Helmut Schmidt

Helmut Schmidt: The Chancellor Who Refused to Blink

In October 1977 a hijacked Lufthansa jet sat on a runway in Mogadishu with ninety people aboard and a dead pilot in the cockpit. In Bonn, the Chancellor of West Germany decided not to negotiate. He sent GSG 9 commandos to storm the aircraft, and every passenger and crew member came out alive. It was the defining act of Helmut Schmidt's career, and it rested on a conviction he never softened: a democracy that flinches is finished.

Barmbek, and a Secret

Schmidt was born on 23 December 1918 in Barmbek, a working-class district of Hamburg, and he never stopped sounding like it — blunt, impatient, allergic to sentiment. He was a non-practising Protestant. He was also, though almost nobody knew it, the grandson of a German Jewish banker, a fact that stayed hidden until 1984.

He left the Lichtwark School in 1937 and volunteered for the Luftwaffe. The war took him to the Eastern Front in 1941, through Operation Barbarossa and the siege of Leningrad, then back to Germany in 1942 as an instructor at the Air Ministry. There he was made to attend the show trials of the 20 July plotters and was revolted by the conduct of Judge Roland Freisler — an experience he cited for the rest of his life. From December 1944 he served as an Oberleutnant in anti-aircraft artillery through the Ardennes offensive, was captured by the British in April 1945, and spent the summer as a prisoner of war. He had married Hannelore "Loki" Glaser, his childhood sweetheart, in 1942; the marriage lasted sixty-eight years.

Released, he studied economics and political science at the University of Hamburg, graduating in 1949, and joined the SPD in 1946. He entered the Bundestag in 1953 and quickly acquired a nickname that stuck for six decades: *Schmidt-Schnauze*, Schmidt the Lip.

The Flood

The moment that made him was a catastrophe. In February 1962 a North Sea storm surge broke over Hamburg and drowned three hundred people. Schmidt was the city's interior senator. The Basic Law did not permit him to use the federal border police or the army for domestic emergencies; he used them anyway, commandeering units and helicopters on his own authority, and an estimated thousand further lives were saved. He never apologised for the illegality. Germans decided they had found a man who would act.

THE FREE TEST

How high is yours?

Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.

Take the IQ test →

Minister of Everything

He was Willy Brandt's defence minister from 1969 to 1972, cutting conscription from eighteen months to fifteen while enlarging the Bundeswehr and founding its universities in Hamburg and Munich. He moved to finance in 1972, floating the mark against the dollar just before the 1973 oil shock and emerging with a reputation as the best economic technician in German politics. When Brandt resigned in May 1974 over an espionage scandal, the succession was obvious.

Chancellor in a Broken Decade

Schmidt governed from 16 May 1974 to 1982, through the ugliest economic weather since the war: oil shocks, stagflation, collapsing exchange rates. His response was disciplined public spending and, from 1979, targeted Keynesian stimulus estimated to have created between 160,000 and 300,000 jobs. West Germany came through the 1970s in better shape than any comparable economy, which is the plainest measure of his competence.

His larger insight was that no country could fix this alone. With Valéry Giscard d'Estaing — a personal friend as much as a counterpart — he convened the first world economic summit in 1975, inventing what became the G7. Together they built the European Monetary System in 1978, the direct ancestor of the euro. He signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975. He was re-elected in 1976 and 1980.

The German Autumn

The Red Army Faction's campaign reached its peak in 1977, and Schmidt met it with total refusal. No negotiation, no releases, no concessions. The Landshut hijacking ended at Mogadishu with the GSG 9 assault; the hostages lived. His approach set the template most European states have used since. He took the decision knowing that a failed raid would have ended his chancellorship on the spot.

The Missiles and the Fall

Schmidt saw before Washington did that Soviet medium-range missiles aimed at Europe created a gap in deterrence that Europeans, not Americans, would pay for. He pushed NATO toward the Double-Track Decision of 1979: deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe unless Moscow agreed to disarm. It was the correct strategic call and it destroyed him politically. In October 1981, 400,000 people demonstrated against it, and the largest bloc of them were his own party's voters. Meanwhile his relations with the Carter White House were frosty, and an April 1981 remark on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drew a ferocious denunciation from Menachem Begin.

The FDP ministers walked out on 17 September 1982. On 1 October the Bundestag removed him by constructive vote of no confidence — the only time in the Federal Republic's history that mechanism has unseated a chancellor — and installed Helmut Kohl.

Why Helmut Is Called a Genius

Schmidt would have detested the word; his self-description was *Macher*, a doer. The case for him rests not on originality of doctrine but on an unusual combination of analytical and temperamental gifts. He could hold macroeconomics, nuclear strategy and coalition arithmetic in his head simultaneously and reason across them, which is why the G7, the European Monetary System and the Double-Track Decision all bear his fingerprints; none of the three was an obvious idea at the time, and all three outlived him. Foreign leaders treated him as the smartest person in the room — his circle included Giscard, Lee Kuan Yew, Kissinger, Sadat and Pierre Trudeau, and he collected twenty-four honorary doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne and Harvard among others. He was a serious pianist who recorded Mozart and Bach concertos with Christoph Eschenbach. And in 1962 and again in 1977 he showed the rarer quality: the willingness to take an irreversible decision alone and carry the consequences.

The counter-case is real. He founded no doctrine and wrote no political theory of note; his memoirs are lucid but not visionary. He was contemptuous of dissent within his own party, which is a large part of why that party abandoned him over the missiles, and his conviction that he was the most rational man present shaded easily into arrogance. His late-life pronouncements were often reactionary and sometimes worse — he opposed Turkish EU membership, called the climate debate hysterically overheated, dismissed the internet as threatening, and argued that multicultural societies require a strong authoritarian state, singling out immigration from beyond Anatolia and sub-Saharan Africa as a problem. He was a supremely competent manager of crises rather than a builder of new orders. But in a decade when several Western democracies looked as though they might not hold, competence of that order was the scarce commodity.

Legacy

He left parliament in 1986 after a final quarrel with the SPD's left, joined *Die Zeit* as co-publisher in 1983 and spent thirty years as Germany's national conscience, a lifelong heavy smoker who outlived every warning issued to him. Loki died in 2010. He died at home in Hamburg on 10 November 2015, aged ninety-six, the longest-lived German chancellor; 1,800 people attended the state funeral at St Michael's, among them Angela Merkel, Kissinger and Giscard. Hamburg's airport now carries his name, as does a university. The euro he helped make possible, and the G7 he convened, are still meeting.