Why were older-era German and some other Continental freight and even passenger cars provided with a brakeman's shack or shelter while I have never seen this feature on British rolling stock?
Was it something to do with British trains always having a guard's or brake van at the end of the train which did not seem to be the practice on the Continent?
Just curious.

British operating procedure was quite different. A train would stop at the top of a slope and the guard would walk along the train putting brakes on on each wagon, then the loco would pull the train down the grade. Then stop at the bottom so the guard could take the brakes off, and on they would go. Much more time consuming.

As an aside to this, there was a series in the UK on the history of British railways recently. They went through this exact procedure to go down a quite steep grade with a handful of wagons, but were so busy doing piece to camera that they forgot to take the brakes off at the bottom. Got to the end of the branch line, ran the loco around, probably spent quite some time (ever been involved in filming anything? It takes ages with all the set up etc to get a short usable take) In due course they start back and get to the slope, and the loco can't pull the wagons up, even though the loco is releasing sand onto the wheels. Eventually they realize what the problem is, release the brakes and off they go without a problem. I wondered how hot the brakes and wheels had got with the running around with the brakes on when they shouldn't have been.

Each wagon had a push down lever that had a ratchet arrangement, so the amount of braking it exerted was variable. The end of the lever was arranged as a step so the guard could jump on it to apply a suitable amount of pressure. I can't remember how it is released - I can see i'll have to go down the local museum and take some photos of brake mechanisms.

The brakevan also had a wheel to put its brakes on, and my assumption is that this was enough to hold a train or provide some tail end braking to keep the chain links taught when stopping.

I just love learning new things about different railways... Thanks!

I can recall seeing shunters in UK using a long wooden pole to force down that lever and presumably release the wagon brake to free the vehicle for movement.
I was amazed to learn that it was normal to man all those brakeman shelters on some early-era Continental trains. That must have meant a very large train crew on a long train compared to only three, I assume, on a British goods train of the period.