Kurt Dehnicke, Professor Emeritus University of Marburg, Germany, and former Editor of Zeitschrift für Anorganische und Allgemeine Chemie (ZAAC) passed away on Sunday, January 16th.
A renowned chemist, he will be remembered for his imaginative and experimentally sophisticated research in the field of main-group elements and transition metals as well as by the further development of physical methods such as IR-spectroscopy. Dehnicke and his co-workers were also the first to synthesize many metal derivatives of sulfur, nitrogen or halogen containing compounds and developed new perspectives for inorganic chemistry of metal compounds of the main group elements. Dehnicke authored over 800 articles.

Kurt Dehnicke was born in Köln, Germany. He worked for a brown coal state holding company before studying chemistry in Leipzig, at that time part of the German Democratic Republic, DDR. He started a PhD and then fled to the Federal Republic of Germany. He received his PhD thesis with J. Goubeau on boron chemistry from the University of Stuttgart and gained his Habilitation on compounds containing electropositive chlorine in 1965. Soon after this, in 1967, Dehnicke became Professor of the Inorganic Department of the University of Marburg, where he stayed until his retirement.