lit a candle 1h agoMy sister called from home to tell me, I almost didn't believe her. I used the Oldenburg institute's archive years back for a book on old Danzig families, the place Broll built from nothing in 1989. Ninety four years, most of it given to other people's histories.
Their story
Werner Broll was a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union who represented Lower Saxony in the Bundestag for more than a decade and later led a federal institute devoted to the culture and history of the Germans of eastern Europe. A schoolteacher by training, he spent most of his…
Werner Broll was a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union who represented Lower Saxony in the Bundestag for more than a decade and later led a federal institute devoted to the culture and history of the Germans of eastern Europe. A schoolteacher by training, he spent most of his life in Oldenburg, where he was a fixture of local Christian Democratic politics for almost twenty years.
He was born in Hanover on 22 May 1932. He studied history and German language and literature at the universities of Munich and Munster, passing his first state examination in 1956 and his second in 1958. He then taught at grammar schools, finishing his teaching career as a senior teacher at the Hindenburgschule in Oldenburg, today the Herbartgymnasium.
His political career began in local government. From 1968 to 1977 he sat on Oldenburg city council, where he was among other things deputy chairman of the schools and culture committee. From 1970 to 1987 he chaired the CDU district association in Oldenburg, and he also served on the board of the party's regional association. In 1976 he was elected to the Bundestag on the Lower Saxony state list, and he remained a member until 1987. From 1982 to 1984 he was deputy chairman of the Bundestag committee on electoral scrutiny, immunity and rules of procedure.
Ahead of the 1987 federal election he lost the nomination for the Oldenburg, Ammerland and southern Friesland constituency to Thomas Kossendey. He moved to the Federal Ministry of the Interior as the designated head of a planned institute on the post war burden sharing programme. When that institute was eventually set up in Bayreuth, Broll instead became director of the newly founded Federal Institute for East German Culture and History in Oldenburg, today the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe (BKGE). He led it until 1997.
Former colleagues described him as a man of wide cultural and academic interests who saw the institute, alongside the city's university, as a true vocation. It was said that he sometimes took one of his musical instruments with him to sittings of the Bundestag in Bonn so that he could practise before or after the day's business.
Werner Broll died in Oldenburg on Thursday 29 October 2026, aged 94. His death was reported by the Nordwest-Zeitung on 2 November. A funeral service was arranged for 6 November 2026 in the chapel of the Catholic cemetery in Oldenburg, followed by burial.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Nordwest-Zeitung.
Photos
1Werner Broll on his CDU candidate poster for the 1980 Bundestag election
by People Forever
