Post by Diana Hildebrandt

Herbert Frahm, born 1913 in Lübeck in the North of Germany, was the son of a single working class mother. Bright enough to graduate from grammar school, he wanted to become a journalist. Politically interested, he became a member of the Socialist Democratic Party (SPD) at age 17. He also started an apprenticeship at a shipping company. Only a year later Frahm left the SPD, disappointed by their cooperation with the conservatives, and joined the more left wing Socialist Workers' Party (SAPD). When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Frahm emigrated, like other members of the forbidden left wing parties. He went to Norway, where he worked as a journalist (et al in the Spanish Civic War) and coordinated exile Socialist #resistance against the Nazi regime. In 1938 Frahm lost his German citizenship. 1940 he was arrested by occupying German forces, but managed to escape to Sweden, where he gained Norwegian citizenship. He stayed until the end of the war. Frahm returned to Germany as reporter on the Nuremberg war trials the same year. In 1948 he re-joined the re-established Social Democratic Party and also regained German citizenship. Since 1934 Herbert Frahm had worked under a code name to escape Nazi persecution. In 1948 he officially took this name for good: Willy Brandt. In 1969 Willy Brandt became the first Socialist Democratic chancellor of Germany since 1930. In 1971 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for "for his efforts to strengthen cooperation in Western Europe through the European Economic Community and to achieve reconciliation between West Germany and the other countries of Eastern Europe." (Nobel Foundation) Willy Brandt died #onthisday 29 years ago, 8th October 1992, at age 78. "My real success was my contribution to the fact that nowadays the name of our country, Germany, and the word peace can be mentioned in the same breath again." (WB in a TV interview 1988) Sources and short video to his most famous gesture in Warsaw 1970 in first comment. Photo: Herbert Frahm alias Willy Brandt, Paris 1937, ©Fred Stein