La Main Rouge

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La Main Rouge , German Red Hand , was a terrorist organization operated by the foreign department of the French secret service Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) in the 1950s . Its aim was to liquidate supporters of the Algerian independence movement and leading members of the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) during the war in Algeria . The attacks themselves were carried out by Service Action .

backgrounds

In the Federal Republic of Germany , the Red Hand was assigned several explosive attacks , for example against the arms dealer Otto Schlüter on September 26, 1956 and June 3, 1957 and Georg Puchert (1915–1959) ( alias Captain Morris ) on March 3, 1959 However, these could never be resolved in the end.

On November 27, 1959, the then thirty-year-old Christian Durieux gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which he claimed that the attacks on Schlueter and Puchert and on the freighter Atlas lying in the port of Hamburg on October 1, 1958, and on the Algerian politician in exile Amédiane To have perpetrated Ait Alcene on behalf of the Red Hand .

In particular, the apparent inaction of the French authorities abroad was understood as an indication of the French government that it had initiated the aggressive action against sympathizers of the FLN.

Assigned assassinations and attacks

  • September 28, 1956, Hamburg , Osterbekstrasse 43–45: A 5 kg bomb with an acid detonator explodes in the business premises of Otto Schlüter GmbH . Schlüter's mother is badly wounded, his business partner Wilhelm Lorenzen, 62 years old, dies of the consequences of his serious injuries.
  • June 3, 1957, Hamburg-Eppendorf, Loogestieg 10: Schlüter's Mercedes 220 explodes due to an adhesive charge. Schlüter's daughter Ingeborg is easily injured, this time his mother fatally injured.
  • July 20, 1957, Port of Tangier: Puchert's cutter Sirocco is sunk by a sticky cargo.
  • 1957: Henriette Tremeaud, wife of the former French prefect of Algiers and now Strasbourg , is killed by an explosive charge destined for her husband.
  • 1957: Madrid : The Spanish secretary of the FLN delegation is shot.
  • October 1, 1958, Hamburg: The Bremen freighter Atlas is partially sunk by explosive charges.
  • November 23 or 28, 1958, Rabat , Morocco : Deputy Attorney General Auguste Thuveny is killed by a bomb. He had recently uncovered links between French terrorists and their backers in the French army, administration and diplomacy.
  • January 19, 1959: The FLN member Abd-El Soualem is murdered at the Saarbrücken train station .
  • May 21, 1959: Algerian lawyer Ould Aoudia is shot dead in front of his office in Paris .
  • July 5, 1959, Rome : A car bomb attack on FLN representative Tajeb Bouhlahrouf fails because children who are playing accidentally shoot a ball under his car, which triggers the bomb. A six-year-old boy is killed in the explosion.
  • September 7, 1959: In Beirut , Mohammed Mahmoud Djami, who wants to meet Ferhat Abbas, is struck down by four shots from a revolver when he is about to board a flight to the USA
  • January 1, 1960: Abd El Kader is injured in an explosion.

literature

  • Pierre Genève, La Main rouge , Paris: Éd. North-South 1960
  • Joachim Joesten , The Red Hand. The Sinister Account of the Terrorist Arm of the French Right-Wind "Ultras" - in Algeria and on the Continent , London, New York: Abelard-Schuman 1962
  • Claus Leggewie , porter. The Algeria project of the left in Adenauer Germany , Berlin: Rotbuch-Verlag 1984, ISBN 3-88022-286X
  • Wolfgang Kraushaar , The Protest Chronicle 1949–1959 - An Illustrated History of Movement, Resistance and Utopia , Volume 1–4, Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard at Two Thousands, 1996, ISBN 3-8077-0350-0
  • Antoine Méléro, La Main rouge. L'armée secrète de la république , Paris: Éd. du Rocher 1997, ISBN 226802699X
  • Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig, linkfix 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 .
  • Mathilde von Bülow, Myth or Reality? The Red Hand and French Covert Action in Federal Germany during the Algerian War , 1956-61, in: Intelligence and national security , Volume 22, Issue 6, 2007, pp. 787-820
  • Mathilde von Bülow: West Germany, Cold War Europe and the Algerian War , Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) 2016. ISBN 978-1-107-08859-7
  • Secondary theater of the Federal Republic , in: Matthias Ritzi / Erich Schmidt-Eenboom , In the shadow of the Third Reich. The BND and its agent Richard Christmann , Berlin: Christoph Links-Verlag 2011, pp. 186-200, ISBN 978-3-86153-643-7
  • Vincent Nouzille, Les tueurs de la République ( The killers of the republic ), Paris: Fayard 2015, ISBN 978-2-213-67176-5

Fiction

  • Jürgen Heimbach : The Red Hand. weissbooks.w Verlag, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-86337-177-7 . The exciting story about the fictional ex-foreign leginary Arnolt Streich, who is dragged into another attack, takes place in Frankfurt am Main and begins after the attack on Georg Puchert. The activities of the Red Hand against the background of the situation in the Federal Republic of Germany in the late 1950s are discussed, and they take place in the context of the reconciliation process between France and Germany.

Film adaptations

Web links