'I acted like a dictator to bring in the euro': Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl admits power-trip forced rest of continent to accept single currency Newly published 2002 interview reveals candid admission about euro project Helmut Kohl says: 'Chancellor must be a man of power to achieve' But also admits that he would have lost a referendum on the single currency By Allan Hall Helmut Kohl has admitted that he 'acted like a dictator' to bring the euro into Germany to replace the beloved D-Mark. Germany's longest-serving postwar chancellor said that he would have lost any popular vote on the euro by 'an overwhelming majority'. He said in an interview conducted in 2002 - but only just now published -: 'I knew that I could never win a referendum in Germany. We would have lost a referendum on the introduction of the euro. That's quite clear. I would have lost and by seven to three. 'I had to be forceful': Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, pictured above in front of the Brandenburg Gate during a private walk in Berlin, has revealed he 'acted like a dictator' to bring in the euro The interview was conducted by Jens Peter Paul in 2002 when the Deutsche Mark was subsituted by the euro. Kohl said he adopted the euro as an 'emblem' of the European project which he believed prevented war on the continent. If a Chancellor is trying to push something through, he must be a man of power. And if he's smart, he knows when the time is ripe. In one case - the euro - I was like a dictator ... The euro is a synonym for Europe. Europe, for the first time, has no more war,' he went on. What he did NOT address in his interview were the lies he and his ministers told to get the common currency in place across Europe - a decision now seen to have fatal consequences as the continent thrashes around in the sixth year of a financial crisis without end. Friends in Europe: The then-West German chancellor Helmut Kohl pictured in 1989 with the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who died yesterday Hundreds of pages of German government documents from 1994 to 1998 and released last year stated clearly that Italy - now one of the floundering southern European euro states - should NOT have been allowed to join the euroclub. Later on the files bring up another country that was poised for catastrophe: Greece. Aides warned Kohl - who, along with the French relentlessly drove the European Project onwards - that Italy's austerity measures taken at the time were merely 'window dressing.' German media dubbed the information in the files as 'Operation Self Deception.' The German ruling class seemingly knew they were driving the continent into a fiscal cul-de-sac... but went ahead with it anyway. The files show how on February 3, 1997, the German Finance Ministry noted that in Rome 'important structural cost-saving measures were almost completely omitted, out of consideration for the social consensus.' 'The documents that have now been released suggest that the Kohl administration misled both the public and Germany's Federal Constitutional Court,' said news magazine Der Spiegel when they came out last year.