Acceptance of RAF dropouts in the GDR

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To accommodate RAF outs in East Germany came in 1980 and 1982. Ten people from the extreme left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF) and their environment and with the support of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in the GDR established where they received false identities. Shortly after the end of the SED dictatorship in the GDR, they were exposed, extradited to the Federal Republic of Germany , tried and most of them sentenced to imprisonment.

procedure

In the spring of 1978, the terrorist Inge Viett - at that time still a member of the June 2nd Movement  - met Harry Dahl , the head of counter-terrorism at the GDR State Security, at Berlin-Schönefeld Airport . After Viett was first noticed with forged papers, she was allowed to leave for West Berlin after a two-hour conversation with Dahl .

A few weeks later, Viett tried again to flee via East Berlin and travel on to Bulgaria . She again attracted attention with forged papers, and a weapon was found on her at the Friedrichstrasse border crossing point . Nevertheless, the GDR authorities let Viett travel on after a few hours. In Bulgaria, Viett, Ingrid Siepmann and one other person barely escaped the control of the Federal Criminal Police Office and fled on to Czechoslovakia . There the three were arrested, brought to Prague - and handed over to the MfS, which in turn let them leave the country unmolested.

In May 1980 Viett and Dahl met again, this time in a house near Königs Wusterhausen . First Viett asked for help from the GDR in the search for a socialist country that would accept eight RAF members who were determined to leave. After further discussions, the MfS made the offer to accept the dropouts in the GDR.

Susanne Albrecht lived in this house in the Sachsendorf-Madlow development area in Cottbus under the name "Ingrid Jäger" from 1980 until she was recognized in early 1985.

Traveled on August 18, 1980

A few weeks later followed

1982 finally

All of them were searched for on Interpol 's wanted lists worldwide.

First they were housed in the Briesen forester's lodge ( 52 ° 18 ′ 16.4 ″  N , 14 ° 13 ′ 29.2 ″  E ), designated by the MfS as "Object 74", and trained for a few weeks to prepare them for life in the GDR . The dropouts received new, legendary identities, which they memorized there, fake birth and marriage certificates, school and training certificates and finally apartments and workplaces in various cities in the GDR.

While West German authorities blamed the people in hiding for attacks since 1980, the dropouts lived as printers, doctors, machinists or photographers in East Berlin, Frankfurt (Oder) , Senftenberg and Schwedt .

In articles and conversations, the unofficial state security officer and former terrorist Till Meyer spread the targeted disinformation that the terrorists had gone into hiding “in Damascus ” or “elsewhere in the Middle East ”.

The MfS fully monitored the dropouts until they were exposed and recorded the processes in the "Star 2 operational procedure". The apartments of the dropouts were bugged , tapped their phone calls, and one place twice a month meetings took place between caregivers and assisted. The dropouts were forbidden from contact with one another. In an internal report by the MfS from 1985, it was stated that the group of ten would no longer pose a threat. Literally it says: "All people have firmly integrated themselves into professional and public life."

Once a year a meeting of the first eight dropouts took place in the Briesener Forsthaus. The anniversary of the founding of the GDR was celebrated under the supervision of the MfS. The others only found out in the summer of 1990 that Inge Viett and Henning Beer were also staying in the GDR.

Over the years, among others, Silke Maier-Witt, Susanne Albrecht and Inge Viett were recognized by GDR citizens or identified by Western secret services and sometimes had to change their identities very quickly.

On December 13, 1989, the Stasi Major General Heinz Engelhardt was given the disinformation task of dispelling the suspicions that had arisen in Western media about the Stasi support for the RAF.

After the end of the SED dictatorship in the GDR , the MfS was dissolved; the dropouts also lost their previous supervisors. After receiving several reports of Susanne Albrecht's stay in the GDR since 1986, the Federal Criminal Police Office passed on its findings on Albrecht's and Silke Maier-Witt's whereabouts to the Central Criminal Police Office in East Berlin in February 1990. As a result, Albrecht's current stay in Moscow was determined until mid-May 1990 and she was arrested on June 6, after she had returned to the GDR. Inge Viett was recognized by a neighbor after Albrecht's arrest had been reported about her on TV and arrested on June 12th. The other RAF dropouts were exposed because their surviving naturalization files were all so extraordinary (very thin and with a background that was difficult to verify) that these files were found on the basis of these features, the dropouts were identified and arrested between June 14th and 17th. Susanne Albrecht, Werner Lotze, Monika Helbing, Silke Maier-Witt, Henning Beer, Inge Viett, Sigrid Sternebeck and Ralf Friedrich were sentenced to prison terms of between six and a half and 13 years for the crimes they committed. The two other people charged with criminal offenses were statute-barred in the meantime . In contrast to the RAF members incarcerated in the Federal Republic, the so-called GDR dropouts showed themselves to be cooperative in the proceedings, gave extensive testimony and in some cases received the status of key witnesses .

In 1990 Erich Mielke was arrested, among other things, for his involvement, and in 1991 an arrest warrant was issued for attempted murder with the support of RAF terrorists. In 1998 all proceedings against Mielke were dropped for health reasons. In 1997 three officers of the Stasi were charged and partly convicted of attempted thwarting of criminal acts; the Federal Supreme Court overturned these judgments in 1998. The actions are to be accepted as an expression of state sovereignty.

The question of the extent to which the Stasi supported the RAF beyond accepting the dropouts and what role individual people played in this is the subject of research. In 2017, the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records published a selection of materials from the Stasi records archive about the RAF.

Movie

  • In 2017, the film "Traitors - Death by the Sea" also addressed the events.
  • ZDF-History The RAF - "Phantom" without mercy

literature

Broadcast reports

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Jens Bauszus: The RAF-Stasi-Connection . In: Focus , May 8, 2007.
  2. ↑ A "pledge" of the Mielke apparatus - The State Security and the Red Army Faction (RAF) . BStU ; accessed on September 28, 2015
  3. ↑ Sketch of how to get to the "conspiratorial object 74" in the Stasi media library of the BStU
  4. ↑ Scouts at the front . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1992 ( online ).
  5. ↑ Sigrid Averesch: "Harry" opened the doors . In: Berliner Zeitung , February 18, 1997
  6. ↑ Detlef Kühn: Common enemy image - contacts between GDR chekists and RAF terrorists . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , August 1, 2008
  7. ↑ Jochen Bölsche, Hans-Joachim Noack, Norbert F. Pötzl, Alexander Smoltczyk: Being / not being of the GDR . In: Der Spiegel . No. 50 , 1999 ( online ).
  8. ^ Butz Peters: Deadly error. The history of the RAF. Argus, Berlin 2004, pp. 582-586.
  9. ^ Regina Haunhorst, Irmgard Zündorf: Erich Mielke. Tabular curriculum vitae in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG )
  10. ^ Andreas Förster: Accommodation of RAF terrorists was not a criminal offense . In: Berliner Zeitung , March 6, 1998.
  11. ^ Sascha Langenbach: The Stasi-RAF connection . In: Berliner Kurier , September 23, 2012
  12. ↑ Michael Hanfeld: They had to meet each other . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , August 21, 2017.