from
Hans Kratz
When the phone rang early in the morning on that memorable Monday in April 1970, Franz Graf von Spreti, the landlord of Kapfing Castle near Landshut, suspected that this was not a good thing. Especially when he heard his nephew’s voice: “You just brought it up on the radio – father is dead.” The news caused consternation across Germany. The dead man was Karl Graf von Spreti, the German ambassador to Guatemala at the time. Six days earlier he had been kidnapped by a guerrilla group on the street. When they found him, he was dead, shot in the head. The diplomat Karl Graf von Spreti is considered the first political victim of terror in the Federal Republic. But what hardly anyone knows: Spreti has also left its mark on film history, namely in India.