Helmut Schmidt

Biography

Helmut Schmidt was born in 1918 in Barmbek, a working-class district of Hamburg, and finished school at the Lichtwark School in 1937. He served in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War, the only German chancellor to have done so. After the war he studied economics at the University of Hamburg, and worked in the city's economic policy department.

Elected to the Bundestag in 1953, he gave up his seat in 1962 to serve as Hamburg's senator for the interior, and his handling of the North Sea flood of February 1962 earned him a reputation as a man who got things done. Back in the Bundestag, he led the SPD group from 1967 and then served Willy Brandt as defence minister from 1969 and finance minister from 1972, briefly also running the economics ministry.

He succeeded Brandt as chancellor in May 1974 and was re-elected in 1976 and 1980. He concentrated on international economic cooperation and European integration, helping create the European Monetary System in 1978, and pressed for the NATO Double-Track Decision on medium-range missiles. In October 1977 he ordered the border police anti-terror operation that freed the hostages of the hijacked Lufthansa jet Landshut in Mogadishu. His coalition collapsed when the Free Democrats backed a constructive vote of no confidence that made Helmut Kohl chancellor in October 1982. He retired from parliament after clashing with the SPD's left, became co-publisher of the weekly Die Zeit, and died in Hamburg in 2015.