Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

In this chapter, Kissinger focuses on German political figure Konrad Adenauer. In 1945, Germany was in ruins, the Nazi empire having collapsed and the population at the mercy of the occupying Allied forces. Germany would have to take on the incredibly difficult task of rebuilding not only its infrastructure but a sense of national self, while atoning for the horrors of its recent past. The leader of this project would be Konrad Adenauer. Adenauer had been mayor of Cologne, and at 69 years old he had witnessed the convulsions of Germany’s bloody 20th century. His great hope, Kissinger states, was that Germany “would become a normal country, though always, he knew, with an abnormal memory” (5). The son of an army officer, he developed a reputation as a capable, nonpartisan bureaucrat, but his opposition to the Nazis stalled his career when Hitler became chancellor in 1933. He and his family lived out the Nazi era in relative quiet, until he was imprisoned toward the end of the Second World War. When US forces liberated Cologne, they reinstated Adenauer as mayor, and along with many who had opposed Hitler, helped form the Christian Democratic Union, which embraced democracy and fiercely repudiated the Nazi legacy. Internally, Germany would draw on its legacy of Catholicism and Protestantism while externally seeking to align itself with the project of European integration and an alliance with the United States.

In 1949, the parts of Germany under French, British, and US occupation merged to form the Federal German Republic, and Adenauer would serve as its chancellor until 1963 (the Soviet zone in the East would become the German Democratic Republic, a division that held until 1990). West Germany (as it was commonly called) retained an allied presence, which Adenauer accepted as crucial to national recovery. At the heart of Adenauer’s “strategy of humility,” Kissinger says, was “accepting the consequences of defeat; regaining the confidence of the victors; building a democratic society; and creating a European federation that would transcend the historic divisions of Europe” (14). While his opponents in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) sought to shake off foreign control, Adenauer embraced massive infusions of American money in the form of the 1947 Marshall Plan, rejecting any calls for economic nationalism. In 1950, he endorsed the European Coal and Steel Commission (ECSC), establishing a common market for commodities essential to wartime production, thereby symbolizing a willingness to trade rather than fight.

Kissinger observes that West Germany’s main security concern was the Soviet Union, and so Adenauer sought rearmament, especially after Soviet forces tried to lay siege to the Western section of Berlin (which was entirely within the Soviet occupation zone, despite having US, British, and French forces). There was reluctance to allow the aggressor of World War II to regain military power so soon after the war’s conclusion, and the Soviet Union offered an alternative plan where Germany could reunify provided that it affirmed neutrality, but instead Adenauer eventually secured West German membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the 1949 alliance of Western nations with the implicit purpose of checking Soviet power. In that same year, 1955, Adenauer was finally elected in his own right, with the previous elections having been ratified by Allied officers.

Adenauer controversially limited prosecutions of former Nazis to those directly responsible for egregious war crimes, and so many former officials of the Third Reich ended up in positions of influence. At the same time, he authorized reparations payments to families of Holocaust survivors, upon a request by the Israeli government. After leaving office, he visited Israel, including its Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem. Prior to that, in 1956, Adenauer had tacitly supported Israel’s invasion of Egypt, which had the explicit support of Britain and France, and was “shaken” by American opposition (26). This pushed him closer to France and its new president, Charles De Gaulle (the subject of the next chapter), in pursuit of a European security community not beholden to the United States.

Kissinger states that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev tried to widen the gap between West Germany and the US, especially by threatening war over the status of West Berlin, and it was in the midst of that crisis that Kissinger himself met Adenauer; they would meet frequently until Adenauer’s death in 1967. In October 1957, Adenauer expressed doubts to Kissinger that the United States would use nuclear weapons to defend its NATO allies against a Soviet attack. In May of 1961, at a particularly stressful moment in the ongoing negotiations over Berlin, Adenauer had become even more skeptical, in part because the US had ceased to back the French effort to maintain control over Algeria, which some took as another betrayal of a European ally. Kissinger adds that Adenauer worried that efforts to negotiate the status of Berlin, from anything less than a position of total strength, signaled a US willingness to turn on the Germans as well for the sake of better relations with the Soviet Union. In February 1962, the now 86-year-old Adenauer clashed with the young and idealistic US President, John F. Kennedy, but Kissinger assured him that the nuclear arsenal was vastly superior to that of the Soviets, and they would not be afraid to use it should it prove necessary.

Adenauer’s ultimate goal was German reunification, but Adenauer was willing to postpone that goal until the risk of falling under Soviet influence had passed entirely—something that would happen a generation after Adenauer’s death. His more hardline policy did not long outlast his time in office, as the SPD would later pursue a more conciliatory policy with their East German counterparts, but his broader commitment to both democratic principles and the Western alliance would hold after he left office. In conversations after his retirement, Adenauer told Kissinger that he still worried about American reliability, as the war in Vietnam was pulling them far away from Europe for a seemingly marginal interest, while angering large swaths of the German public. Adenauer still doubted, states Kissinger, “that any American president will risk nuclear war on behalf of Berlin in every circumstance” (43), though he admitted that so far, the Soviets had remained deterred.

Kissinger claims that Adenauer’s most significant successor, former West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, came across as more of a visionary and idealist, championing better relations with the Soviet bloc, but upon becoming chancellor kept the broad outlines of Adenauer’s pro-Western policies. Germany would even host American medium-range nuclear weapons, a likely target in a Soviet nuclear strike. East Germany ultimately proved incapable of maintaining its totalitarian system of rule, observes Kissinger, and under the leadership of Helmut Kohl, Germany was reunified and the new state was incorporated into NATO.