a necessary step toward restoring peace and order.

On 25 July the State Constitutional Court refused to issue an injunction against Hindenburg's "Emergency Decree concerning the restoration of public safety and order in the territory of Prussia".

In mid-October, he was back in Berlin, and on 25 October the State Court ruled in "Prussia versus the Reich" that the measures taken by Papen and Hindenburg had not been lawful, but that the result had to be accepted.

It was not until Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933 that Hermann Göring, with Papen's help, secured a new emergency decree from Hindenburg that officially deposed Braun's "sovereign government".

The SPD party leadership did not forgive him for his flight, which became known before the polling stations closed for the March 5 election for the Prussian Parliament and the German Reichstag.

Afterwards, Braun was often reproached for surrendering without a fight and not calling a general strike or attempting to regain his powers with the help of the Prussian uniformed police, which at the time numbered 50,000 men.

Braun's behavior during the Prussian coup d'état in particular symbolized the helplessness of the democratic forces in the face of an enemy that felt bound neither by order nor by existing law.

Together they drew up plans for a possible postwar order, but Braun's attempt to have the Allies reinstate the previous democratic Prussian government failed because they had decided to abolish Prussia.

In West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, Braun's longtime domestic political adversary and a staunch opponent of both Prussianism and socialism, dominated the government for many years.

In addition, Braun's commitment to the Weimar Republic was long overshadowed by his ultimate political failure and general passivity during the Prussian coup d'état.