Killing of Benno Ohnesorg

[citation needed] The protest turned violent after pro-Shah demonstrators, including agents of the Shah's intelligence service,[2] began battling with students and the police overreacted, employing brutal tactics in their attempts to control the crowd.

[6] More than forty years later, in 2009, it was revealed that at the time of the events Kurras had been an informal collaborator of the East German secret police Stasi and a long-time member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling East German Communist party; however, the motive behind Kurras' act remains unclear.

Newly examined film and photographic evidence also implicated fellow officers and superiors, demonstrating that the police covered up the truth in subsequent investigations and trials.

[13] Just after Ohnesorg's burial in Hanover, Dutschke, speaking at "The University and Democracy: Conditions and Organization of Resistance" conference held at the university, clashed with philosophy professor Jürgen Habermas over the future of the movement: Dutschke advocated radical, possibly illegal and violent action, although his first proposal was a peaceful sit-down strike.

The conflict prompted Habermas, who had urged a more moderate approach, famously to characterize Dutschke's ideology as amounting to "left fascism",[6] a formulation that he later retracted.

[14][15] The student movement that swelled and, in part, became radicalised in the late 1960s, after Ohnesorg's death, influenced many future German politicians who were in their teens and twenties at the time.