Stockholm hostage-taking

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The German Embassy in Stockholm in August 2008

The Stockholm hostage-taking was a terrorist attack by a Red Army Faction command on April 24, 1975. Six terrorists gained access to the German embassy in Stockholm (Sweden), took twelve hostages and murdered two of them. After an explosive explosion, which the hostage-takers probably accidentally triggered, the remaining hostages were able to flee. The surviving hostage-takers were sentenced to long prison terms.

prehistory

On February 27, 1975 three days before the election to the Berlin House of Representatives , the terrorists had June 2 Movement the top candidates of the CDU Berlin , Peter Lorenz , kidnapped . At that time, the federal government ( Schmidt I cabinet ) gave in to the kidnappers' demands: It released five criminals from the RAF and the June 2 Movement and had them flown to southern Yemen .

course

At noon on April 24, 1975, six RAF terrorists ( Hanna Krabbe , Karl-Heinz Dellwo , Lutz Taufer , Bernhard Rössner , Ulrich Wessel and Siegfried Hausner ) stormed the Federal Republic's embassy in Stockholm, took twelve hostages and barricaded themselves on the upper floor of the Building. They called themselves Kommando Holger Meins (Meins died in a prison in November 1974 after a hunger strike ) and demanded the release of a total of 26 imprisoned RAF members, including Andreas Baader , Ulrike Meinhof , Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe . Stefan Wisniewski was probably hidden outside the embassy and kept the terrorists in the embassy informed about the situation there by radio.

The terrorists threatened to shoot hostages if the Swedish police did not leave the embassy basement by 2 p.m. When the ultimatum passed, two terrorists shot five times directly from behind the military attaché Lieutenant Colonel Andreas von Mirbach , who they had forced to negotiate with the police, and pushed him down the stairs of the embassy building. The police withdrew to an outbuilding of the embassy. Two Swedish police officers, stripped of their underpants, were allowed to take Mirbach out of the danger area an hour after the shooting; after an operation he died two hours later.

At 8 p.m., the crisis team headed by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt decided not to respond to the terrorists' demands. Schmidt opened a meeting of his crisis team with the words: "Gentlemen, all my instincts tell me that we must not give in here."

The terrorists laid out 15 kilograms of TNT explosives and connected him with cables. At around 10:20 p.m., one of the terrorists shot and visibly shot economic attaché Heinz Hillegaart at an open window. At 11:46 p.m. the explosives exploded. The explosion severely damaged the embassy building and injured the four remaining hostages and the hostage-takers, some seriously. The hostages managed to escape. In the later trial, the terrorists claimed that the local forces detonated it, which the German government approved. The court did not believe this statement. Hans-Joachim Klein later wrote that the explosion was triggered by one of the terrorists tripping over a wire, triggering the electric ignition. All of the commandos and hostages were burned. Wessel died two hours later in a hospital, Hausner ten days later in the infirmary of the Stuttgart prison .

After the attack

The four surviving terrorists (Krabbe, Dellwo, Taufer and Rössner) were sentenced on July 20, 1977 by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court to twice life imprisonment for collective murder in two cases as well as hostage-taking and attempted coercion of a constitutional organ. The 3rd Criminal Division of the Federal Court rejected on 1 March 1978, the revisions of the accused against that judgment as unfounded.

Rössner was granted a penalty on November 17, 1992 , and was pardoned in 1994. Taufer and Dellwo were released in spring 1995, Krabbe on May 10, 1996.

Rössner said in 1994 during a television interview on ZDF that he felt no remorse or regret for the victims and their relatives. Clais von Mirbach, son of the shot attaché, then declared that he would like "that the public would oppose such self-glorifications and trivializations more decisively."

Movie

  • Stockholm 75 (Sweden) documentary, 2003, directed by David Aronowitsch.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martin Steinseifer: “Terrorism” between event and discourse: On the pragmatics of text-image compilations in print media in the 1970s. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2011, p. 26.
  2. ↑ FAZ.net February 12, 2007: What do we know about terrorism?
  3. ↑ Marion Detjen, Stephan Detjen , Maximilian Steinbeis : The Germans and the Basic Law: History and Limits of our Constitution , p. 176 ( online ). Series of publications by the Federal Agency for Political Education (2009), ISBN 978-0309286930 .
  4. ↑ a b welt.de / Butz Peters : The terror of Stockholm . welt.de , April 25, 2005, accessed October 27, 2017.
  5. ^ The hostage-taking of Stockholm . Federal Agency for Civic Education , April 21, 2015, accessed October 27, 2017.
  6. ↑ Hans-Joachim Klein: Return to Humanity . rororo aktuell, 1979, p. 51 ( ISBN 978-3499145445 )
  7. ↑ Der Spiegel 20/1976 of May 17, 1975, p. 55 f. ( online )
  8. ↑ BGH, 01.03.1978 - 3 StR 24/78 (S) ( full text online )
  9. ^ The victims of the RAF: Self-transfiguration and belittlement . Federal Agency for Civic Education (ed.): From Politics and Contemporary History , September 24, 2007

Coordinates: 59 ° 20 ′ 4.4 ″  N , 18 ° 6 ′ 23 ″  E