Dr. Adenauer as Oberbuergermeister of Cologne

Chapter 19 XIX Potsdam Germany
Of the pre-Nazi middle class parties, the two showing strongest signs of life were the Center Party and its Bavarian counterpart, the Bavarian People's party. Traditional ties with the Catholic Church helped them to dissociate themselves from nazism, although their members were not always successful in doing so as individuals. US military government, with some misgivings, had been relatively generous in appointing their potential leaders to administrative posts under the occupation, most notably Dr. Adenauer as Oberbuergermeister of Cologne and Fritz Schaeffer as Minister President of Bavaria. But these parties hesitated to enter postwar politics in their old Catholic stance, partly because their more progressive leadership wanted to give them a broader base of voter appeal and partly because -in the case of the Bavarian People's party especially- their actions under the Weimar Republic were not above reproach, but mostly because they were afraid they would not be able to compete against the Communists and Social Democrats. For this last reason, they would just as soon have seen the prohibition on political activity prolonged, and they were furthermore spurred to break with the past and take the lead in promoting "Christian" parties as soon as the Social Democrats and Communists began to organize.