The day after the last day of his presidency, Jimmy Carter flew to Frankfurt to greet 52 American diplomats who had been held as hostages for about a year by radical students in United States Embassy in Tehran. Now they were being attended to in a US Air Force hospital in Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, and Carter wanted to express his sympathy.
On Jan. 21, 1981, the ex-president had warm, but mysterious, words for his German hosts. At the time, Helmut Schmidt, a member of the center-left Social Democrats, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, of the liberal FDP, were leading West Germany in the former capital city of Bonn. The Germans, Carter said, "helped us in a way I can never reveal publicly to the world."
The race to apportion credit began only moments after the words about Germany's mysterious role had been uttered. Chancellor Schmidt allowed himself to be celebrated by the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, which wrote that "Bonn appears to have played a decisive role." Foreign Minister Genscher was lauded by the tabloid Bild, which claimed the "release had been negotiated at night at Genscher's." And Middle East negotiator Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski was praised in the daily Die Welt.
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