Alfred Herrhausen
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Alfred Herrhausen (30 January 1930 - 30 November 1989) was a German banker and Chairman of Deutsche Bank. From 1971 onwards he was a member of the bank's board of directors.
Herrhausen fell victim to a sophisticated roadside bomb shortly after leaving his home in Bad Homburg on 30 November 1989. He was being chauffeured to work in his armoured Mercedes-Benz, with bodyguards in both a lead vehicle and another following behind. The bomb had been hidden in a school bag on a bicycle next to the road that the terrorists knew Herrhausen would be traveling in his three-car convoy. In the bag was a 20-kg bomb that was detonated when Herrhausen's car interrupted a beam of light as it passed the bicycle. The bomb and its triggering mechanism were quite sophisticated. The bomb targeted the most vulnerable area of Herrhausen's car—the door where he was sitting—and required split-second timing to overcome the car's special armour plating. The bomb utilized a Misznay-Schardin mechanism. A copper plate, placed between the explosive and the target, was deformed and projected by the force of the explosion. It is unlikely that this IED had the precise engineering required to form the liner into a more effective slug or "carrot" shape (like in a shaped charge or an EFP)[citation needed] but in any case, the detonation resulted in a mass of copper being projected toward the car at a speed of nearly two kilometers per second, effectively penetrating the armoured Mercedes.
No one has ever been charged with the murder. For a long time, the German federal prosecutor office listed Andrea Klump and Christoph Seidler of the Red Army Faction as the only suspects. The Federal Criminal Police Office (Germany) presented a chief witness Siegfried Nonne who later retracted his statements in which he claimed to have sheltered four terrorists in his home. His half-brother Hugo Föller (died 23 January 1992) furthermore declared that no other persons had been at the flat at the time. German Television on 1. July 1992 broadcast Nonne's explanations how he was coached and threatened by the Verfassungsschutz, the German internal intelligence agency, to become the main witness. In 2004 the federal prosecuter dropped the charges against the Red Army Faction; the investigation was to continue without naming a suspect.
Some months before his violent death, Herrhausen is reported to have advocated Third World debt cancellation and reorganisation of the world's financial system at the World Bank meeting in Washington, D.C. In his position as the chairman of one of the most powerful banks in the world his insistence would have been influential.
The award-winning German documentary movie of 2001 Black Box Germany retells the lives and deaths of Alfred Herrhausen and Wolfgang Grams, a radical activist (who was a major suspect in the attack on Herrhausen). By interviewing relatives, friends, and colleagues of both men, it succeeds in putting their fate into the larger picture of the troubled German politics of the '70s and '80s, explaining things credibly and leaving the audience with new insights and questions.
