Willy Brandt
![Brandt in 1980](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-F057884-0009%2C_Willy_Brandt.jpg)
Fleeing to Norway and then Sweden during the Nazi regime and working as a left-wing journalist, he took the name Willy Brandt as a pseudonym to avoid detection by Nazi agents, and then formally adopted the name in 1948. Brandt earned initial fame as governing mayor of West Berlin. He served as the foreign minister and as the vice chancellor in Kurt Georg Kiesinger's cabinet, and became chancellor in 1969.
As chancellor, he maintained West Germany's close alignment with the United States and focused on strengthening European integration in Western Europe, while launching the new policy of ''Ostpolitik'' aimed at improving relations with Eastern Europe. Brandt was controversial on both the right wing, for his ''Ostpolitik'', and on the left wing, for his support of American policies, including his silence on the Vietnam War that he broke only in 1973, and right-wing authoritarian regimes. The Brandt Report became a recognised measure for describing the general North–South divide in world economics and politics between an affluent North and a poor South. Brandt was also known for his fierce anti-communist policies at the domestic level, culminating in the ''Radikalenerlass'' (Anti-Radical Decree) in 1972. In 1970, while visiting a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising crushed by the Germans, Brandt unexpectedly knelt and meditated in silence, a moment remembered as the ''Kniefall von Warschau''.
Brandt resigned as chancellor in 1974, after Günter Guillaume, one of his closest aides, was exposed as an agent of the Stasi, the East German secret service. Provided by Wikipedia