Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl Passes Away

Helmut Kohl, the former Chancellor of Germany, passed away at the age of 87. Kohl was elected Chancellor of West Germany in 1982. The unification of East and West Germany occurred during his tenure in 1990. After the unification of the two Germanys, he held the highest executive position in the united country until 1998. According to Radio Free Europe, it was Kohl who, by securing an agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev, prepared the groundwork for the unification of Germany and executed it. Kohl had assured Russia that NATO forces would not be stationed in Eastern Germany. To gain Russia's favor, he reduced the size of the German army and provided significant financial assistance for the reconstruction of Russia's economic system. Along with then-French President François Mitterrand, Kohl played a crucial role in laying the foundations for European unity. He was a proponent of the inclusion of Eastern Bloc countries in the European Union and NATO. Kohl and Mitterrand sought to establish the European Union as an equal partner to the United States within NATO. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, many German political leaders called for a federal government between the two parts, but Kohl insisted on complete equality of the two parts under one country, Germany. After months of negotiations with German political leaders and other European countries, as well as Russia, the full unification of Germany occurred in 1990. Kohl believed that this unification would keep his name alive in history. Despite all his efforts to create equality between the two parts of Germany, the economic infrastructure in the East was not competitive with other capitalist countries. Unemployment in the East remained much higher than in the West and the rest of united Europe. One of Kohl's promises was not to raise taxes for citizens, but ultimately his government imposed a tax called 'solidarity' on Western citizens to improve the economic situation in the East. A year after Kohl lost the 1998 elections to Gerhard Schröder, it became clear that he had received financial support from an unknown source to fund his election campaigns, which was against the law. This scandal severely damaged Kohl's political reputation. According to The New York Times, after this major scandal, Kohl was heavily ostracized from political arenas. His first wife committed suicide in 2001. In 2008, after being confined to a wheelchair due to an accident, Kohl married one of his economic advisors who was 35 years younger than him. Helmut Kohl passed away on Friday, June 16, in his hometown of Ludwigshafen, beside the Rhine River.