Image copyright EPA Image caption Despite occasional differences, Mr Kohl forged alliances with UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan

Helmut Kohl, Germany's ex-chancellor and architect of reunification in 1990, has died at 87.

Kohl led Germany for 16 years (from 1982 to 1998). He is credited with bringing East and West Germany together after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Together with his French ally President Francois Mitterrand, he was responsible for the introduction of the euro.

European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker has ordered flags at EU institutions to be flown at half-mast.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Kohl's former protegee who later called for his resignation over a political funding scandal, said his death filled her with deep sadness.

"Helmut Kohl's efforts brought about the two greatest achievements in German politics of recent decades - German reunification and European unity," she said.

"Helmut Kohl understood that the two things were inseparable."

For his part, Mr Juncker said in a tweet: "Helmut's death hurts me deeply." "My mentor, my friend, the very essence of Europe, he will be greatly, greatly missed," he added.

Former US President George HW Bush paid tribute to the man he knew while in office from 1989 to 1993 as a "true friend of freedom" and "one of the greatest leaders in post-war Europe".

Thatcher's rival

Kohl suffered a bad fall in 2008 and had been using a wheelchair.

Image copyright AFP Image caption A piece of the Berlin Wall was erected in Kohl's garden in 2011 as a souvenir

He died at his house in Ludwigshafen, in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate, Bild newspaper reports.

Kohl, who led the centre-right Christian Democrats, was the longest-serving chancellor of the 20th Century.

A passionate believer in European integration, he persuaded Germans to give up their cherished deutschmark in favour of the European single currency.

Image copyright Jean-Claude Juncker Image caption EU flags are being flown at half-mast

In the UK, he is remembered for his differences over the EU with the late UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

In France, he is the German leader who held hands with Mitterrand at a service at the Verdun war memorial in 1984 to mark the 70th anniversary of World War One.

But for Germans he is above all the man who reunified a country divided by the allied powers after World War Two, promising the people of the ex-communist East "flourishing landscapes", in unity with the richer West.

Obituary: Helmut Kohl

Helmut Josef Michael Kohl was born on 3 April 1930 into a conservative, Catholic family.

His political outlook was shaped by his experiences in his hometown of Ludwigshafen in the Rhineland during World War Two.

Because of its huge chemical works, the town was heavily bombed and, at the age of 12, the young Helmut found himself helping to recover the charred bodies of his neighbours from the rubble. What he once described as "the blessing of a late birth" freed him from any taints of Nazism.

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Denounced by Merkel

Kohl fell from grace when a funding scandal under his leadership of the Christian Democrats came to light after he left office in 1998.

Image copyright AFP Image caption Angela Merkel (R) has followed in Kohl's footsteps as a long-serving chancellor

Chancellor Merkel first entered government under Kohl's rule in 1991.

But she publicly denounced him and called for his resignation when it was revealed the party had received millions of dollars worth of illegal donations using secret bank accounts.

In 2011, in a series of interviews and statements, he spoke out against Mrs Merkel's policy of strict austerity to deal with the European debt crisis.

Kohl's later life was also marked by personal tragedy. His wife, Hannelore, killed herself in July 2001 after suffering from a rare skin condition and depression.</s>Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl has died, German newspaper Bild reported. He was 87 years old.

 Kohl, the architect of German reunification, was the first chancellor after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 In 1989, Kohl proposed to reunite Germany and the reunification occurred in October 1990, according to Sputnik News.

 Kohl was born on April 3, 1930 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany.</s>Helmut Kohl: former chancellor and father of German reunification dies aged 87

Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl — the architect of German reunification — has died at his home in Ludwigshafen, western Germany, at the age of 87.

"A life has ended and the person who lived it will go down in history," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, speaking from Rome.

"It will take some time, however, until we can truly judge what we have lost in him. Helmut Kohl was a great German and a great European."

"We mourn," Mr Kohl's Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) tweeted with a picture of the former chancellor.

Germany's longest serving post-war chancellor, from 1982 to 1998, Mr Kohl was a driving force behind the introduction of the euro currency, convincing sceptical Germans to give up their cherished deutschemark.

An imposing figure who formed a close relationship with French president Francois Mitterrand in pushing for closer European integration, Mr Kohl had been frail and wheelchair-bound since suffering a bad fall in 2008.

At home, he is celebrated above all as the father of German reunification, which he achieved after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall despite resistance from partners such as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

He won voters in communist East Germany by promising them "flourishing landscapes".

In a 2012 tribute, former US president Bill Clinton described Mr Kohl as one of post-war Europe's defining statesmen.

For all his accomplishments as chancellor, Kohl's life was tinged by controversy and personal tragedy after he left office in 1998 as Germany's longest-serving leader since Bismarck.

In 2000, he was forced to resign as honorary chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party he had led for 25 years, after admitting to receiving $1.31 million in illegal cash donations during his time as chancellor, which he doled out to local party organisations.

He refused to reveal where the money had come from, saying he had given the donors his "Ehrenwort," or word of honour, not to disclose their names.

The scandal made him a virtual pariah in his own party for years.

Angela Merkel, the shy physicist from communist East Germany whom Mr Kohl had plucked from obscurity to join his cabinet after the fall of the Berlin Wall, turned on him at a crucial moment during the scandal, ensuring his exile.

A year after he was dropped by the CDU, Mr Kohl's first wife Hannelore, who suffered from a debilitating allergy to light, committed suicide.

In an appearance at the German Historical Museum in Berlin in 2012 to mark 30 years since he became chancellor, Mr Kohl reminded his audience of why he had championed European unity and urged EU leaders to continue on the path of closer integration despite the crisis of the euro.

"Europe can never sink into war again," he said.</s>Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the architect of German reunification, died on Friday, the mass-selling newspaper Bild reported. He was 87.

Bild reported in its online edition that Kohl died in the morning in his home in Ludwigshafen, in western Germany.

"We mourn," Kohl's Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) tweeted with a picture of the former chancellor.

Germany's longest serving post-war chancellor from 1982 to 1998, Kohl was a driving force behind the introduction of the euro currency, convincing sceptical Germans to give up their cherished deutschemark.

An imposing figure who formed a close relationship with French President Francois Mitterrand in pushing for closer European integration, Kohl had been frail and wheelchair-bound since suffering a bad fall in 2008.

At home, he is celebrated above all as the father of German reunification, which he achieved after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall despite resistance from partners such as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

He won voters in communist East Germany by promising them "flourishing landscapes".

Shortly after leaving office, Kohl's reputation was tarnished by a financing scandal in his centre-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), now led by Chancellor Angela Merkel. Kohl mentored Merkel early in her career, appointing her to her first ministerial post.</s>German statesman Helmut Kohl, the architect of German reunification after the end of the Cold War, has died, his Christian Democratic Union party announced with a memorial message Friday. He was 87.

Kohl served as chancellor for 16 years — from 1982 to 1998 — and was Germany’s longest-serving leader since 1945.

He worked tirelessly for the reunification of West and East Germany, the countries separated in the ashes of World War II.

Kohl was born in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany, an industrial port city in what is now the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

He began working in the CDU in 1947. He served in the Rhineland-Palatinate legislature from 1959 to 1976, and served as minister-president of the same state from 1969 to 1976.

He was CDU chairman from 1973 to 1998. He was a member of the Bundestag, West German’s lower house of parliament from 1976 to 1990.

Kohl became chancellor of West Germany from 1982 and 1990 and became chancellor of Germany after reunification.</s>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.

Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union party posted on Twitter: “We are in sorrow. #RIP #HelmutKohl.”

The daily newspaper Bild reported that Kohl died Friday at his home in Ludwigshafen.

Over his 16 years at the country’s helm from 1982 to 1998 — first for West Germany and then for all of 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.

It was 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 neighbors.

“Helmut Kohl was the most important European statesman since World War II,” Bill Clinton, the former U.S. president, said in 2011, adding that Kohl answered the big questions of his time “correctly for Germany, correctly for Europe, correctly for the United States, 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.”

Famed for a massive girth on his 6-foot-4 (1.93-meter) frame, Kohl still 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.

For foreigners, the bulky conservative with a fondness for heavy local food and white wine came to symbolize a benign, steady — even dull — Germany.

Kohl’s legacy includes the common euro currency that bound Europe more closely together than ever before. Kohl lobbied heavily for the euro, introduced in 1999, as a pillar of peace — and when it hit trouble more than a decade later, he insisted there was no alternative to Germany helping out debt-strapped countries like Greece.

Once viewed as a provincial bumbler, Kohl combined an understanding of the worries of ordinary Germans with a hunger for power, getting elected four times.

Kohl served longer than Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first post-World War II chancellor and his political idol. Only Otto von Bismarck, who first unified Germany in the 1870s, was chancellor longer, for 19 years.

“Voters do not like Kohl, but they trust him,” Rita Suessmuth, a former speaker of parliament, once said.

Often harsh and thin-skinned, Kohl also could display a quick wit and jovial earthiness that served him well in building up German clout. He ate pasta with Clinton and took saunas with Russia’s Boris Yeltsin.

Kohl linked his dedication to a united Europe to his roots in a part of Germany close to France and his memories of a wartime boyhood. He celebrated the European Union’s eastward expansion in 2004 with a speech declaring that “the most important rule of the new Europe is: There must never again be violence in Europe.”

Still, the “blooming landscapes” that Kohl promised East German voters during reunification were slow to come after the collapse of its communist economy, and massive aid to the east pushed up German government debt. He also drew criticism for failing to embark on economic reforms.

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 earned his doctorate in 1958 at the University of Heidelberg with a dissertation on the politics of Rhineland-Palatinate and became governor of that western state in 1969.

His 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.

He won elections in 1983 and 1987, then rode to an election triumph in 1990 on a wave of post-unity euphoria.

Kohl was reluctant to view united Germany as a major power because of the Nazi past. Still, he slowly edged his country toward greater responsibilities in the 1990s, as Germany sent troops for U.N. humanitarian missions in Cambodia, Somalia and elsewhere, and deployed peacekeepers to Bosnia.

He pursued reconciliation with Germany’s eastern neighbors, though some critics said he moved too slowly after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Kohl was helped in securing German unity by his friendships with French President Francois Mitterrand and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who approved NATO membership for a united Germany and agreed to pull Soviet troops out of East Germany.

Kohl’s earlier bridge-building with the U.S. also paid off. The stationing of U.S. Pershing II missiles starting in 1983, despite huge domestic protests, had established trust in Washington that was crucial to creating a single German state.

“It was a stroke of luck that there were about four to six leaders in power in the mid-80s who really trusted one another and could really make things happen,” Kohl later recalled. In his memoirs, he described former U.S. President George H.W. Bush as “the most important ally on the road to German unity.”

He praised former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for her honesty, even as he recalled a confrontation with her just a few days after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“I cited a 1970s-era NATO statement and said that NATO supported reunification. … Thatcher stamped her feet in anger and screamed at me, ‘That’s how you see it! That’s how you see it!’” he wrote.

In a poignant gesture of reconciliation in 1984, Kohl held hands with Mitterrand during a ceremony at a World War I cemetery in Verdun, France.

Another gesture of friendship and reconciliation the following year turned into a public relations fiasco. Kohl’s trip with then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan to a war cemetery in Bitburg where SS troops were buried alongside ordinary German soldiers generated international indignation.

Kohl’s relationship with Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, also had to overcome early turbulence. In a 1986 interview, Kohl was quoted as comparing Gorbachev’s public relations skills with those of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The Soviet Union protested.

Elation over German reunification ebbed amid the harsh realities of its cost and the difficulties of integrating east and west, but Kohl’s coalition squeaked by again in 1994. Yet high unemployment and Germans’ yearning for change gradually sapped his authority, provoking a humiliating loss to the younger Schroeder’s center-left Social Democrats in 1998.

The following year, Kohl plunged his party into crisis when he admitted accepting undeclared — and therefore illegal — donations during his time as chancellor. Kohl refused to identify the donors, to whom he said he had given his word.

His silence helped trigger a parliamentary inquiry and was condemned by many, both inside and outside his party, but Kohl vehemently denied that any decisions by his government were bought.

When Bonn prosecutors launched an investigation into possible breach-of-trust charges in January 2000, Kohl was pressured to give up his party’s symbolic honorary chairmanship — notably by Angela Merkel, a longtime Kohl protegee who served for seven years in his Cabinet and followed him into the chancellery in 2005.

In a 2001 deal with Bonn prosecutors, the probe was dropped in exchange for a 300,000-mark fine (about $140,000 at the time) — giving Kohl the legal stamp of innocence. That was a common German practice, not considered special treatment, but judicial investigations into other figures in the murky financing scandal continued.

In another battle after his departure from power, Kohl fought and won a lengthy legal fight to prevent the release of most of the files held on him by East Germany’s secret police. Journalists and historians had asked to see the material, prompting speculation it could shed light on the financing scandal. Kohl, however, argued successfully that the wiretaps used by the Stasi to spy on him were illegal and that he deserved protection from damage to his “human dignity.”

Kohl’s estrangement from his party lasted until 2002, when its new leaders invited him to speak at a convention as they sought to regain power.

The former chancellor was married for 41 years to Hannelore Renner, an interpreter of English and French who stood firmly but discreetly by his side throughout his political life. They had two sons, Peter and Walter.

In July 2001, Hannelore killed herself at age 68 in despair over an incurable allergy to light. In 2005, Kohl introduced his new partner Maike Richter, an economist some 35 years his junior. The couple married in May 2008.

Though slowed by illness in his later years, Kohl still made occasional eye-catching interventions on the political stage. As Merkel struggled to convince center-right lawmakers in 2011 of the wisdom of having Germany finance further bailouts of other eurozone nations, Kohl weighed in firmly. “There must be no question for us that we in the European Union and the eurozone stand by Greece in solidarity,” he declared.

He also appeared to question Merkel’s approach at a time when conservatives were unsettled by her decision to speed up Germany’s exit from nuclear energy and by Germany’s abstention in a U.N. vote on a no-fly zone over Libya. “I ask myself where Germany stands today and where it wants to go,” he said.

In April 2016, Kohl welcomed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — who had clashed with Merkel over Europe’s approach to a large influx of refugees — to his home. That coincided with the publication of a new foreword to a Kohl essay in which the ex-chancellor stated that “Europe cannot become the new home for millions of people in need worldwide.”

Kohl and Orban said, however, that they saw no conflict with Merkel’s efforts to solve Europe’s migrant crisis.</s>BERLIN (AP) - 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.

Kohl's Christian Democratic Union Party posted on Twitter: "We are in sorrow. #RIP #HelmutKohl."

The German newspaper Bild reported that Kohl died Friday at his home in Ludwigshafen.

Kohl's 16-year tenure as chancellor stretched from 1982 to 1998.

He combined a dogged pursuit of European unity with a keen instinct for history following the November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Kohl spearheaded, less than a year later, the end of Germany's division at the front line of the Cold War.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton once described Kohl as "the most important European statesman since World War II."

FILE - The Aug. 29, 2001 file photo shows former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl of the Christian Democrats is illuminated by sunlight as he listens to the debate in the parliament, during a special session about the deployment of about 500 German troops for the NATO operation Essential Harvest in Macedonia. (AP Photo/Jockel Finck, file)

FILE - The July 17, 1990 file photo shows Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, center,sitting with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, right, and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher at a table in the garden of the guest house in Archiz during a break in their talks on the discussion of NATO-membership of United Germany, the most difficult topic in the negotiations to German unification. In the background are German government spokesman Hans Klein, West German Finance Minister Theo Waigel, sixth from left, Raissa Gorbacheva, Soviet Finance Minister Pavlov and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, third from right. The other persons are unidentified delegation members. (AP Photo/Roberto Pfeil, file)</s>High Profile Former Germany Chancellor Helmut Kohl Is Dead, Dies At Age 87

Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union party posted on Twitter: “We are in sorrow. (hash) RIP (hash) HelmutKohl.” The daily newspaper Bild reported that Kohl died on Friday at his home in Ludwigshafen.

Over his 16 years at the country’s helm from 1982 to 1998 — first for West Germany and then for all of 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.

It was 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 WWII,” Bill Clinton, the former US president, said in 2011, adding that Kohl answered the big questions of his time “correctly for Germany, correctly for Europe, correctly for the United States, correctly for the future of the world.”

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Also, Like us on facebook</s>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.

Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union Party posted on Twitter: “We are in sorrow. #RIP #HelmutKohl.”

The German newspaper Bild reported that Kohl died Friday at his home in Ludwigshafen.

Kohl’s 16-year tenure as chancellor stretched from 1982 to 1998.

He combined a dogged pursuit of European unity with a keen instinct for history following the November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Kohl spearheaded, less than a year later, the end of Germany’s division at the front line of the Cold War.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton once described Kohl as “the most important European statesman since World War II.”</s>Kohl, who served as chancellor from 1982 until 1998, oversaw the reunification of East and West Germany during his time in office. He is also seen as one of the architects of the Euro.

As head of the Christian Democratic Union between 1973 and 1998, he was initially chancellor of West Germany before later becoming the first leader of the unified state.

Kohl’s former party confirmed his passing in a tweet.

German newspaper Bild reports that Kohl died at his house in Ludwigshafen, in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate on Friday.

Kohl became involved in politics at an early age, joining the CDU youth organization in 1947. He studied political science at the University of Heidelberg and earned a doctorate degree in 1958. A year later, he was elected to the Rhineland Palatinate state legislature.

In 1969 he became prime minister of the Rhineland State and he took over the reins of the CDU four years later. He ran for chancellor in 1976 but lost to Helmut Schmidt. Kohl eventually took power in 1982 at the helm of a coalition government.

After 16 years in power, Kohl’s CDU was defeated in the election in 1998. Three years later he was charged with accepting illegal contributions and was fined.

Dubbed ‘the father of German reunification’, Kohl left active politics in 2002. Following a fall in 2008, he suffered from impaired speech and was reportedly largely confined to a wheelchair.

Kohl, Germany’s longest serving post-war chancellor, was also an early advocate of a European single currency and the principle of European integration, a subject on which he worked closely with his French counterpart Francois Mitterrand.

The former leader was also a mentor to current German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who he appointed to her first ministerial post.

However Merkel publicly denounced Kohl after the illegal contributions scandal came to light, calling for his resignation. Kohl was very critical of Merkel over her austerity policies while dealing with the European debt crisis.

“Where is Germany now and where does it want to go? It’s a question being asked by our partners and allies abroad,” Kohl said in an 2011 interview. “We have to return – urgently – to our old dependability. We have to make clear for others what we stand for, where we’re headed, and that we know where we belong.”

President of the European Commission Jean Claude Juncker has issued a statement saying he is deeply hurt by the death of his “close friend.”

“Without Helmut Kohl, the euro would not exist. From the outset, he has grasped the political and economic importance, the invaluable value and the radiance of a single currency for our continent,” Juncker said.

European Union flags have been lowered to half mast in front of EU institutions to mark Kohl’s passing.

Former US President George H.W. Bush, whose term in office overlapped with Kohl’s, paid tribute to the former German leader.

"Barbara and I mourn the loss of a true friend of freedom, and the man I consider one of the greatest leaders in post-war Europe," Bush wrote in a statement.

"Throughout our endeavors, Helmut was a rock – both steady and strong."
Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl dies at the age of 87.