In the same year, three high-profile figures, including a federal prosecutor, were killed in a wave of RAF assassinations, bombings and kidnappings that shook West Germany throughout the decade. In that same year he helped launch the European Monetary System which paved the way for the euro.
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As the fifth Chancellor of Germany, Schmidt was considered as the most important Chancellor in the postwar period by the Germans, according to a survey.
Schmidt was receiving treatment at home after suffering a “dramatic” downturn in health earlier this week, his physician Heiner Greten told the Hamburger Adenblatt on Tuesday, 10 November. The doctor declined to go into any further detail.
He took over as chancellor in 1974 after his fellow Social-Democrat Party member Willy Brandt resigned, when a most senior aide was unmasked as an East German communist spy. He remained politically active even after leaving office, going on to become an iconic elder statesman, weighing in on Germany’s political debates into his 90s.
French President Francois Hollande led the tributes to Schmidt, saying “a great European has died”.
– December 23, 1918: Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt born in Hamburg, Germany.
That caused rifts between Schmidt and his own party and he was eventually ousted in a parliamentary vote in 1982.
In 1977 when Palestinian militants hijacked a Lufthansa plane and demanded the release of jailed leaders of the extreme-left Red Army Faction (RAF), Schmidt ordered the aircraft be stormed in an attempt to free the hostages at Mogadishu airport.
A lover cigarettes, Hamburg prosectors through out an anti-smoking lobby’s complaint after he and wife Hannelore – better known as Loki – lit up in a theatre, in the face of a newly-introduced ban. They had a son who died in his first year and later a daughter. She died in 2010.
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Schmidt in 2012 introduced longtime acquaintance Loah, a former employee at Die Zeit, as his new partner.
