Former US President George HW Bush said the world had lost "a true friend of freedom".
He is fondly remembered as the man who brought East and West Germany together after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Tributes also poured in from overseas, with former USA president George H.W. Bush hailing "one of the greatest" post-war leaders, and European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker honouring him as the "very essence of Europe".
Later, he was mentor to Germany's current chancellor, Angela Merkel, handing her her first ministerial post in 1991 and referring to her as his "mädchen" or girl.
Kohl (seen in 1990) served as chancellor from 1982 to 1998.
Shortly after leaving office, Kohl's reputation was tarnished by a financing scandal in his center-right CDU, now led by Chancellor Merkel.
"When the Berlin Wall fell, he rose to the occasion".
Elation over German reunification ebbed amid the harsh realities of its cost and the difficulties of integrating east and west, but Kohl's coalition squeaked by again in 1994. But in 1999, when it emerged Kohl had been misusing funds to give his friends kickbacks, Merkel stunned Germany by denouncing him in a front page article for a top conservative newspaper.
Kohl, Germany's longest-serving postwar leader, died today at his home in Ludwigshafen aged 87.
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Even Germany's Left party, the spiritual successor to the East German communists, said that Friday's focus should be on "mourning a great European".
As chancellor of a unified Germany, Kohl reassured its neighbors by definitively relinquishing claims on their territories that had historically had ethnically German populations, and that Nazi Germany had claimed.
The head of the International Monetary Fund is expressing sadness at the death of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Kohl is widely credited as the architect of their eventual reunification, brokering a deal with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev including an undisclosed sum estimated at around 50 to 80 billion marks paid from West Germany to the Soviet Union. "A truly great German has died", said Gabriel in a statement.
In 2000, he was forced to resign as honorary chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party he had led for 25 years, after admitting to receiving $1.31 million in illegal cash donations during his time as chancellor, which he doled out to local party organisations.
"Working closely with my very good friend to help achieve a peaceful end to the Cold War and the unification of Germany within North Atlantic Treaty Organisation will remain one of the great joys of my life", he said in a statement.
"I knew at that moment that Helmut Kohl was the man who could help them realise their dreams".
Kohl had always shown "a great and deep interest in Russia", he said in a statement on the website of his Gorbachev Foundation. This required great political strength and courage - both of which qualities Helmut had in abundance.
As "Chancellor of Unity", Kohl entered the history books.
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