Wow! And, wow! New wrinkle on a notorious event in recent German history

Friederike Dollinger (now Friederike Hausmann) with the dying Benno Ohnesorg, who had just been shot in the head by a West Berlin policeman who was secretly a Stasi agent (June 2, 1967)

I'm really surprised at this one. The West Berlin policeman Karl-Heinz Kurras set off a long wave of violence when he murdered a 26-year-old student named Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967. A photo of Ohnesorg bleeding out from his head wound is one of the most famous images of recent German history. It was a crucial turning point in the student movement in West Germany.

Now the 81-year-old Kurras is admitting that he was a secret member of the East German Communist Communist Party (SED) and spied for East Germany!

Der Fall Karl-Heinz Kurras: "Soll ich mich deshalb schämen?" von S. Höll Süddeutsche Zeitung 24.05.2009 reports that Kurras initially denied it last week when documents from the archives of the Stasi (East Germany secret police) were published showing his role. But now he admits it straightforwardly. He denies getting paid for his spying, though. Höll reports that a new charge against Kurras over the shooting of Ohnesorg is unlikely, since he was acquitted in two trials related to the killing already. He also reports that there is no indication that the Ohnesorg shooting was somehow ordered by East Germany.

Whether or not those trials were genuinely fair ones from the victim's viewpoint, it's clear that there was no good reason for Kurras to shoot Ohnesorg to death. The incident took place after the second of two demonstrations against the Shah of Iran, who was paying a state visit to Germany. There was a politically active community of pro-democracy Iranian dissidents in West Germany who were highlighting the human rights abuses of the Iranian regime. One of them was a young intellectual named Bahman Nirumand who had fled Iran in 1965 and had published a book in 1967 called Persien: Modell eines Entwicklungslandes oder Die Diktatur der freien Welt [Persia [Iran]: Model of a developing country or the Dictatorship of the Free World]. Nirumand criticized the support of the Western democracies for the Shah's brutal government, and his book was one of the most influential books for the activist German students of the 1960s.

Stasi expert Helmut Müller-Enbergs on discovering the Kurras Stasi files: "Ich bin vom Stuhl gefallen." ("I fell out of my chair.")

The German authorities had made a spectacularly ill-advised decision to allow a group of thugs run by the Iranian secret service, the SAVAK, to act as guards to the Shah. During a peaceful demonstration during the daytime of June 2, the SAVAK thugs had attacked a few hundred anti-Shah demonstrators while the Berlin police looked passively on and let it happen. Then the police moved in themselves against the student demonstrators, arresting some of them but none of the SAVAK attackers.

This raised the emotional temperature for a second demonstration already planned that evening outside the Deutsche Oper, where the Shah and his wife were attending a performance of Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute. The demonstrators were more militant, and a few tomatoes and paint balloons flew, injuring no one but embarassing the Berlin officials. Erich Duensing, the chief police official (president), had directed the police to proceed aggressively against the demonstrators, beating them with clubs (men and women alike) and firing water cannons at them, like in the infamous photos from Birmingham, Alabama, of a few years before. The demonstrators were in full flight when Kurras shot Benno Ohnesorg in the back of the head in a parking garage.

Ohnesorg was a 26-year-old literature student who apparently wasn't taking part in the demonstration at all. Nor was he armed or threatening the police in any way. The reaction was intense. Part of the problem, aside from the bad judgments of the moment by German officials and police, was that the Berlin police weren't really trained to deal with street demonstrations at that time. Their training for emergency situations was predicated opposing street actions coordinated with a Soviet invasion of the city. Which also meant that city officials were also pretty clueless about how to respond to such an event as the Ohnesorg shooting. So the Social Democratic Mayor of West Berlin, Heinrich Albertz, said the demonstrators were to blame for the death, adding, "Die Geduld der Stadt ist am Ende." (The patience of the city is at an end.") Not especially diplomatic in a situation where a cop has just made a very questionable fatal shooting, in a situation that was already tense because of blatant police misconduct.

This video shows the report on the German channel ZDF about the Kurras revelations, including footage of the fatally wounded Benno Ohnesorg with Friederike Hausmann:



The Springer press empire, which included the sensation-oriented Bild-Zeitung, accused the demonstrators of acting like Hitler's SA Brownshirts back in the day. Bild on the day after the Ohnesorg murder declared, "In Berlin gab es bisher Terror nur östlich der Mauer. Gestern haben bösartige und dumme Wirrköpfe zum erstenmal versucht, den Terror in den freien Teil der Stadt zu tragen." ("In Berlin up until now, there was Terror only east of the Wall. Yesterday, malicious and dumb crazies attempted for the first time to bring Terror into the free part of the city.") Again, it was the demonstrators they were accusing of Terror, not the police and the SAVAK thugs. A particularly awkward comparison to place against state terror in Communist East Berlin. And even more ironic in retrospect, knowing now that the killer was an East German agent.

Protests grew against the police and the Springer press, as well. Within a few weeks, the slogan "Enteignet Springer!" (Expropriate Springer!) became popular among left-leaning student demonstrators. It's generally assumed among German historians that the killing of Benno Ohnesorg touched off "1968" or "the Sixties" in West Germany, insofar as that meant a mass political movement among the young (though it was not only young Germans who were outraged by the Ohnesorg shooting). As historian Norbert Frei describes it in 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (2008), the fate of Benno Ohnesorg, shot down by a cop because he looked like a student who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, was one in which it was easy for many students to imagine themselves.

The shooting didn't create the student or youth movements, they were already under way. But, referring to the SDS, the leading militant political group among German university students (not to be confused with the American SDS of the same time), Frei writes that at their national conference in Frankfurt a few weeks later, "nobody was talking about tomatoes any more." The Ohnesorg shooting marked a militant and violent turn in the student movement.

Wolfgang Kraushaar writes in Vielleicht war es nicht die NS-Vergangenheit von Frankfurter Rundschau 22.05.2009 that Ohnesorg's death was "the spark that ignited the student revolt". There had been something like a student revolt at the Freie Universität in West Berlin before that, he writes, but the Ohnesorg killing and the general official misconduct around the demonstrations on June 2 created such a shock and outrage among univerisity students and other young people that activism took off among them all over West Germany.

Karl-Heinz Kurras, Stasi agent and killer of Benno Ohnesorg, in 1967

When Karl-Heinz Kurras was acquitted on November 21, 1967 of murder in the Ohnesorg case, the chief judge in the case indicated that he was unhappy with the outcome of the case in words that retroactively take on a new meaning in light of the revelations that Kurras as an East German spy: "Kurras weiss mehr, als er sagt, und er macht den Endruck, als wenn er in vielen Dingen die Unwahrheit sagt." ("Kurras knows more than he's saying, and he gives the impression that he is speaking falsehood in many things.") The judge was more perceptive than he knew.

Despite Kurras' acquital, both police president Erich Duensing and Mayor Heinrich Albertz wound up resigning their posts after the details of the Ohnesorg killing became public.

According to Höll's report, Kurras provided intelligence reports to East Germany on the West German police and the West German Verfassungsschutz, an internal security agency. The Stasi reduced their contacts with him after the Ohnesorg murder. But the files show a Stasi contact as late as 1976. He provided information to the Stasi about East German refugees and planted microphones in offices. He wasn't just passing on office gossip.

I hate to speculate. But who can resist speculating about a spy story? One obvious speculation is that the East Germans could have put him up to shooting somebody at that demonstration to cause trouble. Or, he could have seen himself as a convinced Communist - which he presumably did if he wasn't taking money for his information - a made a similar calculation on his own, although that seems more far-fetched. But there's apparently no evidence of either, so far.

Then it's always possible that the West German authorities somehow greased the skids for Kurras' acquitals on charges related to the Ohnesorg murder because he was working as a double agent, or because they were secretly aware of his spying activities and were using him to feed misinforation to the Stasi. But there is no evidence in the public record of that either, so far as I know.

Still, it is a remarkable coincidence that a policeman whose shooting of student played such a key role in the politics of West Germany in the 1960s turns out to have been a secret Communist and a spy for East Germany!

Kraushaar recalls something I don't recall seeing described before. Benno Ohnesorg's funeral procession of over 100 cars had to pass through East German territory to get from West Berlin to Hannover, where he was buried. Normally, the East German officials required cars to wait for hours to pass. The funeral convoy was waved through. Along the way, young people greeted the convoy along the highway, and East German soldiers along the route even paid honor to the deceased. As Kraushaar says, these unusual occurences looked like an act of state by the East Germans. At a minimum, it meant that East Germany wanted to make the incident as much of a pain as they could for the West German government. Kraushaar cautions that this is not to say that it was some kind of genuine act of solidarity by the East Germans. The leaders of the East German SED regime generally weren't interested in the "anti-authoritarian" goals of the western student movement except as it further their own state goals. Some twenty years later, they were rejecting Michael Gorbachev's brand of reform Communism as way too liberal for their liking.

But he also cautions that there is no evidence of an East German order to Kurras to shoot somebody. And he warns that we may never know. Since Kurras is still alive and apparently lucid, he himself could reveal for the first time what his motive in the killing was. But, as Kraushaar notes, there is no statute of limitations on murder, so by talking openly about his motives, Kurras could open himself to another prosecution on the Kurras killing. So it's unlikely to happen.

Tags: 1968, benno ohnesorg, ddr, deutschland, east germany, german politics, karl-heinz kurras, stasi