Highest Tribute: Klaus J. Jacobs receives the Gold Medal of Honor from his Hometown Bremen

On April 16, 2008, the Bremen Senate bestowed the Gold Medal of Honor on Klaus J. Jacobs for extraordinary services to the City State of Bremen. In bestowing Bremen’s highest award possible the Hanseatic city above all honored Mr Jacobs’ support for the international, private Jacobs University Bremen, to which the Jacobs Foundation bestowed a 200 million euro investment in the fall of 2006.

[ Apr 16, 2008]  Bremen’s Mayor, Jens Böhrnsen, said at the bestowal of the Medal of Honour: „With the Bremen born Klaus J. Jacobs is today for the first time in 90 years a man of business honored with this medal. The honor is bestowed for his exemplary lifetime achievement as entrepreneur and as patron, whose donation to the then International University Bremen brought worldwide attention and approval. With the 200 million euro investment of the Jacobs Foundation, the largest private sum then ever donated to a university in Europe, Klaus Jacobs set a spectacular example world wide in promoting a unique university, which today bears his name.“ The 1,100 students from 91 nations of today’s Jacobs University Bremen make the university a unparalleled global ambassador for Bremen, Böhrnsen continued. “You, Klaus Jacobs, have made an outstanding contribution in strengthening the reputation of Bremen as a center of science and research,” the mayor said. Jens Böhrsen made assurance that the Bremen Senate will continue to be a reliable partner in the realization of Jacobs University's future plans. “I would like to stress that we see in Jacobs University’s future a piece Bremen’s future – in scientific, economic, and social respects.”

Joachim Treusch, President of Jacobs University, paid his thanks to Klaus J. Jacobs and the Jacobs Foundation at the award ceremony: “Your support of our wonderful university has been both generous and spectacular, and without affecting our academic freedom. My thanks goes also to Bremen and to the Senate, who for ten years supported the creation of a private, international university, an at the time of its founding unheard of adventure in Germany, and who, with today’s honors, reaffirm and strengthen their commitment to our ideas and our goals.”

Klaus J. Jacobs, who was born in Bremen in 1936, studied in Hamburg before entering the Bremen based family business, Jacobs AG, in 1962. In 1972 he became the chief executive officer. In 1982 Jacobs AG fused with Interfood to form Jacobs Suchard AG; which was sold in 1990 to Phillip Morris and was renamed Kraft Jacobs Suchard. In the same year the world’s largest temporary employment agency Adecco SA was created trough several mergers, especially the firms Adia Interim and Ecco. From 1995 to 2006 Klaus Jacobs was the President of Addecco SA, of which he is now the honorary president.

In addition to his business ventures, Klaus Jacobs founded the non-profit Jacobs Foundation in 1988 for the development and sponsorship of young people around the world. In 2001 the foundation supported the founding of the Jacobs Center on Lifelong Learning and Institutional Development was founded at Jacobs University (then International University Bremen), which was opened in 2003. Since 2004 the Jacobs Foundation has supported Bremen children with summer language camps for immigrant children with a deficit in the German language. In 2006 the foundation made the generous 200 million euro investment in International University Bremen, which was renamed Jacobs University Bremen in 2007.

The Bremen Gold Medal of Honour was first bestowed in 1854 on the then Mayor Johann Smidt. Several other notable mayors of the Hanseatic city as well as other distinguished personalities have received the award since then. Most well known recipients have been Federal President Karl Carstens (1984) and Hans Koschnick (1994), former Bremen mayor and former of the Federal Parliament.