41 Facts About Hans-Dietrich Genscher

Hans-Dietrich Genscher is widely regarded as having been a principal "architect of German reunification".

Hans-Dietrich Genscher was President of the German Council on Foreign Relations and was involved with several international organisations, and with former Czech President Vaclav Havel, he called for a Cold War museum to be built in Berlin.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher was born on 21 March 1927 in Reideburg, now a part of Halle, in what later became East Germany.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher was the son of Hilda Kreime and Kurt Genscher.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher later said he was unaware of it at the time.

Late in the war, Hans-Dietrich Genscher was deployed as a soldier in General Walther Wenck's 12th Army, which ostensibly was directed to relieve the siege of Berlin.

In 1952, Hans-Dietrich Genscher fled to West Germany, where he joined the Free Democratic Party.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher passed his second state examination in law in Hamburg in 1954 and became a solicitor in Bremen.

In 1965 Hans-Dietrich Genscher was elected on the North Rhine-Westphalian FDP list to the West German parliament and remained a member of parliament until his retirement in 1998.

In 1972, while minister for the interior, Hans-Dietrich Genscher rejected Israel's offer to send an Israeli special forces unit to Germany to deal with the Munich Olympics hostage crisis.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher was widely regarded a strong advocate of negotiated settlements to international problems.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher was a major player in the negotiations on the text of the Helsinki Accords.

In 1984, Hans-Dietrich Genscher became the first Western foreign minister to visit Tehran since the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher was an active participant in the further development of the European Union, taking an active part in the Single European Act Treaty negotiations in the mid-1980s, as well as the joint publication of the Genscher-Colombo plan with Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Emilio Colombo which advocated further integration and deepening of relations in the European Union towards a more federal Europe.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher later was among the politicians who pushed hard for monetary union alongside Edouard Balladur, France's finance minister, and Giuliano Amato, circulating a memorandum to that effect.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher retained his posts as foreign minister and vice chancellor through German reunification and until 1992 when he stepped down for health reasons.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher is most respected for his efforts that helped spell the end of the Cold War, in the late 1980s when Communist eastern European governments toppled, and which led to German reunification.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher had great interest in European integration and the success of German reunification.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher soon pushed for effective support of political reform processes in Poland and Hungary.

When thousands of East Germans sought refuge in West German embassies in Czechoslovakia and Poland, Hans-Dietrich Genscher held discussions on the refugee crisis at the United Nations in New York with the foreign ministers of Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1989.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher's 30 September 1989 speech from the balcony of the German embassy in Prague was an important milestone on the road to the end of the GDR.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher negotiated the German reunification in 1990 with his counterpart from the GDR, Markus Meckel.

In 1991, Hans-Dietrich Genscher successfully pushed for Germany's recognition of the Republic of Croatia in the Croatian War of Independence shortly after JNA entered Vukovar.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher hoped that such recognition would stop the fighting.

At a meeting of the European Community's foreign ministers in 1991, Hans-Dietrich Genscher proposed to press for a war crimes trial for President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, accusing him of aggression against Kuwait, using chemical weapons against civilians and condoning genocide against the Kurds.

When, in the aftermath of the war, a far-reaching political debate broke out over how Germany should fulfill its global responsibilities, Hans-Dietrich Genscher responded that if foreign powers expect Germany to assume greater responsibility in the world, they should give it a chance to express its views "more strongly" in the United Nations Security Council.

On 18 May 1992, Hans-Dietrich Genscher retired at his own request from the federal government, which he had been member of for a total of 23 years.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher had announced his decision three weeks earlier, on 27 April 1992.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher did not specify his reasons for quitting; however, he had suffered two heart attacks by that time.

Ahead of the German presidential election in 1994, Hans-Dietrich Genscher proclaimed his lack of interest in the position, but was nonetheless widely considered a leading contender.

In late 1992, Hans-Dietrich Genscher was appointed chairman of a newly established donors' board of the Berlin State Opera.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher founded his own consulting firm, Hans-Dietrich Genscher Consult GmbH, in 2000.

In 2001, Hans-Dietrich Genscher headed an arbitration that ended a monthlong battle between German airline Lufthansa and its pilots' union and resulted in an agreement on increasing wages by more than 15 percent by the end of the following year.

In 2008, Hans-Dietrich Genscher joined former Czech President Vaclav Havel, former United States Ambassador to Germany John Kornblum and several other well-known political figures in calling for a Cold War museum to be built at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.

On 20 December 2013, it was revealed that Hans-Dietrich Genscher played a key role in coordinating the release and flight to Germany of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of Yukos.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher had first met Khodorkovsky in 2002 and had chaired a conference at which Khodorkovsky blasted Russian President Vladimir Putin's pursuit of his oil company.

Khodorkovsky asked his lawyers during a 2011 prison visit to let Hans-Dietrich Genscher help mediate early release.

When Khodorkovsky's mother was in a Berlin hospital with cancer in November 2013, Hans-Dietrich Genscher passed a message to Khodorkovsky suggesting the prisoner should write a pardon letter to Putin emphasizing his mother's ill health.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher signed on in 2014 to be a member of the Southern Corridor Advisory Panel, a BP-led consortium which includes former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Peter Sutherland, chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher died at his home outside Bonn in Wachtberg on 31 March 2016 from heart failure, 10 days after his 89th birthday.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher has been awarded honorary citizenship by his birthplace Halle and the city of Berlin.