The Warrior Among the Cold Warriors

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 2, 1999

Konrad Adenauer, West Germany's chancellor for 14 years after World War II, doesn't even receive a mention in many American history textbooks these days. As chancellor, he ensured that the Federal Republic of Germany would remain capitalist, democratic, aligned with the United States and economically prosperous. Although it's easy to take such circumstances as a given, Adenauer needed to work hard to protect German freedom. More than any other Western European, therefore, Adenauer deserves credit for the triumph in the Cold War. In the following excerpt from Joseph Shattan's Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War, the author describes how Adenauer accomplished all this at a time when many assumed his career had ended.

On September 25, 1944, a distinguished, elderly German who had served as the Lord Mayor of the great Rhineland city of Cologne throughout the ill-fated Weimar Republic's brief existence was hauled into Brauweiler prison by the Gestapo. The warden of Brauweiler, who had known the new arrival in earlier times, accompanied him to the clothing depot, where he was deprived of his suspenders, shoelaces and pocket knife. "Now please don't commit suicide," the warden mockingly told his new charge. "You would only cause me no end of trouble. You're 68 years old, and your life is over anyway."

The elderly ex-mayor then was placed in a cell directly above the room where prisoners were tortured. As he lay on his straw mattress at night, drenched in sweat, he could hear their screams. During the day, he was able to observe the constant round of executions from his window, including the hanging of a 16-year-old boy. Although the old man himself escaped execution, these events traumatized him. On his death bed he imagined that he was back in Brauweiler. "Now they are locking an old man in prison," he cried out in his delirium.

But in 1944, Konrad Adenauer's death was still 23 tumultuous years away. In 1949, at the age of 73, he became chancellor of West Germany and he held that office for 14 years -- longer than the entire span of the Weimar Republic. During that period, he presided over West Germany's transformation from an international pariah into a respectable member of the Western alliance. He helped spark the economic miracle that turned West Germany into the economic powerhouse of Western Europe. He was personally responsible for West Germany's effort to make financial amends to Israel and the Jewish people for the Holocaust. Most importantly, perhaps, at the height of the Cold War, when West Germany might well have adopted a neutralist, or even pro-Soviet, foreign policy, it was Konrad Adenauer who ensured that his nation would be closely and unambiguously aligned with the West.

"Whoever has Germany has Europe," Lenin said in 1918. Adenauer kept West Germany, and therefore Western Europe, out of Soviet hands. Adenauer's friends and foes alike attributed his stance to a harsh and unbending anticommunism; he was regarded as the ultimate Cold Warrior. There was much truth in this contention: Adenauer despised the Soviet Union with every fiber of his being.

But at the heart of his approach to foreign policy was a distrust of nationalism. To Adenauer, nationalism was a modern form of idolatry -- the worship of a man-made object, the state, instead of God. Having seen how nationalism had encouraged the Germans to ignore God's laws and commit unspeakable crimes during Hitler's Third Reich, he was determined to stamp out the nationalist temptation once and for all by firmly anchoring post-World War II Germany in a wider community the democratic, Christian West. It was antinationalism, as much as anticommunism, that made Adenauer such a firm Western ally. And when, in 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed and serious negotiations over German reunification began, it was Adenauer's policy that ultimately prevailed: West Germany absorbed East Germany without surrendering her membership in NATO or any of her other ties to the West.