Helmut Kohl

Helmut Kohl, a towering figure of the post-war era, who reunified Germany after 45 years of Cold War division, 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 June 16 2017 at his home in Ludwigshafen, Germany, the Rhine port city where he was born. He was 87. Mr. Kohl was remembered by many as a giant of epochal times that redrew Europe’s political architecture, dismantled the minefields and watchtowers of the Iron Curtain and replaced the eyeball-to-eyeball armed confrontation between East and West with an enduring, if often challenged, co-existence between former sworn foes. A politician most of his adult life, Mr. Kohl was chancellor for 16 years starting in 1982, longer than any German leader since Bismarck. He ruled the Christian Democratic Union as if it were a personal domain. But his political career ended with defeat, in elections in 1998, and his legacy was later clouded by disgrace over an opaque party fund-raising scandal. His first wife, Hannelore Kohl, committed suicide in 2001, ostensibly because of a rare allergy to light, which had forced her into a nocturnal existence. In 2008, shortly after his fall, Mr. Kohl announced his intention to marry a newer companion, Maike Richter, 35 years his junior and a former economic adviser in the chancellery. She was later accused of limiting access to him and his archives. Helmut Joseph Michael Kohl was born in Ludwigshafen on April 3, 1930, the third and last child of Cäcilie E. and Hans Kohl, a minor civil servant and tax expert who had been a soldier in World War I. Besides his second wife, Mr. Kohl’s survivors include his sons Walter and Peter. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.