Helmut Kohl Net Worth

What Was Helmut Kohl's Net Worth?

Helmut Kohl was a German politician who had a net worth of $1.5 million. Helmut Kohl was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, in April 1930, and he died on June 16, 2017. Helmut was associated with the Christian Democratic Union political party. He received a doctorate degree from Heidelberg University and started his political career in 1960 when he served as leader of the CDU party. From 1969 to 1976, Kohl served as Minister-President of Rhineland-Palatinate. He served as Chancellor of Germany from 1982 to 1998, which included Chancellor of West Germany from 1982 to 1990 and reunified Germany from 1990 to 1998. As Chancellor, he oversaw the end of the Cold War, and his 16-year term was the longest since Otto von Bismarck.

Kohl is perceived as being responsible for the German reunification, and he and French president François Mitterrand are considered to be responsible for the establishment of the European Union. The pair received the Charlemagne Prize in 1988. Helmut also won the Prince of Asturias Award in International Cooperation in 1996 and was named an Honorary Citizen of Europe in 1998. He was described by United States Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush as "the greatest European leader of the second half of the 20th century."

Early Life

Helmut Kohl was born Helmut Josef Michael Kohl on April 3, 1930, in Ludwigshafen, Germany. He was the son of Cäcilie and Hans Kohl, and he had two older siblings. Helmut's father was a civil servant and a veteran of the Bavarian army. His older brother died at the age of 18 while fighting in World War II. Kohl grew up in a conservative Catholic family that was loyal to the Catholic Centre Party. When Helmut was 10 years old, he joined the Deutsches Jungvolk section of the Hitler Youth, and five years later, he was sworn into the Hitler Youth a few days before the war ended; membership was mandatory for boys that age. He was drafted for military service that year but wasn't involved in combat.

Kohl attended Ruprecht Elementary School and the Max-Planck-Gymnasium, and after he graduated in 1950, he studied law in Frankfurt am Main. In 1951, he transferred to Heidelberg University and studied political science and history. Helmut graduated from Heidelberg University in 1956, and then he accepted a fellowship at the Alfred Weber Institute of Heidelberg University, where he joined the student society AIESEC. Kohl earned a doctorate in history in 1958, and his dissertation was titled "Die politische Entwicklung in der Pfalz und das Wiedererstehen der Parteien nach 1945" ("The Political Developments in the Palatinate and the Reconstruction of Political Parties after 1945"). Helmut then took a job as an assistant to the director of a Ludwigshafen foundry, and in 1960, he became a manager at the Industrial Union for Chemistry.

Career

In 1959, Kohl was elected to the Rhineland-Palatinate state legislature, and a decade later, he was elected the state's minister president (prime minister). He had joined the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) in the mid-1940s, and he became the party's national deputy chairman in the late '60s and its chairman in 1973. He ran for chancellor in the 1976 federal elections as the candidate of the CDU and the Christian Social Union (CSU), but he was defeated by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) candidate, Helmut Schmidt, who was later forced out of office. In the vote for a new chancellor in March 1983, Kohl earned the majority of votes. He was re-elected on January 25, 1987, and he subsequently led the drive for the reunification of West Germany and East Germany. In May 1990, Helmut's government and East Germany's government signed a treaty to unify the social welfare and economic systems of the two countries. East Germany was dissolved on October 3, 1990, and its constituent states (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Thuringia, Saxony, and Saxony-Anhalt) joined West Germany to form a reunified Germany. On December 2, 1990, the first free, all-German parliamentary elections since the early 1930s were held, and Kohl and his governing coalition received a 134-seat majority.

After absorbing East Germany's economy, Helmut's government had to increase taxes and cut government spending. Voters were unhappy with these changes, and in the October 1994 parliamentary elections, Kohl's majority was reduced to 10 seats. He was defeated by Gerhard Schröder in the 1998 federal elections, and he resigned from his position as leader of the CDU. In 1999, Helmut was embroiled in a scandal involving illegal campaign contributions and was later fined for misusing funds. He retired from politics in 2002, and he published his first memoir, "Memories 1930–1982," in 2004.

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Personal Life

Helmut married Hannelore Renner on June 27, 1960. The couple met at a dance class in 1948, and Kohl proposed in 1953 but delayed the wedding until he was financially stable. They welcomed sons Walter (born 1963) and Peter (born 1965) together. Hannelore was fluent in English and French, and she was an advisor to Helmut during his political career. Walter and Peter both attended college in the U.S. (Harvard and MIT, respectively). Walter was a financial analyst for Morgan Stanley before co-founding a consulting firm with Helmut, and Peter was an investment banker in London. Sadly, Hannelore died by suicide in July 2001 at the age of 68 after years of suffering from photodermatitis (also known as sun poisoning).

In 2008, 78-year-old Kohl married 44-year-old Maike Richter while he was in the hospital with head trauma. They remained together until Helmut's death in June 2017, and he was suffering from a brain injury the entire time and was in a wheelchair, and could barely speak. Peter has said that his father didn't intend to marry Maike and "then came the accident and a loss of control." Maike refused to let Helmut's children and grandchildren see him for the last six years of his life. In a biography Peter wrote about his mother, he spoke about the sole time he visited Maike's apartment, describing it as "a kind of private Helmut Kohl museum" that "looked like the result of a staggering, meticulous collecting for the purpose of hero worship." Helmut underwent a bladder operation in 2010 and heart surgery in 2012. In June 2015, he had hip replacement surgery, followed by intestinal surgery, and was reported to be in "critical condition."

Death

On June 16, 2017, Kohl died of natural causes at the age of 87. On July 1st, he received a European act of state in Strasbourg, France. A Catholic requiem mass took place at Speyer Cathedral in Germany, and Helmut was laid to rest in the Cathedral Chapter Cemetery. None of his children or grandchildren were involved in any of the ceremonies due to a feud with Kohl's second wife, Maike Kohl-Richter, who ignored their wishes for a Berlin ceremony and for Helmut to be buried in the family tomb alongside his parents and first wife. Chancellor Angela Merkel said of Kohl's death, "This man who was great in every sense of the word — his achievement, his role as a statesman in Germany at its historical moment — it's going to take a while until we can truly assess what we have lost in his passing." Pope Francis stated, "Chancellor Kohl, a great statesman and committed European, worked with farsightedness and devotion for the good of the people in Germany and in neighbouring European countries."

Honors

Kohl earned numerous honors during his lifetime. In 1977, he received an Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. In the '80s, he was presented with Portugal's Grand Cross of the Order of Christ (1984) and Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry (1988), and he and François Mitterrand shared the Charlemagne Prize of Aachen for "distinguished service on behalf of European unification" (1988). In the '90s, Helmut received the Europe Prize for Statesmanship (1991), Bavarian Order of Merit (1994), the B'nai B'rith International Presidential Gold Medal (1996), Morocco's Order of Ouissam Alaouite (1996), Germany's Eric M. Warburg Award (1996), the Prince of Asturias Award in International Cooperation (1996), the Vision for Europe Award (1997), Poland's Order of the White Eagle (1998), the Grand Cross in Special Design of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1998), the Order of the Netherlands Lion (1999), Belgium's Order of Leopold (1999), the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom (1999), the United States EastWest Institute's Statesman of the Decade award (1999), and an Olympic Order from the International Olympic Committee (1999).

Kohl was later awarded an Order of Merit from the France Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (2003), the United States Chicago Council on Foreign Relations' Global Leadership Award (2005), Estonia's Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana (2006), the Jean Monnet Foundation for Europe's Médaille d'or (2007), the Germany Jewish Museum's Prize for Understanding and Tolerance (2007), the United States Atlantic Council's Distinguished Leadership Award (2009), Croatia's Grand Order of Queen Jelena (2010), and the American Academy in Berlin's Henry A. Kissinger Prize (2011).

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