Konrad Adenauer

Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer, who lived from 1876 to 1967, was a German statesman who served as the first chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963, having already led the Christian Democratic Union party from its founding in 1946 until 1966 and built it into the dominant political force in postwar West German politics. Adenauer took office as chancellor at the age of seventy three, when many observers expected him to serve only briefly as a caretaker figure, but he instead held the position for fourteen years, governing in a highly centralized style that became known as chancellor democracy, in which he made most major decisions personally and treated his cabinet ministers largely as extensions of his own authority. He is regarded as one of the founding fathers of what became the European Union, having pursued a firmly anti-communist foreign policy while steering West Germany toward close integration with France, Britain and the United States, securing membership in NATO and participation in the European Coal and Steel Community, the institutional forerunner of European economic integration. Under his leadership West Germany moved from the devastation of the Second World War toward a stable democracy and rapid economic recovery often called the economic miracle, alongside a program of reconciliation with former wartime enemies, a legacy of durable democratic institutions that has endured well beyond his own time in office.