Schleyer kidnapping

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Hanns Martin Schleyer (1973)

The kidnapping of Hanns Martin Schleyer , President of the Federal Association of German Employers' Associations (BDA) and the Federal Association of German Industry (BDI), on September 5, 1977 by the left-wing extremist , terrorist organization Red Army Faction (RAF) and his murder on September 18 , 1977 . October 1977 were the central events of the so-called German Autumn . With her and the hijacking of the plane “Landshut” by a group of Palestinian terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the release of imprisoned members of the first generation of the RAF from German prisons should be blackmailed. On the basis of experiences from the Lorenz kidnapping, after which terrorists who were pressed free again soon participated in attacks, the federal government under Helmut Schmidt decided not to respond to the demands.

background

In 1972 the leaders of the so-called first generation of the RAF were arrested and sentenced in 1977 to life imprisonment. The release of these prisoners was the main, if not the only goal of the second generation of the RAF. In February and March 1975, the June 2nd movement achieved the only successful release of like-minded people in West German history through the Lorenz kidnapping: Five terrorists who had already been sentenced to prison terms were released and flown to the Middle East. Four of them became terrorist again. In April 1975, when Stockholm was taken hostage, a first attempt by the RAF to free themselves failed .

Two years later, another attempt was to be made with the so-called Offensive 77 . 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.

Lutz Hachmeister writes in his biography of Schleyer that the "image of the ex-Nazi who became the personification of big business in the post-war period" was decisive in the RAF choosing him for the kidnapping.

At the end of June 1977 at his holiday destination in Meersburg , Schleyer received a call from the then Federal Minister of the Interior, Werner Maihofer , who informed him that he was now one of the people for security level I. His apartments in Stuttgart , Meersburg and Cologne were guarded by police posts and Schleyer himself was protected by police officers. He and his escorts did not drive in armored vehicles.

Course of the kidnapping

Raid

The scene of the kidnapping of Schleyer, taken in 2007

On Monday, September 5, 1977 at around 5:10 p.m., Hanns Martin Schleyer in Cologne was met by his driver Heinz Marcisz (41) in a dark Mercedes 450 SEL from the employer's headquarters on Oberländer Ufer to his in an apartment building at Raschdorffstrasse 10 ( Cologne -Braunsfeld ) is chauffeured away . The police operating as close protection Reinhold Brandle (driver 41), Helmut Ulmer (passenger, 24) and Roland Pieler (in the rear, 20) followed in a bright Mercedes 280 E . The three bodyguards were armed, but Marcisz and Schleyer were not.

The so-called Siegfried Hausner Command of the RAF had set up a telephone chain, this reported the approach of the vehicles to the four shooters waiting in ambush: Peter-Jürgen Boock , Sieglinde Hofmann , Willy Peter Stoll and Stefan Wisniewski . Boock and Hofmann were supposed to take out the policemen, Stoll was on Schleyer's driver and Wisniewski was supposed to overpower Schleyer.

When the two cars reached Vincenz-Statz-Straße at around 5:28 p.m., Wisniewski drove the blocking vehicle, a yellow Mercedes 300 D , out of a driveway backwards into the street. Marcisz was able to brake in time, but the escort vehicle crashed into Schleyer's car and pushed it onto the RAF's blocking vehicle. The RAF then opened fire. At least 119 shots were fired in about a minute and a half. Hit several times, Marcisz succumbed to serious injuries after a short time.

After the shots fired at Marcisz, Stoll suddenly ran across the firing direction of Boock and Hofmann in extreme excitement, jumped on the hood of the escort vehicle and fired all the remaining ammunition from his Polish PM-63 submachine gun ( 9 mm Makarow caliber ) the windshield into the interior of the car. The driver Reinhold Brändle was hit 60 times in all areas of the body and died shortly afterwards. Roland Pieler managed to leave the back of the vehicle and shoot back three times with his service pistol without hitting. Helmut Ulmer shot his submachine gun eight times from the open passenger door, but did not hit either. Pieler and Ulmer were each fatally hit at least three times.

The traces of fire on the two right doors of the escort vehicle as well as a Colt M1911 pistol , caliber .45 Colt , found at the scene of the crime , which could not be assigned to any of the four other participants, and the location of the dead officer Pieler at the scene of the crime suggest that a fifth person participated in the attack from the cover of a construction site at the beginning of Vincenz-Statz-Straße. Corresponding investigations by the BKA to identify this fifth person are still not known. Years later, Boock described the exact course of the shooting in an interview during his detention.

Hostage

After the kidnapping, Schleyer was held captive in the Zum Renngraben 8 skyscraper in Erftstadt-Liblar .
50 ° 48 '24 "  N , 6 ° 49' 17.2"  E

After the kidnappers fled the scene of the crime with the uninjured Schleyer in a white T2 VW bus and returned to the underground car park at Wiener Weg 1b in Cologne ( 50 ° 55 ′ 37.7 ″  N , 6 ° 51 ′ 56.6 ″  O ), in which there was a conspiratorial apartment of the RAF, who had changed the escape vehicle, they brought Schleyer to Erftstadt-Liblar near Cologne, where an apartment in the high-rise Zum Renngraben 8 served as a shelter. There, on July 21, 1977, Monika Helbing had signed a lease for apartment 104 under the false name Annerose Lottmann-Bücklers . The hostage was temporarily housed in a closet that was soundproofed with foam rubber and was forced to use video recordings to appeal to the federal government led by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to exchange him for eleven first-generation RAF members in prison . The kidnappers demanded the release of Andreas Baader , Gudrun Ensslin , Jan-Carl Raspe , Verena Becker , Werner Hoppe , Karl-Heinz Dellwo , Hanna Krabbe , Bernhard Rössner , Ingrid Schubert , Irmgard Möller and Günter Sonnenberg . The Federal Government did not follow the request of the letters of confession to broadcast Schleyer's declarations and photos from captivity, which were forwarded from Paris, in the Tagesschau . In addition, a news blackout was imposed on the kidnapping during the first meeting of the crisis team. The management of all important deliberations reserved the right to Chancellor Schmidt, the so-called "Great Political Consulting Group" from key ministers and the Prime Minister, the party and parliamentary group leaders of all parliamentary parties, the BKA Chairmen and attorney general insisted. The daily crisis work was mainly dealt with in the so-called small situation , in which the ministers directly involved and the heads of authorities cooperated.

A local police officer suspected that Schleyer was being held captive in the house because the apartment met numerous criteria that were typical for RAF apartments: the house was close to the motorway, had an underground car park and several rent payments were made in advance in cash. He reported this to the responsible crisis management team in Cologne, but they did not follow up on this report because an officer had put it in the wrong file. Electricity customer data were compared with registration data by means of a raster search . From 16 September Schleyer was for a few days in a house in the Stevinstraat in the district of Scheveningen in The Hague held. The house was observed by the Dutch authorities from across the street, but access only took place after Schleyer had been brought to an elegant apartment in Brussels in the Sint-Pieters-Woluwe district on the night of September 19-20 . The reason for the move was a recent exchange of fire between the Dutch police and Angelika Speitel and another terrorist. Schleyer was held in Brussels until October 18.

Hanns-Eberhard Schleyer , lawyer and eldest son of the abductee, applied to the Federal Constitutional Court on October 15, 1977 for an interim order against the federal government and the state governments concerned to respond to the demands of his father's kidnappers. Oral proceedings were held on the same day. During the night, the First Senate rejected the motion, but did not publish the decision until the next morning.

The federal government under Helmut Schmidt decided in several crisis meetings, unlike in the case of Peter Lorenz, not to respond to the kidnappers' demands. Even after the hijacking of the “Landshut” aircraft, a Lufthansa passenger aircraft, the plane was stormed by officers from Border Guard Group 9 (GSG-9) at Mogadishu Airport in Somalia in the early morning of October 18, 1977 and freed 86 hostages. On the same night in the prison in Stuttgart , Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, who had learned of the storming of the plane, died in their cells by suicide.

assassination

Memorial cross and memorial on the 40th anniversary of the assassination attempt on Hanns Martin Schleyer

When the kidnappers learned of the death of the arrested RAF members, Schleyer was shot three times in the back of the head that same day. His body was found on October 19, 1977 in the trunk of an Audi 100 parked on Rue Charles Peguy in Mulhouse (Alsace) . Peter-Jürgen Boock claimed in 2007 that the fatal shots were fired by Stefan Wisniewski and Rolf Heissler . However, Boock was not a direct witness of the crime and was in Baghdad at the time of Schleyer's shooting. The autopsy result allows the conclusion that all shots were fired from one weapon, but probably by two perpetrators due to the angle of fire. It is still not clear who shot Schleyer.

The letter of confession from the RAF dated October 19, 1977, which Silke Maier-Witt sent to Liberation , read:

After 43 days we ended Hanns-Martin Schleyer's miserable and corrupt existence. Mr Schmidt, who speculated on Schleyer's death from the start in his power calculation, can pick him up in a green Audi 100 with Bad Homburg license plates on Rue Charles Peguy in Mulhouse. His death is meaningless to our pain and anger over the massacres in Mogadishu and Stammheim.

Judgments

Because of their involvement in the Schleyer kidnapping, Stefan Wisniewski, Adelheid Schulz , Brigitte Mohnhaupt , Christian Klar , Peter-Jürgen Boock, Rolf Clemens Wagner and Sieglinde Hofmann were sentenced to life imprisonment. Silke Maier-Witt , Monika Helbing and Sigrid Sternebeck (the latter only because of aid) were sentenced to total imprisonment between seven and ten years using the leniency program. Willy-Peter Stoll and Elisabeth von Dyck , who were both shot by the police while attempting to arrest , were also suspected of being involved . In the case of Stoll, direct involvement in the kidnapping of Schleyer and the shooting of his companions is considered certain. Seven more of the former 20 suspects were convicted of other offenses. Friederike Krabbe has disappeared to this day.

consequences

In terms of political impact, the Schleyer kidnapping was not a success for the RAF. Although the pictures of Schleyer's imprisonment aroused pity among the population, there was no public pressure on the federal government to respond to the kidnappers' demands. Also, contrary to what the RAF expected, the state did not take such repressive measures that would have led to general criticism of the federal government. The opinion polls showed that a majority of the population spoke out in favor of tougher measures against terrorism, while giving in to the Lorenz kidnappers had previously been rated negatively in the reporting.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German continuities. Schleyer and the RAF: Lutz Hachmeister wrote a profound biography. In: Die Zeit , No. 26/2004.
  2. ^ Stefan Aust : The Baader Meinhof Complex . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-455-50029-5 .
  3. ^ Butz Peters : RAF - Terrorism in Germany. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-426-80019-5 .
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.): The RAF and left terrorism. 2 volumes. Edition Hamburg, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-936096-65-1 .
  5. ↑ Entry on residential high-rise Zum Renngraben 8 in Neu-Liblar in the " KuLaDig " database of the Rhineland Regional Council
  6. ↑ a b Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-455-50029-5 , pp. 681 f.
  7. ^ A b c Christian F. Buck: Media and hostage-taking: case studies on staged terror. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15514-2 , pp. 59-62 .
  8. ↑ Interview with Helmut Schmidt: I am entangled in debt. In: Die Zeit , No. 36/2007
  9. ↑ Paul Prillevitz: Ontvoerdershuis RAF Onlangs overcooked . Historiën, November 20, 2008 (Dutch); Retrieved June 20, 2009.
  10. ↑ The history of the RAF. ( Memento from December 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Part 4/6, ZDFinfo from August 2, 2015, ( alternatively on Youtube )
  11. ↑ Boock names Schleyer's alleged murderers. In: Spiegel Online , September 7, 2007.
  12. ^ Butz Peters: Deadly error. The history of the RAF. Argon, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-87024-673-1 , p. 469 and endnote 225, p. 788 f.
  13. ↑ Red Army Faction. Texts and materials on the history of the RAF. Berlin 1997, p. 273.
  14. ↑ Klaus Pflieger: “The Red Army Faction - RAF. May 14, 1970 to April 20, 1998 ". 2nd edition, Baden-Baden 2007, ISBN 3-8329-22075, p. 178.
  15. ^ Sonja Glaab: The RAF and the media in the 1970s. In: Sonja Glaab (ed.): Media and terrorism: on the trail of a symbiotic relationship. Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8305-1435-0 , pp. 49, 50

Coordinates: 50 ° 56 ′ 5.3 "  N , 6 ° 53 ′ 22.5"  E