West Germany was experiencing seasonally cool autumn weather in October nineteen eighty four. It would only be another four years before the fall of the Berlin War, but for anyone living at the time, this was still as inconceivable as a future of social media or New York without the Twin Towers on those many gray and gloomy days that signaled the approach of winter that year. For citizens of both East and West Germany, the Cold War was very
much in operation in West Germany. This could be seen most starkly in the numerous acts of domestic terror that were perpetrated there in the decade leading up to the Berlin Wall's demise. The forefront of this activity was the Red Army faction, also known as the Bader Meinhoff Gang, named after two of the group's early leaders, Andrea Spada and Ulrika Meinhoff. The faction was formed out of radical elements from the nineteen sixties German university protest movement as
a reaction to the post war political landscape. Chief among their concerns was the failure of the West German political system to completely expunge itself of former supporters of Adolf Hitler. And what they viewed as the ever expanding and unchecked
imperialist approach of the United States government. Using funds gained from bank robberies, the group engaged in numerous violent activities focused mainly on West German corporations and the people who worked for them, as well as u S military installations
and personnel, killing thirty people in the process. Meanwhile, in East Germany, it was the machinations of the uber vigilant Ministry of State Security, also known as the Stazi, who perhaps most struck fear into its citizens with its ceaseless and brutal efforts to sniff out any opposition to the country's ostensibly communist government. All in all, it was a dark and unsettling time for citizens of both Germanys, framed
by an ever present atmosphere of violence and paranoia. And it was in the shadow of all that that one morning in October nineteen eighty four, in Anshausen, a small town about thirty five miles east of Bonn in West Germany, thirty four year old gunts Stohl was stirred in front of his bathroom mirror, contemplating the face that were staring
back at him. What he saw was dark hair swept to one side to conceal his slightly receding hairline, a broad, dark mustache under heavy eyebrows, and a dark goatee beard. Unbeknownst to him, this very face was shortly to become the subject of one of the strangest and most cryptic unexplained deaths in recent German history. You're listening to unexplained
and I'm Richard mc lean smith. By the time late October had arrived, Gunta Stall had been unemployed for several months, and with the autumn nights drawing in fast, it was a difficult time to be out of work. In fact, the situation had been getting to Stall a little more than he'd care to admit. His hands had developed a slight tremble, and he couldn't seem to focus on any sort of routine. As the days rolled by and Stoll's attempts to find a job went nowhere, he seemed only
to become more and more anxious. Stoll had worked as a food engineer at a local factory before losing his job a few months earlier. It was a specialist profession, and openings for someone with his particular skills were thin on the ground as such. Stoll's wife was well aware that her husband was unlikely to find work straight away, but she'd become alarmed at just how much of an effect it was having on him. As he became increasingly
agitated and unusually nervous. She wondered if, perhaps or the TV he was consuming now he didn't have a regular day job to go to with its endless reports of domestic terror, kidnappings and killings, was beginning to weigh on his mind. But it was more than that. Stoll, it seemed, was becoming paranoid. Every now and then, his wife would
catch him glancing furtively out of the window. Other times she'd hear him muttering to himself from outside a room, only for him to stop the moment she walked in. Whenever he went out, she watched on quietly from the window as he pulled up the collar of his coat, then quickly scanned all around him before getting into his pale colored Volkswagen Golf, And when he drove off, he would do so slump down low in the driving seat,
as if trying to avoid being seen. When Stall's paranoia seemed to take a turn for the worse, it started one evening over dinner, when Gunter's wife asked him why exactly he'd been peering out into the street that day from behind the curtains, it was, he said, simply because of them. When she asked who they were, Staal went silent for a moment, refusing to answer the question until finally he spoke again. They, he said, were on his trail. It was a few evenings later when Gunter's wife found
him in their bedroom pacing up and down. She asked him once more to explain what was wrong, but again Stall offered only that they were planning to do something to him. A few days later, and he had become convinced that they were in fact out to kill him. For Stal's wife, it was becoming unbearable. Not convinced that there really was a they at all, she was left with the sad realization that her husband was most likely struggling with a severe psychiatric illness for which she was
not equipped to deal with. On Thursday, October twenty fifth, Stall was once again at home, where he'd been or day, Barely able to sit still. By late evening, he was sat in an armchair in his bedroom, still muttering to himself when his wife joined him. The pair spoke for a moment before Stall went back to his now usual nervous worrying. It was shortly for eleven p m when he suddenly leaped to his feet and shouted, yet get
mea ein Lichtoff. Its literal translation to English would be something like now a light comes on, but perhaps now I've got it is a better reflection of its meaning. Stoll's wife could only watch on with alarm as her husband took a sheet of scrap paper, sat down at the bedroom dressing table, and proceeded to scribble something on it. When he'd finished, there appeared to be six characters written
down on the paper. The first two seemed to be the capital letters Y and oh, followed by a third letter which looked like a capital G but could also have been a six, followed by an apostrophe. Then three more letters T, Z and E, also in capitals. Together if it was indeed a G and not a six,
they spelled the apparently nonsensical word yogxy. Stoll's wife looked on as Gunter stared hard at the cryptic characters for a moment before proceeding to cross them out one by one then he leapt up once more, dashed out of the room and tore off down the stairs. Where are you going so late? Shouted his wife after him, as Stoll grabbed his coat and keys. Just to the pub for a drink, he replied, before swiftly opening the door
and rushing out into the street. Missus Stall watched on from the bedroom window as Gunter backed his car down the driveway, turned onto the road and was swallowed up by the night. It was the last time she would see her husband alive. Later that night, Stall was witnessed at his favorite pub in neighboring Wilnsdorf, a former iron mining town about three and a half mile south of Anshausen. It was a quiet Thursday evening in the Willnsdorf bar.
A few regulars chatted quietly and sipped their drinks. Ordinarily, they would barely pay attention to Stall, other than to nod a brief greeting. He was a regular there who tended to keep himself to himself, except that night. There was something undeniably odd about him, which drew many concerned gazes from his fellow drinkers. Just as he had been at home for a good few weeks now he seemed restless, agitated, and preoccupied. The one thing he wasn't, however, according to
all who saw there that night, was drunk. Stall did order a beer, which the bartender poured for him, but before he could take a sip, without any warning, he collapsed to the ground, hitting and injuring his face as he fell, Having seemingly lost consciousness, The customers and the bartender helped him to his feet and suggested he rest a moment while they fetched the first aid kit to tend to the deep gash on his face, but Stall
adamantly refused all help. Instead, he simply paid for his drink and left, before climbing unsteadily into his car and driving off once again into the chilly night. At roughly the same time, seven miles south of Wilsdorf, in the small country town of heiger Sealbach, the elderly eerner Helfritz was struggling to get to sleep. Despite going to bed early, she'd so far only managed to doze on and off.
She was finally drifting off to sleep when she became vaguely aware of the sound of a car drawing up outside her house. This was followed moments later by a flurry of bangs at her front door. Snapping awake. Helfritz somewhat nervously alled herself out of bed and with some trepidation made her way to the front door as a man shouted out to her from behind it. Alfritz relaxed a little when she recognized the voice as that of Gunter Stoll. Helfritz had known Stol all his life, having
been a childhood friend of his mother. However, she soon became alarmed again when she listened closer to what Gunter was saying. Stoll sounded frightened and was begging to be let in, telling her that a horrible incident was about to occur. Helfritz was concerned about Stoll, but given that it was one a m. And how unhinged he sounded, she refused to open the door, telling him to go to his parents place instead, which was only a few
minutes drive away. Much to her relief, Stall stopped shouting and walked away at three a m. Just two hours after Stoll had turned up at Erna Helfritz's home about seventy miles away to the north. The traffic was light on Autobahn A forty five as the occasional car and commercial lorry zipped in and out of the small spots
of light cast by the motorway lamps. Two drivers in the cab of a truck traveling south were listening to the radio as they approached Exit thirteen, the off ramp for the city of Hargansud, when they spotted a pale colored Volkswagen Golf lying in a ditch by the side of the southbound carriageway that looked to be badly damaged,
according to their statements. Later, there was a man in a light colored jacket there too, walking around the car, seemingly inspecting the inside of it, but as the lorry pulled up to the wreckage, the man vanished into the night. Having parked up, one of the lorry drivers hurried to a nearby emergency phone to call for an ambulance, while the other, after taking a few deep breaths to steady
his nerves, cautiously approached the crashed car. As the truck driver drew closer to the smashed up vehicle, he could see that the front end of it was crushed inwards and its windscreen had been completely smashed. The back tailgate was up and the passenger side door was also hanging open. Just then, his colleague returned to say an ambulance was on the way, and so together they then peered inside
the wrecked vehicle. There, lying crumpled over in the passenger seat, was the badly battered and strangely incomprehensibly naked body of a man with thinning dark hair, a black mustache, and goateee beard. Even though they were both untrained in emergency scene response, it was clear the naked man had severe injuries on several parts of his body. Much to their relief, he was still alive, but only just conscious and barely
clinging on to life. As they waited for the ambulance to arrive, the two drivers tried to keep the man talking, comforting him as best they could. Did he remember what happened? They asked? Why wasn't he wearing any clothes? The man fought to find the words, then eventually, in a shaky and raspy voice, explained that four other men had been with him in the car before he'd crashed. The men had apparently beaten him up before running away and leaving him there. When asked if he knew the men, the
man said no. They were complete strangers. An ambulance arrived on the scene soon after, and emergency workers carefully extracted the naked man from the wreckage. It was, of course, gun to Stall. Sadly, though he was alive when he was taken away in the ambulance, he died en route to the hospital shortly after. With the circumstances of Stoll's death and his apparent crash being so odd, the police
quickly decided to make the case a criminal investigation. The following day, the two truck drivers were questioned at the local police station, having first been put into separate rooms to check if their story is tallied. Both drivers testified to having seen a man in a bright or white jacket walking around the crashed car as they arrived on the scene, but the man was gone by the time
they parked up. Other witnesses who were driving that stretch of road at the same time also spoke of seeing someone they described as possibly a hitchhiker in a bright or white coat where Stoll's wrecked car was found. Curiously, some witnesses described the white coat as looking like a lab coat. There were also onlooker reports of a pickup truck near exit thirteen, heading towards Frankfort immediately after the
vehicle crashed. However, this vehicle was never traced. As more and more facts were uncovered, it seemed the mystery only deepened. No evidence of the mysterious passengers Stole claimed to were with him, nor his missing clothes could be found, and there were no leads on the white coated stranger spotted at the scene either. The official cause of death was pronounced as vehicular manslo caused under suspicious circumstances, and then
came Stall's autopsy. Firstly, it showed somewhat unexpectedly that Stoll's injuries had not been sustained from inside his own car, but elsewhere, With the likely possibility that he'd been struck outside his vehicle by another car before somehow ending up back inside the Volkswagen. Police surmised that having somehow been run over, Stoll was then deliberately positioned in the passenger seat of his own car before it was then driven
or pushed into the ditch where it was found. This, again, according to the police, was most likely done to hide the evidence of how, where, and by whose hand he'd received his fatal injuries. In subsequent questioning, Stoll's distraught wife told the police that her husband had made some solo holiday trips to the Netherlands over the previous couple of years.
The police's immediate suspicion was that Gunter had been involved with drug dealing, but further investigations failed to reveal anything incriminating. As the investigation wore on, police profiled around twelve hundred potential suspects, but neither the identity of the man in the bright or white jacket or the four people that Stole claimed were with him just before he died could be ascertained. As for the location of where he'd supposedly
first been injured, that too remained elusive. As news of what became known as the Auto Barn riddle hit the press and gained notoriety in the West German media and beyond, a plethora of theories began to circulate around Stoll's death. With all the strange details, the fact that he'd spoken repeatedly about how he was in danger in the lead up to the fatal incident began to seem less like paranoia and more like a distinct possibility. Then something new
came to light. It was during further questioning by the police, while Stoll's wife detailed the extent of his ever increasing paranoia that she remembered the mysterious note he'd written the night of his death. Having thought nothing of it at the time. Stoll's wife had thrown the note away, but was adamant she could remember it vividly. On it was written the word yoxey, she said, give or take, the
G being a six or not. The revelation of this mysterious code inevitably led to even more public speculation about the case. What on earth could it mean? People wondered, as all manner of theories were put forward. What if it didn't say yoggze at all, but the O was in fact a zero, and the letter Z actually the number two, And if the third letter was indeed the number six, could it be a vehicle license plate? Some wandered the license plate of a car that had been
following him, only to later run him over. Perhaps others suggested the characters were linked to a Romanian radio station, the call sign of which was exactly YO six t ze. There are no mentions of what the police made of the license plate theory, but any connection between the note and the Romanian radio station were found to have been merely coincidental, with police soon hitting a dead end with it. All cryptographers were brought in to analyze the mysterious characters,
they too hit a dead end. In the years since Gunter Stoll's beguiling death, many more theories have been put forward to try and make sense of it. Since Stoll was a food engineer, some amateur sleuths have speculated that the letters yog tze are an anagram for the word psygote, the scientific term for the earliest developmental stage of a fertilized egg, and that Stol had unwittingly discovered evidence of
some sort of secret genetic engineering experiment. Was the man in the white coat seen leaving the crash site, according to some, a scientist from a research laboratory, Or perhaps, rather than being an unwitting innocent said others, was Stoll actually an active agent deeply entangled within the clandestine world
of industrial espionage working for the East German government. Perhaps in his capacity as a food engineer, Stohl had been privy to some secret food ingredient or food modification program knowledge which he was trying to smuggle out to the
other side. What if the first three letters y O G referred to yogurt, thought some, although in German this would be spelt with a jay or yacht as it is called, and not a y. Those following this line of thought contend that the letters t ze might also denote a type of secret flavoring found in yogurt that Stoll was working with. These might seem fanciful ideas to think it now, but throughout the Cold War, including well into the nineteen eighties, the East German government at a
highly developed industrial espionage program. At the time of Stoll's death, there were thought of being thousands of operatives in West Germany engaged exclusively in industrial espionage for the East. Such spying was an attractive option to some West Germans struggling
with their finances. Hans Raider was one prominent example. A physicist and former member of the National German Socialist Workers Party, Raider was deep in debt and struggling to provide for his family when he was recruited by the East German government during the nineteen fifties. An employee at a West German electronics firm, Raider's work put him in contact with detailed information about a range of technologies the company was developing.
In exchange for monthly payoffs, Raider stole key files from his employer and passed them on to East German agents Between nineteen fifty seven to nineteen eighty five. Raider's side hustle spying career delivered staggering amounts of material into the hands of the Stazi, and he was never caught. It all certainly paints Stole's strange behaviour in the lead up to his death in a slightly more complicated light. Or did gun to Stall simply suffer a psychotic breakdown caused
by the increasing mental stress and depression of unemployment. In the end, with it being close to forty years since Stoll's death, it's unlikely will ever learn the truth of what exactly happened to him. Even the cryptic message often touted as the only solid clu from the case was in fact delivered second hand from his wife's memory, something
routinely found to be fallible. Every year the case is re examined by the Attorney General's Office in the hopes of finally solving the mystery, and as its resurfaces in turn in the German public imagination, the amateur sleuths take another stab at finally cracking the case, but it remains to this day unexplained. This episode was written by Diane Hope. Unexplained is an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard mclin Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music,
are also produced by Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, featuring stories that have never before been featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes, and Noble Waterstones, among other bookstores. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like
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