Georg Puchert

Georg Puchert alias Captain Morris (born April 15, 1915 in Petrograd ; † March 3, 1959 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German arms dealer who supplied the Algerian resistance movement FLN with weapons , explosives and military equipment during the Algerian War. He was killed by a car bomb on March 3, 1959 ; the perpetrators were never identified. Puchert's death was the culmination of a series of attacks and murders in the Federal Republic of Germany that began in 1956 and ended in 1961 and for which the press and the judiciary held the Red Hand responsible.

resume

Puchert was of German Baltic origin and came from a family of merchants and shipping companies in Libau . Apparently in the summer of 1940 the family moved to the German Reich due to the Soviet occupation of the three Baltic states ; Puchert entered the Navy and became a naval officer .

After the Second World War , Puchert was apparently active on the Hamburg black market. In the spring of 1949 he left the British Zone of Occupation and moved to the International Zone of Tangier , at the time a smuggler's paradise . Here Puchert got into the cigarette smuggling by Spain , Malta and Italy , and built in the years to a smuggling network on which to the Canary Islands was enough. His nickname "Captain Morris" came from this phase of his life after the popular Philip Morris cigarette brand at the time .

Puchert founded the company "Astramar" in Tangier and acquired a Costa Rican captain's license ; his five cutters Bruja Roja ( Red Witch ), Sirocco , Wild Dove , Typhoon and Fleur-de-Lys ( White Lily ) were registered in the Costa Rican Caribbean port of Puerto Limón and sailed under the Costa Rican flag . The cutters operated as lobster catchers for camouflage .

Apparently in 1953 Puchert began to supply arms to a Moroccan independence movement, from 1955 to the Algerian one. Eventually, the former naval officer became the FLN's main arms supplier. This brought Puchert's attention to the French authorities and intelligence services in both Morocco and Algeria. On July 18 and 20, 1957, two of Puchert's cutters, the Bruja Roja and the Sirocco , were blown up by strangers in the roadstead of Tangier.

In May 1958, Puchert flew to the Federal Republic to organize further supplies for the FLN. Allegedly, the Algerians intended to buy four to five speedboats in addition to grenade launchers , machine weapons and 200 tons of TNT . At the end of September 1958, German and foreign authorities (including the Frankfurt Police Headquarters and the Bonn Security Group of the Federal Criminal Police Office ) received an anonymous letter in which Puchert's connections and transactions were listed in detail. Shortly afterwards, on October 1, 1958, the Bremen cargo ship Atlas was blown up and aground in the port of Hamburg.It later became known that it had loaded weapons and possibly explosives for the FLN, which came from the Hamburg arms dealer Otto Schlueter , who was with him Puchert cooperated and in 1956 and 1957 explosive attacks had been carried out, in which a business partner of Schlüter and Schlüter's mother had been killed.

On November 5, 1958 committed unknown on the expressway Bad Godesberg - Bonn with a submachine gun one attack on the lawyer Amédiane Ait Ahcène , a high FLN member who resided in the Federal Republic and months later to his injuries at a hospital in Tunis passed away. According to Bernt Engelmann , Spiegel editor at the time , there was no connection between the victim and the arms trade:

... But the MP volley was also directed, not least, against the arms trade ... The arms suppliers should be impressively demonstrated the power and ruthlessness of their opponents. The burst of fire that chased the Godesberg diplomatic race track was a final warning for the hard of hearing: Look, we won't stop at anything - not before the bright day, not from the big city traffic, not from diplomatic considerations, and certainly not from the special protective and Security measures of the federal capital ...

Engelmann, My friends, the arms dealers , p. 44

The assassination

On March 3, 1959, at 9:12 a.m., Puchert started his Mercedes, which was parked in Guiollettstrasse in Frankfurt, with the customs number “140 Z 32-74”. After a few meters there was a severe explosion caused by a magnetic charge attached under the car. Puchert bled to death in the vehicle wreck due to his serious injuries before the police and rescue workers arrived. The blast from the explosion destroyed windows within a radius of 70 m and knocked passers-by to the ground, but no other people were injured.

The Frankfurt public prosecutor's office conducted the investigation . On April 16, 1959, Chief Public Prosecutor Heinz Wolf stated at a press conference that only members of the “Red Hand” could be considered as perpetrators, who, however, “most likely worked together in connection with or even on behalf of the French military defense”. (Engelmann, p. 165). Although there were personal descriptions of three alleged perpetrators, the Puchert case could not be resolved at the time, despite requests for mutual assistance from the French authorities.

When it became known in 1996 through Constantin Melnik , French intelligence coordinator at the end of the 1950s, that the murders of the "Red Hand" had actually been committed by Service Action (SA), investigations were reopened in Bonn, Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main as far as known, did not lead to any new results. That for the attacks z. B. was responsible for the SDECE on Puchert's cutter in Tangier, the French author Erwan Bergot had already published in 1976.

At the political level, Melnik's statements were explosive in that he also claimed that French intelligence officers had been provided with information by the Federal Intelligence Service that would have allowed the SA to carry out its operations precisely. Puchert's body was apparently exhumed in Frankfurt in 2012 and reburied in Algeria.

Movie and TV

Georg Puchert was staged as "Günter Puchmann" in the DFF television production Flucht aus der Hölle and portrayed by Peter A. Stiege .

literature

Bernt Engelmann : My friends, the arms dealers. Small wars, big business , Bergisch Gladbach (Gustav Lübbe) 1964.
Constantin Melnik : La mort était leur mission: Le service Action pendant la guerre d'Algerie , Paris (Plon) 1996. ISBN 2-259-18411-1
Gerard Desmaretz: Service Action. Un service secret pas comme les autres: formation, méthode et pratique , Paris (Chiron) 2007. ISBN 978-2-7027-1225-2
Erwan Bergot : LE DOSSIER ROUGE. Services Secrets contre FLN , Paris (Bernard Grasset) 1976. ISBN 2-246-00365-2
Mascolo: Secret services. Licence to kill. French secret services are said to have committed several murders in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s. German prosecutors investigate , in: Der Spiegel No. 35 of August 25, 1997.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Puchert, Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Captain Morris (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German-Baltic arms dealer
DATE OF BIRTH	April 15, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH	Petrograd
DATE OF DEATH	March 3, 1959
Place of death	Frankfurt am Main