Konrad Adenauer was born in Cologne Germany on January 5, 1876. He went to law school at the Universities of Freiburg in Munich and Bonn. He graduated in 1900. Adenauer was a devout Catholic. he was elected to the Cologne City Council in 1906 becoming deputy mayor in 1909. Adenauer was the mayor of Cologne from 1917- 1933. Konrad Adenauer, the first postwar West German chancellor (1949-1963), began his political career as Lord Mayor of Cologne in 1917.
During the World War II, Adenauer who was a staunch opponent of Hitler before the war but he managed to keep a low profile during the war being imprisoned briefly twice. After the war, Adenauer founded the Christian Democratic Union and in 1948 was elected president of the Constituent Assembly. He was also instrumental in writing the new German constitution. In his later years, Adenauer was viewed as something of a European elder statesman, enjoying the sobriquet of "Der Alte" (the old one).