Siegfried Steiger: “Inventor of the 110 and 112” is dead
Siegfried Steiger has been committed to modernizing the emergency services for decades – after his little son died after an accident because the ambulance took so long.
The founder of the Björn Steiger Foundation, Siegfried Steiger, died in Winnenden (Rems-Murr district) on Thursday evening. This was announced by his foundation on Friday. The SWR had previously reported.
The Steiger Foundation has made a significant contribution to the development of the modern rescue service in Germany – including the commissioning of the uniform emergency numbers 110 and 112.
Siegfried Steiger was 92 years old, two weeks earlier his wife Ute Steiger had died at the age of 88. The Björn Steiger Foundation is named after their son, who died in a car accident in Winnenden in 1969 at the age of eight.
It was a preventable death: it took almost an hour for the ambulance to arrive. The boy died on the way to the clinic not from serious injuries, but from shock.
The Steigers from Winnenden near Stuttgart mortgaged their house to finance the air rescue
Like his wife, Steiger grew up in what was then East Germany. After both fled to West Germany in the 1950s, they settled in Winnenden near Stuttgart and ran an architect’s office there. They had three children.
In addition to setting up the nationwide emergency numbers, the Steiger couple also achieved the installation of emergency telephones on the side of the road, the establishment of the 24-hour emergency doctor system, and also contributed to the BOS radiotelephony standard in the rescue service and to cell phone location by rescue control centers. When the air rescue service with helicopters in Germany threatened to fail financially in 1972, the couple mortgaged their own house to secure the financing.
