Helmut Schmidt, who has died aged 96, dominated the European stage more than any other politician during the 1970s as chancellor of West Germany; his eight years in office (1974-82) were marked by his restless energy and personal command of such difficult areas as defence and finance.
Schmidt led from the front, a quality appreciated by voters but ultimately scorned by his Social Democratic Party (SPD). Its Leftward drift in the early 1980s let him down and condemned it to the opposition benches for much longer than could have been expected.
Small in stature and, physically, surprisingly frail, Schmidt (or Schnauze, “The Lip”, as he was popularly known) was a tough, terrier-like politician, impatient of mediocrity. He had an intellectual breadth and versatility rare among modern German politicians, and he knew it. He was especially hurt that a man of much less obvious talent, Helmut Kohl, should unseat him as Chancellor through the political treachery of his Liberal coalition partners rather than by the ballot box.
None the less, physically exhausted by the exigencies of his hands-on approach to government, Schmidt might have enjoyed a shorter life had he had a longer spell in office. An over-active thyroid condition was diagnosed in 1972. This required constant medication, and in 1981, overtaxed by work, he had a heart pacemaker fitted.
Margaret Thatcher with Helmut Schmidt in 1982When, the following year, he prematurely lost his job as chancellor, he was at least cushioned by his interests outside politics – notably music, in which he was an accomplished performer. He could, moreover, sit back and pontificate through the pages of the weekly Die Zeit, of which he became a joint publisher, and through a spell on the lucrative American lecture circuit.
His contribution to German, European and Alliance politics was great, and will be remembered especially for its uncompromising stance on defence in the face of the Soviet arms build-up during the Brezhnev years.
Mindful of the events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Schmidt’s priority was to ensure that an inward-looking United States was securely coupled to Europe. He thus became the chief architect and protagonist of Nato’s so-called “dual track” decision to counter Moscow’s SS-20 medium-range rocket arsenal by stationing American Cruise and Pershing-II missiles in Europe.
It was a bold stand for a German Social Democrat and was to incur the displeasure of his party’s Left wing as well as of the increasingly vociferous anti-nuclear movement. But it was endorsed by his principal political opponents, the Christian Democrats.
Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 only strengthened Schmidt’s resolve, and by then he could count on Margaret Thatcher’s unequivocal support from London. In the end, Schmidt’s determination may have contributed to his losing power in Germany, but it was undoubtedly a factor in the collapse of Communism across eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at the end of the decade. Disarmament followed.
A committed European, Schmidt will also be remembered as the joint architect in 1978 – with French President Giscard d’Estaing, like Schmidt a former finance minister – of the European Monetary System, in which the robust German currency was destined to play a pivotal role. He could thus claim to be a pioneer of European Monetary Union.
Typically for a native of Hamburg, he was prone to Anglophilia – something which, he used to say, he “imbibed with his mother’s milk”. He spoke good English, and was keen to see Britain at the centre of Europe, although he well understood British reservations.
In 1974 he addressed the Labour Party conference only months after succeeding Willy Brandt as chancellor and offered a spirited defence of British EC membership. But, he acknowledged, it was like trying to convince a Salvation Army gathering of the merits of drink.
Helmut Schmidt with Leonid Brezhnev in 1980
In Bonn, Schmidt made a point of cultivating the Anglo-Saxon press, sometimes at the expense of the domestic media. To a modern German chancellor, he once remarked, the two most important newspapers were The New York Times and The Financial Times. Their correspondents, and those of other foreign newspapers, were regularly invited to informal weekend evenings at the Chancellor’s bungalow when he, or a musician friend, would play the piano, and the discussion could fall on German Expressionism or the scupltor Henry Moore.
Schmidt was proud that he had a major work by Moore on the lawn of his otherwise austere modern Chancellery complex, the corridors of which he had hung with excellent Expressionist paintings; he was particularly fond of the work of the Bonn-born painter August Macke, who had been killed in the First World War, as well as that of Ernst Barlach, whose sculpture the Nazis considered degenerate.
As a musician, Schmidt especially loved Bach, Mozart and Brahms, and he was a pianist of near-professional standard. With his friends Justus Frantz and Christoph Eschenbach, he recorded for EMI Mozart’s concerto for three pianos, with the London Symphony Orchestra, in 1981; three years later he recorded Bach’s concerto for four keyboards and strings for Deutsche Grammophon. Both these efforts were well received by the critics. He also played the organ and was a talented chess-player.
Although his musical interests and his love of sailing would have appealed to Edward Heath (who stepped down as prime minister in the year that Schmidt became chancellor), it was with James Callaghan and Denis Healey (to whom he was sometimes compared) that Schmidt formed strong political friendships. He had no particular liking for, or affinity with, Harold Wilson, with whom he initially dealt as chancellor. He was later, however, to hold Margaret Thatcher in high regard, despite their political disagreements. Like her, Schmidt often had a surer grasp of detail than his ministers and did not suffer fools gladly. He shared with her a reputation for arrogance.
Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt was born on December 23 1918 – six weeks after the Armistice – in Barmbeck, a tough working-class district of Hamburg. His father, Gustav, was a schoolmaster who lived to see his son lead his country, dying in 1981 at the age of 92.
Like the other boys at his school, the young Schmidt joined the Hitler Youth, and in 1937, aged 18, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He served with an anti-aircraft battery on the Russian Front in 1941-42. After being commissioned he was decorated with the Iron Cross and transferred to operations in the Western Front. During the Battle of the Bulge, which followed the German Ardennes offensive of December 1944, Oberleutnant Schmidt was captured by British troops and held as a PoW in Belgium for six months.
It was during this time that he became a Socialist and abandoned his earlier ambition of becoming an architect. On his release he went to Hamburg University, where he read Economics, joined the Social Democratic Party and became president of the university’s Socialist Student Federation. On graduating, at the age of 30 he went to the Hamburg State Office for Economics, rising by 1952 to be head of the transport section. The next year he was elected to the Bundestag in Bonn as a Social Democrat deputy.
Schmidt with his wife Hannelore on holiday in Brahmsee in 1982
Among the rank-and-file of the SPD parliamentary party he quickly earned a reputation as a maverick. To a party emotionally opposed to rearmament, Schmidt argued forcefully that the party should master defence policy issues and assert parliamentary control over the armed forces. He raised some eyebrows by taking part as a reserve officer in manoeuvres of the newly formed Bundeswehr (West German armed forces).
Weary of opposition in Bonn, Schmidt left the Bundestag in 1962 to become Senator for Internal Affairs in the Hamburg state government. He had barely taken office when Hamburg was struck by a fearsome hurricane and the river Elbe burst its banks. A fifth of the city was flooded and 300 people drowned.
But Schmidt, cutting through red tape, took control of the emergency so forcefully that a further 1,000 people at risk from drowning were saved, and the thousands made homeless were swiftly rehoused. Media coverage projected him as a national hero; his reputation as an “action” politician – Macher (doer) – was made.
In 1965 Schmidt returned to the Bundestag and became leader of the SPD parliamentary party as a grand coalition was forged between the two main parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. When, in 1969, the SPD emerged as the largest party, and its chairman, Willy Brandt, opted for an alliance with the Liberal Free Democrats, Schmidt was an obvious choice for the defence portfolio.
He brought with him to the ministry his own group of advisers, including – controversially – a prominent industrialist from the Thyssen conglomerate. During Schmidt’s three years at the defence ministry the position of non-commissioned officers was improved; there was an increased flow of volunteers; and he was able to cut conscription to 18 months. He shocked conservatives by allowing recruits to grow their hair long.
A new defence strategy was devised to cope with the threat of Soviet armoured incursion and, along with Britain, West Germany joined Nato’s newly formed Euro-Group to increase Europe’s contribution to Alliance costs and to rationalise European procurement practice.
In 1972 Schmidt moved to his other area of specialisation, taking over the so-called “super-ministry” of economics and finance. Later that year the SPD-led coalition was returned to government, and the ministry was divided into its component parts, with Schmidt taking the finance portfolio.
Meanwhile, a burgeoning United States budget deficit threatened the stability of the Deutschemark, raising the (for Germans) horrific spectre of inflation. Schmidt responded by seeking collaboration among European countries, notably France, whose finance minister, Giscard d’Estaing, like Schmidt, was destined soon to take over the reins of government. In 1973, just before the oil crisis which brought double-digit inflation in the United States and Britain, it was agreed to float the European currencies against the dollar.
In 1974 the Chancellorship was suddenly thrust upon a willing Schmidt following the resignation of Willy Brandt, whose personal assistant, Günter Guillaume, had been found to be an East German spy. A period of strong leadership followed, with West Germany playing a valued role shouldering responsibility in Europe and the Alliance.
With Schmidt’s advocacy of Nato’s “dual track” negotiate-and-deploy decision on medium-range nuclear missiles, Bonn was setting the pace in defence. With the birth of the European Monetary System (or “Snake in the Tunnel”) in 1978, it led in finance. Furthermore, in 1977 Schmidt’s reputation for getting results was enhanced by the successful storming by German commandos of a Lufthansa airliner held by Baader-Meinhof terrorists at Mogadishu in Somalia. Schmidt’s political career had peaked.
Schmidt with Ronald Reagan and the then Mayor of Berlin, Richard von Weizsaecker, at the Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin in 1982
He was returned to office in the autumn 1980 general election, when he convincingly beat off the challenge from Franz-Josef Strauss, the conservatives’ candidate for Chancellor. Subsequently, however, the economy began to turn against Schmidt: unemployment rose and budgets became harder to balance; economic differences with his Free Democrat coalition partners, on whom he depended for his parliamentary majority, brought tensions.
Meanwhile, the Left wing of the SPD and the anti-nuclear movement stepped up their opposition to the planned deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles. The luminous potential of Schmidt’s summit meeting, in December 1981, with the East German leader Erich Honecker was eclipsed by the simultaneous declaration of martial law in Poland and the clampdown on the trades union Solidarity. The new decade was bringing fresh problems which Schmidt was not so well equipped to tackle.
Gradually his authority was eroded, until he was left in the lurch by his erstwhile Liberal allies and ousted by Helmut Kohl in October 1982. The Schmidt era ended in bitterness and disappointment, and he preferred not to linger long in active politics, even though he remained personally popular with the electorate.
Helmut Schmidt derived much strength from his marriage, in 1942, to Hannelore (“Loki”) Glaser, whom he had known since childhood and who died in 2010. Germans were shocked earlier this year when the 96-year old Schmidt admitted that some 45 years earlier he had had an extra-marital affair, but had turned down his wife’s offer to stand aside for his mistress.
They had a son, who died in infancy during the war years, and a daughter, who survives him.
Helmut Schmidt, born December 23 1918, died November 10 2015
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