Former German president Johannes Rau dead at 75

Former German president Johannes Rau, a champion of ethnic integration and reconciliation with Israel, died on Friday at the age of 75 after a long illness, his office said.

After his presidential term ended in July 2004, capping a half century in politics, Rau underwent two operations from which he never recovered. The specific cause of death was not announced.

Rau, a devout Christian known affectionately as Brother Johannes, was one of the Social Democratic Party's leading lights.

He joined the SPD in 1957 and rose through party ranks to become premier in 1978 of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany's most populous state and its industrial heartland, where he governed for two decades.

"Johannes Rau was a great premier of North Rhine-Westphalia and the state and its people have much for which to thank him," the current leader of the state, Juergen Ruettgers, said.

One of Germany's most popular politicians, Rau ran a nevertheless unsuccessful campaign to unseat Helmut Kohl as chancellor in 1986 amid accusations that his party had failed to fully back him.

An elegant figure known as the "patriarch," Rau became president in 1999 for a five-year term marked by efforts to make Germany, deeply traumatized by its Nazi past, a more tolerant nation that would be respected on the world stage.

"I want to be the president of all Germans and an interlocutor for all those who live and work here without a German passport," he said in his inaugural speech.

In February 2000, he delivered a historic apology to the Israeli parliament for the Nazis' crimes in a watershed moment in bilateral relations.

Rau was a frequent critic of human rights violations around the world, famously taking Chinese leaders to task on a state visit in 2003.

"The goal of my political career is to make human beings' lives in the course of their years a bit more humane," he once said.

Rau was born January 16, 1931 in Wuppertal-Barmen, the son of a preacher.

His first job was in 1954 in a theological publishing house, and he eventually became head of the company before entering politics.

Rau did not marry until the age of 51, in 1984, taking the hand of Christina Delius, a granddaughter of former West German president Gustav Heinemann. The couple had three children.

Rau had been plagued by health troubles in recent years and underwent a heart operation in the summer of 2004.

He had already been diagnosed with a malignant tumor on his left kidney, which was removed in 1992. And in 2002, he endured an operation on an abdominal artery.

Rau was succeeded as president by the former head of the International Monetary Fund, Horst Koehler.