Konrad Adenauer was born on January 5, 1876, in Cologne, the third of five children in a middle-class Catholic family. He studied law and politics at the universities of Freiburg, Munich, and Bonn, entered local government, and became mayor of Cologne in 1917 at the age of forty-one, a position he held until the Nazis removed him in 1933. He was arrested and briefly imprisoned twice by the Gestapo during the war, and spent the remaining years of the conflict in quiet retirement, tending his rose garden in Rhondorf. When the war ended, the British occupation authorities reinstated him as mayor of Cologne, then fired him for alleged incompetence, an action that inadvertently freed him for national politics. In 1949, at the age of seventy-three, he was elected the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany by a single vote, including his own. He governed for fourteen years, rebuilding West Germany from the rubble of total defeat into an economic powerhouse and a functioning democracy. His foreign policy was built on two pillars: reconciliation with France, achieved through the Treaty of the Elysee in 1963, and integration into the Western alliance through NATO membership, which he secured in 1955 over fierce Soviet opposition. He also presided over the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that transformed West Germany into Europe's largest economy within a decade of its destruction. He was eighty-seven when he left office in 1963, having served longer than any German leader since Bismarck. He died in 1967 at ninety-one. Germany had never had a leader who embodied its second chance more completely.