From the UK Telegraph:
“The feared ‘Iron Lady’… played an unfriendly, indeed a dangerous role,” in the debate over reunification, he argues in Helmut Kohl, Memories 1982 to 1990.
The book, Mr Kohl has hinted, is his revenge on Lady Thatcher for her snubbing him in her own memoirs as a “provincial politician”. His fury and puzzlement at his British opposite number fill large chunks of its chapter on reunification, suggesting that he is still smarting at his treatment at her hands.
He recalls her losing her temper at a dinner hosted by the then French president François Mitterrand nine days after the Berlin Wall was breached in 1989.
German reunification should go ahead because Nato was in favour of it, Mr Kohl argued. “Over dessert the British prime minister started heavily laying into me… I remained calm… with the thought that even Margaret Thatcher cannot prevent the German people from following their destiny,” he writes.
“Incensed with rage, Thatcher stamped her feet and screamed: ‘That’s how you see it, how you see it!’.”
On another occasion soon afterwards she threatened to veto reunification and implied that Britain had to stand up to Germany as it had during two world wars. “We’ve beaten the Germans twice and now they’re back!” she reportedly said.
The English did not consider European unification to be a good thing under Philip II, Napoleon or Hitler. It is truly a pity that Lady Thatcher did not see the stealthy machinations involved in constructing this latest revival of monstrosity.