HISTORY, LIKE ECONOMICS, is a dismal science, if for no other reason than that nothing about it can ever be known for certain. And sometimes it seems as if the more we know, the less we understand. As “Weird Al” Yankovic sings, “Everything you know is wrong. Black is white, up is down, and short is long…” So too with one of the most infamous events of the 1960s student movement: the killing of the student activist Benno Ohnesorg in West Berlin on June 2, 1967, which is now known to have been not the work of a West German “fascist” but of a paid agent of the East German secret police. Just to complicate matters, the fascist and the communist were one and the same.

Death of an idealist

Ohnesorg’s shooting death may not have been the shot heard ‘round the world, but there is no doubt that it was indeed “the shot that transformed the Republic,” as the German weekly Der Spiegel states in its latest edition. Its impact was roughly comparable to that of the Kent State Massacre in the United States in 1970. It heralded not only the radicalization of the German student movement and the rise of domestic left-wing terrorism – culminating in the murderous Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Army Faction – but also a wave of so-called emergency laws passed to restrain what the West German state regarded as an uncontrollable young population.

Benno Ohnesorg was the perfect sacrificial lamb. Even his surname, meaning "without a care," seemed to symbolize the perceived innocence of pre-June 2 Germany. Born in Hanover in 1940, Ohnesorg was a student of Romance languages and a peace activist who lived in Berlin with his pregnant wife. Like so many young people of his generation, he was appalled by the American bombings in Vietnam, by the older generation's silence over the crimes of the Nazis, and especially by his own country’s support for corrupt Third World regimes, such as that of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran. On June 2, 1967, shortly after listening to a speech by an Iranian dissident concerning the abuses of the Shah’s government, Ohnesorg joined the thousands of demonstrators assembling outside the German Opera on Bismarck Strasse to protest the Shah, who was planning to attend a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute as part of his official state visit to the Federal Republic.

A double life in a double city

Karl-Heinz Kurras was born as the son of a policeman in Barten, former East Prussia, in 1927. After losing his own father to the war, Kurras volunteered for the Wehrmacht in 1944. The war ended for him in the ruins of Berlin. After passing out election materials and being discovered in possession of a leftover gun from the war, the Russians arrested him in 1946 for “anti-Soviet propaganda” and sentenced him to twenty-five years of forced labor. He spent the first three years of his sentence at “Special Camp Sachsenhausen,” the former Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin that the Soviets were now using to detain their own enemies, before being pardoned in 1949. He then moved to the Western sectors of Berlin and joined the West Berlin criminal police, for which he worked until his retirement in 1987.  His colleagues consistently regarded him as a devoted officer and, due to his formative experiences in a Soviet gulag, as a firm supporter of West Germany’s “free democratic basic order.” To his detractors, he was an irredeemable West German “fascist” of the Hitler Youth generation.

That was the official Kurras. The other Kurras only emerged from the shadows on May 19, 2009, when two scholars at the “Office of the Federal Commissioner Preserving the Records of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR,” Cornelia Jabs and Helmut Müller-Enbergs, published the results of their examination of Kurras’s seventeen volume Stasi file in the journal Deutschland-Archiv. Here they discovered that in 1955 Kurras approached the communist authorities in East Berlin and applied for a job with the East German People’s Police. This request was refused. Instead, the Stasi asked him to remain in his job and serve as a mole inside the West Berlin police establishment. Under the code name “Otto Bohl,” Kurras proceeded to pass hundreds of sensitive documents to the Stasi, particularly materials dealing with West Berlin police procedures, the patrolling of the Berlin Wall on the Western side, a list of police codenames used over the telephone, and also matters dealing with the unmasking of other Stasi spies within the police. While the actual value of this information is still difficult to fathom, the Stasi clearly regarded him as an important asset and paid him hundreds, and occasionally thousands, of Deutsche Mark each month for his services. After building up an impressive record as a spy, he was finally permitted to join the SED, East Germany’s communist party, in 1964.

"Gun-crazy"

Kurras enjoyed a reputation as the best marksman in his police unit. His Stasi handlers duly noted in his file that he was “wild about uniforms,” “gun-crazy,” and “obsessively devoted to firearms,” spending up to four hundred marks per month on ammunition. On June 2, 1967 Kurras and dozens of other armed policeman were assigned to the crowds at the German Opera to serve as “Greiftrupps” or “grab squads.” Dressed in civilian clothing, these men were ordered to go “fox hunting”: they were to grab young people from the crowd, rough them up, and then pass them on to uniformed policemen to be arrested as “agitators.” Meanwhile, the regular police had orders to attack the demonstrators as a whole with brute force. Commissioner Duensing called this the “liverwurst tactic,” by which he was going to “squeeze” the demonstrators in the middle so that they would come “squirting out the sides.” The West Berlin authorities additionally allowed the Shah to import scores of his own secret police agents posing as pro-Shah activists. When these men turned on the German youths and started bludgeoning them with their own signs, the West Berlin police joined in. As Kurras’s biographer Uwe Soukoup puts it, this was “the stupidest police operation you could imagine.”

Birth of a legend 

In a back courtyard off of Krumme Strasse near the Opera, Ohnesorg witnessed a group of students being beaten by policemen. The protestors fled the scene and Ohnesorg tried to follow them to safety. It is at this moment that Kurras shot Ohnesorg through the head at short range. “Are you crazy, shooting in here?” one of his colleagues asked him. “It just went off,” Kurras replied. Moments later, his colleagues whisked Kurras away.

The photograph of the dying Ohnesorg circled the globe within hours. He himself was gone long before he reached the hospital. But his death gave birth to a legend. Activists in the leftist scene claimed that his killing was a targeted assassination, proof that the Federal Republic had finally begun its unstoppable slide into open fascism. After this outrage, new domestic terrorist groups like the so-called "June 2 Movement" and the Red Army Faction proclaimed, it was time for the young generation to make amends for the sins of their elders and stop this process in its tracks. By any means necessary. After all, "the state shot first."

Karras successfully claimed during his two trials for negligent homicide that he had been physically attacked by a group of students and had acted in self-defense. Despite numerous eyewitness reports contradicting his statement, he has stood by it ever since. Over the forty-two years that have elapsed since that day, the police’s strategy has been one of pure damage control. As Otto Schily, the former Interior Minister who at that time served as a lawyer for Ohnesorg’s family, told Der Spiegel over the weekend, “If the police had known who this gentleman really was, they would have approached the case very differently. Then Ohnesorg’s death would have been properly investigated.” Kurras was cleared of all charges, but suspended for four years, after which he returned to active service.

"It changes nothing." 

On May 24, 2009 Kurras admitted his Stasi activity and membership in the SED in an interview with Bild am Sonntag. “Why should I be ashamed?" he told reporters. "It changes nothing.”

Kurras may be right. So far there is no evidence that he had been acting as an East German agent provocateur on the evening of June 2, 1967. While the Stasi did indeed provide the later Red Army Faction terrorists with guns, supplies, training, logistics and - once they had lost their usefulness and had become a liability in the 1980s - even jobs and new identities on their own territory, so far no one can prove any direct involvement in the events of that day. The official East German newspaper Neues Deutschland denounced Kurras as a “murderer” and called Ohnesorg a “victim of militarism.” The SED and its organizations openly mourned him as a martyr. By contrast, Kurras’s party membership lapsed soon after the killing and the Stasi essentially cut him off, although they never formally ended the relationship. Apparently there was some suspicion that he was a double agent. A last attempt to return to their good graces failed in 1976. The fact that the SED profited much more from this incident than did the bumbling West Berlin police tells us little about what really happened. Ultimately it may indeed make no difference whether Ohnesorg was killed by a trigger-happy “fascist” or a trigger-happy communist. Or by a trigger-happy thug who was willing to serve any regime, provided that it gave him an opportunity to shoot.

It has taken the Federal Republic decades to emerge from the blood and hatred of those years. Overall, it may be better off for having gone through this experience. The RAF terrorist organization officially abandoned its struggle in 1998. In the meantime, the German police has cleaned up its act as well, and behavior like the “fox hunting” at the German Opera is scarcely conceivable. Looking back at it today, Ohnesorg’s tragic death may not have been entirely in vain. But exactly why people like Karl-Heinz Kurras kill people like Benno Ohnesorg will probably always remain a mystery.