The German movie from 2024, “Herrhausen—Master of Money,” was one of the films presented at the International Emmys in New York, and it got an award in the category “TV mini series.”
A Bildzeitung story on that, which includes an interview with Oliver Masucci, who played the role of the late Deutsche Bank CEO Alfred Herrhausen, opens with: “It is one of the most mysterious murder cases in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The assassination of Alfred Herrhausen, the visionary head of Deutsche Bank, shook the entire country in 1989—and remains unsolved to this day.” In the interview, Masucci says:
“Herrhausen was a humanistic banker—someone who thought in terms of social policy long before cutthroat capitalism began.” Under his leadership, Bild adds, “Deutsche Bank became a global giant. And yet, for Masucci, Herrhausen today seems like a counterpoint to the political and economic reality. For him, Herrhausen stood for attitude, consistency, backbone—not moral posturing.”
Although the terrorist group Red Army Fraction (RAF) claimed responsibility for the assassination, a narrative then becoming dominant also in the mainstream media, Masucci says that their confession does not match the scale of the operation. “I don’t believe that the RAF terrorists were the ones who came up with the idea. They carried it out—but who really gave the order?” For Masucci, Herrhausen was far too well connected and influential to be the sole target of an already-disintegrating terrorist group.
Herrhausen had a profound influence on global power structures. He financed the collapsing Eastern bloc, wanted to open up markets throughout Eastern Europe, and supported Mikhail Gorbachev at a time when Moscow was practically bankrupt. Masucci told Bild: “That was too much for the Americans—suddenly a German banker was financing the entire Eastern bloc.”
No less explosive was Herrhausen’s demand, which he had voiced before, for debt relief for the poorest countries—a direct attack on the trans-Atlantic banks’ handling of the debt as a neocolonial weapon. Masucci: “There were many who had an interest in Herrhausen disappearing. To this day, we don’t know who it was.”
The four-part “Herrhausen” series picks up at the very moment when the world order shifted, Bildzeitung notes: The Soviet Union under Gorbachev collapsed economically, and the collapse came even earlier with East Germany, in the summer and autumn of 1989. The international LaRouche organization was in the middle of the struggle for a better and peaceful world then, offering a perspective of East-West cooperation with the “Productive Triangle” plan (see separate slug—ed.).
The series, shown on German TV last year, is showing again now—a few days before the anniversary of the Herrhausen assassination on November 30, 1989.
