{"id":13061,"date":"2026-01-12T09:03:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T06:03:10","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2026-01-12T10:34:35","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T07:34:35","slug":"the-christian-liar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harici.com.tr\/en\/the-christian-liar\/","title":{"rendered":"The Christian liar"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the occasion of Konrad Adenauer’s 150th birthday, the prevailing foundational narrative of the Federal Republic is seldom called into question.<\/em> Werner R\u00fcgemer<\/em><\/strong>‘s sketch, however, does precisely that. It portrays Adenauer not as the architect of a democratic new beginning, but as a consistent power politician in the service of capital\u2014from the Empire to Weimar, from the Nazi state to the yoke of the United States. A necessary act of demystification.<\/em><\/p>\n

German Chancellor and CDU Chairman Friedrich Merz has bowed to the world’s most powerful far-right figure, US President Donald Trump. This submission entails further militarization, accompanied by the impoverishment of the majority of the population and the peril of nuclear annihilation. This has a history, and that history began with the first Chancellor and CDU Chairman, Konrad Adenauer. His current successor, Friedrich Merz, has confirmed that Adenauer “set the decisive course for the Federal Republic.”<\/p>\n

I. Catholic Ascent in a Protestant Empire<\/strong><\/p>\n

The rise of the Catholic Adenauer began within the Protestant German Empire.<\/p>\n

Following the end of Napoleon’s brief dominion, the Kingdom of Prussia succeeded in annexing the Ruhr and the Rhineland, including its largest city, Cologne. Prussia and rising capitalism had discarded old feudal Catholicism as an ideology: Protestantism became the state religion. After the feudal lords with their Catholic blessings, it was now the turn of the new holders of private power\u2014the capitalists\u2014and their profits, blessed by Protestantism.<\/p>\n

Protestant Prussians Complete the Catholic Cologne Cathedral<\/em><\/p>\n

Consequently, the Prussians were extremely flexible in their use of religion: Since the Rhineland and Cologne were Catholic, replete with an Archbishopric and Romanesque churches, the Prussian Protestants promoted the Catholicism of their new subjects there as well.<\/p>\n

Thus, the Prussian kings showed benevolence and, from 1842 onwards, financed the completion of the 157-meter-high cathedral towers. What the wealthy Catholic Archbishopric of Cologne had failed to achieve in 600 years, the Protestant Prussians accomplished in a few. And the Catholics were now obliged to be grateful to the Prussians.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, the Prussians did not achieve this alone. The Jewish owners of the Sal. Oppenheim bank, rising in tandem with Prussia, also performed political groundwork; some converted to Catholicism, but mostly to Protestantism. They became the second-largest donors for the completion of the “Catholic” cathedral. This bank, ideologically highly flexible, would play a significant role in Adenauer’s ascent as Lord Mayor (Oberb\u00fcrgermeister) of Cologne and subsequently as Chancellor of the Federal Republic.<\/p>\n

Rise in a Catholic Milieu under Prussian Patronage<\/em><\/p>\n

Konrad, the third son of a father who had risen from a craftsman via military service to a Prussian judicial officer, was permitted to attend the Gymnasium<\/em>\u2014specifically, the Royal Catholic Apostel Gymnasium. The school was financed by the Kingdom of Prussia and built directly adjacent to the Catholic Church of the Apostles. The aim here was to support aspiring individuals from the Catholic milieu to serve in the Prussian administration, corporations, and banks. Indeed, in 1894, former Chancellor Bismarck personally congratulated the high school graduate: The 18-year-old Konrad was now “one of us.”<\/p>\n

After high school, Konrad remained within the Catholic milieu; during his law studies in Bonn, Munich, and Freiburg, he joined the relevant Catholic student fraternities. He later began working at Hermann Kausen’s law firm in Cologne; his boss was simultaneously a Royal Prussian Notary and the chairman of the Catholic Centre Party (Zentrum<\/em>) in the City Council. Konrad joined the Centre Party to become a Council Member in 1906 and, as early as 1909, First Deputy Mayor. This rising star was elected with the approval of the Liberal Party\u2014that is, the entrepreneurs, bankers, and, for instance, the bosses of the dominant media clan DuMont Schauberg, whose K\u00f6lnische Zeitung<\/em> was distributed throughout Prussia. Thus, at the unusually young age of 33, this ascending man took charge of the city administration; the Catholic Lord Mayor Max Wallraf, also of the Centre Party, held the office only in an honorary capacity.<\/p>\n

Under Prussia’s three-class franchise system, only wealthy men could vote in Cologne. Rich capitalists were in the Liberal Party; artisans and civil servants were in the Centre Party. The SPD [Social Democratic Party] could not be elected at the local level; it held only a seat in the Reichstag in Berlin.<\/p>\n

Adenauer also ensured the proliferation of his own wealth. He joined the Pudelna\u00df<\/em> Tennis Club\u2014not because he could, or wanted to, play tennis. Rather: The youth of Catholic high society met there. It was there he met his first wife, Emma Weyer, the daughter of the director of the Cologne Reinsurance Company. Thus, the rising Adenauer, with a suitable loan, was soon able to purchase a large plot of land in the developing Catholic villa district of Cologne-Lindenthal and have a 14-room villa with a wine cellar constructed.<\/p>\n

Administrative Chief of the Frontline City of Cologne in WWI<\/em><\/p>\n

As administrative chief, Adenauer had fostered the rise of Cologne’s industry, financed by the Oppenheim, Levy, Seligmann, and J.H. Stein banks. These were also the financiers of industry and railways in the Ruhr area and neighboring cities like Wuppertal.<\/p>\n

The Lord Mayor of Cologne was subordinate to the Prussian military governor and the Prussian-appointed district president of Cologne. With the outbreak of war in 1914, martial law was declared. Thus, in World War I, Cologne became the German Empire’s frontline city against the nearby enemy states of Belgium, France, and England.<\/p>\n

Prior to the war, Adenauer had constructed the Butzweiler Hof airfield as well as another airfield for Zeppelins, and had brought Zeppelin production to Cologne. As soon as the war began, Zeppelins rained bombs on cities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania, and London\u2014the first instance in human history of the aerial bombardment of enemy cities and civilians.<\/p>\n

Stinnes and Krupp shifted munitions production to Cologne, while Bayer in Wuppertal produced poison gas: deadly weapons had to reach the front as quickly as possible. Cologne was also a transit station for soldiers, supplies, and prisoners of war moving to and from the front. Occupied Belgium was also administered from Cologne. Adenauer cultivated close friendships with leading industrialists and took over the war economy management of the frontline city; the municipal department tasked with this had 4,500 employees.<\/p>\n

Cologne: Execution of Christian Sailors<\/em><\/p>\n

It was no coincidence that Cologne was chosen for the execution of sailors Albin K\u00f6bis and Max Reichpietsch, who were sentenced to death for “mutiny” in 1917 for protesting the war. Both were Christians, but members of the New Apostolic Church: This church had been founded because Pope Leo XIII had openly embraced capitalism. The “mutineers” followed early Christianity; Adenauer, the capitalist Christian, had no objection to the execution of such Christians.<\/p>\n

When the incumbent Lord Mayor of Cologne, Wallraf, was called to the stumbling imperial government in Berlin as a (penultimate) last resort, Adenauer became his successor; no one else was even considered. Precisely because a “politician of endurance” was needed for the frontline city of Cologne in a war that could no longer be won, Adenauer, upon his demand, immediately received the highest salary of any mayor in the Empire. He concluded his inaugural speech in October 1917 with an “oath of loyalty to the Kaiser and the Empire, with the call glowing with warm gratitude: His Majesty, our all-highest Kaiser and King, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!”<\/p>\n

“They Died for Germany”<\/em><\/p>\n

Together with his corporate friends, Adenauer rejected peace negotiations in 1917. Millions of dead soldiers and civilians were, for the well-ensconced Christian civil servant-politician, merely collateral damage, ruthlessly factored in.<\/p>\n

In the final year of the war, he declared in the city council that just as “the people of Cologne have endured these hardships to this day,” Germans must “endure all the hardships of war with patience and patriotism.” He justified the 41 deaths in a British air raid on Cologne in May 1918 by stating: “They too died for Germany.”<\/p>\n

“Germany”; this would remain a core value for Adenauer: Dependent laborers are exploited and, for the sake of capitalists masquerading as “Germany” and their privileged accomplices, are expendable even in war.<\/p>\n

End of War: Flattering and Destroying Revolutionaries<\/em><\/p>\n

Fighting rising democratic resistance, saving capitalism: This was Adenauer’s mission at the end of the war.<\/p>\n

Therefore, although the SPD was banned from standing for election under Prussian electoral law, from 1916 onwards he gave compliant SPD politicians positions in the administration and the city council. The SPD politician Wilhelm Sollmann became his special adjutant.<\/p>\n

When a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council was formed in Cologne as well, Adenauer allocated them rooms, telephones, and typewriters in the city hall. At the same time, he ensured that Sollmann became the chairman of this council and could denounce capitalism as a warmonger at large rallies.<\/p>\n

The Christian liar Adenauer walked around with a revolutionary armband on his sleeve, but simultaneously established the “Welfare Committee”: Here, he gathered his banker friends and entrepreneurs; Sollmann was also present. In the final year of the war, the Kaiser awarded Adenauer the Order of the Red Eagle and membership in the Prussian House of Lords, the upper house of the Reichstag.<\/p>\n

Saving the State and City from “Bolshevism”!<\/em><\/p>\n

When Kaiser Wilhelm II fled abroad shortly before the war ended in November 1918, Adenauer remained true to his oath and sharply condemned the Kaiser’s “shameful, ominous flight.” Now, “the country could be dragged into the embrace of Bolshevism.”<\/p>\n

But Adenauer’s Welfare Committee outmaneuvered the penniless activists of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, who lacked political experience. Thus, Adenauer had averted the “Bolshevik danger” on behalf of the fled Kaiser. Later, he boasted of having tricked the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council together with Sollmann, thereby “saving the city from revolution.”<\/p>\n

It was here that he learned ruthless ideological opportunism and the merciless defense of capitalism. With this, he would continue to rise as a politician\u2014and very soon, as a multimillionaire.<\/p>\n

II. Continued Rise in the Hated Republic<\/strong><\/p>\n

Demagoguery regarding the “Bolshevik danger” remained Adenauer’s leitmotif. He carried as much of the monarchy as possible into the Weimar Republic: Relations with the peaks of private capital, and the continuation of the Free State of Prussia within the German Reich. In this way, he would contribute to the NSDAP [Nazi Party] coming to government by 1933.<\/p>\n

Against the “Dictate of Versailles”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Adenauer railed against the “Dictate of Versailles”: He argued that this “intolerable slavery and bondage” destroyed “national and state existence,” ruined the German economy, caused “our children to wither,” and abandoned millions of Germans to “a slow death.” Adenauer said this as President of the German Catholics’ Day in Munich in 1922; yet he never mentioned the architect of the dictate, US President Wilson, who, by designating Germany as the sole guilty party, secured Wall Street’s war loans and the profits of US arms companies.<\/p>\n

However, Adenauer tore into the spreading socialism that sought to “alienate the German people from Christianity.” He condemned the “lack of morality and authority” appearing in the “tortured people,” equating it with “materialism and Mammonism.”<\/p>\n

What distinguished Adenauer from the far-right and the NSDAP was initially his concept of a solution: Catholic Christianity and the Catholic Centre Party. But since he shared the fundamental critique of the Versailles Dictate, his solution, polished with a Christian veneer, would step by step converge with the far-right solution. And as in the monarchy, he would bind himself not even to his own party, but to leading capitalists.<\/p>\n

Thus, Adenauer expanded his personal and institutional relationships with leading capitalists to the entire German Reich and the USA.<\/p>\n

In the Cologne Rotary Club<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1928, Adenauer was a founding partner in the small men’s circle of the Cologne Rotary Club, established on the US model, alongside bankers Hagen (Bank Levy), the Oppenheims, Pferdmenges (Schaafhausen, later Oppenheim), and Baron von Schr\u00f6der (J.H. Stein), industrialists Silverberg (Rheinbraun), Stollwerck (Chocolate), Clouth (Rubber), Tietz (Department Stores), and publisher Neven DuMont (K\u00f6lnische Zeitung<\/em>). The president was Pferdmenges.<\/p>\n

Pferdmenges’ influence had long since transcended the Rhine and Ruhr: In 1929, the Schaafhausen Bank Association merged with Deutsche Bank. During the nationalization of the bankrupt Dresdner Bank and Commerzbank in 1931, he advised the government of Chancellor Br\u00fcning (Centre Party) and in the process joined the Supervisory Board of Dresdner Bank and the Board of the Reichsbank [Central Bank].<\/p>\n

A Favorite in the Circle of Ruhr Industrialists<\/em><\/p>\n

The bosses of the four Cologne investment banks sat on dozens of supervisory boards of Ruhr conglomerates such as Flick, Kl\u00f6ckner, Thyssen, Stinnes, and IG Farben.<\/p>\n

Consequently, Adenauer became a sought-after member of their lobbying associations:<\/p>\n