Lives Remembered: Helmet Schmidt
Former West German Chancellor. Born December 23, 1918 - Died November 10, 2015, aged 96
From his earliest days as a member of the West German parliament, Helmut Schmidt was a political high-flyer.
Indeed, his fierce attacks on the government of the day earned him the nickname Schmidt the Lip. But it took a dramatic event for him to secure the top job as Chancellor.
In 1974 the security forces discovered that one of the aides of his predecessor, Willy Brandt, was an agent of the Stasi, the East German secret service, and Brandt was forced to resign on the grounds of negligence.
Schmidt, the country’s finance minister, inherited an economy in crisis after the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 led to a quadrupling in the price of oil.
A tireless operator who often worked 18-hour days, he would blow a whistle as he made the short walk from his bungalow in the Chancellery grounds to his office to alert staff of his approach
He also had to face tense relations with the Soviet Union as the Cold War continued and a bloody wave of terror being waged by far-Left radicals, the Baader-Meinhof gang. Schmidt had seen the horror of conflict first hand as an anti-aircraft battery commander in the Second World War.
Once he became Chancellor he felt obliged to promote European integration.
In 1979, along with the French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, he was the main political architect of the European Monetary System which paved the way for the launch of the euro 20 years later.
A tireless operator who often worked 18-hour days, he would blow a whistle as he made the short walk from his bungalow in the Chancellery grounds to his office to alert staff of his approach.
Schmidt liked to describe himself as Germany’s chief executive and was sometimes criticised for being an administrator rather than a visionary, a charge to which he responded by saying: “People who have visions should see a doctor.”
His final years in office were marked by party infighting over his determination to station US nuclear missiles on German soil to counter a build-up of Soviet SS-20s.
The Social Democrat relinquished power in 1982 when his coalition partners switched their allegiance to the Christian Democratic Union.
Schmidt, who was born in Hamburg, joined the Hitler Youth in the 1930s when his father, who was the illegitimate son of a Jewish banker, acquired false documents for both of them.
He went on to fight on both the Eastern and Western fronts during the war before being captured by the British after the Battle Of The Bulge.
He married childhood sweetheart Hannelore “Loki” Glaser in 1942. After her death in 2010 he began a relationship with his former secretary, Ruth Loah, 81, and earlier this year he revealed that he had an affair with a party colleague in the “late 1960s or early 1970s”.
He was a heavy smoker who picked up the habit at the age of 15 when an uncle gave him a packet of cigarettes.
Despite his 60-a-day habit he still lived to a grand old age.
Although he rarely drank, he did consume vast quantities of cola.
Schmidt is survived by daughter Susanne.
