Fourth Adenauer cabinet
cabinet of the German Federal Government headed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1961–1963)
The Fourth Adenauer cabinet (German: Kabinett Adenauer IV) was formed by incumbent Chancellor Konrad Adenauer after the 1961 federal election. The cabinet was sworn in on 14 November 1961.
The Spiegel affair in 1962 caused the coalition to fall apart over Defence Minister Franz Josef Strauss' actions which violated press freedom, leading to all FDP ministers resigning in protest. As a result, the cabinet was a minority government of the CDU/CSU for just under a month in the fall of 1962 before Adenauer was able to convince the FDP to return to the coalition by assuring Strauß' resignation.
Composition
Shortly after the Spiegel affair, the resignation of Defence Minister Franz Josef Strauss was required to gain back the FDP's support for the cabinet, leading to a reshuffle. The heavily reshuffled cabinet is sometimes referred to as cabinet Adenauer V; however, this is not constitutionally correct, since no new election of the chancellor took place. The government still drew its constitutional legitimacy from Adenauer's election on 14 November 1961. Adenauer decided to retire just a few months later, following which Ludwig Erhard was elected as Chancellor and formed the first Erhard cabinet on 17 October 1963.
References and notes
Further reading
"Kabinette Adenauer". election.de (in German).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Fourth Adenauer cabinet” as cabinet of the German Federal Government headed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1961–1963). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as cabinet of the German Federal Government headed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1961–1963). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q560693. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1961, 1962 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fourth Adenauer cabinet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.