Helmut Kohl, the son of
a tax official, was born in Germany in 1930.
After studying law at the University of Frankfurt he began a career
in the chemical industry.
Kohl joined the Christian
Democrats (CDU) and in 1969 became president of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
In 1976 he was elected to the parliament of the Federal
Republic of Germany.
Kohl became leader of the party and following the elections in 1983
he formed a coalition government made up of three main political parties,
the Christian Democrats, Free Democrats and the Christian Social Union.
In 1984 Kohl was implicated
in a scandal concerned with the illegal business funding of political
parties. He was cleared of all charges in 1986 and the following year
was elected once again as Chancellor of Germany. While in power he
cut government spending and gave strong support to NATO.
With the collapse
of communism in 1989 Kohl became a leading advocate of the integration
of German
Democratic Republic into
the Federal
Republic of Germany.
This policy was very popular and in December 1990 Kohl and his governing
CDU-led coalition won a 134-seat majority in the Bundestag. He therefore
became the first chancellor of a unified Germany since 1945.
Kohl joined Francois
Mitterrand of
France to promote the Maastricht Treaty (1993) and the move toward
European Monetary Union.
The absorption
of the East German economy proved more expensive than predicted and
Kohl was forced to increase taxes to finance unification. Cuts in
government spending also led to high levels of unemployment and his
popularity slumped. Kohl was expected to step down but if he achieved
another victory in 1998 he would have surpassed Otto
von Bismarck as Germany's longest-serving chancellor. This was
not to be and he was defeated by the Social Democrats.
In 1999 it was disclosed
that Kohl had been fully aware of large illegal cash gifts to the
Christian Democrats from financiers. Kohl admitted he took money in
the run-up to the 1990 election but criminal proceedings were dropped
against him for corruption in exchange for the payment of a fine of
£100,000.
Rumours about secret bank
accounts and corrupt government decisions continued to circulate about
Kohl. His reputation was further hurt by the suicide of his wife Hannelore
Kohl and the suspicious death of Diethelm Honer, Kohl's financial
adviser. Honer was found dead in his villa in Cannes on 17th January,
2001. He had apparently fallen down the stairs but the medical report
claimed that the position of the body was not compatible with a fall.
(1)
BBC
Online, Helmut
Kohl (22nd September, 1998)
When he (Helmut Kohl)
came to power in 1982, hardly anybody expected him to survive for
long. His thick Rhineland accent and the bumbling delivery of his
speeches led most of his political enemies and even many of his friends
to believe that he was a provincial light-weight - despite his imposing
stature.
They were wrong. The apparent
lack of intellect betrayed the fact that Mr. Kohl was a masterful
political operator, who knew how to pull the levers in Bonn and across
West Germany.
Moreover after the intellectual
coolness, some called it arrogance, of his predecessor Helmut Schmidt,
the new chancellor's image of an ordinary person won him the hearts
of many Germans.
(2)
Spectator
Magazine (28th July, 2001)
Helmut Kohl has buried
many bodies in his time, and now he has buried his wife Hannelore.
Earlier this month, while Mr. Kohl was in Berlin, she committed suicide
by taking an overdose of painkillers and sleeping tablets at their
home in Ludwigshafen, on the Rhine. The way he disposed of her body
was characteristic, combining elements of mendacity, effrontery and
the ability to dominate those around him. He assembled the entire
German establishment for a requiem mass in a Roman Catholic cathedral
for a Protestant who had committed suicide. The German media had already,
almost without exception, swallowed Mar Kohl’s explanation for
her death, which was that she was suffering from such an agonising
allergy to light that for the last 15 months she had only been able
to leave the house under cover of darkness. Doctors have been unable,
from the scant details given, to identify her illness, and she was
buried without post mortem. Some people have reported that she seemed
well able to withstand daylight within the last few months. A friend
of mine recently saw her going for a walk in the Grünewald forest
on the edge of Berlin, and Mr. Kohl himself alluded, on the day before
she died, to their forthcoming summer holiday in Austria. Only Stern
magazine ventured to point out that the official account did not hang
together. It also remarked that a few weeks ago, when the Kohls’
son Peter married a Turkish woman, Elif Sözen, in Istanbul, Mr.
Kohl attended the wedding not with Mrs. Kohl, but with his personal
assistant, Juliane Weber, who started working for him in Mainz in
1964 and has long been his right-hand aide. What Mrs. Kohl thought
of this we may never know.
(3)
Laurent
Valdiquié, Le Parisien (9th July 2001)
Following the suicide
of his wife, Helmut Kohl is now indirectly linked to a suspicious
death in France. Diethelm Höner, a German millionaire friend
of Helmut and Hannelore Kohl, was found dead in his villa in Cannes
on 17th January. He had been the Kohls’ informal financial adviser,
running the affairs of Hannelore Kohl’s charitable foundations.
The 60 year-old financier had apparently fallen downstairs but French
prosecutors are now investigating the death. Höner was connected
with the Elf scandal, in which bribes were allegedly paid by the French
oil company to Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic party. Höner,
whose fortune ran to some £ 1 million, had told friends that
he felt threatened for several years. He lived in Cannes in a state
of permanent fear and was obsessed by security. According to a document
leaked to a French paper, he knew about the diversion of large sums
of money via the German intelligence services; he alleged in this
document that most of the aid given by Germany to Russia had been
stolen and that the Russians were using the stolen money to finance
industrial espionage in computer and bio-technology. Höner also
knew Dieter Holzer, a German businessmen living in Monte Carlo, who
is now on the run following the revelation that he took money from
the bribes paid by Elf for the purchase of the Leuna oil refinery.
The French authorities are treating the death as suspicious because,
according to a preliminary medical report, the position of the body
was not compatible with a fall. And the security cameras which otherwise
filmed everything in his villa were mysteriously not functioning on
the night of his death.
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