History Twists: The Killer of Benno Ohnesorg
Posted by Mike E on May 27, 2009
Benno Ohnesorg dying on the street in West Berlin, June 2, 1967
By Mike Ely
It is ancient history for some. But for others, of an older generation, it still aches like an open wound.
Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead, in cold blood, on June 2, 1967, by a police bullet entering the back of his head. The killer was a West Berlin cop named Karl-Heinz Kurras.
The killing happened in the middle of a frenzied police attack on a powerful radical demonstration in West Berlin. It was a protest against the state visit of Iran’s rightwing pro-U.S. dictator, the Shah. And they ended it using a bloody police riot. It was the first demonstration Benno had ever been part of.
Benno’s death was like the German Kent State. I went to Germany as a teenage radical the following year, 1968-69, meeting anarchist, communist and Reichian radicals and learning about their movement. The anger over Benno’s killing was still smoking hot. It was one of those events that “lit the sky” — and taught a profound lesson to everyone watching.
It divided the country between those orderly Germans who thought the society should crack down, and those rising in just rebellion. And it helped harden the emerging radical movement, making people consider serious revolutionary politics against the West German state and capitalist society.
Now, there are startling new revelations about the killing of Benno — and about the identify of the plainclothes cop who pulled the trigger that night, in the midst of the police mayhem.
An Unforgettable Event
First let me discuss for a moment, the impact of Benno’s death:
The funeral of Benno Ohnesorg with students carying black flags at the German-German crossing June 8, 1967
Almost twenty years after the shooting, in the mid-1980s, I worked on the English publication of a valuable book called Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918-1919” I wrote the foreward and afterwards to that book (under my German pen name Richard Bruch). In that afterward I noted that the book’s author Sebastian Haffner had decided to write about Germany’s first communist attempt at revolution because of the events of 1968 and the impact of Benno’s death. Haffner saw a powerful symbolic connection between Benno’s murder in the uprisings of 1967, and the murder of Rosa and Karl in the revolution of 1919. I wrote in the book’s afterward:
“As [Haffner's] book appeared…those late 60s saw the first street battles in West Germany after a long quiet decade. Spurred by the Vietnam War, by the Chinese Cultural Revolution, by the days of May in France — West German students erupted in a radical movement that seemed to respect nothing about the smug society around them. West Berlin’s Free University became a beehive of alternative thinking and action, and for the authorities it became enemy territories.
“Sebastian Haffner, then a journalist for Stern, had already incurred the wrath of those authorities: in 1967 at the high point in the confrontation, a demonstrator, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot to death. Haffner responded with a searing article entitled ‘The Night of the Long Billy-clubs,’ describing these events as ‘a police pogrom’ which ‘even in the Third Reich only rarely occurred outside concentration camps.’ Both the author and his publisher were charged under West Germany’s strict press laws by Berlin’s social-democratic police.
“Appearing the following year, Haffner’s book on The Failed Revolution represented a blunt warning to a new generation of political rebels. Like the workers of 1918, these students had largely grown up in a political tradition defined by social democracy. Their principal organization, the Socialist German Student League, had formed as the youth organization of the SPD itself and had only recently broken ties to walk the ‘extra-parliamentary’ path.
‘In such a climate, this book was more than just compelling history. It stood as a parable. In Haffner’s own words, the legacy sears the present like a lethal laser beam.”
A Shocking Discovery
Karl Heinz Kurras' secret membership documents in the East German party
Now, forty years after Benno’s killing, a ground-shaking discovery has been announced: The plainclothes cop who murdered Benno was a double agent. While he worked as a West Berlin cop, he was also a secret agent of the East German secret police (the Stasi) and was a secret member of the ruling party of GDR (German Democratic Republic), i.e. the Socialist Unity Party.
This immediately raises questions of who this pig was taking orders from when he shot Benno. Was it West Berlin’s social democratic government that unleashed its cops to brutalize the students that night in a “police pogrom”? Or was it the East German phony-communist authorities wanting to destablize West Berlin?
As Haffner said, the legacy sears the present like a lethal laser beam.
Not surprisingly, it is said by some in the new raging German debate that this discovery makes the radicalization of the 1960s illegitimate. That it shows how naive students were manipulated by the East — and it vindicates the West Berlin authorities.
Let me put forward a different suggestion:
First, nothing vindicates the West German authorities — who invited the blood-soaked torturing Shah of Iran and who unleashed their police force with intense brutality. And (let’s not forget) it was the West German authorities who twice cleared their murdering cop Karl-Heinz Kurras of all charges in this murder. The West German state was guilty and blood-spattered. And the lessons that the radical left drew from this were fully justified.
But there is a second lesson worth drawing today — one that often feels distant and unimportant to many of today’s radicals. And it is about the nature of the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and the nature of its allied states, like East Germany’s German Democratic Republic.
This was a time when the world was sharply divided into warring camps: The eastern bloc headed by the Soviet Union, the western bloc headed by the United States, and a third pole, Maoist China which stood for the world revolution.
And today, there is a general tendency to assume that the Soviet Union was somehow “better” than the West. That it had features (however twisted) of socialism. That it stood (somehow) with more radical elements in the world. This kind of thinking comes up in our discussion of Che Guevara — where a new generation can see his heroism and sacrifice, but has trouble understanding the implications of his allegiances to the Soviet bloc.
But the killing of Benne Ohnesorg highlights this: That in the world of that time, there were two oppressive and imperialist world blocs, East and West. And the Soviet bloc was not somehow more “progressive.”
We don’t know whether they ordered the killing of Benno that night. But I do know that they were quite capable of coldly, cynically issuing such orders. They were certainly and quite consciously manipulating sympathetic parts of the Left in Europe for their strategic intersts — including not only the soft “revisionist” parties, but also armed groups like the Palestinian PFLP and the German Red Army Faction (RAF) . Soviet, East German and Mongolian tanks entered Czechoslovakia in 1968, occupying the country by force and declaring the imperialist Breshnev Doctrine (which said that the Soviet Union had the unilateral right to invade any of its allies and remove their governments.
It was shocking and revealing in 1967, for a whole generation of German youth to see the Social Democratic Party with their own blood on its hands. And it is revealing in a new way today, in 2009, to realize that some of those killer cops had secret allegiance to the East German authorities as well, highlighting that they were bloody counterrevolutionaries in their own way.
* * * * * *
The following is today’s piece in the New York Times, which contains some of the details of the new revelations:
Spy Fired Shot That Changed West Germany
BERLIN — It was called “the shot that changed the republic.”
The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.
Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the West Berlin police, was at the time also acting as a Stasi spy for East Germany.
It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper.
“It makes a hell of a difference whether John F. Kennedy was killed by just a loose cannon running around or a Secret Service agent working for the East,” said Stefan Aust, the former editor in chief of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel. “I would never, never, ever have thought that this could be true.”
The revelation last week that researchers, looking into Berlin Wall deaths and East German intelligence, had stumbled across Mr. Kurras’s Stasi files raised a host of uncomfortable issues that are suddenly the subject of national debate.
For the left, Mr. Kurras’s true allegiance strikes at the underpinnings of the 1968 protest movement in Germany. The killing provided the clear-cut rationale for the movement’s opposition to what its members saw as a violent, unjust state, when in fact the supposed fascist villain of leftist lore was himself a committed socialist.
There is the sobering reminder of the Stasi infiltration of West German structures, but also the question of whether it went much deeper than has ever been uncovered. The Stasi’s reach in East Germany is well known; Chancellor Angela Merkel said just last week that the security service had tried to recruit her, though she had turned it down.
The most insidious question raised by the revelation is whether Mr. Kurras might have been acting not only as a spy, but also as an agent provocateur, trying to destabilize West Germany. As the newspaper Bild am Sonntag put it in a headline, referring to the powerful former leader of the dreaded East German security agency, Erich Mielke, “Did Mielke Give Him the Order to Shoot?”
The historians who unearthed the 17 volumes of files that revealed Mr. Kurras’s double life say there is no evidence to support the theory that the Stasi was behind the killing. Berlin officials have resisted public calls from victims’ groups and others to retry Mr. Kurras. He was acquitted in 1967, the year of the shooting, of manslaughter charges and was later allowed to rejoin the police force after the verdict was upheld.
In an interview with the Bild, Mr. Kurras, 81, confirmed that he had been in the East German Communist Party. “Should I be ashamed of that or something?” Mr. Kurras was quoted as saying. As for the Stasi, he said, “And what if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything,” the paper reported.
Mr. Kurras does not deny that he shot the demonstrator, Benno Ohnesorg, in the back of the head, but has said the shooting was an accident. He denied records showing he had been paid by the security service, and said the agents who had put those details in his file must have been lining their own pockets.
Mr. Kurras was born in East Prussia and volunteered for military service in 1944 when he was 16 years old. He was imprisoned not long after the war by the Soviets at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for three years. He was known to be an enthusiastic gun collector and an excellent marksman.
He began leading a secret double life in 1955, when he went to the authorities in East Berlin and asked to move to East Germany and join the police there. Instead, according to files unearthed by the historians Helmut Müller-Enbergs and Cornelia Jabs, he was told to stay with the police in West Berlin while spying for the Stasi, and he had a cover name, Otto Bohl.
If Mr. Kurras seemed to fit the bill of the “fascist cop,” Mr. Ohnesorg came across as the most innocent of victims. A student who also wrote poetry, he was married, his wife pregnant with their first child, when he went to a demonstration against a state visit by Iran’s leader, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Mr. Ohnesorg’s death had a powerful mobilizing effect. The photograph of a woman cradling his head as he lay on the ground is among the most iconic images in Germany. Average students who might never have joined the 1968 protest movement were moved to action. And on a darker note it became the chief justification for violent action by terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction and the Second of June Movement, which even took its name from the day of Mr. Ohnesorg’s killing.
“The biggest milestone on the road toward violence was not what people thought it was,” said Mr. Aust, who also wrote a book on the Red Army Faction. “The pure fact that he was an agent from the East changes a lot, whether he acted on orders or not.”
While the East German government highlighted the killing for propaganda purposes, the dissension and upheaval sowed by the shooting were temporary and had the unintended consequence of making the West a far more attractive alternative to the East in the long run.
According to Marek Dutschke, the son of the student-movement leader Rudi Dutschke, Mr. Ohnesorg’s death ignited the modernization of West Germany, leading to greater democracy, gender equality and sexual freedom.
“Germany would not have become this liberal place, not in the same way, if this event hadn’t happened,” Mr. Dutschke said.
Victor Homola and Stefan Pauly contributed reporting.
Gary said
This is great analysis Mike, such as can’t be found elsewhere. Thanks.
Was Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918-1919 circulated/promoted by RCP? If so I missed it. I remember Barricades in Berlin.
Paul Costello said
You write:
“in the world of that time, there were two oppressive and imperialist world blocs, East and West. And the Soviet bloc was not somehow more “progressive.”
This is pure Trotskyist “Third Campism.” “In the world of that time,” the USSR, the GDR, etc. were providing material aid to Vietnam, Cuba, and liberation movements around the world. Ask Vietnamese, Cuban, and South African revolutionaries struggling “in that time” if there was no difference between the two blocs.
Mike E said
Yes, it was published by Banner Press. And it is a truly valuable book. Haffner (who was never a communist) is a very radical and thoughtful guy, and a terrific writer…. and his approach to these events is particularly non-dogmatic. His writings later (as the 60s cooled) are a bit less revolutionary… but that is the nature of upsurges, isn’t it?
The book is available on Amazon, and imho worth reading and sharing.
entdinglichung said
a good short comment (in German, sorry) can be found here: http://www.info.libertad.de/de/blogs/7/190
Mike E said
Paul writes:
Nah, my views are not shaped by Trotskyism’s “Third Campism.” I became a Maoist from these experiences (including my experiences in eastern europe).
And it is true, that the people of Vietnam and Cuba received “material aid” from the Soviet Union in their anti-American resistance. But that, in and of itself, is not evidence of the social nature of the Soviet bloc, and that aid is a piece of a much larger picture. (And included in that larger picture is the impact of that aid on the developments in Cuba and Vietnam — because “fraternal aid” came with strings, that became ropes.)
In inter-imperialist rivalries, the imperialist powers often support insurgencies against their rivals. This is not a sign of their progressive character, it is a long standing feature of their capitalist interests. Just two examples: The U.S. supported popular uprisings in Puerto Rico and Cuba against the Spanish empire in the 1890s. And they did it because those uprisings weakened spain, and created a basis for U.S. penetration.
And similarly, the U.S. imperialists supported anti-Japanese resistance movements (in Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam and even China) during World War 2 — i.e. the interimperialist rivalry over which power would dominate East Asia. The communist movements of several countries got material aid from the U.S. (in ways quite similar to the material aid, later movements got from the Soviet Union.)
But such rivalry, and such dabbling in proxy wars, doesn’t define the nature of the society (it doesn’t make the Soviet Union progressive, any more than the U.S. was progressive in its actions in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the 1800s.)
Someone once said, “If you want to say that Churchill is better than Hitler, you had better make the argument in Belgium not in India.”
Meaning: that the nature of imperialist powers looks a little different in various parts of the world.
And if you want to say that Bresnev was better than Nixon, you better say it in Hanoi or Havana, not in Prague, or Baku, or Beijing.
I spent some time in eastern Europe in the 1960s, with my mind and eyes wide open. I went there as a young radical trying to decide: “Is eastern europe socialist, is it capitalist, or what?”
And I want to share with you what I thought every day I was there “If that is socialism, i’m no socialist.”
Every place I went, every person I met, hated the society. They hated the Soviet domination. And it was clear, from many sides, that Eastern Europe had never seen any socialist transformation, and was socially indistinguishable from the U.S., or West Germany, or Portugal. I mean issues like popular control, popular alienation, brutal domination by the state, social inequality, male supremacy, open racism, etc. any standard you want to pick.
Examples:
While hanging out in France (in an incredible youth hostel high in the Alps), I met with one Soviet party member, named Petrov, who had a Phd. in Marxism-Leninism. He was the head of a delegation of elite Soviet graduate students (one a physicist, another an economist etc.). And I kept asking him about the conflict between the Soviet Union and China. Finally, he agreed to talk, and In the most crude and racist terms he said that the Soviet Union was playing a key historic role in preventing a “yellow” takover of the Eurasian landmass, and that white people (like him and me) should unite clearly against this danger.
I tried to step back and again raise the politics of the struggle — the issue of revisionism and capitalist restoration. I asked Petrov what he thought of Mao. He put a hand at the corner of each eye and pulled them back into slits, and said “Ching, Chang, China man.” I was speechless. And then he said to me, “You are so interested in politics, you will be president some day.” And when I answered, that I had no interest in the presidency, that we needed a revolution, Petrov looked at me with genuine shock in his eyes, like i was totally insane.
There was not a radical bone in Petrov’s body, who had worked long years on that doctorate in “Marxism Leninism.” He explained how he had been born in Siberia and fought his way to the capital, and clawed his way up from the bottom, through all the layers of the soviet aparatus. It was a Horatio Alger story, he sounded exactly like a Republican “self-made man.” Years later when Gorbachev came to power, I thought to myself, “I know this man Gorbachev.” Because Gorbachev was exactly a man of the Petrov-type (and of precisely that same generation), for whom “Marxism” and “socialism” were just the words occasionally needed for their careers, and had literally nothing to do with their worldview or politics.
Or while I was in Prague, i was on a tour of the city organized by the Czech communist party. And that night, they were very excited to take us to a strip tease club (the only one i’ve ever been in!) And, afterwards, i talked to the woman head of the delegation about it. And i tried to explain how i thought that objectifying women in that way, making sex a commodity in that way, and all the social relations of hooting men etc. was against the interests of the people. To her, this club was something to be proud of, because it showed “how far they come.” And what was remarkable about her response was not that she disagreed with me, but that she had no idea what I was talking about. She literally had no idea what I was talking about. And had no sense (at all) that there was oppression of women, and it was something that a communist should fight against. This was a country that had had not progressive or radical movement in my lifetime. And the so-called “communists” were no more progressive or radical than a typical city ward hack in 1950s Chicago.
Another example: I was in a student union in Czechoslovakia, and (as usual under occupation) the place was a beehive of debate. and a Hungarian student was agitating that their countries in eastern europe needed divided powers …. a balance of power between the presidency, the legislature and the judiciary. And after having listened for a while, I jumped out with my own views, saying that what society needed was the people on the bottom to overthrow the people on the top — and that this early American theory of “divided powers” was a theory for domination of the many by the few. And we were arguing, in a college amphitheater surrounded by 60 or so students from all over Eastern Europe. And suddenly a guy stood up in the back, and pointed at me, and shouted, “You, You, you are a Marxist!” And the crowd looked at him with a blank look, not one of them showed any sense of recognision — of what a Marxisst was, or why I (the only Western student in the room) should get that label. Later I talked to the guy, and asked him “How come you are the only one in the room who knew what a Marxist was?” He laughed, and said “That’s easy, I went to Antioch.” In other words, in the highly depoliticized conditions of supposedly “socialist” eastern europe, not only were people generally anti-communist, but they had NO idea (zero) what a communist believed — even though every person in authority claimed to be a communist, of course.
I could go on, many more experiences…. but not now. But you get my overall point…right?
That if you want to claim that the Soviet bloc was communist, or socialist or progressive, then you are right to make that argument based on perceptual appearances in Vietnam (where at least they LOOKED LIKE they were on the right side.) But if you zoom back and look at the world (like Afghanistan 1979, where the Soviets are the invaders and the U.S. was backing “the rebels”), or if you go deep in to the Soviet bloc itself…. then it is clear that there is nothing progressive there. This was imperialist society, and in my experience, indistinguishable from the capitalism i had come to hate in the west.
This was an oppressive society. If it acted in ways that seemed to support the radicals (in Vietnam or Cuba) it was still for IMPERIALIST motives and interests (and with very bad political impact on the people who accepted that aid).
Paul Costello said
Mike, thanks for the personal background, but you didn’t really respond to my point. You say your position is not Third Campism, but Maoism. But, objectively, your position is indistinguishable from Third Campism.
We can all agree on the limitations of the Soviet and Eastern European social formations. What distinguishes Third Campism is the refusal to recognize the real differences between the role and impact of World Imperialism and that of the Soviet system in international developments. Without the existence and support of the Soviet bloc, the Vietnamese, Cuban and South African victories (among others) would not have been possible. That role was objectively progressive in that it advanced the world revolutionary process, regardless of the motives involved.
To me, there is no problem is both saying, “If that is socialism, i’m no socialist” and the role of the Soviet bloc was progressive to the extent it supported genuinely revolutionary movements in other countries. To fail to recognize this dialectic, to not have a nuanced assessment of their very different roles in the world, is, again, to me, to abandon a “concrete analysis of a concrete situation, and the hallmark of Third Campism, either in its Trotskyist or “Maoist” forms.
Mike E said
Paul writes:
In general, I don’t see a lot of value in discussing politics in this war of labels. You have (from your political background) a set of little bags, and one of them says “Third Camp” on it. And you read my analysis and demand “why shouldn’t I put you in that bag” (with all the verdicts and baggage attached by history to the “Third Camp” in your view).
Well, Trotskyism’s “Third Camp” is not a set of positions — but basically a whole package of analysis. It has assumptions about what capitalism is and socialism is. It was notorious for flirting with rather raw anticommunism from the late thirties on (calling them “reds” and “commies” during the McCarthy period). When the Chinese revolution happened in 1949, they denounced it as just more capitalism. When the U.S. tried to conquer North Korea and threatened to nuke liberated CHina, the Third Camp insisted that they had no dog in that fight.
And this is rooted in a specific view of “what is socialism” that I don’t share — and an assumption that there was little functional difference between the Soviet Union of the 30s and 40s, and Nazi Germany of the 30s and 40s.
So without spending a lot of time, and without digging myself into a fixed trench on all of this (and without demonizing the folks of Solidarity or ISO) — I just want to repeat that my views at this point are rather different (in both concept and detail) from the “Third Camp” Trotskyists on the history of the Soviet Union, on the nature of socialism, on the dynamics of the cold war, on the nature of Maoist china, and so on.
Paul writes:
Perhaps. But I suspect that there are real disagreements on what those limitations are, and what they arise from. And in some ways this is (as I said) ancient history — but in another sense, it is rather important to have a revolutionary appraisal of the twentieth century and what we can learn from the experience of socialist revolution there.
Paul writes:
That is a rather metaphysical view of history. If there had been no “soviet bloc” the history of the whole world would have been different.
In our dimension, britain, France and Germany were all exhausted and weakened — first by World War 1 and then (even more) by World War 2 — and a huge wave of anti-colonial resistance emerged. They were simply not able to hold onto their colonial empires as before. This is the main reason that you had the liberation of China, Vietnam, Africa etc.
What would have happened if a “Soviet bloc” had not emerged from World War 2? Well, I’m not that great at convincing historical fantasy. Something else would have happened.
You don’t mention the Chinese revolution all, or the quite significant aid it provided countries like Vietnam. And you don’t mention that they were willing to support Cuba, but that there was struggle over what KIND of aid was needed. (Mao thought that Cuba’s plan to become super focused on sugar production was colonialist, and refused to aid them IN THAT by providing external food sources like rice.)
But I imagine that, even without the Soviet bloc, there still would have been a major wave of anti-colonial revolutions the moment some war had weakened the major imperialist powers.
And further, while you seem focused on the 1970s where the Soviets supported various anti-U.S. movements — we need to remember that they also spent decades (in the 50s and 60s) urging oppressed people not to rock the boat, not to rise up with arms, not to aim at fighting and defeating the western imperialists. They played a very destructive role with their “aid-with-strings” in that period too — though a distinct one from the later decades (where they promoted proxy wars with the U.S.)
Paul writes:
Sometimes we have trouble finding a common language. I have no idea what you mean by “objectively progressive” in this case.
Imperialist often support movements that are in one sense or another “progressive”…. but that doesn’t make the imperialists progressive or “objectively progressive.”
Examples:
Britain supported the anti-slavery struggle in East Africa in the 1800s, and they used it as a mechanism for estalbishing a colonial empire there (driving out Arab influences). The AFricans resistance to Arab slavery was “objectively progressive” — but the British empire was not.
The U.S. supported Cuban and Puerto Rican rebels rising up against the Spanish empire in the 1890s. Those movements were certainly “objectively progressive” (in my view) but the U.S. intrigue was not.
And the Soviet Union (similarly) supported the Vietnamese struggle against the U.S. and the Angolan struggle against South Africa and so on. These struggles were certainly “objectively progressive” — but Soviet social-imperialism was not.
And “motives” do matter — because they are not just “subjective ideas in your head.” They shape the politics and the events. When soviet aid made the Vietnamese dependent on complex missiles system and heavy weaponry, it affected the kind of warfare the Vietnamese waged, and the kind of political forces that emerged from that conflict. When the Soviets gave “aid” to Cuba it had a profound effect on the kind of society that emerged in Cuba (especially when they literally demanded that Cuba adopt Soviet methods in exchange for the purchase contracts for sugar.)
Paul writes:
We can explore who has a nuanced assessment and who doesn’t. I have not yet had a chance to lay out my views of the conditions in Cuba or Vietnam and the role of Soviet “aid.”
But for now, let’s leave it here: It is important to have a concrete analysis of concrete situations — and in evaluating the social nature of a country (or a military bloc), you can’t just examine one “situation” but the whole world picture. And to understand the role and impact of Soviet influences, you also have to understant the objective social nature of that formation (i.e. whether it is capitalist or socialist).
Stanley W. Rogouski said
I had never heard about this incident until today.
But I got three impressions from the NY Times article.
1.) The same people who mock “conspiracy theories” when the accusations are made against the US government or the US ruling class have a much lower standard of proof when it comes to accusations of conspiracy by communists or Muslim radicals or any group the US government expects us to dislike.
2.) Even when we apparantly have the smoking gun for a “false flag operation” it’s still difficult to have any real closure on it. What are the odds that of all the cops in West Germany, this one should be a Stasi agent (How thorougly had the Stasi penetrated the West German police)? Not very high, it seems to me. But there’s still no conclusive “proof”.
3.) By these same standards of proof, the Kennedy assassination was an obvious communist hit (James Jesus Angleton went to his grave believing it was a Communist hit). What are the odds that of all the lone, violent nuts, the one who shot Kennedy would be a pro-Castro ex Soviet defector? And yet, what are the odds that during the height of the Cold War, someone who spent three years inside the Soviet Union would get back into the country so easily?
Mike E said
Stan:
One point on “conspiracy theories”: not everything and not every event is the result of conscious decisions, but there are (in real life) conspiracies (in the sense of hidden networks acting on secret decisions).
I agree with you that there is no proof of whether there were orders to shoot-to-kill, and who gave them.
There is (however) proof that the West Berlin cop shot Benno. There is proof that the authorities unleashed a “police pogrom.” There is also proof that the West Berlin authorities and legal system cleared this killer cop twice of charges — essentially approving the murder.
Similarly, I have always been curious to know the degree to which Nixon actually ordered the Kent State shootinigs (which are officially portrayed as the nervous actions of untrained national guardsmen). He had leaned on the New Haven authorities to crack down on the big demonstration at Yale in May 1970 (clearly imho with an intention of drawing blood). And then turned to his close ally, the Republican governor of Ohio, to stand firm (as nixon went into Cambodia). Nixon did not want his policies confronted in a massive way, and as he made the gamble of entering Cambodia, he was determined to stop the spread of massive protest by cold repression. So I have always suspected that the action at Kent (the sending in of soldiers with live ammo and orders to stand tough) had higher level approval. (Not necessarily the case at Jackson state, which is a different story).
Now there emerges in Germany, this killer cop was a more complex figure than we knew — with divided loyalties. (He had volunteered to move to East Berlin to serve there as a cop, and was asked to stay in the West as a double agent.)
As for your question about Stasi penetration: The Stasi had extensive penetration in West Germany and West Berlin — the degree and details are still cloudy. Agents were uncovered at the highest levels (in Willy Brandt’s inner circles), and were certainly funded throughout the organized left (with awful consequences of various kinds).
Stanley W. Rogouski said
Similarly, I have always been curious to know the degree to which Nixon actually ordered the Kent State shootinigs (which are officially portrayed as the nervous actions of untrained national guardsmen). He had leaned on the New Haven authorities to crack down on the big demonstration at Yale in May 1970 (clearly imho with an intention of drawing blood). And then turned to his close ally, the Republican governor of Ohio, to stand firm (as nixon went into Cambodia).
And he cheered on the Hard Hat Riot, even after Kent State.
FWIW, I think conspiracy theories have become almost a form of primitive rebellion. Saying “Bush Planned 9/11″ is a way of both flipping off respectable liberals and of saying “I believe my own government is capable of the worst thing imaginable”.
But after awhile, they lead you into the hall of mirrors. They’re really impossible to prove conclusively.
I’ve always compared Dan Ellsberg to James Jesus Angleton.
Ellsberg in his autobiography talks about “insider information”, about how it almost becomes an addiction after awhile. He also says “well everything in the Pentagon Papers was really just confirmation of what you could have figured out using public information”.
Angleton, on the other hand, was an insider. But he got obsessed with conspiracy theories to the point where he was driven mad. The Russians got wind of this and played him. They fed him a mixture of good information and bad information, sent him fake defectors along with real defectors. And he wound up being the best Russian mole of them all and destroyed the Soviet division of the CIA with his paranoia.
That’s why I think this is an important thing to say.
There is (however) proof that the West Berlin cop shot Benno. There is proof that the authorities unleashed a “police pogrom.” There is also proof that the West Berlin authorities and legal system cleared this killer cop twice of charges — essentially approving the murder.
Yep. The conspiracy is fascinating to unravel. But the truth is available out in public.
Stanley W. Rogouski said
But that caveat aside, I think there are cases when it’s positively vital to be able to prove a conspiracy.
The Turkish government, for example, doesn’t deny that a lot of Armenians died during the First World War. What they say is that they died as a result of the unfolding of the war, through disease, hunger, the bad conditions in Turkey at the time. What they deny is that it was a conspiracy inside the Turkish government. It’s actually illegal in Turkey to have a conspiracy theory about the Aremnian genocide.
Similarly, Ward Churchill was targetted because of his remarks on 9/11 but he was actually fired because he wrote that a lot of the smallpox epidemics among natives were the result of a conspiracy by whites, not just by accident (and he may have overreached in trying to prove it and gave them the opportunity to fire him).
Jaroslav O. said
Ka Mike I was wondering what your thoughts are on Bommi Baumann’s (leader of 2 June Movement) book How it all started? By chance I just read it a couple months ago, I’m sure you’ve read it too though it’s probably been quite a bit longer. One tidbit I thought was cool is that as mentioned above they took their name from the date of Benno’s murder; because of this, every time their group was mentioned the press had to write about Benno’s murder by police in explanation of the name, so readers then always compared whatever action of the movement to the police’s murder (& by the way Benno was just some guy at a protest, he wasn’t a leader or somebody doing violent/illegal actions etc). Anyways Baumann’s book was pretty interesting, their group was more anarchist-leaning than RAF, but they also looked up to Mao. Also when some women comrades got arrested, they were inclined to help the authorities as a revenge for bad treatment by their male ‘comrades’ but they didn’t say anything about the guys who actually treated them as equals.
Mike E said
Photogallery on this murder and subsequent events:
from Spiegel magazine in Germany
land said
When I saw the picture in the New York Times of Benno Ohnesorg
dying on the street in West Berlin, June 2, 1967
I thought Kent State.
I thought Rachel Corrie.
I did not know about this. But a friend recently loaned me the book Failure of a Revolution by Sebastian Haffner. I knew nothing about Sebastian Haffner.
I didn’t know the author of the forward and Afterword was the pen name of Mike Ely.
I had been reading the book because I wanted to know about this history. Why this revolution failed.
And I think there is much to say about this history.
But in terms of Benno. Incidents like this do change history.
They actually happen all the time and sometimes people get used to it. This cop was cleared twice of all charges.
But at certain times these pictures travel around the world. Regular life stops and people pay attention in a way they weren’t paying attention before.
Great article. Get the book.
annie said
I am abit confused by the definition of Trotsky’s position on the Soviet Union and the character of the “workers’ states” as “Third campism”. Trotsky and indeed most of the diverse groups who describe themselves as Trotskyist generally supported what they called deformed workers’ states. I believe LT described the SU as having a workers’ state-based economy and a police state (political superstructure). Thus where the interests of imperialism (capitalist “globalisation”) they invariably opposed the imperialist state. However, due to the repressive political character of the SU and its satellite states support of these states was critical and the political bureaucracy that ruled Eastern Europe, the SU and China were seen as an obstacle to the establishment of genuine workers’ control and democracy based on the public ownership that had been established in these states