Willy Brandt

December 18, 1913 – October 8, 1992

German Social Democratic politician who was Chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974 and led the SPD from 1964 to 1987. His Ostpolitik of reconciliation with Eastern Europe won him the 1971 Nobel Peace Prize.

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Biography

Willy Brandt was born Herbert Frahm in Lübeck in 1913. He joined the Social Democrats as a teenager and in 1931 moved to the more radical Socialist Workers' Party. After the Nazis came to power he fled to Norway and later Sweden, working as a left-wing journalist under the name Willy Brandt, which he made his legal name when he returned to Germany and the SPD in 1948.

He represented West Berlin in the Bundestag and sat in the Berlin assembly. As Governing Mayor of West Berlin from 1957 to 1966 he faced the building of the Berlin Wall. He was the SPD's candidate for chancellor in 1961 and 1965, led the party from 1964 to 1987, and served as foreign minister and vice chancellor in Kurt Georg Kiesinger's grand coalition from 1966.

In 1969 he became the first Social Democratic chancellor since 1930, heading a coalition with the Free Democrats. His Ostpolitik produced the 1970 treaties with the Soviet Union and Poland, the 1971 Four Power Agreement on Berlin and the 1972 Basic Treaty with East Germany, and in Warsaw he knelt at the memorial to the ghetto uprising. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.

Brandt resigned in 1974 after his aide Günter Guillaume was exposed as an East German spy. He remained SPD chairman, presided over the Socialist International from 1976 to 1992, and chaired the commission that produced the Brandt Report on the North-South divide. He died in 1992.