Kurt Georg Kiesinger

Kurt Georg Kiesinger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 as a young lawyer, then spent the war years in Ribbentrop's Foreign Office working propaganda and broadcast policy to avoid the front. After 1945 he reinvented himself in the Christian Democrats, won a Bundestag seat in 1949, and by 1958 had become Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg, where he founded two universities and built a reputation as a brilliant speaker and conciliator. That skill made him the compromise choice to lead a grand coalition with the Social Democrats in December 1966, but student protestors never let him forget where…