The Schmidt years were severely strained by
an upsurge of terrorism. A prominent German
industrialist, Hans Martin Schleyer, was kid-
napped in 1977 and then murdered when
Schmidt refused to meet the terrorists’ demands.
It was just one of a series of abductions and
murders. That same year in October a Lufthansa
jet with eighty-six passengers was hijacked by
Arab terrorists to Mogadishu, where a specially
trained German force spectacularly freed the
victims. Fortunately, the wave of terrorism abated
without having turned the Federal Republic into
a police state.
Schmidt’s period in office required almost con-
tinuous crisis management. In foreign affairs he
was particularly concerned about the rapid build-
up of Soviet missiles aimed at Western Europe
just when the US and the Soviet Union had
reached an agreement on balancing their inter-
continental missiles. Schmidt saw two dangers:
either that the US might decouple from Europe
in the event of a nuclear threat, or, more likely,
that a third world war would be fought in
Europe. Then there would be nothing left of
Germany. Until the Soviet Union disarmed its
European missiles, the only response was to build
up Western missiles in Europe as a deterrent. But
Schmidt had a hard time getting President Carter
to pay much attention to the issue.
In December 1979, with Schmidt a leading
advocate, NATO took the ‘dual track’ decision:
there would be a period of negotiation designed
to persuade the Soviet Union to withdraw its
European missiles completely (the zero option) or
to reduce them, and if this made no progress
NATO would respond by stationing US missiles
in Europe; the most dangerous of these, the
Pershing missiles, would be based in the Federal
Republic. The incoming Reagan administration
was not keen on this deal, or any serious negoti-
ations with the Soviet Union. Off-the-cuff
remarks by administration spokesmen that a
‘limited’ nuclear war in Europe was feasible made
the situation worse. Schmidt’s role and the
NATO decision produced a powerful resurgence
of protest outside parliament and strong opposi-
tion within the party. But Schmidt persevered.
Reagan took up the zero option in November
1981, without results. Two years later in 1983
the US began its missiles build-up to match the
Russian arsenal, thus setting out on a path that
led eventually to the Soviet–US treaty abolishing
intermediate- and short-range missiles, signed at
the Washington summit in December 1987 by
Reagan and Gorbachev. This success owed much
to Schmidt’s original clarity of vision, steadfast-
ness and courage in following an unpopular policy
that at the time was characterised as an irrational
twist to the dangerous nuclear-arms build-up.
When Schmidt sought a renewal of his mandate
as chancellor together with his coalition partner,
the FDP, now led by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the
foreign minister, in the general election of 1980,
he faced as the CDU/CSU candidate the able but
mercurial Strauss, whose right-wing politics thor-
oughly alarmed the liberal reformers. Although the
economy showed no signs of improvement –
indeed, with rising inflation, rather the reverse –
the Schmidt coalition beat the CDU/CSU. The
SPD had held its share of the vote at 42.9 per cent,
the FDP had increased its share to 10.6 per cent,
and Strauss had lost votes compared to the
CDU/CSU’s results four years earlier. Schmidt
seemed set for a long period in office, but his
health had been undermined, and the increasingly
uneasy coalition with the FDP finally fell apart in
- The economic situation had seriously de-
teriorated throughout Western Europe. In the
Federal Republic unemployment rose to over 7 per
cent and the FDP was demanding cuts in govern-
ment spending on unemployment benefit which
the SDP could not accept. The FDP now once
more switched its support to the CDU/CSU, and
with Genscher’s support Helmut Kohl became
chancellor in October 1982.
It was largely the economic situation that had
finally beaten Schmidt, though the fault lay not
with his policies but with a world recession, which
actually affected the Federal Republic less badly
than its neighbours. At times of perceived eco-
nomic crisis the majority of the electorate turned
more conservative. Kohl won the 1983 election
by a handsome margin. A new phase of CDU/
CSU–FDP government began. Unemployment
rapidly increased as the coalition fought the reces-
sion with sound money policies, as the rest of
1
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