Early Career and Wartime Activities
Born in Ebingen, Kingdom of Württemberg (now Baden-Württemberg), Kiesinger was educated in Berlin and became a lawyer. As a student, he joined the (non-couleur wearing) Roman Catholic corporations Alamannia Tübingen and Askania-Burgundia Berlin. He became a member of the Nazi Party in February 1933, a few weeks after Hitler became chancellor. In 1940, he was called to arms but avoided mobilization by finding a job in the foreign ministry's radio propaganda department, rising quickly to become the ministry's connection with Goebbels' propaganda ministry. After the war, he was interned and spent 18 months in the Ludwigsburg camp before being released as a case of mistaken identity.
During the controversies of 1966, the magazine Der Spiegel unearthed a Memorandum dated November 7, 1944 (five months before the war's end) by which a colleague denounced to Himmler a conspiracy including Kiesinger that was propagating defeatism and hampering anti-Jewish actions within their department and several others.
Read more about this topic: Kurt Georg Kiesinger
Famous quotes containing the words early, career, wartime and/or activities:
“He had long before indulged most unfavourable sentiments of our fellow-subjects in America. For, as early as 1769,... he had said of them, “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.””
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)