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40 years after the murder of the German right-wing radical Frank Schubert in the region around Koblenz, some contemporary witnesses have died or can no longer remember exactly. Others recall details of that fateful day, December 24, 1980.
On Christmas Eve it is also clear that the memory is still alive for the relatives of the two victims. Every year on Christmas Eve, they put flowers and candles on the memorial plaque in the Koblenz Cemetery. So this year too.
To this day there are two little riddles about the facts. One concerns a yellow bag that Schubert still carried with him in Koblenz when he shot two police officers and killed one of them.
Combed forests
Six days later, 34 policemen participated in a major search operation. Police suspected ammunition and weapons in the yellow bag instead of important documents. That morning, the police combed the forests of Böttstein and the villages of Schlatt and Fehrenthal, which belong to the municipality of Leuggern.
According to testimony, which the police described as good, Schubert is said to have stayed in Fehrenthal. The description of the person who ran in the direction of Böttstein corresponded to him. It was unclear if he still had the bag with him.
The search was unsuccessful. The most obvious thing seemed to be that the 23-year-old right-wing extremist has become the bag of the Aare. For a while he was walking along the banks of the river before entering a forest, along a stream, towards Böttstein:
Before that, after the two murders of the border guard Josef Arnold and the canton police officer Walter Wehrli, Schubert fled his car, a red Mini, towards Leuggern / Böttstein. Near a gravel pit and the Böttstein Forest Cemetery, a little above the village of Eien, he left the car, the rear window of which had been smashed, and fled on foot.
His five-hour escape ended in Böttstein. After another shooting with two policemen shortly before 8 pm, in which one of the officers was wounded, the Nazi hid in a bush near Böttstein castle and tried himself.
In this place flowers were deposited on Christmas Eve of the following years, as several people in the region remember. “When we came home after midnight mass, they weren’t there yet, but then on Christmas morning,” former mayor Fritz Ringele said in an earlier report in the Aargauer Zeitung. “It has never been known who brought them, and they no longer put flowers.”
Improved weaponry
The 1980 acts brought about changes in the border guards and the cantonal police. Border guard Arnold was alone on patrol from Zurzach to Koblenz when it came to the fateful encounter with Frank Schubert, who shot him. Soon after, two-man patrols were introduced. Equipment and weaponry have also been improved. The border guard training was clearly geared towards intervention technology.
Government councilors Louis Lang as police director and Kurt Larreida as finance director realized that the police force had to be better equipped. The canton police quickly received new armored vests, machine guns and radios.
