What a playground! Mahoney pricks up his ears. At the age of three and a half, he was allowed to go to Oktoberfest. Well, it’s only seven o’clock in the morning and there’s nothing going on in the Marstall festival tent. The beer haze from the night before still hangs in the air. And in the floorboards that Mahoney is sniffing over.
What is a great pleasure for the four-legged sleuth from the Munich police canine unit has a serious background. You are reminded of this just a few meters away from the Marstall tent – by 234 steles of a memorial: On September 26, 1980 at 10:20 p.m., the right-wing extremist Gundolf Köhler killed twelve people there. With a homemade bomb that he had hidden in a trash can.
“If the dog signals, then you are suddenly at a high level,” says an experienced dog handler from the Munich police. Then he has to decide: false alarm because the explosives dog smelled the right substance, but it was only used in a cleaning agent or glue – or a serious suspicion? The latter would mean: “The full program.” So lock it up, clear it out, bring in more explosives experts from the State Criminal Police Office… Mahoney points out. The X-Herder, a mix of a Belgian and Dutch sheepdog, remains motionless in front of a beer bench.
His owner, police chief Emanuel Wichtler, and an officer from the police department’s “special services”, who is always present at the morning inspection, take it all in stride. No, “the pump doesn’t work,” says the explosives expert. And not just because in this case Wichtler himself hid the ominous substance. For demonstration purposes. For the dog. And for the photographer. The bomb hunters don’t want to look too closely at their cards. Operational tactics. Anyone who plans something bad could otherwise unintentionally receive dangerous tips.
Mahoney is still happy. He has his sense of success. Mahoney’s brother from the same litter – sister Moneypenny was trained as Munich’s first data storage dog – is also on duty at the Oktoberfest this morning. A total of four to five teams are on the move to declare all the festival tents safe before the rush of revelers begins at 10 a.m. The Munich dog team receives support from external colleagues.
When the search gets really serious, the spectators have to leave the stables. The German Shepherd with the name borrowed from the Police Academy films and his two companions will inspect four more tents this morning. They have 20 to 30 minutes for each of the huge festival halls, which will soon be filled with up to 6,000 visitors each. There is always a break in between, which people and animals need. In the end, they will once again have managed without “the full program” that morning.
And on Tuesday they will also make their rounds around the morning Oktoberfest as usual. Just a few meters away at the memorial, the victims of the Oktoberfest attack are remembered. At 9.30 a.m., the DGB youth and the Before advice center will remember the people who lost their lives in a bomb in 1980, the suffering of their relatives and those who were seriously injured. Robert Höckmayr, a survivor, will speak. Anyone can read his warning on a stele of the memorial: “Something like this can happen anywhere, at any time.”