Richard Karl Freiherr von Weizsäcker (German: [ˈʁɪçaʁt fɔn ˈvaɪtszɛkɐ] ; 15 April 1920 – 31 January 2015) was a German politician who served as President of Germany from 1984 to 1994. Born into the aristocratic Weizsäcker family, he took his first public offices in the Protestant Church in Germany.
A member of the CDU from 1954, Weizsäcker was elected as a member of parliament at the 1969 elections. He continued to hold a mandate as a member of the Bundestag until he became Governing Mayor of West Berlin, following the 1981 state elections. In 1984, Weizsäcker was elected as President of the Federal Republic of Germany and was re-elected in 1989 for a second term. As yet, he and Theodor Heuss are the only two Presidents of the Federal Republic of Germany who have served two complete five-year terms. On 3 October 1990, during his second term as president, the reorganised five states of the German Democratic Republic and East Berlin were absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany, making Weizsäcker President of a reunified Germany.
Weizsäcker is considered the most popular of Germany's presidents, held in high regard particularly for his impartiality. His demeanor often saw him at odds with his party colleagues, particularly longtime Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He was famous for his speeches, especially one he delivered at the 40th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe on 8 May 1985. Upon his death, his life and political work were widely praised, with The New York Times calling him "a guardian of his nation's moral conscience".
Richard von Weizsäcker was born on 15 April 1920 in the New Palace in Stuttgart, the son of diplomat Ernst von Weizsäcker, a member of the Weizsäcker family, and his wife Marianne von Graevenitz, a daughter of Friedrich von Graevenitz (1861–1922), a General of the Infantry of the Kingdom of Württemberg. Ernst von Weizsäcker was a career diplomat who served as State Secretary at the Foreign Office for Nazi Germany and as Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the Holy See. The youngest of four children, Weizsäcker had two brothers, the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Heinrich von Weizsäcker, who fell as a soldier in Poland at the beginning of World War II. The sister Adelheid (1916–2004) married Botho-Ernst Graf zu Eulenburg-Wicken (1903–1944), a landowner in East Prussia. Richard's grandfather Karl von Weizsäcker had been Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Württemberg, and was ennobled in 1897 and raised to the hereditary title of Baron (Freiherr) in 1916. His term in office ended in 1918, shortly before the monarchy was abolished in the German Revolution of 1918–1919. However, during the following years, he still occupied an apartment in the former royal palace where his grandson was born in an attic room.
Because his father was a career diplomat, Weizsäcker spent much of his childhood in Switzerland and Scandinavia. The family lived in Basel 1920–1924, in Copenhagen 1924–1926, and in Bern 1933–1936, where Richard attended the Swiss Gymnasium Kirchenfeld. The family lived in Berlin, in an apartment in the Fasanenstraße in Wilmersdorf, between 1929 and 1933 and again from 1936 until the end of World War II. Weizsäcker was able to miss the third class of his elementary school, and entered a secondary school at the young age of nine, the Bismarck-Gymnasium (now the Goethe-Gymnasium) in Wilmersdorf. When he was 17 years old, Weizsäcker travelled to England to study philosophy and history at Balliol College, Oxford. In London, he witnessed the coronation of King George VI. He spent the winter semester of 1937–1938 at the University of Grenoble in France to improve his French. He was mustered for the army there in 1938 and moved back to Germany the same year to start his Reichsarbeitsdienst.
After the outbreak of World War II, Weizsäcker joined the Wehrmacht, ultimately rising to the rank of captain in the reserves. He joined his brother Heinrich's regiment, the Infantry Regiment 9 Potsdam. He crossed over the border to Poland with his regiment on the very first day of the war. His brother Heinrich was killed about a hundred meters away from him on the second day. Weizsäcker watched over his brother's body through the night until he was able to bury him the next morning. His regiment, consisting in a large part of noble and conservative Prussians, played a significant part in the 20 July plot, with no fewer than nineteen of its officers involved in the conspiracy against Hitler. Weizsäcker himself helped his friend Axel von dem Bussche in an attempt to kill Hitler at a uniform inspection in December 1943, providing Bussche with travel papers to Berlin. The attempt had to be called off when the uniforms were destroyed by an air raid. Upon meeting Bussche in June 1944, Weizsäcker was also informed of the imminent plans for 20 July and assured him of his support, but the plan ultimately failed. Weizsäcker later described the last nine months of the war as "agony". He was wounded in East Prussia in 1945 and was transported home to Stuttgart, to see out the end of the war on a family farm at Lake Constance.
Education, marriage and early work life
At the end of the war, Weizsäcker continued his study of history in Göttingen and went on to study law, but he also attended lectures in physics and theology. In 1947, when his father, Ernst von Weizsäcker, was a defendant in the Ministries Trial for his role in the deportation of Jews from occupied France, Richard von Weizsäcker served as his assistant defence counsel. He took his first legal Staatsexamen in 1950, his second in 1953, and finally earned his doctorate (doctor juris) in 1955. In 1953 he married Marianne von Kretschmann. They had met when she was an 18-year-old schoolgirl and he was thirty. In 2010, Weizsäcker described the marriage as "the best and smartest decision of my life". They had four children: Robert Klaus von Weizsäcker, a professor of economics at the Technical University of Munich, Andreas von Weizsäcker, an art professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Beatrice von Weizsäcker, a lawyer and journalist, and Fritz Eckhart von Weizsäcker, chief physician at the Schlosspark-Klinik in Berlin. In the late 1970s, his son Andreas was a student at the Odenwaldschule. When reports about sexual abuse there surfaced in 2010, it was speculated in the media that Andreas might have been one of the victims, but this was denied by the family. Andreas died of cancer in June 2008, aged 51. Weizsäcker's son Fritz was murdered by a man armed with a knife on 19 November 2019, while holding a lecture at the Schlosspark-Klinik in Berlin, where he worked.
Weizsäcker worked for Mannesmann between 1950 and 1958, as a scientific assistant until 1953, as a legal counsel from 1953, and as head of the department for economic policy from 1957. From 1958 to 1962, he was head of the Waldthausen Bank, a bank owned by relatives of his wife. From 1962 to 1966, he served on the board of directors of Boehringer Ingelheim, a pharmaceutical company. It was involved in production of the Agent Orange. This fact is speculated to be the motive behind the murder of his son in 2019, though the suspect has been sent to a secure hospital unit due to a "delusional general aversion" against the victim's family.
German Evangelical Church Assembly
Between 1964 and 1970, Weizsäcker served as president of the German Evangelical Church Assembly. He was also a member of the Synod and the Council of the Protestant Church in Germany from 1967 to 1984. During his early tenure as president, he wrote a newspaper article supporting a memorandum written by German evangelical intellectuals including Werner Heisenberg and his brother Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker who had spoken out in favour of accepting the Oder–Neisse line as the western border of Poland as an indispensable precondition for lasting peace in Europe. While this was met by negative reactions from politicians, especially in Weizsäcker's own party, he nevertheless led the Evangelical Church on a way to promoting reconciliation with Poland, leading to a memorandum by the Church in both West and East Germany. The paper was widely discussed and met with a significantly more positive response.