Susanne Albrecht

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Susanne Albrecht (born March 1, 1951 in Hamburg ) is a former German terrorist belonging to the second generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF). She was involved in the 1977 assassination of Jürgen Pontos as well as in the failed attack on the federal prosecutor's office and in 1979 in the failed assassination attempt on NATO commander-in-chief Alexander Haig . From 1980 to 1990 she lived under different names as a RAF dropout in the GDR . After her exposure in June 1990, she was sentenced to twelve years ' imprisonment. She was released from prison in 1996 and has lived under a different name ever since.

Life

Origin, school, studies

Susanne Albrecht is the daughter of the Hamburg lawyer Hans-Christian Albrecht (1920–2007) and his wife Christa, b. Dubois (1925-2016), a librarian who came from a family of officers from Berlin . Her grandmother Grete Albrecht was President of the German Medical Association until 1965 .

Susanne Albrecht grew up with three siblings in Hamburg-Blankenese , attended after elementary school , the school Willhöden in Blankenese. When she no longer performed the required services there, they sent her parents to the Solling boarding school in Holzminden . There she passed her Abitur in May 1971 and completed an internship in a Hamburg hospital. During this time her boyfriend at the time, who was still in boarding school, committed suicide. She blamed "the adult world" for his death. At the age of 21 she moved out of home, began studying pedagogy , sociology and psychology at the University of Hamburg , changed her circle of friends, looked after preschool children with environmental disabilities, and was involved in the Hamburg squatter scene .

First contacts with the RAF

She was arrested in 1973 while clearing an occupied house in Hamburg's Ekhofstrasse. In the same year she began to get involved in the "Committees Against Torture", which were considered part of the RAF sympathizers. In the squatter scene she met her future friend Karl-Heinz Dellwo , who went into hiding in the spring of 1975 and participated in the hostage-taking of Stockholm . In 1974 she was arrested for the first time in Nordhorn for smuggling detonators from the Netherlands to Germany. Her father gave her legal support.

On October 30, 1974, Albrecht took part in the occupation of Amnesty International's office in Hamburg. The later terrorists Ralf Baptist Friedrich and Christian Klar also took part in the same action . Like other participants in the occupation, she joined the RAF and went underground in late June 1977. The year before, she had passed her first state examination for primary and secondary school teaching.

Murder of Jürgen Ponto and other acts of terrorism

Susanne Albrecht played a key role in the murder of the board spokesman of Dresdner Bank , Jürgen Ponto, on July 30, 1977 in Oberursel (near Frankfurt am Main). Susanne Albrecht was invited to visit by her parents, a couple who were friends with the Pontos. Without knowing who the other guests were, Jürgen Ponto and Susanne Albrecht also let Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar into the villa. The RAF had planned to kidnap Pontus. In the course of the planned kidnapping, however, Klar and Mohnhaupt shot Ponto, who later succumbed to his injuries. Unlike other RAF attacks, Albrecht signed the letter of confession. According to Tobias Wunschik , Albrecht was “deliberately recruited by the illegals because they hoped to help out in the upcoming Ponto attack.” However, this did not make her a member of the RAF “against her will”. Rather, it is true that "joining the group seemed to be a necessary prerequisite for her to contribute to the liberation of prisoners."

In 1978/1979 Albrecht stayed with others in a Palestinian camp in Yemen and received military training there.

On June 25, 1979, together with Werner Lotze and Rolf Clemens Wagner , she carried out an explosive attack on the car of the then NATO commander-in-chief, General Alexander Haig , in Obourg, Belgium , which he survived unharmed.

As an RAF dropout in the GDR

The house in which Albrecht lived in Cottbus

In 1980 Albrecht left the Federal Republic via Prague with seven other RAF dropouts and fled to the German Democratic Republic , where she was settled in Cottbus by the Ministry for State Security (MfS) under the false name "Ingrid Jäger" with alleged place of birth in Madrid and a fictitious résumé . Here she worked at the engineering college as an English translator. The MfS carried her in its files under the code name "Ernst Berger" as an unofficial employee for securing and penetrating an area of ​​responsibility (IMS) , but a declaration in which Albrecht has committed to IM activity is not on record.

In the GDR she married a physicist. In 1985 she had a son with him. In her new place of residence Köthen she worked as a chemical laboratory assistant. After the wanted RAF member was reported on West TV in 1986, they recognized work colleagues. The State Security therefore moved Albrecht to Berlin in 1987. Since she was becoming more and more of a “constant and high security risk” for the GDR, her husband received an employment contract in 1988 in Dubna , a good 100 km north of Moscow in the nuclear research center - as did Susanne Albrecht herself.

Exposure, conviction and imprisonment

According to a former MfS employee, Susanne Albrecht was arrested by the People's Police in Berlin-Marzahn on June 6, 1990, a few months before reunification , and was the first of the RAF members who went into hiding in the GDR to be extradited to the Federal Republic . Her husband had only learned of his wife's true identity a few days earlier.

Susanne Albrecht was accused of participating in the attack on Alexander Haig, a failed attack on the Federal Prosecutor's Office and involvement in the murder of Jürgen Ponto. In the subsequent criminal proceedings before the fifth criminal division of the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court from April 25, 1991, she made a comprehensive confession. On June 3, 1991, she was convicted of murder in unity with attempted hostage-taking and attempted extortionate kidnapping in the Ponto case, as well as attempted murder in three cases in unity with causing an explosive explosion , although the public prosecutor's office in the Ponto case only lasted for "attempted kidnapping resulting in death “Had spoken. Using the leniency one was total sentence of twelve years' imprisonment formed. In 1992 Albrecht was transferred to Bremen and in 1996 the remaining sentence was suspended .

Life after prison sentence

As an outdoor worker , she began working at a district school in Bremen as early as 1993 and was later employed by a private agency as a German teacher for migrant children. This was done in May 2007 by the CDU on the subject of the state election campaign in Bremen . After the Bremen CDU had described Albrecht's employment as “unacceptable”, the parents' council of the elementary school at which she worked issued a written declaration in favor of her teaching activities.

In 2011 Susanne Albrecht's sister Julia Albrecht and Corinna Ponto , daughter of Jürgen Ponto, jointly published the book Patent Daughters , which deals with the trauma of the Albrecht and Ponto families through the murder of Pontos.

In May 2015, ARD broadcast a documentary entitled The Consequences of the Act , in which Julia Albrecht traces Susanne Albrecht's career up to the Pontos murder in discussions with her mother and the people around her and deals with the consequences for her family.

literature

  • Julia Albrecht, Corinna Ponto: Goddaughters: In the shadow of the RAF - a dialogue. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2011, ISBN 978-3-462-04277-1 .
  • Katrin Hentschel, Traute Hensch (ed.): Terrorists - Bagdad '77: the women in the RAF . Der Freitag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-936252-18-7 .

documentary

  • The consequences of the act , documentary by Julia Albrecht and Dagmar Gallenmüller, Germany 2015, first broadcast on ARD on May 27, 2015
  • The Susanne Albrecht case - the many lives of an RAF terrorist . Germany 2017, documentary by Franziska von Tiesenhausen, 45 min., First broadcast on July 28, 2017 on ZDFinfo

Broadcast reports

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Gerhard Mauz: A phenomenon of despair . In: Der Spiegel . No. 33 , 1977 ( online ).
  2. “The Consequences of the Act” - author works on Ponto-Mord , derwesten.de , May 26, 2015
  3. Bremen filmed the family history of the ex-terrorist Albrecht . weser-kurier.de, May 27, 2015
  4. Judgment: life sentence? The story of the Albrecht family of perpetrators , tagesspiegel.de, May 25, 2015
  5. Contemporary history: mother of a murderess . In: Der Spiegel . No. 22 , 2015 ( online ).
  6. Julia Albrecht - The stigma of the terrorist sister . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur . ( deutschlandfunkkultur.de [accessed on July 30, 2017]).
  7. a b c d e Tobias Wunschik: Baader-Meinhofs children: The second generation of the RAF . Springer-Verlag, 1997, ISBN 978-3-531-13088-0 , pp. 211ff
  8. a b c d e f g h i The consequences of the act ( Memento from May 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), film production zero one film
  9. a b c Treason . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 2007 ( online ).
  10. ^ A b c Lars-Broder Keil, Sven Felix Kellerhoff : The rise and fall of the second RAF generation . Welt Online , February 12, 2007
  11. Short biography of Susanne Albrecht on rafinfo.de
  12. A number for everyone . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 1990, pp. 103-105 ( online - interview with Peter-Jürgen Boock ).
  13. Jens Bauszus: Jürgen Ponto: The killer squad with the bouquet of roses. In: Focus Online . July 30, 2007, accessed May 25, 2015 .
  14. ^ Chronological course of the incorporation of "Ernst Berger" (Susanne Albrecht) into the GDR. Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic (BStU), signature: BStU, MfS, HA XXII, No. 19483, Bl. 58–60 ( PDF 1.7 MB)
  15. a b c Grandma in the old squad . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 1990 ( online ).
  16. a b Your father is a murderer - How the children of arrested RAF dropouts live . In: Der Spiegel . No. 26 , 1991 ( online ).
  17. Michael Sontheimer : Of course you can shoot. A Brief History of the Red Army Faction. DVA / Spiegel-Verlag, Munich 2010, pp. 147–150 ISBN 3-421-04470-8
  18. Michael Sontheimer : Of course you can shoot. DVA, 2010, p. 115 f., Online at Google Books ; Klaus Marxen u. a. (Ed.): Criminal justice and GDR injustice. Volume 6: MFS offenses. De Gruyter, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-89949-344-3 , p. 353 .
  19. Erwin Single: 12 years for the key witness Albrecht . In: taz. the daily newspaper . June 4, 1991, p. 4 .
  20. Maximilian Schönherr : June 3rd, 1991: Judgment in Stammheim - 12 years for Susanne Albrecht , SWR2 Archivradio , August 9th, 2012
  21. Klaus Pflieger, Armin Striewisch: New leniency? In: Die Kriminalpolizei (magazine), 2006; the judgment Stuttgart, 03.06.1991 - 5-2 StE 4/90 is printed in the juristic newspaper 1992, pp. 537-539.
  22. Björn Hengst: A woman who has gone through hell . In: Spiegel Online , May 3, 2007 (Interview with Henning Scherf )
  23. Johannes Feest : Election campaign and reintegration - On the case of Susanne Albrecht , Strafvollzugsarchiv e. V. at the University of Bremen, May 4th 2007
  24. ^ Ralf Wiegand: Dispute about ex-terrorist Albrecht , Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 10, 2010
  25. Bremen Parents' Council: Ex-RAF terrorist should remain a teacher , Sueddeutsche Zeitung , May 11, 2010
  26. Stefan Ponto, the son of Jürgen Ponto, took a critical position on this book in a Spiegel interview. He called it an "unbearable book". ( The true tragedy of my life . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 2014, p. 118-121 ( online ). )
  27. Kerstin Decker: RAF documentary "The Consequences of the Act": Judgment: life sentence? The story of the Albrecht family , Tagesspiegel , May 25, 2015
  28. ^ "The Susanne Albrecht case": ZDFinfo documentary on the Ponto murder 40 years ago , ZDF press release from July 25, 2017