World: Prussian Maverick

It was one of the most remarkable statements in support of the developing countries of the Third World that delegates to the United Nations General Assembly had ever heard. It called the present rate of aid from rich to poor "appalling" and criticized the industrial nations, notably the U.S., Britain and West Germany, for impeding the creation of a "new economic order." Significantly, the speaker was West Germany's own Baron Rüdiger von Wechmar in his inaugural address upon his election as President of the General Assembly.

The dramatic debut was in keeping with von Wechmar's reputation as an independent-minded maverick as well as an astute diplomat. More important, his election conveyed a special symbolic meaning: he is the first German—East or West—to hold the General Assembly presidency. The choice was an obvious confirmation of West Germany's postwar rise to political and economic power, and to what the Stuttgarter Zeitung called "full moral acceptance."

For von Wechmar, 56, the election climaxed a long and distinguished diplomatic career. The son of a Prussian army officer, he served as an officer in Rommel's famed Afrika Korps. Captured by an American unit at Tunis in 1943, he was shipped to P.O.W. camps in Virginia and Colorado, where he earned a bachelor's degree in journalism through a correspondence course. "We are a famous family of prisoners of war," says von Wechmar, whose brother, father and both grandfathers were all captured by the enemy. "We've had our share of barbed wire."

Back home after the war, von Wechmar worked as a translator and reporter, becoming Bonn bureau chief for United Press in 1954. Recruited into the diplomatic service, he was appointed chief government spokesman in 1972. As permanent representative to the U.N. since 1974, he has regularly demonstrated a Prussian passion for exactitude with an un-Teutonic irreverence and an irrepressible zest for diplomacy's social whirl. "A good man to carry this important honor for us," comments a West German foreign ministry official. "It's equally important that it won't go to his head."