Willy Brandt family name Brandt
Early life and WWII
Willy Brandt was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm in the Free City of Lübeck (German Empire) on 18 December 1913. His mother was Martha Frahm (1894–1969) a single parent, who worked as a cashier for a department store. His father was a teacher from Hamburg named John Heinrich Möller (1887–1958) whom Brandt never met. As his mother worked six days a week, he was mainly brought up by his mother's stepfather, Ludwig Frahm (1875–1935). He joined the "Socialist Youth" in 1929 and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1930. He left the SPD to join the more left wing Socialist Workers Party (SAP), which was allied to the POUM in Spain and the Independent Labour Party in Britain. 
After passing his Abitur in 1932 at Johanneum zu Lübeck, he became an apprentice at the shipbroker and ship's agent F.H. Bertling. In 1933, using his connections with the port and its ships, he left Germany for Norway to escape Nazi persecution. It was at this time that he adopted the pseudonym Willy Brandt to avoid detection by Nazi agents. In 1934, he took part in the founding of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Youth Organizations, and was elected to its secretariat.Brandt was in Germany from September to December 1936, disguised as a Norwegian student named Gunnar Gaasland. The real Gunnar Gaasland was married to Gertrud Meyer from Lübeck in a marriage of convenience to protect her from deportation. Meyer had joined Brandt in Norway in July 1933. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Brandt worked in Spain as a journalist. In 1938, the German government revoked his citizenship, so he applied for Norwegian citizenship. In 1940, he was arrested in Norway by occupying German forces, but his real identity was not uncovered as he wore a Norwegian uniform. Upon his release, he escaped to neutral Sweden. In August 1940, he became a Norwegian citizen, receiving his passport from the Norwegian legation in Stockholm, where he lived until the end of the war. He lectured in Sweden on 1 December 1940 at Bommersvik College about problems experienced by the social democrats in Nazi Germany and the occupied countries at the start of the Second World War. In exile in Norway and Sweden, he learned Norwegian and Swedish. He spoke Norwegian fluently, and retained a close relationship with Norway.In late 1946, Brandt returned to Berlin, working for the Norwegian government. In 1948, he re-joined the SPD and became a German citizen again, formally adopting the pseudonym Willy Brandt as his legal name. In 2021, it became known that Brandt served as a paid informant for the US Counterintelligence Corps from 1948 to 1952. He supplied reports on circumstances in the GDR, including the situation of East German authorities and industries, as well as Soviet troops.Brandt's family
From 1941 until 1948, Brandt was married to Anna Carlotta Thorkildsen (the daughter of a Norwegian father and a German-American mother). They had a daughter, Ninja Brandt (born in 1940). After Brandt and Thorkildsen were divorced in 1948, Brandt married the Norwegian-born German writer Rut Hansen in the same year. Hansen and Brandt had three sons: Peter Brandt (born in 1948), Lars Brandt (born in 1951) and Matthias Brandt (born in 1961). After 32 years of marriage, Willy Brandt and Rut Hansen Brandt divorced in 1980, and from the day that they were divorced they never saw each other again. On 9 December 1983, Brandt married Brigitte Seebacher (born in 1946).
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