Portraits and Miniatures(30)

One of Adenauer’s sensitivities was whether he had or had not been a Rhineland separatist in the inter-war years. Both in 1919 and in 1923 he had been involved in movements for the setting up of a Rhenish Republic. The key questions were whether he intended this to be little more than the equivalent of a modern Land within the Reich, and how far he was working with people who were in effect French agents intent upon the disruption of Germany. On the answer to these questions there depended the issue of whether he could reasonably be accused of having tried to turn his back on the ‘Vaterland’. What he undoubtedly wanted to do was to get the Rhineland out of Prussia, in which it had been incongruously placed after 1815. But not out of Germany, he rather obsessively subsequently insisted, even causing his authorized 1957 biographer to blow up an account of Berlin meetings in November 1923 at which, he claimed, Stresemann and others, panicked by currency collapse and the French occupation of the Ruhr, tried to force him against his will to follow the autonomous course. All accounts leave an impression of his protesting too much on the issue.

There is also some ambiguity about Adenauer’s life during the twelve Nazi years. What is certain is that he declined to join the bandwagon of the incoming Führer in 1933 and consequently found himself quickly dismissed from his mayoralty. Hitler was appointed a minority Chancellor by President Hindenburg on 30 January and immediately announced Reichstag elections. On 17 February he came to Cologne. Adenauer declined to meet him at the airport (admittedly at 11 p.m.) and then ordered swastika flags to be taken down from the pillars of the municipally owned Rhine bridge, although saying that they could be flown in front of the Trade Fair Hall (where Hitler’s meeting was to take place). On 5 March Hitler won a landslide victory, with a strong vote in Cologne. A week later, warned of impending danger, Adenauer fled and/or was dismissed from his office and his city.

It was never wholly clear which came first, the dismissal or the flight. And his destination was also surprising. He went to Berlin and made a personal petition of complaint to Goering, of all people, against the local conditions that had made him flee from Cologne. And he took up residence as president of the second chamber in the state apartments of the Prussian Government, situated in the Wilhelmstrasse, of all places. He had gilded furniture but no money and no security. The former deficiency was repaired by a sudden cash gift of 10,000 marks (the equivalent today of about £20,000) by a Jewish American admirer, a businessman resident in Belgium. (There is some evidence that this vital subvention had a permanent effect on Adenauer’s attitude to Jews and Israel; no doubt as a post-war German Chancellor he would in any event have felt it necessary to show evidence of guilt, but he did so with more spontaneous conviction than might have been expected from a central European Catholic of his generation.)

The security deficiency was less easily repaired. After a few weeks he clandestinely left Berlin and took refuge, without his family, in a remote Benedictine monastery in the Eifel mountains, of which the abbot was a former school-fellow. He stayed there until the beginning of 1934. Then he was offered and accepted the tenancy of a lavish house whose owner was leaving Germany, which probably drew attention to it and which was most inappropriately situated for Adenauer, very near to Berlin and in flat, sandy, Prussian pine forests. There most things went wrong. He was accused of massive municipal peculation in Cologne, succeeded in destroying his accuser and in establishing his innocence of dishonesty (although it was clear that he had been most handsomely remunerated), but was none the less arrested and harshly interrogated in Potsdam at the time of the Röhm ‘blood-bath’ in June 1934.

Then he was released, as suddenly and irrationally as he had been arrested. He spent a few months - or was it a few weeks, or a few quarters, details are curiously imprecise - more or less on the run, and settled in Rhöndorf, a village across the Rhine and a little above Godesberg, at first in a rather mean house. Rhöndorf was to remain his base for the rest of his life. Then he was expelled from the Cologne rural district, in which Rhöndorf was just situated, and moved about four miles. Then he was allowed back, then mysteriously his Cologne city pension was half restored at a rate sufficient to give him about £40,000 (at present-day values) a year. Out of this, and some compensation for his sequestered Cologne property, he built a substantial house, with mounting terraces, a lovingly tended rose garden, and a striking westward view across the river to the Eifel mountains.

There he lived unmolested for seven or eight years. He was detached from the regime, but not its active enemy. His three sons served in the German army. He declined to have anything to do with the ‘July plot’ against Hitler, but was none the less arrested in August 1944. He then hovered on the brink of Buchenwald and extermination for a few months, but survived through a mixture of luck and the respect in which he continued to be held by most Rhinelanders, even if they were serving as policemen or guards or doctors in Nazi camps. He was back in Rhöndorf well before the Americans arrived in March 1945 and drafted him to his old post in the Cologne Rathaus.