Kraemer, Fritz Gustav Anton b. July 3, 1908; Essen (West Falia), Prussia d. September 8, 2003;Washington, D.C.

German American civil servant, geopolitical strategist, chief civilian adviser, and tutor to successive defense secretaries, U.S. Army chiefs of staff, and other top military commanders; accomplished scholar of international law, political philosophy, economics, and history.

Kraemer was the son of a Prussian state prosecutor and his wife, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist family. His parents raised him in the Lutheran faith and instilled in him conservative values that guided him for the rest of his life. His education began at the Arndt Gymnasium in Berlin and then continued mostly abroad. He attended school in England, graduated from the London School of Economics, and then went on to earn two doctorates, one from the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and the other from the University of Rome. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he made no secret of his disdain for totalitarian ideologies and their oppressive regimes and launched himself more than once into street battles against Nazi brownshirts and Communist ruffians.

In 1933, newly married to his Swedish wife Britta Bjorkander, he left Germany for Rome, where he worked as a legal adviser for the League of Nations and authored eight books on international law. In 1939, before Germany invaded Poland, he decided not to return to Germany and sent his wife and son Sven to his mother’s estate in Wiesbaden for a farewell visit. They would remain there for six years.

With the onset of war, Kraemer fled to the United States and in 1943 was drafted into the army. He was assigned to the 84th Infantry Division at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. In the summer of 1944 Kraemer met a young recruit by the name of Henry Kissinger. He was impressed with the young man’s understanding and his seemingly natural ear for the musicality of history. The admiration was mutual, and Kraemer became Kissinger’s mentor during the years they spent together in the army and beyond.

In November 1944, the 84 th shipped out to Europe, and Kraemer’s unit entered combat in the Battle of the Bulge. In 1945 he earned a battlefield commission and Bronze Star for single-handedly achieving the surrender of a German town and swept with his unit across Germany to the Elbe. After the war, he remained in occupied Germany as an intelligence officer, where he analyzed captured documents and interrogated German prisoners in preparation for the Nuremberg trials. He also helped establish the U.S. European Command Intelligence School in Oberammergau.

Kraemer saw, firsthand, the cost of illusions and appeasement in the face of dictators who first terrorized their own nation’s people and then threatened their neighbors. He was an elitist who believed that the strength or weakness of a state depended on the commitment of its intellectual elite to serve in important positions, not only in government, but in business, education, and other socially critical fields as well. Members of this elite, as he defined it, were a group of men and women of excellence who possessed personality traits such as strength of character, fortitude, conscientiousness, and—most importantly—who believed in honor, duty, and absolute moral

values. His experiences in Weimar Germany added force to his conviction that a cowardly elite, morally corrupt and driven only by self-interest, betrayed the people by abandoning them to the demagoguery of Adolf Hitler. Kraemer held conservative values and a contempt for totalitarian ide- ologies—be they Communist or National Socialist. He was convinced that when governments allowed social order to break down, they provided totalitarian regimes— from the Left or Right—with an opportunity to exploit the provocative weakness and to step in as saviors.

Thus, when the Nixon administration and its chief diplomat, Kissinger, departed from a strictly anti-Communist course and embarked on a policy of detente with the Soviet Union, Kraemer was thoroughly disappointed with his one-time protege.

He chided Kissinger’s willingness to deal with the Soviets as dishonorable and accused him of defeatism. As a result of their differences, Kraemer and Kissinger broke off contact for twenty-eight years.

Disdaining money, power, position, recognition, and conventional measures of success, which he called “easily discernible license plates,” Kraemer served for twentyseven years as a Pentagon adviser on geopolitics and strategy. Throughout his career and even after his retirement in 1978, he remained dedicated to educating and inspiring talented people to shoulder the responsibilities of public service. In addition to Kissinger, he profoundly influenced the lives and decisions of senior military and political leaders such as General Creighton Abrams, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and General Vernon Walters. Upon the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Walters, who was then U.S. ambassador to Bonn, and other senior government officials from both sides of the Atlantic sought and received Kraemer’s counsel on the importance of ensuring Germany’s future as a democratic federal republic and not a confederation of two German states.

Bianka J. Adams

Kraemer, Fritz Gustav Anton b. July 3, 1908; Essen (West Falia), Prussia d. September 8, 2003;Washington, D.C.

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