Gerhard Schroeder; Former West German Official

Gerhard Schroeder, 79, foreign minister of West Germany from 1961 to 1966. Schroeder, a conservative, was in turn West German interior, foreign and defense minister in the 1950s and 1960s, and chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs beginning in 1969. In 1974 he became the first senior West German politician to meet the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, at a time when it was still considered daring for a Western politician. Schroeder did not tell his party in advance, and the Damascus meeting stirred a storm of anger at home. Schroeder retired from politics in 1980. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl hailed him as a figure whose greatest wish was to secure West Germany’s place in the European Community and the North Atlantic Alliance and whose “steps showed the way” in reducing East-West tension. On Dec. 30 of unannounced causes at his vacation home in Sylt, West Germany, near the Danish border.