German Politician. Governing mayor of Berlin and the sixth President of Germany. Before the war he studied philosophy and history in Oxford and Grenoble. He joined the Infantry Regiment Nr. 9 where his brother was a lieutenant in 1938. Their unit crossed the border to Poland on September 1st, 1939. His brother was killed on the second day of the war and was buried by Richard. He was also part of the Operation Barbarossa and, after being wounded, rejoined his unit for the Battle of Moscow. In the following years he spent some time as an Ordonnanzoffizier (batman) with the Oberkommando des Heeres (Supreme High Command of the German Army) and returned to his unit as the adjutant of the regiment commander. In 1944 he received the Iron Cross First Class and was promoted to the rank of a captain of the reserve. He was again wounded in March 1945 in East Prussia. After being evacuated to Gdańsk he traveled further to Copenhagen and back to Potsdam. As soon as the war was over he started to study jurisprudence and history at the University of Göttingen. As a student he served as his father's assistant defense counsel. In the 1950's and 60's he worked for Mannesmann and Boehringer Ingelheim and was later head of Waldthausen Bank. In 1966 he settled as a lawyer in Berlin. From 1964 to 1970 and from 1979 to 1981, he served as President of the German Evangelical Church Assembly. He had joined the CDU in 1954 and was elected to the Bundestag for the first time in 1969. In 1978 he returned to Berlin and became opposition leader there until he was elected mayor in 1981. Three years later he was elected President of Germany, receiving 832 of 1017 votes. He held his most famous speech on the 40th anniversary of the war's end in the German Bundestag. In it, he pointed out that 8 May 1945 was a day of liberation, addressed the suffering of those affected and the responsibility of future generations. In May 1989 he was reelected. At the ceremony the reunification of Germany in Berlin on October 3rd 1990 Weizsäcker coined the words "to unite oneself is to learn how to share". After his retirement from office he confirmed his reputation as a "political" President by holding a number of presidencies in various committees, lectured and continued to take a position on the current political debates. He received more than thirty prizes and medals, thirteen honorary doctorates and became knight of several orders. He is also honorary citizen of Bonn, Gdańsk, Stuttgart and Berlin. He was married to Marianne von Kretschmann since 1953 with whom he had four children.