Jakob Kaiser

Germany state institutions Conservatism and Christian democracy 1888–1961 ○ Natural death

Christian Democrat who led the CDU in the Soviet zone until SMAD removed him, then became West Germany’s minister for all-German affairs

A bookbinder from Hammelburg in Bavaria, he became a leader of the Catholic trade-union movement and was elected to the Reichstag for the Centre Party in 1933. He joined the resistance against the Nazis, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1938, and went into hiding after the 20 July 1944 plot. After the war he co-founded the CDU in the Soviet zone and became its co-chairman with Ernst Lemmer; as a Christian Socialist he called for the nationalisation of key industries. Critical of the Communists, he and Lemmer were removed as chairmen by the Soviet Military Administration in December 1947, and he moved to West Berlin. He opposed Adenauer’s Western integration in favour of a neutral, united Germany, and was minister for all-German affairs from 1949 to 1957. He died in Berlin in 1961.