Helmut Kohl spouse Maike Kohl-Richter
Controversial second marriage (2008–2017)
While in hospital in 2008 after suffering serious head trauma, Kohl, then aged 78, married Maike Richter, a former Chancellery employee who was 44 years old; they had no children. For the entire duration of this marriage, Kohl had a brain injury, was barely able to speak, 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. Richter has been severely criticised in Germany, by Kohl's children, former friends and by German media. Following his new marriage, Kohl became estranged from his two sons and his grandchildren, and his sons said their father was kept "like a prisoner" by his new wife. His children and grandchildren were also prevented from seeing him by his new wife for the last six years of his life. In his biography of his mother, Peter Kohl wrote about the only time he had visited Richter's apartment, which he described as "a kind of private Helmut Kohl museum" full of Helmut Kohl photographs and artefacts everywhere; "the whole thing looked like the result of a staggering, meticulous collecting for the purpose of hero worship, as we know it from reports on stalkers," Kohl wrote. Jochen Arntz criticised Maike Richter in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2012 for building a "wall" around Helmut Kohl and controlling him; as a result he had also become estranged from many former friends disliked by his new wife. Kohl biographer Heribert Schwan describes Richter as "more than conservative, rather German nationalist," and said she insists on the right to "interpretational sovereignty" in relation to Kohl's life and that she has insisted on many proven falsehoods. It caused a scandal when Richter denied Kohl's sons and grandchildren entry to Helmut Kohl's house, the sons' childhood home, after Kohl's death. Richter was also criticised for attempting to take full control of Kohl's funeral, and for trying to prevent Chancellor Merkel from speaking at the ceremony in Strasbourg. Richter wanted the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has fiercely criticised Merkel's refugee policies, to speak instead; she only relented when told it would cause a scandal.Kohl was honoured with an unprecedented European act of state on 1 July in Strasbourg, France. A Catholic requiem mass was subsequently celebrated in Speyer Cathedral. Kohl was interred in the Cathedral Chapter Cemetery ("Domkapitelfriedhof") in Speyer, directly adjacent to the Konrad Adenauer Park and a few hundred metres to the northwest of the cathedral.    It was reported that Kohl had himself chosen the burial location in the late summer of 2015 when his health began to deteriorate.
No member of the Kohl family—Kohl's children and grandchildren—participated in any of the ceremonies, owing to a feud with Kohl's controversial second wife Maike Kohl-Richter, who had among other things barred them from paying their respects to him at his house, ignored their wish for a ceremony in Berlin and their wish that Kohl should be interred alongside his parents and his wife of four decades Hannelore Kohl in the family tomb.
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