Peter Urbach (2 May 1940 – 3 May 2011) was an informant and

agent provocateur An agent provocateur () is a person who commits, or who acts to entice another person to commit, an illegal or rash act or falsely implicate them in partaking in an illegal act, so as to ruin the reputation of, or entice legal action against, the ...

of the

West Berlin West Berlin (german: Berlin (West) or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any sovereignty, and was under mi ...

domestic intelligence agency, the ''

Verfassungsschutz The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (german: Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz or BfV, often ''Bundesverfassungsschutz'') is Germany's federal domestic intelligence agency. Together with the Landesämter für Verfassungss ...

'', in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He had contacts with the

Kommune 1 Kommune 1 or K1 was a politically motivated commune in Germany. It was created on 12 January 1967, in West Berlin and finally dissolved in November 1969. Kommune 1 developed from the extraparliamentary opposition of the German student movement o ...

and with several people who would go on to form the German terrorist organization, ''

Rote Armee Fraktion The Red Army Faction (RAF, ; , ),See the section " Name" also known as the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang (, , active 1970–1998), was a West German far-left Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla group founded in 1970. Th ...

''. He supplied the scene with weapons,

Molotov cocktails A Molotov cocktail (among several other names – ''see other names'') is a hand thrown incendiary weapon constructed from a frangible container filled with flammable substances equipped with a fuse (typically a glass bottle filled with flammab ...

and bombs. In 2005 it was revealed that Urbach had supplied the bomb for the November 9, 1969 attempted attack on the Jewish Community Center in Berlin by the

Tupamaros West-Berlin The Tupamaros West-Berlin (TW) were a small German Marxist organization which carried out a series of bombings and arsons at the end of the 1960s. In 1969 Dieter Kunzelmann, Georg von Rauch, and a few others traveled to Jordan to train at a Fata ...

. The bomb failed to explode, but a police report concluded that it contained enough explosives to have killed many of the 250 people present in the center at the time. The people behind the attack were known by the prosecutor's office, but they were not charged, presumably to avoid uncovering the government's involvement. In 1970 information by Urbach led to the first arrest of

Andreas Baader Berndt Andreas Baader (6 May 1943 – 18 October 1977) was one of the first leaders of the West German left-wing militant organization Red Army Faction (RAF), also commonly known as ''the Baader-Meinhof Group''. Life Andreas Baader was born in ...

who would go on to lead the ''Rote Armee Fraktion''. His cover having been blown, Urbach testified at a terrorism trial in 1971 and was then given a new identity by the security agencies; he lived in

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

under his own name until his death in 2011. German historian Gerd Koenen called the planned disappearance of Urbach by the ''Verfassungsschutz'', and the lack of official inquiries of Urbach's possible actions in fostering leftist terrorism, "one of the greatest scandals of its kind in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany", and added that the ongoing lack of clarification would result in a "disturbing silence".

Literature

Ada Wilson, Red Army Faction Blues, Route, Pontefract 2012,

References

External links

Obituary: Peter Urbach (1941 - 2011). Santa Maria Times, 7. Mai 2011
{{DEFAULTSORT:Urbach, Peter 1940 births 2011 deaths Spies for the Federal Republic of Germany