On March 2, 1972, the police searched a house in Hamburg while searching for RAF terrorists. The head of the special commission, Hans Eckhardt, was shot. He dies three weeks later.
by Axel Franz
From today's perspective, the action seems reckless:On March 2, 1972, the police with a special commission in Hamburg hunted down members of the so-called Baader-Meinhof gang, a terrorist group. A clue leads the officers to the Rotherbaum district, a good area near the university with mansions from the Wilhelminian period. There is said to be a suspicious apartment at Heimhuder Strasse 82. The head of the Soko, Chief Inspector Hans Eckhardt, is personally in charge of the operation.
Night exchange of gunfire in the stairwell
The investigators break into the apartment, but find no one. Several officers lie in wait behind the closed apartment door. At around 10:45 p.m., a VW bus pulls up, two men get out and enter the house. When they unlock the apartment on the second floor, they are confronted with police officers with drawn pistols. While one of the suspects shouted "Hands up, police!" follows, the other grabs his gun and shoots. The bullets hit Chief Inspector Eckhardt in the chest and stomach. He collapses.
The officers return fire, hit the shooter, who wants to flee but has to give up injured in the stairwell. The second man can be arrested without resistance.
Hamburg police had encountered the hard core of the RAF
Investigations begin while paramedics attend to the injured. who are the men It quickly becomes clear that Manfred Grashof has drawn the gun. The 25-year-old is counted among the hard core of the Red Army Faction (RAF). He is said to have been involved in a shootout with the police in Frankfurt am Main a year earlier and escaped. Within the terrorist group, the native of Kiel, with the alias "Carlos", is considered a specialist in forged identity papers. In fact, the investigators found a well-equipped counterfeiting workshop in the Hamburg building.
Keyword:RAF
The Red Army Faction (RAF) was founded in the spring of 1970 by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin. Some media initially refer to the group as the "Baader-Meinhof Gang". The roots of the RAF date back to the student movement of the late 1960s, but their exact connection is disputed among historians. A key concept in the group's self-image is "urban guerrilla" based on revolutionary associations in Latin America. Their common goal:change of the political system by a small group - also with violence.
A series of robberies followed in May 1972 the first bomb attack by the RAF to the headquarters of the US Army in Frankfurt am Main. Shortly afterwards there are more attacks; among other things on the building of the Axel Springer publishing house in Hamburg. Within a few months, the investigators took almost all members of the RAF Celebration.
While the leaders of the group were being tried in Stuttgart-Stammheim in 1975, the "second generation" of the RAF committed the crimes increasingly brutal attacks. The terror reached its peak in 1977 during the so-called German Autumn, which began with the kidnapping of Employer President Hanns Martin Schleyer on September 5th. The terrorists kept the country in suspense for weeks. Schleyer was found murdered on October 19, 1977. He is one of 34 dead attributed to the RAF walk. A day earlier, the three leading RAF had met -Members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe apparently killed themselves in their cells in the high-security prison in Stuttgart-Stammheim.
A "third generation" changes strategy in the early 1980s and wants the RAF internationalize. The killing goes on. Only in 1998 did the RAF declare itself for resolved.
Grashof's companion is also no stranger to the police:Wolfgang Grundmann. The 23-year-old student from Marburg is wanted in connection with a bank robbery in Kaiserslautern in which a police officer was shot and around 130,000 marks were stolen.
Medics fight in vain for the investigator's life
While the officers are investigating, the doctors at the Eppendorf University Hospital are struggling to save the life of the police officer who was shot. Despite serious injuries, he seems to be on the mend after a few days. But the tide is turning:20 days after the shooting on Heimhuder Strasse, Chief Inspector Hans Eckhardt dies in the intensive care unit. Still in shock from the events, around 3,000 people said goodbye to Eckhardt at the funeral service on March 28 in the Alsterdorf sports hall. Several roads are closed for the funeral procession to Ohlsdorf.
Eckhardt is the second casualty of the RAF in Hamburg. As early as October 22, 1971, about six months earlier, a detective had been shot dead in front of a shopping center when an arrest had failed.
Prison terms for the terrorists
In 1977, a court in Kaiserslautern sentenced Manfred Grashof to life imprisonment for murder. On March 2, 1989, exactly 17 years to the day after the shooting in Hamburg, he was released from prison. The then Prime Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate, Bernhard Vogel (CDU), had pardoned him. Wolfgang Grundmann has been imprisoned for four years for membership in a terrorist organization.
The investigators believe that by arresting those they are looking for, they have struck an important blow against the RAF. But there are still numerous other suspects on the wanted list, including Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. They are only arrested a few months later - after a series of bombings and robberies throughout Germany. But the terror of the Red Army Faction does not end there either, on the contrary. It only reached its peak in the "German Autumn" of 1977 with the kidnapping and murder of employer president Hanns Martin Schleyer and the kidnapping of the Lufthansa plane "Landshut" to Mogadishu. To this day, not all of the crimes of the three RAF generations have been cleared up.