The Shot Heard 'Round die Welt?

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.

BBC: Allied Liberation of France Was Drawn Up As A Whites-Only Affair

The BBC did some digging recently and unearthed some documents showing that officials in both the US and British governments were complicit in "whiting out" the armies that were going to take part in the formal liberation of Paris in 1944. The American official in question is General Walter Bedell Smith, a hard-scrabble career officer from Indiana who at that time was serving as Eisenhower's Chief of Staff and went on to become one of the most influential directors of the CIA. This is really about par for the course as far as the contemporary institutional mindset of the US government, which did not desegregate its own armed forces until after the war. The article does not specify the precise extent of de Gaulle's involvement in this particular decision.

It does note that the overwhelming majority of French-Africans who served in the Free French Forces were simply asked to go home after the war, and were eventually stripped of their pensions. This reminds me that I cannot recommend enough the 2006 film "Fields of Glory," which, besides receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film and a nomination for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, moved Jacques Chirac to reverse French policy on withholding pensions from veterans from its former colonies.

Communism Was Just a Red Herring

It took me a while to understand this quip from the movie "Clue," but this story about Lech Walesa being accused of aiding Poland's Communist rulers illustrates the point. Most Poles, or at least ones younger than American Baby Boomers, have now completely moved on from obsessing over the crimes committed in Communist Poland, and in fact view this effort to out former collaborators as a witch hunt. While it does indeed seem as if Walesa was involved in assisting Communist authorities to a certain degree -- his quote in the story asking whether historians' efforts to tarnish his image "serves Poland" does seem suspect -- he was still undeniably the figurehead for the Solidarity movement that ended the repressive Jaruzelski regime.

As a History major I do agree that historically important individuals' lives must be shown completely, warts and all. Certainly, there is no tasteful way for Walesa to own up to this charge -- referring to the act of putting fellow citizens' lives at risk as a "youthful indiscretion" probably wouldn't work. But at the end of the day, it's the big picture that counts, and Poland would not be where it is today without the work of Lech Walesa.

Walesa is not the only prominent critic of Communism to have been accused of having collaborating with Communist authorities early in their careers. The Czech author Milan Kundera has also recently come under suspicion for having revealed the identity of a Western spy in his youth. The evidence here appears to be even flimsier, and a phalanx of renowned writers have come to his defense.

These countries will continue to struggle with their Communist pasts for at least another generation, but most of the populace will be content to simply note that the incident occurred and move on with their lives. In the cases of Walesa and Kundera, one could even ponder whether living with the guilt of their alleged actions led to their later roles as resistance fighters and reformers.