Denazification and the Unsolved High Tech Murder That Reshaped Post-Cold War Europe

On the morning of November 30, 1989, a trio black Mercedes-Benz sedans pulled away from a house in the quiet Frankfurt suburb of Bad Homburg vor Der Höhe and turned down a shady, tree-lined lane called Seedamweg [“zay-dam-vehg”]. They had taken this route many times before, and it seemed like just any other morning. Slowing down to pass a school crossing, the drivers may have spotted a man in a jogging outfit standing behind some bushes, adjusting his walkman and headphones. Or they may have noticed a child’s bicycle chained to one of the white bollards separating the street from the sidewalk, a small package strapped to its rear rack. Nothing out of the ordinary. But at 8:34 AM, just as the lead car began turning onto Kaiser Friedrich Promenade, the early morning quiet was shattered by a powerful explosion. The blast engulfed the middle car in the convoy, launching it 25 metres across the road. When police arrived on the scene and pulled open the charred smoking vehicle, they found its passenger, 59-year-old Alfred Herrhausen, dead in the back seat. Herrhausen was no random victim. As the head of the Deutsches Bank, the largest bank in Europe, he was one of the most powerful and influential men in West Germany - and a prime target for political violence. Indeed, as police searched the crime scene, they soon found the bomb’s detonator hidden behind some bushes. And beneath this they found a piece of paper in a protective plastic cover, on which was printed an ominous symbol: a red five-pointed star overlaid with a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun. It was the logo of the Red Army Faction or RAF, a notorious left-wing guerrilla group which had terrorized West Germany for nearly three decades. Coming just three weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen marked the culmination of a unique period of political tensions in German history, one that would soon give way to new tensions as the long-divided country attempted to unify. Yet despite the high profile of the victim and the RAF claiming full responsibility, the actual perpetrators of this act have never been caught, and thirty five years later questions continue to surround just who killed Alfred Herrhausen - and why. This is the story of the mysterious and surprisingly sophisticated assassination of Germany’s top banker. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices