Horst Köhler (22 February 1943-1 February 2025) was President of Germany from 1 July 2004 to 31 May 2010, succeeding Johannes Rau and preceding Jens Böhrnsen.
Biography[]
Horst Köhler was born in Heidenstein, Nazi Germany (now Skierbieszow, Poland) in 1943 to a family of Bessarabian Germans with Romanian citizenship. He spent the first fourteen years of his life a refugee of World War II and communism, and he was raised in Ludwigsburg, Baden-Wurttemberg. Köhler served in the Bundeswehr before becoming a civil servant in the Federal Ministry of Economics and later serving as head of Gerhard Stoltenberg's office in the Federal Ministry of Finance. He served as Secretary of State in the Finance Ministry from 1990 to 1993, preparing G7 summits and international conferences; he also negotiated the final withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany in 1994. Köhler organized the privatization of state businesses in East Germany, selling 11,000 aged and moribund businesses through the Treuhand.
After a banking career and serving as President of the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC from 2000 to 2004, Köhler served as President of Germany from 2004 to 2010. Köhler supported the synthesis of patriotism and cosmopolitanism, and he supported "globalization with a human face," poverty eradication, a "fair partnership with Africa" that involved meetings of heads of state, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and students from Africa and Europe, and the vetoing of the privatization of Germany's Air Safety Administration. By the summer of 2005, he had a 72% approval rating. However, he resigned in 2010 after he was criticized for advocating the use of the German military to safeguard trade, jobs, and income (seen as an unconstitutional military policy), even though his speech was targeted at fighting Somali pirates. He served as a UN special envoy for Western Sahara from 2017 to 2019 and died in 2025 at the age of 81.