Don't worry, this happened in 1980.
So, if you plan to go this year or in the future, all you will encounter is several thousand drunks, puddles of puke, and general merriment.
Since Bavarian politicians have publicly expressed worries about how starved Muslim refugees arriving in Munich would react to the melee of friendly drunks, we figured this is a good time to talk about the 1980 bombing of the Oktoberfest and the still unresolved mystery of the severed hand.
The biggest terrorist attack in post War Germany to date, the 1980 bombing which killed 13 and injured 211 was quickly attributed to a single right wing student who was also killed in the attack. The student was known to the authorities as a sympathizer of a right wing "military sports group". The investigation into the bombing was complicated by the fact that the alleged lone bomber was literally blown to pieces in what police would call a premature detonation.
Oddities, such as the absence of traces of explosives in the student's apartment and his car as well as eyewitness reports claiming that the alleged bomber and been struggling with another man over a bag at the time of the explosion, remained unresolved.
The biggest mystery, though, was a severed hand found at the scene.
The hand was so badly damaged that no reliable blood tests could be performed. And with DNA diagnostics not available in 1980, investigators were left with the one test the state of the hand still allowed: fingerprinting.
No fingerprints of the suspect were available, but investigators found prints from the hand on some study materials in the suspect's apartment. To the investigation team, this meant the hand belonged to the bomber.
Speculation about the hand continued to fester in the subsequent decades, compounded by the fact that it has disappeared from evidence storage at some unknown point, preventing modern DNA analysis.
A tenacious journalist raised a new angle in a 2015 documentation. In this, a nurse from the northern city of Hannover recounts that a young man whose lower arm had been blown off by an explosion appeared at the hospital a short time after the bombing. The man remained in the hospital for five days, he did not explain the explosion, and the hospital did not inform the police. According to the nurse, the man was visited during that time by obviously right wing acquaintances and disappeared at the end of five days.
A newly formed group of investigators of the 1980 bombing maintains that the patient in Hannover (six or seven hours by car north of Munich) is unlikely to have been involved. They say no one would survive this kind of injury without treatment long enough and point to the absence of other injuries, which would be expected in a bomb blast.
The journalist and others, though, provide a possible scenario: the man could have received local emergency care enabling him to travel, and the absence of injuries to other areas of his body could be explained by being shielded in the crowd.
How is this related to the current refugee crisis?
An OpEd in one of Germany's major papers claimed that people warning of right wing extremism in the 1980s were lone warners whose call would only become relevant in the 1990s and later. This follows a pattern of casting current German neo-Nazi activities as more of a "former East German states" problem than the historical record shows.
The fact remains: the most deadly terrorist attack on German soil after World War II was perpetrated by at least one neo-Nazi sympathizer, and authorities refused to call it a terrorist attack, going with the easy "lone wolf" version of events.
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