Ex-West German Leader Kiesinger Dies

Former Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who overcame the taint of a Nazi past to head West Germany for three years in the 1960s, died today at age 83.

Kiesinger had been a member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945 and worked in the Foreign Ministry’s radio propaganda section during World War II. He was never charged with war crimes or atrocities.

The Christian Democratic politician died in the Tuebingen University hospital of heart failure, his office in Bonn said.

In 1966, Kiesinger succeeded fellow Christian Democrat Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, whose mini-coalition with the small Free Democrats had broken up.

Kiesinger, serving as West Germany’s third chancellor, was a symbol of reconciliation to many Germans. He grouped the conservative Christian Democrats and their Bavarian counterparts with the leftist-leaning Social Democrats to forge what was called the “Grand Coalition.”

It was the first German government in a generation to include the Social Democrats, whose Willy Brandt served as the coalition’s foreign minister before taking over as chancellor in 1969.

As a 29-year-old lawyer, Kiesinger, a Roman Catholic, joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power. He said he became disillusioned with the Nazis a year later because of the bloody purge of storm trooper leader Ernst Roehm and his associates.

After the war, he spent 16 months in an American internment camp. A German court fined him 50 marks, then $12.50, for being a party member. The fine was remitted when the court ruled later that he had risked his life to get a student out of a Nazi prison.

Kiesinger’s Nazi past brought him much unfavorable publicity when he became a candidate for chancellor, and the issue cropped up again during his term. He always denied any wrongdoing and declared:

“I have clean hands. I know what I did and what I did not do.”