Former German President Richard von Weizsaecker, who declared Germany's World War II surrender a "day of liberation" for his country as he urged it to confront the Nazi past, and promoted reconciliation during a 10-year tenure that spanned the reunification of west and east, has died aged 94.
President Joachim Gauck's office announced Weizsaecker's death today.
Weizsaecker, a patrician and eloquent figure who was president from 1984 to 1994, raised the profile of the largely ceremonial presidency and established himself as a moral conscience for the nation.
Weizsaecker's May 1985 speech marking the 40th anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II cemented his reputation. It won widespread praise as an effort to bring fellow Germans to terms with the Holocaust.
"All of us, whether guilty or not, whether young or old, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it," said Weizsaecker, who served as a regular soldier in Adolf Hitler's army. "Anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present."
"The 8th of May was a day of liberation," he told the West German parliament. "It freed us all from the system of National Socialist tyranny."
Later that month, the Netherlands' German-born Prince Claus presented the president with a Dutch translation of the speech, telling him that it enabled him finally to acknowledge his roots in a country where resentment of the Nazi occupation remained widespread.
In October 1985, Weizsaecker made the first visit to Israel by a West German head of state. Israeli counterpart Chaim Herzog in 1987 reciprocated with the first visit by an Israeli president to West Germany and praised Weizsaecker for his "positive stand" toward Israel and the Jewish people.
"Richard von Weizsaecker stood worldwide for a Germany that had found its way to center of the democratic family of peoples," Gauck, the current president, said in a message of condolences to Weizsaecker's widow. "He stood for a federal republic that faces up to its past."
Weizsaecker served as deputy defence counsel to his father, career diplomat Ernst von Weizsaecker, who was sentenced in to prison in Nuremberg after the war for his role as a deputy foreign minister during the Nazi era.
