On June 2, 1967, the Shah of Iran arrived in Berlin for an official state visit. A young student, Benno Ohnesorg, had decided to take part in protests organized by West German student unions. The demonstrations began peacefully, but harsh crowd control tactics by the West German police caused a melee. In the confusion, an officer shot Ohnesorg in the back of the head. He was dead an hour later.
The consensus view of the shooting is that it set off a chain reaction that would leave part of Germany's student movement inexorably radicalized. With the officer’s eventual acquittal on murder charges, students came to view West Germany as hopelessly fascistic; any reform would have to come about through violence. At the head of this new extremist bloc were Ulrich Meinhoff and Andreas Baader, who would go on to form the Red Army Faction, responsible for hundreds of kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations.
It has now emerged that the officer in question, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was a spy for the Communist-led East German government. The Anglophone press has run wild this story, with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist each proclaiming that, had West German students known that Ohnesorg’s killer was a Stasi agent, the history of post-war Germany would have taken an entirely different course. A former editor of Der Spiegel, quoted in the Times’ story, puts it thusly: “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.”
But why should it have mattered whether Kurras was a Communist? No evidence has emerged that the shooting was at all premeditated, which suggests that the GDR, at least at that moment, did not intend to destabilize West Germany. After his acquittal, Kurras was mothballed by the Stasi, which referred to the incident in Kurras’ private file as a "highly regrettable accident."
Even if his identity somehow had been known, it is not as if the students would have rushed to the defense of West Germany. Both East and West Germany were viewed by German youth as reactionary, authoritarian societies. As Ohnesorg's lawyer explains to Der Spiegel: "Naturally the Stasi kept trying to influence the student movement. On the other hand, the '68ers were fairly critical of the German Democratic Republic. The GDR didn't have some sort of heroic status."
According to the facts of the case laid out in the Der Spiegel article, it was the West German police that did everything they could to cover up the shooting: a Norwegian doctor was prevented from giving first aid, and it took an hour for him to arrive at the hospital. The fragment of Ohnesorg's skull containing the bullet was later discarded before it could be analyzed.
While the shooting certainly got the ball rolling, it was merely the first in a series of radicalizing events – the attempted assassination of student leader Rudi Dutschke; the passage of the Emergency Laws in May 1968, which gave the state the authority to restrict basic constitutional rights – that caused the movement to turn violent. If it hadn’t been the shooting of Ohnesorg, it is certain that some other incident would have come along as a pretext for the RAF to form.
Revisiting the June 2 incident does serve to highlight an anomaly of American post-war history: that American student groups like SDS, and even the Weather Underground, were able resist turning to extreme acts of violence, while their German counterparts embarked upon a worldwide reign of terror. This, despite the fact that the unrest plaguing the US was arguably more severe than anything Germany was experiencing: the twinned assassinations of two of its most important leaders, National Guardsmen opening fire on innocent civilians, and an unwinnable war halfway around the world. The list of grievances among Germany’s student-radicals, meanwhile, included “a non-consumerist society,” and an end to psychiatry.
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