Maike Kohl-Richter

Maike Kohl-Richter ( Richter; born April 1964) is best known as the second wife of the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl from 2008 until his death in 2017.

She is controversial in Germany for her right-wing anti-immigrant views and support for Viktor Orbán, and for her public feud with Kohl's children and grandchildren.

She has been accused of hijacking the Kohl legacy and "has been criticized by Kohl's own children for allegedly hero-worshipping the former chancellor and being obsessed" with him.

She was criticized by German media, public figures and the Kohl family after Kohl's death.

Richter was born in April 1964 in a village near Freudenberg in Siegerland, to Evelyn and Wolfgang Richter.

She grew up the third of four children in Oberheuslingen.

Her father was an engineer working for RWE in Siegen.

Her mother was a local reporter at the local newspaper, the Siegener Zeitung.

She described her daughter in a biographical novel as "a child face like out of a children's book, joyous, unrestrained and totally without problems".

Richter attended a Protestant high school ("Gymnasium") and joined the CDU's youth wing, the Junge Union, while still at school.

She was noticed by Dirk Metz, district chairman, who said, "She was a perky one, with short cut hair - a stunner."

She became a committee member of the district executive Siegen-Wittgenstein.

From 1994 to 1998, Richter worked as a junior speechwriter at the German Chancellery when Helmut Kohl was in power.

She left after he lost the election and briefly worked as an adviser to Friedrich Merz, member of the Bundestag for the CDU.

Thereafter she was a business journalist for Wirtschaftswoche for one year.

She joined the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in Bonn as economy ministry aide heading the department for regional economic policy, urban development and regional planning.

She attended Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and earned a doctorate in economics in 1996.

Friends remember that she wanted to become at least state secretary ("mindestens Staatssekretärin").

Her elder sister and a brother became physicians.

In 2004, she vacationed at a beach resort in Sri Lanka, and survived the massive 2004 tsunami.

Per Richter, Helmut Kohl had started introducing her as his "new life-partner" in 2005.

She left her job only in 2008 after she had married Helmut Kohl.

They married on 8 May 2008, seven years after the suicide of Kohl's widely respected first wife Hannelore Kohl.

At the time Richter was 44 years old and Helmut Kohl, then aged 78, was hospitalized in "critical condition" with serious head trauma, and was barely able to speak.

For the duration of their marriage, Helmut Kohl was impaired by brain damage, had difficulty speaking and was wheelchair-bound.

According to Helmut Kohl's son Peter Kohl, Helmut Kohl did not intend to marry Richter and had stated this clearly; "then came the accident and a loss of control," Peter Kohl said, suggesting that Richter had pressured his then seriously ill father into marrying her.

Peter Kohl said Richter had seemed nervous and hectic the first time they met, and that she had declared, seemingly in full earnest, that her brother "also is a Kohlian".

He had asked her if she said "Korean" and she had loudly proclaimed, "No, no, no, K-O-H-L-I-A-N," and looked at him in a completely disenchanted way.

Peter Kohl speculated that his father was not "able or allowed" to take part in the 10th anniversary commemoration event for Hannelore's death.

Peter Kohl wrote in the biography of his late mother Hannelore Kohl about the only time he had visited Richter's apartment.

"In my male naïveté, I was not prepared for what awaited me there: I had entered a kind of private Helmut Kohl museum," which he described as full of Helmut Kohl photographs and artefacts wherever he looked.

"The whole thing looked like the result of staggering, meticulous collecting for the purpose of hero worship, as we know it from reports on stalkers," an unhealthy obsession with his father.

Kohl became estranged from his two sons and his grandchildren.

In 2011, Peter Kohl managed to visit his father together with his daughter, Leyla Kohl, for the last time.

His father had been happy to see them, but after a while he let them know that it would be better if they left before Richter found out, otherwise there would be "great troubles".

In 2012, Jochen Arntz criticized Kohl-Richter in the Süddeutsche Zeitung for building a "wall" around Helmut Kohl and controlling him; as a result Kohl had also become estranged from many former friends whom she disliked.

In 2013, his sons said his new wife kept their father "like a prisoner" and that she prevented them from seeing him for the prior six years.

Kohl's sons later explained that it was unclear whether letters purportedly from their father were actually written by him or Richter, they were not allowed to speak with their father on the telephone and that they were threatened by Richter with police and imprisonment if they tried to visit their parents' house, their own childhood home.

They noted that Richter had appropriated their late mother's jewellery, their family heirlooms, and ordered their mother's pictures to be removed from the Kohl family home; "it seemed to be the case that she tried to erase all traces or memories of Hannelore Kohl, her children and grandchildren," Peter Kohl wrote.

In 2014, Heribert Schwan, Helmut Kohl's biographer, described Richter as "more than conservative, rather German Nationalist" (deutschnational), and said she insists on the right to "interpretational sovereignty" in relation to Kohl's life and that she had insisted on many proven falsehoods.