Helmut Schmidt - Personal Life

Personal Life

• He is a great admirer of the philosopher Karl Popper, and contributed a foreword to the 1982 Festschrift in Popper's honor.

• The University of Germany's Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg was renamed Helmut Schmidt University – University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg in 2003 in honour of the politician who – as minister of defence – had introduced obligatory academic education for German career officers.

• Born and raised in Hamburg, Schmidt is regarded in Germany as an embodiment of hanseatic values, according to which he has never accepted a medal or an order of merit (not even the Federal Republic's Federal Cross of Merit).

• Schmidt is also a talented pianist, and has recorded piano concertos of both Mozart and Bach with the well-known German pianist and conductor, Christoph Eschenbach.

• Schmidt (as was his late wife) is a smoker. He is well known for lighting up cigarettes on TV interviews and talkshows. In January 2008, German police launched an enquiry after Schmidt was reported by an anti-smoking initiative for defying the recently introduced smoking ban. The initiative claimed that Helmut Schmidt had been flagrantly ignoring laws "for decades". Despite pictures in the press, the case was subsequently dropped after the public prosecution service decided that Schmidt's actions had not been a threat to public health.

• On April 6, 2010, with a lifespan of 33 342 days he surpassed Konrad Adenauer in terms of longevity and is now the oldest former chancellor in German history.

• His wife, Loki Schmidt, died on 21 October 2010.

• At the beginning of August 2012, Schmidt gave an interview on German television where he revealed that at 93 years of age he had fallen in love again. His new fiancée is Ruth Loah, 79, a long-time associate of his.