Saturday, September 13, 1975, 4:29 p.m.:A huge bang shook the Hamburg main station, metal splinters fly through the air. People are screaming, calling for help, running in panic through the busy train station. A bomb has exploded in a luggage locker right next to a bakery. Eleven people are injured.
Only about two minutes before the explosive device went off, the Hamburg fire brigade received another call:"At 4:30 p.m. a bomb went off in the train station, revenge for Ralf Reinders. Red Army," warns an unknown person. But the time is too short - the bomb explodes before the people can be taken out of the station.
Who is behind the attacks?
Searches of the surrounding lockers provide no clues to the perpetrators.Shortly after the attacks, there were indications that 19-year-old Andreas V. from Hamburg, who had gone into hiding, could be responsible for the assassination. He is said to belong to the left-wing extremist scene and to have been involved in a similar bomb attack in Bremen nine months earlier. He is also said to be close to the left-wing terrorist "June 2nd Movement," to which Ralf Reinders, named by the anonymous caller and arrested a few days earlier, belongs. But whether V. actually carried out the bomb attack in Hamburg is - and remains - unclear. He was arrested in March 1976 and sentenced to ten years in prison in October 1980 for involvement in the kidnapping of CDU politician Peter Lorenz in February 1975. However, he is not charged with the bomb explosion in Hamburg.
RAF and "June 2nd Movement" distance themselves
In 1975 the leaders of the so-called first generation of the RAF were already in prison.Shortly after the attack, the "June 2nd Movement" and the RAF denied any involvement in the attack. From the prison in Stuttgart-Stammheim, the group led by Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin declared on September 23, 1975:"Contrary to the attempt by state propaganda to attribute the attack in Hamburg Central Station to the RAF, we find:The language of this explosion is the language of reaction. The political-military action of the urban guerrillas is never directed against the people."
In fact, many experts consider it unlikely that the RAF could have carried out the bomb attack, including former intelligence officer Lothar Jachmann. In an interview with the television journalists Susanne Brahms and Rainer Krause, who were investigating the case of the Bremen bomb attack in December 1974, Lachmann explains in 2014:"There was the principle of hitting big industry and big capital, but not ordinary people. (. ..) Unthinking attacks, such as on lockers in train stations, carried the high risk that completely uninvolved persons and, from their point of view (the RAF, editor's note) not responsible for this 'pig system', would be harmed they could not be placed because they wanted to create sympathy for their actions in a certain scene."
Two more attempted attacks follow
After the attack in Hamburg, there were two similar attacks in the train stations in Nuremberg on October 6 and in Cologne on November 12, 1975, but no one was injured. As a result, parts of the left-wing scene blame the state itself as a possible contributor. The statement by the RAF, which condemned the attack in Hamburg as an "intelligence service-controlled provocation through terror against the people", also points in this direction.
"Cover letters from would-be terrorists"?
According to former intelligence officer Lachmann, the perpetrator was probably an individual or a small group who sympathized with the left-wing extremists and wanted to gain access to the illegal scene through an attack:"There were people in a very wild anarcho scene who wanted to connect to these concepts (the RAF, the June 2nd Movement and the Revolutionary Cells, editor's note). For this purpose, letters of application had to be handed in, so to speak. They were letters of application from would-be anarcho-terrorists."
The CDU politician Lorenz was kidnapped by members of the "2 June Movement" in February 1975 and exchanged for captured terrorists.There are many indications that the bombers actually came from the left-wing extremist splinter group in Bremen, to which Andreas V. also belonged, and that the attacks in Bremen and Hamburg were carried out by the same perpetrators. In addition to V., the former physics student Reiner H. also belonged to this group until his arrest in February 1975. H. testified from 1978 as a key witness in the trial surrounding the Lorenz kidnapping and the 1974 murder of the Berlin Supreme Court President Günter von Drenkmann.
Bomb attack remains unsolved
The research results of the journalists Brahms and Krause, who dealt with the Bremen attack for two years, suggest that the investigations into the crimes in Bremen and Hamburg came to a standstill in return for the important statements by H. "The two cases (Drenkmann and Lorenz, editor's note) obviously weighed more heavily for the investigators than the attacks in northern Germany," the two Bremen journalists stated at the time. This is also supported by the fact that the then court chairman Friedrich Geus stated at the end of the Lorenz Drenkmann trial in 1980 that there were indications that H. "some promises had been made to arouse his willingness to testify". Against this background, it seems unlikely that the circumstances and perpetrators of the Hamburg attack will ever be clarified. The Hamburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution has no new findings 45 years after the attack.