Helmut Schmidt was German Chancellor from 1974 to 1982, difficult years to be sure, in a country hoping to make amends for its immediate past. The knowledge that he had been in the Hitler Youth induced a shudder. A Wehrmacht officer, he had fought on the Eastern and then the Western fronts. In the Battle of the Bulge, the British took him prisoner, so he spoke good English. Handsome and evidently a well-rounded human being, he played the piano and chain-smoked. A Social Democrat with only a light flow of socialism in his veins, he was surprisingly ready to oppose Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union and Erich Honnecker’s East Germany, and give the United States the right to install missiles in what was then West Germany.
Characteristically he didn’t try to justify his past or to apologize for it, but in common with most Germans worked to establish a new identity as Europeans. In the age of nonentities like Jimmy Carter, Harold Wilson, and Valery Giscard d’Estaing, he was able to give the impression that he at least had a view of the world. In practice he laid the groundwork for the harmonizing of European currencies that has resulted in the euro. Even at the time many warned that economic unity necessitated political unity, something national electorates would never stand for. Should the European Union succeed, Helmut Schmidt will enter history books as a founding father. Should the EU fail, he will have a measure of responsibility for bringing about a historic mistake for which the continent will pay dearly. Born in Hamburg, he has just died there at the age of 96. R.I.P.