Otto Graf Lambsdorff

Otto Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von der Wenge Graf Lambsdorff, known as Otto Graf Lambsdorff, (20 December 1926 – 5 December 2009) was a German politician of the Free Democratic Party.

Lambsdorff was born in Aachen (Rhineland) to Herbert Graf Lambsdorff and Eva, née von Schmidt. He attended school in Berlin and Brandenburg an der Havel and became an officer cadet in the Wehrmacht in 1944. In April 1945 he was severely wounded in an Allied strafe attack and lost his lower left leg. Lambsdorff was a prisoner of war until 1946. After World War II he passed his Abitur and studied law at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne where he obtained a PhD. In 1951 he became member of the liberal FDP, and from 1972 to 1998 he represented this party in the Federal Diet, the Bundestag. He was also chairman of the FDP from 1988 until 1993.

Within and outside his party he was known as a representative of the market liberals; a mocking name was der Marktgraf ("the market count", a play on Markgraf, "margrave").

From 1977 until 1982, and again from 1982 until 1984, Graf Lambsdorff was the West German Federal Minister of Economics, when he was forced to resign over the Flick Affair. On 16 February 1987, he was convicted by the Bonn State Court of tax evasion.

In 1999 Lambsdorff was appointed as the federal envoy to the negotiations for the compensation of the victims of forced labor in Germany during World War II by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, which led to the establishment of the Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future".

He was a member of the scientific advisory board of the Centre Against Expulsions and a jury member of the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award.

***

The pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) had been in coalition with the Socialist SPD, it changed direction in the early 1980s.

Lambsdorff led the FDP to adopt the market-oriented "Kiel Theses" in 1977; it rejected the Keynesian emphasis on consumer demand, and proposed to reduce social welfare spending, and try to introduce policies to stimulate production and facilitate jobs. Lambsdorff argued that the result would be economic growth, which would itself solve both the social problems and the financial problems. As a consequence switched allegiance to the CDU, and Schmidt lost his parliamentary majority in 1982. For the only time in West Germany's history, the government fell on a vote of no confidence.

***

The Lambsdorff family is of old Westphalian aristocratic descent, but settled for centuries in the Baltic countries and was hence closely connected to Tsarist and Imperial Russia (see Baltic Germans). Lambsdorff's father served as a tsarist cadet in St. Petersburg and the former Russian foreign minister Vladimir Lambsdorff is one of his relatives.

Since 2004, his nephew Alexander Graf Lambsdorff has represented the FDP in the European Parliament.

Lambsdorff married Renate Lepper in 1953; they had two daughters and a son. He was married to Alexandra von Quistorp from 1995 until his death. He is survived by all three children.

***

Regarding personal names: Graf was a title, translated as Count, not a first or middle name. Before 1919 preceding the first name, former titles are with people alive after 1919 dependent parts of the surname, thus preceding the main surname and not to be translated. The female form is Gräfin.