Former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt dies aged 96

Schmidt, who in 1961 became a regional interior senator in the city-state of Hamburg and went on to lead the then-West Germany between 1974 and 1982, died peacefully in his home city on Tuesday at the age of 96. As a new leader, Mr. Schmidt brought a sometimes abrasive self-confidence and his experience as West Germany’s defense, finance and economy ministers to the job, which he took during the economic downturn that followed the 1973 oil crisis.

In separate messages to German President Joachim Gauck and Chancellor Angela Merkel, Xi Jinping mourned Schmidt’s death and extended sympathies to his relatives.

German media reported that Schmidt caught an infection after having surgery to remove a blood clot from his leg about two months ago.

“Die Welt”, one of Germany’s nationwide daily newspapers with post-war origins in Hamburg, said in its Wednesday edition that planning had begun for a state funeral in Germany’s northern port metropolis in two or three weeks’ time. Schmidt steered the country through a bloody wave of terror by far-left radicals from the Red Army Faction (RAF), preached free-market economics to his party and embodied cool-headed pragmatic politics in a Europe riven by the Iron Curtain.

He was elected chancellor in May 1974 after the resignation of fellow Social Democrat Willy Brandt, triggered when a top aide to Mr Brandt was unmasked as an East German agent.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said of Schmidt that he had lost a friend with political courage.

“The history of this continent shaped him for nearly a century and made him a committed European”, said Juncker. That wasn’t true for the “little haberdasher” who built an American-led global order from scratch in the 1940s. She died in 2010. They had a son, who died in his first year, and later a daughter.