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 he'd spent 1940 to 1945. He served until October 1969, led the CDU until 1971, then returned to the Bundestag for another decade - always trailed by the question of what accommodation with the past actually meant.