Konrad Adenauer

Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer (5 January 1876 – 19 April 1967) was a German statesman and politician who served as the first chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963. From 1946 to 1966, he was the first leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a newly founded Christian democratic party, which became the dominant force in the country under his leadership.

As a devout Catholic, Adenauer was a leading politician of the Catholic Centre Party in the Weimar Republic, serving as Mayor of Cologne (1917–1933) and as president of the Prussian State Council. In the early years of the Federal Republic, he switched focus from denazification to recovery, and led his country to close relations with France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. During his years in power, he worked to restore the West German economy from the destruction of World War II to a central position in Europe with a market-based liberal democracy, stability, international respect and economic prosperity.

Adenauer belied his age by his intense work habits and his uncanny political instinct. A strong anti-communist, he was deeply committed to an Atlanticist foreign policy and restoring the position of West Germany on the world stage. Adenauer was a driving force in reestablishing national military forces (the Bundeswehr) and intelligence services (the Bundesnachrichtendienst) in West Germany in 1955 and 1956. He refused the diplomatic recognition of the German Democratic Republic as an East-German state and the Oder–Neisse line as a postwar frontier to Poland. Under Adenauer, West Germany joined NATO. A proponent of European unity, he signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Adenauer is considered as one of the "Founding fathers of the European Union".

Konrad Adenauer was born on 5 January 1876 in Cologne, Rhenish Prussia, as the third of five children of Johann Konrad Adenauer (1833–1906) and his wife Helene (née Scharfenberg; 1849–1919). His siblings were August (1872–1952), Johannes (1873–1937), Lilli (1879–1950) and Elisabeth, who died shortly after birth c. 1880. One of the formative influences of Adenauer's youth was the so-called Kulturkampf, the struggle of the Prussian state with the Catholic church, an experience that as related to him by his parents left him with a lifelong dislike for "Prussianism", and led him like many other Catholic Rhinelanders of the 19th century to deeply resent the Rhineland's inclusion in Prussia.

Having a passion for inventing, Adenauer started experimenting with plants in the back garden as a child, which was not welcomed by his father who told him "One should not try to meddle with the Lord's hand", then in 1904 he invented a reaction steam engine which was supposed to filter out dust produced by cars. However, as his hobby of inventing grew ever more costly, Adenauer's activities in this area slowly diminished.

After final school examination (Abitur) in 1894, Adenauer studied law and politics at the universities of Freiburg, Munich and Bonn, demonstrating competent but not exceptional academic ability. In 1896, he was mustered for the Prussian army, but did not pass the physical exam due to chronic respiratory problems he had experienced since childhood. He was a member of several Catholic students' associations. He graduated in 1900, and afterwards worked as a lawyer at the court in Cologne for four years.

As a devout Catholic, he joined the Centre Party (German: Deutsche Zentrumspartei or just Zentrum) in 1906 and was elected to Cologne's city government in the same year. In 1909, he became Vice-Mayor of Cologne, an industrial metropolis with a population of 635,000 in 1914. Avoiding the extreme political movements that attracted so many of his generation, Adenauer was committed to bourgeois decency, diligence, order, Christian morals and values, and was dedicated to rooting out disorder, inefficiency, irrationality and political immorality. In 1917, he was unanimously elected as Mayor of Cologne for a 12-year period, and re-elected in 1929. By 1931 and whilst Mayor of Cologne, he was also acting Vice President of the German Colonial Society from 1931 to 1933 and said: "The German Empire must strive for the acquisition of colonies. There is too little room in the Empire itself for its large population."

During World War I, he worked closely with the army to maximize the city's role as a rear base of supply and transportation for the Western Front. He paid special attention to the civilian food supply, enabling the residents to avoid the worst of the severe shortages that beset most German cities during 1918–1919. In 1918, he invented a soy-based sausage called the Cologne sausage to help feed the city. In the face of the collapse of the old regime and the threat of revolution and widespread disorder in late 1918, Adenauer maintained control in Cologne using his good working relationship with the Social Democrats. In a speech on 1 February 1919 Adenauer called for the dissolution of Prussia, and for the Prussian Rhineland to become a new autonomous Land (state) in the Reich. Adenauer claimed this was the only way to prevent France from annexing the Rhineland. Both the Reich and Prussian governments were completely against Adenauer's plans for breaking up Prussia. When the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were presented to Germany in June 1919, Adenauer again suggested to Berlin his plan for an autonomous Rhineland state and again his plans were rejected by the Reich government.