Class News

Peter von Braun '64 writes a sad vignette of his life

December 20, 2019

No good deed goes unpunished.

My father was commissioned in the U.S. Cavalry in 1929 and served during WWII. Between the wars, he and some colleagues rescued a significant number of Jews from the Holocaust and resettled them in the U.S.

Fast forward . . .

In 2011, I ran for the Greenwich CT Board of Education. My opponent, another Yalie, based her campaign on the untrue and defamatory claim that my father was a Nazi war criminal. I defeated her, but somehow she got her message to a billionaire who controlled the bank I used for my real-estate development projects. He proceeded to cancel my untapped $4.5 million line of credit and then foreclosed on my $10 million waterfront condo project.  I tried to finish it with my own funds, but narrowly missed. When he was being deposed, the banker admitted that his motive was to get revenge for my father’s alleged Nazi past. Altogether I lost the project, my 7,700 sq. ft. San Francisco home, and our ski house in Vermont, in total worth about $10 million.

No attorney will take my case.

I now live one step above welfare.