Helmut Schmidt

Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt (Hamburg, December 23, 1918 – Hamburg, November 10, 2015) was a German politician, member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He held the posts of Minister of Defense between 1969 and 1972, Minister of Economy and Finance in 1972, Minister of Finance from 1972 until 1974, Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 until 1982, and Minister of Foreign Affairs in September and October 1982. Trained as an economist, Schmidt is considered to be a supporter of Keynesianism.^{[citation needed]} From 1983 until his death he was editor of the influential weekly Die Zeit.

Biography

Schmidt planned to study without interruption, so he volunteered at eighteen for military service in 1937. He began serving with a Luftwaffe anti-aircraft battery at Vegesack, near Bremen. In World War II, after brief service on the Eastern Front during the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union (including the siege of Leningrad), he returned to Germany in 1942 to work as a trainer and adviser at the Ministry of Aviation. During his service in World War II, Schmidt was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class. He attended the People's Court as a military spectator at some of the show trials for officers involved in the July 20 Plot, in which a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler was made at Rastenburg. Towards the end of the war, from December 1944 onwards, he served as an Oberleutnant in the Flakartillery on the Western Front during the Battle of the Bulge and the Bulge Offensive. He was captured by the British in April 1945 at Lüneburg Heath, and was a prisoner of war until August of that year in Belgium.

From 1946 to 1949 he studied Political Economy and Political Science in Hamburg. In March 1946 he became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and between 1947 and 1948 he was Federal President of the German Socialist Student Federation.

Between 1949 and 1953 he held various positions within the Hamburg city administration. From 1953 to 1962 he was a deputy for the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament. There he demonstrates against an armament of the Bundeswehr, the German army, with nuclear weapons.

At the beginning of 1962 Schmidt left the Bundestag because at the end of 1961 he had become a senator for domestic policy in the senate (government) of the city of Hamburg. From 1965 to 1987 he was again a deputy in the Bundestag. From 1968 to 1983 he was Vice President of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Schmidt in 1973.

From 1969 to 1972 he was Minister of Defense in the government of Chancellor Willy Brandt. After Brandt's resignation, in 1974, Schmidt became chancellor. He was elected by a coalition of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). He was chancellor until 1982.

Remains in the annals of German parliamentary rhetoric his speech of more than an hour, almost all from memory and replies to Walter Scheel (FDP), in the debate on the laws on the state of emergency (Notstandsgesetze) of the Federal Republic of Germany, on May 30, 1968, forming part of the CDU/CSU/SPD coalition government.

European integration

Helmut Schmidt in 2001.

As chancellor, Schmidt promoted the creation of the European Regional Development Fund and the European Monetary System. He also promoted the first universal suffrage elections to the European Parliament in 1979.

The European Council was created by decision of the Heads of State or Government of the Member States of the then European Communities, meeting at a conference held in Paris on December 9 and 10, 1974. The initiative came from the President French Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Chancellor Schmidt, who proposed to the other heads of government to institutionalize the summits, which until then had been held irregularly. They did so at the request of some of the Member States and thus agreed to meet at least twice a year.