Former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt died Tuesday aged 96, his doctor told news agency DPA.

Schmidt led then-West Germany from 1974 to 1982 as it rose to become a global economic powerhouse.

A centrist from the Social Democrat Party (SPD), Schmidt steered the country through a bloody wave of terror by far-left radicals from the Red Army Faction, preached free-market economics to his party and embodied cool-headed pragmatic politics in a Europe riven by the Iron Curtain.