Obituary of Hartmut Nordsieck (4 January 1940-24 October 2022)

Abstract

On 24 October 2022, Hartmut Nordsieck, world-renowned specialist on the land-snail family Clausiliidae and honorary member of the Malacology Section at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. Hartmut Nordsieck was born on 4 January 1940 in Hermsdorf near Berlin, the second of 5 children of Fritz and Hildegard Nordsieck. Shortly before the end of the war, his mother fled with her 2 sons to relatives in the central-German Harz region, where his father worked as a district administrator in Gandersheim (in what was then West Germany) after his return from the war. Later the family finally moved southwest to the Rhineland, where they found a new home in Haan, in the district of Mettmann. Hartmut’s father, Dr Fritz Nordsieck (1906–1984), was a business economist and administrative expert, who worked for many years as a local politician but also became known as a researcher on European marine molluscs. Hartmut’s education was closely overseen by his father, who held firm values and was very dominant but also close to nature, and this had a formative influence on him.