1972 March 2, 1972 Hamburg and Augsberg

Hamburg police raid an apartment used by the Baader-Meinhof Gang for producing forged documents. In the evening, Manfred Grashof and Wolfgang Grundmann enter the apartment and are surprised by the police. Grundmann gives up immediately, but Grashof fires at the cops from behind Grundmann. Police Chief Superintendent Hans Eckhardt, who is in charge of Hamburg’s Baader-Meinhof Special Commission, takes two bullets. The other police return fire and shoot Grashof in the head and chest. Grashof will survive, but Eckhardt dies in Eppendorf University Hospital two weeks later.

In Augsburg police close in on a young couple that they had kept under surveillance for four weeks. A cop with an itchy trigger finger shoots Thomas Weissbecker, loosely connected to the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Movement 2 June (and perpetrator of last year’s prison switch with Georg Von Rauch). Hit in the heart, Weissbecker dies instantly. His companion, SPK member Carmen Roll, is taken into custody.