About Gustav Heinemann
Gustav Walter Heinemann was a German politician who was President of West Germany from 1969 to 1974. He served as mayor of Essen from 1946 to 1949, West German Minister of the Interior from 1949 to 1950, and Minister of Justice from 1966 to 1969. Having finished his elite secondary education in 1917, Heinemann briefly became a soldier in the First World War, but his severe illness stopped him from being sent to the front. When Konrad Adenauer became the first Chancellor of the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, he wanted a representative of the Protestants in the CDU in his government. Opposition against those German Christians came from the Confessing Church, and Heinemann became a member of its synod and its legal adviser. A year later, when it became known that Adenauer had secretly offered German participation in a Western European army, Heinemann resigned from the government.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.