The “fascist cop” who martyred a left-wing German student in the sixties, and created the German left-wing terrorist movement, including Baader-Meinhoff, and helped turn the German nation to the left, has turned out to be a Stasi agent:
Ohnesorg galvanized a generation of left-wing students and activists who rose up in the iconic year of 1968. What was a fringe soon turned to terrorism.
To them his killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was the “fascist cop” at the service of a capitalist, pro-American “latent fascist state.” “The post-fascist system has become a pre-fascist one,” the German Socialist Student Union declared in their indictment hours after the killing. The ensuing movement drew its legitimacy and fervor from the Ohnesorg killing. Further enraging righteous passions, Mr. Kurras was acquitted by a court and returned to the police force.
Now all that’s being turned on its head. Last week, a pair of German historians unearthed the truth about Mr. Kurras. Since 1955, he had worked for the Stasi, East Germany’s dreaded secret police. According to voluminous Stasi archives, his code name was Otto Bohl. The files don’t say whether the Stasi ordered him to do what he did in 1967. But that only fuels speculation about a Stasi hand behind one of postwar Germany’s transformative events.
Mr. Kurras, who is 81 and lives in Berlin, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he belonged to the East German Communist Party. “Should I be ashamed of that or something?” He denied he was paid to spy for the Stasi, but asked, “What if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything.” Mr. Kurras may be the monster of the leftist imagination — albeit now it turns out he is one of their own.
Hey, fascist, communist, it’s all good
Any German readers of this blog have any thoughts about whether this will spark a “re-think” in Germany about the 50 years after WW2? Gunter Grass, SS guard, and now this?
How very Reichstag-y.
> Gunter Grass, SS guard
Not SS guard, Waffen-SS tank gunner. That’s bad enough, but one may forgive a 17 year old for that. What needs to be explained is the long silence on his own past while sharply critisising others.
Martijn,
Thanks for the correction. I don’t fault a 17 year old for his actions. I object to the subsequent 60 years of projecting his own inability to forgive himself onto an entire culture that needed above all else to be able to forgive itself.
Yeah, that’s the main criticism leveled at Grass and I tend to agree with it. His brilliance as a writer is acknowledged by friend and foe alike, but the combination of criticism of others and hiding his own past will always be a stain on his legacy.