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]
In 2005 the historian Wolfgang Kraushaar published a book on the Tupamaros' attempted bombing of the West Berlin Jewish Community Centre, setting off a debate on anti-semitism in the German left and the German student movement.[4][8] The bombing was allegedly planned by Kunzelmann and the bomb itself planted by Tilman Fichter, brother of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund's then-chairman, Albert Fichter.[4] On the date of the attempted bombing more than 200 people had gathered in the community center to commemorate Kristallnacht.[4]
Around the time of the TW's creation Fritz Teufel formed a similar group in Munich, the Tupamaros Munich (TM).[6] Brigitte Mohnhaupt, later an important figure in the second generation of the RAF, was a member.[9]