Ulrich K. "Ricky" Wegener (born
August 22, 1929) is a retired
German police officer and founding member of the
counter-terrorist force
GSG 9. He was born in
Jüterbog,
Brandenburg. After
World War II Brandenburg was assigned to the
Soviet Occupation Zone, which in 1949 became the
German Democratic Republic, or
East Germany.
In the early 1950s Wegener was arrested for the illegal distribution of dissident pamphlets and was imprisoned for one year.[1] In 1952 Wegener moved to West Germany and participated in entrance examinations for the Officer Candidate School of the German Armed Forces.
The man tasked with creating the tactics and strategies that would be used by Germany's first exclusive counter-terrorist force, Colonel Wegener was the Bundesgrenzschutz (Federal Border Protection, now German Federal Police) liaison officer for German Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher at the time.
Wegener witnessed the botched attempt to rescue the Israeli hostages held by Palestinian terrorists at Munich in 1972 and was assigned to create an elite counter-terrorist unit by the West German government after the disaster.
