Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt was chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974, the first Social Democrat to hold the office since 1930, the mayor of West Berlin who had stood at the Wall when it went up and who as chancellor made the Ostpolitik that accepted it. There were the treaties with Moscow and Warsaw in 1970 recognising the Oder-Neisse frontier and the loss of the eastern territories, the Basic Treaty with East Germany in 1972 that recognised the other state without recognising it as foreign, the four-power agreement that secured Berlin, and the moment on 7 December 1970 when he knelt in the rain before the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto, which he said he did because words were not enough. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 and resigned in May 1974 when his personal assistant Gunter Guillaume was arrested as an East German spy. He was born Herbert Frahm in Lubeck in 1913, illegitimate, the son of a shop assistant, joined the Socialist Workers' Party at eighteen and fled to Norway in 1933 under the name he kept, working as a journalist, reporting the Spanish civil war from Barcelona, losing his German citizenship in 1938 and taking Norwegian, and escaping to Sweden in 1940 in a Norwegian uniform when the Germans came. He came back to Berlin in 1945 as a Norwegian press attache, took his citizenship back, and was the city's mayor from 1957 to 1966, through the ultimatum, the Wall and Kennedy's visit. The right's campaign against him in the elections of 1961 and 1965 used his birth and his exile. He was foreign minister in the grand coalition from 1966 and won the chancellorship in 1969 with the Free Democrats by twelve seats, saying he wanted to dare more democracy. The treaties passed the Bundestag in 1972 after the opposition's motion of no confidence failed by two votes, bought, it later emerged, by the Stasi, and the election of November 1972 gave the Social Democrats their best result ever. The second term was the oil crisis, the public-sector strike he lost, his depression, and Guillaume, whom the security service had suspected for a year while letting him stay; Brandt took the responsibility and Schmidt the office. He was the party's chairman until 1987, chaired the Brandt commission on North and South, presided over the Socialist International, and lived to see the Wall come down, saying in Berlin the next day that what belonged together was now growing together. He died at Unkel on the Rhine in October 1992.
- Lived: 1913 CE – 1992 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: chancellor, politician
