Otto Graf Lambsdorff

Lambsdorff was born in Aachen (Rhineland) to Herbert Graf Lambsdorff and Eva, née 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, Lambsdorff became a member of the liberal FDP, and from 1972 to 1998 he represented this party in the Federal parliament, the Bundestag.[3]

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").

After resigning from active politics, Lambsdorff remained an advocate of free markets, becoming an active figure in the DSW shareholder action group, and regularly warned about the dangers of growing bureaucracy and tax burdens.[13] From 1993 until 2008, he served on the supervisory board of Lufthansa.[14]

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".[15]

He also served as a member of the scientific advisory board of the Centre Against Expulsions[16] and a jury member of the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award.

Lambsdorff was honorary president of the Liberal International.[17] In this capacity, he personally delivered the World Association of Newspapers' Golden Pen of Freedom Award to Kenyan human rights activist Gitobu Imanyara in 1992, who was banned by his country's authorities from leaving the country.[18]

The pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) had been in coalition with the social democratic SPD, but changed direction in the early 1980s.[19] 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.[20]

The Lambsdorff family is of old Westphalian aristocratic descent, but settled for centuries in the Baltic countries[9] 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.[21]

Between 2004 and 2017, his nephew Alexander Graf Lambsdorff represented the FDP in the European Parliament. He has been a member of the Bundestag since September 2017.

Lambsdorff married Renate Lepper in 1953; they had two daughters and a son. He was married to Alexandra von Quistorp from 1975 until his death on 5 December 2009. He is survived by all three children.

Regarding personal names: Graf was a title before 1919, but now is regarded as part of the surname. It is translated as Count. Before the August 1919 abolition of nobility as a legal class, titles preceded the full name when given (Graf Helmuth James von Moltke). Since 1919, these titles, along with any nobiliary prefix (von, zu, etc.), can be used, but are regarded as a dependent part of the surname, and thus come after any given names (Helmuth James Graf von Moltke). Titles and all dependent parts of surnames are ignored in alphabetical sorting. The feminine form is Gräfin.

• Telegraph obituary

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