Uwe Behrendt

Uwe Behrendt (born April 1, 1951; died September 16, 1981) was a German right-wing terrorist. He is accused of killing two people and of torturing several other. He was also the deputy-leader of a militant right-wing organisation "Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann".

Behrendt grew up in Pößneck in Thuringia in the German Democratic Republic and passed his A-levels in 1970. After a failed escape attempt from East Germany in 1973, he was held in custody for eleven months in Cottbus DDR but was finally ransomed for 50,000 DM and deported to West-Germany on 24 July 1974. While in West Germany he studied theology, German studies and medicine in Ulm, Erlangen and Tübingen and undertook journeys to South Africa and the then Rhodesia. He had contacts with various right-wing extremist groups and ran in 1976 as a candidate for the right-wing Hochschulring Tübingen students (HTS) for the General Student Committee of the University of Tübingen. In HTS there was at least one other member of Werhsportgruppe Hoffmann, the Munich Oktoberfest bomber Gundolf Köhler. In June 1976, Behrendt was elected to the University Political Committee (HpA) of the German Burschenschaft.

On December 19, 1980 Behrendt shot and killed Shlomo Lewin and his partner Frieda Poeschke in front of their house in Erlangen with a Beretta sub-machine gun. Lewin had written several critical reports on the "Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann. According to a statement by Hoffmann, Behrendt confessed to him that he had committed the killings. Hoffmann helped Behrendt to cover his tracks by burning some of his clothes. At the time of the crime, Behrendt lived at Schloss Ermreuth, Hoffmann's private residence.

After the murder, Behrendt fled West Germany on December 23, 1980 and stayed until 25 December 1980 in Pößneck in East Germany on a pretended Christmas visit to his parents. Thereafter, he is said to have returned to West Germany and from there he made his way to Damascus in Syria and later to Beirut in Lebanon. There WSG Hoffmann established (with Fatah's support) an organisation, called "WSG Ausland". In Lebanon, Behrendt allegedly tortured and mistreated other members of the WGS Hoffmann. One of the members, Kay-Uwe Bergmann, disappeared without a trace. Behrendt committed suicide on 16 September 1981 in a Lebanese military camp[1] Karl-Heinz Hoffmann was convicted for having participated in the torture of Kay-Uwe Bergmann.

In 2017 the Federal Prosecutor's Office started new investigations into the so called "Lebanon complex". The skull and a few bone fragments belonging to Behrendt were found on the grounds of the camp in Lebanon.[2]

References
  1. Hans-Gerd Jaschke, Birgit Rätsch, Yury Winterberg, Nach Hitler: radikale Rechte rüsten auf, Bertelsmann 2001, S. 42
  2. https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/politik/spur-nach-beirut/
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