Willy Brandt was an alias adopted to hide from Nazi agents
The West German chancellor known worldwide as Willy Brandt was born Herbert Frahm in Lübeck in 1913. Fleeing to Norway in 1933, he took a false name to evade Nazi agents, later made it legal, and in 1971 won the Nobel Peace Prize for reconciling West Germany with Eastern Europe.
Brandt's mother was a single parent who worked six days a week as a department store cashier; he never met his father, a Hamburg teacher, and was raised mostly by his mother's stepfather. He joined the Social Democrats at 16, below the usual minimum age, and wrote for a local party paper. In 1931 he broke away to a more radical socialist party, losing both his job and the promised help with university fees, and worked for a shipbroker after leaving school.
In exile he became a Norwegian speaker and journalist. In late 1936 he slipped back into Germany for several months posing as a Norwegian student, and in 1937 he reported from the Spanish Civil War. Germany stripped his citizenship in 1938. When German forces occupied Norway in 1940 they arrested him, but because he was wearing a Norwegian uniform they never discovered who he was. Released, he fled to Sweden, where he spent the rest of the war with a Norwegian passport.
He returned to Berlin in 1946 working for Norway, regained German citizenship in 1948, and rose to national fame as governing mayor of West Berlin. Documents revealed in 2021 showed he had been a paid informant for American counterintelligence between 1948 and 1952. After serving as foreign minister, he became in 1969 the first Social Democratic chancellor since 1930.
His Ostpolitik sought better relations with the Soviet bloc while keeping West Germany close to the United States, drawing criticism from both right and left. At a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970 he unexpectedly dropped to his knees in silence, a gesture remembered as the Kniefall von Warschau. He resigned in 1974 when a close aide, Günter Guillaume, was exposed as an East German spy. His later Brandt Report framed the world's divide between a rich North and a poor South. He died in 1992.
Source: Willy Brandt
