Explosives attack against the JVA Weiterstadt

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The bomb attack against the Weiterstadt JVA took place on March 27, 1993 and was the last terrorist attack by the Red Army Faction (RAF) before it was dissolved in 1998.

prehistory

The new penal institution in Weiterstadt was supposed to improve the previous conditions in pre-trial detention. Models for this were prisons from Sweden and the Netherlands . The prisons in Hesse that had existed until then were overcrowded and in poor condition.

A year before the attack, the RAF had declared that it would not use force. In the future, she wanted to forego “attacks on leading representatives from business and the state”, as these would not be able to advance the discussion process that was necessary after the fall of the Wall . This renunciation of assassinations was made dependent on the behavior of the state towards the imprisoned members of the RAF: “If they do not let us, who fight for a human society, live, then they must know that their elites cannot live either . Even if it is not in our interest: War can only be answered with war. ”At the same time, a simmering conflict developed within the RAF over the future direction from the beginning of the 1990s, which came to a head with the declaration of de-escalation. However, this only culminated in the open division of the prisoner collective after the attack against the Weiterstadt prison and the GSG-9 deployment in Bad Kleinen .

However, the hoped-for improvements for the imprisoned members had not materialized. Instead, statements by the RAF terrorists who had been exposed in the GDR after the end of the SED dictatorship led to further trials against those who had already been imprisoned. From the perspective of the RAF, “the state has once again decided to escalate the prisoners”. With the attack, the RAF wanted to prove its ability to act and demonstrate ideological continuity.

attack

At the time of the attack, the Weiterstadt correctional facility was not yet officially open and not occupied with prisoners. Ten members of the guards were there.

On the night of March 26-27, 1993, shortly after 1 a.m., at least three men and a woman climbed over the 6.5 m high outer wall. All were masked and armed with submachine guns. They broke into the sentry box and took the two guardians by surprise. The other eight present were surprised in their sleep and also handcuffed. The attackers then locked the personnel in a delivery truck and parked the vehicle about 600 m away behind a landfill. The perpetrators deposited five loads with a total of 200 kg of commercial explosives.

The charges exploded at 5:12 a.m. Three accommodation buildings and the administration wing were destroyed, the rest of the complex was more or less badly damaged. The material damage was initially estimated at 100 to 120 million DM, later at 80 to 90 million DM. The immediate search was unsuccessful.

According to the assessment of the RAF expert Alexander Straßner , during the attack “precisely those points of criticism that were raised against the command level in advance [...] were systematically eliminated. In the attack, target selection, technical perfection, a previously unachievable dimension of damage were combined with the demonstratively pre-exercised protection of human life. "

Command Katharina Hammerschmidt

Three days later, on March 30, 1993, the " Katharina Hammerschmidt Command " published a statement on the attack on Weiterstadt prison .

The Federal Prosecutor's Office suspects Birgit Hogefeld , Wolfgang Grams , Daniela Klette , Ernst Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg to have been involved in the attack. According to press reports, the investigators found DNA traces of burdock, dust and other people in pieces of carpet that the perpetrators had wrapped around the rungs of a rope ladder to dampen the footstep noises. The arrest warrant for the volatile Klette, Staub and Garweg was therefore expanded to include this allegation. Hogefeld was convicted in 1996 by the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main, among other things, for this act, after an appeal by the Federal Court of Justice in 1998, which overturned the judgment on this point, this charge was no longer raised in the legally valid judgment of 1999.

reconstruction

The reconstruction took four years. In May 1997 the first prisoners were transferred from the Preungesheim prison to Weiterstadt.

literature

  • Lars Zimmermann: With full power from the left. About the RAF attack on the new JVA Weiterstadt building in 1993 . In: Archivnachrichten aus Hessen 14/2 (2014), p. 28.

Web links and other sources

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The perpetrators of the last RAF attack identified. In: Spiegel Online. October 24, 2007, accessed December 4, 2014 .
  2. ^ Weiterstadt remand prison opened
  3. ^ Red Army faction April 10, 1992 : Declaration on the de-escalation of violence
  4. ↑ Alexander Straßner: The third generation of the "Red Army Fraction": emergence, structure, functional logic and disintegration of a terrorist organization. Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2003, pp. 141, 194–197; RAF statement cited from p. 196.
  5. ↑ Alexander Straßner: The third generation of the "Red Army Fraction": emergence, structure, functional logic and disintegration of a terrorist organization. Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2003, pp. 235f.
  6. ↑ a b Red Army Faction, Katharina Hammerschmidt command: Attack on the Weiterstadt prison. Declaration of March 30, 1993. Documented in: Red Army Fraction. Texts and materials on the history of the RAF. ID-Verlag, Berlin 1997. Also documented online at rafinfo.de. - Compare also Alexander Straßner: The third generation of the “Red Army Fraction”: emergence, structure, functional logic and disintegration of a terrorist organization. Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2003, pp. 141ff.
  7. ↑ Tobias Wunschik: Baader-Meinhofs children: The second generation of the RAF. Zugl. Diss. Univ. Munich 1998, Westdt. Verlag, Opladen 1997, ISBN 978-3-531-13088-0 , p. 412; limited preview in Google Book search
  8. ↑ Alexander Straßner: The third generation of the "Red Army Fraction": emergence, structure, functional logic and disintegration of a terrorist organization. Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2003, p. 142.
  9. ↑ The Federal Prosecutor General at the Federal Court of Justice: Preliminary proceedings against Ernst-Volker Staub, Burkhard Garweg and Daniela Klette. Press release 2/2016 from January 19, 2016
  10. ^ Philipp Wittrock: Investigators are looking for an RAF trio. In: Spiegel Online. October 24, 2007, accessed December 4, 2014 .

Coordinates: 49 ° 53 '38.3 "  N , 8 ° 33' 48.3"  E