rumblings yet, the smattering of last terrorist of the Red army faction. Daniela Klette, Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg have committed since 2011 in Northern Germany with Bazooka and rifle, nine robberies, about 400,000 euros stolen and can not be taken up today. Apparently, the Trio at the age of 50 to 64 the money for the rest needs to stand in the ground. Classical terrorism, that no longer is, yet flickers with each robbery, the horrors of a bloody era.

There was something, from the 1970s to the first years after the reunification. An Era of extreme left-wing terror, which is today blended by the “Islamic state”, Al Qaeda and the NSU. And almost gone from the public’s perception of the man who invented the computer-aided counter-terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany. The security re-defined. Because the freedom was in danger.

Horst Herold. Legendary President of the Federal criminal police office from 1971 to 1981. The toughest opponent of the RAF, which has murdered up to its dissolution in 1998, a total of 34 people. This man owes the country a lot. Without him, adequately thanked. In Nuremberg, he died now at the age of 95 years, after a serious illness. Germany loses one of the most influential, but also one of the tragic figures of their history.

The allegation: He wants the surveillance state

born in Thuringia, he even once left, before he became the enemy of the Left. Refusal to hate is not reflected back to Herald only from the environment of the RAF, the left-liberal criticized him sharply and asked him, he wanted to transform the Republic into a surveillance state. With methods such as grid search, the invented Herold. To the professionalism of the terrorists consider to be.

The Criminalist with the distinctive, chunky glasses, was not deterred. He built the rather betuliche BKA to an efficient police Department, he soon became known as “Mister Computer”. Herold created in 1972, the database Inpol, it was an innovative Instrument and meant a boost to Modernization of the BKA and the police nationwide. With the stored information to terrorists and other serious criminals, the search of offenders and suspects has been revolutionized.

Inpol was the Basis for the dragnet, in the case of the Central characteristics of wanted persons with a Share of the population are compared. The suspects to be filtered out. And Herold pumped up the BKA. In his term in office, tripled it eighth in the number of employees and quintupled the budget. Early on, Herold had success. But it is also heavy defeats.

In June 1972, just a few weeks, succeeded after a series of attacks by the RAF and the arrest of their leaders. Andreas Baader, Holger Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe were caught in Frankfurt am Main, Gudrun Ensslin, Hamburg, and Ulrike Meinhof in Langenhagen near Hannover. The Core of the army was. Herold, the BKA were celebrated.

However, the RAF was zählebig. There are new generations of self-styled urban guerrillas were formed. And there are other underground groups, and in Berlin it was the “movement 2. June“. Herold was able to contain terrorism, not defeat it. Worse still, Despite an intensive search, the RAF’s spectacular attacks to reach. In April 1977 a command in Karlsruhe, Germany, murdered the former chief Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback, his driver Wolfgang Göbel, and the head of the driving readiness of the office of the attorney General, Georg Wurster. Herold lost Buback one of his closest comrades-in-arms. At the tomb of the chief Prosecutor of the Republic of the BKA-President promised, “I’ll take them all”.

Schleyer insulted him in a video message

There are other, awful setbacks followed. In July 1977, the RAF shot in Oberursel (near Frankfurt) the speaker of the management Board of Dresdner Bank, Jürgen Ponto. In September, a command in Cologne, kidnapped the President of the Federal Association of employers, Hanns Martin Schleyer, and killed three bodyguards and managed to reveal the driver. The terrorists wanted to press Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and eight other imprisoned Comrades free. Herold brought the BKA apparatus to Vibrate, to find the kidnappers and to liberate Schleyer. It was not possible. Because of a glitch. The report of a police main master to a suspect’s apartment in Erftstadt-Liblar, near Cologne, the right tip was lost. Of note, in another of the Herald-developed system of Investigation would be arrived, the Pios (“persons, institutions, objects, stuff”) would have Schleyer can be saved. The BKA processed at the time of the kidnapping of 70,000 notes. At that time, a massive achievement. But without a hit.

the Herald had to accept to be the hostage in a video message to the RAF insulted. “I’m not ready, silently from this life, to cede, to cover the mistakes of the government and the inadequacy of the overhyped heads of the Federal criminal police office,” said Schleyer, in the camera of the terrorists. 19. In October he was shot down by the RAF in command. Previously had killed in the high-security prison in Stuttgart-stammheim, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, after the GSG 9 had stormed in Mogadishu, one of the Palestinians out of “solidarity” with the RAF, hijacked a German passenger plane.

then, in 2004, the Federal cross of merit, a later, thanks to

The “German autumn”, such as the gruesome weeks in September and October 1977, in the history books, was over. Herold wanted to draw conclusions and information and communication systems of the BKA continue to expand. The went to the then Minister of the interior Gerhart Baum (FDP). Herold had to go in 1981. With 57 Years. It was not the only humiliation.

The Ex-BKA-President planned, with a new identity in the United States. He was not allowed to. The Federal Ministry of the interior did not want to keep an eye on him, probably only because of the risk of an attack by the RAF. Herold got an Area on the site of a Federal border guard barracks in the Bavarian Rosenheim assigned. There is a Bungalow was built. The cost of property and construction, Herold had to wear, there were 600,000 in D-marks. Until 2017, after the death of his wife, he returned to his former home to Nuremberg.

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He was “the last prisoners in the national prison of the RAF” should have had told Herald on his retirement. He wrote many professional articles and was in hardly, how he had dumped her. In 2004, there were already 23 years since the farewell to the BKA passed, he received the Federal cross of merit with star and shoulder ribbon. Only a year earlier, the BKA had replaced the Herold-designed information system Inpol “Inpol”. More than three decades, had kept Inpol. It was a Symbol of the energy of the most important criminologists in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.