Richard von Weizsäcker

Biography

Richard von Weizsäcker was born in 1920 in the New Palace in Stuttgart, the youngest child of the diplomat Ernst von Weizsäcker. He grew up partly in Switzerland and Scandinavia, went to school in Berlin, and at 17 studied briefly at Balliol College, Oxford, and in Grenoble before returning to Germany in 1938. In the Second World War he served as an infantry officer from the first day of the invasion of Poland, where his brother was killed near him, and he gave help to friends plotting to kill Hitler.

After the war he studied history and law at Göttingen, assisted his father's defence at the Ministries Trial in Nuremberg, and took a doctorate in law in 1955. He worked for Mannesmann, ran a family-owned bank and sat on the board of Boehringer Ingelheim, and from 1964 to 1970 was president of the German Evangelical Church Assembly, where he pressed for reconciliation with Poland.

A CDU member from 1954, he entered the Bundestag in 1969, lost the 1974 presidential election to Walter Scheel and was vice president of the Bundestag from 1979. From 1981 to 1984 he was Governing Mayor of West Berlin.

Elected federal president in 1984 and re-elected without opposition in 1989, he became the first head of state of reunified Germany in October 1990 and served until 1994. His speech of 8 May 1985 on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war in Europe was widely praised, and his independence often set him against Helmut Kohl. He died in Berlin in 2015.