Helmut Kohl, Chancellor Who Reunited Germany, Dies at 87 -
By CRAIG R. WHITNEY and ALAN COWELLJUNE 16, 2017
Helmut Kohl, a towering postwar figure who reunified Germany after 45 years of Cold War antagonism, propelled a deeply held vision of Europe’s integration
and earned plaudits from Moscow and Washington for his deft handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall, died on Friday at his home in Ludwigshafen, Germany, the Rhine port city where he was born.
He had a choice, Kohl said: President Reagan could go to Bitburg, or he could cancel and see the Kohl government fall.”
The president went to the former Nazi concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen and then, without regrets, to Bitburg.
In December 1999, Ms. Merkel, one of his Christian Democratic Union protégés from the formerly Communist part of Germany, wrote in the daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
that it was time for Mr. Kohl to withdraw from politics and “make way for the successors, the younger generation.”
Ms. Merkel took over the Christian Democrats in 2000 and became chancellor in 2005, the first woman to hold the office.
Helmut Joseph Michael Kohl was born in Ludwigshafen on April 3, 1930, the third
and last child of Cäcilie E. and Hans Kohl, a civil servant and tax expert who had been a soldier in World War I.
Leftist demonstrators in Halle, in the East, spattered Mr. Kohl with eggs, calling him
a “liar.” Mr. Kohl went after them with clenched fists before being restrained.
A physically imposing man — he stood 6 feet 4 inches
and weighed well over 300 pounds in his leadership years — Mr. Kohl pursued his and his country’s political interests as Germany’s chancellor with persistent, even stubborn, determination.