Active Stocks
Thu Mar 28 2024 15:59:33
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 155.90 2.00%
  1. ICICI Bank share price
  2. 1,095.75 1.08%
  1. HDFC Bank share price
  2. 1,448.20 0.52%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 428.55 0.13%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 277.05 2.21%
Business News/ News / World/  Former German president Richard von Weizsaecker dies at 94
BackBack

Former German president Richard von Weizsaecker dies at 94

Von Weizsaecker declared Germany's World War II surrender a 'day of liberation' for the country and urged it to confront the Nazi past

A file photo of Richard von Weizsaecker (left) with Chancellor Angela Merkel. Von Weizsaecker promoted reconciliation during a 10-year tenure that spanned the reunification of west and east. Photo: ReutersPremium
A file photo of Richard von Weizsaecker (left) with Chancellor Angela Merkel. Von Weizsaecker promoted reconciliation during a 10-year tenure that spanned the reunification of west and east. Photo: Reuters

Berlin: Richard von Weizsaecker, the former German president who helped reinterpret the country’s World War II defeat as a form of liberation from Nazi tyranny, has died. He was 94.

His death was announced by President Joachim Gauck’s office on Saturday.

“We lose a great human being and outstanding head of state," Gauck said in the statement. “Richard von Weizsaecker was a world and state citizen in the best sense. He stood for a federal republic that faces up to its past."

In a speech to parliament in Bonn on 8 May 1985, marking the 40th anniversary of the Third Reich’s surrender, von Weizsaecker broke with the previously held convention that the German defeat—while ending an evil regime—was a traumatic debacle for the nation.

Von Weizsaecker, who served as an infantry officer from 1939 to 1945, said the Nazi defeat provided “the seed of the hope for a better future". He said the Holocaust was a crime “without historical parallel" and that Germans must never “close their eyes to the past, because this would make them blind to the present".

The speech was the defining event of the southern German aristocrat’s 10 years as head of state, from 1984 to 1994, during which he expanded the role of the country’s ceremonial presidency.

Back to Berlin

“It was a moment of profound honesty," said Gary Smith, former executive director of the American Academy in Berlin, a research organization. “No major speech of any postwar German leader was more unsparing with the truth."

During his presidency, von Weizsaecker also made controversial decisions to pardon convicted Red Army Faction terrorists and helped clinch the decision to move the German government from Bonn back to Berlin after the 1990 German reunification.

As a member of the German parliament in the early 1970s, von Weizsaecker defied his own Christian Democratic Union party to help Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt win passage of a series of treaties that normalized West Germany’s relations with eastern-bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Brandt lacked one vote in parliament’s lower house, the Bundestag, to gain approval for the treaty with Poland that recognized the 1945 Oder-Neisse Line border between Poland and East Germany and in effect renounced German claims to territories lost after World War II, including East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia.

Son of diplomat

Von Weizsaecker described in his memoirs how tensions exploded when he told fellow CDU members that he would back the Polish treaty. “Afterward there was tumult," said von Weizsaecker, who was accused of treason and told to resign by some party members. In order to hold the CDU together and guarantee a majority for the treaty, he helped engineer a deal in which the party abstained from voting to allow Brandt to win.

Richard Karl Freiherr von Weizsaecker was born on 15 April 1920, in a former royal palace in the southwestern city of Stuttgart, the youngest of four children to German diplomat Ernst von Weizsaecker and his wife, Marianne.

He grew up in Berlin, Denmark and Switzerland and studied at Oxford University in England and at the University of Grenoble in France before World War II. He earned a law degree at the University of Goettingen in Germany after the war.

‘Changed forever’

As a soldier, he took part in Germany’s 1 September 1939, invasion of Poland that started World War II. Von Weizsaecker’s elder brother, Heinrich, was killed a few days later while fighting a few hundred yards away from him.

“I sat up awake all night watching over my beloved brother until morning came and we buried him with other dead on the edge of a forest," he wrote in his memoirs. “The war had only just begun and my life was changed forever—things would never be the same again."

Von Weizsaecker was wounded twice in combat while serving on the eastern front.

A fellow officer told him of witnessing the mass execution of Jews in the fall of 1942, von Weizsaecker wrote, adding that nobody in his regiment carried out war crimes and that he and other officers refused to pass on orders to kill prisoners and execute captured communist functionaries.

The future German president was close to, though not directly involved with, officers who took part in the failed attempt to kill Adolf Hitler in July 1944.

Prison term

As a young lawyer after the war, he defended his father, who had served as a deputy foreign minister under the Nazis, when he was tried at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Ernst von Weizsaecker received a seven-year prison term, later reduced to five years, even though he had been associated with the German resistance.

Richard von Weizsaecker was a member of the West German parliament from 1969 to 1981 and mayor of West Berlin from 1981 to 1984.

His brother Carl Friedrich, a well-known physicist who took part in nuclear research during World War II, died in 2007.

Von Weizsaecker married Marianne von Kretschmann in 1953. The couple had four children. Bloomberg

Christoph Rauwald in Frankfurt contributed to this story.

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 31 Jan 2015, 07:11 PM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App