30Nov1989: Alfred Herrhausen Deutche Bank boss assassination

[Total Spectrum Dominance]

EFP assassination of banker Alfred Herrhausen



Alfred Herrhausen (30 January 1930 - 30 November 1989) was a German banker and Chairman of Deutsche Bank. From 1971 onwards he was a member of the bank's board of directors.

Herrhausen fell victim to a sophisticated roadside bomb shortly after leaving his home in Bad Homburg on 30 November 1989. He was being chauffeured to work in his armoured Mercedes-Benz, with bodyguards in both a lead vehicle and another following behind. The bomb had been hidden in a saddle bag on a bicycle next to the road that the assassins knew Herrhausen would be traveling in his three-car convoy. In the bag was a 20 kg bomb that was detonated when Herrhausen's car interrupted a beam of infrared light as it passed the bicycle. The bomb and its triggering mechanism were quite sophisticated. The bomb targeted the most vulnerable area of Herrhausen's car—the door where he was sitting—and required split-second timing to overcome the car's special armour plating. The bomb utilized a Misznay-Schardin mechanism. A copper plate, placed between the explosive and the target, was deformed and projected by the force of the explosion. It is unlikely that this improvised explosive device had the precise engineering required to form the liner into a more effective slug or "carrot" shape (as in a shaped charge or an EFP)[citation needed] but in any case, the detonation resulted in a mass of copper being projected toward the car at a speed of nearly two kilometers per second, effectively penetrating the armoured Mercedes. Herrhausen's legs were severed and he bled to death.

No one has ever been charged with the murder. For a long time, the German federal prosecutor office listed Andrea Klump and Christoph Seidler of the Red Army Faction as the only suspects. The Federal Criminal Police Office (Germany) presented a chief witness Siegfried Nonne who later retracted his statements in which he claimed to have sheltered four terrorists in his home. His half-brother Hugo Föller (died 23 January 1992) furthermore declared that no other persons had been at the flat at the time. German Television on 1. July 1992 broadcast Nonne's explanations how he was coached and threatened by the Verfassungsschutz, the German internal intelligence agency, to become the main witness. In 2004 the federal prosecutor dropped the charges against the Red Army Faction; the investigation was to continue without naming a suspect.

Some months before his violent death, Herrhausen is reported to have advocated Third World debt cancellation and reorganisation of the world's financial system at the World Bank meeting in Washington, D.C. In his position as the chairman of one of the most powerful banks in the world, his insistence would have been influential.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

This book gets to the crux of the matter. Herrhausen was assassinated by the ?CIA? This violent death sent a clear message to Helmut Kohl NOT to negotiate with the Russians. Gorbachev, Herrhausen & Helmut Kohl were planning to build state of the art factories in Eastern Europe to take on the dollar.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Global-Gamble-Washingtons-Faustian-Dominance/d p/1859842712/ref=pd_sim_b_1


Contemporary European politics seems to gripped by a stifling conformism, an uninspiring uniformity of outlook which afflicts all the major parties. However, if there is one issue which does divide - though with fault-lines within just as much as between Right and Left - it is question of Europe, the future of the Union. But, for all the heat generated by the debate between Eurosceptics and Europhiles, and the vivid claims and counterclaims about federalism or the fate of national sovereignty, there is widespread public confusion about what is at issue - partly because of the opaque nature of the Community's institutions, and partly because much that is written on the subject is jargon or officialise. The Question of Europe offers an antidote, by collecting some of the liveliest and sharpest commentary on Europe, across the full political spectrum, from leading authorities in the study of history, economics, philosophy, culture and sociology. Eminent German, Italian, French, Swedish and Irish writers are included, as well as key figures from Britain and the US.
Looking panoramically at the past, present and future of integration, The Question of Europe brings polemic and scholarship together to offer us a new way of approaching the Union.


far beyond its exepcted time frame. I really enjoyed reading the articles, of authors Wallace, Smith et al. Not only was it a theoretical study but very useful in practice. A brilliant resource with forerunners of the particular areas writing but also lesser knowns whose contributions were brilliant. Again, a brilliant buffet, a literary and historical/philosphical/ political feast!!!

[TonyGosling]

Key W. German Banker Killed in Car Bombing
December 01, 1989|WILLIAM TUOHY | TIMES STAFF WRITER
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-01/news/mn-145_1_west-german

BONN — Alfred Herrhausen, the head of West Germany's largest bank and one of the most powerful men in Europe, was killed in a bomb attack Thursday while he was en route to his office in Frankfurt.

The office of the chief federal prosecutor said that the Red Army Faction, a terrorist organization, had claimed responsibility for the attack in a letter left at the scene.

The blast that killed Herrhausen destroyed his armored BMW limousine and was heard as far as three miles away from Bad Homburg, a Frankfurt suburb where Herrhausen lived. His driver was severely injured.

The 59-year-old executive, a personal friend of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and an economic adviser to Kohl's government, was on his way to his office at the Frankfurt headquarters of the Deutsche Bank, of which he was chief executive.


Kohl, when informed of the killing, denounced it as a "cowardly and brutal murder." He described Herrhausen as a friend and patriot.

"Whoever knew him," Kohl said, "knows he was an outstanding businessman, an important banker and one of the most important spokesmen for the German economy around the world."

Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher said Herrhausen had been "an eminent representative of responsible social and political policies in West Germany" and that he had "made a great contribution to aid programs for Third World countries."

In Rome, a spokesman for Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who was meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, said "the prime minister and President Gorbachev expressed their regret at Herrhausen's death."

Herrhausen had strong ties to the Soviet Union and had recently made it clear that his bank was prepared to expand toward the East as a result of the decline in Communist power there.

On Monday he had flown to London to complete arrangements for the Deutsche Bank to take over the British merchant bank Morgan Grenfell, a move designed to expand the West German bank's role in Europe.

But his status as West Germany's No. 1 banker had drawn criticism from people who said they feared the power of the banks, and particularly that of the Deutsche Bank because of the latter's interests in many important private companies, including key industrial enterprises.

The Deutsche Bank recently pressed for a merger between the auto maker Daimler-Benz AG, of which the bank is a major shareholder, and the aerospace concern Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm (MBB). This role helped make Herrhausen a potential target for terrorists.

"Anything related to weapons," a fellow banker said Thursday, "is seen by the general public as immoral."

Heribert Hellenbroich, former head of West German counterintelligence, suggested that Herrhausen's part in the Daimler-Benz-MBB arms industry merger could have drawn terrorist attention to him.

Moreover, for the extreme left wing, the largest West German bank and its chief executive were a symbol of the hated capitalist system.


"He (Herrhausen) is an unusual phenomenon in terms of what one expects from the chairman of Deutsche Bank," the liberal weekly Die Zeit once commented. "He does not act like a traditional banker, but instead more like a captain of industry who by sheer force wants to transform his institution into a company with 'international identity' active in all areas of finance."

Besides the bank's industrial holdings in 1,700 West German and 200 foreign firms, Deutsche Bank under Herrhausen recently began moving into such new financial areas as insurance and mortgage banking.

The bombing attack occurred just after 8:30 a.m., about 500 yards from Herrhausen's heavily guarded residence in Bad Homburg, a fashionable spa. As Herrhausen's BMW moved along, followed by a vehicle carrying security personnel, an explosive device was detonated, apparently by remote control.

The car was thrown into the air. Its doors, hood and trunk flew open, and its windows were shattered. The force of the explosion knocked out the windows of homes and other buildings in a wide area.

Policemen found the letter claiming responsibility not far from the shattered car. It bore the Red Army Faction symbol of a Kalashnikov rifle superimposed on a star, but neither police nor the prosecutor's office made public the letter's details.

In Paris, the chairman of the Deutsche Bank's French branch said that the Frankfurt office had been warned by West German anti-terrorist services of a possible attack.

"For several weeks security measures had been tightened at the Deutsche Bank's headquarters in Frankfurt," Hesse Zu Leiningen told French television.

Security sources here said the Red Army Faction, thought to have been all but extinct, was preparing "a new phase of its struggle." Until Thursday's incident, the group was not known to have mounted any such action for more than three years.

[TonyGosling]

Thus, on November 30, 1989, Alfred Herrhausen, chairman of the Deutsche Bank and member of the Bilderberger group, was assassinated by professional killers (not the Red Brigade, the RAF - Rote Armee Fraktion!) Herrhausen was an important advisor to Kohl. A few days earlier, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he had talked about his plans for the rebuilding of East Germany. In one decade it should become Europe's most progressive industrial nation. He also talked about a funding program for Third World nations. Apparently, Herrhausen had positioned himself against the system of the Establishment, which he had clearly stated at the BILDERBERG conference of 1988 and at a meeting of the "American Chamber of Commerce", also in 1988. Later the head of the Treuhand, Detlev Rohwedder, was also shot dead. An assassination attempt on Wolfgang Schauble failed to kill him. All attacks were linked to the rebuilding program in East Germany.

That the phantom of the Red Brigade had to take the blame in the killing of Herrhausen is close to a bad joke. Herrhausen was one of the most vulnerable personalities in Germany and special security arrangements had been made. The security department of the Deutsche Bank guarded his person, the police was responsible for patrolling the area where he lived and used for the observation of the residential area specially trained and equipped units of the Hessian mobile task force (MEK). Despite this the assassins managed to dig a hole in the street in Bad Homburg, to lay a cable and resurface the road without anybody 148 noticing. Chief Federal Prosecutor VON STAHL told the members of the Bundestag that the attack had been planned a week earlier and that the assassins had already installed almost all parts of the later bomb trap, including the cable subsequently identified as the lead to the fuse mechanism.

On the day of the attack the assassins installed a photoelectric barrier and positioned the bomb mounted on a bicycle so that Herrhausen's car had to pass immediately by it. All these preparations happened at a location that had been patrolled by the police just half an hour before without them noticing anything untoward.

This is remarkable, because a janitor of the swimming baths nearby had seen - about half an hour before the attack - some young men who acted conspicuously. In addition the trap would only work if Herrhausen's car would pass first through the photoelectric barrier, not preceded by another car.

The former president of the Bundeverfassungsschutz (the German secret service), DR.

RICHARD MEIER, told the Bundestag (the German parliament) one week after the attack, that the car normally leading Herrhausen's three-car convoy had been called off. ( Had somebody from the RAF telephoned and said that the first car was hindering the assassination?) Another peculiarity thought out by the assassins which points to a lot of experience in handling military explosives in the fact that the bomb was fashioned as a hollow charge.

This had the effect of the shock wave being directional instead of uniformly extending all around. The building of this bomb as well as the knowledge of the weak points of the armored Mercedes car with the opening side windows about which only a small circle of security specialists who had seen the pertinent test results knew: all this cannot by any stretch of the imagination be blamed on the RAF terrorists or any other beginners.

The security service could not find any useful leads at the site of the attack what would enable them to point to any group of perpetrators. A piece of paper with a five-pointed star, a picture of a Heckler & Koch submachine gun with RAF stenciled on and the words "Kommando Wolfgang Beer" had been left behind which, however, did not lead anywhere.

As with all the other attacks apparently made by an RAF since the arrest of the so-called second RAF generation around Christian Klar and the now well-known disappearing of part of the terrorists in the former GDR since 1984, there was and is not a single proof of an actually existing leftist terrorist group that can legitimately be called RAF.

There are no fingerprints, no saliva on cigarette stubs, no hair nor any other useful leads to the perpetrators who for nine years now have been bombing, shooting and recently expertly blew up a prison. The letter claiming responsibility in the Herrhausen case was so flimsy that the former Federal Minister of the Interior SCHAUBLE criticized that the contents of the letter were curiously at odds with the severity and technical perfection of the assassination.

There is a desperate lack of proofs or even hints and clues of a terrorist organization RAF, still the security service of Germany is holding on to the theory of an RAF committing these crimes.

On July 1 , 1 992 the authors of a German TV report in BrennpunhA (focus) titled The End of the RAF Legend showed the results of their research. They postulated that the so-called third generation RAF that was officially blamed for these attacks existed only as a legend that was no longer tenable. The Brennpunkt authors Wolfgang Landgraeber, Ekkehard Sieker and Gerhard Wisnewski elaborated on their thesis in their book about the RAF Phantom (Knaur Verlag). Their main arguments: Contrary to the first (Meinhof, Baader, Enslin) and the second (Susanne Albrecht, Christian Klar) RAF generations the so-called third generation leaves "not even a hint of a clue" at the scene of the crime.

The persons counted among the third generation (e.g. Christian Seidler) all disappeared without a trace in the mid-Eighties without any sign of life ever emerging since.

149 The cells being commanded by terrorists in prison is doubted if not outright excluded by specialists. The command level had to be elsewhere.

The only clues from which the perpetration by the RAF had been deduced were the letters claiming responsibility that were deemed authentic by the Federal Secret Service. The methods used to reach this verdict are not above doubt, however.

The main point in the program was an interview with the principal witness of the Herrhausen case, Siegried Nonne who now retracted his statement of January 1992. He said that he had been forced by members of the Hessian office responsible for defending the constitution threatening him with imprisonment and murder to make the false statement of having harbored the perpetrators in his apartment in Bad Homburg and to have helped them prepare the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen.

The TV team reached the conclusions that the third generation RAF were a phantom artificially kept alive to mislead the population. Further there was the suspicion that the political powers of the Federal Republic of German had not only tolerated but fostered outright the disappearances of a large section of RAF members in the former GDR in the late Seventies and early Eighties.

It is probable that not only the secret services of the Allies but also the German authorities had known that these former RAF members had gone underground in the GDR. The public however was led to believe that these people still shown on "Wanted" posters had something to do with the attacks in the Eighties. In the most recent attack that the so-called RAF claimed having perpetrated was the expert detonation of the prison building at Weiterstadt, everything was as usual: just a paper with the RAF emblem and the commando name, otherwise no clues, no mistakes, no witnesses.


https://archive.org/stream/VanHelsingJan-SecretSocietiesAndTheirPowerI nThe20thCentury/VanHelsingJan-SecretSocietiesAndTheirPowerInThe20thCen tury_djvu.txt