Several of the films he produced had Holocaust theme, including Agnieszka Holland’s Golden Globe-winning “Europa Europa” about a boy in Nazi Germany joining the Hitler Youth to try to conceal the fact he is Jewish. His “Babi Yar” in 2003 centered on the 1941 Nazi massacre of Jews in Ukraine, in which several of Brauner’s relatives were killed. Brauner was disappointed by the lack of box-office success for the film in Germany, saying the test of “whether the German cinema public has become politically more mature” had “clearly negative” results.
He also had a share in producing “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” set in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, which won the Oscar for best foreign-language movie in 1972. Brauner described “Morituri,” a 1948 movie about a group of concentration camp inmates helped to escape by a Polish doctor near the end of the war, as his most important film. It received a negative reception at the time but Brauner called it “practically the first film that dealt with the issue of Nazi victims.” Brauner believed his lighter post-war films matched the public’s taste. “People wanted to be entertained after the terrible war, and I had a feeling for the needs of the audience,” he told the Funke newspaper group in 2018. His persistence helped. He recalled driving 36 times through communist East Germany from Berlin to Munich in his rickety Volkswagen to persuade the actress Maria Schell to play the part of a penniless pregnant woman in the 1955 drama “The Rats,” one of his favorite films. Culture Minister Monika Gruetters praised Brauner’s efforts over the decades to ensure that the victims of the Holocaust were not forgotten and said it was “a great gift for our country” that Brauner chose to make movies in Germany and support its democratic rebuilding. In recent years, Brauner was worried by the rise of right-wing populism in Europe.