Schmidt’s Secret Now Open Book

It was 1980, and then-West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing were traveling in a car when Schmidt confided: “You will be the only one to know it apart from my wife and my closest collaborator. . . . My father is Jewish.” The revelation from one world leader to another is recounted eight years later in “Power and Life,” Giscard d’Estaing’s book to be released next week. Of the revelation, the former French president writes: “I was stupefied . . . Helmut, chancellor of this West Germany that was still expiating its war crimes and the Holocaust, the best-known German politician in the world. Born of a Jewish father.” Although Schmidt’s Jewish origins have been mentioned before, Giscard d’Estaing said he sought Schmidt’s permission before publishing details of the conversation. Schmidt and his father falsified their identity papers during World War II, during which Helmut served in the army, he told Giscard d’Estaing. Schmidt recounted that his father was the illegitimate son of a rich Jewish banker who was adopted by a family named Schmidt. “I thought for a long time they were my grandparents,” Schmidt said. Schmidt, 69, recently wrote his memoirs, “People and Powers,” which topped the best-seller lists late last year in West Germany.

--Perpetual dieter Edward I. Koch is on another weight-losing regimen, this one a liquid version that he has dubbed the “swill diet.” New York’s mayor said the diet consists of mixing two powders with water, and that he managed to lose four pounds in less than a week. “I call it the swill diet,” Koch said, “because it’s swill. They tell you it tastes good. It doesn’t taste bad, but you can’t say it tastes good.” Koch has undertaken diets before, including one after he suffered a minor stroke last year.

--It’s every student’s nightmare, ranking right up there with the one where the student, in a terrifying dream, forgets the day and time of an exam. In this real-life mishap, more than 100 students at Washington University in St. Louis got the news recently that an unsupervised student worker had shredded their exams from a class in which the three-hour-long test was to represent the entire course grade. “I’m quite concerned about the students, particularly those who put a great deal of effort into taking the course and preparing for the exam,” said Dorsey Ellis Jr., dean of the law school. The school decided all the students in the class would receive credit for taking the course but would not receive an actual grade. “We considered a whole range of possibilities,” Ellis said. “We concluded the one that we adopted was the fairest . . . “