Ulrich Wegener grew up near Berlin, was conscripted into the Hitler Youth as a boy of fourteen, and after the war found himself in the Soviet zone handing out anti-communist leaflets. The Stasi arrested him for 'socially hostile activity' and held him for more than eighteen months in an attempt to break him. He escaped west in 1952 and joined the Federal Border Guard.
On 5 September 1972 he was at the Munich Olympics as adjutant to the head of the Border Guard when Black September took eleven Israeli athletes hostage. He watched, from close enough to see it, as German police with no training, no equipment and no plan attempted a rescue at Fürstenfeldbruck airfield. Every hostage died. The Federal Republic, which had deliberately built a police force with no paramilitary capacity for reasons anyone can understand, had to build one in a hurry.
Wegener was given the job. Grenzschutzgruppe 9 — the ninth group of the Border Guard, a deliberately flat name — was declared operational in April 1973. He borrowed everything he could from the SAS and the Israelis, trained his men with live ammunition and hostage role-players, and waited.
It came on 18 October 1977. Lufthansa Flight 181 had been hijacked, flown across the Middle East for five days and had its captain shot; it was sitting in Mogadishu with eighty-six people aboard. Wegener led thirty GSG 9 men aboard the aircraft in the dark using rubber-coated ladders, with two SAS advisers providing stun grenades. From the first charge to the last hostage off took seven minutes. Three of the four hijackers were killed, every passenger survived.
He commanded GSG 9 until 1979, advised half the world on building similar units, and died in 2017 at eighty-eight. Germany's answer to Munich has since been copied from Ottawa to Canberra.
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