Helmut Kohl called his escape from wartime combat the mercy of late birth
Sworn into the Hitler Youth at 15, days before Germany's surrender, and drafted without ever seeing combat, Helmut Kohl later spoke of the mercy of late birth. He went on to become the longest-serving elected chancellor in German history, presiding over reunification and the birth of the European Union and the euro.
Kohl was born on 3 April 1930 in Ludwigshafen, the third child of a Bavarian army veteran turned civil servant, and grew up in a conservative Catholic household that had backed the Catholic Centre Party. The Wehrmacht claimed his elder brother in 1944, when he was 18. Like most German children, Helmut was enrolled in the Jungvolk at ten. After the war he joined the Christian Democratic Union at 16, became the first in his family to go to university, and earned a history doctorate at Heidelberg in 1958, briefly working as a business executive.
He rose quickly. In 1959 he became the youngest member of the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament, and from 1969 to 1976 he led the state as minister president. Considered a progressive in the CDU during the 1960s, he took the national party chair in 1973 and came to be seen as more conservative. His party did well in 1976 and 1980 without unseating Helmut Schmidt, but when the liberal FDP abandoned Schmidt in 1982, Kohl won a constructive vote of no confidence and formed a coalition with the FDP.
As chancellor from 1982 to 1998 he championed European integration and the Franco-German partnership and stood firmly with the United States, backing Ronald Reagan's tougher line on the Soviet Union. After the revolutions of 1989 his government moved fast, and Germany reunified in 1990. With France's Francois Mitterrand he designed the Maastricht Treaty that created the EU and the euro, and he pushed eastward enlargement. At home he concentrated on absorbing the former East, sharply raised federal spending on culture, and moved the capital from Bonn to Berlin.
His reputation took a blow after he left office: a party donations scandal forced him to quit as honorary CDU chairman in 2000. Honours still flowed, including the 1988 Charlemagne Prize and, in 1998, the title Honorary Citizen of Europe. Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton called him the greatest European leader of the late twentieth century. He died on 16 June 2017 and received the first European act of state, held in Strasbourg.
Source: Helmut Kohl
