Horst Köhler

Horst Köhler's parents, ethnic Germans and Romanian citizens, had to leave their home in Bessarabia in 1940 during the Nazi-Soviet population transfers that followed the invasion of Poland and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which awarded Bessarabia to the Soviet Union.

As part of the Generalplan Ost, they were resettled in 1942 at Skierbieszów, a village near Zamość, Poland (then part of the General Government).

Horst Köhler (born 22 February 1943) is a German politician who served as President of Germany from 2004 to 2010.

As the Wehrmacht was pushed back and the first parts of Poland had to be abandoned in 1944, the Köhler family fled to Leipzig.

In 1953, they left the Soviet Zone – via West Berlin – to escape from the communist regime.

The family lived in refugee camps until 1957, when they settled in Ludwigsburg.

Horst Köhler hence spent most of his first 14 years as a refugee.

A teacher recommended that the refugee boy Köhler should apply for the Gymnasium, and Köhler took his Abitur in 1963.

After two years of military service at a Panzergrenadier battalion in Ellwangen, he left the Bundeswehr as Leutnant der Reserve (Reserve Lieutenant).

He studied and finally gained a doctorate in economics and political sciences from the University of Tübingen, where he was a scientific research assistant at the from 1969 to 1976.

Köhler joined the civil service in 1976, when he was employed in the Federal Ministry of Economics.

In 1981, he was employed in the Chancellory of the state government in Schleswig-Holstein under Prime Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg.

The following year, Köhler was made head of the Ministers office in the Federal Ministry of Finance, upon Stoltenberg's recommendation.

A member of the CDU since 1981, he was Secretary of State in the Federal Ministry of Finance from 1990 to 1993, and as such, the administrative head of the Ministry and the deputy of the Federal Minister of Finance (Theodor Waigel).

In that capacity, he served as a "sherpa" (personal representative) for Chancellor Helmut Kohl, preparing G7 summits and other international economic conferences.

He rose to Director General for financial policy and federal industrial interests in 1987.

In 1989 he became Director General for currency and credit.

Between 1993 and 1998 he served as President of the association of savings banks in Germany, Deutscher Sparkassen- und Giroverband.

As secretary of state, Köhler negotiated both the German-German monetary union and the final withdrawal of Soviet troops from the GDR in 1994.

Besides, he was chief negotiator for the Maastricht Treaty on European Monetary Union, which led to the creation of the euro as the Union's single currency.

Köhler also played a central role in organizing the enormously expensive privatization of state businesses in Eastern Germany.

He organized the Treuhand, the agency charged with selling 11,000 rusting and moribund companies.

He was president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from 1998 to 2000 and head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2000 to 2004.

In 1998 Köhler was appointed president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and settled in London, where the headquarters of the bank is located.

At the EBRD, he took over in September 1998, when the bank was facing annual losses of $305 million, largely due to the financial collapse of Russia.

He took stock of the situation, then began to refocus the EBRD's notoriously lax investment policies and tighten up on opulence at the bank itself.

At the same time, he was widely reputed to clash with his American vice president, Charles Frank, and other EBRD officials reportedly complained about his temper and management style.

Köhler was appointed managing director and Chairman of the executive board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2000.

The government of Gerhard Schröder nominated him after their first nominee, Caio Koch-Weser, was rejected by the United States.

Though respected, Köhler was not a particularly well known or prestigious figure in international financial circles.

At the time, he was one of three candidates for the IMF position, with Japan having put forward its former deputy finance minister Eisuke Sakakibara and several African nations backing Stanley Fischer.

In one of his first moves at the IMF, Köhler joined British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown in hosting a gathering of anti-poverty activists to discuss an international campaign to write off billions of dollars in debts that developing nations owe the IMF, World Bank and other government creditors.

As the candidate of the two Christian Democratic sister parties, the CDU (of which he is a member) and the CSU, as well as the liberal FDP, Köhler was elected to his first five-year term by the Federal Convention on 23 May 2004 and was subsequently inaugurated on 1 July 2004.

He was reelected to a second term on 23 May 2009.

Just a year later, on 31 May 2010, he resigned from his office in a controversy over a comment on the role of the German Bundeswehr in light of a visit to the troops in Afghanistan.

During his tenure as president, whose office is mostly concerned with ceremonial matters, Köhler was a highly popular politician, with approval rates above those of both Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and later Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Köhler is an economist by profession.

Prior to his election as president, Köhler had a distinguished career in politics and the civil service and as a banking executive.

From 2012 to 2013, Köhler served on the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Köhler was born in Skierbieszów (then named Heidenstein), in the General Government area of German-occupied Poland, as the seventh child of Elisabeth and Eduard Köhler, into a family of Bessarabian Germans from Rîșcani in Romanian Bessarabia (near Bălți, present-day Moldova).