Well, the <br /> should not be corrected, because it's the only markup that can stand alone without closing tag and will therefore be parsed correctly with the space before the slash. To make the problem clear, the html parser cannot identifiy closing markup tags with the space in between and this will demage the grid layout in your German layout. You can easily check if you didn't miss any faulty closing markup by opening the source code page of pages which do not look the same as in the English version of a page.

Make sure to clear caches in Studio as well as in your browser after you've done the corrections.