FOR FOUR decades, Germany has been haunted by the image of a young man dying in a Berlin car park, a woman nursing his bleeding head and begging for help. The killing of student Benno Ohnesorg in June 1967 by West Berlin police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras is seen today as the opening shot in the student revolt that changed the course of German history. Now a new round of "what-if" speculation has begun with the news that Kurras, a high-ranking police officer, was also a member of the ruling East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) and a high-ranking Stasi mole.
Mr Kurras was twice acquitted of charges of negligence relating to the shooting. Now 81, and still living in Berlin, he denies ever working for the Stasi.
But files found in the former Stasi archive show that the West Berlin police officer approached the Stasi and signed up in 1955. For the East German secret service, the man who signed his reports "Otto Bohl" would become a perfect spy.
Working in the West Berlin espionage department, he gave the Stasi everything they needed to know about western activities against them.
Crucially, there is no indication in the file of Stasi involvement in the Ohnesorg shooting; indeed the East Germans broke off contact afterwards. Still, the revelation has sparked another round of heated debate about Germany's student revolution.
The shooting on June 2nd, 1967, followed a day of student protests in West Berlin at the state welcome for the Shah of Iran. A protest outside the Deutsche Oper opera house turned violent when students were attacked by pro-Shah demonstrators and, later, by baton-wielding police officers.
Passing by was the 26-year-old student Benno Ohnesorg and Christa, his pregnant wife of just six months. He went to get a closer look and he was found minutes later, bleeding from a bullet hole in the back of his head. Police prevented him from getting immediate medical attention and it was 45 minutes before Ohnesorg arrived - and died - in hospital.
The Ohnesorg shooting - followed by a problematic investigation and Kurras's acquittal due to lack of evidence - radicalised a generation of West German students. They went out to protest against injustice in far away countries - the Shah's repressive regime and the Vietnam war - and returned alarmed about repression they themselves were experiencing.
"The post-fascist system has become a pre-fascist one," declared the SDS student organisation hours after the shooting. Present that day in Berlin, too, were Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, founding members of the extreme-left Red Army Faction (RAF). For them, the Ohnesorg killing justified a violent struggle against what Ensslin dubbed the "fascist authorities" that evening at a rally.
The bloody "Baader-Meinhof" armed struggle ended a decade and 50 deaths later, after bringing West Germany to the brink of a constitutional emergency. Already the Kurras revelation has reopened the 1968 left-right fault line that runs through German life.
For left-wingers, the news has hardened long-held suspicions of a police cover-up.
"But we cannot come to the conclusion that the Stasi steered this part of our history - they could only dream of that kind of influence," said Otto Schily, former interior minister and lawyer for the Ohnesorg family.
Der Spiegelmagazine gave a more right-wing slant, suggesting that the 1968 generation had "lost an important foundation stone that justified their rebellion".
"(Kurras) remains the gunman but he can no longer be called the marionette of a potentially fascist regime," suggested the magazine. "He was the marionette of a socialist state with . . . a similarly authoritarian character."
