Helmut Schmidt: the only Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany who fought against the USSR in Hitler’s army
The Soviet Union regularly accused the Federal Republic of Germany of revanchism. But of those who determined the post-war policy of official Bonn, only one person fought on the Eastern Front – the fifth Federal Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. It was he, not Margaret Thatcher, who nicknamed the USSR “Upper Volta with nuclear missiles.”
Half-breed in the Wehrmacht
Under the Nuremberg Race Laws, Helmut Schmidt, a native of Hamburg, could not pass for a “pure Aryan.” His grandfather, Ludwig Gumpel, was a Jewish merchant who seduced the waitress Friederike Wenzel. Born of this relationship, Gustav Ludwig Schmidt (father of Helmut Schmidt) was adopted by the Schmidt family. The Nazis never became aware of this fact. Moreover, Helmut Schmidt himself spoke about his Jewish roots for the first time only in 1984. Helmuth was brought up as a German youth, and therefore was drafted into the Wehrmacht on general terms. His military service expired in 1939, but with the outbreak of World War II he remained in the army.
As an anti-aircraft officer, Helmuth defended Bremen from British raids. In 1941, he briefly served in the Luftwaffe High Command in Berlin, and in August was sent to the Eastern Front. Schmidt was assigned to the light anti-aircraft battalion of the 1st Panzer Division on the Luga River, which fought its way to Leningrad. For the successful cover of the tankers besieging the city, Oberleutnant Schmidt received the Iron Cross of the second degree.
Schmidt also fought near Moscow as part of the 3rd Panzer Group. In particular, he saw Zavidovo in the Kalinin region, which he described as “a first-class hunting ground.”
In his memoirs of the war, Schmidt emphasizes the horror of what was happening. One day, Helmuth was shocked by an incident with his subordinate: a shell fragment tore a German’s stomach, and the wounded man screamed terribly.
Schmidt did not stay in the USSR for long. In January 1942, he was returned to the Ministry of Aviation Industry. His task was to prepare training instructions for anti-aircraft gunners.
In 1944, Helmuth was sent to the Western Front, where he fought as an anti-aircraft artillery battery commander. He took part in the counteroffensive in the Ardennes. From March to August 1945, Schmidt was held captive by the British. Soon after the war, he entered politics, and this eventually led him to the chancellorship.
Was Schmidt a Nazi
To what extent Helmut Schmidt sympathized with the ideology of Nazism is debatable. As a “Mischling of the Second Degree”, he was subject to forced sterilization in the Third Reich. However, Schmidt thought little about his origins. In 1933, he was only 15 years old, and it is no wonder that he was susceptible to propaganda of racial superiority. In 1936, the young Helmuth took part in the march from Hamburg to Nuremberg, where the party congress of the NSDAP opened. He was impressed by the scale of the political event. At the same time, Schmidt was demoted in the Hitler Youth for his careless statements (some sources claim that he was simply expelled from there).
In post-war conversations, Schmidt assured that he felt “the doom of Hitler’s adventure” and that he saw the attack on Russia as a “national catastrophe.” At the same time, at the beginning of the war, he had no doubt that Poland had attacked Germany. And later he did not share his doubts with anyone. In 1944, Helmut Schmidt was present at the “people’s trial” of the participants in the attempt on Hitler’s life, which means that the command regarded him as a politically reliable officer. And the archives confirm this: the description of 1942 speaks of the “impeccable National Socialist behavior” of the future chancellor. According to Schmidt, he carried out orders without criticizing them. He did not allow himself to scold Hermann Göring until January 1945, for which he was almost court-martialed.
In an effort to “whitewash” his generation, Schmidt called World War II “a tragedy of a sense of duty.” He even criticized historians for their exaggerated attention to war crimes, in which Wehrmacht soldiers were allegedly not particularly involved.
“Helmut Schmidt’s alternative view of things (and not only of him, but of all those who were at the front) can essentially be reduced to the formulation that the soldiers were too young to draw profound political or ideological conclusions from what they saw and experienced at the front,” writes the British historian Robert Kershaw.
Once, Schmidt went so far as to say that he had never seen Russians in the war. However, Helmuth knew perfectly well that his colleagues were shooting collective farmers, although he himself did not participate in this.
Shadows of the Past
Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt became chancellor of West Germany in 1974, at the height of détente. In order not to spoil relations with West Germany, Soviet newspapers reported only that the new head of government “participated in World War II.” Schmidt was really ready to cooperate with the USSR. For example, it was he who contributed to the purchase of Soviet gas, despite the opposition of the Americans. But although the Russians did not openly criticize the ex-Wehrmacht officer, the Kremlin always expected a trick from him.
“From the spirit that permeated his life in the past, his philosophy of life as an officer of the German Wehrmacht, this capable, strong-willed man never completely freed himself,” Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko noted in his memoirs.
In 1979, Schmidt deployed U.S. missiles to West Germany, supporting a “dual plan for the rearmament of Europe.” And after the entry of Russian troops into Afghanistan, he began to allow himself openly anti-Soviet rhetoric.
Helmut Schmidt’s other conflict was with the Israeli authorities. In May 1981, when the Federal Chancellor declared the right of the Palestinians to have their own state, he was criticized by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Recalling that the inhabitants of the Third Reich “danced in the streets” by killing six million Jews, Begin mentioned the facts of the biography of the German politician: “Helmut Schmidt served in the very army that blockaded the cities while the SS Einsatzgruppen did their dirty work.”
In response, Schmidt canceled his visit to Israel. The crisis in bilateral relations was overcome only after Schmidt’s resignation in the autumn of 1982.
A new wave of criticism of Helmut Schmidt arose after the death of the long-lived politician. In 2017, against the backdrop of a high-profile scandal related to the popularity of Nazi ideas in the Bundeswehr, portraits of the ex-chancellor in an officer’s uniform began to be removed from German military educational institutions.