Kohl kept the peace while Wall tumbled

Chancellor's memoirs: He thanks Gorbachev, but says British PM's prejudices made her an obstruction to German unity

On 9 November 1989 Helmut Kohl was visiting Poland when he received an agitated telephone call from one of his aides in Bonn. "Herr Chancellor, the Wall is falling at this very moment," stammered Eduard Ackermann, at the other end of the line. "Are you sure, Ackermann?" asked the Chancellor.

It was an uncharacteristic chink in Mr Kohl's armoury of supreme self- confidence. Had he not told Mikhail Gorbachev four months earlier that the tide of German unity, like the Rhine, could not be dammed? In a book due to be launched today, Mr Kohl seeks to demonstrate that he not only knew the two Germanys would unite in his lifetime, but carried the project through almost single-handedly, with a little help from the Soviet leader.

Never mind the millions of East Europeans who had risen against Communist rule throughout the Soviet block. The Wall, it seems, tumbled before the Chancellor's will power. "I wanted German unity," proclaims the title of Mr Kohl's memoirs. Ergo, German unity happened.

The Chancellor, who celebrates 14 years in office today, often refers to the unification as his greatest achievement, to be surpassed only by the unification of Europe's currencies in 1999. Historians credit him with recognising the opportunity and grasping it with both hands, but according to these recollections he should also be thanked for stopping the Russians shooting at East Germans.

After the momentous news reached him, Mr Kohl interrupted his Polish visit and made haste for East Germany. Under a post-war treaty, his Luftwaffe jet was banned from the Berlin skies, so he flew to Hamburg over Swedish airspace, transferred to a military plane rustled up by the United States embassy in Bonn, and headed east.

In West Berlin, he was met by jeering left-wing crowds, who greeted his every word delivered from the balcony at Schoneberg town hall with whistles. As he was trying to pacify the mob, Moscow was receiving alarming news about the dramatic events unfolding in the city. Mr Gorbachev had managed to reach a member of the Chancellor's entourage by telephone.

"Gorbachev wanted to know if it was true that things in Berlin were getting completely out of hand," Mr Kohl writes, according to extracts published by Der Spiegel magazine. "Was it true that outraged masses were storming Soviet military facilities?"

Mr Kohl says he later discovered the Soviet leader had been fed false information by his own people and the East German security service. "Opponents of reform in the KGB and the Stasi wanted to provoke a military intervention by the Soviet troops stationed in East Germany," he explains.

But the Chancellor dared not go to the phone and leave the balcony, so he asked an aide to relay his assurance to the Kremlin that Berlin was not on the verge of an insurrection. Mr Gorbachev believed him and a bloodbath was averted. "To this day I am very grateful to Gorbachev for not listening to the agitators," Mr Kohl writes. "As Mikhail Gorbachev told me later, he had then sent an unmistakable signal to the East Berlin authorities that, unlike on 17 June 1953, the Soviet Union's tanks would not be intervening."

In fact, the border had only been open for one day, and East Germans were far too busy sampling the delights of West Berlin's department stores to worry about the Soviet bases. And the East German leadership very quickly understood whose orders they would have to follow.

The following day, 11 November, Mr Kohl had his first telephone conversation with Egon Krenz, the new and soon to be ex-leader of the German Democratic Republic. Mr Krenz tried to extract a pledge that German reunification would not be on the agenda, but his Western counterpart flatly refused: "On this question I already had ... an entirely different opinion," he writes.

The implications sank in immediately. Mr Krenz asked sheepishly how the East German media ought to describe their discussion. "Just tell them that we have held an intensive discussion," Mr Kohl suggested. "Krenz repeated it in military style: `an intensive discussion'."

The plan to annex East Germany was hatched by Mr Kohl's kitchen cabinet. The East German Prime Minister, Hans Modrow, had produced a blue-print for a "confederation", an idea the Chancellor was not prepared to tolerate. Others might want to consult their governments, even their legislature s, about such an important matter, but not Mr Kohl.

On Saturday, 25 November, he travelled to his house in Ludwigshafen, gathered two friends around the kitchen table, made "a couple of calls" to an MP, and came up with the "10 Points for Germany", the document detailing re-unification step by step. But it was not all the Chancellor's doing. His memoirs reveal that the actual words were jotted down by his wife, Hannelore Kohl.