It's a page six type story and most Germans won't care.....but Focus (the German news magazine) laid out a little short piece on the former Chancellor of Germany....Helmet Kohl (now deceased).
After the 1998 German election....the defeated Helmet Kohl had virtually every single document that he'd created (into hundreds of files).....transported out of the government facility and over to the party headquarters. Later (several years), he had the files removed from the party headquarters and sent to his house....chief reason being a memoir that he was writing.
Well....the Federal Archives folks have been hint for months that they'd like to recover the documents. Most of the Chancellors all turn over their documents to the Archives and it helps to provide a research base on history.
So, it's an odd thing. This week....the Archives got a letter from Kohl's widow...Maike Kohl-Richter, who says that Kohl had no government documents from his term of office.
Yep....absolutely none.
What happened? Unknown. Now, I could look at this and think three things.
First, maybe after he acquired the hundreds of binders....Kohl himself just started shredding everything on his own. Maybe out of anger over the election, or the treatment by the party....it doesn't matter.
Second, the binders never left the party headquarters, and mostly all sit there in some basement room.
Third, Kohl left this messy business of cleaning up his legacy to this widow, and she decided to shred the whole thing to prevent any historian from ever digging into the Kohl era.
Either way, it's done. Whatever was done or achieved in the Kohl era.....will never be reviewed to the personal extent of what Kohl signed or did. Kind of a curious way to sign off a legacy, but that's it.
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