Konrad Adenauer

Konrad Adenauer became the first chancellor of West Germany in 1949, at the age of 73, and held the office for fourteen years. A Catholic Rhinelander and long-serving mayor of Cologne, he anchored the new Federal Republic firmly in the Western alliance, reconciled it with France and helped launch European integration, while his government also ended denazification and kept many former Nazis in public life.

Adenauer was born in Cologne, then part of Prussia, on 5 January 1876. He studied law at Freiburg, Munich and Bonn, joined the Catholic Centre Party and entered city government in 1906. In 1917 he was elected mayor, a post he held until 1933. He guided the city through food shortages in the First World War and the unrest that followed, rebuilt its university, and planned bridges, parks and a stadium. Disliking Prussian centralism, he floated plans in 1919 and 1923 for an autonomous Rhineland, which Berlin rejected. From 1921 to 1933 he also presided over the Prussian State Council.

When Adolf Hitler came to power, Adenauer was removed as mayor in April 1933, and his bank accounts were frozen. He sheltered for a time at the abbey of Maria Laach, was briefly arrested in 1934, and later lived in seclusion after winning back his pension in 1937. After the failed plot against Hitler in July 1944 he was imprisoned again and released in November 1944.

The Americans reinstated him as mayor in 1945, but the British dismissed him that October. He then threw himself into building the Christian Democratic Union, a party meant to unite Catholics and Protestants, and led it from 1946 to 1966. He chaired the council that drafted West Germany's constitution, the Basic Law, and after the first federal election in August 1949 the Bundestag elected him chancellor on 15 September, reportedly by a single vote. He chose Bonn as the provisional capital.

Adenauer's guiding aim was to bind West Germany to the West, even at the price of continued division during the Cold War. He took the country into the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, rejected Stalin's 1952 offer of a neutral, united Germany, and led West Germany into NATO in May 1955, with new armed forces founded that November. He signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, built a close friendship with Charles de Gaulle and sealed Franco-German reconciliation with the Élysée Treaty of January 1963. He refused to recognise East Germany or the Oder–Neisse border with Poland. Under the Luxembourg Agreement, pushed through the Bundestag against strong opposition, West Germany committed itself to paying compensation to Israel and to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.

His government ended denazification, passed amnesties that benefited hundreds of thousands, pressed the Allies to free convicted war criminals and kept as his state secretary Hans Globke, who had played a major part in drafting the Nazi race laws. Meanwhile the "economic miracle", led by his economics minister Ludwig Erhard, doubled real wages between 1950 and 1963, and in 1957 the Christian Democrats won an outright majority. His position weakened after the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the Spiegel affair of 1962, and he handed over to Erhard in October 1963.

Adenauer stayed in the Bundestag and remained party chairman until 1966. He died at his home in Rhöndorf on 19 April 1967, aged 91, and leaders from around the world attended his requiem in Cologne Cathedral. In 2003 German television viewers voted him the greatest German of all time.

Our 1914 and 1930 maps show the German Empire and the Weimar Republic of his Cologne years, our 1938 map shows Nazi Germany, and our 1960 map shows the divided Germany he led; see also Germany.