Willy Brandt

Born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm in 1913, he escaped Nazi Germany for Norway and Sweden, working as a left-wing journalist under the pseudonym Willy Brandt, which he adopted formally in 1948. He rose to governing mayor of West Berlin, then became West Germany's first Social Democratic chancellor since 1930 when he took office in 1969. As chancellor he launched Ostpolitik to thaw relations with Eastern Europe - drawing fire from the right - while holding the American line on Vietnam until 1973 and issuing the hard Anti-Radical Decree against domestic communists in 1972. In 1970, visiting Warsaw, he dropped to his knees unscripted at the ghetto uprising memorial, a silent act of contrition the world hasn't forgotten. The Nobel Peace Prize came in 1971. He resigned in 1974 after his close aide Günter Guillaume turned out to be Stasi, and died of colon cancer in 1992.