Helmut Schmidt
Helmut Schmidt was chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, the Hamburg senator who had run the city's response to the flood of 1962 by calling in the army without the authority to, the finance minister who took over from Brandt in the Guillaume affair, and the chancellor of the German autumn of 1977, when the Red Army Faction kidnapped the employers' leader Schleyer and Palestinians hijacked a Lufthansa jet to Mogadishu to free the Baader-Meinhof prisoners, and he sent the GSG 9 to storm the plane and let Schleyer be killed rather than yield. He was also the man who, with Giscard, invented the G7 summits and the European Monetary System, and who asked NATO in 1977 for the Pershing missiles to answer the Soviet SS-20s, which split his party and, with the recession and the Free Democrats' defection, brought him down in a constructive vote of no confidence in October 1982. He was born in Hamburg in 1918, the son of a teacher whose own father, he learned late, was a Jewish banker, served as an artillery officer on the eastern front and in the Ardennes, and was a British prisoner when the war ended. He studied economics in Hamburg, joined the Social Democrats in 1946, and was in the Bundestag from 1953, where his debating earned him the name Schmidt the Lip. He was defence minister under Brandt from 1969, finance minister from 1972, and chancellor on 16 May 1974, governing with the Free Democrats through the oil shocks with a competence that kept German inflation the lowest in the West and unemployment below a million. The autumn of 1977 was the test. There were the forty-four days of Schleyer's captivity, the government's refusal, the hostages freed at Mogadishu on 18 October, the prisoners' suicides in Stammheim that night, and Schleyer's body found in a car boot in Mulhouse. The double-track decision of 1979, to deploy the American missiles unless the Soviets negotiated, was his, and the peace movement of the early 1980s was the party's answer to it. The left of the SPD deserted him, Genscher's Free Democrats left the coalition over the budget, and Kohl was elected in his place on 1 October 1982. He co-published Die Zeit for the rest of his life, smoked menthol cigarettes on every television programme that had him, wrote thirty books, and died in Hamburg in November 2015 at ninety-six, the country's elder.
- Lived: 1918 CE – 2015 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: chancellor, politician
