Who was Kurt Georg Kiesinger?
Kurt Georg Kiesinger trained as a lawyer in Württemberg. He joined the Nazi party in 1933 and stayed in it until the regime fell in 1945. During the war he worked in the Foreign Office on radio propaganda, and by 1943 he was a deputy head of department. After a spell in internment he was cleared in 1948, joined the CDU and entered the Bundestag in 1949. He became head of the government of Baden-Württemberg in 1958. When Ludwig Erhard's government broke apart in December 1966, Kiesinger took over as chancellor, with the SPD as partner and Willy Brandt as foreign minister. The Union won the most votes in 1969, but the SPD and FDP then formed a government without it.
Political views
- In 1966 he built the first coalition of the CDU/CSU with the SPD, the two largest parties.Source: hdg.de
- His government dealt with the recession and budget crisis of 1966-1967 by passing a stability law and drawing up financial plans over several years.Source: hdg.de
- His coalition widened compulsory pension cover, brought in student grants and made employers pay sick workers for the first six weeks.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- Together with the SPD he pushed through the Emergency Acts, which were hotly disputed.Source: hdg.de
- He set up diplomatic ties with Romania in 1967 and Yugoslavia in 1968, which began to chip away at the Hallstein Doctrine.Source: hdg.de
- In 1966 he and the SPD agreed to bring in a first-past-the-post voting system, but the coalition never delivered it.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- From 1950 to 1958 he sat in the Council of Europe's Consultative Assembly, and he later led the Bundestag's foreign affairs committee.Source: hdg.de
Legacy
Supporters say Kiesinger held an unlikely partnership together, brought the first postwar recession to an end, passed large social and constitutional reforms and took the first careful steps toward Eastern Europe. Critics start with his Nazi record. He was a party member for twelve years and held a senior job in the Foreign Office's radio propaganda effort, even though an SS security report found later in the Spiegel archive said he had blocked anti-Jewish actions. The journalist Beate Klarsfeld struck him in the face at a party congress in 1968, to drag the issue into public view. The Emergency Acts, passed during his term, also fed the student protest movement.