The Gladbeck hostage crisis or Gladbeck hostage drama was a bank robbery and hostage-taking that took place in northwestern West Germany from 16 to 18 August During the hostage crisis, a year-old boy and an year-old woman were killed. Dieter Degowski was born on 4 June in Gladbeck; he was the fifth child in a family of six children. One year later, she married her second husband in Duisburg ; they moved to Gladbeck and opened a bar. At gunpoint, the employees gave the robbers , DM.
At am, an emergency call was made to the police by a witness. A parked police car was seen by the offenders as they left the branch.
They went back into the bank and took two clerks hostage, demanding a car and ransom money, firing their guns into the air several times. Journalist Hans Meiser , then working for a RTL radio station, called the bank to interview the robbers, becoming the first member of the press to conduct an interview with them as the hostage crisis was happening. The vehicle had been equipped with tracking and listening devices , with which police intended to track them.
At pm, the getaway started. The robbers took two bank employees with them as hostages. Police operated under the assumption that the robbers would release their hostages within the next hours before fleeing on their own, so the monitoring was lax and no rescue operation was planned ahead of time. The robbers remained in town for several more hours, driving around aimlessly and stocking up on food and alcohol at local restaurants, paying while brandishing their guns.
The pair successively stole two other cars, but abandoned them due to fears that they were police decoys, before settling on a final vehicle, which had in fact been planted by police and was also bugged.
