Obituary Prof. Dietrich Kraft (1937 – 2026)
Friends and colleagues,
distinguished members of the Austrian Society of Allergology and Immunology!
On February 28, 2026, our society’s Past President, Full Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and recipient of many prestigious awards and prizes, Prof. emer. Dr. Dietrich (Dietz) Kraft, passed away peacefully after a short illness precipitated by an injury.
Dietz was born in Innsbruck in 1937, studied medicine in Vienna and Hamburg, and received his MD degree in 1965. He started his academic career as dermatovenerologist and soon developed a keen interest in not only the clinicopathological features of (skin) diseases, but also in the cellular and molecular events operative in disease pathogenesis. For this purpose, he embarked on a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Prof. Robin Coombs at the University of Cambridge, U.K. where he received a profound training in the fields of immunology and experimental pathology.
After his return to Vienna, he studied the role of the complement system in immune complex diseases, the phenotype and function of natural killer cells and, most notably, the immunopathology of allergic disorders such as penicillin allergy. This work laid the groundstone for his becoming a world-renowned leader in basic allergology. His claim to fame is and will always be to have led this field, after many years and decades of „medical alchemy“, into a new, molecular era. The production of recombinant allergens such as Betv1 and many others by Dietz Kraft and his fellows and students has become the gold standard for a correct and reproducible diagnosis of and, for that matter, a targeted therapy of allergic diseases.
As a highly esteemed member of the international scientific community and founder of an Austrian school of allergology, Dietz Kraft was one of the figureheads heralding the renaissance of medical sciences in Austria after the disastrous time of the Nazi regime and the postwar years of poverty and deprivation. He could do so not only because of his sound and cosmopolitan education, his brilliant intellect and his critical mind, but also because of other important facets of his personality: friendliness, warmheartedness and diplomacy, embedded in a catalogue of convictions and values that he was willing to articulate and to defend.
As a scientist, he was a strict follower of Sir Karl Popper, knowing that the absolute scientific truth does exist only in a given moment and must be subject to falsification in the future.
Next to and together with his wife Johanna and his children Nikolaus and Katharina, Dietz was interested in philosophy and history and a true lover of the fine arts. Nobody who has experienced it will ever forget him describing and explaining, with great passion and enthusiasm, the different schools of painting in the 19th and 20th century and their mutual influences on each other.
Dietz, you have left us an enormously rich legacy. We are challenged to keep it alive.
Georg Stingl, M.D.
On behalf of the ÖGAI board
