Joachim Gauck

German Protestant pastor and politician, Federal President of Germnay 2012–2017 (born 1940)

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Age
86
Born 1940
Known for
The Team
2014

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

A Lutheran pastor who turned East Germany's secret police files into a weapon against forgetting. Gauck spent a decade opening the Stasi archives after reunification, then carried that reckoning all the way to the presidency.

Biography

About

Born 24 January 1940, the son of a Gulag survivor, Gauck grew up under the weight of totalitarianism and became a Lutheran pastor in East Germany. In 1989 he co-founded the New Forum opposition movement during the Peaceful Revolution. After reunification he was elected to the Bundestag in 1990 but served only one day before taking the job that would define him: Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, a position he held until 2000, methodically exposing the crimes of the communist secret police. He ran for president in 2010, lost in the third ballot to Christian Wulff despite his popularity…

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