Germany’s wealthiest man is pouring billions into transforming Heilbronn from a faded postwar industrial city into a major 21st-century technology and education hub, The Irish Times reported.
Dieter Schwarz, the 87-year-old founder of discount retailer Lidl, has bankrolled a sprawling academic complex known as the Bildungscampus through his private foundation. The private group behind Lidl posted a turnover of €185.6 billion in 2025, according to The Irish Times. Schwarz was born in 1939 and raised in Heilbronn’s postwar ruins.
By 2030, roughly 20,000 students will study on the campus, which features Danish brick facades and oak parquet floors.
The Dieter Schwarz Foundation purchases land, builds state-of-the-art facilities, and hands them over rent-free to top-tier academic institutions.
“It’s fine for things to cost a bit more once they are sustainable and long-term,” said Prof Reinhold Geilsdörfer, chief executive of the Dieter Schwarz Foundation, told The Irish Times. “One just shouldn’t spend money on nonsense.”
The Technical University of Munich and ETH Zürich serve as anchor tenants on the campus. The foundation has agreed to fund 47 full professorships over 30 years across architecture, engineering, computer science, and management.
Federal primary research institutes including Max Planck and Fraunhofer have also established a presence in Heilbronn, bypassing traditional public funding and tender constraints.
The foundation also funds a local school, science museum, and a kindergarten teacher training college.
“We’ve always been sure that education and research have a gigantic influence on future prosperity,” Geilsdörfer told The Irish Times. “We can see that, where there are prosperity shifts in the wrong direction, a readiness grows to believe in simple slogans.”
In addition to elite university campuses, Heilbronn hosts a branch of the DHBW, a state-run dual vocational university. Carsten Kortum, head of the retail and trade department and a former senior Lidl executive, draws parallels between his past corporate career and the new educational venture.
“At Lidl the golden rule was, ‘be independent and do what you can yourself’ and we are doing the same thing here in Heilbronn,” said Kortum, told The Irish Times.
“We are losing our independence in Germany, in particular with our dependence on US tech firms, but we are lucky to have a private benefactor willing to push us forward.”
The campus also features Campus Founders, a startup and co-innovation hub designed to connect young entrepreneurs with the region’s family-owned enterprises.
Florian Kratz, director of marketing communications for the hub, emphasized the institution’s practical focus.
“We are not building future competition here, we don’t want to disrupt but to transform,” said Kratz, told The Irish Times. “We are not here to entertain people: we want to see results.”
Forbes magazine estimates the personal fortune of Lidl founder Dieter Schwarz at €58 billion.
Non-EU students pay €100 in semester fees for programs such as the English-language management master’s degree.
Lidl operates as a global powerhouse in over 30 countries.
Keep reading