Period: Yugoslav Wars

Region: Yugoslavia

The German criminal Helmut Kohl (1930-2017)

Helmut Kohl (1930-2017) was a German historian, politician, and chancellor with the longest tenure in that position (as many as four terms). He led the German state in the last two decades of the 20th century, with a total of 195 months of rule.

He was anti-Slavic and led the policy of the new German imperialism, that is, the unification of Europe to the detriment of small nations. He welcomed the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of 1989 and the unification of East and West Germany into one state the following autumn. His idea of introducing a single European currency (the euro) came to life four years after he stepped down.

In the early 1990s, Kohl actively advocated the break-up of Yugoslavia and the recognition of its republics as independent states. In that, he mostly supported the Socialist Republic of Croatia and its confrontation with the citizens of Serbian nationality. He also helped the Albanian national community in the Republic of Serbia, which worked on redrawing the borders in the Balkans and creating the so-called chauvinist idea. Greater Albania with genocidal intentions. He was also against the Serbs during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is believed to have been one of the creators of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords in Ohio.

He became the honorary president of his party, the Christian Democratic Union, in 2000. By the way, he is a Catholic by religion, and his political conviction belongs to right-wing conservatism.
During World War II, Helmut Kohl was a member of the Hitler Youth organization, where he even took an oath of allegiance at the age of 15.

Helmut Kohl studied politics and history at the University of Heidelberg. During his studies, he was a member of many youth organizations and had many public appearances. He received his doctorate in history at the age of 28.

Helmut Kohl was described by American presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton as "the greatest European politician of the second half of the 20th century".

He died on June 16, 2017, in his house on the outskirts of Meinheim (a small town in western Germany).

CURRICULUM VITAE

Helmut Kohl was born on April 3, 1930, in Ludwigshafen, a town in the far west of present-day Germany in the Rhineland-Palatinate.

At that time, it was the Weimar Republic, which was formed after the collapse of the German Empire in the First World War.

Origin and childhood

His father's name was Hans (1887-1975) who was a veteran and soldier of the Bavarian Army, and with it, he was a participant in the Great War. He fought on the Western Front with the French. His mother's name was Cecilia nee Cord (1891-1979).

His parents had two more children.

Kohl's family was very conservative and religious and regularly went to the Roman Catholic Church. So Helmut himself was loyal to the Catholic Center Party.

German boys greet Hitler

His older brother died during World War II as a young soldier recruit. Helmut Kohl was a member of the Nazi organization Hitler's Youth (German: Deutsches Jungvolk), where he took an oath of allegiance to the Führer when he was only 15 years old, or on April 20, 1945, when the war was already ending in Europe.
According to some stories, Cole himself received an invitation to put on a uniform and borrow a rifle, but due to his age, he did not take part in the fighting.

Education

Kohl finished elementary school in Ruprecht and continued with the McPlanck High School in 1950. In Frankfurt am Main, young Helmut began his studies at the Faculty of Law but gave up after only two semesters.

He moved to the University of Heidelberg in 1951, where he studied political science and history. He graduated in 1956. During his student days, Kohl was a member of youth organizations.

He received his doctorate in history in 1958 from Professor Valtet P. Fuš.

Personal life

Helmut married Hennelor Renner in 1960. He lived with her until 2001 when she committed suicide. They met in 1948 in dance classes. She bore him two sons: Walter (1963) and Peter (1965). Henelora studied languages and was fluent in French and English. His wife was an important advisor in politics. Insiders say that she advocated the unification of Germany in the early eighties when it was a mere dream.

Their sons were educated in the United States at Harvard University.

While in the hospital in 2008, Helmut Kohl (then 78) married Mike Richter. 43-year-old former associate. He had no children with her. His second marriage was opposed by everyone: friends, family, party colleagues, the media ...

The second wife was accused by his sons of holding Helmut as a prisoner. She built the "Cole Museum" in his house during his lifetime.

Career and politics

He got a job as an assistant director of a foundry in Ludwigshafen, and two years later he became the manager of the Industrial Union for Chemistry in the same city.

The Christian Democratic Union (HDU) was founded in 1946 and is joined by the young 18-year-old Helmut Kohl. He immediately became the leader of the youth of that party. As early as 1953, he was admitted to the HDU board for his province. His goal then was to turn the youth into the church.

At the head of the Christian Democrats

In the 1960s, Kohl had a series of elections and fights for his place in the HDU party. Thus, in May 1969, he took over the leadership of the entire HDU party. He focused his reforms on education and schools. There, he connected with the politician Heiner Geissler, with whom he would cooperate for two decades.

In the early 1970s, he had a series of setbacks within the HDU party that cost him support, and it was not until June 12, 1973, that he gained real trust after Barzel withdrew. He stayed in that place for 25 years.

Until the early 1980s, Helmut Kohl was a vocal opposition leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

FEDERAL CHANCELLOR

In October 1982, he won the vote of confidence in the Bundestag and became the 8th German post-war chancellor (prime minister). Helmut Kohl remained in that position until October 27, 1998, which means that he led Germany for 5,869 days.

Reconciliation and unification

Reconciling former enemies of West Germany was Helmut Kohl's main goal in foreign policy.
On September 22, 1984, an important meeting took place with President Francois Mitterrand in Verdun, where a fierce battle was fought with the French during the First World War. There was a symbolic "burial of both world wars", that is, the burying of the enmities between the two great European states and peoples.
Cole tried to create a coalition with his colleagues in Paris, that is, new allies because he thought that it would be in the spirit of new European integration. As a result, the European Economic Community became the European Union in 1992.

Historical reception of Kohl in Dresden in 1990.

In addition to looking for allies in Europe, Kohl also searched for overseas countries, including the United States. Thus, on May 5, 1985, he hosted Ronald Reagan, the 40th American president, with whom he visited the cemetery in Bitburg, where soldiers of Nazi SS units are buried. Their partnership was significant for ending the Cold War, that is, breaking up the Soviet Union, a great rival of the Western Hemisphere. In 1987, Helmut Kohl hosted Erich Honecker, the leader of East Germany. It was the first visit of its kind and can be considered historic.

In the second half of the 1980s, Helmut Kohl did his best to reunite West and East Germany, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in September 1989, and the historic unification took place a year later. In February 1990, Kohl went to Moscow, where he met with Mikhail Gorbachev, the then Soviet president, where he received guarantees that the USSR would not interfere in the process or hinder the unification of the two Germanys.

The consequence was that units of the Red Army and the entire administration of the Soviet Union left East Germany during 1990-1991 and returned to the homeland. This was not just a mere victory for Helmut Kohl, but a historic moment that determined the further destiny of all European nations. The official unification took place on October 3, 1990. Berlin became the capital again, and five provinces of East Germany joined West Germany.

The last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev receives
Hans Genscher and Helmut Kohl (right) in the Caucasus in 1990.

When the Soviet Union officially disappeared on December 25, 1991, Chancellor Helmut Kohl rejoiced with happiness.
In Warsaw on November 14, 1990, Kohl signed an agreement with Poland, according to which a united Germany publicly renounced its territories east of the Odra River. These were areas that Germany controlled until 1944. Only a few months earlier, Kohl stated that Germany would return those territories, if necessary by force, which caused a real diplomatic scandal. He did the same with the Czech Republic when an agreement was signed in 1993 to renounce the Sudetenland, a historic area inhabited by Germans until World War II.

Kohl was not in a close relationship with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The English feared the unification of Germany because it was the danger of a new world war.

Former Yugoslavia

In the spring of 1990, multi-party elections took place in Yugoslavia, where separatist parties, supported by Western politicians, won in the western parts of the country, and Helmut Kohl was the most vocal among them. Then there was a serious political crisis that resulted in the illegal arming of Croatian and Slovenian separatists (Janez Janša and Martin Špegelj).

Kohl saw Yugoslavia as a "Serbian child" and that it should be destroyed. He also supported Ljubljana and Zagreb in realizing their dreams of independence. By the way, there have been hidden camps in Germany since the 1960s for training young Croatian men in terrorism and sabotage. Kohl knew about this, but he didn't shut them down.
The Kohl administration actively assisted Croatia in the civil war in the 1990s, when Tudjman's regime expelled more than 650,000 Serbs from the former Yugoslav republic. Citizens of Serbian nationality did not flee due to criminal operations: Oluja, Bljesak, Otkos, Orkan, Medački džep, Miljevački plato but the system of intimidation in urban areas was such that Serbs left their homes en masse in fear for personal safety: Karlovac, Gospić, Split, Dubrovnik, Sisak, Osijek, Vukovar, Virovitica, Bjelovar, Šibenik, Zadar, Zagreb, etc.

Many European Union countries (first Germany) recognized the independence of Slovenia and Croatia on January 15, 1992, and the recognition of Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina was announced. Here the Helmut Kohl government was the biggest supporter of such ideas and carried out anti-Serbian propaganda for decades. It stopped after Kohl left the post of chancellor. Moreover, in that period, Helmut Kohl approved sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro among his allies from the EU and NATO, because he wanted to punish "evil Serbs".

As soon as the armed conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina began in the spring of 1992, Helmut Kohl sided with Muslims and Croats and advocated their alliance against Serbs. He helped them financially, militarily, logistically in the media. In November 1995 in Dayton, where an agreement was signed which ended the Bosnian-Herzegovinian war, he supported the demands of Alija Izetbegović and Franjo Tuđman.
 

Meeting with Franjo Tudjman on December 5, 1991.
"Danke Deutschland" - thank you for everything

In his last term as German chancellor, the focus of armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia shifted from the western parts to the south-east when anti-Serbian hysteria began again for which Albanians from Kosovo and Metohija were misused. In fact, the Albanian national community in the Republic of Serbia has been skillfully manipulating their rights in the worst possible way for decades, saying that their rights were "endangered".

They wanted the realization of the so-called chauvinist idea. Greater Albania, but to the detriment of Serbia, Vardar Macedonia, Greece, and Montenegro. Apart from the Americans, the Helmut Kohl administration had a lot of help in that. He wanted to see Serbia on its knees.

Assistance to Albanians Agreed, June 1998

Although he did not welcome the NATO aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in power, he openly advocated such an idea.

LEAVING POLITICS
In the 1998 elections, Helmut Kohl lost confidence and was defeated by Gerhard Schroeder of Lower Saxony, who was twice chancellor. The reason for that was the bad internal policy of the Circle administration, which resulted in high unemployment.

However, Schroeder was replaced by Angel Merkel in 2005. From 1991, she was Kohl’s protegee, and as such, appointed to the federal government.

Vladimir Putin welcomes Kohl to the Kremlin
on March 6, 2002.

He officially left politics in 2002, although his party HDU later wanted to use his success abroad for its political benefits.

He published his memoirs entitled "Memories" three times, in which he referred to three periods: before the reign of 1930-1982, the first two terms of 1982-1990, and the 1990s. In addition, he published the book "No Care for Europe".

He suffered a stroke and ended up in a wheelchair in 2008. He had partial paralysis and difficulty in speaking.
It is interesting that in 2011 he started giving interviews to journalists in which he condemned the policy of Angela Merkel, her long-term associate, saying that she was destroying "his Europe".

In April 2016, he received Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at his residence, with whom he had talks on the Migrant Crisis, where they issued a joint statement stating that Europe is not ready to absorb so many refugees from Islamic countries.

DEATH AND INHERITANCE

Helmut Kohl died at the age of 87 on June 16, 2017, at his home in Ludwigshafen, Ogersheim County. He was buried in the cemetery of the Catholic Cathedral in Spier. He chose that place in the summer of 2015 when his health was seriously damaged.

None of his closest family attended his funeral: children and grandchildren, nor at any ceremony later dedicated to him.

Helmut with Pope Benedict XVI

Many public figures from Europe and the world paid tribute to him, among them:

• Pope Francis, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, called Helmut Kohl "a great statesman and a devoted European who saw far and wide."
• Tenzin Diasto, the 14th Dalai Lama, praised Kohl as a "visionary and leader".
• Donald Tusk, a politician from Poland, the president of the EP, called Kohl "the unifier of Europe".
• George W. Bush praised Kohll as "a friend of freedom and a great statesman of post-war Europe."
• Bill Clinton, the president of the USA, said that he was saddened by the death of a dear friend and that Kohl "was a visionary of 21st century Europe".
• James Becker, an American diplomat, called Kohl's death "the loss of the bell of freedom".
• Emanuel Macron, the French leader, told Cole that he "smoothed French-German relations".
• Mark Rutte, the Spanish prime minister, praised Kohl as a great statesman who "shaped European history".
• The Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said that he had left a deep mark in European history.
• Romano Prodi, the Italian Prime Minister and President of the European Commission said that Kohl was a "European giant".
• Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, praised Kohl for being a great "old man" and a friend of Hungarians.