Horst Herold, "Commissar Computer": The "last prisoner of the RAF" is 95

The last entry in Hanns-Martin Schleyer's diary was: "Call herald". The President of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations had been warned of an attack by the Red Army Faction (RAF). But Horst Herold, chief of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), could not help Schleyer.

On the evening of September 5, 1977 Schleyer was attacked and kidnapped in Cologne, terrorists shot his driver and three bodyguards of the police. From an unknown location, the kidnappers first sent a photo, later videos of their hostage to the federal government. They demanded the release of RAF terrorists Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, who were imprisoned in Stuttgart-Stammheim, as well as eight other RAF members.

With this day began the so-called German Autumn. From then on, Horst Herold was publicly at the center of the anti-terrorist struggle. In the television news you could see constantly the beefy man with thick horn-rimmed glasses and a determined expression. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt led the crisis-team meetings - but Herold determined the tactics. He was, as a crisis-teller found, "the next to an autocrat, which this Republic has ever experienced"; the BKA chief conducted border patrol and intelligence, police and politicians.

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Herold feverishly let search for Schleyer's whereabouts - by "dragnet", which he had invented. It was clear to him where Schleyer had to be hidden: in an anonymous block near the motorway near Cologne, in an apartment for which rent and electricity were paid in cash, because the illegals could not transfer from account to account.

That's exactly how it was. Schleyer was in a high-rise apartment in Erftstadt-Liblar. A local police officer suspected sent a telex with this tip. But with the RAF special commission in Cologne the message was lost. It was not among the 70,000 clues that Herold evaluated by computers.

Target: to be at the scene before the offender

"A triumph of the greatest extent was in sight," Herold grunted - without the human error Schleyer could have been freed. Instead, he experienced his Waterloo. On October 18, 1977, the body of the employer's president was found in the trunk of a car in Alsace. Shortly before, the special unit GSG 9 in Mogadishu had raided the "Landshut" aircraft hijacked by Arab RAF loyalists; then the Stammheim prisoners took their own lives.

Today, the very quick linking of all tangible files is common practice, for example in the fight against Islamist terror. At that time, the visionary Herald was decades ahead of his time.

Herold already believed in the outstanding possibilities of data processing as Nuremberg police chief, when he celebrated success with his concept of "criminal geography" in the late sixties. The Nuremberg police constantly fed the still room-sized computers with data from crimes. The computers automatically evaluated the information, calculated statistical crime probabilities, and derived daily updated schedules. So could the police already "before the perpetrator at the scene," Herold described his goal.

SPIEGEL editor Michael Sontheimer on the "German Autumn" 1977:

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THE MIRROR

Actually Herold, born 1923 in the Thuringian Sonneberg, was unfit for the police service because of heavy war injuries. But the public medical examination was forgotten when the doctorate lawyer was tired of the work of a judge and prosecutor and in 1964 got involved as a chief of police in Nuremberg.

In 1971, the Social Democrat was appointed BKA President. He immediately transformed the hitherto low-skill, disorganized authority into an efficient mix of think tank and database. He created the electronic police information system Inpol and forced the expansion of the worldwide unique forensic BKA institute. The scientific analysis of crime scene traces should allow the judiciary objective judgments, untroubled by fallible witness memories.

"I bring them all to you"

Herold's "watchful search" made it possible to save contact persons of suspects. It revealed in the spring of 1977 that Christian Klar, Knut Folkerts and others from the RAF environment had plunged underground. The Attorney General Siegfried Buback Herold predicted in early April 1977: "These are our future murderers." Only a few days later, Buback was shot dead in his company car. Klar and Folkerts were later convicted as Buback killers.

"For the first time," Herold mused, "the security authorities knew the alleged perpetrators of the crime, but the opportunity to seize the perpetrators did not materialize." A publicity investigation had to be discontinued against the will of Herold and Buback.

At Buback's grave Herold vowed: "I bring them all" - and fulfilled his vow to a good part: About 300 "most dangerous terrorists," he added, came in his term "with the strong involvement of the BKA" behind bars.

In public, the image of a hard-hitting sheriff was created. In fact, Herold was a thoughtful criminal philosopher. He studied Karl Marx and ponders how extremism arises. He put himself in the minds of the terrorists by analyzing their writings. From this, "Commissar Computer" distilled his methods. Shortly before the Orwell year 1984, however, technology contempt and privacy hysteria spread in Germany. Herald became the specter of the surveillance state, reviled as a data-addicted doctor Mabuse the police.

Collision with the Minister of the Interior

The dragnet, irritant word of the epoch, had been wrongly discredited, he complained again. With the "negative dragnet" delete the police from the files all persons who are not considered as perpetrators. In a SPIEGEL interview in 1986, his last major interview, Herold asserted that "protect innocent people in an ideal way". Their names would be "withdrawn from the eyes of the police", a "better form of data protection" could "actually do not exist".

The procedure was practiced once under Herold's aegis. In order to track down RAF members submerged in the Frankfurt area, in February 1979 police computers deleted from all around 18,000 cash-paying electricity customers all persons who were stored in other registers under their real names. All that remained were two false names: a drug trafficker and a wanted terrorist - Rolf Heißler was arrested shortly thereafter.

According to Herold, the police are required to guarantee the fundamental rights of citizens and avert possible dangers. He wanted "to constantly feel like a doctor (...) the pulse of society" in order to prevent crime. Computers should help, but be programmed so that the privacy of innocent people is not touched.

Herold was "without doubt the most ingenious and intelligent criminologist of his time," judges his biographer Dorothea Hauser. But the relationship with Gerhart Baum (FDP), Interior Minister from 1978, deteriorated rapidly. Baum wanted to profile himself against the computer-loving BKA boss as guardian of civil rights.

When Herold tried to convince him of the idea of ​​a "digital integrated broadband special network of the police for language, image, data", the Minister exclaimed: "I do not understand what you want with it, I just do not understand it" - and left after five minutes the hall. Herold planned a kind of intranet that would have made it possible for every police officer to gain access to data and direct communication for the first time.

Moving from "my home" to the "clay pit"

Annoyed Herold applied for a heart attack in September 1980, his early retirement. His official residence on the roof of the Wiesbaden BKA concrete castle, which Herold had seldom left and which he called "my ancestral home", he had to vacate immediately after his departure in March 1981 for his successor.

But where should he go, the most endangered person in the Republic? To guard his house in Nuremberg, the state found itself unable. Herold's proposal to live in the United States with a new identity, rejected the Bonn bureaucrats for formal reasons. Finally, he had to buy the state a plot of land on the site of a federal border guard barracks in Rosenheim, where he had built a prefabricated house.

Here Herold hid from the public. In his study in the basement he continued to write essays. If visitors came, he was a humorous conversation partner and gracious host, hosting them with white sausages, wheat beer and pretzels.

Herold called the area surrounded by a mound its "clay pit", only after years the bulwark was leveled. Behind bats and barbed wire he felt like "the last prisoner of the RAF". Even if he took a trip to a nearby beer garden in his armored Mercedes, the drive had to be registered with the guard and escorts in a second car be requested.

He sacrificially nurtured his wife until her death last year. He then left his barracks prison and returned to Nuremberg. There, Horst Herold celebrates his 95th birthday on October 21st.