So this is one of my historical essays over a small event in German history.
In the northern suburbs of Munich....rests Schwabinger. In early summer of 1962 (21 June)....local residents in the district ended up calling the police on some street musicians.
What history writes about the occasion is that this Thursday evening ended up in chaos as the police arrived.
The law on quiet hours? Most communities have a standard of after-10 PM being 'quiet hours'. So at 10:30 PM that night....the call went to the police.
The showing of the police? Somewhere in the midst of this....the chief of Munich's police showed up. Maybe it was the fact that one of the calls came from the local city council guy. So this escalated fairly quickly.
The decision to detain the five musicians at the heart of the event? That probably was an unwise decision.....but this was 1962, and the police usually made harsh decisions without thinking over later consequences.
Rather than tone down the mess....all through this evening, and going on for four additional days.....was a city-wide protest. Some suggest between 30,000 and 40,000 locals were part of this protest effort.
The two groups? The police, and mostly college students.
What's mostly said by locals after the event is that a fair amount of public and private damage was done, and police would admit that they'd arrested upwards to 400 students. Charges? This mostly went to misdemeanor situations and light fines and suspended jail sentences.
The harsh criticism over police actions and thug-behavior? That drifted around for a few days and disappeared for the most part.
As things cooled off.....city authorities and the police came to agree that a lot of the start-up and negative reaction....came from the blunt actions of the police. So there was a updated training episode occurred, where the police (not just in Munich, but throughout Bavaria, and the rest of the nation) were lectured to calmly walk into a situation....have a gameplan ahead of time, and only detain the parties necessary.
So there are two key elements to the Munich riot episode.
First, most historians will agree that this kinda opened the door for the golden era of the Adenauer era as Chancellor to end. To be truthful, this also had appearances to the 1918-1919 riots of Munich and probably scared a few Bavarian political figures.
Second, oddly....one of the rioters in this event was a 19-year-old kid by the last name of Baader. Yeah, the guy who started the Baader-Meinhof gang, and the Red Army Faction by 1970.
Without the loud music, the riot and the police accusations. Baader would have returned from Munich without much to talk about.
The beginning of the RAF 'civil war' in Germany? People will argue about this, but there's no doubt that this one key event changed the perception of the police, and opened up the door for radicalization to occur.
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