Update on Horst Herold's Rasterfahndung Computer System - all credit to Joe (Patreon)

Several people reach out to me after the RAF episodes came out asking if the Rasterfahndung computer system was IBM or (Lord help us) part of the PROMIS system. I was extremely interested in the question, too, so I asked Joe, who was kind enough to write this response:

"Short answer: They were Siemens 4004, which apparently were mostly based on and compatible with IBM computers.

Long answer: Computerization in Germany started in the 1950s. In the beginning it was almost exclusively universities, insurance companies (hmmh) and large businesses that had both the funds and use for computers. In 1964/1965 the German government launched the first large digitalization campaign, which was supposed to bring EDP (electronic data processing) to ministries and public authorities, especially the public registrations office. All of this is meaningful because Rasterfahndung is based precisely NOT on police data, but on data from various parts of the bureaucracy that is then evaluated by police using computers. 

Therefore, we can probably safely assume that the early Rasterfahndung still to some degree used physical media, which they likely then transposed into data themselves in order to use computer evaluation. these efforts to digitize the bureaucracy were led by the AG Datenverbeitung, a group which I can find very little on sadly.

In the case of the police, computerization didn't really start until the '60s, or in a centralized form until 1969. president of the BKA Paul Dickopf (which funnily enough means Paul Bullhead) was fervently opposed to digitalization, and one text claims he even was "skeptical of cars". Dickopf was SS/SD and later, from Wiki: "Between 1965 and 1971, he was the 4th president of the BKA and a paid "unilateral agent" of the CIA", and also likely of Swiss intelligence. At the very same time he was the head of interpol, starting 1968. "After his death it was revealed that Dickopf had made the Federal Criminal Police a safe haven for former Nazi and SS officials, a large number of them war criminals. Under his leadership some concepts of National Socialism were still upheld and practiced, for example in the way members of Sinti and Roma were treated."

Now our friend Dickopf only became head of the BKA by basically deposing of his predecessor Dullien in a diplomatic way, essentially by abusing an extremely obscure law to force him into pension because he was over 60 years old. It is my personal theory that the reason for making Horst Herold Dickopf's successor was because of the formers technophobia, and because his SS methods weren't exactly efficient in sniffing out the terrorists. This is why we get the sudden change from a literal Nazi to Horst Herold as new head of the BKA, who in his youth was a "Marxist",  later came to the SDS (out of which the RAF emerged partially) and lastly to the SPD.

Herold was pretty much the enabler for the digitalization of the police, which the old Nazi Dickopf opposed. Herold was already known for having attempted computerization "from the ground up" instead of top-down, meaning he worked with computers in his precinct in Nürnberg. He also proposed what he called a "criminal geography", which was a way of "preventative policing", was talking about the "socially sanitary" or "socially hygienic" role of police in society. I don't think anymore needs to be said.

To his defense, he was avant-garde in seemingly every way. For example, he proposed structural reform towards a reformative justice system instead of a punitive one, a policy Germany still holds today. He also flirted with critical criminology, which was a Marxist-inspired theoretical approach which heavily reflected on the role of private property in criminal justice. Herold himself is a thoroughly intriguing person, reportedly having built a guided-tank-aiming system as a teen. He openly claimed that "Scientific Marxism" aided him in his police work.

But I am  already way too far from the original question, lets maybe reserve this for another day. Anyway, Bergien claims that regionally EDP was used for police work even in the 60s, and that Herold wasn't the only one. The other key player in computerization of the police was a company called "Kienbaum Consulting", which was one of the most successful consulting groups for tech in post-WW2 Germany. On their website they claim "Kienbaum became the first consulting company in Europe." They didn't just get private contracts however, the BKA also contracted Keinbaum.

Rüdiger Bergien claims that the German police did not have a computational "center" until 1972. I believe this is where the Siemens computers come in. I do not know for a fact which computer models were used before 1972, but I am very sure that from 1972 onwards, two Siemens 4004 were the central processing units of German police EDP. In that regard they were slightly behind the USA, which launched the NCIC in 1967.

Only one year earlier, so in 1971, the German minister of interior first launched the SOKO (special commission) Baader-Meinhoff in Bad Godesberg which exclusively dealt with the RAF. It was initially only 11 people (so the BKA themselves claim, I found a text by someone who was actually with the SOKO from the very start. His friend Eckhardt was killed by a fleeing RAF member, I think this is even in the movie). Very quickly the group grew to more than 50, and they started local chapters with a total of 113 people involved. After the capture of Meinhoff and Baader this process seemingly exploded and groups were formed all over Germany, with names like "Gruppe Landesverrat" (group high treason), "Abteilung Terrorismusbekämpfung" (anti-terror unit), which quickly grew to encompass over 200 people. Between 1974 and 1975 they captured more than 130 "terrorists and supporters."

After Mogadishu and Schleyer went down, another group was formed: "SOKO Zielfahndung. This is where we get into Rasterfahndung according to that BKA historian. At that point they were getting so many "tips" from the civilian population that it was utterly impossible to keep track of all of them. They hoped to bypass this via "computerized systems". This was, so to speak, the precursor. Rasterfahndung proper then, according to him, was used for the first time in 1979, leading to the arrest of Rolf Heißler in Frankfurt.

They were apparently searching all over western Europe, even going as far as Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (!). Out of 35 arrests, 23 were outside of Germany. They were even negotiating with the PLO  to not accept Germans at their camps anymore. The text is really bizarre, but basically the author doesn't say but makes it extremely obvious that these very negotiations led to the arrest of 5 RAF members. He mentions that after leading the SOKO Baader-Meinhoff, then the anti-terror unit, he went on to the Chief of the Verfassungsschutz in Hessen, so essentially the head spook.

So, this is pretty much the story of how Rasterfahndung came to be and how German police started using EDP. I was actually unaware that Herold kind of pioneered preventative policing via data, and that to me seems a very meaningful takeaway from this whole story. It wasn't Raserfahndung that pioneered computer use, it was Herold's system, which imho inspired the contemporary form of policing in Germany and the US today. Sadly all the sources are German, but the things Herold says about selecting specific areas, collecting data and then predicting hot-spots for crime certainly sounds a lot like the US today."

Joe's an international treasure, and I hope to have him on again. Check out his podcast  below if you speak German.

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