Word: ohnesorg
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Benno Ohnesorg was shot on June 2, 1967, by a policeman in West Berlin during a demonstration against the Shah of Iran, the young German student became a martyr for a generation of left-wing activists. The killing triggered the radicalization of the mass protest movement in West Germany, which directed its anger against the police, the government and the conservative establishment. The poignant image of a woman cradling Ohnesorg's head as he lay dying on the ground became etched in Germans' minds. But now it has emerged that the police officer who pulled the trigger was actually...
...Birthler Agency, the Stasi surprisingly broke off contact with Kurras shortly after the shooting in 1967. In the file, the Stasi merely described the shooting as an "unlucky accident." Kurras was charged with manslaughter but acquitted in November 1967. After a successful appeal by prosecutors and the Ohnesorg family lawyer to Germany's highest civil court, Kurras was put on trial again in 1970 and acquitted anew. He carried on working as a police officer and steadfastly maintains to this day that the shooting was an accident...
...researchers who unearthed the new documents say there was no evidence in the files to suggest that Kurras was acting on direct Stasi orders to kill Ohnesorg. But the discovery that it was a Stasi spy who shot him has raised new questions about the history of the student movement. Prime among them: how might the student protest movement have developed if Germans had known at the time that Kurras was in the pay of the East German secret police? The question is all the more sensitive since that movement spawned the Red Army Faction, postwar Europe's most deadly...
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