| Detlev Karsten Rohwedder | |
| Office: | President of the Treuhandanstalt |
| Appointer: | Lothar de Maizière |
| Term Start: | 29 August 1990 |
| Term End: | 1 April 1991 |
| Predecessor: | Reiner Maria Gohlke |
| Successor: | Birgit Breuel |
| Office1: | State Secretary in the Ministry for Economics |
| Chancellor1: | Willy Brandt Helmut Schmidt |
| Minister1: | Karl Schiller Helmut Schmidt Hans Friderichs Otto Graf Lambsdorff |
| Term Start1: | 22 October 1969 |
| Term End1: | 16 February 1978 |
| Predecessor1: | Klaus von Dohnanyi |
| Successor1: | Dieter von Würzen (1979) |
| Birth Place: | Gotha, Free State of Thuringia, Weimar Republic |
| Death Place: | Düsseldorf-Niederkassel, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany |
| Party: | Social Democratic Party |
Detlev Karsten Rohwedder (16 October 1932 – 1 April 1991)[1] was a German manager and politician,[2] as member of the Social Democratic Party.[3] He was named president of the Treuhandanstalt, the agency responsible for the reprivatization/privatization of all state-owned property in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR),[4] in September 1990, and served until his assassination by a Far Left terrorist organization, the Red Army Faction, in April 1991. He had also been CEO of the steel manufacturer Hoesch AG since 1980.[5]
On Monday, 1 April 1991, at 23:30, Rohwedder was shot and killed through a window on the second floor of his house in the suburb of Düsseldorf-Niederkassel (Kaiser-Friedrich-Ring 71) by the first of three rifle shots. The second shot wounded his wife Hergard; the third hit a bookcase.
The shots were fired from 63 m away from a rifle chambered in 7.62×51mm NATO. It was the same rifle that was used during a sniper attack on the American embassy in February committed by the Red Army Faction (RAF), a West German far-left terrorist group. An inspection of the scene found three cartridge cases, a plastic chair, a towel, and a letter claiming responsibility from an RAF unit named after Ulrich Wessel, a minor RAF figure who had died in 1975. The shooter has never been identified.[6]
In 2001, a DNA analysis found that hair strands from the crime scene belonged to RAF member Wolfgang Grams. The Attorney General did not consider this evidence sufficient to name Grams as a suspect of the killing. Grams was killed in a shootout with police in Bad Kleinen in 1993.
On April 10, 1991, Rohwedder was honoured in Berlin with a day of mourning by German President Richard von Weizsäcker, Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia, Johannes Rau, and Chairman of the Board of Treuhandanstalt Jens Odewald. The Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus, the seat of the Federal Finance Ministry, is named in his honour.
In 2020, A Perfect Crime, a documentary about the Rohwedder assassination, was released by Netflix.[7]