Gerold Braunmühl

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from
Gerold von Braunmühl
)

Gerold von Braunmühl (15 September 1935 – 10 October 1986) was a senior

far-left guerrilla group, the Red Army Faction
(RAF).

Life and work

Gerold von Braunmühl came from a noble family of

Washington, DC (1965-1966), and graduated with a Master's degree.[1]

Activity in the Foreign Office

In 1966, Braunmühl joined the Foreign Service and worked as an

Soviet bloc, so that he had become one of the most influential officials in the Foreign Office. Braunmühl was instrumental in improving relations with the Soviet Union and Poland, which had cooled since the ban of the Polish trade union
movement. He was considered a likely candidate for the post of Secretary of State in the Foreign Office.

Gerold von Braunmühl, Dirk von Braunmühl, grave on the cemetery Bonn-Poppelsdorf
Memorial plaque in Bonn-Ippendorf at crime scene

Murder

On the evening of 10 October, 1986, Braunmühl was shot by two people outside his residence in Bonn as he was arriving home from work. As he got out of his taxi, an unknown masked gunman came up to him and shot him twice in the upper body. As Braunmühl tried to escape behind a parked car, there appeared a second masked gunman who shot him at close range in the head, and disappeared together with the first gunman. The perpetrators fled to Bonn Endenich, where four days later their getaway car was discovered. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who had recently been released from hospital, wrote in his memoirs that he received a phone call from Mrs. Hilde Braunmühl, who said to him: "My husband has been shot." Then Genscher went to Ippendorf to the house of his former office manager. In the words of FM Genscher: "I will never forget the image of Gerold Braunmühl lying dead on the road in front of me."

The main suspects in his murder are Red Army Faction members Barbara and Horst Ludwig Meyer but there is no evidence. In the forensic examination of the projectiles, a revolver of the Smith & Wesson type was identified, most likely the same type of gun with which West German business leader

Poppelsdorf Cemetery in Bonn. Near his residence in Bonn, Buchholzstraße 39, a commemorative plate was mounted in 1987 with the following text: "Here died on 10.10.1986 Dr. Gerold Braunmühl, Political Director of the Foreign Office. He was murdered by terrorists." Soon thereafter, Gerold Braunmühl Auditorium was dedicated in the (now defunct) training and education center of the Foreign Ministry (diplomatic academy) in Bonn. The Federal Foreign Office commemorates him through a memorial wall in the old building of the construction on the Werder market in Berlin
for members who were killed in the line of duty.

Open letter by the Braunmühl brothers to the RAF

In November 1986, the five brothers of Gerold Braunmühl wrote an open letter to the RAF, on the one hand to get an answer to the meaning and motives for his murder, and on the other hand to enter into a kind of "dialogue", to prevent further such acts.[2][3][4]

References

  1. ^ Senior Bonn Official is Slain by Masked Gunman The New York Times, 11 October 1986
  2. ^ Kalenderblatt 10 Oktober 1986 Deutsche Welle
  3. ^ "A letter and its consequences", Der Spiegel, 13 September, no. 21, 1988
  4. ^ "No paper can replace a conversation", Der Spiegel, 13 September, SPIEGEL-Interview with former terrorists Peter-Jürgen Boock, no. 39, 1988