This 1967 photograph of Benno Ohnesorg being cradled by a woman after being shot at a West Berlin peace protest is among the most iconic images in Germany.
Newly-discovered records show that the West German police officer who shot and killed unarmed peace protester Benno Ohnesorg in 1967 was in fact an undercover Stasi spy.
The 1967 killing of Ohnesorg is the pivotal event in West German history that changed the conservative country into the liberal, socialist state Germany is today. To suddenly discover that the police officer who killed Ohnesorg was in fact a spy working for Communist East Germany is equivalent to finding out that the officers responsible for Kent State were working for the KGB, that Jack Ruby really was a Soviet agent, or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Communist agitator trained and supported by the Soviet Union.
The East German Communist Party membership card of Karl-Heinz Kurras.
The 17 volumes of files uncovered by historians Helmut Müller-Enbergs and Cornelia Jabs show that Karl Heinz-Kurras began his secret double life in 1955. It was then that he went to the authorities in East Berlin and asked to move to East Germany and join the police there. Instead, Kurras was told to stay with the police in West Berlin while spying for the Stasi under the cover name of Otto Bohl.
Kurras became the archetype of the “fascist cop” and was the rallying point that mobilized the disparate socialist student groups in West Germany. Average students who might never have joined the 1968 protest movement were moved to action. Marxist groups like the Red Army Faction and the Second of June Movement, which took its name from the day of Ohnesorg’s killing, used the event as justification for their violent terrorist attacks.
“Germany would not have become this liberal place, not in the same way, if this event hadn’t happened,” says Marek Dutschke, the son of the student-movement leader Rudi Dutschke.
Karl-Heinz Kurras, today.
While historians Engerbs and Jabbs could not find any evidence to conclude that Kurras was sent by the Stasi to de-stabilize West Germany, the German media is raising this very question. A recent headline in the newspaper Bild am Sonntag referred to the powerful former leader of the dreaded East German security agency, Erich Mielke, and asked, “Did Mielke Give Him the Order to Shoot?”
In an interview with the Bild, Kurras, now 81, is unrepentant for his membership in the East German Communist Party. “Should I be ashamed of that or something?,” Kurras told the paper. As for the Stasi, he said, “And what if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything.”
Kurras does not deny that he shot 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 Stassi, and says that information was put into his file by other agents who were being paid to do so.
Kurras 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. Berlin officials have so far resisted public calls from victims’ groups and others to retry him.
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