Roderich Kiesewetter

Roderich Kiesewetter (born 11 September 1963 in Pfullendorf) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and a retired army colonel. He has been a directly elected member of the Bundestag for the constituency of Aalen–Heidenheim in Baden-Württemberg since 2009. At the federal election of 23 February 2025 he kept the seat with 41.4 percent of the first votes (74,010), ahead of an Alternative for Germany candidate on 23.1 percent, in a constituency where turnout was 83.0 percent.

He entered the Bundeswehr in 1982 after his Abitur and left active service in 2009 as Oberst a.D. From 1983 to 1986 he studied economics in Munich and in Austin, Texas. The Bundestag biography records subsequent command and staff appointments, general-staff training at the Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr from 1995 to 1997, work in the Federal Ministry of Defence, and command of a rocket-artillery training battalion from 2002 to 2004. Between 2006 and 2009 he was executive officer to the Chief of Staff at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, a NATO headquarters, and the same biography notes deployments with the Stabilisation Force in the Balkans and with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. He was promoted to Oberst im Generalstabsdienst in 2006.

Since April 2014 he has been the CDU/CSU parliamentary group's spokesperson (Obmann) on the Foreign Affairs Committee, of which he has been a full member since entering the Bundestag. He chaired the Parliamentary Control Committee, the Bundestag body that oversees the federal intelligence services, from November 2020 to March 2022, and was its deputy chair from March 2022 until June 2025. He has chaired the advisory board of the Federal Academy for Security Policy since November 2018, and from 2010 to 2025 he led the German delegation to the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly.

On security policy he has pressed for heavier German military support to Ukraine, including Taurus cruise missiles. In July 2023 Der Spiegel reported that he wanted those missiles supplied to Kyiv "immediately," and that he told Welt am Sonntag the Bundeswehr held about 600 Taurus systems, of which roughly 450 were not operational but could be refurbished by the manufacturer MBDA for export. In June 2025 the CDU/CSU group did not renominate him to the Parliamentary Control Committee. Die Welt reported that the decision was attributed to Chancellor Friedrich Merz and quoted Kiesewetter: "Das ist der Preis, wenn man eine Haltung hat" ("That is the price if one has a position"). The same account described him as a party critic of Merz on Russia, the debt brake, and Union migration motions that passed with AfD votes, and noted that he had backed a motion to examine banning the AfD.

Early life and education

Childhood and schooling

Roderich Kiesewetter was born on 11 September 1963 in Pfullendorf, in Baden-Württemberg. Munzinger’s biography states that he grew up with a father who was a soldier. A Schwäbische Zeitung profile published for his 60th birthday reported that the father joined the Bundeswehr in 1956, was stationed in Ellwangen in 1960, where he met Kiesewetter’s mother, and was serving in Pfullendorf when their son was born. The same account, which matches Munzinger’s outline, traces later postings through Heidelberg, the Rhineland and Karlsruhe, and then a return, after years of moving, to the Ellwangen district of Schrezheim, where his mother had grown up. Munzinger records that her ancestors came from Hungary; the newspaper described her as an expellee (Heimatvertriebene) with Hungarian roots. Kiesewetter has said that he grew up in Ellwangen-Schrezheim.

He passed the Abitur in 1982 at the Hariolf-Gymnasium in Ellwangen, a Gymnasium. Munzinger states that he joined the Junge Union in 1979, aged 16, and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1981, and that he was local chairman of the Junge Union in Ellwangen, deputy district chairman of the Junge Union, and deputy state chairman of the Schülerunion in Baden-Württemberg. At that local association’s 70th anniversary in 2016, the Schwäbische Zeitung reported that both Kiesewetter and Winfried Mack, a member of the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg, had begun their careers as its chairmen. Kiesewetter has also described activity, while still at school, in the student council (Schülermitverwaltung) and the Schülerunion, the founding of a municipal youth ring (Stadtjugendring) and of a local group of the International Society for Human Rights, and service as a lifeguard with the German Life Saving Association (DLRG). The 2023 profile wrote that he founded the Schülerunion in Ellwangen; Munzinger instead records the deputy state chairmanship of the Baden-Württemberg Schülerunion.

University studies

After the Abitur he committed himself to the Bundeswehr as a career officer candidate (Berufsoffiziersanwärter) in the artillery. From 1983 to 1986 he studied economics (Wirtschaftswissenschaften) in Munich and in Austin, Texas, and finished as a Diplom-Kaufmann. The Schwäbische Zeitung names the Munich institution as the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, describes the course as economics and business administration (Volks- und Betriebswirtschaftslehre), and states that one year of it was spent at the University of Texas at Austin.

Military career

Artillery service and German reunification

Kiesewetter joined the Bundeswehr in 1982, after his Abitur, as a career-officer candidate in the artillery of the German Army. From 1983 to 1986 he studied economics in Munich and at Austin, Texas, then held command and staff posts through 1995, including the Aufbau Ost, the build-up of Bundeswehr structures in the former East. His parliamentary biography records a battery command in Thuringia during that build-up. He later described about two years there in connection with winding up the National People's Army, and listed battery commander and adjutant among his early appointments with troops.

General staff, command and deployments

From 1995 to 1997 he took the general-staff course at the Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr in Hamburg. In 1997, as an army major, he received the General-Heusinger-Preis, endowed in 1967 by General Adolf Heusinger, the Bundeswehr's first inspector general, for one graduate a year of the national general- and admiral-staff course whose conduct and performance fellow students would regard as justifying the award.

His Bundestag biography places him at the Federal Ministry of Defence from 1997 to 1999, on the staff of the deputy inspector general, and from 1999 to 2002 on an SFOR deployment and at the Council of the European Union, Western European Union headquarters and NATO headquarters in Brussels. A regional profile adds that the ministry work was in Bonn. From 2002 to 2004 he commanded a rocket-artillery training battalion equipped with the MARS launcher. Contemporary reporting identifies it as Raketenartillerielehrbataillon 52 in Hermeskeil: in June 2003, as a lieutenant colonel, he opened a fortieth-anniversary open day at the Hochwald barracks and said an attack in Afghanistan that had killed four Bundeswehr soldiers overshadowed the event.

In 2004–05 he was G3, the operations staff officer, of the 7th Panzer Division in Düsseldorf and deployed again with EUFOR; in 2006 he returned to the ministry and was promoted to Oberst i.G., colonel on the general staff. From 2006 to 2009 he was executive officer to the Chief of Staff at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, at NATO headquarters in Mons, with repeated stays with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan and in the Balkans, before a 2009 posting to the operational command in Ulm. His biography dates Bundeswehr service to 2009, when he entered the Bundestag. Under sections 5 and 8 of the Members of the Bundestag Act, a career soldier's rights and duties are suspended for the mandate, and the style außer Dienst may be used. He later said a superior had told him that leaving meant throwing away a general's uniform. Formal discharge came in June 2015, when the Inspector of the Army, Lieutenant General Bruno Kasdorf, released him at a colonels' farewell at the Army Officer School; he was already an MP and association president, and has since been styled Oberst a.D.

Reservists' association

In January 2010 he joined the presidium of the Verband der Reservisten der Deutschen Bundeswehr as deputy to president Gerd Höfer. On 11 November 2011 delegates in Blankenfelde-Mahlow elected him president with 147 of 149 votes. He told them the association represented more than 120,000 members and looked after more than 1.2 million reservists still under military supervision. The Bundestag biography dates the presidency to 2011–2016.

Spiegel reported in February 2015 that the previous autumn, while he was president, he had learned that two senior figures in the association were cooperating with the Federal Intelligence Service. The magazine wrote that he felt betrayed, and that the link sat badly with his role as Christian Democratic Union whip on the Bundestag's NSA committee, where he might be taken for a spokesman of the BND; he gave up that post in early 2015 but remained association president. BND president Gerhard Schindler denied that the service had compromised the inquiry, saying work with former soldiers served its statutory tasks. Deputy president Bernhard Brinkmann said such contact was not unusual, and that the parliamentary step deserved respect as a way of dispelling doubts about impartiality.

On 28 June 2016 he resigned over a reception after the first Sicherheitspolitisches Forum Berlin, held on 22 June at the Tipi am Kanzleramt for about 400 guests. He wrote that catering alone had cost about 20,000 euros, a figure he learned only afterwards "with great dismay", and that it broke the duty of economy when small reservist groups fought for every euro; he had not known the sum in advance but took overall responsibility so that a vice-president's conduct would not be fastened on him. The presidium later counted 21,400 euros — 5,350 euros from its own funds and 16,050 euros from the tax-funded budget — and called that reasonable for Berlin. Deputies Oswin Veith and Karl-Heinz Brunner accepted the resignation while saying they would still examine the spending. On 20 August 2016 the extended presidium in Munich elected Veith, a CDU parliamentarian and reserve colonel, as successor.

Elections and constituency

The Aalen–Heidenheim seat

Bundestag constituency 270, Aalen–Heidenheim, lies in eastern Baden-Württemberg. For the 2025 federal election the Federal Returning Officer defined it as the whole district of Heidenheim plus 21 municipalities of the Ostalbkreis, among them Aalen, Ellwangen (Jagst), Bopfingen, Neresheim, Oberkochen, Essingen and Westhausen. The remaining Ostalb municipalities belong to constituency 269, Backnang–Schwäbisch Gmünd.

On 31 December 2023 the constituency contained 32 municipalities, covered 1,644.6 square kilometres and had about 307,900 inhabitants, a density of 187.2 people per square kilometre. The seat already carried the number 270 and the name Aalen–Heidenheim at the 2009 federal election.

Roderich Kiesewetter has held its direct mandate for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since the federal election of 27 September 2009. He succeeded Georg Brunnhuber, the CDU member for the constituency, after Brunnhuber announced that he would leave the Bundestag. At the nominating assembly in October 2008 Kiesewetter won on the first ballot with about 75 percent of the vote, although two other candidates stood. In 2005, the last election before that change, the CDU candidate in constituency 270 had taken 49.9 percent of the first votes (85,134).

Federal election results

Final figures published by the Federal Returning Officer show Kiesewetter winning the first-vote contest at each election from 2009 to 2025. In 2009 he received 70,599 first votes, 45.0 percent of 156,718 valid ballots, ahead of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on 39,951 votes (25.5 percent). Turnout was 71.3 percent of 224,418 eligible voters, and the CDU’s second-vote share in the constituency was 36.8 percent. An official ranking of constituencies likewise records the winning first-vote share in Aalen–Heidenheim as 45.0 percent, down from 49.9 percent in 2005.

His highest share was in 2013: 92,293 first votes, or 57.6 percent, 12.6 points above 2009, with the SPD second on 39,464 votes (24.6 percent). Turnout was 73.1 percent of 222,959 eligible voters, and the CDU took 49.3 percent of second votes. In 2017 the first-vote share fell to 46.4 percent (77,752 votes). The SPD remained second with 35,164 votes (21.0 percent), and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 11.0 percent of first votes. Turnout was 76.7 percent; the CDU’s second-vote share was 38.2 percent.

In 2021 he was returned with 61,832 votes, 37.0 percent, 9.4 points below 2017 and his lowest share in the seat. Leni Breymaier of the SPD placed second with 36,501 votes (21.9 percent). Turnout was 76.4 percent of 220,686 eligible voters, and the CDU’s second-vote share was 27.4 percent. At the 2025 election he received 74,010 votes, 41.4 percent, a gain of 4.3 points on valid first votes of 178,828. Dr Jürgen Müller of the AfD was runner-up with 41,337 votes (23.1 percent), and the SPD fell to 25,137 votes (14.1 percent). Turnout rose to 83.0 percent of 217,574 eligible voters; the CDU took 34.7 percent of second votes.

Local party offices

By September 2013 Kiesewetter was deputy chairman of the CDU Bezirksverband Nordwürttemberg. On 19 September 2015 a congress of the CDU Ostalb elected him Kreisvorsitzender. He did not seek another term after seven years. At the congress in Ellwangen in May 2022, Landtag member Tim Bückner succeeded him with about 70 percent of the vote; Christoph Konle, mayor of Rainau, received about 30 percent.

The CDU bodies covering the constituency choose the Bundestag candidate at a joint members’ meeting. In April 2021, in the Wöllersteinhalle in Westhausen, 146 of 154 ballots were cast for Kiesewetter, six against him and two abstentions. The Schwäbische Post reported that the meeting followed weeks in which he had faced an email affair, irregularities in the accounts of the CDU Ostalb and his resignation as chairman of the Bundeswehr reservists’ association. In July 2024 a meeting in Westhausen nominated him again, with 98.7 percent of the vote.

Parliamentary roles

Kiesewetter’s standing assignments in the Bundestag have been the Foreign Affairs Committee, interparliamentary delegations, and the advisory board of the federal security-policy academy. Several dates come from the Bundestag biography, which the House says rests on members’ own information and which was last modified on 7 August 2026; committee rolls are cited where they differ.

Foreign Affairs Committee

He has been a full member of the Foreign Affairs Committee (Auswärtiger Ausschuss) since its constitutive sitting on 25 November 2009, as one of 14 CDU/CSU members, and has remained an ordinary member through the 21st Bundestag. Article 45a(1) of the Basic Law requires the committee, which follows government foreign policy ahead of major decisions. In the 21st Bundestag it has 42 full members, and Armin Laschet has chaired it since 21 May 2025.

Each group names one Obmann or Obfrau in a committee: its main link to the group leadership, who helps set the group’s line and the agenda. A Bundestag interview of 17 February 2014 already called Kiesewetter Obmann of the Union group in the Foreign Affairs Committee; his biography dates the post from April 2014. On 7 April 2021 the Schwäbische Post reported that the CDU/CSU group had re-elected him with 91 per cent, and described the Obmann as deputy to the foreign-policy spokesperson. Abgeordnetenwatch records that label only for 2017–2021, and lists him as an ordinary member in 2021–2025 and 2025–2029. The 21st Bundestag’s roll instead names Jürgen Hardt — foreign-policy spokesperson since September 2015 and chair of the group’s foreign-affairs working group — as Obmann and spokesperson. The group’s website still lists Kiesewetter as Obmann and as deputy chair of that working group.

In the 21st Bundestag he is a deputy member of the subcommittees on arms control, non-proliferation and international disarmament, and on crisis prevention, strategic foresight, stabilisation and peacebuilding, as he was on the arms-control subcommittee in the previous term. From 2022 to 2025 the biography lists him as the CDU/CSU spokesperson for crisis prevention, a group office rather than a committee chair.

Interparliamentary delegations

From 2010 to 2025 he headed the Bundestag’s three-member delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean, the body known until 2010 as the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly. Founded in 2004, the assembly follows Mediterranean cooperation dating from the 1995 Barcelona Declaration, and the delegation reports to the Bundestag. The paper on the March 2010 plenary in Amman is signed by Kiesewetter as delegation head, although Günter Gloser attended that session; Detlef Seif (CDU/CSU) now leads the delegation.

He is an ordinary member of the German side of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly — 50 members each from the Bundestag and the French National Assembly — which meets at least twice a year in Germany and France and first sat in Paris on 25 March 2019, under an agreement linked to the Élysée Treaty. He is also an ordinary member, not the leader, of the German delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary Conference for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defence Policy. Created in 2012, that conference has no decisions of its own; national parliaments and the European Parliament use it to discuss those intergovernmental policies with the Council Presidency and the High Representative. In the 21st Bundestag Nancy Faeser (SPD) leads the delegation and Thomas Erndl (CDU/CSU) is deputy leader.

Federal Academy for Security Policy

On 16 October 2018 Kiesewetter was elected speaker of the eighth advisory board of the Federal Academy for Security Policy, succeeding Walter Kolbow, with Fritz Felgentreu and Tanja Gönner as deputies. The board advises the academy’s trustees on cross-departmental training and teaching; members serve for three years and usually meet twice a year in private.

The tenth board was constituted on 19 May 2026 with Thomas Erndl, the CDU/CSU defence-policy spokesperson, as speaker. Kiesewetter is not among its 17 members; the academy’s caption of the meeting calls him speaker of the previous board, seated beside Defence Minister Boris Pistorius. His Bundestag biography still says he has chaired the board since November 2018.

Foreign and security policy

Russia, Ukraine and European defence

Kiesewetter, a Christian Democratic Union foreign-policy specialist, has treated Ukraine's defence as German and European security. In October 2023, after reports that Chancellor Olaf Scholz would not supply Taurus KEPD 350 cruise missiles, he told Bild, as quoted by Der Spiegel, that the refusal confirmed "the total failure of Germany as a self-styled leading nation for European security" and affronted Britain and France, which were already delivering cruise missiles. Taurus, he said, could cut Russian supply lines to Crimea.

A Taurus KEPD 350 cruise missile on a transport cart before a German Air Force Tornado.

In the Bundestag on 16 November 2023, at the first reading of a CDU/CSU motion to deliver Taurus, he said the issue was not one weapon but whether Europe would uphold the strength of law and offer Ukraine a place "in its 1991 borders" inside the European Union and NATO. Supporting Ukraine "for as long as it takes" was not enough, he argued, if even Scholz's limited aim—that Ukraine must not lose and Russia must not win—went unmet. Because Crimea mattered symbolically to Vladimir Putin, supply lines there should be cut; a Ukrainian defeat, he warned, would be a blueprint for Serbia toward Kosovo, and for China toward Taiwan. In Kyiv in February 2024 he told Deutsche Welle that the war had to be "carried into Russia," with Ukrainian strikes on military sites, ministries and command posts, and that Ukraine "deserves EU membership and, as soon as possible, NATO membership." If Ukraine failed, he said, the German peace order and the EU would be "history" and Germany would become a belligerent—"exactly what Russia wants."

The Bundestag rejected the motion on 14 March 2024 by 188 votes to 494, with five abstentions. Scholz said missiles with a range of about 500 kilometres could be used only with German soldiers' involvement and would draw Germany into the war: "I am the chancellor, and therefore that applies." Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann and one other Free Democratic member voted with the opposition. An infratest dimap poll for the ARD-DeutschlandTrend on 4–6 March 2024 found 61 percent against a delivery and 29 percent in favour; a narrow majority of Union supporters were also opposed, and 62 percent feared Germany could be pulled into the war. In the November debate Gregor Gysi had argued for a ceasefire rather than Kriegstüchtigkeit.

On 1 March 2024 Russian state media published a recording of a 19 February Webex call in which German Air Force officers, including Inspector Ingo Gerhartz, briefed on Taurus. They said a rapid delivery would require German personnel, while training Ukrainians to use the missile alone would take months. Kiesewetter, then deputy chair of the Parliamentary Control Committee, told ARD that indications were hardening of an unnoticed Russian dial-in, called the Bundeswehr the victim, and asked for stronger counter-intelligence and an inquiry. He also said the tape showed a delivery "merely needs to be well prepared," and that the Kremlin had released it deliberately, just after Alexei Navalny's funeral. Tagesschau noted that military counter-intelligence had not confirmed a Russian participant. To the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he located the scandal less in the armed forces than in a missing sense for secure communications.

He did not drop the demand after Friedrich Merz, who as opposition leader had offered Taurus, became chancellor. In May 2025 he told the Augsburger Allgemeine it was "high time" to train Ukrainians and deliver the missile, which in larger numbers could protect civilians, and he called Merz's lifting of range limits "in fact not relevant" because Germany supplied no long-range weapons. On maischberger that November he called the reversal a political error Germany would "have to chew on for a long time," said there was "no legal reason" against delivery, and argued that Washington was turning to Tomahawk because Europeans were doing too little. Anton Hofreiter called the range announcement a smokescreen without Taurus. Sahra Wagenknecht called strikes on Russian cities tantamount to a declaration of war and demanded a referendum on banning the missile.

In April 2025 he told watson that the aim was not rearmament for its own sake but to become kriegstüchtig—"to prepare for war in order to prevent it." Russia, he said, knew Europe needed about three years, so the next two would decide. If Ukraine could not hold, he saw the war spreading to the Baltic states, Poland or Moldova, with Germany a transit country for troops, refugees and wounded. He blamed what he called a German romance with Russia and the belief that trade buys security.

Transatlantic relations and NATO

Before Donald Trump's return to office, Kiesewetter called American hesitation a warning that Europe could not depend on "a would-be dictator, which Trump likes to play, a tool of Putin's, which Trump is." In the February 2024 Deutsche Welle interview he wanted Scholz, with Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders, to tell Washington that Europeans would carry more of the burden for Ukraine while still expecting the United States to see itself as Europe's protecting power.

Other regions, China and arms control

The November 2023 speech already tied a Ukrainian defeat to Taiwan. In July 2024 Kiesewetter led a delegation to Taipei, met Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung, and discussed authoritarian expansion and semiconductors. He endorsed Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's Dresden investment as a way to exchange talent and technology and to strengthen a democratic supply chain. Lin said China was waging hybrid warfare and that cross-strait stability underpinned supply chains.

On the southern flank he argued for European responsibility beyond the east. In November 2025 he urged the Union to extend EUNAVFOR MED Irini: "As the Union parliamentary group we support this operation. It is an expression of the European Union's will to take responsibility in the south of the European Union." The mandate, under which German forces help enforce the UN arms embargo on Libya, passed by 313 votes to 182, with 69 abstentions. Green MP Luise Amtsberg cited a UN finding that support for the Libyan coast guard had facilitated crimes, and her group abstained.

He has treated the Baltic gas pipelines as a security issue. In April 2025 he said Angela Merkel had missed what the supposedly commercial Nord Stream project meant for states between Germany and Russia, and that answering 2014 with Nord Stream 2 had left Germany open to blackmail. When the Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported US investor interest in reviving Nord Stream 2, he told Der Tagesspiegel he had heard of such approaches, called them disastrous, and said reactivation could never be part of a peace.

On nuclear weapons he has argued for contingency planning, not a German bomb. In January 2026 he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that a US move on Greenland could break NATO and put the American nuclear umbrella in doubt. Germany, he said, should consider paying into a European shield "without taking the lead." In his reading the Two Plus Four Treaty bars a national programme and a German decision to use the weapons, but not financing or stationing them with partners. SPD politician Rolf Mützenich replied that even indirect participation would breach the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Two Plus Four Treaty, and that arms control should be rebuilt by negotiation instead.

Intelligence oversight

Parliamentary Control Committee

The Parlamentarisches Kontrollgremium (PKGr) is the body the Bundestag appoints, under Article 45d of the Basic Law, to control the federal intelligence services: the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the Militärischer Abschirmdienst (MAD) and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV). Under the Kontrollgremiumgesetz the government must brief the panel on the services’ general work and on matters of particular importance, and the panel may demand further reports. The panel meets in secret. Members must win the votes of a majority of the whole Bundestag, not merely of those present.

On 5 November 2020 the Bundestag elected Kiesewetter, on a CDU/CSU proposal, to the then nine-member panel, by 541 votes to 34, with 30 abstentions. He replaced Armin Schuster, who was leaving the Bundestag. The panel made Kiesewetter chair on 25 November 2020. After the 2021 election a panel of 13 was constituted on 24 March 2022, with Konstantin von Notz of Alliance 90/The Greens as chair and Kiesewetter, again sitting for the Union, as deputy. Candidates of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and of Die Linke missed the majority then required, 369 votes. He was still deputy chair in April 2025. His membership ended when a new panel was elected on 26 June 2025; the CDU/CSU group did not nominate him again.

NSA inquiry and the reservists

In the 18th Bundestag, Kiesewetter was the CDU/CSU Obmann on the first committee of inquiry, set up in March 2014 to examine mass data collection by the United States National Security Agency and other services after disclosures associated with Edward Snowden. On 19 January 2015 he announced that he would leave on 1 March, citing other duties in foreign and defence policy.

Die Welt and the Süddeutsche Zeitung then reported a different account, which Kiesewetter confirmed and the BND disputed. He said that, as president since 2011 of the Association of Reservists of the Bundeswehr, he had learned that two members of its leadership were cooperating with the BND. He told Welt that he saw the association’s work as compromised by the service and had resigned “in order to counter possible doubts about my impartiality”, and that he had never himself worked for the BND. One of those concerned confirmed a cooperation that predated his presidency. BND president Gerhard Schindler rejected any link to the inquiry: unrelated matters were being connected, he said, and work with former soldiers served the BND’s statutory task.

Opposition politicians demanded an explanation. Green co-leader Katrin Göring-Eckardt spoke of trust lost through the BND; Martina Renner, the Left’s Obfrau, said she understood that Kiesewetter felt deceived; and von Notz asked whether the Union spokesperson had been deliberately misled or used. In July 2015 Kiesewetter confirmed to Welt am Sonntag that a BND employee had told him in October 2014 that two close associates in the association worked for the service at a lower level. The BND would not comment in public, saying it discussed personnel matters only with the government, the competent Bundestag bodies or, where appropriate, prosecutors. Welt reported that neither the PKGr nor the inquiry had been told, and that security officials suspected an unproven Russian effort to pressure a backer of transatlantic cooperation.

AfD and classified oversight

After the February 2025 election the AfD, as the second-largest group, sought a PKGr seat, which brings file access and entry to the services. Kiesewetter told the Tagesspiegel that the party was “a security risk also for intelligence cooperation with our partners” and that an AfD member would cause “immense” foreign- and security-policy damage. He called it an “extended arm of the Kremlin”, anti-democratic and “in parts right-wing extremist”, and warned of leaks, espionage or foreign influence. Union parliamentary secretary Thorsten Frei also opposed AfD membership; SPD member Ralf Stegner said his group would vote against every AfD candidacy; and von Notz was sceptical. The AfD called the exclusion unjustified and said it wanted insight into the domestic service observing it.

The BfV was then treating the AfD as a suspected right-wing extremist endeavour (Verdachtsfall), a status the administrative court in Cologne had held lawful in 2022. On 2 May 2025 the office said it now regarded the whole party as confirmed extremist, citing an ethnic conception of the people incompatible with the free democratic basic order. On 8 May, after the AfD sued, the BfV gave a standstill commitment and, pending an urgent ruling, again described the party publicly only as a suspected case, while observation at that level could continue. On 26 June 2025, for a panel cut from 13 seats to nine, AfD candidates Martin Hess and Gerold Otten received 121 and 127 votes, short of the 316 required. Die Linke’s Heidi Reichinnek, with 260, also failed, and six members were elected. The AfD had sat on the panel after 2017 but not after 2021.

Relations with the CDU

Votes against the group line

On 29 January 2025 the Bundestag adopted a non-binding CDU/CSU motion, printed paper 20/14698, for a stricter migration and asylum policy. The corrected roll recorded 702 votes cast, 348 in favour, 344 against and 10 abstentions. The Schwäbische Post reported that the motion passed with votes from the Alternative for Germany. Kiesewetter did not cast a ballot: the stenographic report lists him among the members excused for the sitting, and his name is absent from the yes, no and abstention lists. Antje Tillmann was the only Union member recorded as voting against that motion.

The Bundestag during the January 2025 debate on the CDU/CSU migration motions.

He told the Schwäbische Post that the absence was deliberate. "Ich habe bewusst die Option der Nicht-Abstimmung gewählt, weil ich die Entschließungsanträge, die keinen operativen Effekt entfalten, grundsätzlich für inhaltlich unausgegoren halte," he wrote. He called it a serious political error to accept the AfD's support: "Als Christ kann ich das so nicht unterstützen." The AfD, he wrote, wanted to destroy the Union as a Volkspartei, and "Meine Fraktion scheint in die Falle der AfD getappt zu sein." He invoked the free mandate in Article 38 of the Basic Law. He said he would also stay away from the vote on 31 January on the Zustrombegrenzungsgesetz, the Union bill on limiting illegal arrivals of third-country nationals.

That bill failed. The final roll showed 692 votes cast, 338 in favour, 349 against and five abstentions. n-tv reported that 184 members of the Union group voted yes, that none voted no or abstained, and that 12, including Kiesewetter, did not cast a vote. Unlike on 29 January, he was not on the list of members formally excused for the sitting.

An earlier break with group leader Friedrich Merz was over spending. In May 2024 Kiesewetter told Der Spiegel, "Der Krieg lässt sich nur mit Schulden gewinnen," and urged a budgetary emergency over the war in Ukraine so defence and aid could be financed outside the debt brake. Participants told Focus that, at the group executive on 3 June 2024, Merz said public dispute in Germany would please Vladimir Putin. Kiesewetter answered that he had repeatedly asked Merz for a meeting; Merz rejected that account.

Removal from intelligence oversight in 2025

After the 2025 federal election the Parliamentary Oversight Panel, which scrutinises the federal intelligence services, was reduced from 13 to nine members. Kiesewetter, its chair until 2022 and thereafter deputy chair, was not among the Union nominees. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on 4 June 2025 that his Land group chair had still put his name forward, but that Merz's circle had signalled he was not to sit on the panel. Die Tageszeitung quoted an unnamed Union member of parliament who said Chancellor Merz had ordered the decision personally, and who described an intervention of that kind by the executive in a parliamentary appointment as rare. The group leadership, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported, said Kiesewetter had no grounds for complaint.

Kiesewetter told the taz, "Das ist der Preis, wenn man eine Haltung hat." He told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he had declined a contested candidacy "weil ich das wichtige Amt nicht beschädigen will," and that not joining the panel was "der Preis, den ich für meine Haltung bezahle." He was instead made the Union's Obmann on the Foreign Affairs Committee. According to the same account, colleagues complained that his calls for stronger support for Ukraine had further complicated an already difficult campaign before the three eastern state elections of 2024.

On 26 June 2025 the Bundestag set up the nine-member panel and the panel elected Marc Henrichmann (CDU), from North Rhine-Westphalia, as chair, with Konstantin von Notz of the Greens as deputy. The members chosen were Henrichmann, Alexander Throm and Heiko Hain for the CDU/CSU, Daniel Baldy and Sonja Eichwede for the SPD, and von Notz for the Greens. Nominees of the AfD and of The Left did not obtain the required majority, so six of the nine seats were filled.

Public profile, threats and criticism

Media presence

In February 2026 the Neue Zürcher Zeitung called Kiesewetter one of Germany's most prominent security experts and omnipresent on television talk shows, and wrote that four years of arguing for stronger support for Ukraine had meant accepting death threats.

Interviewed by Deutsche Welle in Kyiv on 9 February 2024, he said "the war must be carried into Russia", that military sites and headquarters had to be destroyed, and that Ukraine should be able to strike ministries and command posts as well as oil refineries, while warning that Germany must not become a belligerent, which he said Russia wanted. On Sandra Maischberger's ARD show he repeated that line to Gesine Schwan, adding supply lines and Moscow's war ministry. As a guest of Markus Lanz he urged support "as quickly as possible, as much as possible" so Ukraine could restore its borders, called Germany a Russian war aim, and said Berlin must not enter the war.

The 2024 assault in Aalen

On 1 June 2024, at about 09:15, the Aalen police headquarters reported that a 55-year-old man had insulted Kiesewetter, set upon him and knocked him to the ground at a Christian Democratic Union information stand on the market square in Aalen. He was slightly injured and was not treated on the spot. The man, known to police by name, left before officers arrived. Criminal police investigated bodily harm and insult; the force said the background was not yet known.

Kiesewetter told the Schwäbische Post that he was first attacked verbally and jostled, that the man tore the stand's roof, and that when Kiesewetter followed to film him the man struck him, pushed him into a raised flower bed and caused abrasions. He said he had offered not to file a complaint if the man apologised. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported abrasions and a bruised shoulder, and that he had been called a "Kriegstreiber" (warmonger). Deutschlandfunk, and the Deutsche Presse-Agentur citing the Schwäbische Post, described the suspect as a local politician standing in municipal elections for a grouping close to the Querdenker movement. The Schwäbische Zeitung named him as Peter Baur, operator of the Café Luther. Baur called the violence allegations absurd: he said anger at Kiesewetter's Ukraine policy had led him to shout "Kriegstreiber-Arschloch", after which he left, and that Kiesewetter, still filming, stepped backward over low boards and fell into the bed. Baur said he had apologised for the verbal outburst.

In November 2024 the Ellwangen prosecutor's office said it had sought a penalty order (Strafbefehl) for insult and intentional bodily harm. The Aalen court said the man had objected, so a hearing was expected; the proposed sentence and a date were not given. Interior minister Nancy Faeser wrote that violence in a democracy was never acceptable. Green co-leader Ricarda Lang said democrats stood together if one of them was attacked, and an all-party group in Aalen called a vigil against violence and hate. SPD chairman Lars Klingbeil called the attack incomprehensible. Kiesewetter thanked supporters and said he would keep his course on Ukraine.

Disputed quotations and political criticism

The February 2024 wording drew sharp replies. Sahra Wagenknecht told the Berliner Zeitung that Kiesewetter seemed not to have all his cups in the cupboard, and that carrying the war into Russia by destroying military sites and ministries with German weapons would carry the war into Germany. Right-wing accounts treated the remarks as a call for a war of aggression; Alternative for Germany politician Beatrix von Storch used them against what she called the "cartel parties" for endangering peace.

On 16 August 2024, asked by the channel Welt about a Wall Street Journal report on possible Ukrainian involvement in the Nord Stream explosions, Kiesewetter said: "The security of Ukraine, whether or not they should have destroyed it, is in our interest." Social-media posts circulated a shortened line, "Even if Ukraine destroyed Nord Stream, that is in our interest." The dpa fact-checking service and Correctiv both rated that version false: he had named Ukraine's security, not the sabotage, as the German interest. The Cologne lawyer Markus Haintz published a criminal complaint he said he had filed that month with the Ellwangen prosecutor's office, alleging approval of a crime under section 140 of the Criminal Code.

Personal life

Roderich Kiesewetter was born on 11 September 1963 in Pfullendorf. The Bundestag biography, which the parliament notes is based on members' own statements, records him as Protestant, married and the father of two children. A Schwäbische Zeitung profile published for his 60th birthday reported that he met his wife, Silke, during a two-year posting in Thuringia connected with the Bundeswehr's Aufbau Ost work after reunification. He states that the family has lived since 2009 in the Unterrombach district of Aalen, that the two children are adults and that he has grandchildren; the CDU association in Oberkochen likewise lists him as living in Aalen-Unterrombach, married, with two children.

Since 2009 he has sat on the board of trustees (Kuratorium) of Aalen University of Applied Sciences (Hochschule Aalen). On 17 October 2023, after a Studium Generale lecture, rector Harald Riegel named him an honorary senator (Ehrensenator), which the Schwäbische Zeitung called the university's highest distinction, citing support for research projects, a chair in renewable energies and advice on STEM promotion. The Bundestag's register of disclosable interests lists two current outside posts, both unpaid: assessor (Beisitzer) on the board of the Deutsche Atlantische Gesellschaft in Berlin, and member of the advisory board of the Zentrum für die liberale Moderne gGmbH. Abgeordnetenwatch's copy of the 2025–2029 filings, entered on 28 August 2025, shows the same honorary functions and no income band for any current activity; the only other entries, recorded on 18 June 2026, are pre-parliamentary posts as a general-staff officer in the Federal Ministry of Defence and as head of office to the chief of staff at NATO's SHAPE headquarters in Mons. The biography also lists memberships including Atlantik-Brücke, the European Council on Foreign Relations, the German Red Cross and the Clausewitz Society. The Trilateral Commission lists him among the members of its European Group, describing him as a Member of the German Bundestag, Berlin. His chairmanship of the advisory board of the Federal Academy for Security Policy, and his earlier presidency of the reservists' association, are treated in those sections.

On 26 February 2026 Econ, an imprint of Ullstein Buchverlage, published Was wollen wir? Was können wir? Deutschlands Rolle in der globalen Machtverschiebung, a 288-page hardcover (ISBN 978-3-430-21219-9). The publisher's summary asks whether Germany will accept political, diplomatic and military consequences in order to prevent war, and sets two prospects against each other: becoming an actor able to act, or leaving the country's future to other powers. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung of 2 March 2026, Georg Ismar treated Kiesewetter's alarm about Russia as warranted, noted the book's attack on what it calls German "Sofa-Pazifismus" and a proposal for general conscription on the model of Finland, and objected that the author examined his own misjudgments too little. In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 13 July 2026, Thomas Speckmann recommended it as a sobering interim account of the Zeitenwende, above all the case for more European security and military responsibility between Russia and the United States.