However, Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik was a key factor in the détente of the 1970s.

Although anxious to relieve serious hardships for divided families and to reduce friction, Brandt's Ostpolitik was intent on holding to its concept of " two German states in one German nation.

In the SPD-FDP coalition, he helped shape Brandt's policy of deescalation with the communist East, commonly known as Ostpolitik, which was continued under Helmut Schmidt after Brandt's resignation in 1974.

Although the Social Democrats showed strong support for the expellees especially under Kurt Schumacher and Erich Ollenhauer, social democrats in more recent decades have traditionally been less supportive — and it was under Willy Brandt that West Germany recognized the Oder-Neisse line as factual as part of his Ostpolitik.

Brandt's most important legacy was Ostpolitik, a policy aimed at improving relations with East Germany ( then German Democratic Republic ), Poland, and the Soviet Union.

In West Germany, Brandt's Neue Ostpolitik was extremely controversial, dividing the populace into two camps: one camp, embracing all of the conservative parties and most notably the victims i. e. those German-speaking, West German residents and their subsequent families who were driven west (" die Heimatvertriebenen ") by Stalinist ethnic cleansing from Historical Eastern Germany, especially the part that was arbitrarily given to Poland by the Stalinists ; western Czechoslovakia ( the Sudetenland ); and the rest of Eastern Europe, such as in Romania.

Brandt's new Ostpolitik was a policy of negotiating with the GDR government in order to improve the situation of Germans in GDR and involved supporting visits from one part of Germany to the other.

Ostpolitik was an effort to break with the policies of the Christian Democratic Union ( CDU ), which was the elected government of West Germany from 1949 until 1969.

Such was the consensus that Ostpolitik had been vindicated that Bavarian Minister-President Franz Josef Strauß, who had fiercely fought against the Basic Treaty and was Kohl's main opponent within the CDU / CSU bloc, secured the passage of a Kohl-initiated 3 billion mark loan to the GDR in 1983.

The Republic of Korea's 1980s policy of Nordpolitik was named in allusion to Ostpolitik ; a similar concept is Sunshine policy, the successor to Nordpolitik.

It stresses, however, that this was out of compassion for people in difficulties, and quite unconnected with his well-known conservative views, in spite of which he conducted a personal " Ostpolitik " of contacts with the Soviet embassy in favour of the Church in Eastern Europe, without informing Pius XII of these contacts.

Though anxious to relieve serious hardships for divided families and to reduce friction, West Germany under Brandt's Ostpolitik was intent on holding to its concept of " two German states in one German nation.

After the SPD was able to form a government without the conservatives, in 1969, Strauss became one of the most vocal critics of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik.

During the 1970s while Willy Brandt was chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany ( FRG ), the FRG followed a foreign relations policy of Ostpolitik abandoning elements of the Hallstein Doctrine.

During the 1970s while Willy Brandt was Chancellor of the FRG, the country followed a foreign relations policy of Ostpolitik.

Eva Köhler was a member of the Social Democratic Party ( SPD ) from 1972 to 1990 ( as she advocated Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik ) and participated in local politics.

Only in 1969 did the West German government of Willy Brandt reverse this policy in what was known as Ostpolitik.

While the plan was denounced as radical at the time, it helped pave the way for Brandt's Ostpolitik, as well as indirectly influencing some developments within the European Union, such as a European common security policy ) and the eventual reunification of Germany.

As part of the Ostpolitik of Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, the treaty was signed on December 21, 1972 in East Berlin.

The treaty was one of the Brandt-initiated policy steps ( the ' Ostpolitik ') to ease tensions between West and East during the Cold War.

The Treaty of Warsaw was an important element of the Ostpolitik, put forward by Chancellor Brandt and supported by his ruling Social Democratic Party of Germany.

This is generally seen as a sign that Kohl pursued Ostpolitik, a policy of détente between East and West that had been begun by the SPD-led governments ( and strongly opposed by Kohl's own CDU ) during the 1970s.

Hupka had opposed the Ostpolitik initiated by Willy Brandt and carried on by further SPD and even ( later ) CDU-led administrations.

The majority ( over 100 thousand ) gradually left and after the improvement of German-Polish relations by the German Ostpolitik of the 1970s 55, 227 persons from Warmia and Masuria moved to Western Germany in between 1971 and 1988, today approximately between 5, 000 and 6, 000 Masurians still live in the area, about 50 percent of them members of the German minority in Poland, the remaining half is ethnic Polish.

The easing of tensions with the East envisioned by Ostpolitik necessarily began with the Soviet Union, the only Eastern Bloc state with which the Federal Republic had formal diplomatic ties ( despite the aforementioned Hallstein Doctrine ).

West Germany commenced this Ostpolitik, initially under fierce opposition from the conservatives, by negotiating non-aggression treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary.

In practice, however, ties between East Germans and their West German countrymen increased, in part due to the policies of Ostpolitik and détente followed by both East and West during the 1970s.

After the adoption of Ostpolitik by the German Chancellor Willy Brandt, the former German inhabitants were allowed to travel to their hometowns and tried to establish relations with the current population and the Holy See redrew the boundaries of the ecclesiastical provinces along the post-war borders.

The Social-liberal coalition of SPD and FDP had lost its majority after several Bundestag MPs ( like former FDP ministers Erich Mende and Heinz Starke or SPD partisan Herbert Hupka ) had left their party and become members of the CDU / CSU opposition to protest against Chancellor Willy Brandt's Neue Ostpolitik, especially against the de facto recognition of the Oder-Neisse line by the 1970 Treaty of Warsaw.

Despite the example provided by Ludendorff and his circle, for Hillgruber, the changes in German foreign policy introduced by National Socialist Ostpolitik ( Eastern Policy ) were so radical as to be almost differences of kind rather than degree.

It made economic arguments for membership, on the grounds of growing globalization of markets, political arguments based upon the idea of holding the government of West Germany ( which was, at the time, the SPD with its then policy of Ostpolitik ) in check, and emotional arguments that played on the British antipathy towards the French by presenting its own federalist view of European communities as an anti-French alternative to the French government's proposals of intergovernmental union.

Under the Hallstein Doctrine, the FRG did not have any diplomatic relations with countries in Eastern Europe until the early 1970s, when Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik led to increased dialogue and treaties like the Treaty of Warsaw, where West Germany accepted the Oder-Neisse line as German-Polish border, and the Basic Treaty, where West and East Germany accepted each other as sovereign entities.

As the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Kiesinger's grand coalition cabinet, Brandt helped to gain further international approval for Western Germany, and he laid the foundation stones for his future Neue Ostpolitik.

However, Brandt's Neue Ostpolitik lost him a large part of the German refugee voters from East Germany, who had been significantly pro-SPD in the postwar years.

Neue Ostpolitik ( German for " new eastern policy "), or Ostpolitik for short, refers to the normalization of relations between the Federal Republic of Germany ( FRG, or West Germany ) and Eastern Europe, particularly the German Democratic Republic ( GDR, or East Germany ) beginning in 1969.

Challenges facing DIA at this time included: the rise of Ostpolitik in Germany ; the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Mideast ; and the U. S. incursion into Cambodia from South Vietnam.

In the early 1970s, the Ostpolitik led to a form of mutual recognition between East and West Germany.

* Sarotte, M. E. Dealing with the Devil: East Germany, Détente and Ostpolitik, 1969-1973.

West Germany eventually abandoned its Hallstein Doctrine, instead adopting the policies of Ostpolitik.

Chancellor Willy Brandt in the late 1960s abandoned the Hallstein Doctrine of previous chancellors and employed a new " Ostpolitik ", seeking improved relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and thereby laying the groundwork for détente and coexistence between East and West.

As Chancellor, Brandt developed his Neue Ostpolitik ( New Eastern Policy ).

When the Brandt government came to power in 1969, the same politicians now feared a more independent German Ostpolitik, a new " Rapallo ".

Meanwhile, these developments coincided with the " Ostpolitik " of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.