Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, passed away today in Hamburg, Germany. Herr Schmidt became Chancellor in 1974, when Willy Brandt resigned after it was discovered one of his top aides was an East German agent. Herr Schmidt lost the chancellorship to Helmut Kohl in 1982, when the Free Democrats left its coalition with the Social Democratic Party and allied with Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrat Union. Herr Schmidt continued to speak out and play a role in German political life until his death.
Perhaps the most important thing of the prior paragraph, and in Helmut Schmidt’s career, is that he was Chancellor of West Germany and he died in Germany. Even though Helmut Schmidt was no longer chancellor by 1989/1990, he played a key role, while he was chancellor, in the policies that protected the West in the late 1970s and early 1980s and helped set the stage for German unification in 1990.
In the late 1970s, it was Helmut Schmidt who first called public attention to the Soviet Union’s placement of SS-20 medium-range nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe. Chancellor Schmidt called for the West to respond and supported NATO’s “double-track” policy of deploying cruise and Pershing 2 missiles in the West Europe while at the same time negotiating with the Soviets to limit, or eliminate, medium range missiles in Europe.
His stance cost Chancellor Schmidt the support of much of the left wing of the Social Democratic Party, but he continued to support the deployment by NATO even after losing the chancellorship. The policy eventually worked when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agree to remove all such missiles in 1987.
Helmut Schmidt’s approach on this issue, and during his political career as a whole, was well stated in a speech he gave at a Congress on philosophy and politics entitled “Kant In Our Time” in Bonn on March 12-13, 1981:
“The politician is not justified simply by the fact that he pursues the morally right aims. That is at best a part of his justification. His political actions must be preceded by a critical analysis of the situation and the various implications:
In this respect I am following very closely the line of thought of Max Weber. … He said: … ‘Indeed,’ -- and here I quote from his famous essay on ‘Politics as a Profession” written in 1919 – ‘he has to answer for the consequences of his actions.’ And he wrote in parenthesis: for the ‘foreseeable’ consequences of his actions. I would prefer to delete the word ‘foreseeable,’ although life is of course more pleasant for the politician if he is told that he must only answer for the foreseeable consequences. In reality he must also answer for the consequences he could not foresee!”
Helmut Schmidt played a key role in the defense of Western Europe and NATO during very difficult days of the Cold War. He should be remembered and honored for the statesman he was.
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