Rolf Steiner (mercenary)

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Steiner 2013 in Munich

Rolf Franz Heinz Steiner (born January 3, 1933 in Munich ) is a former German mercenary .

Life

According to his mother's will, Rolf Steiner should attend a priestly school. Instead, he was recruited by the French Foreign Legion in Offenburg in 1950 at the age of 17 . He fought first in the Indochina War , later as a sergeant in the Algerian War . In 1959 he was given an indefinite leave of absence from the Legion because of tuberculosis . He married for the first time in 1963 and lived for a few years with his first wife in Grenoble, later in Nice.

Later he worked for the French underground movement OAS and trained, among other things, in dealing with plastic explosives. Finally he was won over by representatives of the Igbo to participate in the Biafra War in 1967. Frederick Forsyth was a correspondent there at the time. When Forsyth heard that Steiner was denouncing him - Forsyth - as an agent of the British secret service MI6 (which was true), Forsyth had Steiner arrested and deported to Libreville . As part of his subsequent activity as a military advisor to the South Sudanese Christian rebels in the war of civil secession in South Sudan , he was arrested in Uganda and extradited to Sudan just before the Idi Amin's coup , which was said to have sympathy with him . There he was sentenced to death in 1971 as the first white mercenary in Africa for his mercenary activities . Steiner was pardoned to a prison sentence of twenty years and finally, after serving less than three years, at the end of March 1974, for humanitarian reasons, he was handed over to the German embassy for medical treatment, which immediately flew him to Germany. He then wrote his memoirs, which appeared in French in 1976. In it, as in later interviews, he tried to refute his reputation as a mercenary: he never fought for material reasons, but always to help oppressed peoples. In April 1976 the Cologne Administrative Court dismissed Steiner's lawsuit against the Foreign Office , in which he demanded diplomatic immunity against the Sudanese government in order to enforce a claim for damages amounting to DM 12.5 million . When the rumor arose during this time that he was now fighting on the side of Christian Falangists in Lebanon , Die Zeit published a portrait of his recent existence as a civilian with his second wife and a child in a village in the Münsterland .

The last time he made headlines was in June 1982 when he defended himself in proceedings before the Administrative Court in Munich against the enforcement of claims by the Federal Republic of Germany because of the costs of his transport from Sudan. He argued that at the time he had been forced into German territory against his will.

Works

  • Carré rouge: du Biafra au Soudan, le dernier condottiere. R. Laffont, Paris 1976
  • The last Adventurer: from Biafra to the Sudan. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1978, ISBN 0-297-77363-1

literature

  • Roman Deckert, Cord Eberspächer, Gerhard Wiechmann: The documentary film as a weapon in the Cold War: “The laughing man. Confessions of a Murderer ”and“ Whenever Steiner came ”. The film's great moments or demagogic dismantling? In: Lars Karl (ed.): Canvas between thaw and frost. The Eastern European feature and documentary film in the Cold War . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-938690-54-3 , pp. 171-202.
  • Frederick Forsyth : The Biafra Story. The Making of an African Legend . Pen & Sword, Barnsley 2007, ISBN 1-84415-523-4
  • Anthony Mockler: The new mercenaries . Corgi Books, London 1986, ISBN 0-552-12558-X , pp. 162-192
  • Our fight . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1968 ( online - portrait of Steiner from the time of the Biafra War).
  • Peter Abbott / Philip Botham / Raffaele Ruggeri: Modern African wars 5: The Nigerian-Biafran war 1967-70 , Oxford ( Osprey Publishing , Men-at-arms series 507) 2016. ISBN 978-1-4728-1609-2

Movie

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Interview with Odette Steiner. In: BILD , September 19, 1971
  2. ^ Frederick Forsyth: The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue . Corgi, 2016, ISBN 978-0-552-17170-0 (English).
  3. ↑ Steiner complained in vain , dpa report in Reutlinger Generalanzeiger of April 28, 1976, p. 2
  4. ↑ The random walks of Rolf Steiner, legionnaire without a legend . In: Die Zeit , No. 30/1976
  5. ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung , June 18, 1982
personal data
SURNAME Steiner, Rolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steiner, Rolf Franz Heinz (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mercenary
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich