In the 1990s, he pushed forward the railway reform under Chancellor Kohl, and he also made a name for himself as a reorganizer of AEG: the former railway boss Dürr died at the age of 90.
The Swabian entrepreneur and former railway boss Heinz Dürr is dead. He died on Monday evening in Berlin at the age of 90, as the mechanical and plant manufacturer Dürr AG in Bietigheim-Bissingen announced. From 1990 to 2013, Dürr was chairman of the supervisory board of Dürr AG.
“As a company, Heinz Dürr always looked outside the box and questioned things,” said Dürr CEO Jochen Weyrauch in tribute to him. “That made him an extraordinary personality with insatiable curiosity.”
Railway boss at Helmut Kohl’s request
Dürr became head of the German Federal Railway in 1991 and, with the railway reform, pushed forward the merger of the Federal Railway and the Reichsbahn as well as the conversion of the official railway into a private company. He took over the post at the request of then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
In 1997, Dürr, then 64 years old, moved to the supervisory board, which he headed until 1999. He then took over the management of the Carl Zeiss Foundation.
negotiator in collective bargaining negotiations
Dürr, born in 1933, initially completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith and then studied mechanical engineering in Stuttgart. He joined the family business in 1957 and drove internationalization forward. In the 1970s he made a name for himself as a negotiator for metal employers in collective bargaining negotiations.
In 1980 he gave up his position as head of the family company Dürr and moved to the top of the electrical company AEG, which was in financial difficulties. This then found a new home under the umbrella of what was then Daimler-Benz AG.