This was published in 1990 in Lies of Our Times 1.7, 4-5.
The murder of Alfred Herrhausen, chairman of the Deutsche Bank, on Nov. 30, 1989, has been treated from the beginning as an open-and-shut case by the media on both sides of the Atlantic: the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) did it. Everyone knows the RAF did it, but if you ask them how they know, all they can say is they read it in the paper or heard it on TV. The fact is that there is next to no evidence whatsoever for this contention, in the papers or anywhere else.
The first problem in questioning this foregone conclusion is that one can be easily accused of defending a terrorist group which has been German Public Enemy No. 1 for the past 16 years. This is like appearing to defend Saddam Hussein if you're against the Gulf War.
Nevertheless, the evidence is thin. The only witness who claimed to have direct knowledge of RAF involvement turned out to be a government informer whose testimony was totally discredited. Otherwise, there is a letter of confession found at the scene of the bombing, and another a letter written in October 1989 by Helmut Pohl (not to be confused with the German chief of state), an imprisoned RAF leader, and intercepted by German authorities. In the letter, according to Der Spiegel (Dec. 4, l989), Pohl says "We must orient ourselves to a new phase of the struggle" and "strike at the mechanism which makes everything work."
As head of the biggest German bank, Herrhausen was certainly a key figure in the "mechanism," and after the opening of the border on Nov. 9, and of Eastern Europe in general, he was in a particularly powerful position to influence these massive changes. Shortly before his death he announced Deutsche Bank's purchase of the British investment bank Morgan Grenfell for 2.7 billion marks, which Spiegel calls "the most important strategic decision of the Deutsche Bank since World War II," giving them a bridgehead in London, still the most important European center for international banking.
But Herrhausen was controversial as well as powerful. Buried on p. 9 of the 10-page Spiegel article is a brief explanation of why:
Some of the things Herrhausen said and did do not fit in the simple leftist image of the ugly capitalist enemy. For example, he was the first prominent Western banker to propose publicly, two years ago, that the debt crisis in the Third World could not be solved without a partial waiver of claims by the Western creditor banks. This was also clear at the time to most other heads of banks, but they would have preferred to keep it to themselves a while longer.
No one thought to ask if this might be the key to his murder. Herrhausen supported the strategy of debt reduction, as opposed to re-financing ("fresh money"), strongly and consistently. His detailed proposal was published in the German financial newspaper Handelsblatt on June 6, 1989, and repeated in a presentation to the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington on Sept. 25, 1989. In the latter he remarked: "Mr. Reed, speaking for Citibank, has said they are a 'new money' bank. I can tell you that the Deutsche Bank is a 'debt reduction' bank." In the same speech, he pointed out that a major obstacle to his proposed debt reduction strategy is that Japanese and American banks would find it more difficult than their European counterparts to partially compensate for their losses through tax adjustments.
The New York Times of Dec. 8, 1989, printed portions of a speech which Herrhausen was to give in New York on Dec. 4 at the American Council on Germany. The entire speech was published in German on the same day in Die Zeit. The comparison is revealing.
The original manuscript is in English (which I obtained from the public relations office of Deutsche Bank), and the title is "New Horizons in Europe." The Times excerpt, about half the length of the original, is entitled "Toward a Unified Germany." This is already a gross misrepresentation. It is clear, even in what the Times printed, that Herrhausen is not pleading for unification. In fact, he is refreshingly cautious on this point, in contrast to the increasingly strident media campaign Germans East and West had been subjected to in the preceding months. He says that if the East Germans decide to join the West, fine, but
At this point, the question is still very much an open question. [This sentence was omitted in the Times.] Secondly, such an endeavour would be a difficult and certainly a long process in view of the large economic and social differences that exist today.
Henry Kissinger appeared on German television at around the same time predicting unification within 5 years. Herrhausen was figuring on at least 10 years. The reader of the NYT cannot know this, however, because the following paragraph was excised from the middle of the portion of the speech printed by the Times:
Of course, the process [of transforming a socialist society into a capitalistic one] could and should be managed in stages and it should be closely coordinated with price and currency reform. Price, currency and property reform would mean profound changes throughout society in Eastern Germany. Many people in the East, including some of the leaders of the present opposition groups, are already worried about the social costs of such adjustment. The rewards would certainly not accrue instantaneously. However, I am convinced that, given an adequate economic environment in the East and pertinent support by the West, the East German as well as the other Eastern economies could achieve impressive growth. I believe the GDR in particular could then catch up on the Western standard of living in about ten years or so.
More importantly, the Times excerpt also omits Herrhausen's discussion of the same proposals for debt reduction and in-country development banks which he had made to the World Bank and the IMF in September. These proposals, coming from a man in his position, are surely the most newsworthy items in the speech. Why did the Times find them unfit to print? Herrhausen refers here to Poland, but the same could apply to other highly indebted countries:
In the past, the banks have agreed to regular reschedulings, but now the onus is on government lenders assembled in the Paris Club [a committee representing creditor nations that meets in Paris to deal with debt problems of individual countries] to come up with a helpful contribution. They account for roughly two-thirds of the country's external debt. If there is to be a permanent solution, this will require enlarging the strategies hitherto adopted to include a reduction of debt or debt service.
As an alternative to the European Development Bank proposed by France, Herrhausen proposes
... the establishment of a development bank on the spot, that is in Warsaw. Its job would be to bundle incoming aid and deploy it in accordance with strict efficiency criteria. I could well imagine that such an institution might be set up along the lines of the German Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, the Reconstruction Loan Corporation, whose origin goes back to the Marshall plan.
Representatives of the creditor countries should hold the majority in the management board of this new institution. Such a Polish "Institute for Economic Renewal" (IER), as it could be called would have two functions: it should help and monitor. Since both these functions can only be exercised in close cooperation with the Polish authorities and with Polish trade and industry, genuine involvement on the part of the Institute in the Polish economy and the country's development process would be absolutely essential. It could be set up "until further notice" or come under Polish control after a transitional period. By channeling Western "help towards self-help" in the right directions, the Institute could play a constructive role in economic reform. Similar institutions could of course be established for other countries.
These are eminently sensible ideas, but it is not difficult to imagine that they would encounter powerful opposition, much more powerful than the likes of Helmut Pohl. No matter how you put it, for the creditors, debt reduction means giving away money. And of course it is sensible to put the lending bank "on the spot," since this would keep the repaid capital and interest in the country where it is needed, but this is not the way the big international banks make money.
Herrhausen may have been a terrorist victim. The question is: Who are the terrorists?