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...Richard von Weizsacker is not Kurt Waldheim. He should not be placed on any watch list. He should not be excluded from polite company. He should even be welcomed at Harvard, to lecture, to debate, to honor others. But should this apologist for his father's Nazi war crimes be among the two handfuls of distinguished people from around the globe honored by Harvard? Many survivers of the Holocaust and others who care deeply about justice do not believe so. They do not want the Harvard honor to be understood as helping Richard von Weizsacker "rehabilitate his family name...
...selecting and rejecting honoraries is so fatally flawed that there does not even appear to be a constructive way to change it. Every member of the Harvard community is ultimately dishonored by this most recent insensitivity. The system should be changed for the future. For the present Richard von Weizsacker must be shown dramatically and unforgettably that those who selected him for the honor do not speak for the Harvard faculty, student body, alumni or community. They speak only for themselves--and unless the system is changed they will soon be speaking mostly to themselves...
...article published in two area newspapers, Francis L. Loewenheim--a professor at Rice University--charged that while this year's Commencement speaker, Richard von Weiszacker, is an eloquent voice of the need for modern Germany to bear responsibility for Nazi war crimes, he has distorted his father's own role in those atrocities...
Loewenheim, the author of several books on Germany, said von Weizsacker assisted his father, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, in authoring untruthful memoirs of the Baron's war years. The historian also said that the president--who served as his father's lawyer during the Nuremberg trials--claims to this day that his father was unaware of the existence of death camps in the face of what Loewenheim called overwhelming evidence to the contrary...
...elder von Weiszacker was charged by the international tribunal with assisting in the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps and served 18 months in prison...