Tilman Zülch

The Society for Threatened Peoples (German: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker) grew out of this organization in 1970. Its main office has been located in Göttingen since 1979. As of 2006, its German branch, GfbV-Deutschland, is one of the largest human rights organizations in Germany.

In June 1968, with Klaus Guerke, he founded Aktion: Biafra Hilfe to draw the attention of the world to the genocide happening in Biafra, in present-day Nigeria.

Zülch was born in Liebau, in the Sudetenland, now Libina, Czech Republic. His family left the Sudetenland in 1945, during the postwar expulsion of Germans. As a boy he belonged to the Bündische Jugend, part of the German Youth Movement, in Hamburg. He completed his Abitur at the Louisenlund Gymnasium in Rendsburg-Eckernförde. He studied politics and economics in Hamburg, Graz, and Heidelberg. He was active in college political groups and the Außerparlamentarische Opposition.

Tilman Zülch feels that it is an obligation to campaign for religiously and ethnically persecuted people, especially for Germany and Austria given the crimes of Nazi Germany. He feels that the way for Germans to deal with the past is not to stay silent in face of other crimes such as those of the Stalin era, the mass expulsions of Germans after 1945, or the genocides of today. For example, in the early 1990s he was fined for breaking into a Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm warehouse in Munich to secure evidence of the company's covertly supplying the Iraqi air force; he repeatedly protested Russia's military actions in Chechnya, comparing the bombing of Grozny to Dresden in 1945; in 2005 in advance of the official visit of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg, East Prussia) to celebrate the city's 750th anniversary, he demanded in an open letter that Schröder note the mass expulsions and deaths of Germans there and elsewhere in the former eastern territories of Germany under Stalin; he protested the 2008 Summer Olympics in China on behalf of Tibet, comparing it to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin under the Nazis; and he has been credited as one of those most responsible for the Sinti and Roma being recognized as a minority people in Germany. He is also the editor of the journal bedrohte völker (previously pogrom).

Tilman Zülch (born September 2, 1939) is a German human rights activist. He is the founder and general secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP).