Offensive 77
The term Offensive 77 was used by the Red Army Faction (RAF) as well as by the media and investigative authorities in connection with the group's terrorist attacks from 1977 onwards. The aim of the offensive was to free the arrested terrorists from prisons. It began with the assassination attempt on the Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback on April 7, 1977, led in the course of the Schleyer abduction to the state crisis known as the German Autumn and ended on October 18, 1977 with the suicide of the arrested RAF leaders on the night of death in Stammheim and the Assassination of Schleyer. Parts of the RAF planning, essentially designed by Siegfried Haag (see: Haag / Mayer papers ), were already known to the Federal Criminal Police Office , but could only be assigned later.
RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock said:
- The actions planned for 1977 focused on the liberation of the prisoners. The group felt that the abduction of a single person would not be enough to achieve the desired goal. A second person should therefore be kidnapped at short notice, in particular to avoid countermeasures by the manhunt. The two actions should take place in rapid succession and complement each other. (Minutes of the interrogation of Peter-Jürgen Boock on April 1, 1992)
The journalist Butz Peters later put it:
- According to the RAF, “Offensive 77” is more than the mere sequence of individual acts. She sees a “unit of action” in the successive attacks: it is intended to keep the state softened.
Time table offensive 77
| April 7, 1977 | Murder of Siegfried Buback in Karlsruhe | |
| April 28, 1977 | Andreas Baader , Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe are sentenced to life imprisonment | |
| July 1, 1977 | Assault on an arms shop in Frankfurt am Main | |
| July 30, 1977 | Jürgen Ponto is murdered in Oberursel | |
| August 25, 1977 | Unsuccessful rocket launcher attack on the Federal Prosecutor's Office building in Karlsruhe | |
| 5th September 1977 | Schleyer kidnapping in Cologne (prelude to the German Autumn ) | |
| October 13, 1977 | Landshut kidnapping | |
| October 18, 1977 | 0:05 a.m. to 0:08 a.m. CET, the hostages were successfully freed from the Landshut plane in Mogadishu | |
| October 18, 1977 | from about 0:40 the night of death from Stammheim | |
| October 18, 1977 | around 1:00 p.m., murder of Schleyer in Hem near Lille | |
| 19th October 1977 | Hanns Martin Schleyer found dead in Mulhouse |
Web links
- TV documentary: The history of the RAF (4/6) , planning the offensive 77
- The daily newspaper : The key to the RAF code , the Haag / Mayer papers and the late decoding of the terms Big Money , Operation Margarine , Big Raushole etc.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Butz Peters, Deadly Error. The history of the RAF . Argon-Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-87024-673-1 . P. 774
- ↑ Yearbook Extremism and Democracy, Volume 8, 1996.
- ↑ Butz Peters, Tödlicher Errtum, p. 378