BERLIN (AP) – The latest on the death of former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose legacy includes putting a reunited Germany at the heart of Europe and helping create the continent’s common currency, the euro. (all times local):
7 p.m.
German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel says former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was “a great statesman, a great German politician and most of all, a great European.”
Gabriel said in a statement Friday that Kohl “did a lot not just to make German reunification happen, but also for European integration.”
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, died Friday at 87.
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5:48 p.m.
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.