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Prisoner of Freedom. Caught with his flak outfit in the Stalingrad encirclement, Strauss escaped but suffered frostbite so severe in both feet that he was declared unfit for combat. Ending the war as a lieutenant and an instructor at a flak school in southern Bavaria, Strauss was taken prisoner by the U.S. Third Army. It was the break of his life. The Americans made Strauss an interpreter. Then, finding that he was untainted by Nazi ties, they gave him a local-government job. Under American supervision, a new Catholic party was being formed in Bavaria. Joining forces with those who wanted to make it a modern conservative party to include Protestant merchants and Catho lic trade unionists as well as the peasant diehards, Strauss was named secretary-general of the new Christian Social Union.
The boy who wanted to teach had found his true vocation. In 1949 Strauss was elected to the first postwar Bundestag. At 33, he was the leader of Bavaria's delegation by virtue of his party post. "Anyone who wants a weapon in his hand," he said in one of his first speeches, "should have his hand cut off."
It was then Allied occupation policy not only to enforce total disarmament of a nation that had thrice in 70 years invaded its neighbors, but to re-educate Germans to hate militarism. The Com munist invasion of Korea changed all that. The danger that limited war could start in Europe, too, led U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in September 1950, to propose the rearmament of West Germans under NATO command. (The Communists had already organized their East Germans in paramilitary "police" units.)
In West Germany, Acheson's proposal met with sharp resistance. "Believe me," observed then-President Theodor Heuss, "at first it was not very easy to explain to the man in the street that it was his duty to do military service, after he had been told by propaganda that his previous military service had been bordering on criminal action." By this time, Franz Josef Strauss had observed that the man to get along with in German politics was Konrad Adenauer. When Adenauer, under Allied pressure, began talking up German rear mament, Strauss did too. It looked like a road to political power.
Crashing the Cabinet. In the face of heckling by table-banging Socialists, Adenauer once faltered. Strauss leaped to his feet, bellowed the opposition into silence as he argued that Russia was out to absorb Germany and that Germany's only hope lay with alliance with the West. "However much I like to see them talk to each other, I still would not like to see Dr. Adenauer and Dr. Schumacher [then Socialist leader] talk behind barbed wire in the Urals about what they should have done in the spring of 1952," he cried. Der Alte was so moved that he strode down to wring Strauss's hand. After Strauss delivered a big Bavarian majority in the 1953 elections, Adenauer offered him the Ministry for Family and Youth Affairs. "Me, a bachelor, in charge of family affairs?" countered Strauss, who was leading a pretty gay life in the wine-houses of Bonn. He settled for Minister Without Portfolio, a likelier steppingstone to the defense ministry.