The first shot from the rifle killed Detlev Rohwedder instantly as he stood near the window in the first-floor library of his opulent Düsseldorf home. The second injured his wife, Hergard, on the arm; the third bounced off a bookshelf. The unsolved 1991 murder of Rohwedder, 58, the head of the government body charged with privatising state industry in communist former East Germany, was as audacious as it was shocking. He was described “as a martyr of German unity”, by Theo Waigel, the finance minister at the time. A four-part Netflix documentary about the killing, released ahead of next Saturday’s 30th anniversary of Germany’s reunification, is providing a reminder of how the euphoria that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall soon gave way to

Source: The Times September 26, 2020 23:03 UTC