The extensive investigation files now indicate that the authorities knew about Köhler's contacts with Hoffmann before the attack. The German military counterintelligence service had intercepted letters between Hoffmann and Köhler that remain classified today. The Baden-Württemberg state intelligence service also had Köhler under observation, because his name had appeared on two WSG membership lists in 1977 and 1979. The police also knew about Köhler's ties to the Viking Youth and Hoffmann's WSG long before the Oktoberfest bombing. They too had found his name on membership lists they had seized from right-wing extremist groups.

But according to the investigation files, Köhler was only in contact with the WSG until 1976. The investigators did not find it sufficiently interesting that he had completed a type of guerilla training in Hoffmann's group and had even discussed "the possibility of a civil war in Germany" with other members.

The Viking Youth and the WSG were not the only stations in Köhler's extremist career. As a student in the southwestern city of Tübingen, he also gravitated toward the center of the far-right scene there. On Hoffmann's advice, he contacted the right-wing extremist group Hochschulring Tübinger Studenten, or "University Ring of Tübingen students." Its leader was Axel Heinzmann, an NPD member today and, at the time, a young politician for the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), the national sister party to Bavaria's CSU. He was also known at the university by his -- and Hitler's -- initials, "A.H."

In a letter to his young protégé, Hoffmann had advised him to seek Heinzmann's help in developing a local Wehrsportgruppe. This placed Köhler at the interface between right-wing extremism and the nationalist conservative establishment. Heinzmann cleverly addressed two milieus, the neo-Nazis and the CSU. He was a driving force behind the Aktionsgemeinschaft Vierte Partei (Fourth Party Action Group), which had ties to the CSU and aimed to expand the party's reach nationwide. Heinzmann and his neo-Nazi friends also attended joint conferences between NPD officials and CSU members of the Bundestag, including the party's foreign-policy spokesman at the time, Hans Graf Huyn.

Fighting communism was the subject of these meetings, known as Africa Seminars. In perfect harmony, neo-Nazis and Strauss supporters, including a number of CSU Bundestag members, discussed how best to vanquish the red threat. "Our freedom is being defended on the Cape," one of the meeting slogans read. To demonstrate their solidarity, CSU and NPD politicians traveled to southern Africa in the late 1970s. In 1981 Edmund Stoiber, the general secretary of his party at the time, campaigned for the CSU trips "with a number of interesting interlocutors." On another occasion his boss, Bavarian state governor Strauss, said: "One mustn't be too squeamish with auxiliary troops," no matter how reactionary they might be.

Damning Witness Testimony

Heinzmann's militant leanings had been public knowledge in Tübingen for some time, a circumstance that led to a bloody brawl in December 1976, when about 200 anti-fascists tried to prevent a neo-Nazi meeting from taking place. Hoffmann, Heinzmann and their friends, including Köhler, were in the thick of the brawl. The local press described it as one of the "most brutal altercations in the city since 1945." In a flyer titled "Is Bloodshed Necessary?" Hoffmann bragged that he and his supporters had beaten seven leftists so bad that they had to be hospitalized, and had also "injured many others." Köhler also bragged about the beatings. He had "participated in the activities of a radical right-wing group in Tübingen" and had "really cleaned up," he later told friends in Donaueschingen.

But Köhler's relationship with Heinzmann, his role in Tübingen right-wing extremist circles and the connections between the CSU and the far right were all clues that investigators did not pursue. The public was also not familiarized with the immediate background of the attack, even though witness testimony in the extensive files clearly indicate that Köhler had more on his mind than his problems at university.

In early August 1980, a few weeks before the attack, the student spoke with close friends about the Bundestag election scheduled for that October. He wanted to vote for Strauss, he said, but added that it was also important for the NPD to receive more votes. In the end, he said, only violence could produce change. It was about time, he said, for someone besides the left to stage an attack, namely the right.

In the conversation, Köhler also said that it might be a good idea to commit a bombing attack in Bonn, Hamburg or Munich. The attack, he added, "could be blamed on the left, and then Strauss will be elected."

Neo-fascists in Italy had already done something similar. Only eight weeks earlier, a bomb attack had devastated the train station in Bologna, killing 85 and injuring 200. The right-wing extremist attack was initially portrayed as the work of leftist terrorists. The strategy apparently fascinated Köhler and other right-wing radicals in Germany. They envisioned a series of bombings that would spark fear throughout the country, setting the scene for the establishment of a new Nazi dictatorship.

A Meeting in Italy

Another clue also raises questions about the background of the Oktoberfest attack. A few weeks earlier, Köhler's idol Hoffmann apparently met in Italy with the internationally feared neo-fascist Joachim Fiebelkorn. The neo-Nazi from the town of Eppstein in the Taunus Mountains near Frankfurt was an informant for the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and a number of intelligence agencies. He also helped Klaus Barbie, the former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, build a paramilitary combat group in Bolivia. According to previously unknown Stasi documents, Fiebelkorn, "at the instruction of Chiaie," had met with "Karl-Heinz Hoffmann in Rome on July 13, 1980," as well as with French and Italian right-wing extremists.

The Italian neo-fascist Stefano delle Chiaie was viewed as one of the leading international terrorists of the day, a sort of right-wing counterpart to the left-wing terrorist "Carlos." Western intelligence agencies held Chiaie and his varying terrorist organizations, like "Ordine Nuovo," responsible for anti-communist attacks on several continents in the 1970s and 1980s. Bu what did Hoffmann discuss during his meeting in Italy, if it took place as the Stasi had noted? Did the men merely discuss ideological issues? Or the possibility of staging attacks in Germany based on the Italian model?

Hoffmann, who was in prison for several years for other crimes and now raises woolly-coated pigs in Saxony, says today: "I was not in Italy in 1980, I never saw or spoke with Fiebelkorn, and I don't know anything about him. I was neither the mentor nor the instigator for Gundolf Köhler, who, incidentally, was not a perpetrator but the victim of a staged attack. All investigative proceedings against me in that case were discontinued."

According to the files on the Oktoberfest attack, Köhler spoke with friends about his mentor Hoffmann three weeks before the attack. "Gundolf quoted Hoffmann, who had said several times that the bigger the target and its values, the more victims there could be," one witness was quoted saying.

Possible Accomplices Sighted

Then the bomb exploded in Munich, creating a scene of carnage at the exit from the Oktoberfest grounds. Body parts and dying victims were strewn across the path, while scores of people who had been in good spirits only moments earlier were now injured and confused. But what no one has known until now is that there were already signs at the time that Köhler may have had accomplices. Four youths told police that they had seen Köhler with several young men wearing German armed forces parkas shortly before the attack. They drew sketches of Köhler and his possible accomplices that largely coincided with the statements made by another witness. But the investigators also showed little interest in this possible lead.

The SPD/FDP federal government had wanted to send investigators to the crime scene that night, but the Bavarians put them off. Strauss appeared at the Theresienwiese festival grounds late that night. The Bundestag election campaign was in full swing, and the Bavarian candidate for the chancellorship promptly went on the offensive and tried to blame the left for the attack.

A few hours later, Strauss wrote an opinion piece for the weekly newspaper Welt am Sonntag. "For months I have been receiving indications that an attack was to be expected before the elections," he wrote, noting the question of whether the attack had come from the left or the right was irrelevant. "The terror began on the left. We have been warning against such a development for years." Strauss later speculated on possible perpetrators, saying that such an attack might be the work of then Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, the Stasi or the KGB.

The Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann, on the other hand, was exculpated after the attack by the Bavarian interior and close associate of Strauss, Gerold Tandler. "At no point," Tandler said, did the group constitute "a threat."

As a result, Köhler's act of violence was not used as an opportunity to thoroughly investigate the Wehrsportgruppe, the right-wing extremist terrorist network in Germany and the role of the perpetrator. It would have been a chance to shed light on the right-wing clique backing Köhler. Instead, his associates were able to continue what they were doing.

Right-Wing Extremist Violence Continues

Less than three months after the Oktoberfest drama, the Jewish author Shlomo Levin and his girlfriend were murdered in Erlangen, near Stuttgart. Levin had written a critical report about the Wehrsportgruppe and had compared its leader Hoffmann with Hitler. The police suspected that the murder had been committed by Uwe Behrendt, one of Köhler's acquaintances from Tübingen. But Behrendt fled to East Germany through Hoffmann's Bavarian residence at Ermreuth Castle. He was found shot to death, under suspicious circumstances, in Lebanon three months later.

A wave of bank robberies designed to raise cash, based on the RAF model, ensued. In one case, a robbery led to a deadly shootout in a Munich street between neo-Nazis and the police. Car bombs wounded US soldiers in the central German city of Giessen, and another friend of Köhler's, Stefan Wagner, went on a rampage in Frankfurt. Before he turned his gun on himself, Wagner told his hostages that he had been an accomplice in the Oktoberfest bombing.

Despite their extensive findings, the authorities held onto their theory that the Oktoberfest bomber was a "sole perpetrator." In fact, even Köhler's brother Hermann had told the police that he didn't believe that the killer had acted alone. "He wanted change within Germany, and he felt that he was part of a small elite unit that felt the same," he said when he testified about his brother Gundolf. "In the event of a change in Germany, this group was to be prepared to assume power." His brother, he added, had advocated a "violent overthrow," insisting that then "the people would clamor for a Führer."

Strauss's assertion that the security services had everything "under control" was therefore a deliberate deception.

Köhler's friends in the Hochschulring Tübinger Studenten, the Wehrsportgruppe and other right-wing terror cells remained out of control after the Oktoberfest bombing and the failure to fully investigate it -- and right-wing extremist violence remained an ongoing problem in Germany.