Chancellor Willy Brandt (1969-1974)

Willy Brandt is the adopted name of Herbert Ernst Karl Frahrn. Born in December 1913 to an unwed Liibeck shopgirl, he was raised by maternal grandfather to be a fervant blue- collar socialist. As a teenager Brandt joined the Social Democratic Party of Gerrnany ( SPD) in 1930, but one year later switched to a more radical spin-off the Socialist Labour Party ( SAP). In 1933 to escape arrest the Gestapo changed his name to Willy Brandt and flet to Scandinavia where he was active as a joumalist and in anti- fascists movement. In 1945/46 he worked as a correspondent in Gerrnany for Scandinavian newspaper and became press office at the Norwegian Mision in Berlin. Brandt was persuaded by fellow Social Democrats to apply for reinstatement of his Gerrnan citizenship. In 1949 he was elected a member of the first parliament of the post war West Gerrnany that convenced in Bonn. In 1957 the SPD chose him as its candidate for the office ofthe Mayor ofWest Berlin. At the 1958 Stuttgart Party Congress Brandt was elected to the Party Comitee and was prominent in the in the proceeding of extraordinary party congress held in Bad Godesberg in 1959 where the policy outlook of the party was fundamentaly adjusted in the so-called Godesberger Program which accepted that a social marked economy had some advantages of a and..