Episode 73 | GLADBECK | THE MOST UNFORGETTABLE HOSTAGE CRISIS IN HISTORY

In this podcast we're going to take a deep dive into a most bizarre and frankly hard-to-believe hostage crisis and murder that took place in West Germany back in 1988. Two 'ordinary' drug-fueled bank robbers hastily took hostages when their ill-planned bank heist went sour. For the next 50+ hours they stayed awake on coffee and drugs hijacking a bus and eventually escaping in a getaway car provided by the police. But what makes this case most extraordinary is the media circus that developed as journalists and bystanders jockeyed for position to interview and photograph the hostage-takers as they loitered around unengaged by police and while waving their weapons around nonchalantly. Listen on for a most unforgettable story. ★Enjoy!

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Transcript

Prologue

When you think of an armed robbery, with an active hostage situation, what images come to mind? Probably demands being set and urgent, attempts to meet them? A tense standoff between criminals and police, with agitated bits of communication? Glimpses of the elusive criminals themselves? How about reporters and journalists surrounding and casually interacting with the criminals out in the open, on the streets, interviewing them as if they’re celebrities? Or the hostage-takers posing – really posing – for photoshoots with the media, as they set up stepladders to create the perfect angle for a shot? How about reporters asking for specific poses from them while they’re pointing guns at the hostages, asking whether ‘we’ should ‘have the pistol at her head?’ Sound far-fetched? How about a reporter getting into the car with the kidnappers to give them directions on the quickest way to the highway? No, really! All this actually happened during the Gladbeck Hostage Crisis in 1988, in the (then West German) state of North-Rhine Westphalia.

It was a scenario that in hindsight seemed destined for spectacular disaster, yet somehow back then that didn’t dawn on people. – a greedy, sensationalistic, no-restrictions-at-all media, on a collision course with two desperate, bigheaded career criminals very much ready to take it all the way to the bitter, bloody end. It has been considered ‘the darkest hour of German journalism since the end of WWII’.

With all its twists and turns, it is a tragic case that would be simply impossible to re-occur nowadays.

Scenarios like a reporter asking one of the robbers, Dieter Degowski – while he’s pointing a gun at hostage Silke Bischoff – ‘Are you really prepared to kill people?’, to which he says ‘Yes’, and then with that just having been said, with that just having been established, the reporter just turning and asking Bischoff straight-faced ‘how are you doing (with this gun on your neck)?’ And then Bischoff’s response, a heart-breaking show of misguided assuredness that it will all be okay:

‘Yes, actually pretty good. It all hasn’t really dawned on me.’

‘Can you imagine that he will really pull the trigger?’

‘No. No.’ was her reply. 

Then came a short, almost indifferently delivered comment to the cameras by the other robber, Hans-Jürgen Rösner in an absolutely monotone voice ‘I shit on my life’.

Act I

It all began at 7:15 AM on a Tuesday, on the 16th of August 1988, with two men putting on black masks and getting on a red Honda 250 motorbike, which they had stolen two days before. They approached a branch of Deutsche Bank in the town of Gladbeck. 

Far from criminal masterminds, small-time crooks as described by many, and far from having a master plan; two men – Dieter Degowski, and Hans-Jürgen Rösner – had spent most of the years prior between prison and pubs, and fittingly were carrying out a half-cocked plan that apparently owed its conception to the marriage of canned beer and Vesparax sleeping pills, a cocktail whose function is to completely reverse the effect of the sleeping pills, and something that they’d been using regularly for the past months. Visions of a get-rich-quick heist to live out the rest of their lives in rich and spoiled anonymity. 

A few seconds into their Vesparax-fueled shitshow, they fly off the Honda at the first turn. The motorbike crashes, and the seat breaks off. 

A very fitting image that sums them up perfectly. These two weren't seasoned robbers, but rather incompetent, unstable drinking buddies with delusions of grandeur. And they were about to be given the red carpet treatment by a horde of salivating news reporters. Not hard to guess how well that’s gonna go. 

Rösner and Degowski did eventually manage to break into the bank branch, and when threatening the cashier a passerby notices them and calls the police.The bank manager who had the key to the vault was uncharacteristically late that morning, so they broke through the window. The noise lead to more people calling the police. An inexperienced crew of officers are seen by the robbers, leading to hostages being taken and a short-lived shootout. Negotiations began with a ransom (300,000 Deutschmarks) delivered by an officer wearing nothing but swimming trunks). This was the hostage-takers odd demand. They were also provided with a car, a requested BMW 735i – law enforcement got the better of the two robbers, as they switched out the dreamy beamer with a far slower Audi 100- still nothing to scoff at- it was also bugged (something Rösner and Degowski were, however, apparently suspicious of, so refrained from talking during their getaway).

Now why just gloss over all of that? Break-ins and hostages and shootouts and ransoms and bugged getaway cars? 

Because that’s not even remotely close to the interesting part. That’s the normal part, the rational part. Anywhere else, and that would be the story. The tension, the action, the movie-like hooks. But that is not what this story is about. 

At this same time, a young prosecutor’s assistant trainee – Silke Bischoff – is at work, having absolutely no reason to believe that this day will go any different than any other day of the week. 

Meanwhile, an ambitious journalist, well known nowadays for his unrivaled expertise when it comes to this case – Udo Röbel – had no idea what had been going on as he had been away from tv and radio for a few days. Little did he know the grandest case of his career was unfolding and he would be a major actor in it. 

Act II

It TRULY began at 7:04 PM on a Wednesday, on the 17th of August 1988, not with Rösner’s and Degowski’s approach towards a bus full of people, but with the media’s approach, following them closely behind. After taking the two bank employees with them as hostages, picking up Rösner’s girlfriend Marion Löblich on the way, and driving on the highway towards the city of Bremen, what would be unthinkable today finally happens – in front of rolling cameras, the robbers turned kidnappers overtake a bus and take its 30 passengers hostage.

Amidst these 30 unlucky people, are four especially unlucky ones; a pair of siblings, 8 year old Tatyana and 14 year old Emanuele De Giorgi, and a pair of friends, 18 year olds Ines Voitle, and Silke Bischoff – who normally should’ve already been home long ago, but she waited up for her friend Ines, something that to this day Ines has not forgiven herself for. The two were planning on watching a horror film together – little did they know. 

Rösner lets everyone know that there’s no reason to be afraid, while threatening them with his weapon and (alleged)hand grenades. They do let the older passengers go, and the bus driver says how he’s not feeling well and how technically his shift was already over, and asks them if he could go too, which Rösner permits.  

Voitle has said how she at first considered this to be some bad practical joke – a consideration that probably ended when Rösner gathers them all towards the back of the bus as human shields against the police, now considering himself in a sufficiently strong bargaining position to begin negotiating with law enforcement. 

It was his initial intention to exchange hostages for an officer, but police didn’t budge. This is where this case evolves into something much more unfathomable.

Reporters and cameramen climbing in and walking around amidst the terrified and confused hostages, detachedly taking pictures of everything, in every which way. Journalists fighting for the best positions from which to shoot. Among their favorites to photograph are Emanuele and Tatyana, the big brother wrapping his arm protectively around his little sister. These will be the last images of them together. 

Across from the bus an enormous crowd of media has congregated, within them photojournalist Peter Meyer. Meanwhile Rösner notices more and more sharpshooters positioning themselves on nearby rooftops, and so he gestures for Meyer to come over, and asks him to demand from law enforcement a bigger getaway car, and the complete withdrawal of the police’s forces. Meyer – in the hope of also being allowed to take pictures of the hostages – complies.

At that moment, something clicked for Rösner. He suddenly realizes just how advantageous to him the media’s craving for a spectacle can be, that he can utilize it to his benefit.

Gun in hand, he walks out towards the mass of TV crews. Here he will put on the definitive show that will make sure that his image will live on far past himself  – he talks about how he’s spent over a decade in prison, how he’s got nothing more to lose, how he shits on life, and how ‘for myself it’s an absolute certainty that I’ll get away  – otherwise, this here,’ as he sticks his gun into his mouth. 

Absolute treasure produced right before the media’s eyes, absolutely blinding them to any moral interference or second thought that would otherwise be expected. As pointed out by journalist Udo Röbel, ‘Gladbeck was a completely new situation for the police and, most certainly for the media.’ It’s clear that if something like that happened today, every journalist would consider the boundaries that mustn't be crossed. But they were all in a kind of frenzy. Like coked up paparazzi.

As time passes, and fatigue sets in, tensions rise. Rösner begins to unravel, and starts firing at a house across from him, only barely missing an elderly inhabitant. Despite many opportunities, the uniqueness of the situation, the media presence, law enforcement are prevented from stepping in. The next step for the hostage-takers is to single out two hostages from among the bus passengers, bargaining chips.

Rösner, now coming apart at the seams, drags Tatyana away from her brother, screaming ‘If no one comes, I’ll blow her away!’ pressing his revolver against the girl’s temple. 

The second hostage? Silke Bischoff, she was too beautiful for her own good. Not just beautiful, but striking. And on that day, she struck a chord with Degowski. There was no escaping him after that. From early on in the bus he already had her picked out as his personal favorite: he whispered into her ear ‘I’m taking you with me,’

The hostage that he had up until that point, threatening with a gun nonstop for a full day and a half  was Andrea B. – one of the bank clerks. Suddenly she becomes irrelevant to Degowski once he saw Silke and left her in peace. 

It’s not difficult to see the logic behind the choices of Bischoff and Tatyana as hostages – a pretty, young, blonde woman, and a little girl. Rösner and Degowski recognized their value, and wanted as close to a guarantee as possible that they would be allowed to reach their destination without interference. 

With still not even a hint of movement from the police, at 9.45 PM, the bus takes off. 

As they drive on, the journalists follow. Once they stop at a gas station, they are once again surrounded by them, once again lighting up the scenery with spotlights in order to produce the highest photographic quality. 

A few minutes earlier, the first, and most unsung, victim lost his life – a police officer racing in pursuit of the bus crashes into a construction site.

Peter Meyer also followed the bus, and is now made a – to him – irresistible offer – an exchange of hostages; the Gladbeck hostages, for him. Meyer agrees, without hesitation.

Later on, a seemingly no-brainer call would turn out to be the trigger to set off a horrifying event. Rösner’s girlfriend, Marion Löblich, is detected unaccompanied in the restroom by the police. As she is leaving it, she is apprehended.

Degowski and Rösner soon find out, and panic. Rösner then sends Meyer to deliver a grisly ultimatum – bring Marion back within five minutes, or a hostage will be shot.

The five minutes pass. The realization sets in. A little longer passes. The pressure mounts.

Degowski points his gun at Emanuele, and pulls the trigger. 

This is what followed. The rage of Degowski, perhaps even appalled at his own act. He lunges at Meyer, grabs him by the neck and throws him to the ground, screaming that he would be the next to die! Rösner, screams at Degowski ‘Have you lost it?’ Degowski responding telling him it doesn’t matter, that there’s no other way!

After a while, the bus sets off again, this time crossing the border into the Netherlands. There it’s abandoned as Rösner and Degowski enter a BMW provided by the German police. Only two hostages are taken with them into the car; Bischoff and her friend Ines Voitle.

Once they arrive in Cologne, at 10:30 AM, nothing seems to have changed. The car is once again quickly surrounded by dozens of journalists and onlookers, all pressing up, poking their microphones and cameras through the open windows, interviewing Silke Bischoff with a gun pressed to her neck, as she answers questions with a weak smile. 

Some reporters offer to guide the abductors and to give them pictures of police officers in order to prevent trickery in case of a hostage exchange. 

But there is one of them that seems to have established some kind of rapport with Rösner. So much so that Rösner – clearly losing it, pointing his gun at the crowd – steps out of the car and addresses that man directly –  journalist Udo Röbel.

Act III

Displaying perhaps some sense of level-headedness, some sense of awareness, some validity to the popular view that he was the conscience of the two, that it was Degowski who was off-the-rails and the instigator of it all – or at least the off-the-rails parts – he told Röbel that ‘they needed got to get out of there now, that Rosner was about to lose it completely.

Röbel began to describe the route, but Rösner’s anxiety was getting the better of him. 

He then asked Röbel such a simple question, on the surface. 

‘Why don’t you get in and show us the way?’

Röbel had to make a decision despite conflicting impulses. He had the feeling he had been given responsibility for a situation that was becoming less and less controllable. But also had that reporter's instinct that says, “I want this story. This is mine.”’ Was he the reporter from Hell, or simply a human being, trying to de-escalate the situation and trying to help the two girls. He was simultaneously both, the guy who was trying to calm things down, and the adrenaline-filled reporter on the story of a lifetime.

And of course he got in. He sat right next to Bischoff, and they all once again slowly pulled away from the crowds – for the last time.

Röbel assumed that the car was bugged so he tried to get them to say something that might be of use to the police. Degowski pointed a gun at him and told him to ‘shut [his] mouth.’ And so he did. About 40 minutes later, at which point Silke Bischoff had begun shaking uncontrollably from fear and immense fatigue, they reached a service station on the highway. Röbel was dropped off, and watched as the BMW drove away. A television crew arrived and interviewed him at which point he went weak at the knees realizing that he could easily have been killed.

Inevitably, the police catch up to the doomed-from-the-beginning wannabe robbers. 54 hours after this all began, it all ends fairly quickly. A specially commissioned ram vehicle slams into the BMW, triggering a gunfight. Three minutes, 62 shots fired by police forces.

At 2.08 PM, the interior minister is informed of the outcome of the operation: ‘Strike at kilometer 38 successful. Perpetrators apprehended, one hostage wounded, one hostage dead.’ 

To this day, Rösner denies having shot Silke Bischoff intentionally. 

As a direct result of the Gladbeck Hostage Crisis, the German Press Council banned future interviews with hostage-takers during hostage situations.

Epilogue

There was one more thing said during that exchange between reporter, gun-holding Degowski and gun-threatened Bischoff, and that was the response of Degowski, to Bischoff’s first reply of assuredness of her safety, after the ‘It all hasn’t really dawned on me’ line. 

‘Too young’, with a strange little smile on his face. Too young to know better? Too young to deserve this? Too young to have a gun pointed at her neck, her head (as if there is an appropriate age for that)? Too young to comprehend that her life truly was in danger? Too young to even truly know the value of that life? Too young. 

Silke Bischoff became emblematic to this case – the image of her and Degowski in the car, a cigarette in his mouth and a gun to her neck. SO emblematic that the other lives lost have gone almost unnoticed, all but forgotten. Silke Bischoff is not one of the three victims, she is THE victim. Even when they are mentioned, Emanuele di Giorgi and the fittingly unnamed police officer have been forever relegated to the second tier of relevance.

And then there’s the others, the ones that got to live on. Survivors they may be, though whether that’s a blessing or a curse, to emerge out of such an ordeal still alive; with memories, with regrets, with guilt, with burdens that they’ll have to carry for life, whether fate has been kinder or crueler to them for making them go on, only they can ever know. 

In 2018, in an interview with the BBC, Udo Röbel said he feels shame that he tried to write the story of the last minutes of Silke Bischoff's life, that he drove this media voyeurism right to the very end, squeezing the very last drops out of the story.

Several years later,  Röbel was invited to take part in a public discussion at a local police academy – and present was the judge who had sentenced Rösner and Degowski to life in prison. Apparently at some point, Röbel said something along the lines of ‘reporters had crossed the line and that that should never happen again.’ 

The judge then turned to Röbel, and said the following: 

'It seems to me, Herr Röbel, that you prevented a bloodbath that day in Cologne. If you hadn't got into the car and the gangsters hadn't been able to drive away, the whole situation would have run out of control.'

Röbel has since said that those words were like absolution to him. 

Though how much absolution? A year later the man would go on to become editor-in-chief of Europe’s largest and most lurid tabloid newspaper – Bild – absolution is certainly up for debate. 

In 2018, Degowski was released from prison on conditional parole, after evaluations of ‘positive’ rehabilitative prognoses from experts. In February of that year images of him were leaked and released through Bild, quickly spreading online. An unrecognizable, overweight old man, sitting alone on a bench. 

Once released, he was given a new identity – the rest of his life lived out in anonymity after all, though on unemployment benefits instead of bank robbery spoils. 

In 2015, Rösner was granted a day release, his first walk outside after nearly three decades of confinement. For four hours he was allowed to roam around in Eschweiler, a municipality in the district of Aachen in Germany, accompanied by three officers. As put by a speaker of the state Ministry of Justice, ‘He can finally get a look at how the world has changed after 27 years.’ 

In 2018, Rösner conducted an interview with German network RND, during which he was asked whether there’s things he especially regrets, to which he responded not just with the deaths of the two hostages, but that he regrets that he ‘never sent Emanuele’s De Giorgi’s little sister Tatyana home – rather than using her as a bargaining tool against the police – and exposing her to the murder of her brother. Saying ‘unfortunately I couldn’t afford to show any empathy in that situation, because as perpetrators our lives are also constantly in danger.’

He half-blames Degowski, half-refuses to pass the buck for the robbery and all that followed, stating that while ‘the idea for the robbery of Deutsche Bank came from Degowski’, ‘to me it’s not about the idea or being at fault or not at fault – we had both decided to go ahead with the robbery. Nothing else counts.’ 

When asked whether he still thinks about the hostage situation, he emphasized ‘two images’ that have been ‘burned into my mind’: ‘Silke Bischoff, after the police’s ambush, lying motionless on the highway’, and ‘when Degowski shot Emanuele’. ‘And it always re-surfaces.’  

Regarding Bischoff, he said that if he could talk to her he would tell her that ‘I’m very sorry about everything. Because I couldn’t keep my word that I was going to let her and her friend Ines Voitle go in Frankfurt. I would tell her that her death to this day lies heavy on me.’

If he were to ever be let free, he states that he would go ‘far and away from everyone and everything, to live out the rest of my life in peace and quiet, with my partner.’ The ‘path of evil’ he claims to have ‘long abandoned’. 

He says he wishes he could be released either in 2022 or 2024. He mentions how he just recently joined a residential group, which he hopes is a first step towards a free life. 

Whether genuine or a show, whether romanticists or cynics can claim this one, whether he has indeed come such a long way (not that 27 years isn’t long enough) from that vacant-eyed man that shat on his life, we’ll probably never know.