Hannelore Kohl

Who was Hannelore Kohl?

Hannelore Kohl was the first wife of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. She met him for the first time at a prom in Ludwigshafen, Germany, when she was 15 years old.

She was born in Berlin and was christened Johanna Klara Eleonore Renner. Her father was Wilhelm Renner, who headed the employment office at HASAG that developed the successful one-man anti-tank weapon, the Panzerfaust. Later, 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 5 July 2001, Kohl was found dead at age 68 in her Ludwigshafen home.