Tupamaros West-Berlin

The target of the West Berlin Tupamaros' first attempted bombing, West Berlin's (then) Jewish Community Center.

The Tupamaros West-Berlin (TW) were a small German Marxist organization which carried out a series of bombings and arsons at the end of the 1960s.[1] In 1969 Dieter Kunzelmann, Georg von Rauch, and a few others traveled to Jordan to train at a Fatah camp, forming the Tupamaros on their return to Germany.[2][3] The group took their name from the Uruguayan Tupamaros. The TW had a core membership of about 15 people.[3]

Their first action was an attempted bombing of West Berlin's Jewish Community Centre on November 9, 1969 (the anniversary of Kristallnacht); the bomb, supplied by the undercover government agent Peter Urbach, failed to explode.[4][5] This was followed in the fall of 1969 by a number of bombings and arsons targeting police, judges, and US and Israeli targets.[6] The TW claimed responsibility for these attacks under a variety of different names in order to exaggerate the size of their movement.[6]

The group was led by Kunzelmann and von Rauch, and dissolved after the former was arrested in 1970 and the latter was killed by police in 1971.[3] Its core members then formed the Movement 2 June, while some others joined the Red Army Faction.[3][7]

  1. ^ Kundnani, Hans (2009). Utopia Or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust. Columbia University Press. p. 114.
  2. ^ Kundnani 91, 99
  3. ^ a b c d Hauser, Dorothea (2008). "Terrorism". In Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth (ed.). 1968 in Europe: a history of protest and activism, 1956-1977. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 271–72.
  4. ^ Gessler, Philipp; Stefan Reinecke (25 October 2005). "The anti-Semitism of the 68ers". die tageszeitung. Retrieved 22 April 2010. Translated into English by Sign and Sight.
  5. ^ Kundnani 88, 90
  6. ^ a b Kundnani 97
  7. ^ Huffman, Richard. "Tupamaros". Baader-Meinhof.com. Archived from the original on 27 July 2010. Retrieved 22 April 2010.