At first he was just an adventurer, then an eyewitness and an activist: Rüdiger Nehberg set out from his own bakery for spectacular survival trips. He became Germany's number one adventurer.
Rausdorf (dpa) - The survival pioneer and human rights activist Rüdiger Nehberg is dead. The adventurer and activist who became known as "Sir Vival" died at the age of 84, as his wife told the dpa. "We mourn," was also the website of Nehberg's association Target.
With his spectacular actions as a survival artist on the Atlantic, in the jungle and in the desert, Nehberg had always caused a sensation. He used the attention to get involved with endangered peoples. Since the beginning of the 80s, he campaigned for the indigenous people of the Yanomami in the Brazilian rainforest, whose habitat had been endangered by gold prospectors.
Later, Nehberg and his wife fought against the practice of female genital mutilation in young girls and women in Africa and Asia. With his association Target, the couple living in Rausdorf near Hamburg organized a "caravan of hope" through the desert and in 2006 a conference of high-ranking Islamic scholars in Cairo, which declared genital mutilation in the form of a fatwa to be prohibited by Islamic law.
The skilled baker and confectioner from Bielefeld had his own shops in Hamburg before and initially during his adventurous days. At the end of the 1960s he dealt with survival training and became a survival pioneer in Germany.
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