The Gladbeck hostage crisis or Gladbeck hostage drama was a bank robbery and hostage-taking that took place in northwestern West Germany from 16 to 18 August 1988. Two men with prior criminal records – Hans-Jürgen Rösner and Dieter Degowski – robbed a branch of the Deutsche Bank in Gladbeck, North Rhine-Westphalia, taking two employees as hostages. During their flight, they were joined by Rösner's girlfriend Marion Löblich, with whom they hijacked a public transport bus in Bremen. With twenty-seven hostages aboard, they drove towards the Netherlands, where all but two hostages were released, and the bus was exchanged for a getaway car. The hostage-taking was finally ended when the police rammed the getaway car on the A3 motorway near Bad Honnef, North Rhine-Westphalia.
During the hostage crisis, a 14-year-old boy and an 18-year-old woman were killed. A third victim, a 31-year-old police officer, died in a traffic collision while chasing the hostage-takers. At the time, the unfolding of events was extensively covered by West German media, which quickly spiraled into a media circus. In the aftermath of the hostage crisis, journalists were criticised for conducting interviews with the hostage-takers, asking them to pose for photographs, and aiding them by giving them, among other things, coffee and road directions. This resulted in the German Press Council banning any future interviews with hostage-takers during hostage situations.
Perpetrators
Hans-Jürgen Rösner
Hans-Jürgen "Hanusch" Rösner was born on 17 February 1957 in Gladbeck. He grew up in a family with three older sisters and one younger sister. His father, who was a World War II veteran, was often violent and physically abused him throughout his childhood. At the age of 8 or 9, an acquaintance of his father's reportedly taught him to shoplift. Rösner was a bedwetter until age 10 and had a pronounced stutter during his school years. His first conviction for theft was at the age of 14.
By his late 20s, Rösner had already committed numerous thefts and burglaries, and had spent a total of eleven years in prison. In August 1986, he disappeared while on furlough and went into hiding at his sister's house. One year later, he moved in with his girlfriend, Marion Löblich, and her teenaged daughter Nicole, in an apartment in the neighborhood of Rentfort-Nord. The police, having been tipped by Rösner's ex-wife Ursula regarding his whereabouts, planned to arrest him on 16 August 1988 – the day of the bank robbery and hostage-taking.
Dieter Degowski
Dieter Degowski was born on 4 June 1956 in Gladbeck; he was the fifth child in a family of six children. Like Rösner, he experienced domestic abuse as a child, causing him to develop a violent and anti-social character. The two met while attending a primary school for special education. In his early teens, he regularly committed minor crimes, such as shoplifting, and was first arrested at the age of 15 for stealing sedative drugs. He later started stealing cars, and developed an alcohol and Vesparax addiction.
In 1983, Rösner and Degowski crossed paths again when they shared a cell in Werl Prison for eight months. Shortly before the bank robbery in August 1988, Degowski agreed to be Rösner's accomplice on the premise that they would use the money to establish their own car recycling business near Münster. Degowski's IQ was assessed at 79.
Marion Löblich
Marion Irma Löblich (née Müller) was born on 14 April 1954 in Bremen; she was the second of eight children. During her childhood, her parents often coped with financial problems. In her late teens, she became pregnant with her first child and married the father. Some time after the birth of her daughter Leila, who is intellectually disabled, she caught her husband cheating with her best friend. She applied for a divorce in 1975, while pregnant with her second daughter, Nicole.
One year later, she married her second husband in Duisburg; they moved to Gladbeck and opened a bar. There, she met Ralf Löblich and divorced her husband in 1978 to marry a third time. In 1980, she gave birth to a son, named Pierre. The couple worked as taxi drivers for some time, but unsatisfied with her marriage, Löblich eventually left her husband to start a relationship with Hans-Jürgen Rösner.
Timeline
16 August 1988
At 7:55 am, Degowski and Rösner broke into a branch of the Deutsche Bank in the district of Rentfort-Nord in Gladbeck before opening hours. The men were hooded and armed with a M1911 and a Smith & Wesson Model 27, respectively, and also carried a backup Luger pistol and 350 rounds of assorted .357, 9 mm and .45 ACP type ammunition in a plastic bag. At gunpoint, the employees gave the robbers 120,000 DM.
At 8:04 am, an emergency call was made to the police by a witness. A parked police car was seen by the offenders as they left the branch. They went back into the bank and took two clerks hostage, demanding a car and ransom money, firing their guns into the air several times.
Journalist Hans Meiser, then working for a RTL radio station, called the bank to interview the robbers, becoming the first member of the press to conduct an interview with them as the hostage crisis was happening. Negotiations were held over the next hours through Gladbeck branch bank director Wolfgang H. Schöning. The abductors were given 300,000 DM and a white Audi 100 as a getaway car by an unarmed police officer in his underwear. The vehicle had been equipped with tracking and listening devices, with which police intended to track them.
At 9:45 pm, the getaway started. The robbers took two bank employees with them as hostages. Police operated under the assumption that the robbers would release their hostages within the next hours before fleeing on their own, so the monitoring was lax and no rescue operation was planned ahead of time. Dieter Höhbusch, the officer in charge during the initial bank robbery stand-off, later recalled that he was convinced that the hostage crisis would be resolved "by the time I woke up the next morning", as they thought Rösner would be easily found in a statewide manhunt due to his numerous tattoos and "unimaginative mindset".
The robbers remained in town for several more hours, driving around aimlessly and stocking up on food and alcohol at local restaurants, paying while brandishing their guns. As Rösner correctly suspected that the car was rigged, he began to look around for another vehicle. Rösner first entered a pub and demanded the keys to a parked car outside at gunpoint, but left after no one admitted to being the owner. At a gas station, Rösner mugged a policeman, stealing his sidearm and radio. The pair successively stole two other cars, but abandoned them due to fears that they were police decoys, before settling on a final vehicle, which had in fact been planted by police and was also bugged. Before leaving Gladbeck, the group picked up Marion Löblich, the girlfriend of Hans-Jürgen Rösner, which initially went unnoticed by authorities. Via the A1 and A30 highways, they first drove north through Münster to Osnabrück, where they turned back south at Bad Oeyenhausen, passing through Bielefeld and Dortmund over A2 before ending up in Hagen. The robbers made frequent stops at rest areas and roadside cafés in company of the hostages.
17 August
In the early hours of 17 August, after driving back north on the autobahn from Hagen to Bremen, the abductors arrived in the district of Vegesack. Rösner and Löblich left the car to visit the latter's family and shop in a commercial area while Degowski watched the hostages. By this point, Bremen Police had been notified of the abductors' presence, located their vehicle and kept it under close watch. As the trio believed that police had lost their trail, they were no longer vigilant and at one point, Degowski left the occupied car unattended for several minutes to urinate. Neither the observing police 250 meters away or the hostages themselves made any attempt to vacate the area. By the time Rösner, Degowski and Löblich continued their drive through Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia Police arrived, but had difficulty following the location of the abductors' vehicle fed by local police as they were unfamiliar with the streets.
During the day, knowledge about the Gladbeck robbers' presence in Bremen spread to the public, with camera crews managing to track down the movement of the kidnappers, capturing footage of them at various stops as they discussed their next steps. The previous day, Friedhelm Meise of Recklinghausen Police had implored the press to not actively cover the ongoing hostage crisis until "the release of the hostages/arrest of the hostage takers" as to not risk the lives of those involved. Rösner and Degowski repeatedly called police to re-open negotiations, but no one at the station was willing to pick up the phone. Attempts by Rösner to have bank director Schöning act as a proxy once more again failed due to a lack of police response.
By midday, the kidnappers had stopped in the district of Huckelriede, where they parked their car at a vegetable market to again have a hostage call police. When the hostage complained that the dispatcher was refusing to talk with the hostage takers and remarked that police were likely watching them at the same moment, Rösner and Degowski became agitated. The men drew their guns, pointed them at the two hostages and walked to a nearby bus stop. Unlike in Gladbeck, where the buildings near the bank had been almost immediately evacuated after police arrival, traffic was entirely uninhibited despite Bremen Police knowing about the armed kidnappers. Only the trams had ceased operations, which only led to an increase in bus usage as substitute. At 7:00 pm, Rösner and Degowski hijacked a public-transit bus (Line 53) with 32 people inside, including five children. Bus driver Wolfgang Schweickart tried to drive off upon seeing the armed men approach, but he instinctively braked upon seeing the red light ahead. There were too few officers without adequate equipment to properly cordon off the scene so the media were able to get close and even into the bus interior with the permission of the abductors.
The abductors as well as the hostages were interviewed without any interference from the police, and photographers took pictures of both the robbers and passengers. Marksmen were placed in neighboring buildings while plainclothed MEK (Mobile Einsatzkommandos) was allowed on the bus without the abductors' knowledge, but police specifically ordered that no action was to be undertaken, claiming that the department lacked the training and resources to handle the situation. Uniformed officers kept their distance while passersby occasionally walked up to the open bus doors and freely talked to those inside the bus. Some hostages even had a pistol pressed against their throats. Five elderly hostages were released by the hostage takers' own accord, with no officers in the area to take them in. Police did not send in a negotiator, a role that was instead served by press photographer Peter Meyer, who relayed to on-site TV crews the demands of the kidnappers for another getaway car, more handcuffs, and a restrained police officer in exchange for the hostages. Rösner felt comfortable enough around the press to sometimes leave the bus with Degowski and Löblich, who had armed herself with the leftover Luger, to be interviewed outside by journalists. During interviews, Rösner frequently demanded direct police contact, reiterated his demands, and openly talked about his willingness to kill the hostages, at one point putting the pistol in his mouth to underline his readiness to commit suicide afterwards. Rösner ended up using a reporter's car phone to communicate with police, who continued to refuse contact. Rösner had left his pistol on his lap during the calls, with reporter Rainer Fromm recalling that everyone was close enough to grab it. In the evening hours, in response to spotting a figure in a building opposite of the bus, Rösner shouted for police to leave the premises and put his gun to the head of 9-year-old Tatiana De Giorgi in view of TV cameras as a threat while also crouching behind her to avoid being targeted by police snipers.
The bus was driven out of Bremen. Both state police and the media, in private cars and taxis, followed behind the bus. Rösner fired on a taxi occupied by journalist Manfred Protze, as it was closing in on the driver's side, leading Rösner to falsely believe that it was being used by a police officer, but the shots missed. The bus made several stops for the next 35 kilometers, until it came to the autobahn service area of Grundbergsee near Sottrum. The two bank clerks were released there. Degowski stepped out for a TV interview while holding Silke Bischoff hostage with his gun under her chin.