Former Chancellor of West Germany

Born: April 3, 1930

Died: June 16, 2017

Helmut Kohl, who has died aged 87, was a German politician whose influence upon his country and upon Europe was monumental in the closing decades of the 20th century.

He led as Chancellor of West Germany from 1982 to 1990 and of the reunited Germany from 1990 to 1998, having masterminded the reunification of the country following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

With French president Francois Mitterrand he was also the key driver of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty on European Union, which created the Euro currency and the three basic pillars of the European Union.

A tall, bear-like man whose appearance belied an often ruthless political astuteness, confidants say Kohl was by turns personable, gregarious and brusque. He was one of the key architects in the 1980s of a sense of conciliation and togetherness which helped to rehabilitate Germany in the eyes of the world and lay the groundwork for the ‘European project’ as we know it now, shaking the hand of Mitterrand (as a Socialist, Kohl’s diametric political opposite, but a key ally) at the First World War battleground of Verdun, welcoming Ronald Reagan on state visits, and bringing an East German leader, Erich Honecker, to West Germany for the first time.

His tireless cross-border and cross-party alliance-forming allowed Kohl to freeze out Margaret Thatcher, a strong critic of German reunification, in the lead-up to Maastricht.

Although, in common with every leader in the West, Kohl had little part in and no pre-knowledge of the fall of the Berlin Wall, his political legacy was made on the swiftness of his reaction after the event. Treaties were swiftly draw up which would allow the countries’ legal systems and governments to join, Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev was successfully petitioned to allow East Germany to choose its own path, and the Eastern economy was given the same financial status as the West’s; a controversial move which undoubtedly speeded up the reunification process.

Winner of four elections in a row before he was finally defeated in 1998, the only blot on Kohl’s political career came after his retirement, when he was implicated in a controversial party funding scandal. But the weight of his achievements ensured his reputation remained largely unblemished.

An early mentor of Angela Merkel, in his later years Kohl nevertheless attacked her policies of austerity in Europe and of confrontation with Russia over the Ukrainian crisis, believing that they contradict the spirit of bi-lateral agreement he had pursued in Germany and Europe.

Helmut Josef Michael Kohl was born in 1930 in the industrial town of Ludwigshafen, Bavaria, to father Hans, a World War I army officer and civil servant, and mother Cacilie (nee Schnur). The youngest of three children, he was raised in a conservative Catholic environment and served as an altar boy in the local church in Freiesenheim, where he grew up. The proximity of the area to France, now barely forty minutes’ drive from Strasbourg, has been credited with helping inform Kohl’s later sense of Europeanism.

Yet his first great encounter with the country and continent around him traumatised a generation, and his family.

Hans Kohl was conscripted once more into the German army to fight in World War II, as was Helmut’s older brother Walter. None of the family were members of the Nazi Party, although the young Helmut was obliged by law to join the child’s wing of the Hitler Youth and, in 1945, the full Hitler Youth – when he was also conscripted to the army and declared fit for duty. That the war ended soon after and he saw no action was, said Kohl, due to the “mercy of late birth”.

After graduating from his local Gymnasium, Kohl studied law in Frankfurt, switching within a year to history and political science at Heidelberg University. Since 1946 he had been a member of the newly-formed Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – and was drawn strongly to its stated ambition to “restore the good name of the German people in the world”.

Kohl was increasingly active from his teenage years before being elected president of the CDU in his local region Rhineland-Palatinate in 1969. He remains the youngest person ever given such a role. His first bid to become Chancellor of West Germany in 1976 was unsuccessful, narrowly missing out to the Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt’s coalition. He finally became Chancellor in 1982 in unusual circumstances, as the head of a coalition which had won a vote of no confidence in the current Bundestag, but which won a resounding electoral confirmation the following year.

Helmut Kohl was married to Hannelore Renner – with whom he had two sons – in 1960 until her suicide in 2001. Suffering a stroke from which he never fully recovered in 2008, he married Maike Richter in the same year.

By David Pollock