Erhard Eppler (9 December 1926 – 19 October 2019)[1] was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and founder of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ).

[2] He studied English, German and history in Frankfurt, Bern and Tübingen, achieved a PhD and worked as a teacher.

Born in Ulm on 9 December 1926, Eppler grew up in Schwäbisch Hall where his father was the headmaster of the local grammar school.

"[6] While he was studying in Bern at the end of the 1940s, Eppler got to know Gustav Heinemann, one of the founders of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

[3] Heinemann became Minister of the Interior from 1949 to 1950, but then left the cabinet, and later the CDU, together with several other party members who disagreed with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's policy of complete integration into the Western world.

During Gerhard Schröder's second term as Chancellor (2002–2005), however, he supported the government's economic and social reforms, which were widely criticized as neo-liberal (Agenda 2010).

Moreover, although he had been close to the peace movement of the 1980s,[10] he supported the foreign policy of the Schröder government and approved of German participation in the military interventions in Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan since 2001.