Around 300 demonstrators had gathered on Bülowstrasse in Berlin-Schöneberg in front of a ramshackle old building that the police had just cleared.
West Berlin's Senator for the Interior, Heinrich Jodokus Lummer (CDU), posed for the television cameras on the balcony.
The squatters and their supporters whistled and booed in the street below.
The police had evacuated eight houses on September 22, 1981.
Without warning, dozens of policemen in white helmets rushed up to them and started clubbing, while others chased their dogs on the demonstrators.
To get to safety, they ran in the direction of the busy Potsdamer Strasse 100 meters away.
In this chaos, someone wanted to stop a slow-moving double-decker bus on line 48, but got under the vehicle in front of the left front wheel.
The driver - probably in shock - did not brake at first and only came to a stop 70 meters further.
When he had backed up the bus, the picture was horrific.
The squatter stopped moving, his back was a bloody mass.
He was dead.
From the Lower Rhine to the Spree
The police spread the false news that an occupier had stabbed an officer.
It took hours until the demonstrator, dragged to death, was identified: Klaus-Jürgen Rattay, 18, unemployed, from Kleve on the Lower Rhine.
Hardly anyone in the squatter scene knew him.
A personal memory: I was a squatter reporter for the »taz« at the time.
After the police published a photo of the dead man, I realized that I had met him a good two weeks earlier - on a sandy wasteland behind three houses that were about to be cleared.
Squatters and supporters camped around a large fire.
Everyone was waiting for the big showdown.
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Klaus-Jürgen Rattay: The day before his death, the squatter interviewed Stefan Aust, from whose »Panorama« film this picture is
Rattay, tall, strong, with protruding reddish-blond hair and a blond full beard, wore a thick black leather jacket, olive-colored trousers and heavy black combat boots. What irritated one squatter, however, was a "killer", a small iron club covered in fabric, dangling from his belt. He made it himself, he said, not without pride. "But you won't get into the house with that thing," the squatters explained emphatically, "we only offer passive resistance during the evacuation." He mumbled, "Okay, okay, I understand."
Klaus-Jürgen Rattay grew up in Kleve on the Lower Rhine, not on the sunny side of life.
His father was a locksmith, his mother died early.
He attended special school, then a vocational training course, which he dropped out after nine months.
After hitchhiking around Europe a little, he came to West Berlin in the summer of 1981.
The front city, a huge adventure playground
Stefan Aust, then editor of the NDR political magazine »Panorama«, asked Rattay on the day before his death why he had joined the occupiers.
"I just came here to Berlin to take part in the squatting and all," said Rattay.
“I dropped out of society because I didn't feel like going on working.
Because you're constantly being oppressed at work by some wanker.
I've been here for a month and a half now and I think it's good that there is an incredible amount of smoking weed here.
I think it's fine how people live together here.
I'm afraid of the evictions, but at the same time I have the courage to fight. "
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Berlin: The true socialist paradise was in the west
During these years, West Berlin was a magnet for discontented, bored young people from the West German provinces. There was no conscription, no curfew. As of February 1979, young anarchists, punks and hippies had occupied more than a dozen houses in Kreuzberg. When a police chief wanted to prevent a new "repair (occupation)" on December 12, 1980, not far from the Admiralsbrücke, which is now besieged by tourists, a wild night street battle broke out - many more were to follow.
The SPD, paralyzed by one of its building corruption scandals, allowed more and more houses to be occupied, 167 in the summer of 1981. At first, the squatters enjoyed the sympathy of the population because they finally did something against the absurd demolition policy.
But the more they banked on rioting, indulged in dreams of expropriation and revolution, the more West Berliners longed for security and order.
»11.12 a.m.
Penetration with a battering ram "
In June 1981 the CDU became the strongest party for the first time with the top candidate Richard von Weizsäcker, who later became Federal President.
He made Heinrich Lummer from the right wing of the party the Senator of the Interior.
Encouraged by the Springer newspapers, the CDU Senate announced at the end of July 1981 that eight houses would be cleared, six of which belonged to the union's own housing association Neue Heimat.
The writer Klaus Schlesinger, who had relocated from East to West Berlin the year before and like Günter Grass, Joseph Beuys and other artists, had sponsored an occupied house, wrote about the start of the eviction on Winterfeldtstrasse on September 22nd: »The Police are on the march.
Increased blood pressure, claustrophobia. "
"We are defending ourselves against the criminal association of the Senate and speculators who are destroying cheap housing with millions of taxpayers' money," was written in large white letters on the outside of the balconies.
Two dozen militants had erected a barricade across the street, which they doused with gasoline and set on fire.
One of them, it is said later, was Rattay.
A police bulldozer pushed the barricade aside within seconds.
In the situation reports from the West Berlin Interior Senate to the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Bonn, which can be found in the Stasi files, it reads as follows: »10.55 to 11.12 sound of the property with a request to leave the property.
11.12.
Penetration with a battering ram, start of the search.
People checked 220, including 136 men, 84 women, 2 men deprived of liberty. "
Lummer presented himself in a victory pose
The police carried and dragged the occupiers down the stairs one by one and took them to the barricade.
At 13.55 the evacuation of the three houses in Winterfeldtstrasse 20 to 24 was completed, and shortly afterwards the nearby house in Bülowstrasse was also cleared.
The employer of the police, the right-wing populist Lummer, insisted on posing like a victorious general on the balcony.
"They say: if yes, then yes," he told journalists with a grin.
"It's best done in one go."
After Rattay's body was removed, shocked occupiers laid flowers on the bloody asphalt of Potsdamer Strasse and sat down to mourn.
But after a few minutes the police rushed up, clubbed the occupiers, trampled the flowers with their boots and sprayed the remains with a water cannon.
“The cops had no respect for death,” recalls Benny Härlin, then “taz” editor and squatter, later a member of the European Parliament for the Greens.
"Stones, chants, howling sirens"
In the brutal conflict over a total of 167 occupied houses, the occupiers saw themselves confirmed: Lummer and the police under him are walking over corpses.
At that time, many people who peacefully demanded reforms and rejected violence turned against the destruction of the old buildings.
But politicians and the media had completely ignored the protests - until stones flew, windows shattered and property damage occurred that ran into the millions.
Unlike the rebels of 1968, the occupiers in '81 did not dream of a world revolution.
Most of them wanted above all to realize themselves and to feel comfortable in their neighborhood.
Nor were they the intellectual elite, the future judges and professors - there were many marginalized young people in their ranks, such as Klaus-Jürgen Rattay was one.
On the evening of the day he died, a good 15,000 people marched through the city of West Berlin in a funeral march.
For a long time they only hummed "Here's To You" by Joan Baez, from the film about the anarchists Sacho and Vanzetti who were once executed in the USA.
But after that it really banged.
"Barricades that burn until late at night, acrid smoke, clouds of tear gas," wrote the writer Klaus Schlesinger.
"Stones, chants, howling sirens."
A turning point in the "urban warfare"
Rattay's death had consequences.
"It was a shock for everyone, it was clearly noticeable," said Gerhard Schuhmacher in a "taz" interview.
In 1981, the documentary filmmaker took Super 8 recordings of the bus that caught the young squatter and only stopped at an intersection.
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Dragged under the front wheel: the filmmaker Gerhard Schuhmacher recorded how Rattay was killed
Photo: Gerhard Schuhmacher
After this shock, Richard von Weizsäcker and his CDU Senate felt compelled to consider serious negotiations with the squatters.
And the occupiers understood that they had no chance against the overwhelming state power.
Gradually the "urban warfare" subsided.
The police evacuated around 60 houses with more or less force, the last time in November 1984. A good 100 occupations were legalized.
The squatters had pushed through the turnaround for "cautious urban renewal".
In 1982 squatters lifted five square slabs from the sidewalk where Rattay had died on Potsdamer Strasse and poured a cross with cement on which they only wrote: "9/22/81 Klaus-Jürgen Rattay." The modest one Thoughtless construction workers destroyed the memorial when they laid lines in November 2017.
However, the left in the responsible district parliament has ensured that a very similar commemorative sign has been erected in front of the house in which Sony will soon move into its German headquarters: again a cross, this time made of iron.
It will be unveiled on the 40th anniversary of the death of Klaus-Jürgen Rattay.