He left federal politics for eight years (from 1958 to 1966) to serve as Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg, and subsequently became Chancellor by forming a grand coalition with Willy Brandt's Social Democratic Party.

The student movement in particular, but also other sections of the population, saw Kiesinger as a politician who stood for the inadequacy of Germans' coming to terms with the past.

As a student, he joined the (non-couleur wearing) Roman Catholic corporations KStV Alamannia Tübingen and Askania-Burgundia Berlin.

After the war, he was interned by the Americans for his connection to Ribbentrop and spent 18 months in the Ludwigsburg camp before being released as a case of mistaken identity.

[5] Franco-German journalist Beate Klarsfeld demonstrated Kiesinger's close connections to Ribbentrop and Joseph Goebbels, the head of Nazi Germany's Propaganda Ministry.

[6] She also asserted that Kiesinger had been chiefly responsible for the contents of German international broadcasts which included anti-Semitic and war propaganda, and had collaborated closely with SS functionaries Gerhard Rühle [de] and Franz Alfred Six.

The latter was responsible for mass murders in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and was tried as a war criminal in the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg.

[7] These allegations were based in part on documents that Albert Norden published about the culprits of war and Nazi crimes.

For the 1976 federal election, Kiesinger renounced his own constituency and entered parliament via the Baden-Württemberg state list of his party.

Kiesinger reduced tensions with the Soviet bloc nations, establishing diplomatic relations with Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, but he opposed any major conciliatory moves.

Vocational training legislation was also introduced, while a reorganisation of unemployment insurance promoted retraining schemes, counselling and advice services, and job creation places.

[9] In August 1969,[10] the Landabgaberente (a higher special pension for farmers willing to cede farms that were unprofitable according to certain criteria) was introduced.

[11] The historian Tony Judt has observed that Kiesinger's chancellorship, like the presidency of Heinrich Lübke, showed the "a glaring contradiction in the Bonn Republic's self-image" in view of their previous Nazi allegiances.

[13] After the election of 1969, the SPD preferred to form a coalition with the FDP, ending the uninterrupted post-war reign of the CDU chancellors.

In 1972 he held the main speech for justification to the constructive vote of no confidence by the CDU/CSU parliamentary group against Willy Brandt in the Bundestag.

The election of then CDU leader Rainer Barzel as chancellor was unsuccessful because of the bribery of Julius Steiner and probably Leo Wagner by GDR's Stasi.

After a requiem mass in Stuttgart's St. Eberhard Church, his funeral procession was followed by protesters (mainly students) who wanted his former membership in the Nazi Party remembered.