Traian Brăileanu

Traian Brăileanu or Brăilean (September 14, 1882 – October 3, 1947) was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian sociologist and politician. A native of the Bukovina region, he attended Czernowitz University, where he studied philosophy and classical languages, subsequently earning a doctorate. Ending up as a translator in Vienna, he fought for Austria during World War I. At the conclusion of hostilities, returned to the renamed Cernăuți, now part of Greater Romania. There, he soon became a professor of sociology, leading a "Cernăuți School" of academics during the interwar period.

Meanwhile, he was involved in nationalist politics, supporting Alexandru Averescu, Nicolae Iorga and, ultimately, the extremist Iron Guard, of which he was among the most prominent intellectual backers. A theoretician of organicism, corporatism, and antisemitism, he inspired the creation of Iconar, a literary society, and founded the review Însemnări Sociologice. He was elected to the Romanian Senate in 1937, and reached the apex of his political career during the short-lived National Legionary State of 1940–1941. He served as Education and Arts Minister under this regime, targeting the country's Jewish community and his various political opponents. In the wake of the Legionnaires' rebellion, he was arrested, tried and acquitted, but later arrested again and interned.

Freed yet again in 1944, he was placed under house arrest following the coup d'état of 23 August 1944, and, increasingly ill with ulcers, was tried before one of the Romanian People's Tribunals in 1946. Given a twenty-year sentence for war crimes, he died the following autumn at Aiud Prison, shortly before the establishment of a communist regime that suppressed his publications for the more than four decades of its existence.