Short answers, pulled from the story.
Konrad Adenauer was a German statesman who served as the first chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963. He was also the first leader of the Christian Democratic Union from 1946 to 1966 and is considered one of the founding fathers of the European Union.
Konrad Adenauer was born on the 5th of January 1876 in Cologne, Rhenish Prussia, and died on the 19th of April 1967 at his family home in Rhoendorf. He was elected chancellor at age 73 and remained head of the CDU until he was 90.
Adenauer's dislike of Prussia traced to the Kulturkampf, the struggle between the Prussian state and the Catholic church, which his parents related to him in his youth. As a Catholic Rhinelander he resented the Rhineland's inclusion in Prussia, and he later came to believe Prussianism was the root cause of National Socialism.
Adenauer pressed for German rearmament and led West Germany into NATO in May 1955, with the Bundeswehr founded that November. He promised that Germany would never seek nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons and that its military would operate under NATO control.
Adenauer and his cabinet unanimously rejected the 1952 Stalin Note, which offered to unify the two German states into a single neutral state with its own army. They shared the Western Allies' suspicion about whether the offer was genuine, and critics later denounced him for missing a chance at reunification.
When Germans were asked after his death what they admired most about Adenauer, the majority said he had brought home the last German prisoners of war from the USSR, an event known as the Return of the 10,000. In 2003 he was voted the greatest German of all time in a ZDF contest with more than three million votes.