German ‘first lady’ as the wife of Helmut Kohl who served as Chancellor from 1982 to 1998. She met him for the first time at a prom in Ludwigshafen, Germany, when she was 15 years old. She chose the portmanteau “Hannelore” to be used as her first name.
In the days following Germany’s defeat in World War II, at the age of 12, Hannelore Kohl was raped by Red Army soldiers and subsequently “thrown out of a window like a sack of potatoes by the Russians.” In addition to the obvious psychological impact, the attacks left her with a fractured vertebra and back pain for the rest of her life. In order to help others with similar injuries, in 1983 she founded the Kuratorium ZNS, a foundation that helps those with trauma-induced injuries to the central nervous system, and became its president.
On 27 June 1960, she married Kohl, after he had already asked for her hand in marriage in 1953, delaying the ceremony until he was financially stable. Both had known each other since 1948, when they met in a dancing class. They had two sons, Walter Kohl (born 1963) and Peter Kohl (born 1965). Hannelore Kohl had studied languages and spoke fluent French and English; during her husband’s political career, she was an important adviser to him, especially on world affairs. She was a steadfast advocate of German reunification even before it seemed feasible, and of NATO and Germany’s alliance with the United States.
On 5 July 2001, Kohl was found dead at age 68 in her Ludwigshafen home. She had apparently committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills, after years of suffering from what she had claimed to be a very rare and painful light allergy induced by an earlier penicillin treatment that had forced her to avoid practically all sunlight for years. In 2005, the Kuratorium ZNS was renamed ZNS – Hannelore Kohl Stiftung in her honour.
However, journalist Andrew Gimson, writing in The Spectator, cast doubt upon the official version of events. Similar questions were also raised by the German news magazine Stern and the BBC.
Link to Wikipedia biography