Uwe Behrendt (April 1952 – September 1981) was a German far-right extremist. In 1976 he became de facto deputy leader of the "Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann" (WSG-Hoffmann), a network of between 400 and 600 politically like-minded activists and terrorists (according to the perspective of the commentator) which concealed its underlying mission, rather unconvincingly, by presenting itself as a paramilitary sports club. Behrendt was widely considered as the group member closest in terms of (informal) seniority and personal support to the leader, Karl-Heinz Hoffmann. He came to wider attention because of a notorious double murder and questions posed by the subsequent handling of it when, on 19 December 1980, believed to have been motivated by antisemitic race-based hatred, Behrendt murdered a rabbi-publisher (and known anti-fascist) called Shlomo Lewin and Lewin's life-partner, Frida Poeschke in Erlangen. From the perspective of the German legal system, no one was ever convicted in connection with the murder. Behrendt was able to escape to Lebanon where, following further controversy involving allegations of torture and more killing, he is believed to have committed suicide in 1981.
Because evidence was never proven in a court of law that Hoffmann had either mandated the killing or had any prior knowledge of it, Behrendt is classified in public records as a lone killer. Following research undertaken during the intervening four decades by investigative journalists and specialist scholars it has nevertheless become accepted in some quarters that Uwe Behrendt was part of a network of far-right terrorists who were involved in violent attacks and killings in a number of European countries at the time.
Life Provenance and early years Uwe Behrendt was born in Pößneck, a small town in the hill country south of Jena. It was here, in the recently launched Soviet-sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany) that he spent his childhood and in 1970 passed his school final exams, after which he embarked on an apprenticeship in the agriculture sector. However, following the usual break for a period of military service, he returned not to an agricultural education but to study for a degree in Electro-technology at the Ilmenau University of Technology. He remained dissatisfied with his life, however, and by 1973 was ready to escape from the country. Escaping to the west had become a feature of life in East Germany and was known as Republikflucht: it had become progressively more firmly stigmatized by the authorities through the 1950s. By 1961 “Republikflucht” had become extremely difficult, and was treated, under most circumstances as a criminal offence. Behrendt's flight attempt failed and the Czechoslovak authorities returned him to East Germany after a few weeks: he was then sentenced to a 20-month jail term. It was during 1974 that Behrendt was “sold” by the East German government to the West German government for 50,000 (western) marks under the still highly secret ”Häftlingsfreikauf” programme, under the terms of which East German political prisoners could be selected by the East German authorities for release to the west. West Germany received young people identified by agreement as “political prisoners” and East Germany received large amounts of western currency, of which there was a desperate shortage east of the Iron Curtain. The programme was applied, almost exclusively, to people of working age. The slaughter of war had left both versions of Germany desperately short of working age population, and for the former Soviet occupation zone the problem had been exacerbated by the several million “East Germans” who had fled to the west before the authorities moved first to discourage and then to prevent the practice. On 24 July 1974 Behrendt was delivered by bus with a number of others picked out for the same process to West Berlin.Rainer Fromm: Die „Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann“, Frankfurt am Main 1998, pp. 342–344 Several of those handed over to the west at around the same time had already been involved in Neo-Nazi activism in East Germany, and once arrived in West Germany would lose no time in joining the WSG. These included Ralf Rößner and, indeed, Behrendt himself.Bernd Siegler: Auferstanden aus Ruinen: Rechtsextremismus in der DDR. Bittermann, 1991, ISBN 3923118872, p. 178f.
At the end of summer 1974 Behrendt enrolled at the University of Tübingen to study Protestant Theology and Germanistics. He became a member of the Strasbourg “Arminia” student fraternity. According to the quarterly journal “Burschenschaftliche Blätter” produced by the German "Burschenschaft" (umbrella organisation for German student fraternities) he took part in two “Mensuren” (fencing duels). During 1976/77 he was a member of the “Universities Policy Committee” of the German Burschenschaft. He was also active in the right-wing extremist “Hochschulring Tübinger Studenten” (HTS) student association which at that time was led by Axel Heinzmann, who was another of the young men recently “traded” from East to West Germany under the secret ”Häftlingsfreikauf” programme For Behrendt, meeting Heinzmann was a key experience: "From him I heard, for the first time, clarity about the German political situation". In 1976 Behrendt stood for election to the Tübingen ” AStA” (university students’ committee) as an HTS candidate. In his contributions to university politics he spoke out for anti-communism, advocated legal rehabilitation for Nazi criminals and supported apartheid racism in South Africa.
Leading Neo-Nazi activist in the WSG Hoffmann As a Theology student at Tübingen, through his student fraternity connections and, in particular, through the HTS, Behrendt came into contact with the ”Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann” (WSG-Hoffmann), which in 1976 already had perhaps 440 members. That made it West Germany's largest paramilitary sports club. On 4 December 1976 the extremist HTS (right-wing extremist student association) invited the WSG leader, Karl-Heinz Hoffmann to address them on the theme of “Black-communist aggression in South Africa”. Counter-protestors turned up to greet him, and Behrendt was one of a number of the HTS representatives present to take the opportunity to attack them savagely. Several of the anti-fascist demonstrators had to be hospitalised. The incident formed the basis for a criminal trial, known as the “Prinz Karl Trial" which opened in September 1977 and received extensive media coverage across West Germany. There were eleven people before the court, including both Behrendt and Hoffmann himself. The charges involved Breach of the Peace and causing Bodily Harm. The hearing ended after 18 days and Behrendt walked free. He may already have been actively engaged with the WSG by 1976: he was certainly prominently involved after the trial in 1977, quickly becoming identified as second-in-command only to Hoffmann himself.
Behrendt was one of the WSG members who was frequently invited to guard meetings, and he soon became one of the “inner core” surrounding Hoffmann. He was often involved on behalf of the group in brawls and in attacks on pet targets such as left-wing bookshops, meetings and left-wing demonstrations by those whom group members derided as “Kommunaken”. As economic growth stalled across Europe in the aftermath of the 1973/74 oil price shocks, the late 1970s became a period of intensifying street violence. Some alarmed eyewitnesses and commentators reported the attacks in which, armed with knives and “chemical clubs” (tear-gas canisters), Behrendt and other WSG activists participated as nothing less than “eruptions of naked terror", described in one report as “one of the most terrible things that has happened since 1945". The security services, even in West Germany, came under pressure to take a less relaxed approach to the situation. At one stage Hoffmann received and served an eighteen-month prison sentence because of his involvement in the violence relating to a demonstration in Tübingen; and while he was forced to step back a little from WSG frontline activism, Behrendt's own position, as the leader's most trusted lieutenant within the loosely defined hierarchy of the group became even more central. In prison Hoffmann was not kept completely ”incommunicado” by the authorities, and Behrendt continued to be selected by him to undertake “special missions”. One of the more thoroughly publicised of these, if only retrospectively, was Hoffmann's instruction that he kill Ralf Rößner, a former comrade who had also been traded for cash by the East German authorities in the early 1970s, who more recently had left the group and, for his own purposes, removed a large stash of forged dollar bills from a secret underground WSG storage location. Behrendt made arrangements to carry out his mission with dramatic effect, using a hand grenade. He failed in his mission only because when he turned up at Rößner's apartment, neither Rößner nor his girl-friend were there. The planned killing of Ralf Rößner only came to light some years later, in 1984, following Behrendt's own death.
In the summer of 1977 the WSG convened a large meeting for holocaust deniers, in Nuremberg, with participants invited from all over West Germany. The prospect of a “revisionist Auschwitz Congress” was greeted with horror by political opponents who formed an “anti-fascist action alliance” to try and persuade the Bavarian state government to ban the event. The most prominent representative of this alliance on the public stage was the rabbi Shlomo Lewin, who at that time was a leader in the Jewish religious community at Nuremberg. Lewin also took a lead in organising demonstrations against the WSG, notably to the north of the city at Ermeuth which had historical Hitlerite connections and where, more recently, the WSG, had established a headquarters. Hoffmann responded to the anti-fascist campaign with well-publicised targeted threats against Rabbi Lewin. These he followed up, some time later, in a hostile and defamatory article about Lewin, published in March 1979 in “Kommando”, a monthly political publication over which the WSG leadership exercised significant control.Ulrich Chaussy: Das Oktoberfest-Attentat und der Doppelmord von Erlangen, Berlin 2020, pp. 267–273.
Meanwhile, between April and 1979, Behrendt was in South Africa, from where he wrote to an uncle that he had joined the South African army. Details are hard to pin down, but it is known that during this period a number of German “neo-nazis” did indeed travel to South Africa and participate as mercenaries in the defence of Apartheid, a cause which was evidently dear to the hearts of a number of them. While he was in South Africa Behrendt was issued with a new passport by the West German consulate there, having reported the loss of his old passport and identity card. (In 1982 a suspect identified in sources as “an Arab” would be arrested and searched in Stockholm. The man was found to be carrying a number of “genuine” passports. These included the passport which Behrendt has reported as lost in 1979.)Sebastian Wehrhahn, Martina Renner: „Ermordet von Händen von Bösewichten“, in: Matthias Quent and others. (compiler-editors.): Wissen schafft Demokratie, Berlin 2020, pp. 73, 78, 73-80 & footnotes. 16–18