'It Was Horrific, And It Will Always Remain So': Former German President Details World War II Experiences

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SPIEGEL: After the war, you interrupted your law degree to help defend your father at the Nuremberg Trials. The Americans eventually sentenced him to five years in prison. You have always criticized this sentence as unfair.

Weizsäcker: My father was tried before the wrong kind of court. Foreign policy was the only work he really had any influence over and that he really enjoyed. Although the outbreak and expansion of the war frustrated all his efforts, his actions later prompted the so-called Reich Main Security Office -- a part of the SS -- to demand he be charged with high treason by the People's Court. Even the wife of the then foreign minister wrote extensively about this demand in her memoirs. Luckily by the time they got round to it my father was the ambassador to the Vatican in American-occupied Rome and therefore out of the reach of the German bloodhounds.

SPIEGEL: He was also acquitted of the charge of "crimes against peace." The verdict was based on "crimes against humanity." In 1942 Adolf Eichmann asked the German Foreign Ministry to issue a statement on the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. Ernst von Weizsäcker replied that the ministry had "no objections."

Weizsäcker: My father faced a central moral dilemma: Should he stay in office or not? What would and should he be prepared to accept any mission for? What could he influence personally, and what was beyond his control?

SPIEGEL: And your reply?

Weizsäcker: He remained at the Foreign Ministry in spite of all the deep disappointment it brought him. But after fastidiously reviewing the matter, he found that he was powerless to prevent the central domestic crimes against humanity. That's why he was all the more willing to help in any specific case of persecution he had access to. This is why he remained in office. Hundreds of statements from Jews, from churches, at home, in Britain and in other countries thanked him for the many ways he protected them, as did one of the judges at the Nuremberg Trials, in contrast to his two colleagues.

SPIEGEL: So you say your father was not treated fairly at the trials?

Weizsäcker: During a confidential though recorded meeting before the trial began, the prosecutor asked my father to be a prosecution witness and agree to testify against others. The prosecutor said surely it was worth committing a bit of perjury if it meant he could therefore escape trial. My father vehemently rejected the offer. The sentence was neither historically, morally nor humanly just. The American high commissioner in Germany ordered my father's immediate release from custody, and the first German federal president, Theodor Heuss, and many others spoke out on my father's behalf. In a speech during a parliamentary debate in England, Winston Churchill even said American prosecutors had made a "deadly error" over my father.

SPIEGEL: Have you ever asked him what would have happened if he had voiced his concerns to Eichmann?

Weizsäcker: Of course we put this imaginary scenario to him.

SPIEGEL: It's not an imaginary scenario, but a moral one.

Weizsäcker: The concrete effects were imaginary. Please believe me when I say that we haven't only just discovered what a moral question is.

SPIEGEL: You mean it wouldn't have made any difference if he had refused to approve it?

Weizsäcker: I won't repeat the conversations we had, but of course both he and we were deeply concerned about this issue. What do you think?

SPIEGEL: We're trying to understand what happened back then.

Weizsäcker: I have come to know and tried to portray him as best as is humanly possible.

SPIEGEL: Does that concern you to this day?

Weizsäcker: Of course. There is no such thing as historical, moral, human immunity, whether in youth or old age. I'm sure we agree on that too.

SPIEGEL: Mr. von Weizsäcker, we thank you for this interview.

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• Part 1: Former German President Details World War II Experiences
• Part 2: 'It Was Clear Hitler Expected to Win War by Autumn of 1941'
• Part 3: My Father's 'Sentence Was Neither Morally Nor Humanely Just'