Herrhausen and Rohwedder: Two RAF Killings the Archives Cannot Close

In 1989 and 1991 the killings of Alfred Herrhausen and Detlev Karsten Rohwedder shook a reunifying Germany.

21 October 2026 · Part of Cold War — a guide to 21 articles →

Two men were killed in the space of sixteen months, one the head of the largest bank in West Germany, the other the president of the agency selling off East Germany's state-owned economy. The Rote Armee Fraktion claimed both killings. Neither has ever been solved in court, and the honest state of the record is that the authorship of the group is the accepted reading, not a proven one.

Two victims, one transition

In 1989 and 1991 Germany was changing faster than its institutions could describe. The Wall had fallen on 9 November 1989, as told in the fall of the Berlin Wall, and both of the men killed in the following sixteen months stood at the points where West German money met the East.

Alfred Herrhausen was the spokesman of the board of Deutsche Bank. Detlev Karsten Rohwedder was the president of the Treuhandanstalt, the trust agency charged with privatising the state enterprises of the former GDR. Their killings were not obscure crimes. They were the most prominent attacks of the group's last decade, which our article on the third generation places in the wider pattern of attacks with almost no convictions.

This piece does one thing only: it sets out what the record establishes, what it does not, and why the two cases remain open in the archives.

Chronology

Bad Homburg, 30 November 1989

On the morning of 30 November 1989 Herrhausen's armoured car was travelling through Bad Homburg when a bomb went off at the roadside. According to the federal agency for civic education, a charge of about seven kilograms had been fixed to the luggage rack of a bicycle and was set off by a light barrier as the car passed. Herrhausen was killed; his driver was injured.

Investigators found at the scene a sheet of paper bearing the emblem of the Rote Armee Fraktion and the words "Kommando Wolfgang Beer". Wolfgang Beer was a RAF member who had died in a car accident in 1980, so the name is a tribute, not a signature. Five days later a longer letter claimed the attack. In the Kommando statement we explain why such documents are evidence of the group's self-presentation, and why they are not evidence of who physically did the deed.

The technique is the reason the case is hard. A remotely triggered charge leaves no gunman, no face and no witness at the moment of the act. It also required careful preparation: someone had to choose the spot, learn the route and place the device without being noticed.

Düsseldorf, 1 April 1991

Rohwedder was killed on the night of 1 April 1991, shot through a window of his house in Düsseldorf. He had run the Treuhand since the previous year, in the months when closing, selling or rescuing thousands of East German firms made it the most hated institution in the East. A letter signed in the name of the RAF was found near the place from which the shots were fired and a claim reached the press the next day.

The attribution to the RAF's third generation is the official one and the majority view among experts, according to press retrospectives, but it was never confirmed by a verdict. Other theories have circulated for decades, among them that the East German secret police had a hand, and commentators still disagree. We state it as an open question because the evidence that would close it does not exist in public.

What the investigations produced

For Herrhausen, the record is a sequence of leads that did not hold. A former informant of the Hessian domestic intelligence service confessed in 1991 and later retracted. In January 1992 the authorities presented a witness as a key figure, and he too withdrew his statements; a 1995 parliamentary document returns to the episode. The federal agency for civic education says the case could not be completely cleared up, and notes the speculation about the East German service and about the Hessian authorities. Speculation of this kind is not a finding. No court has convicted anyone of the killing.

For Rohwedder, the federal prosecutor announced in 2001 that a hair trace on a towel found in the bushes near the shooting position could be assigned, with modern methods, to a RAF member who had died in 1993. The prosecutors described it as a decisive new impulse, but they did not call that person a suspect or an accomplice, and because the person was dead no trial could follow. A trace placed at a scene is evidence of presence at some moment, and it does not say who fired.

The result is the same in both cases: a claim in the group's name, a scene with physical evidence, and no judgment.

Why unsolved is a finding

It is tempting to resolve the two cases by choosing a reading. We do not, and the group's own history is the reason. The RAF issued statements to take credit for its attacks and also to shape how they were read, as the German Autumn of 1977 showed in its own way. A document found at a scene tells us what the group wished to say. It does not identify the hands.

The same discipline applies to the people named in public speculation. Our record of these operations lists the victims, the functions and the outcome, and it leaves out the names of anyone who was never convicted. The victims are named because their identity is the identity of the event. Suspects who were never tried are not, because an accusation without a verdict is not a fact.

The shape of the failure also connects to the state's earlier response: the vast data-matching drive described in Rasterfahndung was built for the first generation, and the courtroom of Stammheim for the first trials. The third generation produced neither a trial of that kind nor a record that could support one.

Conclusion

The killings of Herrhausen and Rohwedder were the two best-known acts of the RAF's last phase, and they remain the least resolved. What can be said is limited but firm: both were claimed in the group's name; both attacks were carefully prepared; and in neither case has a court established who carried it out. A history that fills that gap with a name or a theory it cannot support does less than one that says plainly where the evidence stops.

Frequently asked questions

Who killed Alfred Herrhausen? The attack was claimed in the name of the Rote Armee Fraktion, and the attribution to the group is the accepted reading. Nobody has been convicted of the killing, and the federal agency for civic education describes the case as never fully cleared up.

Was Detlev Karsten Rohwedder killed by the RAF? Officially and in the view of most experts he was killed by members of the group's third generation, and a claim in its name was sent to the press. No verdict has confirmed it, and alternative theories, including one about the East German secret police, have circulated without ever being proved.

Did the 2001 announcement solve the Rohwedder case? No. The federal prosecutor said a hair trace could be assigned to a RAF member who had died, but did not call the person a suspect, and no trial could follow. A trace at a scene shows presence, not who fired.

Why does this article not name suspects? Several people have been linked in public to these attacks without ever being convicted. Naming them would present accusation as proof, so this article names the victims and their functions and leaves the unresolved question open.

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