29.03.2023

Hans Georg E Krause 1937-2023

We have received the sad news that German access and telehandler sales manager Hans Georg Krause has died.
He passed away on March 6th at the age of 86, having suffered from ill health over the past few years.

Georg Krause was born in Magdeburg which became part of East Germany after the war, but moved away in the 1950s and travelled to the USA, where he worked with a number of companies, including Sealand and Ford, moving back to Germany he spent most of his career in the Cologne area, where he worked with Sony and then chocolate comapny Stollwerck, he even worked for a film producer in Frankfurt.
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Hans Georg Krause

His career in the equipment market began, as far as we know, when he started working for JCB Germany in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s. However he found ‘his niche’ in the access market when he joined UpRight in April 1994 to manage the company’s wholly-owned Germany distribution business - Instant Deutschland - a role he fulfilled until he retired, although he served as a consultant to companies in the aerial lift business to keep busy and his mind active until around 2014, when his much loved wife Gisela sadly passed away, following a long period of illness.
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Hans Georg Krause (L) with Holger Johan at Platformers Days

George Krause was a true ‘one off’. His former colleagues can all relate numerous anecdotes of ‘George being George’. He could talk his way out of almost any situation, no matter how challenging, and it is almost certain that some of the frequent orders he landed were due to customers giving in to his friendly, eloquent but persistent persuasion - you can just imagine then saying: “OK OK where do I sign!”

He was always impeccably dressed and fastidious about everything, from his car to his office, not to the point of being weird, he just had his act together and liked precision in almost everything he did. In his decade or two in the access business he made a great many friends in the industry and kept in touch with many of them long after he had retired. He and Gisela loved to travel and spent a great deal of time in Southern Africa, enjoying trips to Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique.
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Georg Krause was a one off, a true character of the German powered access industry of the 1990s and early millennium years. He will be mourned by everyone who knew or worked with him.
Rest in peace George.