Konrad Adenauer
Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor of West Germany at seventy-three and governed for fourteen years, anchoring it in the West permanently. Born in Cologne in 1876, he was Lord Mayor of the city from 1917 to 1933 — through the war, the French occupation of the Rhineland, the inflation and the depression — and was removed by the Nazis in 1933, arrested twice, and spent the war in retirement and briefly in a Gestapo cell after the July plot. The Americans reinstated him as mayor in 1945 and the British dismissed him for incompetence, which he regarded as the making of his national career. He led the new Christian Democratic Union, presided over the parliamentary council that wrote the Basic Law, and became Chancellor in 1949 by a single vote — his own, as he acknowledged. His central conviction was Westbindung: that Germany's future lay in irreversible integration with France, the United States and Western Europe, even at the cost of postponing reunification indefinitely. Critics on the left argued he was choosing division; he accepted the charge. He took West Germany into the Council of Europe, the Coal and Steel Community, NATO in 1955 and the EEC in 1957, and signed the Élysée Treaty with de Gaulle in 1963. He negotiated reparations to Israel in 1952 against considerable domestic opposition, and went to Moscow in 1955 to bring home the last German prisoners of war. He also left many former Nazis in the civil service, including his own state secretary. He died in 1967.
- Lived: 1876 CE – 1967 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: chancellor, head_of_state, founding_father
