Helmut Kohl, Chancellor Who Reunited Germany, Dies at 87
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.
Der Spiegel, an influential newsmagazine that acknowledged a troubled relationship with Mr. Kohl, said in 2012
that the "link between political history and the physical frailty of this once-powerful man" had "turned his twilight years into a tragedy that is being closely watched in Germany." Mr. Kohl went to college in Frankfurt and later in Heidelberg.
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 herself 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.
By CRAIG R. WHITNEYJUNE 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.
