This article was first published March 6th, 2020 with thekasaantimes.news
Front picture: Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-1990-0821-025,_Detlev_Rohwedder,_Präsident_der_Treuhandanstalt
Decades-old bans on thinking
When on 1 April 1991, Easter Sunday, two unidentified persons, under cover of darkness and the colony of arbours in front of the house in Düsseldorf, waited until Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, head of the Treuhandanstalt, went to his desk, it seemed like a perfect RAF assassination.
Rohwedder was not only one of the most hated West Germans at the time but also one of the people in absolute danger. This circumstance was clear both to the BKA (Federal Criminal Police Office) and to Rohwedder himself. His wife had already sensed something days earlier and had alerted the police in Düsseldorf to a possible escalation.
It is probable that the Treuhand boss’s habits had been spied out before the perpetrators committed the crime. His wife was injured in the assassination attempt. Rohwedder died at the scene of the crime.
An immediate search for the assassins yielded nothing. The phantoms of the night had escaped. Already hours after Rohwedder’s death it was clear in investigative circles that the perpetrators were from the Red Army Faction. A letter of confession that was completely bizarre even for the RAF was found not far from the crime scene.
Excerpts from the letter of the alleged Kommando Ulrich Wessel:
“THOSE WHO DO NOT FIGHT WILL DIE IN GUESSING. FREEDOM IS ONLY POSSIBLE IN THE FIGHT FOR LIBERATION. On 1 April 1991 we shot and killed the head of the Berliner Treuhandanstalt, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, with the KOMMANDO ULRICH WESSEL… Rohwedder had held key political and economic positions for 20 years.”
Days later, another letter of justification was received by the dpa (Deutsche Presse-Agentur). Even for the RAF it was idiotic – not a confession, but a letter of justification.
Someone had excellently falsified it but had not understood the historical context of the RAF’s declarations. At the time of the Stasi–RAF connection it had not been difficult to learn the background and the characteristics of the letters of confession. The hair of Wolfgang Grams on the towel that had been spread over the garden chair when the perpetrators fired could also have been caught during one of Grams’ visits to the GDR. The cigarette butts left behind did not lead to a person, only to blood group A.
Only one thing quickly became evident but was hushed up: none of the RAF terrorists was capable of shooting at that distance – 63 metres. The escape route, as the police also confirmed, ran through the neighbouring colony of arbours. It must not be forgotten that there were no snipers in the RAF who were able to shoot through bushes, upwards, through a window at night, then escape the security forces, dive through the Rhine and disappear undetected on the other side of the river. That sounded, and still sounds, too absurd.
The story of the murders of Rohwedder and Herrhausen began years earlier, when employees from politics and business, the Stasi and state security realised that the GDR was a socialist phase-out model. The most obscure figures of the GDR – HVA full-time agents and saboteurs of State Security, who later advised VEB Kombinat Robotron – were still involved. The trail of the old networks (Seilschaften), which Rohwedder had also identified, led to Thuringia and the Vogtland.
Sly profit and the golden handshake
Millions were moved from the GDR to the West into accounts. According to contemporary witnesses, this shifting began already in 1987. Arms of the NVA and the Soviet Western Group of Forces were still being moved even after the collapse of the Honecker regime. Rohwedder knew about all these cronies of the collapsed Stasi apparatus.
Was there a connection between former Stasi people who saw themselves as hosts to RAF dropouts and the third generation of the RAF?
Or was the third generation of the RAF only a facade for activities of the MfS/Stasi?
Was the cooperation between the Stasi and the RAF revived again when the GDR and the RAF were already dead – or was the hair found on a towel of the terrorist who later, in 1993, died by suicide in Bad Kleinen deliberately placed there?
It seems so. The Stasi was finished on 3 October 1990. Insignificant parts remained in a loose structure. The octopus was smashed to pieces, although people like Werner Großmann refused to believe it. The Stasi had known this years before.
Everything in those days of the wild turnaround revolved against Rohwedder and around VEB Robotron, around the countless businesses that were simply too dilapidated for any economic process to continue at all.
Rohwedder had offered the companies that still needed to be restructured to foreign investors. Countless assets of former Stasi companies were hidden in businesses or real-estate holdings that the system’s operators wanted to sell off as soon as an opportunity arose. Robotron was a sinister representative of the GDR. Already in GDR times, innumerable companies in the West circumvented the CoCom embargo regulations. The business with embargoed goods promised high profits. There were also illegal channels in the 1980s: Robotron – the Eastern high-tech corporation that was able to copy everything from the West. Many of the embargoed goods were then shipped via Greece to Bulgaria and from there to Dresden with the VEB Deutrans forwarder. Whole high-performance computers from the West were fitted into Robotron cabinets and sold as an achievement of completely ailing socialism.
What became of the members of the RAF who have been missing for years – or are they even dead? Is there or was there a connection with the murder of Alfred Herrhausen, whose booby trap worked in a highly professional way, in contrast to the rather simple actions of the RAF?
Were the light barriers at Robotron forged – the same type that later killed Alfred Herrhausen shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall?
At some point in the mid- to late 1990s the Rohwedder investigation commission was dissolved. They had only been following the RAF trail. The other leads seemed too absurd even to consider. To this day it is still not clear who the third generation of the RAF was or is. Especially since the RAF “pensioners”, despite the group’s dissolution in 1998, have been earning their living for years by robbing armoured-car companies. Only a few people still talk about the Stasi. The younger generation no longer knows the effects of German division.
So who were the murderers who assassinated the then head of the Treuhand? It seems that Rohwedder was the pawn of the young, reunified republic.
