Count Otto Lambsdorff:COUNT OTTO Lambsdorff, who has died aged 82, was one of the most colourful and influential politicians in Bonn before German unification. He brought down chancellor Helmut Schmidt's left-liberal coalition, thus enabling Helmut Kohl to take his place – and was then convicted of tax fraud in West Germany's biggest corruption scandal.
Lambsdorff made his career in the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the minority liberal party that made and broke coalition governments. In 1966 the FDP was the only opposition in the Bundestag when the grand coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD) took power under chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger (CDU). In 1969 the FDP under Walter Scheel helped the SPD to oust the CDU, enabling chancellor Willy Brandt (SPD) to lead a social-liberal coalition which won a famous victory in 1972, the year Lambsdorff was elected to the Bundestag.
When Brandt made way for Schmidt (SPD) in 1977, Lambsdorff was appointed minister of economics. Tension mounted as the count pursued his old-style liberal belief in an untrammelled free market, challenging trade union power and what he saw as an overweening welfare state. Even a social democrat as moderate as Schmidt found this difficult to live with.
In 1980 a portentous “Lambsdorff paper” set out his uncompromising right-wing views. In hindsight the document was renamed the “divorce paper” because two years later he fell out with Schmidt over the budget and led the FDP ministers out of the coalition, forcing Schmidt out of office.
As an astute politician, Schmidt saw to it that the FDP took the blame for the break-up, bitterly describing them as “traitors”, but this did not prevent the FDP from switching allegiance to the CDU, enabling Kohl to take over as chancellor. Lambsdorff stayed on as minister of economics, in a much more sympathetic cabinet.
Otto Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr (baron) von der Wenge, Graf (count) Lambsdorff, was born in Aachen, Westphalia, and educated in Berlin. The family, though German, had spent centuries in the service of Russian tsars, but Otto’s father fled the revolution and went into business in the ancestral Rhineland after the first World War. Conscripted into the Wehrmacht as an officer-cadet in 1944, the 18-year-old Lambsdorff was badly wounded in an Allied air attack, which cost him his lower left leg. Despite a prosthesis, he never lost his heavy limp, but was always impeccably turned out: the walking stick he had to carry always had a silver handle.
He matriculated as a British prisoner of war and went on to study law at Bonn and Cologne. For several years he worked in banking and insurance and practised as an attorney. He joined the FDP and before long, he made his name as an unusually gifted speaker, combining charm with sardonic wit. Lambsdorff stayed on at the economics ministry under Kohl, but only for two years, until 1984. In June that year an indictment was issued implicating the giant Flick concern and senior FDP figures, including Lambsdorff, in tax evasion.
Secret donations had been made to the FDP as part of Flick’s policy of “tending the political landscape” with handouts to all parties.The “Flick affair” became West Germany’s biggest political scandal and Lambsdorff was convicted on lesser charges, incurring a fine of DM180,000. This did not prevent him from being elected chairman of the FDP. Even though his party was sidelined in 1998, the then chancellor, Gerhard Schröder (SPD), chose Lambsdorff to negotiate with the US on a compensation scheme for victims of Nazi forced labour. A settlement involving billions of dollars was achieved.
Lambsdorff married Renate Lepper in 1953: they had two daughters and a son. In 1995 he married Alexandra von Quistorp.
Otto Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von der Wenge, Graf Lambsdorff: born December 20th, 1926; died December 4th, 2009