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

agent provocateur An is a person who actively entices another person to commit a crime that would not otherwise have been committed and then reports the person to the authorities. They may target individuals or groups. In jurisdictions in which conspiracy is a ...

of the

West Berlin West Berlin ( or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin from 1948 until 1990, during the Cold War. Although West Berlin lacked any sovereignty and was under military occupation until German reunification in 1 ...

domestic intelligence agency, the ''

Verfassungsschutz The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution ( or BfV, often ''Bundesverfassungsschutz'') is Germany's federal domestic intelligence agency. Together with the Landesämter für Verfassungsschutz (LfV) at the state level, the fed ...

'', 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 moveme ...

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 ( ), was a West German far-left militant group founded in 1970 and active until 1998, considered a terrorist organisat ...

''. He supplied the scene with weapons,

Molotov cocktails A Molotov cocktail (among several other names – ''see '') is a hand-thrown incendiary weapon consisting of a frangible container filled with flammable substances and equipped with a fuse (typically a glass bottle filled with flammable l ...

and bombs. In 2005 it was revealed that Urbach had supplied the bomb for the 9 November 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 Fatah ...

. 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 a West German communist and leader of the far-left terrorist organization Red Army Faction (RAF), also commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Group. Life Andreas Baader was born in Mu ...

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 that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

under his own name until his death in 2011. German historian

Gerd Koenen Gerd Koenen (born 9 December 1944) is a German historian and former communist politician. Life and work Born in Marburg, Koenen grew up in Bochum and Gelsenkirchen and studied Romance languages, history and politics in Tübingen. There, he ...

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 Police informants