Death and funeral of Helmut Kohl

Helmut Kohl, the former Chancellor of Germany, died on the morning of Friday, 16 June 2017 in the Oggersheim district of Ludwigshafen, his home town, aged 87.^[1][2][3] In office from 1982 to 1998, he is widely regarded as the "father of the German reunification" and as a principal architect of the Maastricht Treaty which established the European Union (EU) and the euro currency. In 1998 he became the second person to be named an Honorary Citizen of Europe. Following his death, he was lauded by world leaders as "the greatest European leader of the second half of the 20th century" and was honoured with an unprecedented European Act of State in his honour in Strasbourg, France, attended by the leaders of the EU's nations and other current and former world leaders. Subsequently, a Catholic requiem mass was celebrated in the Speyer Cathedral in Speyer, Germany, after which Kohl was interred in the nearby Old Cemetery.

Helmut Kohl was survived by his two sons Walter Kohl and Peter Kohl, and by his grandchildren Johannes and Leyla Kohl. No member of the Kohl family, Kohl's children and grandchildren, participated in any of the ceremonies, owing to a feud with Kohl's controversial second wife Maike Kohl-Richter, who had among other things barred them from paying their respects to him at his house and ignored their wishes for a ceremony in Berlin and that Kohl be interred alongside his parents and his wife of four decades, Hannelore Kohl, in the family tomb.^[4]