Wolfgang Grams

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Wolfgang Werner "Gaks" Grams (born March 6, 1953 in Wiesbaden , † June 27, 1993 in Lübeck ) was a member of the terrorist organization Red Army Fraction (RAF). Grams went into hiding in 1984 and then belonged to the command level of the third RAF generation . While attempting to arrest him by the GSG 9 police unit in Bad Kleinen , he was shot and then died of suicide after the findings of the Schwerin public prosecutor's office, which had been repeatedly checked by the courts . The exact circumstances of his death are not fully understood; especially in the politically left spectrum, the thesis persists that Grams was executed by officials.

Life

Grams' father Werner had voluntarily applied to the Waffen SS during World War II . After 1945 he and his wife Ruth fled the east . Wolfgang also had a brother named Rainer. From 1959 to 1963, Wolfgang Grams was a student at what was then the boys' elementary school on Lorcher Strasse and then at the Gutenberg School in Wiesbaden. Grams took violin lessons at a young age and was certified perfect pitch . He also played guitar and later was an extra at the Wiesbaden theater . He stated that he would like to work as a forester or pastor. Grams was shaped politically, among other things, by the demonstrations against the Vietnam War . Because of this experience , Grams refused military service. His political socialization, like that of other members of the third RAF generation, followed the patterns of the second RAF generation, in that the concern for the captured RAF members was merged with the supposed will to annihilate the post-fascist state of the Federal Republic in its imperialist connection with the USA.

Red Army Fraction

After the arrest of the core of the first RAF generation in June 1972 (Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, Raspe, Meins, Gerhard Müller), Grams joined the “Socialist Initiative Wiesbaden”. He later got involved in an “undogmatic” Red Aid group that supported the arrested RAF members during the 1974 hunger strike. Grams showed solidarity with the prisoners and visited some of them in what he perceived to be inhuman detention. He also occasionally took over courier services for the RAF.

When Willy Peter Stoll was shot dead by a police officer in 1978 , there were references to Wolfgang Grams in his notebook. Grams was arrested and spent 153 days in custody in Frankfurt am Main. After his release he received compensation of 10 marks per day of imprisonment.

Grams later met Birgit Hogefeld . As a couple, they moved into an apartment together. Hogefeld and Grams went underground in 1984, joined the command level of the Red Army Faction and helped build the third generation of the RAF. In 1985 the police discovered a conspiratorial RAF apartment in Tübingen and found fingerprints of Christoph Seidler, Barbara Meyer , Horst Ludwig Meyer , Thomas Simon, Eva Haule and also Wolfgang Grams. On February 15, 1987, a search call for Grams and Hogefeld was broadcast in the Tagesschau .

In autumn 1990, Grams met his parents for the last time in the Taunus .

Bad little ones

On June 27, 1993, Grams was supposed to be arrested together with Birgit Hogefeld during a GSG-9 mission in Bad Kleinen at the local train station. The arrest of Hogefeld was successful. Grams fled to platform 3/4 and opened fire on the officers who were running behind. In the exchange of fire, Grams met 26-year-old GSG-9 officer Michael Newrzella fatally and seriously injured another. He himself was hit five times and fell seriously injured on the tracks. Grams was brought by helicopter to the emergency room at the Medical University of Lübeck , where he died shortly afterwards. A head shot on the temple was identified as the cause of death. Grams was buried on August 6, 1993 in the Wiesbaden Südfriedhof .

The exact circumstances of his death could not be fully clarified. Members of the GSG 9 partially contradicted their statements. In addition, mistakes were made in securing evidence: The projectile that was responsible for the fatal headshot at Grams was not found. This may have destroyed traces that could have proven that Grams first fatally injured Newrzella in an exchange of fire and then, hit and in the described hopeless situation, shot himself. Before the autopsy, Grams' hands were washed to unambiguously identify him by dactyloscopy , his head was washed and some hair was cut away and thrown away - which removed possible traces. The forensic scientist Wolfgang Lichtenberg described these processes as "incorrect".

Particularly in the left spectrum, the suspicion is widespread that Grams was deliberately killed by a GSG-9 man, although he was already incapacitated. This was claimed independently from each other by two witnesses who gave the television magazine Monitor and the news magazine Der Spiegel information a few days later and spoke of an "execution". This led to a crisis of public confidence in the security organs - also due to false information and insufficient evidence from the investigative authorities - which led to the resignation of Federal Interior Minister Rudolf Seiters on July 4, 1993 and to the retirement of Attorney General Alexander von Stahl .

The Spiegel title, written by Hans Leyendecker , referred to an alleged witness from the GSG-9 command. A later review of Leyendecker's information by the Spiegel internal "Relotius Commission" revealed doubts in 2019 as to whether the alleged witness had actually existed.

The following examinations and five forensic medical reports clarified the course of events in the following to the extent that the statements of the two witnesses - which were also contradicting themselves - were not classified as credible by the investigating public prosecutor's office in Schwerin. In January 1994, the public prosecutor closed its investigation against the GSG-9 officers involved; accordingly, Grams committed suicide with a head shot. Years after the incidents, texts and books were published that doubt or attack the results of the investigation.

Grams' parents also assumed that their son had been deliberately killed by GSG-9 officials. The Rostock Public Prosecutor's Office rejected her complaint against the termination of the proceedings. A lawsuit enforcement procedure before the Rostock Higher Regional Court was rejected as unfounded on March 29, 1996, and a constitutional complaint on July 17, 1996 was not accepted for decision by the Federal Constitutional Court. The parents' civil lawsuit before the Bonn Regional Court for reimbursement of their son's transport and funeral costs was rejected on the grounds that there were no circumstances in favor of a shot by a GSG-9 officer "even after exhausting all of the possibilities for knowledge" Waiver of revision legal force. The human rights complaint at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg was unanimously dismissed as unfounded on October 5, 1999; the investigations of the Schwerin public prosecutor's office were carried out correctly. In 2017 , Petra Terhoeven recorded that Grams had committed suicide after being hit by several police bullets; Rumors of an execution persisted for years, but were "ultimately refuted".

DNA analysis in the Rohwedder case

Wolfgang Grams has not been proven to be involved in any of the acts of violence committed by the third generation of the RAF. The murder of the then Treuhand boss Detlev Rohwedder in April 1991, to which the RAF acknowledged in a letter found at the crime scene (and later repeated), was also completely unexplained for a long time. In 2001, a hair that came from a towel at the Rohwedder crime scene could be unequivocally assigned to Grams through a DNA analysis . The federal prosecutor's office did not name Grams as a suspect, as they assessed this evidence as insufficient. In response to a request from the PDS parliamentary group, the Federal Prosecutor's Office stated that hair could be checked at an earlier point in time without a DNA analysis, but was not carried out because after Grams' death a blood sample had been taken , but no hair sample . Wolfgang Kraushaar sees this evidence as a “high probability” that Grams “must have been involved in the crime”.

reception

Grams was portrayed posthumously together with the Deutsche Bank executive spokesman Alfred Herrhausen, who was murdered by the RAF , in the multiple award-winning documentary Black Box BRD . The film by Andres Veiel tells the intertwining of the lives of Herrhausen and Grams. Relatives and friends of both protagonists had their say in numerous interviews, as did former colleagues von Herrhausen and his wife Waltraud .

In terms of literature, Christoph Hein processed the failed arrest attempt in Bad Kleinen and its legal processing in his novel In his early childhood, a garden , which was also performed as a play in 2006. The crime novel writer Wolfgang Schorlau also took up the topic in his novel The Blue List . The punk bands WIZO , Slime and Capitulation BoNn portray Bad Kleinen as an intentional killing by the GSG-9. The punk band Third Choice also dedicated a song to Grams' Tod.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gutenbergschule Wiesbaden: yearbook 1966–1968. Wiesbaden 1968, student statistics, p. 108.
  2. ^ Petra Terhoeven: The Red Army faction. A history of terrorist violence (= Beck Wissen. Volume 2878). CH Beck, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-406-71235-7 , p. 101 f.
  3. ↑ Christoph Seils : RAF: The end of the horror. In: Die Zeit , April 20, 2008.
  4. ^ Willi Winkler : The history of the RAF. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2008, p. 397.
  5. ↑ Grape harvest campaign. In: Die Zeit , August 20, 1993.
  6. ^ ID archive in the IISG (ed.): Bad Kleinen and the shooting of Wolfgang Grams. ID archive, Berlin and Amsterdam 1994, ISBN 3-89408-043-4 , p. 29 (PDF) ; Grams buried. In: Neues Deutschland , August 7, 1993.
  7. ^ Heribert Prantl : RAF disaster in Bad Kleinen: Shocking use. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . June 27, 2013, p. 2.
  8. ↑ Butz Peters : The last myth of the RAF. 2006, pp. 157-159.
  9. ↑ That is one of the deadly sins . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1993 ( online - November 19, 1993 , interview with the forensic scientist Wolfgang Lichtenberg about securing evidence in Bad Kleinen).
  10. ↑ Georg Altrogge : Bad Kleinen's fatal shot: “Spiegel” reveals a 26-year-old research. WeltN24, December 22, 2019.
  11. ↑ A detailed discussion of the reports, testimonies and arguments can be found at the Bonn Regional Court , judgment of September 29, 1998, file number 1 O 274/96 , full text at Openjur . Journalistically, this was processed by Butz Peters : The last myth of the RAF. 2006; Investigations section . Pp. 151-218; Egmont R. Koch : Access in the tunnel - The fatal drama of Bad Kleinen. Production: SWR / NDR 2013 ( YouTube ).
  12. ↑ This result is also unanimously confirmed in science, see for example Steffen Kailitz : Politischer Extremismus in der Bundes Republik Deutschland. An introduction. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-531-14193-7 , p. 117 ; Alexander Straßner : Perceived World Civil War. "Red Army Fraction" in Germany. In: ders. (Ed.): Social revolutionary terrorism. Theory, ideology, case studies, future scenarios. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15578-4 , pp. 209-236, here pp. 226 f. ; Stefan Aust : The Baader Meinhof Complex . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1985, quoted from the 2008 new edition, ISBN 978-3-455-50029-5 , p. 877.
  13. ↑ See the book Bad Kleinen and the shooting by Wolfgang Grams , online in an abridged version at Nadir.org . See also No Peace (ed.): The defeat of the RAF is a defeat of the left: Bad Kleinen, Steinmetz and the break in the RAF; a preliminary report. 3. Edition. AWI 1992, Frankfurt am Main 1994 ( online ( memento of August 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive )).
  14. ↑ Landgericht Bonn , judgment of September 29, 1998, file number 1 O 274/96 , full text in Openjur , paragraphs 130 and 136.
  15. ^ Petra Terhoeven: The Red Army faction. A history of terrorist violence (= Beck Wissen. Volume 2878). CH Beck, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-406-71235-7 , p. 105.
  16. ↑ New findings on the assassination attempt on Dr. Detlev Karsten Rohwedder. Press release. In: Generalbundesanwalt.de , May 16, 2001.
  17. ↑ Small question from MP Ulla Jelpke and the PDS parliamentary group: New suspicions by the Federal Prosecutor in the Rohwedder murder case and reports about an alleged "new RAF". BT-Drs. 14/6297 , June 18, 2001 (PDF; 44 kB).
  18. ↑ Answer of the Federal Government to the minor question from the MP Ulla Jelpke and the parliamentary group of the PDS. BT-Drs. 14/6525 , July 2, 2001 (PDF; 52 kB).
  19. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar: The blind spots of the RAF. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-608-98140-7 , p. 25.
  20. ↑ Dietrich Kuhlbrodt : "Everyone was an enemy of the state". Interview with Andres Veiel. In: the daily newspaper , May 23, 2001; Volker Hummel: The radicalism of the careerist Herrhausen and the terrorist Grams. Andres Veiel on his film "Black Box BRD". In: Telepolis , May 24, 2001 (interviews with the director).
personal data
SURNAME Grams, Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grams, Wolfgang Werner; Grams, gaks
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German terrorist of the Red Army faction
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesbaden
DATE OF DEATH June 27, 1993
Place of death Lübeck