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Henry Alfred Kissinger (May 27, 1923 – November 29, 2023) was an American diplomat and political scientist who served as the United States secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 and national security advisor from 1969 to 1975, in the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Born in Germany, Kissinger emigrated to the United States in 1938 as a Jewish refugee fleeing Nazi persecution. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and, after the war, was educated at Harvard University, where he excelled academically. He later became a professor of government at the university and earned an international reputation as an expert on nuclear weapons and foreign policy. He acted as a consultant to government agencies, think tanks, and the presidential campaigns of Nelson Rockefeller and Nixon before being appointed as national security advisor and later secretary of state by President Nixon. An advocate of a pragmatic approach to geopolitics known as Realpolitik, Kissinger pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrated an opening of relations with China, engaged in "shuttle diplomacy" in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. For his role in negotiating the accords, he was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize to controversy. Kissinger is also associated with controversial U.S. policies including its bombing of Cambodia, involvement in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, support for Argentina's military junta in its Dirty War, support for Indonesia in its invasion of East Timor, and support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War and Bangladesh genocide. Widely considered by scholars to have been an effective secretary of state, Kissinger was also accused by critics of war crimes for the civilian death toll of the policies he pursued and for his role in facilitating U.S. support for authoritarian regimes. After leaving government, Kissinger founded Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm which he ran from 1982 until his death. He authored over a dozen books on diplomatic history and international relations. His advice was sought by American presidents of both political parties. Early life and education Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger on May 27, 1923, in Fürth, Bavaria, Germany. He was the son of homemaker Paula (née Stern; 1901–1998), from Leutershausen, and Louis Kissinger (1887–1982), a schoolteacher. He had a younger brother, Walter (1924–2021), who was a businessman. Kissinger's family was German-Jewish. His great-great-grandfather Meyer Löb adopted "Kissinger" as his surname in 1817, taking it from the Bavarian spa town of Bad Kissingen. In his childhood, Kissinger enjoyed playing soccer. He played for the youth team of SpVgg Fürth, which was one of the nation's best clubs at the time. In a 2022 BBC interview, Kissinger vividly recalled being nine years old in 1933 and learning of Adolf Hitler's election as Chancellor of Germany, which proved to be a profound turning point for the Kissinger family. During Nazi rule, Kissinger and his friends were regularly harassed and beaten by Hitler Youth gangs. Kissinger sometimes defied the segregation imposed by Nazi racial laws by sneaking into soccer stadiums to watch matches, often resulting in beatings from security guards. As a result of the Nazis' anti-Semitic laws, Kissinger was unable to gain admittance to the Gymnasium and his father was dismissed from his teaching job. On August 20, 1938, when Kissinger was 15 years old, he and his family fled Germany to avoid further Nazi persecution. The family briefly stopped in London before arriving in New York City on September 5. Kissinger later downplayed the influence his experiences of Nazi persecution had had on his policies, writing that the "Germany of my youth had a great deal of order and very little justice; it was not the sort of place likely to inspire devotion to order in the abstract." Nevertheless, many scholars, including Kissinger's biographer Walter Isaacson, have argued that his experiences influenced the formation of his realist approach to foreign policy. Kissinger spent his high-school years in the German-Jewish community in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Although Kissinger assimilated quickly into American culture, he never lost his pronounced German accent, due to childhood shyness that made him hesitant to speak. After his first year at George Washington High School, he began attending school at night while working in a shaving brush factory during the day. Following high school, Kissinger studied accounting at the City College of New York, excelling academically as a part-time student while continuing to work. His studies were interrupted in early 1943, when he was drafted into the U.S. Army. U.S. Army Kissinger underwent basic training at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina. On June 19, 1943, at the age of 20, while stationed in South Carolina, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. The army sent him to study engineering at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania under the Army Specialized Training Program, but the program was canceled and Kissinger was reassigned to the 84th Infantry Division. There, he made the acquaintance of Fritz Kraemer, a fellow immigrant from Germany who noted Kissinger's fluency in German and his intellect and arranged for him to be assigned to the division's military intelligence. Kissinger saw combat with the division and volunteered for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge. On April 10, 1945, he participated in the liberation of the Hannover-Ahlem concentration camp, a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. At the time, Kissinger wrote in his journal, "I had never seen people degraded to the level that people were in Ahlem. They barely looked human. They were skeletons." After the initial shock, however, Kissinger was relatively silent about his wartime service. During the American advance into Germany, Kissinger, though only a private (the lowest military rank), was put in charge of the administration of the city of Krefeld because of a lack of German speakers on the division's intelligence staff. Within eight days he had established a civilian administration. Kissinger was then reassigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), where he became a CIC Special Agent holding the enlisted rank of sergeant. He was given charge of a team in Hanover assigned to tracking down Gestapo officers and other saboteurs, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star. Kissinger drew up a comprehensive list of all known Gestapo employees in the Bergstraße region, and had them rounded up. By the end of July, 12 men had been arrested. In March 1947, Fritz Girke, Hans Hellenbroich, Michael Raaf, and Karl Stattmann were subsequently caught and tried by the Dachau Military Tribunal for killing two American prisoners of war. .... Discover the Dr Edwin A Bundy popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Dr Edwin A Bundy books.