What ethnicity was Henry Kissinger?

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Bavaria on 27 May 1923. The family left it late to flee the Nazi persecution, but they joined the German-Jewish community in New York in 1938.

Henry Alfred Kissinger (ˈkɪsəndʒər/; May 27, 1923 – November 29, 2023) was an American politician, diplomat, political scientist, and geopolitical consultant who served as United States secretary of state and national security advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. In the United States, he excelled academically and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. He earned his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively.

Kissinger played a prominent role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977, pioneering the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrating an opening of relations with China, engaging in what became known as shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. After leaving government, he formed Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm. Kissinger wrote over a dozen books on diplomatic history and international relations.

Kissinger’s legacy is a polarizing subject in American politics. He has been widely considered by scholars to be an effective Secretary of State and condemned for turning a blind eye to war crimes committed by American allies due to his support of a pragmatic approach to politics called Realpolitik. For his actions negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances.

Early life and education

Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger (German pronunciation: [haɪnts ˈʔalfʁeːt ˈkɪsɪŋɐ]) on May 27, 1923, in Fürth, Bavaria, Germany, 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,^[11] his great-great-grandfather Meyer Löb having 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 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 results 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.” However, many scholars, including Kissinger’s biographer Walter Isaacson, have disagreed and argued that his experiences influenced the formation of his realist approach to foreign policy.

Kissinger spent his high-school years in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan as part of the German-Jewish immigrant community that resided there at the time. 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 and worked in a shaving brush factory during the day.

Following high school, Kissinger enrolled in the City College of New York, studying accounting. He excelled academically as a part-time student, continuing to work while enrolled. His studies were interrupted in early 1943, when he was drafted into the U.S. Army.