Benno Ohnesorg

Benno Ohnesorg (; 15 October 1940 – 2 June 1967) was a West German university student who was fatally shot in the back of the head by policeman Karl-Heinz Kurras during a demonstration in West Berlin. His death spurred the growth of the left-wing West German student movement.

Incident Protest

On 2 June 1967, Ohnesorg participated in a student protest held near the Deutsche Oper in opposition to the state visit of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was attending a performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute at the Deutsche Oper that night. It was the first political demonstration in which Ohnesorg had ever taken part.

Violence and shooting The protest turned violent after pro-Shah demonstrators, including agents of the Shah's intelligence service, In the ensuing tumult, demonstrators dispersed into the side streets.

A week after Ohnesorg's death, a funeral caravan accompanied his coffin as it was transported from West Berlin through checkpoints in East Germany to his hometown of Hanover in West Germany, where he was buried.

Re-investigation More than forty years later, in 2009, it was revealed that at the time of the events Kurras had been an informal collaborator of the East German secret police Stasi and a long-time member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling East German Communist party; however, the motive behind Kurras' act remains unclear. The new information was based on documents discovered in the Stasi archives.

On the basis of the 2009 revelations about Kurras, the German prosecutor's office initiated a new investigation, in order to clarify definitively whether there was any evidence that the killing of Ohnesorg could have been ordered by authorities in East Berlin; in November 2011, that investigation was officially closed with the determination that there was not enough evidence to justify reopening the case. The prosecutor's office noted that, due to the passage of time, many participants in the trial were either no longer alive or otherwise unable to provide reliable testimony, and that documents relevant to the case were evidently among those destroyed by the East German foreign intelligence service in the interval between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990.

Legacy

Ohnesorg's death served as a rallying point for the left, and spurred the growth of the left-wing German student movement.

Student activist Rudi Dutschke led student protest actions in the period following Ohnesorg's death. Just after Ohnesorg's burial in Hanover, Dutschke, speaking at "The University and Democracy: Conditions and Organization of Resistance" conference held at the university, clashed with philosophy professor Jürgen Habermas over the future of the movement: Dutschke advocated radical, possibly illegal and violent action, although his first proposal was a peaceful sit-down strike. The conflict prompted Habermas, who had urged a more moderate approach, famously to characterize Dutschke's ideology as amounting to "left fascism",

The student movement that swelled and, in part, became radicalised in the late 1960s, after Ohnesorg's death, influenced many future German politicians who were in their teens and twenties at the time.

A monument next to the Deutsche Oper Berlin, which was designed by Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka, serves as a memorial for the killing. with the role of Ohnesorg played by Martin Glade.