The protest turned violent after pro-Shah demonstrators, including agents of the Shah's intelligence service,[2] began battling with students and the police overreacted, employing brutal tactics in their attempts to control the crowd.[4] In the ensuing tumult, demonstrators dispersed into the side streets.[2] In the courtyard of Krumme Straße 66, Ohnesorg was then shot in the back of the head by police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras.[2] Ohnesorg died before he could be treated at a hospital.[2] Kurras stood trial the same year and was acquitted, on 27 November 1967.[2][3] Ohnesorg was a student of Romance and German studies. He was married and his wife was pregnant with their first child.[5]
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 HanoverinWest Germany, where he was buried.[6]
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.[4][7][8] The new information was based on documents discovered in the Stasi archives.[4] Initial reports indicated that the archives contained no evidence that Kurras was acting under Stasi orders when he shot Ohnesorg.[5][9]
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.[10] 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.[10]
Following up in January 2012, Der Spiegel magazine reported that research carried out by federal prosecutors, as well as by the magazine, found that the shooting was not in self-defense as always claimed by Kurras and that it was certainly premeditated. Newly examined film and photographic evidence also implicated fellow officers and superiors, demonstrating that the police covered up the truth in subsequent investigations and trials. Additionally, medical staff who carried out the autopsy on Ohnesorg were ordered to falsify their report. However, the Spiegel report indicated that the new information was still unlikely to be sufficient for the case to be reopened.[11]
Student activist Rudi Dutschke led student protest actions in the period following Ohnesorg's death.[13] 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, with Dutschke advocating radical action that might include illegality and violence if necessary, although his first proposed action 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",[6] a formulation that he later retracted.[14][15]
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.[citation needed]
A monument next to the Deutsche Oper Berlin, which was designed by Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka, serves as a memorial for the killing.[2] In December 2008, municipal authorities inaugurated an official memorial panel on the sidewalk in front of the house where Ohnesorg was shot,[2] and in Ohnesorg's hometown of Hanover, a bridge over the Ihme river is named after him.[1]
^ abcdefgh"Gedenktafeln für Benno OhnesorgArchived 18 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine" [Memorial plaques for Benno Ohnesorg] (in German). Bezirksamt Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. BerlinOnline Stadtportal (official Berlin website). berlin.de. Note: Includes a downloadable PDF document『Infotafel zur Erschießung Benno Ohnesorgs am 2. Juni 1967』with text in both German and English. Retrieved 1 June 2017.
^ abRethmann, Petra (Winter 2006). "On Militancy, Sort Of". Cultural Critique. Vol. 62. pp. 67–91; here: p. 75. doi:10.1353/cul.2006.0008. Retrieved 1 June 2017 via Project Muse database.
^Beeg, Rena; Betz, Malte; Hellwig, Marcus; Nachtsheim, Katharina; and Uhlenbroich, Burkhard (10 July 2009). "Karl-Heinz Kurras: Gab Mielke ihm de Schießbefehl?Archived 27 May 2009 at the Wayback Machine" (in German). Bild. bild.de. Retrieved 1 June 2017. With photo gallery of the event as well as of Kurras and Ohnesorg.
^"West Berlin Gunman Wounds Leader of Left-Wing StudentsArchived 29 July 2018 at the Wayback Machine" (preview only; subscription required). New York Times. 12 April 1968. "It was Mr. Dutschke who led the Berlin students in their activities against the authorities following a shooting incident [in June 1967] in which a policeman shot and killed Benno Ohnesorg, another West Berlin student."
Short video about Ohnesorg's death, in English, with contemporary footage, in The Berlin Wall: A Multimedia History, RBB (Berlin-Brandenburg broadcaster)