Provocation from the East

It’s well-known that the violent left-wing student protests of the late 1960s were funded and encouraged by the KGB and other East-Bloc intelligence services. What was not so well-known until fairly recently was the enormous extent of communist penetration of Western leftist groups. New revelations — such as the recent confirmation that I.F. Stone was a Soviet agent — keep popping up in the press.

The latest scandal to emerge from the Stasi archives of the DDR concerns the shooting in 1967 of a student demonstrator by a West German policeman. Now, more than forty years later, it turns out that the cop who pulled the trigger was on the Stasi payroll.

Here’s the report from NRC Handelsblad as translated by our Flemish correspondent VH:

The Stasi was behind murder that incited RAF terror

By Joost van der Vaart

Berlin, May 22 — The bullet came from a Stasi spy. The West German policeman who shot the Berlin student Benno Ohnesorg in the 60’s — an event with far-reaching effects in the Federal Republic — had been working for the secret service of the Communist Socialist DDR. [The MSM always writes “Communist”, but that is a deceit. The German Democratic Republic started as the “Sozialistischer Staat der Arbeiter und Bauern”: Socialist State of Workers and Farmers, and was ruled by the “Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands”, SED: the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.]

This is evident from a research by two employees of the Stasi archives, the vast collection of documents of the former “Ministerium für Staatssicherheit der DDR” (East German Ministry for State Security, or Stasi). The service did not only spy on its citizens, but also interfered with the affairs of the neighboring republic, the “class enemy” West Germany.

Benno Ohnesorg was a student who marched in a demonstration on June 2, 1967 in West Berlin against the Shah of Iran. The rally got out of hand and Ohnesorg was shot dead by a civilian police officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras. Ohnesorg’s death led to continuing student protests in West Germany, and was the direct cause for the creation of extremist left-wing terrorist group the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). For nearly a quarter of a century the RAF kept the country in the grip of violence.

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Ohnesorg’s death has always been enigmatic. Kurras shot the student at close range, who was hit above his right ear. After the shooting a colleague asked Kurras why he drew his gun. Answer: “He came running towards me.” Years later Kurras said in an interview: “Whoever attacks me like that will be destroyed. That is how you should see it”.

The question now is whether the Stasi had planned a murder of a West Berlin student to socially destabilize the Federal Republic of Germany.

Kurras (81) was registered under the pseudonym “Otto Bohl” as Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (unofficial employee = spy) on the payroll of the Stasi. He is still alive, but is not yet able to clarify this. For the West German student movement the DDR was not a factor of interest. The protests were directed against the right-wing forces in the world: the government, former Nazis, America. The German journalist and historian Arnulf Baring said this morning: “If it was known then that the Stasi had killed Ohnesorg, the students would have viewed that as a conspiracy; a lie of the right-wing press”.