Press Attaché at the Norwegian mission

Willy Brandt, who had been deprived of his German citizenship by the National Socialists in 1938, returns to Germany as a Norwegian citizen. He has accepted the offer of the Norwegian government to act as Press Attaché at the Norwegian mission to the Allied Control Council in Berlin for one year beginning in January 1947. Brandt notes his impressions of post-war developments in Germany in hundreds of reports to the government in Oslo.

In October 1947 Erich Brost, the delegate of the SPD party leadership to the Allied Control Council in Berlin, asks Willy Brandt to succeed him. Brandt decides to accept the offer and to return to German politics. However, the Party Chairman of the SPD, Kurt Schumacher, hesitates, because he reproaches Brandt with having held an "anti-patriotic attitude" during his exile. Willy Brandt effectively rebuts this slander and sets forth his personal and political viewpoint in an impressive letter to Schumacher. He is thereupon, on January 1, 1948, appointed Brost's successor.