Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt dies at 96

[Zanza]

German ex-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt dies at 96

Helmut Schmidt, who served as West German Chancellor from 1974 to 1982, has died aged 96, his office says.

Mr Schmidt, who was a Social Democrat, was an architect of the European Monetary System, which linked EU currencies and was a key step on the path to the euro.

He was credited with helping to consolidate the country's post-war economic boom.

He is seen as one of the most popular German leaders since WWII.

Mr Schmidt died on Tuesday afternoon in his home city of Hamburg, his doctor Heiner Greten was quoted as saying by German media. The doctor provided no further details.

[...]

Helmut Schmidt was a far-sighted strategist who lived to see his ambitions for Germany fulfilled in 1990, the BBC's Jenny Hill in Berlin reports.

By 1972, Mr Schmidt was finance minister in the government of Willy Brandt, a brilliant manager of the economic miracle. Two years later he himself was chancellor.

The Berlin Wall dividing West and East Germany was the front line in a dangerous Cold War at the time.

With skilled diplomacy, Mr Schmidt pursued detente with communist leaders on the other side, but when the Soviet Union stepped up the arms race, he stood firm, our correspondent says.

Braving fierce protests at home, he let America deploy medium-range nuclear missiles on West German soil to keep the military balance.

Strongly pro-European, Mr Schmidt together with French leaders launched the European Monetary System in 1979. This later paved the way for the euro.

He will also be remembered for leading his country through a period of political violence in which groups - such as the Red Army Faction - carried out bombings and kidnappings, our correspondent says.

In 1982, the coalition led by Mr Schmidt's party collapsed and he lost power to Helmut Kohl.

'Schmidt the Lip'
Born in a tough, working-class district of Hamburg in 1918, a month after the end of World War I, Helmut Schmidt spent his early years in a Germany wracked by political, economic and social strife.

Aged 14 when the Nazi Party came to power, he became a group leader in the Hitler Youth, joined the German army in 1937 and, during World War II, saw action on both the eastern and western fronts.

Promoted to first lieutenant rank and the recipient of an Iron Cross, Helmut Schmidt was captured by the British after the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45.

While in captivity, his fellow prisoners of war convinced him to become a Social Democrat. Joining the party on demobilisation in 1946, he progressed effortlessly through its ranks.

He graduated from Hamburg University in 1949, having been national chairman of the Social Democrats' student wing, and became an economic adviser to the Hamburg government.

He was elected to the federal parliament in 1953, where his verbosity soon earned him the nickname "Schmidt-Schnauze" (Schmidt the Lip).

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34778565

One of the greatest postwar politicians of our country. Rest in peace. 

[Jaron]

Rip Schmidt the Lip

[Zanza]

http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2015-11/helmut-schmidt-dead-english

Helmut Schmidt has passed away
DIE ZEIT is mourning its publisher: Helmut Schmidt passed away today in Hamburg. The former German chancellor was 96 years old.

Former German Chancellor and DIE ZEIT publisher Helmut Schmidt has passed away. He died on Tuesday at the age of 96 in his Hamburg home.

The DIE ZEIT newspaper and publishing house bid farewell to Helmut Schmidt in deep mourning and profound gratitude: "As publisher of DIE ZEIT -- for a time also as head of the Zeitverlag publishing house and Managing Director -- he oversaw the fate of our paper for 32 years. We have lost a shrewd counselor, a reliable companion and a good friend. We will miss Helmut Schmidt terribly."

Schmidt's influence on German politics is almost unmatched, initially as senator in the Hamburg city-state government and then as a federal cabinet member before becoming chancellor. He gained his reputation for pragmatism and for being a successful crisis manager as Hamburg interior minister by organizing relief measures during the massive 1962 Hamburg floods: Even absent constitutional authority, he requested the help of helicopters from the German military and from the Royal Air Force to rescue people in the disaster zone.

Four years later, he joined Social Democratic Party (SPD) head Willy Brandt in the formation of Germany's first "Grand Coalition," pairing the SPD with the center-right Christian Democrats. In 1967, Schmidt became SPD floor leader in the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament. In 1969, Schmidt was tapped as defense minister in Brandt's second cabinet, formed in coalition with the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP). Shortly before 1972 general elections, he took over leadership of the Finance Ministry and, temporarily, also that of the Economics Ministry.

When Brandt was forced to step down in 1974 after a close advisor of his was revealed to be an East German spy, in what became known as the Guillaume Affair, the SPD-FDP coalition elected Schmidt as chancellor. His government found itself confronted with numerous foreign and domestic crises. But under Schmidt's leadership, Germany found its way through the global economic downturn and the 1970s oil crises relatively unscathed. It was the terror attacks perpetrated by the left-wing militant group Red Army Faction that exacted the most difficult decisions of his term. Can a state allow itself to be blackmailed? That was the question facing the chancellor when the Lufthansa passenger jet Landshut was hijacked to Mogadishu in 1977, and the RAF kidnapped and threatened to murder Hanns Martin Schleyer, the president of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations, in order to force the release of RAF prisoners. Schmidt decided against a prisoner exchange and ordered a GSG-9 special forces unit to storm the plane. The RAF murdered Schleyer in response.

Schmidt's party and a significant share of the populace distanced themselves from Schmidt two years later when he pushed through the NATO Double-Track Decision, which foresaw the stationing of medium-range ballistic missiles in West Germany. Then, in 1982, Schmidt' governing coalition with the FDP collapsed in a no-confidence vote and Helmut Kohl, of the Christian Democrats, was chosen to replace him.

Just a short time later, DIE ZEIT's founding publisher Gerd Bucerius brought Schmidt on board as publisher of the weekly paper. He remained in that position for more than 32 years. Up until the very end, he enriched the paper with his analyses, commentaries and interviews on current events.

[Zanza]

And one more :tim:

Helmut Schmidt has died, aged 96
The Social Democrat chancellor of West Germany died on November 10th

HE WAS so clever, and so rude with it, that his listeners sometimes realised only too late that they had been outwitted and insulted. Helmut Schmidt did not just find fools tiresome. He obliterated them. The facts were clear and the logic impeccable. So disagreement was a sign of idiocy.

He was impatient too, with his own party, which failed to realise the constraints and dilemmas of power. It wanted him to spend money West Germany did not have, and to compromise with terrorists who belonged in jail. He was impatient with the anti-nuclear left, who failed to realise that nuclear power stations were safe, and that the Soviet empire thrived on allies' weakness. And he was impatient with post-Watergate America, which seemed to have lost its will to lead.

He was imperious in good causes and in bad. His addiction to menthol cigarettes trumped convention and courtesy. He smoked whenever and wherever he felt like it, even (when they existed) in non-smoking compartments of railway carriages. "Can you ask Mr Schmidt to put his cigarette out?" a passenger asked the conductor. "Would you mind telling him yourself?" came the timid reply.

Yet his brains, eloquence and willpower were unmatched in German politics. They brought him through the detestable Nazi period, thrown out of the Hitler Youth for disloyalty but with an Iron Cross for bravery. He was one-quarter Jewish,which he concealed when he married his wife Loki and needed to prove his Aryan background. Only late in his career did an army document emerge which described him as ideologically sound.

Released from a prisoner-of-war camp, he flourished in post-war West Germany. He made a successful career in Hamburg's city government, where he commandeered army units to deal with the floods of 1962, breaking a taboo, and the law, but gaining a deserved reputation as a doer.

He replaced Willy Brandt (the victim of an East German espionage operation) in 1974, at a time when the West was reeling from the oil-price shock, terrorism and America's humiliation in Vietnam. With his friend Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (another fluent English-speaker), he launched the idea of summit governance to deal with the world's economic woes. G7 meetings were more effective in those days: brief, informal affairs with real conversations and real decisions, not the micro-managed showpieces of today. Decisions made then laid the foundations for the modern European Union.

Other leaders did not find him easy to deal with. He detested the weakness of the Carter administration, and the two men got on badly. His foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, recalled: "Schmidt was of the opinion that the world would be fairer if he was president of the United States and Carter the German chancellor." Menachem Begin called him "unprincipled, avaricious, heartless, and lacking in human feeling" after he said Germans living in a divided nation should feel sympathy for Palestinian self-determination.

Banged up
His toughness towards the nihilist terrorists of the Red Army Faction outraged many liberal-minded Germans, who felt that extensive snooping, interrogations and quasi-military justice had dreadful echoes of the Nazi period. They flinched when he urged America to beef up its nuclear presence in Europe in response to the Soviet Union's growing stockpile of medium-range missiles. But for him social democracy was based on fairness, not fads. He had no time for greenery, feminism or culture wars. Far more important was bolstering the welfare system, building more houses, and making Germany safe at home and abroad. Unfortunately his party thought differently, as did, increasingly, his liberal coalition partner, the FDP. Flexibility and charm were not Mr Schmidt's strong points. A bit more of them might have saved him.

His nemesis was Helmut Kohl, the beefy Christian Democrat leader. He underestimated his rival, mocking his mumbled provincial diction. Mr Schmidt was an accomplished music and art critic, as elegant a wordsmith in prose as in speech. Mr Kohl's main interest outside politics was food. But the conservative leader's willingness to listen and do deals made Mr Schmidt look arrogant and out of touch. As his coalition disintegrated, the chancellor, in government since 1969, suddenly found himself in the political wilderness. His party (like many in Europe spooked by Ronald Reagan's unabashed anti-communism) veered leftwards.

Mr Schmidt, still puffing away on his beloved cigarettes (stockpiled in case of a ban) and playing the piano (of which he had a near-professional mastery) varied his views hardly an iota. As publisher of Die Zeit, Germany's most heavyweight (in every sense) weekly, he was its leading commentator—more influential in shaping opinion, perhaps, than as an embattled chancellor. He deplored worries about climate change (population growth was a far bigger problem). Intervention in other countries' affairs was a mistake (though he made an exception for Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine: that was a justified response to Western meddling). Unpopular views—but the facts and logic were clear. Anyone who disagreed was stupid.

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21678156-social-democrat-chancellor-west-germany-died-november-10th-helmut-schmidt-has-died

[Syt]

Guess it was one cigarette too many.

But yeah, he was one of the last real elder statesmen in Germany (after the death of Brandt) and never shy to voice is opinion on a great many things (unlike Kohl who pretty much disappeared from public view after the bribery affairs).

One thing I found somewhat charming was in a documentary about him a few years ago, showing him at home in his small house in a nice part of Hamburg, with Henry Kissinger visiting. Apparently they were good friends and met a few times a year if time allowed.

[Syt]

Politics used to be a bit different.

Schmidt receiving Brezhnev in his terraced house in Hamburg. Note also the cigarette buffet on the plate in front.




Celebrating his 56th birthday, during his first year as chancellor with foreign minister Genscher. He's mixing Bloody Mary for the guests.

[Valmy]

What did we do in the Ukraine that justified Russia's invasion?