The Tupamaros West-Berlin (TW) were a small German Marxist organization which carried out a series of bombings and arsons at the end of the 1960s. In 1969 Dieter Kunzelmann

Dieter Kunzelmann

Dieter Kunzelmann is a German left-wing activist. In the early 1960s he was a member of the Situationist-inspired artists' group Gruppe SPUR. He was one of the founders of Kommune 1 in 1967. At the end of the 1960s he was one of the leaders of the Tupamaros West-Berlin, which carried out...

, Georg von Rauch

Georg von Rauch

Georg von Rauch was a member of the left-radical Blues-Scene in West-Berlin at the end of the 1960s during the German student movement.-Early life:...

, and a few others traveled to Jordan to train at a Fatah

Fatah

Fataḥ is a major Palestinian political party and the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization , a multi-party confederation. In Palestinian politics it is on the left-wing of the spectrum; it is mainly nationalist, although not predominantly socialist. Its official goals are found...

 camp, forming the Tupamaros on their return to Germany. The group took their name from the Uruguayan Tupamaros

Tupamaros

Tupamaros, also known as the MLN-T , was an urban guerrilla organization in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s. The MLN-T is inextricably linked to its most important leader, Raúl Sendic, and his brand of social politics...

. The TW had a core membership of about 15 people.

Their first action was an attempted bombing of West Berlin

West Berlin

West Berlin was a political exclave that existed between 1949 and 1990. It comprised the western regions of Berlin, which were bordered by East Berlin and parts of East Germany. West Berlin consisted of the American, British, and French occupation sectors, which had been established in 1945...

's Jewish Community Centre on November 9, 1969 (the anniversary of Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and...

); the bomb, supplied by the undercover government agent Peter Urbach, failed to explode. This was followed in the fall of 1969 by a number of bombings and arsons targeting police, judges, and US and Israeli targets. The TW claimed responsibility for these attacks under a variety of different names in order to exaggerate the size of their movement.

The group was led by Kunzelmann and von Rauch, and dissolved after the former was arrested in 1970 and the latter was killed by police in 1971. Its core members then formed the Movement 2 June

Movement 2 June

Movement 2 June was a West German terrorist organization that was based out of West Berlin. Active only from 1971–1980, the anarchist group was one of the few violent groups at the time in West Germany. Although Movement 2 June did not share the same ideology as the Red Army Faction , these...

, while some others joined the Red Army Faction

Red Army Faction

The radicalized were, like many in the New Left, influenced by:* Sociological developments, pressure within the educational system in and outside Europe and the U.S...

.

The Jewish Community Centre bombing

In 2005 the historian Wolfgang Kraushaar

Wolfgang Kraushaar

Wolfgang Kraushaar is a political scientist and historian at the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung.Kraushaar studied political sciences, philosophy and German studies in Frankfurt. From 1974-75 he was the chairman of AStA and resides in his current position at the Hamburger Institut für...

 published a book on the Tupamaros' attempted bombing of the West Berlin Jewish Community Centre, setting off a debate on anti-semitism in the German left and the German student movement

German student movement

The German student movement was a protest movement that took place during the late 1960s in West Germany. It was largely a reaction against the perceived authoritarianism and hypocrisy of the German government and other Western governments, and the poor living conditions of students...

. The bombing was allegedly planned by Kunzelmann and the bomb itself planted by Tilman Fichter, brother of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund

Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund

Der Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund was founded 1946 in Hamburg, Germany, as the college organisation of the SPD...

's then-chairman, Albert Fichter. On the date of the attempted bombing more than 200 people had gathered in the community center to commemorate Kristallnacht.

The Tupamaros Munich

Around the time of the TW's creation Fritz Teufel

Fritz Teufel

Fritz Teufel was a prominent figure in the West German political left of the 1960s. One of the founders of Kommune 1, Teufel cultivated a theatrical, humorous public image--encapsulated in his idea of the "Spaßguerilla" . In the 1970s he rejected this image and became involved with the violent...

 formed a similar group in Munich, the Tupamaros Munich (TM). Brigitte Mohnhaupt

Brigitte Mohnhaupt

Brigitte Margret Ida Mohnhaupt is a German militant associated with the second generation of the Red Army Faction members. She was also part of the Socialist Patients' Collective...

, later an important figure in the second generation of the RAF, was a member.