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Valiant Combatant: "Grey Panther" Trude Unruh is dead

2022-08-02T15:06:25.944Z


Valiant Combatant: "Grey Panther" Trude Unruh is dead Created: 08/02/2022Updated: 08/02/2022 16:52 Trude Unruh, founding member of the Die Grauen party. © Roland Weihrauch/dpa/archive image A veteran of the senior citizens' movement is dead. For decades, Trude Unruh stood up for the rights of the elderly - not quietly and reservedly, but loudly and heartily. Wuppertal – The co-founder of the S


Valiant Combatant: "Grey Panther" Trude Unruh is dead

Created: 08/02/2022Updated: 08/02/2022 16:52

Trude Unruh, founding member of the Die Grauen party.

© Roland Weihrauch/dpa/archive image

A veteran of the senior citizens' movement is dead. For decades, Trude Unruh stood up for the rights of the elderly - not quietly and reservedly, but loudly and heartily.

Wuppertal – The co-founder of the Senior Citizens Protection Association and the Gray Panther party, Trude Unruh, is dead. As the city of Wuppertal confirmed on Friday at the request of the German Press Agency in Düsseldorf, Unruh had died on November 30 last year at the age of 96 .

The death of the controversial and argumentative politician, who had withdrawn from the public many years ago for health reasons, has only now become public.

Nothing is known about the cause of death.

On its website, the Federal Association of Gray Panthers praised the activist, who was born Gertrud Kremer in 2025, as a “tireless fighter for the rights of the old and the young”.

The co-founder of the Gray Panthers has achieved a lot since 1975.

"Countless cornerstones of their work have become important and right for the people." The association will "miss its combative role model" and promise to continue.

Her name was program for Trude Unruh.

"As long as I'm alive, I'll keep fighting," said the Westphalian, for whom retirement was a foreign word, many years ago in a dpa interview.

Most recently, Unruh was ill.

From 1987 to 1990 she was a member of the Bundestag.

She was elected via the state list of the North Rhine-Westphalian Greens, but was later expelled from the parliamentary group because of the founding of the Die Grauen party.

From 1968 to 1973, Unruh was a member of the SPD, later she switched to the FDP and other political groups.

She was born on March 7, 1925 as the illegitimate daughter of a housekeeper in Essen and grew up with her grandparents.

She spent her childhood in a Krupp workers' settlement.

Her grandfather was a steelworker.

In 1940 she started working in an office at Krupp and, thanks to diligent training, worked her way up to executive secretary.

In 1968 she moved to Wuppertal with her husband Helmut and their two sons.

In a marriage that lasted almost 50 years, her husband actively supported her until his death in 1993.

Even as a social democrat, Unruh drew attention to herself as a combative social politician.

After only five years, the restless fighter turned her back on the SPD, first looking for a political home with the FDP and then with the Green Action Future, the Pensioners' Party and finally the Citizens' Party.

In 1975, the then 50-year-old founded the Grauen Panther in Wuppertal, and in 1989 the party Die Grauen.

The resolute man of conviction polarized supporters and opponents within her own ranks.

She founded the party after members of the Gray Panthers accused her of politicizing the Senior Citizens Protection Association.

"It's terrible to have apolitical people around you," said Unruh at the time.

"If you turn on the flame in the morning, that's energy policy.

That's how you have to see it."

In the summer of 1998, the Wuppertal-based club had to take an oath of disclosure because of a mountain of debt amounting to around 20 million marks.

However, the Gray Panthers later reorganized themselves with a new legal structure.

Trude Unruh's life's work thus continues.

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Unruh did not have to testify in a donation fraud scandal that ended with convictions for other federal board members in 2011.

Investigations against the then 86-year-old had been discontinued because of severe dementia.

dpa

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2022-08-02

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