Kurt Georg Kiesinger

Kurt Georg Kiesinger was a lawyer from Württemberg who joined the Nazi party in 1933 and remained a member until 1945. From 1940 he worked in the radio policy department of the Reich Foreign Office, rising to deputy head of department in 1943. After internment he was classified as exonerated in 1948, joined the CDU, sat in the Bundestag from 1949 and led Baden-Württemberg from 1958. In December 1966, after Ludwig Erhard's coalition collapsed, he became chancellor of a Grand Coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD, with Willy Brandt as foreign minister. Although the Union remained the largest party in 1969, the SPD and FDP formed a government without him.

Supporters credit Kiesinger with holding together an unusual coalition that ended the first postwar recession, passed major social and constitutional reforms and opened the first cautious contacts with Eastern Europe. Critics focus on his Nazi past: he was a party member for twelve years and a senior official in the Foreign Office radio propaganda apparatus, although an SS security report later found in the Spiegel archive said he had hindered anti-Jewish actions. In November 1968 the journalist Beate Klarsfeld slapped him at a CDU congress to draw attention to his past. The Emergency Acts passed under his government also became a focus of the student protest movement.