Richard von Weizsäcker

Born into aristocracy in 1920, Weizsäcker entered public life through the Protestant Church before joining the CDU in 1954. He won a Bundestag seat in 1969, then became Governing Mayor of West Berlin after the 1981 elections. Elected President of Germany in 1984 and again in 1989, he became one of only two presidents to serve two full five-year terms. On 3 October 1990, during his second term, reunification made him president of a whole Germany for the first time in decades. His impartiality and moral clarity often put him at odds with Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his own CDU colleagues. When he died in 2015, The New York Times called him "a guardian of his nation's moral conscience."