Willy Brandt was the West German statesman who, as chancellor, pursued a historic reconciliation with the communist East and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Born Herbert Frahm in Lübeck, he became a socialist as a teenager and a fierce opponent of the Nazis; when Hitler took power in 1933, he fled to Norway, adopting the name Willy Brandt and taking Norwegian citizenship, before escaping again to Sweden when the Germans invaded.
After the war he returned to Germany and rose through the Social Democratic Party. As the courageous mayor of West Berlin during the Cold War's tensest years — including the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 — he became an international symbol of the city's defiance.
In 1966 Brandt became foreign minister, and in 1969 he was elected chancellor, the first Social Democrat to lead West Germany. His defining achievement was "Ostpolitik," a policy of reaching out to the Soviet bloc: he signed treaties accepting postwar borders and normalizing relations with East Germany, Poland, and the USSR. In a famous, unscripted gesture in 1970 he fell to his knees before the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto, a silent act of penance that moved the world. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.
A scandal involving an East German spy on his staff forced his resignation as chancellor in 1974, but he remained an influential elder statesman of the left until his death in 1992.