Wshe didn't know everything. And what did Juliane Weber really know? For example, about the donations that Helmut Kohl and his CDU secretly accepted for many years in order to then hide the money in “black accounts”. And had she actually accepted a large sum of cash in an envelope from manager Eberhard von Brauchitsch on behalf of CEO Friedrich Karl Flick 20 years earlier and passed it on to her boss? In both cases, Juliane Weber was summoned before an investigative committee and had to provide official information. Which was visibly uncomfortable for her, who rarely ever appeared in public, which is why there are hardly any pictures of her.
Kohl's girl for everything
But as always, Kohl could rely on his closest confidant. She asserted that she knew nothing, neither about the Flick nor about the CDU party donation affair. This was widely doubted, after all she was “Kohl’s girl for everything”. That was definitely meant to be derogatory, just as it would later make someone else smaller and more insignificant than she was in the end: “Kohl’s girl” number two – Angela Merkel.
Juliane Weber, who was born in Dresden in 1939, was at Kohl's side from an early age. For a long time, Hannelore Kohl refused to accompany her husband on his career across Germany. While Hannelore Kohl, as a single mother of two sons, preferred to stay in Ludwigshafen, in the Oggersheim district since 1971, Juliane Weber went with her boss first to Mainz, later to Bonn, and finally to Berlin.
“Not a relationship in the normal sense”
Kurt Biedenkopf, once a confidante of Helmut Kohl, once said: “There was an unsolvable problem for Hannelore Kohl. And that was Ms. Weber. Mrs. Weber had an incredible influence on cabbage. This is a very strange relationship. It was certainly not a relationship in the normal sense. Although Ms. Weber was almost always near him.” There is no question that she had an enormous influence that she never let out to the outside world. “And this kind of thing is a problem for the wife herself.”
In fact, there were evil tongues who claimed that “the effective and dashing Juliane Weber, married to a ZDF director, was more than just Kohl's office manager,” as Hans-Peter Schwarz writes in his Kohl biography. Hannelore Kohl dealt with the rumors in her own way: she demonstratively went on vacation with Juliane Weber. Because she knew: Helmut Kohl couldn't do it without his “Juliane”.
And that has been the case since 1965, even before he became state chairman of the CDU in Rhineland-Palatinate. And she stayed that way for 40 years, until 2005, when she retired at the age of 66 and settled in Bonn with her husband, the former CFO of ZDF, Bernhard Weber. Juliane Lamp married him in 1964 when she was still working in the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of the Interior.
She herself described her task as “coordination and communication”. If you wanted to go to Kohl's, you had to go past Weber. She was much more than just his secretary, office manager or personal assistant, she was an integral part of the “Kohl system” and was part of his “kitchen cabinet” that was formed early on and consisted of a few loyal followers such as Horst Teltschik, Wolfgang Bergsdorf and Eduard Ackermann.
But Weber, like most of his other companions, did not leave Kohl because he became more and more stubborn. “There are only two people who know everything about me,” Kohl is said to have once said, “my wife and Juliane.” And the former Chancellor was able to rely on both of them until the end. As has only now become known, Juliane Weber died on Saturday at the age of 84.
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