Harmut Kaiser

Future 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta enrolls in the planning program of the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, where he studies for a master’s degree. Atta chose Hamburg after meeting two German schoolteachers from there in the fall of 1991. The teachers were in Cairo because they organize student exchanges between Germany and Egypt. After being introduced by mutual friends, they offered Atta a rent-free room in their home, where he stays for about six months, before moving into student housing. [Chicago Tribune, 3/7/2003] At the university, Atta is lucky that the department’s chairman, Dittmar Machule, is a specialist on the Middle East. Machule feels that Atta shares his passion and says that Atta is “tender, sensitive… he had deep, dark eyes. His eyes would speak. You could see the intelligence, the knowledge, the alertness.” Those who know Atta at the university will say he sits and listens, without making hasty comments, he is careful about what he says, and he is very respectful of well-prepared teachers. Fellow student Martin Ebert will say, “I don’t think it was possible to have a fight with him.” Another fellow student, Harmut Kaiser, will say that it is hard to draw Atta into political discussions in class, even if politics is relevant to the topic under discussion: “He wasn’t a guy who acted like he wanted to change the world—unlike a lot of other students in the group.” [McDermott, 2005, pp. 24-25]