I sat last night and watched a Channel One (ARD) special documentary on the October 1980 Oktoberfest bombing here in Munich.
I'd left in January of 1980 and simply read the events over the years. Thirteen dead folks, along with 200-odd folks injured/wounded. Over the past fifty years....this was probably one of the top twenty events which got the attention of the public.
What generally happened over the next two or three weeks was a closed investigation, and the Munich cops identifying one guy (a neo-Nazi character)...in his early twenties....and he did it all by himself. No help. No extra connections. Just one guy.
To a great degree....no one believed the story that much, but it simply went on. Case closed. Files wrapped up. The wounded tried to make what they could out of life, and thirteen families had to deal with a dead loved one.
In the last year or so....things came up and there's more support for the idea of a conspiracy....more people involved....and perhaps an entire group of neo-Nazi characters involved (not just one).
The documentary went into the various details and frankly.....I think they did a five-star job on analyzing the whole thing.
The big puzzle after the bomb exploded was this hand that was found among all the damage. The cops ID'ed as the guy who placed the bomb, and that was the end of the investigation for them.
Oddly? The fingerprints on the end don't match up with the fingerprints found on this guy's car, which was found later. Yeah. It's pretty odd. A guy dead.....his car found in the parking lot....but fingerprints don't match.
What the reporter found years later? He found a nurse from a regional hospital.....miles and miles away from the scene who reported having this one guy show up with a bloody mess left on his arm.....no hand. No explanation was ever given. They gave the guy several days of treatment....then he just disappears. Oddly, he had visitors at the hospital....but never family members....just other guys.
The hand? Destroyed as evidence.....as the time limit occurred to dispose of evidence.....so they can't do a simple DNA test to prove it's not the dead guy's hand.
Why did the cops rush to clean this up? Well....roughly six weeks after the bombing....there was a German national election, and the head of state for Bavaria was the guy running for Chancellor (CSU - Strauss). If this was quickly cleaned up....he'd lose points (in his mind) for the election. So, just point at the one dead guy and let him be the final detail. End of the report.
The authorities are now looking into the details and what the reporter found for ARD. Needless to say.....they are probably looking for a one-armed guy, who has connections to the neo-Nazi network of Germany. The odds of them finding such a one-armed character? You put a rough-age onto the guy, and I'd say it's a nine-out-of-ten chance that they will find the character within 2015. Getting him to confess? One in a million chance. The evidence all destroyed? Yeah.
For a number of folks.....it leaves a bad taste in their mouth. Neo-Nazi characters running around and killing a number of folks....thirty years after the war? Yeah. Cops being told to marginalize their investigation? All in the interest of politics?
On the positive side (cynically spoken of course).....ARD played the documentary piece after 10PM, so there probably were less than 500,000 folks who watched it. It might be quoted, and maybe used for a Sunday political chat forum....but it's simply a curious story which will be forgotten in six weeks....unless this one-armed character is ID'ed.
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