Born April 3, 1930
Ludwigshafen, Germany

German chancellor

Helmut Kohl became the chancellor of West Germany in the early 1980s. After West Germany and East Germany reunited on October 3, 1990, he became chancellor of the entire country, winning Germany's first nationwide elections since World War II (1939–45). At the end of the war, Germany had been divided along zones of Allied occupation. The Soviet zone was called East Germany; like the Soviet Union, East Germany had a communist government. The three other occupied zones, controlled jointly by the British, the French, and the Americans, were called West Germany. Like the occupying Western countries, West Germany had a democratic government and a capitalist economy.

Kohl engineered the reunification of his country and then oversaw its rise to economic dominance in Europe. He was the longest-serving German leader...