Odfried Hepp

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Odfried Herbert Hepp (born April 18, 1958 in Achern ) is a former German neo-Nazi who, together with Walter Kexel in the right - wing terrorist so-called "Hepp Kexel Group", several attacks on facilities and members of the US armed forces and bank robberies in Germany in 1982 committed. From 1982 to 1985 he was an unofficial employee of the GDR State Security .

Life

Hepp grew up in Achern. After his parents divorced in 1971, he grew up with his father, a civil engineer . A German-religious community was the political home of his father, who motivated the boy in 1970 to join the League of Youth Loyal to Home at the age of twelve . Here he radicalized himself to the point of almost complete identification with the theory and practice of National Socialism. In May 1977 he graduated from high school and then did basic training with the Bundeswehr in Nagold. During the military service he switched to the Wiking-Jugend (WJ). With other members of the WJ, he founded a military sports group in 1978 based on the model of the military sports group Hoffmann . This "military sports group Schlageter" had bases in Achern, Appenweier, Renchen, Offenburg and Karlsruhe.

After completing his military service, Hepp enrolled at the Technical University in Karlsruhe for civil engineering in the 1978/1979 winter semester, but dropped out after two semesters. On March 17, 1979 he was appointed leader of the WJ "Horst Ortenau". In June 1979 he was promoted to WJ-Gau leader of the "Gau Schwaben". Hepp was taken into custody from September 1979 to February 1980 for “related crimes” by the “Wehrsportgruppe Schlageter”, including the distribution of a pamphlet by Robert Faurisson “There were no gas chambers” as well as bank robberies and attacks on cars by US soldiers.

Military sports group Hoffmann

After his release from custody, Hepp lived with VSBD member Frank Schubert with Ursula and Curt Müller in Mainz. In the spring of 1980 he contacted Karl-Heinz Hoffmann .

Due to an upcoming main negotiation on the subject of the "Wehrsportgruppe Schlageter" and to escape the law enforcement authorities in Germany, Hepp and his comrades Peter Hamberger, Steffen Dupper and Kay Uwe Bergmann went to Lebanon on July 27, 1980 to join the armed forces To unite Hoffmann. Hepp and his companions stated that they were in a PLO camp near Sidon from July to September 1980 . In September 1980 the group decided to return to Germany. To this day there are contradicting statements about the reasons. On September 22nd, 1980, Hepp, Hamberger, Drupper and Bergmann presented to the German embassy in Beirut. On September 24, 1980, they were kidnapped by a commando on their way to the airport. To this day it is unknown who kidnapped Hepp's group and tortured them for days. The PLO and the Phalange accused each other at that time; To this day there is speculation that the kidnapping was faked.

After the unsuccessful attempt to leave Lebanon, Hepp only managed to return to Germany in 1981. On June 15, 1981, Hepp, Hamberger and Hans-Peter Fraas reported to the German embassy in Beirut and made extensive statements to the Federal Criminal Police Office about Hoffmann's activities in Lebanon. The group flew to Germany on the same day, Hepp was arrested on the plane at Frankfurt Airport . He was sentenced to 16 months' imprisonment and released early on December 15, 1981 without giving any reason.

Hepp Kexel Group and IM activity

In February 1982 Hepp went to East Berlin and served himself at the Ministry for State Security (MfS). The MfS was initially skeptical. Under the provisional cover name "Adler II" and then as an unofficial employee "Friedrich", Hepp quickly became the most important informant about the neo-Nazi scene in Germany from 1982 onwards.

After his release from prison in December 1981, Hepp met Walter Kexel from the VSBD. With him he formed the core of the “Hepp Kexel Group” in Frankfurt am Main in December 1981 , which was formed in autumn 1982 and last had six members. Their underground life and their actions were financed mainly through five bank robberies committed between April and December 1982 , in which they stole a total of DM 630,000. From October to December 1982, the group carried out at least eleven explosive attacks on American soldiers and facilities in the Rhine-Main area .

Hepp was the intellectual head of the "Hepp-Kexel Group". The group represented anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism disguised as anti-imperialism and is considered an example of one of the few German right-wing terrorist groups with a formally justified approach that goes back to popular socialist ideas of the brothers Straßer and Ernst Niekisch .

Before the group went underground, on June 30, 1982, Hepp and Kexel wrote the programmatic text entitled “Farewell to Hitlerism”, which was published in the taz , among others . There they propagated a national revolutionary , anti-imperialist “liberation struggle” in order to liberate Germany from American “occupation”.

In February 1983 three members of the group were arrested in Frankfurt. Kexel and one other member were arrested in England that month. Only Hepp, who had previously moved to West Berlin, escaped arrest by the Berlin police on February 19, 1983 by fleeing to East Berlin.

Escape with the help of the GDR State Security

While Interpol was looking for Hepp , he went into hiding in the GDR for a few months . With the help of the Ministry of State Security , he was placed in two different objects. In one, the MfS training camp "Object 74", the forester's house An der Flut near Briesen , terrorists from the RAF were previously housed. In return for protection from the MfS, Hepp completed the MfS's knowledge of the right-wing extremist scene in the Federal Republic. Due to the risk and the high cost of Hepp's surveillance with at times 15 MfS employees, he was obtained a false Federal Republican passport and was flown to Damascus on July 27, 1983. There he was supposed to learn Arabic, build a bourgeois existence and wait for assignments, which however failed to materialize. On New Year's Eve 1983, Hepp went into business for himself from the MfS and flew to Tunisia, where he made contact with the Palestinian terrorist group PLF . There he quickly rose to the inner circle and was supposed to set up a network of weapons depots in Europe for the PLF. On May 21, 1984, he moved from Tunis to Marseille and lived there for a while. Contact with the MfS was maintained through several meetings in Budapest, at which Hepp provided information on the Palestinian terrorist groups. However, the MfS no longer provided him with logistical support. When he tried to get a new passport on April 8, 1985, he was arrested by French security forces in Paris.

Condemnation

After his arrest in Paris in 1985, Hepp was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. In February 1987 he was extradited to the Federal Republic of Germany and sentenced on October 27, 1987 to another 10½ years imprisonment. In the course of the criminal proceedings , he testified extensively, partly as a key witness , against former comrades from the neo-Nazi terrorist scene.

After imprisonment

In December 1993, Hepp was released from prison. He then studied Arabic and French at the "Department of Applied Linguistics and Cultural Studies" at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germersheim and passed his diploma examination in April 2000 . He wrote his diploma thesis on “Moroccan stock corporation law. Terminology and Background ”. He has been working as a specialist translator for French and Arabic since 2000 . In 2006 he volunteered for the documentary The Rebel by Jan Peter .

Literature and media

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernhard Rabert, Left and Right Terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1970 to Today , Bernard & Graefe 1995, p. 290
  2. ↑ Uwe Backes, Eckhard Jesse , Political Extremism in the Federal Republic of Germany , Propylaen 1993, p. 304
  3. ↑ Peter Dudek, Young Right-Wing Extremists: Between Swastika and Odalsrune 1945 to the present , Bund-Verlag 1985, p. 138
  4. ↑ Uwe Backes, Eckhard Jesse, Political Extremism in the Federal Republic of Germany: Documentation Volume 3 , Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik 1989, p. 294
  5. ↑ DER SPIEGEL No. 4/1981, neo-Nazis: “Thors Hammer” in Lebanon , page 69f, available online
  6. ↑ a b ARTE documentation The “Rebel” - “Our hour will come!” Odfried Hepp - National Socialists in the network of the secret services , November 7, 2005, minute 21:15 and 1:03:36;
  7. ↑ Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, Ulrich Stoll, Die Partisanen der NATO: Stay-Behind-Organizations in Deutschland 1946–1991 , Ch. Links Verlag 2016, p. 252
  8. ↑ Rainer Fromm writes on page 468 of his dissertation The "Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann": Presentation, analysis and classification: a contribution to the history of German and European right-wing extremism , Lang 1998: "His attempts to influence the adventurers of the Hoffmann troop politically in a neo-Nazi manner fail, whereupon he would like to return to Germany with his three companions. ”- Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, Ulrich Stoll, on page 254 of the 2016 revised edition of their book Die Partisanen der NATO: Stay-Behind-Organizations in Deutschland 1946–1991 :“ That they had fled to the Christian Phalange due to the sadistic training at the PLO, the four did not share "
  9. ↑ DER SPIEGEL No. 4/1981, neo-Nazis: “Thors Hammer” in Lebanon , pages 74, 76 and 78, available online
  10. ↑ Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, Ulrich Stoll, Die Partisanen der NATO: Stay-Behind-Organizations in Deutschland 1946–1991 , Ch. Links Verlag 2016, p. 253
  11. ^ Rainer Fromm, Die "Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann": Presentation, analysis and classification: a contribution to the history of German and European right-wing extremism , Lang 1998, p. 455
  12. ↑ a b c d You are one of us now. The Stasi career of the West German neo-Nazi Odfried Hepp. In: Der Spiegel . November 18, 1991, accessed on February 19, 2015 (issue 47/1991 in the archive).
  13. ↑ Sebastian Gräfe, Right-wing Terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany: Between Experience-Oriented Young People, “After-Work Terrorists” and Clandestine Underground Cells , Nomos 2017, p. 142
  14. ↑ Sebastian Gräfe, Right-wing Terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany: Between Experience-Oriented Young People, “After-Work Terrorists” and Clandestine Underground Cells , Nomos 2017, p. 147
  15. ↑ Sebastian Gräfe, Right-wing Terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany: Between Experience-Oriented Young People, “After-Work Terrorists” and Clandestine Underground Cells , Nomos 2017, p. 150
  16. ↑ Constitutional Protection Report 1985, p. 183
  17. ↑ Sebastian Gräfe, Right-wing Terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany: Between Experience-Oriented Young People, “ After-Work Terrorists ” and Clandestine Underground Cells, Nomos 2017, p. 150ff
  18. ↑ Sebastian Gräfe, Right-wing Terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany: Between Experience-Oriented Young People, “ After-Work Terrorists ” and Clandestine Underground Cells , Nomos 2017, pp. 145f
  19. ↑ Sebastian Gräfe, Right-wing Terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany: Between Experience-Oriented Young People, “After-Work Terrorists” and Clandestine Underground Cells , Nomos 2017, p. 153
  20. ↑ Gideon Botsch, Die extremerechte, Federal Agency for Civic Education BpB, Bonn 2012, ISBN 9783838902838 , p. 83
  21. ↑ A left-right terrorist unpacks: "The Rebel" at Arte. In: FAZ. November 7, 2005, accessed February 19, 2015 .
  22. ↑ a b ARTE documentation The "Rebel" - "Our hour will come!" Odfried Hepp - National Socialists in the network of the secret services , November 7, 2005, from 1:19:56 to 1:29:40
  23. ↑ List of diploma theses. (txt) Uni Mainz , archived from the original on September 18, 2004 ; Retrieved February 19, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Hepp, Odfried
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hepp, Odfried Herbert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German right-wing extremist terrorist
DATE OF BIRTH April 18, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Achern