The Gladbeck Getaway Car - WDR-Arkaden
On 18 August 1988 the Gladbeck hostage takers parked their getaway car, with two 18 year old hostages on the back seat, on this stretch of Breite Straße, where reporters crowded round for live interviews and one even climbed in to guide them to the motorway. That afternoon, a police ambush on the A3 ended with 62 shots and one of the hostages dead.
À propos de ce lieu
Breite Straße, once the widest street inside Roman Cologne and later the city's newspaper district, is today a busy pedestrian zone lined with shops, and its eastern end is framed by the arched facade of the WDR Arkaden, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Gottfried Böhm and opened in 1996 for the broadcaster WDR. Eight years before the arcades opened, this pavement saw one of the most shameful scenes in German press history. Late in the morning of 18 August 1988, on the third day of the Gladbeck hostage drama, Hans-Jürgen Rösner and Dieter Degowski stopped their BMW here with two young women from a hijacked Bremen bus on the back seat. Rösner later claimed he had only wanted to see the cathedral. Instead of a police operation, a media circus began: reporters and onlookers surrounded the car so tightly that officers could not intervene, journalists held live interviews with the armed men, and a plainclothes police officer who had his arm around Rösner's neck held back for fear of disciplinary trouble. Finally a tabloid reporter climbed into the car to guide the kidnappers to the A3. Shortly after 1.30 pm, special police rammed the BMW near Bad Honnef, fired 62 shots, and 18 year old Silke Bischoff was killed by a bullet from Rösner's pistol. Nothing on Breite Straße marks the spot today, but the scenes filmed here changed German journalism for good.
À retenir
- 54 hours — The length of the Gladbeck hostage drama, from the bank robbery on the morning of 16 August 1988 to the police ambush on the A3 two days later.
- 2 hostages — Both 18 years old, they sat on the back seat of the getaway BMW while reporters and onlookers crowded round it on Breite Straße.
- 62 police shots — Fired in the gunfight on the A3 near Bad Honnef after special police rammed the getaway car, shortly after it left Cologne.