KURRAS, KARL-HEINZ (1927– ). A West German policeman and
highly prized agent of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS)
who was responsible for the killing of an unarmed student demon-
strator, Karl-Heinz Kurras was born in Barten, East Prussia (today
Barciany, Poland) on 1 December 1927. A Wehrmacht volunteer at
the end of World War II, he was arrested for illegal arms possessions
by Soviet authorities in 1946 and spent three years in the Sachsen-
hausen concentration camp. In April 1955, despite his ideological
motivation to move to East Berlin and join the People’s Police, MfS
officials engaged him as an agent (code name otto bohl) with in-
structions to retain his position at the Charlottenburg branch of the
West Berlin police. In December 1962, at his request, he also became
a member of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED).
By January 1965, Kurras had arrived at his main goal—a counter-
intelligence posting in the West Berlin criminal police. As a result
of his efforts, the MfS acquired a comprehensive knowledge of the
innermost workings of its opponent’s security operations: the iden-
tity of Western agents in the German Democratic Republic; advance
warning of impeding arrests of East bloc operatives; details about
persons who had escaped across the sealed border and their accom-
plices; and the modus operandi of the police including their interac-
tion with West German and Allied intelligence officials. In addition,
Kurras’s calm and obliging manner impressed his MfS superiors, and
his remuneration increased on a steady basis.
On 2 June 1967, during a violent demonstration against a state
visit by the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Kurras fatally
shot Benno Ohnesorg outside the city’s opera house—a signal event
in the mass left-wing protest movement in the Federal Republic of
Germany (FRG). The MfS reacted immediately, ordering Kurras to
destroy his records and cease activities henceforth. A West Berlin
court acquitted him of a manslaughter charge later the same year,
and he subsequently rejoined the police force. No evidence indicates
MfS complicity in the killing—his longtime case officer, Werner
Eiserbeck, characterized it as “a most regrettable mishap”—although
the SED sought to exploit the event in its ongoing propaganda cam-
paign against the FRG. Prior to his retirement from the police force
in 1987, Kurras attempted to revive his relationship with the MfS, but
at a meeting in East Berlin in March 1976, Eiserbeck gave him no
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