Helmut kohl, who reunited Germany, dies

berlin — Helmut Kohl, the physically imposing German chancellor whose reunification of a nation divided by the Cold War put Germany at the heart of a united Europe, has died at 87.

At the country’s helm from 1982 to 1998 — first for West Germany and then for a united Germany — Kohl combined a dogged pursuit of European unity with a keen instinct for history.

Less than a year after the November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, he spearheaded the end of Germany’s decades-long division into East and West, ushering in a new era in European politics.

The close friendships that Kohl built up with other world leaders that helped him persuade both anti-communist Western allies and the leaders of the collapsing Soviet Union that a strong, united Germany could finally live at peace with its neighbours.

“Helmut Kohl was the most important European statesman since World War II,” former US President Bill Clinton, said in 2011, adding that Kohl answered the big questions of his time “correctly for Germany, correctly for Europe, correctly for the US, correctly for the future of the world.” “The 21st century in Europe really began on his watch,” Clinton said, describing Kohl as “a man who was big in more than physical stature.”

Kohl moved nimbly in domestic politics and among rivals in his conservative Christian Democratic Union, holding power for 16 years until his defeat by center-left rival Gerhard Schroeder in 1998.

That was followed by the eruption of a party financing scandal which threatened to tarnish his legacy and for a time plunged the CDU into crisis.

Born on April 3, 1930, in Ludwigshafen, a western industrial city on the Rhine, Kohl joined the Hitler Youth but missed service in the Nazi army. As a 15-year-old, he was about to be pressed into service in a German anti-aircraft gun unit when World War II ended. His oldest brother, Walter, was killed in action a few months earlier.

A Roman Catholic, Kohl joined the CDU in his teens shortly after its postwar founding. He became governor of the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate in 1969.

Kohl’s first attempt to unseat Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt failed in 1976, but Kohl seized his chance six years later, taking power on Oct. 1, 1982 when a junior coalition party switched sides. —