Before leading West Germany, Adenauer tinkered with inventions and hid from the Nazis
Konrad Adenauer was dismissed as mayor of Cologne in 1933 with his bank accounts frozen, leaving him without money, home or job. He sheltered in a monastery and moved house repeatedly for years. Long past normal retirement age, he became West Germany's first chancellor and anchored it firmly in the West.
Adenauer was born in Cologne in 1876, third of five children, and grew up amid the Kulturkampf, Prussia's struggle with the Catholic Church, which shaped his lifelong Catholic politics. He had an inventor's streak: as a boy he experimented on plants until his father warned him not to meddle with the Lord's handiwork, and in 1904 he designed a steam device meant to filter dust thrown up by cars. The hobby grew too expensive and faded. Chronic breathing problems kept him out of the Prussian army after law studies at Freiburg, Munich and Bonn.
Joining the Catholic Centre Party and Cologne's city government in 1906, he became deputy mayor in 1909 and mayor from 1917. He rebuilt the university, pushed through a Rhine bridge and a power plant and helped plan a stadium, a ring road and a green belt of parks. Twice he was floated as national chancellor in the 1920s, but he turned down the terms. Inside his party he argued for opening it to Protestants, an idea that later underpinned his Christian Democrats.
He misjudged the Nazis at first, thinking they could be absorbed into government while the real danger lay with the Communists. By early 1933 he saw his mistake; he was sacked in April, briefly jailed after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, and lived on friends' charity until a pension was settled in 1937. Hitler, according to Albert Speer, admired his civic projects but judged his principles incompatible with the regime.
After the war he led the new Christian Democratic Union from 1946 and was chancellor from 1949 to 1963. He moved the focus from denazification to recovery, tied West Germany to France, Britain and the United States, took it into NATO, rebuilt its armed forces and signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957. He refused to recognise East Germany. He is counted among the founders of the European Union and died in 1967.
Source: Konrad Adenauer
