Horst K%C3%B6hler

Horst Khler bornFebruary 1943 is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union, and served as President of Germany from 2004 to 2010. As the candidate of the two Christian Democratic sister parties, the CDU and the CSU, and the liberal FDP, Khler was elected to his first fiveyear term by the Federal Assembly onMay 2004 and was subsequently inaugurated onJuly 2004. He was reelected to a second term onMay 2009. Just a year later, onMay 2010, he resigned from his office in a controversy over his comment on the role of the German Bundeswehr in light of a visit to the troops in Afghanistan.

Khler was born in Skierbieszw , in the General Government area of Germanoccupied Poland, as the seventh child of Elisabeth and Eduard Khler, into a family of Bessarabian Germans from Rcani in Romanian Bessarabia . Horst Khlers parents, ethnic Germans and Romanian citizens, had to leave their home in Bessarabia in 1940 during the NaziSoviet population transfers that followed the invasion of Poland and the MolotovRibbentrop Pact, which awarded Bessarabia to the Soviet Union. As part of the Generalplan Ost, they were resettled in 1942 at Skierbieszw, a village near Zamo, Poland . As the Wehrmacht was pushed back and the first parts of Poland had to be abandoned in 1944, the Khler 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 Khler hence spent most of his firstyears as a refugee.

Source: Wikipedia