Nazi nuclear scientist Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker dies at age 94

BERLIN -- Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, a physicist who researched atomic weapons for the Nazis and became a philosophy professor who espoused pacifism after World War II, died Saturday, his family said. He was 94.

Weizsaecker had been severely ill for a long time, his daughter-in-law said by telephone from his house. She declined to provide her name.

Born in Kiel on June 28, 1912, into a nationally prominent family of jurists and theologians, Weizsaecker studied physics and mathematics in Leipzig, Berlin and Goettingen, and became a professor of physics. His brother Richard was president of Germany from 1984 to 1994.

Weizsaecker said he worked on the atomic bomb to avoid being conscripted into the Nazi army. He also insisted in postwar interviews that he was grateful the nuclear technology was never used by the Nazis.

But a secret recording of German scientists captured by the Allies caught Weizsaecker saying, after hearing of the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan that, "If they were able to finish it by summer '45, then with a bit of luck, we could have been ready in winter '44-'45."

After the war, Weizsaecker became a philosophy professor at the University of Hamburg. He also remained a physicist, conducting research for Germany's Max Planck Institute.

In 1957, he and 17 other leading German physicists formed the Goettinger 18, which protested the idea of arming the West German army with nuclear weapons.

Weizsaecker also wrote several books, translated into more than a dozen languages, that analyzed the dangers of war in the contemporary world.

Weizsaecker received the Max Planck Medal in 1957, the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers in 1963 and the Theodor-Heuss Prize for Religion and Integration in Europe in 1988.

He is survived by four children.