Henry Kissinger

Origins and early life

Henry Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth on 27 May 1923, into a German Jewish family, the son of Louis Kissinger, a schoolteacher, and of Paula Stern. Under Nazi rule the Gymnasium was closed to him as a Jew and his father lost his teaching post, so on 20 August 1938 his parents fled Germany with their sons, reaching New York on 5 September; several of his relatives were later murdered by the Nazis. He grew up in the German Jewish community of Washington Heights, worked in a shaving-brush factory while finishing school at night, and in 1943 was drafted into the United States Army, becoming a citizen on 19 June that year.

Work and career

He served in military intelligence in Europe, took part on 10 April 1945 in the liberation of the Ahlem concentration camp near Hanover, and received the Bronze Star. At Harvard he took his first degree in 1950 and his doctorate in 1954, taught there until 1971, and in 1957 published A World Restored and Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Richard Nixon made him National Security Advisor on 20 January 1969, and in September 1973 he also became Secretary of State, the first person to hold both posts, staying on under Gerald Ford until 20 January 1977.

He held talks in Beijing in 1971 that opened relations with the People's Republic of China, and after the October 1973 war his shuttle diplomacy produced disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel in January 1974 and between Syria and Israel in May 1974.

Recognition

On 27 January 1973 he and the North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho signed the Paris agreement on ending the war in Vietnam, and the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize went to them jointly for having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam, an award Le Duc Tho declined. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, kept writing on diplomacy for decades, and died at his home in Kent, Connecticut, on 29 November 2023, aged one hundred.