OEZ attack in Munich: “Our laughter lost” – Munich

Evil, says Rudolf Kollmann, should never have the last word. Exactly five years ago to the day, evil entered the lives of the Kollmann family in Munich. Once again. On July 22, 2016 at 5:53 p.m., a racist mass murderer killed the then 19-year-old Guiliano Kollmann; five 9 by 19 millimeter projectiles hit the young man’s body from behind. “Guili”, as his father and his soccer buddies from FC Aschheim called him. Guiliano happened to be at the Olympia Mall that evening. He was sitting with a friend at McDonald’s when the first shots rang out there. The two fled outside, on Hanauer Strasse. The murderer was waiting there.

The perpetrator didn’t know anything about his victims, he didn’t know them, they didn’t know him. However, Guiliano was not a chance victim in the inhuman worldview of the murderer – the 19-year-old with the boyish face looked to the shooter like one of those whom he considered to be “Kanaken”, for “subhumans”, for a “virus”, to be exterminated. “Your own fault,” yelled the murderer at another of his dying victims. Guiliano was bleeding to death in the arms of two helpers. Armela Segashi (14 years old), Sabine S. (14), Can Leyla (14), Roberto Rafael (15), Selçuk Kılıç (15), Hüseyin Dayıcık (17), Dijamant Zabërgja (20) died with him within a few minutes. , Sevda Dağ (45).

“Such an act is pointless, it can never have any meaning,” says Rudolf Kollmann, the father, five years later. But at least Guiliano should not have died in vain. The 50-year-old is thinking of a project for disadvantaged young people, a signal that even evil, which believed to triumph in those minutes in front of the Olympic shopping center, does not have the last word. Can you do that as a father who has lost his son? It clearly works in Rudolf Kollmann. Then he talks about the Free Christian Congregation of Yeschua and about his faith, which repeatedly gives him strength and support. “That’s what caught me, even in deep valleys,” says Rudolf Kollmann. The prayer room of the Sinti community is on Hanauer Strasse, just 500 meters from the place where Guiliano died five years ago.

Rudolf Kollmann got an idea of ​​what it is like when evil claims the last word as a child. The boy from Hasenbergl was nine years old when suddenly his friends Ilona and Ignatz were suddenly no longer there. The day was September 29, 1980 when a bomb killed ten visitors to the Munich Oktoberfest at 10:19 p.m. Including two children, Ilona, ​​eight, and Ignatz, six years old. “At Hasenbergl, we’re a big family,” says Kollmann. Rudolf experienced the grief and despair of the family. How terrible it must be to have to suffer something like that, he thought at the time …

Seven family members were murdered in Auschwitz

Evil had haunted the Kollmann family before. It came in the form of the German state authority. Seven family members were murdered in the Auschwitz extermination camp. The father of Guiliano’s grandmother only survived the Dachau concentration camp by lucky coincidence after seven years of martyrdom. “In any case, there is probably no Sinti family in Germany that is not affected by the Nazis’ extermination policy”: The lawyer Onur Özata said this in his plea on January 15, 2018. As a co-plaintiff, he demanded on behalf of the Kollmanns that the right-wing arms supplier to the Munich shooter should be convicted of aiding and abetting murder.

But the man who called himself “Rico” on the Darknet and announced that after his release from prison he wanted to immortalize himself on the memorial on Hanauer Strasse with the sentence “Rico was here” was jailed for negligent homicide. It won’t be long before he’ll be free again. Unlike the Kollmann family. “The family is everything, without a family everything is nothing,” said Guiliano’s father when he and his lawyer visited the grave in Munich’s north cemetery. Two days after the fatal shooting, Guiliano’s cousin wrote on Facebook: “We have all lost our laughter and have lost our joy in life.”

“I don’t want anyone to lose a child in such a way,” says Guiliano’s grandmother Gisela in the Spotify podcast “Terror am OEZ” Southgerman newspaper has produced. Guiliano grew up with his grandparents and had a particularly close relationship with his grandmother. “It is traditionally a very close relationship that members of the Sinti have with their grandparents,” said lawyer Özata in his plea. “Despite the indescribable experiences of the genocide of the European Sinti and Roma at the time of National Socialism, it is these grandparents who preserve the traditions, the special culture of the Sinti and their language and transfer them to the following generations.” Guiliano’s grandmother hopes “for a little more support. That it will be honored a little more, that it won’t fall out of mind from people”. The fact that the political dimension of the racist attack in Munich was deliberately belittled, even suppressed for a long time, that there was long talk of a “rampage” and the perpetrator as a mentally disturbed victim of bullying – Rudolf Kollmann’s method suspects this.

Munich’s dark tradition

Munich has a dark tradition as the German city that suffered the most deaths in right-wing terrorist attacks after the war, a total of 24 victims in the Oktoberfest attack, the attack by “Gruppe Ludwig” in 1985, the NSU series of murders and the ADZ attack . And there was always the same pattern: attempts to make the victims complicit, insistence on individual perpetrator theses, denial of right-wing extremist references. The bomb attack on Schillerstrasse is almost forgotten, the files on the Oktoberfest attack are finally closed, the supporters of the NSU core trio are at large. And the allegedly apolitical “rampage” at the OEZ was officially classified as a politically right-wing act only after three years of tough struggle, and the incorrect inscription on the memorial was not corrected until another year later.

Can collective memory arise on this basis? For Thursday, Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder ordered public buildings to be flagged in memory of the victims of the attack. For Rudolf Kollmann a right, and probably an important, gesture. But: “That should have happened sooner.”

The city of Munich takes Rudolf Kollmann out of his criticism. Lord Mayor Dieter Reiter supported the family very much. “It affects him, you can tell from a person,” says Rudolf Kollmann. The city also made a decisive contribution to the fact that the crime was finally reassessed after three years. As early as 2018, following a decision by the Federal Office of Justice, the victims’ families were entitled to state hardship payments that are available for those affected by extremist attacks: “We had a pension of around 141 euros,” says Guiliano’s grandmother in the SZ podcast. “They have now also deleted, because supposedly our pain would have gotten better … After five years you are forgotten.”

In the hallway of Rudolf Kollmann’s apartment, Guiliano’s picture hangs framed directly opposite the front door. Next to it is the last sentence that the 19-year-old posted on Whatsapp – a few hours before the racist murderer shot him: “We are not all rich, but we all bleed the same.” The sentence is also on Guiliano’s grave. Rudolf Kollmann stops again and shows the visitor the photo. No, he says in a voice that is supposed to sound firm and yet trembles audibly, evil should never have the last word.