Chancellor Angela Merkel's office says the German leader's mother, Herlind Kasner, has died. She was 90.
Merkel's office confirmed the death in a short statement Thursday and asked that the "privacy of the chancellor and her family" be respected.
According to German media reports, Kasner, who lived in the town of Templin, about 75 kilometers (50 miles) north of Berlin, died earlier this month.
Kasner, who was born in the Free City of Danzig, as Gdansk in today's Poland was known in Germany between 1920 and 1939, moved to communist East Germany in 1954 with her husband Horst when he took up a post at a Lutheran seminary in Brandenburg.
Merkel was known to be close to her mother, who was present in parliament when Merkel was sworn in for her fourth term last year. The chancellor, who rarely comments on her private life, has made no public comment on her death.
Kasner was a retired English and Latin teacher in Templin, where Merkel's father, who died in 2011, was a protestant minister.
A teacher by trade, she was not allowed to teach in East German state schools because of her husband's work in the church, which was frowned upon by the communist authorities.
She ended up teaching English and Latin in Templin, a small town in the Uckermark district of Brandenburg, where the family settled.
Templin mayor Detlef Tabbert recently remarked that she was still teaching English at the age of 90.
