as ‘a hotbed of treason’. But it all ended with a
government rout: democracy had passed a test in
the face of arbitrary government. Two years later,
in October 1963, Adenauer at last made way for
Erhard.
Adenauer had never doubted the path West
Germany had to follow. Unerringly he anchored
the Federal Republic to the community of
Western European nations and to NATO. He
rejected all Soviet blandishments and hints that a
neutral, disarmed Germany might be reunified.
Was there ever a possibility that West Germany
could have chosen the ‘Austrian’ solution?
Adenauer regarded as the centrepiece of his
achievement the Franco-German reconciliation,
and the creation between them of an ‘unarmed
frontier’. The Franco-German friendship treaty of
January 1963 symbolised the special relationship
that had been established between the two coun-
tries. Adenauer did not have to create tension with
the Soviet Union to drive his countrymen into the
arms of the Western alliance. The repression of
freedoms in the Soviet zone, the harsh Ulbricht
regime in the German Democratic Republic which
led to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to
prevent even more millions of Germans leaving
their people’s republic, the periodic Soviet threats
to West Berlin, the preponderance of Soviet
troops and tanks, not at a safe distance but just
across the border, their use in East Berlin in 1953
and in Budapest in 1956 were all sufficient to con-
vince the majority that safety lay in close alliance
with Germany’s NATO partners.
In the Adenauer period there was little oppor-
tunity to improve relations with the Soviet Union
and the DDR. Adenauer’s claim that his govern-
ment could speak for all Germans until free elec-
tions were held in what was, in Western eyes, still
the Soviet zone took up the moral high ground,
even if the claim was looking increasingly unreal.
The Federal Republic broke off diplomatic rela-
tions with any country that recognised the sover-
eignty of the DDR and exchanged ambassadors
(the Hallstein Doctrine). On his visit to Moscow
in 1955, however, Adenauer had to breach this
line and agree to an exchange of ambassadors
with the Soviet Union, as part of a bargain to
release German prisoners of war still languishing
in the USSR. The Soviet Union in the post-Stalin
decades was realistic too and accepted the Federal
Republic as an independent and powerful nation
whose loyalty to the Western alliance could not
be shaken. Responding immediately to the
Schuman Plan, Adenauer had also helped to lay
the foundations of the European Economic
Community, accepting that in its relations with
France, Germany would for a time have to show
deference to de Gaulle’s visions of grandeur. In
changed circumstances, his successors were able
to modify the policies adopted towards the Soviet
Union and the DDR, but in all its essentials
Adenauer had set the fundamental course to be
followed by the Federal Republic in its relations
with its neighbours and the rest of the world. He
possessed that rare gift of the statesman, the
ability to distinguish the important from the sec-
ondary, and steadfastly to pursue the main objec-
tives of his policy without being led astray by
subsidiary considerations.
In his policies at home Adenauer was less suc-
cessful. Autocratic in his Cabinet, he manipulated
colleagues and felt little loyalty towards them.
His views of the past and present were clear to
the point of cynicism. Above reproach in his
own behaviour during the Nazi years, he knew
that the same could not be said of the majority
of his countrymen. But the nation could not
simply discard all former adherents of National
Socialism; who would have been left to run the
country and to rebuild it? Everyone would need
to pull together, whatever their past, except for a
few members of the Nazi elite. There would be
no witch-hunts. The administration that had run
1
WEST GERMANY 511
Bundestag elections, 1957–65
1957 1961 1965
% Seats % Seats % Seats
CDU/ 50.2 270 45.3 242 47.6 245
CSU
SPD 31.8 169 36.2 190 39.3 202
FDP 7.7 41 12.8 67 9.5 49
Others 10.3 17 5.7 0 3.3 0
