Konrad Adenauer

• 1. Introduction

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  Konrad Adenauer was elected the first chancellor of West Germany on the 15th of September 1949 by what observers called a majority of one vote, his own. He was 73 years old. Most assumed he would be a caretaker. Instead he held the office for 14 years, until 1963, and remained head of his party until he was 90. He had been born on the 5th of January 1876, before the German Empire was a decade old, and he would die in 1967 having helped found something entirely new. How did a Catholic Rhinelander who detested Prussia come to rebuild a shattered country? Why did he refuse offers to reunite Germany? And why, when Germans were later asked what they admired most about him, did they point not to NATO or the economy, but to the men he brought home from Soviet camps?

• 2. A Rhinelander Against Prussia

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  The Kulturkampf, the struggle between the Prussian state and the Catholic church, was one of the formative influences of Adenauer's youth. His parents passed it to him, and it left him with a lifelong dislike of what he called Prussianism. Like many Catholic Rhinelanders of the 19th century, he deeply resented the Rhineland's inclusion in Prussia. That resentment shaped a lifetime of politics.

  In a speech on the 1st of February 1919, Adenauer called for the dissolution of Prussia and for the Prussian Rhineland to become a new autonomous Land within the Reich. He argued it was the only way to prevent France from annexing the Rhineland. Both the Reich and Prussian governments stood completely against him. When the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were presented to Germany in June 1919, he proposed the autonomous Rhineland again, and Berlin rejected him again.

  In late October 1923, the conviction hardened into something near reckless. After Chancellor Gustav Stresemann announced that the new Rentenmark would not circulate in the Rhineland, Adenauer opened talks with the French High Commissioner Paul Tirard for a Rhenish republic in economic union with France. He called it a grand design for Franco-German reconciliation. Stresemann, who viewed it as borderline treason, ended the crisis on his own terms.

  Decades later, in a December 1946 letter, Adenauer wrote that the early 19th-century Prussian state had become an almost God-like entity that valued state power over the rights of individuals. He came to believe Prussianism was the root cause of National Socialism. His dislike ran so deep that he opposed Berlin as a future capital for the country he would lead.

• 3. Building Cologne

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  An industrial metropolis of 635,000 people in 1914, Cologne was the stage on which Adenauer first proved himself. He had joined the Centre Party in 1906 and won a seat on the city government the same year. In 1909 he became Vice-Mayor when his wife's cousin took the mayor's office. In 1917 the council unanimously elected him Mayor for a 12-year term, and re-elected him in 1929.

  Having a passion for inventing since childhood, Adenauer never quite gave it up. As a boy he experimented with plants in the back garden, which displeased his father, who told him one should not try to meddle with the Lord's hand. In 1904 he invented a reaction steam engine meant to filter dust from cars. In 1918, with the city short of food, he invented a soy-based sausage to help feed Cologne.

  He paid special attention to the civilian food supply, sparing residents the worst of the shortages that beset most German cities during 1918 to 1919. He rebuilt the University of Cologne, masterminded a bridge across the Rhine and an electrical plant, and helped plan a stadium and a city park. Working closely with the army during the First World War, he made the city a rear base of supply for the Western Front. Even Hitler, according to Albert Speer's Spandau: The Secret Diaries, admired these civic projects, the bypass road circling the city and the green belt of parks.

  From 1921 to 1933 he also served as president of the Prussian State Council, the chamber representing Prussia's provinces. Twice the office of Chancellor came within reach. In 1921 his insistence on a majority government blocked it. In 1926 the Zentrum offered it again, but he rejected the German People's Party condition that Gustav Stresemann remain Foreign Minister, dismissing Stresemann as too Prussian.

• 4. Surviving The Reich

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  On the 4th of April 1933, Adenauer was officially dismissed as Mayor of Cologne and his bank accounts were frozen. A strong opponent of Adolf Hitler, he had spent the early 1930s convinced that ignoring the Nazis and concentrating on the Communist threat would work. He had no money, no home, and no job. He turned to the abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Maria Laach for a stay of several months.

  After the Night of the Long Knives on the 30th of June 1934, Adenauer was imprisoned for two days. Then, on the 10th of August 1934, maneuvering for his pension, he wrote a ten-page letter to Hermann Goring, the Prussian interior minister. He stated that as mayor he had allowed Nazi flags on city flagpoles, and that in 1932 he had publicly said the Nazis should join the Reich government in a leading role. At the end of 1932 he had indeed demanded a joint Zentrum and Nazi government for Prussia.

  Fear governed the next years. He changed residences often, living on the benevolence of friends, until lawyers helped him secure a pension in August 1937. After the failed assassination attempt on Hitler of July 1944, he was imprisoned a second time. He fell ill and credited a former municipal worker in Cologne, a communist named Zander, with saving his life. Zander, then a section kapo of a labor camp near Bonn, found Adenauer's name on a deportation list to the east and got him admitted to a hospital. Adenauer was rearrested, then released from prison at Brauweiler in November 1944.

• 5. Founding A New Party

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  In January 1946, as the oldest man in attendance, the Alterspraesident, Adenauer convened a political meeting of the future Christian Democratic Union in the British zone and was informally confirmed as its leader. He had a specific theory behind the new party. A Catholic-only party, he believed, would once again hand German politics to anti-democratic forces. The CDU would instead embrace both Protestants and Catholics in a single party.

  This was an old fight for him. A debate had run inside his Centre Party since 1906 over whether to leave the tower, meaning admit Protestants, or stay in the tower as a Catholic-only party. Adenauer was a leading advocate of leaving the tower. At the 1922 Katholikentag, the annual meeting of German Catholics that he presided over, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber publicly admonished him for wanting to take the Zentrum out of the tower.

  The British had, in a sense, made his career possible. After reinstalling him as Mayor of Cologne, the Director of the British military government, General Gerald Templer, dismissed him for incompetence in December 1945, angered that Adenauer treated Germans as the political equals of the occupying Allies. That dismissal freed him to pursue an alliance with the Allies in the 1950s without being branded a sell-out.

  His leading role in the CDU of the British zone carried him to the Parliamentary Council of 1948, called by the Western Allies to draft a constitution for the three western zones. He chaired that convention. From the chairman's seat he vaulted to head of government once the new Basic Law was promulgated in May 1949.

• 6. Anchoring The West

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  Two clashing visions of Germany defined the first Bundestag election, held on the 15th of August 1949. Adenauer wanted to integrate the Federal Republic with the West, especially France and the United States, even if the price was a Germany that stayed divided. His rival, the Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher, wanted a united, socialist, and neutral Germany, and strongly opposed joining NATO. Theodor Heuss of the Free Democrats became the first President; Adenauer became Chancellor.

  He ran the office as no one quite had. As chancellor he made most major decisions himself, treating ministers as extensions of his authority, an approach that gave West Germany its reputation as a chancellor democracy. He even chose its seat of government, championing Bonn over Frankfurt and Heidelberg. He rejected Heidelberg partly because it was the setting of The Student Prince, a popular American operetta about German student drinking culture, and the world would not take the new state seriously.

  The magnet theory underpinned his Cold War strategy. A prosperous, democratic West Germany bound to the West would act as a magnet that eventually pulled down the East German regime. He refused to recognize East Germany and broke off relations with countries that recognized it, such as Yugoslavia. He refused to accept the Oder-Neisse line as Germany's eastern frontier, courting expellee and nationalist votes, though privately he considered the eastern provinces lost forever.

  When the Stalin Note of 1952 offered to unify the two German states into a single neutral state with its own army, Adenauer and his cabinet rejected it unanimously, sharing the Allies' suspicion. Critics said he had missed a chance for reunification. Schumacher had already pinned a label on him during the Petersberg debates, calling him Chancellor of the Allies.

• 7. Living With The Nazi Past

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  In a speech on the 20th of September 1949, Adenauer denounced the entire denazification process and announced an amnesty law for Nazi war criminals. He argued that continued denazification would foster a growing and extreme nationalism by excluding millions from German life forever. He demanded an end to this sniffing out of Nazis. By the 31st of January 1951, the amnesty had benefited 792,176 people, including 3,000 functionaries of the SA, the SS, and the Nazi Party, and 20,000 Nazis sentenced for deeds against life.

  His policy of integration extended to keeping former Nazis in office. When it emerged in 1950 that his State Secretary Hans Globke had helped draft the antisemitic Nuremberg Race Laws, Adenauer kept him on. He linked the release of war criminals to rearmament, receiving the Himmerod memorandum in October 1950, in which four former Wehrmacht generals named freedom for war criminals as the price of a new army. On the 2nd of January 1951 he met the American High Commissioner John J. McCloy to argue that executing the Landsberg prisoners would ruin the Federal Republic's Cold War role. McCloy and Thomas T. Handy reduced all but the seven worst death sentences.

  The other half of his approach was compensation, Wiedergutmachung. Under the Luxemburger Abkommen, West Germany agreed to pay compensation to Israel, with Jewish claims bundled in the Jewish Claims Conference. Facing severe opposition from the public and his own cabinet, Adenauer could only get the agreement ratified by the Bundestag with the support of the SPD. In Israel, the fledgling state under David Ben-Gurion accepted the money, opposed by parties such as Herut.

  That opposition turned violent. On the 27th of March 1952, a package addressed to Adenauer exploded in the Munich Police Headquarters, killing a Bavarian police officer named Karl Reichert. Investigators traced the plot to Menachem Begin, then head of Herut and a future Prime Minister of Israel, who aimed to stop the Reparations Agreement. The West German government sealed all proof to prevent antisemitic responses from the public.

• 8. Rearmament, Reconciliation, And Departure

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  After the Korean War broke out on the 25th of June 1950, the United States and Britain agreed that West Germany had to be rearmed against a possible Soviet invasion. To soothe French fears, the French Premier Rene Pleven proposed in October 1950 a European Defense Community in which German forces would serve as part of a multinational army. Adenauer disliked the Pleven plan but supported it as the only path the French would accept. When the French National Assembly killed the EDC treaty in August 1954, Anthony Eden steered Britain toward backing independent West German rearmament and NATO membership instead.

  The promises came fast at the London conference. Eden pledged that Britain would keep at least four divisions in the Army of the Rhine as long as a Soviet threat lasted. Adenauer promised Germany would never seek nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, nor capital ships or long-range artillery, and that its military would fall under NATO operational control. In May 1955 West Germany joined NATO, and in November the Bundeswehr was founded. To keep it under civilian control with no links to the past, Adenauer gave great power to the military reformer Wolf Graf von Baudissin.

  Prosperity ran beneath all of it. Alongside his economics minister Ludwig Erhard, the social market economy produced the Wirtschaftswunder. Real wages doubled between 1950 and 1963, working hours fell by 20 percent, and unemployment dropped from 8 percent in 1950 to 0.4 percent in 1965. His domestic record included a maternity leave law in 1952 granting 12 weeks of paid leave, child allowances in 1954, and pension indexation in 1957. More controversially, a school lunch programme was abolished in 1950.

  France was the friendship closest to his heart. He first met Charles de Gaulle in September 1958 and saw him as a rock, the only foreign leader he could completely trust. Their work produced the Elysee Treaty, signed in January 1963. The end came under pressure. The construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, his attack on Willy Brandt's birth in a speech on the 14th of August 1961, and the Spiegel affair of October 1962 all eroded him. He turned the office over to Erhard in October 1963.

  Adenauer died on the 19th of April 1967 at his family home in Rhoendorf. His last words, in Cologne dialect, were Da jitt et nix zo kriesche. His requiem mass in Cologne Cathedral drew guests from over one hundred countries, among them Charles de Gaulle and Lyndon B. Johnson, before his remains traveled upstream on the Rhine aboard the navy vessel Kondor. In 2003 he was voted the greatest German of all time in a ZDF contest that drew more than three million votes. Yet when Germans were asked what they admired most, most named the Return of the 10,000, the last prisoners of war he brought home from the USSR.