Monika Ertl

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Monika Ertl (born August 7, 1937 in Munich ; † May 12, 1973 in Bolivia ) was a German-born member of the armed political underground in Bolivia. She became known in Germany as " Che Guevara's Avenger".

Life

Monika Ertl grew up as the child of the temporary head cameraman of the NS filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl , Hans Ertl , in Germany . When her father got into trouble with his denazification , he emigrated to Bolivia in 1948. In 1953 the family followed him. Hans Ertl later ran a farm there and made his last films. Even at the age of sixteen, Monika accompanied her father on jungle and film expeditions. Monika worked as a camera assistant on Hito-Hito (1958), a film about an Indian tribe threatened with extinction, and other documentary films.

After a failed marriage with a German-Bolivian, she joined the left-wing revolutionary guerrilla organization Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN, German: National Liberation Army) in the late 1960s , which was in the process of rebuilding after Che Guevara's death. At first she took a rather passive part in the fight against the military government . For example, it gave shelter to the surviving fighters of Guevara's failed uprising and other victims of persecution by the military government, in particular to the brothers "Inti" and "Chato" Peredo, who were Guevara's successors in the leadership of the ELN. With her organizational talent, Ertl became one of the most important leaders of the organization under her battle names “La Gringa” and “Juana”. At first she tried to find a site for training the supporters of the ELN. For this she wanted to win her father, who ran a farm in the remote jungle. However, he saw no prospect of success in the ELN's project and turned it down. When Monika Ertl's car was recognized as an escape vehicle during a bank robbery to raise funds for the ELN, the police wanted her in Bolivia from 1970.

Apparently Monika Ertl murdered the consul Roberto Quintanilla Pereira on April 1, 1971 in the Bolivian consulate general in Hamburg; Ertl's culprit could never be fully proven. A Colt Cobra .38 Special owned by the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli , who was at the time in the political underground, was used for the deed . The Hamburg public prosecutor had Ertl searched via Interpol , but ultimately closed the case as unsolved. The victim, Police Colonel "Toto" Quintanilla, was seen by the ELN as one of the main characters in the shooting of Che Guevara: The killed Guevara had been severed for identification or as a trophy. According to “Chato” Peredo in an interview in 1988, this happened on the orders of Quintanilla.

In 1972 Ertl and Régis Debray tried to kidnap Lyon's former SS boss Klaus Barbie , who lived in Bolivia under the false name "Klaus Altmann" and worked for the Bolivian Ministry of the Interior. The plan was to bring Klaus Barbie to France via Chile to put him on trial there. The aim was to eliminate a dangerous advisor to the police apparatus and at the same time establish a spiritual connection between the ELN and the French Resistance . However, the kidnapping attempt failed. From 1966 Barbie worked for the West German secret service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and also wrote reports about Monika Ertl.

On May 12, 1973, Ertl was shot dead by Bolivian security forces . Régis Debray claimed that the deadly trap set on her was organized by Klaus Barbie, although he could not prove it. Since her body was not turned over to her family, it cannot be proven or refuted whether she was tortured before she died. Torture was a common practice in dealing with political enemies by South American dictatorships. Ertl's father, who knew the reality in the country, also assumed it in the television interview in 1988 and therefore hoped that it had not fallen into the hands of the security forces alive.

reception

The documentary "Gesucht: Monika Ertl" (1988) by Christian Baudissin deals with the life of the underground fighter.

literature

Non-fiction:

Fiction:

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jobst Knigge : Feltrinelli , p. 114 (PDF; 983 kB).
  2. ↑ Senza Soste: 12 maggio 1973, l'uccisione di Monika Ertl, la donna che vendicò Che Guevara
  3. ^ Mode: Trotsky ed il Che: aneddoti italiani
  4. ↑ Martin Läubli, NZZ December 28, 2017, online under the title Der-Nazi-und-die-Guerillakäuferin. Accessed January 1, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Ertl, Monika
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-born members of the armed political underground in Bolivia
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 1973
Place of death Bolivia