Rainer Krüger

Rainer Krüger was born in 1939 in Silesia. He studied geography, English, education and philosophy at the University of Göttingen and at the Free University of Berlin, and completed his doctorate in 1967. He then worked as a research associate at the East European Institute of the Free University of Berlin.

In 1968 Krüger moved to the Pädagogische Hochschule Berlin as a university lecturer, and in 1970 he was appointed full professor of geography at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Oldenburg.

The University of Oldenburg was founded in 1973. Krüger served on the executive board of its founding committee, and that work led to his election as founding rector in 1974, when he was 34. As rector he pursued a policy of renewing university structures, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary research and project based study, and he worked to make the university easier to enter, for example for people already in employment. He concluded the first cooperation agreement between a German university and the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB). He also pressed for the decision of the university's bodies to name it after Carl von Ossietzky, which the state government of the time rejected; the name was only approved in 1991. Environmental and energy research, taken up in the 1970s, was later cited by the university as an example of the pioneering work of the reform university.

By June 1979 the university had 4,905 enrolled students and, alongside teacher training across the full range of subjects, eight new diploma programmes. That year Krüger resigned as rector in protest against the state government's higher education policy, which had not kept its promise to expand the university. He returned to teaching and research in geography. In 1992, together with Professor Brake, he founded the Forschungsinstitut Region und Umwelt (FORUM) at the University of Oldenburg and was its first scientific director until 1998. He held his professorship until he became emeritus in 2004.

After his retirement in 2004 Krüger moved to Berlin and devoted himself to tourism research. He led tourism projects in Germany and Italy, and in 2008 he founded CaravaningConsult, a consultancy and planning agency for tourism in the state of Brandenburg. He lived in Berlin until the end of his life.

Rainer Krüger died on 11 November 2026 at the age of 87. The University of Oldenburg announced his death in a press release on 13 November 2026. The cause of death was not made public. University president Ralph Bruder said the university was mourning a formative personality and scholar whose service to the university, founded in 1973, could not be valued highly enough, and that his exceptional commitment had laid the foundation for Oldenburg to become one of the most successful new universities in Germany despite early resistance in politics and the public.

Krüger is remembered as the man who steered the University of Oldenburg through its founding years. The reforms associated with his rectorate, including interdisciplinary research, project study, wider access for working people, the cooperation with the trade unions and the early commitment to environmental and energy research, helped shape the institution's identity, and the Carl von Ossietzky name he championed was eventually adopted in 1991. The research institute FORUM, which he co founded in 1992, continued his interest in regional and environmental questions.