When Helmut Kohl’s wife, Hannelore, took her life in 2001, after years battling a rare allergy to daylight, she left a suicide note begging her sons to make peace with their estranged father.
Now, days before what would have been her 80th birthday, Walter and Peter Kohl have gone public with details of their long-running feud with their father.
They accuse him of cheating on their mother in the 1990s with a woman 34 years his junior, Maike Richter. Then an employee in the chancellor’s office and now the ex-chancellor’s second wife, she is accused by the Kohl brothers of being an obsessive stalker who wears their dead mother’s clothes and jewellery.
After Hannelore Kohl died and his father’s relationship with Richter became public, Peter Kohl recalled visiting his future stepmother’s apartment, which he recalls as a “private Helmut Kohl museum”.
“It all looked like the result of decades of meticulous collector’s passion for the purposes of hero worship, like one can sometimes read in reports about stalkers,” said Peter Kohl on German television. “It gave me a very bad feeling . . . every conversation is like an adulation of my father like a propaganda channel permanently in the background.” The strained relationship between the ex-chancellor and his two sons has been the subject of much speculation for years. However they say matters have deteriorated rapidly since their mother’s death and the emergence of Mrs Kohl-Richter.
The ailing former chancellor has, in interviews, spoken movingly of how his second wife has improved his quality of life – particularly since a bad fall in 2008 left him wheelchair-bound and unable to speak clearly.
“If she wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be alive and my life would be a lot less worth living,” said Kohl in a recent interview.
But the Kohl sons say their stepmother has used his ill-health as an excuse to shut their father away from the outside world, “censoring the reality” he experiences by screening calls, letters and visitors.
She has banned them and many other long-time friends and employees from visiting the ex-chancellor, they say. Recent attempts to visit their father have ended with threats of arrest in front of the former family home.
“For decades I spoke every two days with my father, now the last time I saw him was May 2011,” said Peter Kohl. “And even then that was only possible because I just showed up at the door . . . After about 10 minutes, my father said it was probably better if I went because, if we didn’t, there’d be huge fuss again.” The Kohl sons say they are concerned about mismanagement of their father’s legacy, going to court to prevent the former ghost-writer of Helmut Kohl’s memoirs, Heribert Richter, writing further about their family.
Confidential files
Dr Richter has conducted more than 600 hours of interviews with Dr Kohl and is in possession of confidential files.
“My father cannot, for health reasons, control it all,” said Peter Kohl, and Mrs Kohl-Richter has “clearly completely lost the overview.”
