In 1976 he became de facto deputy leader of the "Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann" (WSG-Hoffmann), a network of between 400 and 600 politically like-minded activists and terrorists (according to the perspective of the commentator) which concealed its underlying mission, rather unconvincingly, by presenting itself as a paramilitary sports club.
Following research undertaken during the intervening four decades by investigative journalists and specialist scholars it has nevertheless become accepted in some quarters that Uwe Behrendt was part of a network of far-right terrorists who were involved in violent attacks and killings in a number of European countries at the time.
It was here, in the recently launched Soviet-sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany) that he spent his childhood and in 1970 passed his school final exams, after which he embarked on an apprenticeship in the agriculture sector.
The slaughter of war had left both versions of Germany desperately short of working age population, and for the former Soviet occupation zone the problem had been exacerbated by the several million “East Germans” who had fled to the west before the authorities moved first to discourage and then to prevent the practice.
At one stage Hoffmann received and served an eighteen-month prison sentence because of his involvement in the violence relating to a demonstration in Tübingen; and while he was forced to step back a little from WSG frontline activism, Behrendt's own position, as the leader's most trusted lieutenant within the loosely defined hierarchy of the group became even more central.
One of the more thoroughly publicised of these, if only retrospectively, was Hoffmann's instruction that he kill Ralf Rößner, a former comrade who had also been traded for cash by the East German authorities in the early 1970s, who more recently had left the group and, for his own purposes, removed a large stash of forged dollar bills from a secret underground WSG storage location.
The prospect of a “revisionist Auschwitz Congress” was greeted with horror by political opponents who formed an “anti-fascist action alliance” to try and persuade the Bavarian state government to ban the event.
These he followed up, some time later, in a hostile and defamatory article about Lewin, published in March 1979 in “Kommando”, a monthly political publication over which the WSG leadership exercised significant control.
[16] On 29 September 1980 West German Intelligence notified the Bavarian Criminal Office that Hoffmann had used the article in Oggi to persuade PLO negotiating partners that he was a true “enemy of Zionism and Jewry”.
Here he gave vent to an antisemitic conspiracy theory: he told anyone listening that Israeli intelligence had planned and carried out the Oktoberfest atrocity, and that they had been motivated in their actions by the wish to torpedo collaboration between the WSG and the PLO and at the same time to eliminate Hoffmann.
He made Behrendt hand over all the clothes he had worn for his murderous trip into town and burned them in the tiled heating oven that in cold weather warmed his apartment in the building.
He returned to Ermreuth on 26 December, however, packed a bag and, while many security service personnel were presumably still, at their own homes celebrating the Christmas holiday, took a train to Bonn, stopping off at the Syrian embassy where he collected a visa.
Bergmann's death, resulting from the torture inflicted on him in Lebanon in February 1981, is described in at least one source as “an open secret”, though the verdict delivered on the matter by investigative journalists was never confirmed in a court of law.
These included a raid on an oil refinery back in West Germany, and, closer to their Lebanese base, attacks on a UN convoy, the United States army and an Israeli ship.
There were contingency plans drafted for kidnapping embassy staff and shooting judges and state prosecutors if Hoffmann should be imprisoned by the authorities in West Germany for longer than six months.
An officer at the ministry recorded receipt of the information and added his own comments to the inevitable file, noting that the PLO had “reconstructed the suicide” and referenced “major differences of opinion” within the so-called “WSG-Ausland” of which Behrendt had been the leader in the group's Lebanese camp homebase.
[5][32][33] The wave of extremist terrorism that had swept through West Germany and Italy through the 1970s continued to fascinate investigative journalists and their readers during the years that followed, especially in cases where new snippets of knowledge surfaced periodically, often in the context of court hearings, providing opportunities for regular re-evaluations.
Within a couple of weeks Criminal Investigators from West Germany arrived in Lebanon and exhumed a body from the location where, on account of information received from the former WSG activist Leroy Paul, they had expected to find it.
It was in the context of continuing unease about the reliability of the suicide reports that in 2017 members of the ”Linke” party submitted a superficially innocuous parliamentary question in the “Bundestag” (German national parliament) about the circumstances under which Uwe Behrendt had died.
The obvious question that remained unanswered was how it could be determined, by means of a post mortem performed on a badly decomposed body that had been rotting in a desert grave for three years, that the hole in the skull was the result of a suicide rather than of a gun shot fired by an unknown third party.
These had been purchased from “Optiker Schubert”, an optician in the little town of Heroldsberg, known to be the location of an earlier “WSG headquarters”, used before Hoffmann moved his base the short distance to Schloss Ermreuth.
[32][29][37] Media reports started to speculate about the owner of the distinctive sunglasses on 22 December 1980, but the police continued to look for the clues that might identify the perpetrator of the murder in the immediate area in which the victims lived, and among the small Jewish community in the surrounding Nuremberg-Erlangen conurbation.
The lid of an aerosol spray-can found at the crime scene contained traces of the same chemical combination as that in a filler-foam recently used to install new doors and windows at Schloss Ermreuth.
The part of the national judgement which could be expected to have a bearing on prosecutor Schmidt's investigations at a state level was the determination that the section of the criminal code dealing with terrorism offences could only be applied within German borders.
It may have been that the Bavarian State Criminal Department were taking a lead from the higher court judgement when they decided not to travel to Lebanon to locate the body of Kay Uwe Bergmann, believed to be a more recent victim of a killing in which Behrendt was centrally implicated.
The prosecution case advanced by Brunner was centred on a contention that Behrendt had fired the gun that killed the victims, but he was acting on instructions from Hoffmann and Birkmann who were present at the scene.
In refusing to convict, the court implicitly placed some level of confidence in statements by Hoffmann that the home-made gun silencer had been produced simply as a “prototype sample” in connection with a planned gun-silencer manufactory in Lebanon.
Hoffmann insisted that statements by others that he had wanted to persuade WSG members to “murder a Jew” were nothing more than wild attempts at revenge by men who had become resentful over the harsh discipline whereby the organisation had been controlled by him.
[33][42][44][45][46] A further source of unease among serious journalist-commentators has been (and remains) the continuing refusal of the “Bundesverfassungsschutz” (Germany's ‘’national office for the protection of the constitution’’) to permit access to official files on a number of WSG witnesses involved in the trial, who were described as having been working from within the “neo-nazi” group as government informants.
The suspiciously formulaic “catch-all” grounds provided for the refusal by the government agency responsible to release the files is simply that any such inspection of them would imperil "the wellbeing of the Federal Republic of Germany".