Otto Schlüter (arms dealer)

Otto Schlüter (born 1920 in Rostock ) is a Hamburg businessman and arms dealer . In the 1950s he traded arms in the Middle East and North Africa and had business connections with the Algerian independence movement FLN . Schlüter was the target of two bomb attacks .

Life

Otto Schlüter's family had a cross-generational gunsmith tradition. He attended high school in Rostock and then learned the family trade in the Thuringian arms factories in Suhl and Zella-Mehlis .

In 1939 he became a soldier and was wounded twice on the Eastern Front . As a war invalid , Schlüter was dismissed from military service in 1943.

Schlüter came in 1948 from the eastern zone of Rostock to the Duchy of Lauenburg in the western zone . In Mölln he leased a hall on the site of a former ammunition factory and opened the company "Hubertus-Metallwerke". In this factory, 30 employees produced handcuffs , crossbows and air rifles until Schlüter was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1954 . He has faced a court case for fraud and fraudulent bankruptcy . Soon afterwards Schlüter opened "Otto Schlüter GmbH" at Osterbekstrasse 43–45 in Hamburg. He worked as a commercially successful arms dealer. Its annual turnover in the mid-1950s exceeded the million mark ( DM ) considerably . The fact that he had secured the commercial agency of the Austrian Hunting Cartridge Factory and the Spanish pistol works Astra unceta y compania AS by means of exclusive contracts contributed to his success .

He exported machine guns , submachine guns , carbines and cartridges in large numbers to Algerian rebels through intermediaries in Switzerland , Morocco , Tunisia and Libya . However, he could not show any West German export permits for war weapons.

Schlüter's dealings with the Algerian rebels stood in the way of the interests of the French authorities and French nationalists. He was then intimidated into receiving a package in the mail from an unknown sender. The package contained a miniature coffin containing a replica of a human skeleton.

On September 28, 1956, a 5 kg bomb exploded on the premises of his Hamburg company. The explosive device was equipped with a long-term acid fuse . Otto Schlueter's mother and four other people were injured, some seriously, in the explosion. Schlüter's business partner Wilhelm Lorenzen, then 62 years old, died as a result of his serious injuries.

A second assassination attempt on June 3, 1957 on Schlueter survived this also largely unharmed. A sticky charge was attached to Schlüter's Mercedes 220 by means of a magnet and exploded when he drove into the car. The bomb, however, was placed under the right front seat and not under Schlüter's driver's seat. The explosive device was filled with nine millimeter thick chrome steel balls. This time Otto Schlueter's mother was fatally injured, his daughter slightly.

On October 2, 1958, the cargo ship Atlas , which was supposed to carry weapons for Algeria, was severely damaged by two explosive charges at Hamburg's Kaiser Wilhelm port .

The criminal investigation at that time was inconclusive . While many media assumed that Schlueter had delivered weapons to the Algerian freedom movement, others claimed the opposite: Schlueter had supplied French security authorities with military equipment. Competitors who allegedly tried to push Schlueter out of business were also suspected. It was not until 1959 that it became known that the attack had been carried out by the Red Hand in the context of the Algerian War .

By sinking the Atlas, the assassins at Schlueter achieved the desired effect; he withdrew from the Algeria business. Schlüter's business partner Georg Puchert , a Frankfurt arms dealer, did not do so and was killed in a bomb attack on March 3, 1959.

In contrast, Schlüter remained active in the international arms trade until at least the early 1970s; so is z. B. known that in 1961 he offered weapons for Angola.

Cultural reception

The four-part television film Escape from Hell (1960) produced by East German television in 1960 was used by Schlüter as a model for one of the main characters. The British writer Frederick Forsyth conducted undercover research for his book The Dogs of War in the early 1970s . At a meeting with Schlueter, he posed as a South African who wanted to buy weapons.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Bernt Engelmann: My friends, the arms dealers: small wars, big business , Verlag G. Lübbe , 1964 pp. 80–81 [1]
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} DEATH COMES IN THE POST . In: Der Spiegel . tape 10/1960 , March 2, 1960 ( spiegel.de ).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} WEAPONS: Skeleton in the coffin . In: Der Spiegel . tape 30/1957 , July 24, 1957 ( spiegel.de ).
4. ^ German Bundestag, 10th session, Bonn, February 12, 1958, pp. 425-426 [2]
5. ↑ ^{a b} Christoph Albrecht-Heider: Murder of Georg Puchert: A death as a political issue . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . February 17, 2014 ( fr.de ).
6. ↑ ^{a b} SECRET SERVICES: The killer . In: Der Spiegel . tape 13/1959 , March 25, 1959 ( spiegel.de ).
7. ↑ ^{a b} Malte Herwig, Frederick Forsyth: The underworld laughs itself dead at our correctness . In: THE WORLD . October 31, 2010 ( welt.de ).
8. ↑ INTERARMCO / ARMS TRADE: Junk for Angola . In: Der Spiegel . tape 27/1961 , June 28, 1961 ( spiegel.de ).
9. ^ EAST PROGRAM: Through the desert . In: Der Spiegel . tape 44/1960 , October 26, 1960 ( spiegel.de ).