Helmut Kohl has always been grateful that he benefited from the "grace of late birth." Though forced into the Hitler Youth, Kohl was too young to be drafted into the Nazi war machine and sent to the front.

But he did not escape the torments of war. He felt the privation and human cost of the Nazi era.

After witnessing the bloodbath that was World War II, Kohl was inspired to keep Europe at peace — through a united Germany and European Union currency, the euro.

Kohl drew that spark from his father, who loathed the Nazis. Hans Kohl, a World War I veteran, feared the coming of World War II, wrote Henrik Bering in the authorized biography "Helmut Kohl."

Years later, Helmut Kohl wrote: "He despised crimes that were being committed in the name of Germany in the climate of racism and Teutonmania."

The Nazi regime ordered Hans Kohl, then over 50, back into uniform. He returned from the war in failing health.

As Germany collapsed, Hitler ordered youngsters into uniform. Helmut went to an anti-aircraft unit near Berchtesgaden, Hitler's Alpine aerie. This for a teen who had spent the early war years enduring Allied bombing raids on his hometown, Ludwigshafen. When the war ended in 1945, Kohl walked home across Germany. He had nothing to wear but his uniform.

He was jumped and beaten by a group of Poles freed from a Nazi labor camp. His brother, Walter, had died in combat. Two-thirds of Kohl's hometown was rubble. He went to work on a farm, tending cattle and plowing fields.

At just 16, and with his own conscience clear, Kohl began his political career. It would thrust upon him the responsibility and privilege of uniting communist East and democratic West Germany.

In his early political life, Kohl faced critics who said he had an easy war, that he should have rejected the Hitler Youth. The charge was unfair, says Konrad Jarausch, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina.

Jarausch contends Kohl could not have dodged the Hitler Youth and that his age, just 9 when the war began and 15 when it ended, was too young for conscription. Rather than wriggle off the hook, "he became keenly conscious of his own historic responsibility."

Kohl had been an average boy with uninspiring grades from a working-class family before the war. His family's beliefs shaped his path to leadership.

His parents were politically conservative and Catholic, but open-minded. In 1960 they embraced his Protestant wife, Hannelore.

Kohl began to work for the Christian Democratic Union in high school. That party, with religious roots and conservative values, would be his political home.

In college, after a few years of foundering, he found his intellectual passion — political science and history. He earned a doctorate at the University of Heidelberg in 1958.

"History became very important to him, which is probably why he's proud of his record," said Lars Rensmann, a political science professor at the Universities of Michigan and Potsdam.

Kohl's goal became to drive Germany toward unification and push Germans to embrace a European identity. "He will go into the history books not only as the chancellor of unification, but also as a key figure of European integration," Rensmann said.

Kohl, now 77 and widowed, dodges personal questions. Instead, "he is eager to discuss historical figures and topics, and in doing so he indirectly reveals a good deal about himself," Bering wrote.

Kohl climbed the political ladder quickly. In 1959, one year after earning his Ph.D., he won a seat in the Rhineland-Palatinate state house.

Nothing could stop him. He became head of the state in 1969 and then won a seat in the federal parliament.

His failed bid for the chancellorship in 1976 was simply a bump in the road. He drove on to become Germany's head of government in 1982, steering his party to a massive electoral triumph soon thereafter.

He began to implement his key program, to drag Germany out of the shadow of World War II.

"Kohl felt that Germany should become more self-confident than it was," Rensmann said.

Critics on the left underestimated him, Jarausch says. The situation reflected what his U.S. counterpart, Ronald Reagan, faced.

"They saw him as a country bumpkin," Rensmann said.

Kohl had a folksy manner that "played well with the electorate," Jarausch said. "The German left always loved to hate him."

At 6 feet 4 inches, he had size going for him. He made others look like garden gnomes, Henry Kissin-ger once observed.

Kohl was not "rhetorically inspiring," Jarausch said.

Yet behind that unsophisticated exterior was a master tactician.

The East German regime collapsed and Germans breached the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. Throughout his term, Kohl had called for one Germany. Now he was quick to act.

He put together a plan to unite the two Germanies. "We want to pursue this course with warm hearts and cool heads," he told the German congress.

Bringing the East into the fold in 1990 — after four decades of communist oppression and decay — was daunting. Integration was guaranteed to drag down the old, cozy West German economy.

Kohl tackled that complication with the same vision he displayed while embracing the euro currency and thus a united Europe, Rensmann says. He consulted mainly himself while cashing in the German mark for the euro in the 1990s. Many of his countrymen groused. Some allies, including the British and French, fumed.

Paris called it a "surprise attack." France had advocated a united Europe, but now Germany was twice as big.

"If you're hugging someone who suddenly grows a foot and a half, hugging becomes harder," Jarausch said. France feared its loss of influence to a larger Germany.

Kohl convinced French President Francois Mitterrand that a united Europe and NATO would contain Germany. The key was the euro, which would create economic unity and dampen calls for war.

Kohl did not shirk from a strong defense. In the early '80s, he supported putting U.S. missiles in Germany to counter Soviet missiles.

In the '90s, Nazi-like ethnic cleansing in the Balkans helped Kohl convince Germans they had military obligations beyond their borders.

Kohl sank along with Germany's economy, which paid the price of high unemployment amid unification. He lost his office in 1998.

Today, many people laud Kohl for helping Germans transition from guilt to responsibility in the world, Rensmann says.

"He was the right man at the right time, in 1989 and 1990," he said.

BY PETER BENESH