Detlev Rohwedder was a German manager, politician and president of the Trusteeship Agency, assassinated by a sniper in his home on April 1, 1991.
Wiki/Biography
Detlev Rohweder was born on Sunday, October 16, 1932, as Detlev Karsten Rohweder (58 years old at the time of his death) in Gotha, Thuringia, Germany, at his grandparents’ home. He graduated from high school in Meldorf, western Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, in 1953. He later studied law and economics in Hamburg and Mainz.
Gotha, birthplace of Rohwede
address
Detlev Rohwedder lives at Kaiser-Friedrich-Ring 72 in Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Detlev Rovede House
family
Relationships, Wife and Children
In 1960, Detlef Rohweder married Judge Helgard Toussaint, who had met her husband, Detlef Carsten Rohweder, during her studies. She had long served as a judge in the Asylum Chamber of the Administrative Court of Düsseldorf.
Detlev Rohwedder and his wife Hergard Rohwedder
The couple has two children, Philipp Rohwedder, who was previously CEO of the German-speaking region of Warner Bros., and Cäcilie Rohwedder, a journalist for an American business newspaper.
Profession
Detlev Rohweder began his career in 1963 as head of the legal and tax department of the Düsseldorf audit firm “Kontinentale Treuhandgesellschaft”, of which he became co-owner in 1965. In 1969, Rohweder joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and switched to politics. In the same year, he became state secretary at the Federal Ministry of Economics. In 1979, Rohweder switched from politics to industry. He was appointed head of the Dortmund steel group Hoesch.
On July 3, 1990, Rohweder was appointed Chairman of the “Treuhand” and by 1991 he had risen to become President of the “Treuhand”. The “Treuhand”, commonly referred to as the “Treuhand”, was an agency set up by the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) before the reunification of Germany. In 1991, with the fall of the “Berlin Wall”, Rohweder was given the most difficult task in the German economy: to protect, restructure and privatize the assets of the GDR’s state-owned enterprises, including 8,000 industrial plants. The GDR was the eastern region of Germany ruled by the Communist Party, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). Communism in the GDR was protected by the “Stasi”, the GDR’s secret police and intelligence agency, which was responsible for monitoring citizens suspected of any political resistance to the SED.
Detlev Rohwedder of Treuhand
die
On Easter Monday, April 1, 1991, at 11:30 p.m., Detlev Rohwedder was assassinated by a sniper in his office on the first floor of his villa in Düsseldorf-Niederkassel.
The gunman fired three shots with a Belgian G1 rifle from a distance of 63 meters across the vegetable garden. The first shot killed Detlev Rovede as he stood up from his desk. The second shot hit his wife Hegad in the arm, and the third shot hit a bookshelf.
Bullet marks on the windows of Detlev Rohwedder’s home.
Just three minutes after the shooting, Düsseldorf police launched a massive manhunt, but the attacker escaped without leaving any trace of the murder weapon. Three bullet shells, a plastic chair, a towel, binoculars, three cigarette butts and a confession signed by Red Army Commando (RAF) commando Ulrich Wessel were found at the crime scene.
Roveder’s body is removed from his villa in Düsseldorf
The RAF is an extremist terrorist organization in the Federal Republic of Germany. Ten years after the crime, the police found DNA from a towel at the crime scene belonging to RAF member Wolfgang Grams, who died in Bad Kleinen in 1993, but an analysis of saliva on three cigarette butts revealed that they had been smoked by people with type A blood; therefore, Wolfgang Grams was cleared of suspicion. So far, investigators have followed up on about 1,000 leads, but the “Treuhand” special commission was disbanded without knowing who the murderer was.
Wolfgang Gramm, British RAF terrorist
dispute
Hegaard Rohweder accused the East German secret police, the Stasi, of planning and participating in the murder of her husband, Detlev Rohweder. Allegedly, the Stasi and her husband were about to find the missing assets of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, worth 800 million German marks. Rohweder became a capitalist when he had to close hundreds of dilapidated factories due to communist mismanagement, resulting in massive unemployment. The communists were furious at their sudden fall from power and wanted to regain their position. This supported the theory that the Stasi assassinated Rohweder and blamed the murder on the RAF. Hegaard had doubts in her mind because the RAF had never shot the victim’s family in previous assassinations. In an interview, she said,
The RAF had never shot at the family members of the victims in previous assassinations, never! They shot us several times; my husband fell down immediately, and a few seconds later I walked into the room and they aimed and shot me… It was perfectly planned – just at the moment he got up from his desk to go to bed. Anyone with experience in security policy believed that this could not have been done by the RAF alone.
Detectives also speculated that the RAF had received intelligence about a Stasi agent employed by a security company that installed bulletproof glass windows on the ground floor of Rovedder’s home.
Awards/Honors
- In 1983, Detlev Rohwedder was named “Manager of the Year”.
- In 1985, the Ruhr Press Association awarded Roveide the “Iron Man Reynold Award”.
- In November 1990, he was again named “Manager of the Year”.
- In 1992, the Cabinet Office building in Berlin was renamed the Detlev Rohwedder Haus in honor of Detlev Karsten Rohwedder.
Detlev Rohwede Building
- In 1999, the Detlev Rohweder Prize was established in his memory. It is awarded to a person who has made an exceptional contribution to the deregulation of the social market economy between 1999 and 2006.
Facts/Trivia
- Although the location of the Düsseldorf villa where the murder took place is exposed, the windows on the upper floors are not made of bulletproof glass like those on the ground floor.
- Three to four days before the murders, some suspicious activity, such as late night phone calls and doorbells ringing in the middle of the night, gave Hegard Rovede a sense that something was brewing. In an interview, she said,
They came at two or three in the evening…No one came. It was quiet. Then the doorbell rang again in the evening—I didn’t open the door. But I looked down. There was nothing, no one.”
- During the interview, she also revealed that a large car was parked in the adjacent parking lot the day before the incident, with a couple sitting in the car. She said,
We spent Sunday in Essen and handed out big bouquets of flowers to everyone… When we got home, I made a mistake that I still regret today. There was a big car parked in the parking lot next door with a young couple in it. It was Sunday afternoon. There was a law firm in the house and there was no reason to go there on a Sunday. I wanted to go, but my husband said: “Come on, forget it, who cares, we’re going in!” It must have been a murderer! At least I could have written down the license plate number. I really blamed myself.
- Detlev Rohweder is a bibliophile. After working at Treuhand, he wants to become an antiquarian in the book trade. Hergard Rohweder says,
He dreamed of opening a good bookshop in Strasbourg. Someone like him would probably be outdated today, because he had a literary and historical education.’
- On September 25, 2020, Netflix premiered a documentary about the unsolved murder case of Detlev Rohwedder and the strange evidence that was discovered.
Perfect Crime(2020)
- In an interview, Hegaard Rovede recalled her husband:
He was a caring patriot. An idealist who was happy to help in this great task. The country was so cruelly divided that it is hard for young people today to imagine what it was like when the Berlin Wall was built. The Berlin Wall cut off all connections between people. And his goal was to carefully put it all back together to build a Germany, yes, Germany.
Tomb of Detlev Rohwede
Categories: Biography
Source: HIS Education