Brigitte Mohnhaupt

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Brigitte Margret Ida Mohnhaupt (born June 24, 1949 in Rheinberg ) is a German former terrorist of the Red Army Faction (RAF). She is considered to be the leader of the second generation and was instrumental in planning the attacks in the German autumn of 1977. After her arrest in 1982, she was sentenced to five life imprisonment and an additional 15 years for nine murders and multiple attempted murders . She was released on March 25, 2007.

Life

Youth and Studies

The daughter of a publishing clerk in Rheinberg spent her childhood as an only child in a middle-class family. After her parents divorced in 1960, Brigitte Mohnhaupt stayed with her mother. One of the teachers at the Schönborn-Gymnasium in Bruchsal , where she graduated in 1967, described her as “a good student, actually a very good student, but not overly diligent and not overly interested.” After graduating from high school , Mohnhaupt wanted to be a journalist and enrolled at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Munich to study journalism and history. There she came into contact with the left-wing scene and moved with Rolf Heissler to the commune at Metzstrasse 15. She was briefly married to him (from 1968 to 1970); he too later became a member of the RAF.

Entry into the RAF and first prison sentence

In 1971 Mohnhaupt joined the RAF and participated in organization, logistics and arms procurement. On June 9, 1972, she was arrested in Berlin and sentenced to four years and six months imprisonment for supporting a criminal organization, assault and illicit gun possession. She was imprisoned for another two months after assaulting a correctional officer.

A receipt from Gudrun Ensslin from 1973, in which she gives the most important imprisoned members of the RAF code names for communication via the RAF information system, suggests that Mohnhaupt was already part of the extended core of the first generation.

She spent the last months of her imprisonment in the high-security wing of the Stuttgart penal institution , where she spent several hours around each day with Andreas Baader , Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe . During this time, Baader and Ensslin systematically prepared her for her new leadership role within the RAF members who were in freedom. After her release from prison on February 8, 1977, Baader confirmed in a document smuggled out of prison that "Mohnhaupt now has some kind of authority."

German autumn 1977

In the course of 1976, under the leadership of the former lawyer Siegfried Haag, the so-called second generation of the RAF ("Haag-Mayer-Gang") had formed. a. forged against the Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback and the employer president Hanns Martin Schleyer . To this end, the group practiced handling heavy automatic weapons in Palestinian training camps in Yemen . The attack on Buback was referred to internally by the perpetrators as "Operation Margarine". A margarine brand called SB was popular at the time; the initials of Buback.

Hague's arrest on November 30, 1976 led to a temporary standstill until Mohnhaupt was released from prison. Mohnhaupt was largely responsible for the planning and execution of the attack series in the German autumn of 1977 (" Offensive 77 ").

At the beginning of April 1977, Mohnhaupt and her lover at the time, Peter-Jürgen Boock, traveled to Baghdad to negotiate with Wadi Haddad , a leader of the Palestinian terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

On July 30, 1977, Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar, with the help of Susanne Albrecht, got access to the house of the board spokesman of Dresdner Bank Jürgen Ponto . The situation escalated and Ponto was shot by Mohnhaupt and Klar, who were later convicted for it.

On September 5, 1977, the President of the Federation of German Employers' Associations (BDA) and the Federation of German Industries (BDI), Hanns Martin Schleyer, was kidnapped. Mohnhaupt was not directly involved in the Schleyer kidnapping , but had systematically spied on Schleyer's routes and planned the sequence of events in the weeks before - as in the Buback case. According to Boock, the murder of Schleyer himself only took place after a direct request, which Mohnhaupt and he sent by telex to Schleyer's guard in Brussels (wording: "Goods are spoiled").

At the beginning of October 1977 Mohnhaupt flew to Baghdad with the majority of the active RAF members and negotiated again with Wadi Haddad there together with Boock. As a result, the Landshut aircraft was hijacked by the PFLP.

1978 to 1982

After the failure of the extrication attempts and the suicide of the imprisoned first generation of the RAF, Mohnhaupt stayed in the Middle East until May 1978 and then returned to Europe. On May 11th, she was arrested by Yugoslav authorities at Zagreb Airport . Since the Federal Republic did not accept the offer of the Yugoslav authorities to exchange Mohnhaupt and her companions for a group of Croatian separatists, she was released at the beginning of November and deported to southern Yemen , where she completed military training in a Palestinian camp.

At the beginning of 1979 she returned to Europe and organized the failed assassination attempt on the NATO commander-in-chief Alexander Haig on June 25, 1979 ("Operation Hengst").

In the following months and years she tried in vain to realign the RAF and to recruit new members. In the fall of 1981 she was directly involved in the attempted assassination of US General Frederick Kroesen . On November 11, 1982, she was arrested as one of the last active RAF members in a wooded area near Heusenstamm .

Second prison term

On December 4, 1984, during a court hearing, Mohnhaupt announced that the RAF inmates would go on hunger strike . The conclusion is drawn from the fact that the hunger strike call was heeded by almost all prisoners and that a new series of attacks and murders of the so-called third generation broke out at almost the same time (the first attack in the “84/85 offensive” took place on December 18, 1984) suggests that Mohnhaupt also led the RAF from prison.

Against this background, Mohnhaupt was sentenced on April 2, 1985 for involvement in the nine murders of 1977, for the attempted murder of Frederick Kroesen and his three companions in 1981, and for the attempted murder of at least five public prosecutors to five individual prison terms and a prison term of 15 Sentenced for years. In the grounds of the judgment, the judge described Mohnhaupt as "the most dangerous and vicious woman in Germany".

At the beginning of 1989, the then State Secretary in the Ministry of Justice and later Minister of Justice and Foreign Affairs, Klaus Kinkel, visited Mohnhaupt in the JVA Aichach as part of the so-called Kinkel Initiative , where she spent 22 years of her 24-year imprisonment. Kinkel later described Mohnhaupt as "obstinate and difficult".

Despite a new wave of violence, Kinkel continued his efforts to find a solution to the problem and finally succeeded in getting the majority of both freed and imprisoned RAF members willing to renounce violence against persons. For Mohnhaupt, who had fiercely resisted any concession to the end, this meant de facto her dismissal as leader of the RAF, which she confirmed in a letter published on October 28, 1993 by the Frankfurter Rundschau (“Break in the cohesion of prisoners and ... the RAF ").

Leadership style

When she was released from prison, the head of the prison at the time described Aichach Mohnhaupt as “helpful, not at all unsympathetic”. Reports from the time when she was actively in command of the RAF, on the other hand, have a completely different effect. Former RAF members such as Susanne Albrecht and Silke Maier-Witt described her as "absolutely dominant", she formulated her commands in short, militarily terse sentences and, if there were discussions, counterarguments that did not suit her, in hurtful ones Wise and shouted down in a screeching voice.

In contradiction to this apparent self-confidence and dominance are their public reluctance and their need to protect themselves for many years with a kind of deputy figure at their side. In the first few years up to her arrest in 1980, this was Sieglinde Hofmann , then until around 1985 Christian Klar and in the following years Helmut Pohl , with whom she organized a hunger strike in 1989 and negotiations with Klaus Kinkel.

Mohnhaupt was released from custody on March 25, 2007 after serving the court-determined minimum of 24 years.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ dpa: Ex-terrorist Mohnhaupt testifies in the Becker trial. In: Zeit Online . February 8, 2011, accessed May 23, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Holger Schmidt: A new life after 24 years in prison tagesschau.de (tagesschau.de archive).
  3. ↑ Volker Wagener: Who is Brigitte Mohnhaupt? In: Deutsche Welle , February 12, 2007
  4. ↑ Butz Peters: The murder machine . In: Rheinischer Merkur , February 1, 2007
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar : “When will the fight against the holy cow Israel finally begin?” Munich 1970: on the anti-Semitic roots of German terrorism . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-03411-5 , short biography p. 781
  6. ↑ Brigitte Mohnhaupt . rafinfo.de
  7. ↑ bundesarchiv.de ( Memento from May 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Thomas Holl: Baader's authorized representative . In: FAZ , February 12, 2007
  9. ^ Stefan Aust : The Baader Meinhof Complex . P. 417
  10. ^ Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex . P. 454
  11. ^ Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex . P. 462
  12. ↑ a b Butz Peters: Deadly error . P. 397 ff.
  13. ^ TV interview with Peter-Jürgen Boock
  14. ^ Butz Peters: Deadly error . P. 493 ff.
  15. ^ Butz Peters: Deadly error . P. 601
  16. ^ Judgment of the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court of April 2, 1985, file number 5-1 StE 1/83
  17. ^ Butz Peters: Deadly error . P. 649
  18. ↑ Ralf Husemann: "She is not a hardliner". In: sueddeutsche.de. May 17, 2010. Retrieved May 23, 2017 .
  19. ^ Knobbe, Schmitz: Terror Year 1977 . P. 95
personal data
SURNAME Mohnhaupt, Brigitte
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mohnhaupt, Brigitte Margret Ida (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German terrorist of the Red Army faction
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Rheinberg