Helmut Schmidt was the elder of two sons of teachers Ludovica Koch (10 November 1890 – 29 November 1968) and Gustav Ludwig Schmidt (18 April 1888 – 26 March 1981) in Barmbek, a working-class district of Hamburg

Schmidt joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1946, and from 1947 to 1948 was the leader of the Socialist German Student League, the student organisation of the SPD. Upon graduating from the University of Hamburg, where he read economics, he

In 1965, he was re-elected to the Bundestag. In 1967, after the formation of the Grand Coalition between the SPD and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), he became chairman of the Social Democratic parliamentary party, a post he held until the elections of

Schmidt had planned to study without interruption. Therefore, he volunteered at age 18 for military service in 1937. He began serving with an anti-aircraft battery of Luftwaffe at Vegesack near Bremen.
In World War II, after brief service on the Eastern Front during

The government of the city-state of Hamburg is known as the Senate of Hamburg, and from 1961 to 1965, Schmidt was the Innensenator: the senator of the interior. He gained a

Schmidt became Chancellor of West Germany on 16 May 1974, after Brandt's resignation in the wake of an espionage scandal. The worldwide economic recession was the main

In 1982, along with his friend Gerald Ford, he co-founded the annual AEI World Forum. The following year he joined the nationwide weekly Die Zeit newspaper as co-publisher, also acting