Verena Becker

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Verena Christiane Becker (born July 31, 1952 in Berlin ) is a former member of the terrorist groups Movement June 2nd and Red Army Faction (RAF). In 1977 she was sentenced to life imprisonment in Stuttgart-Stammheim for attempting to murder two police officers . During her detention she was an informant for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution . In 1989 she was pardoned . In 2012 she was sentenced to a further four years imprisonment for complicity in the murder of federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback .

Life

Membership in the Movement June 2nd

At the age of 19, Verena Becker and her friend Inge Viett joined the June 2nd movement in Berlin. A few months later, on July 21, 1972, she was arrested. For involvement in a bomb attack on the Berlin British Yacht Club in Berlin-Gatow , where the club boatman Erwin Beelitz died, she was in 1974 at a youth custody convicted of six years.

With the kidnapping of the Berlin CDU chairman Peter Lorenz , Becker and four other terrorists were released from the June 2nd movement on February 27, 1975. She was flown to the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen together with Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann , Ingrid Siepmann , Rolf Heissler and Rolf Pohle .

Becker then joined the Red Army Faction (RAF).

Another arrest and conviction

On the morning of May 3, 1977, Verena Becker and Günter Sonnenberg were subjected to a personal check in the "Café Hanser" in Singen . Becker and Sonnenberg had traveled by train from Bonn to Singen the evening before and wanted to flee across the green border to Switzerland. When they couldn't identify themselves, two police officers escorted them to their vehicle. To avoid arrest, Sonnenberg and Becker shot the two police officers. Both police officers were injured, the officer Wolfgang Seliger was life-threatening after Sonnenberg shot him several times from a short distance until the magazine of his pistol was empty. The two police officers did not fire a shot in the incident. Becker and Sonnenberg were able to escape by capturing a passing Opel Ascona , but were arrested after a chase and another exchange of fire in which Günter Sonnenberg was hit in the back of the head and Verena Becker in the lower leg. The weapon used in the murder of Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback and his two companions Wolfgang Göbel and Georg Wurster was seized from Becker .

The trial against Verena Becker began on November 28, 1977 in Stuttgart-Stammheim . A month later, she was sentenced to life imprisonment for attempted murder . After twelve years in prison, she was pardoned by the then Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker . On November 30, 1989 - the day of the RAF bomb attack on Alfred Herrhausen  - she left the Willich correctional facility without any public attention .

Siegfried Buback Murder Case and Trial

On April 21, 2007 it became known that Verena Becker had testified in the 1980s that RAF member Stefan Wisniewski was the shooter in the murder of Siegfried Buback. Suspicions that a woman was involved in the attack emerged early on. In 2007 this thesis was expressed again by Michael Buback and the SWR .

Since April 2008 the federal prosecutor's office has been investigating Verena Becker again. An initial DNA analysis initially relieved her of this suspicion. On August 20, 2009, the Federal Prosecutor announced that Verena Becker had found DNA traces in the letter confessing her to the murder of Attorney General Buback. Traces of saliva could be detected on the flaps of the envelopes with which the letters of confession were sent and on the postage stamps. Her home was then searched. On August 27, 2009, Verena Becker was arrested on suspicion of having been involved in the attempted murder on Siegfried Buback and taken to a Berlin remand prison. An arrest warrant was issued against her the next day. In the course of the new investigations, earlier reports confirmed that Verena Becker had worked as an informant for the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution .

On 23 December 2009, the warrant was due to their appeal against detention on 11 November 2009 by the Federal Court repealed and Becker from the detention dismissed. The BGH judges rate Becker's involvement in the crime more as aiding and abetting, and there are no longer any mandatory reasons for imprisonment to order remand. On April 8, 2010, the federal prosecutor brought charges. At the same time, she announced that she had been able to access almost all files of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution on the Buback attack that had been blocked until then. The defendant was charged, among other things, with the fact that she had always advocated carrying out the assassination attempt during the specific planning of the offenses in 1976/77. On April 6, 1977, she and two other RAF members spied out the location of the planned attack in downtown Karlsruhe. 33 years after the murder of Federal Public Prosecutor Siegfried Buback , the main hearing opened on September 30, 2010 before the 6th criminal division of the Higher Regional Court in an outsourced courtroom in the Stuttgart-Stammheim prison.

In the context of a discussion about the book Verena Becker and the protection of the constitution presented by Wolfgang Kraushaar , the former head reporter of the Bild newspaper , Nils von der Heyde , declared on February 14, 2011 in the Hamburg Institute for Social Research that the deceased then head of the department of the state constitution protection in Hamburg , Christian Lochte , told him immediately after the crime in 1977 that Verena Becker had shot the Federal Public Prosecutor Buback. "Sola fired," he reported. Sola was Verena Becker's code name during her time with the June 2nd Movement . At the same event, Michael Buback pointed out that the media repeatedly reported inaccurately that Becker was charged with murder. In fact, however, the prosecution only refers to "essential contributions to the preparation and implementation of the attack (...) and in the context of the incident after the attack," which restricts the trial.

In a personal statement read out to the Higher Regional Court in Stuttgart on May 14, 2012, Verena Becker denied any involvement in the attempted murder on Buback. She was in Yemen at the time of the crime. In the course of the proceedings, the federal prosecutor and the defense agreed that Becker could not have sat on the motorcycle in 1977 from which Siegfried Buback was shot. Their defense lawyers Walter Venedey and Hans Wolfgang Euler therefore demanded an acquittal for the defendant in their closing argument. The federal prosecutor's office had previously demanded a four-year and six-month prison sentence for complicity in murder.

On July 6, 2012, Becker was found guilty of aiding and abetting the assassination attempt on Buback and two companions of the federal prosecutor and sentenced to four years in prison. However, two and a half years were already considered to have been carried out on the basis of a previous life sentence. The appeal at the Federal Court of Justice was unsuccessful, so the judgment became final. Since the four months of pre-trial detention were also taken into account, a remaining sentence of one year and two months remained. On February 12, 2014 the Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart suspended this remaining sentence on probation.

In the case of the assassinated Federal Public Prosecutor Siegfried Buback , Michael Buback and the murdered man's brother applied for compulsory investigation against former RAF member Siegfried Haag and one other person, but failed because of the formal admissibility hurdles of this type of procedure. There was therefore no public trial.

Critical voices on the new process

Protests during the trial.

Political scientist Wolfgang Kraushaar has dealt intensively with the Becker case, its possible role in the assassination attempt on Buback and the involvement of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, also in the context of his relevant book publication. In 2011 he took part in the trial of Becker as an observer and commented that, in his opinion and that of other observers, “the state is defending the accused”. It is a " perversion of the rule of law when the representative of the prosecution secretly represents the interests of the accused, in this case an ex-terrorist". In June 2011 he titled a newspaper article about the trial “An RAF trial as a farce”.

On the question of whether Becker could have worked with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution before he was known and whether this could have exerted more influence than known on the development of terrorism, Kraushaar said:

“Secret services, western as well as eastern, are still the great unknown in the origin and development of terrorism, of German as well as the international terrorism intertwined with it. If research does not succeed in shedding light on the various interfaces between secret services and terrorist organizations, then the historical representation - such as that of the RAF - will remain highly inadequate. However, I am not of the opinion - to be clear in advance - that the RAF, the 2nd June Movement , the revolutionary cells and other terrorist groups can be reduced to elements that are remote-controlled by the secret services . "

It has been proven that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution exerted influence on the radical left scene earlier . As an example of this influence, Kraushaar cited - which was also put forward in the trial by the accessory prosecution and the witness Baumann (see below) - the only partially clarified role of the constitution protection undercover agent Peter Urbach , who at the end of the 1960s in the transition from the student movement to the first Berlin underground groups like the RAF acted as a kind of agent provocateur . At the end of the 1960s, Urbach delivered numerous bombs and occasional weapons to the student scene without being asked , including a 9 mm Browning pistol to RAF co-founder Horst Mahler .

In the Becker trial, Michael “Bommi” Baumann also testified as a witness who Becker had originally recruited for the June 2 movement. Among other things, he put forward why, in his opinion, Becker could have worked with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution much earlier than 1977 - that is, before Buback's murder. Kraushaar pointed out that the prosecution and defense had failed to do anything to make the, according to his own statement, opiate addict Baumann appear as a completely unbelievable witness. The fact that Baumann was in a drug replacement program was not mentioned, and the difference between methadone and heroin was not even discussed. Kraushaar had the impression that the public prosecutor wanted first and foremost that he would be regarded as restricted in his ability to perceive and therefore unreliable. The fact that in Baumann's person you were dealing with someone who, unlike most other former alumni, had credibly distanced himself from terrorism , on the other hand, was not worth mentioning:

“It was once again noticeable how much Federal Prosecutor Hemberger concentrated on dismantling witnesses according to all the rules of legal art. In view of this attitude, the impression arose again as if he were the real defender of Verena Becker. Now he [Baumann] could say what he wanted, there was no need for any further inquiries. Everything was sufficiently discredited by the confession of drug use. The witness Baumann - this seemed to be his [the public prosecutor's] secret résumé - could be debited from the public prosecutor's office among the settled cases. "

Baumann himself said that when asked about the possible role of the protection of the constitution , he had the feeling that he was the actual defendant. He has "never experienced anything like this."

literature

Web links

 Wikinews: Verena Becker  - in the news

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Scheuer: Failure of the secret services in the fight against the RAF: "We waited, they disappeared" , Focus Magazin, No. 39 (2011)
  2. ↑ a b spiegel.de July 6, 2012: Black Hole in History
  3. ↑ zeit.de July 6, 2012 (comment): The futile mission of Michael Buback
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Gast: Former RAF terrorist Verena Becker. Die Agentin , taz, May 14, 2012
  5. ↑ Andreas Müller: "It was nothing personal" In: Schwäbische Zeitung , May 3, 2010, accessed on May 3, 2010.
  6. ↑ a b Michael Buback: Have n't heard anything for 30 years. Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 1, 2007, accessed on December 2, 2011 .
  7. ↑ Thomas Scheuer: Trial against Verena Becker: Ex-RAF terrorist Christian Klar comes to court as a man without a face , Focus, September 14, 2011
  8. ↑ Holger Schmidt, The RAF Ghosts
  9. ↑ Wisniewski is said to be a Buback murderer. In: Spiegel Online , April 21, 2007.
  10. ↑ Veit Medick : New speculations in the Buback murder case In: Die Tageszeitung , July 6, 2007.
  11. ↑ DNA report exonerates ex-terrorist Becker. In: Spiegel Online , July 22, 2008.
  12. ↑ Hans Leyendecker: SZ: The DNA of Terror. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 30, 2010.
  13. ↑ Suspicion against Verena Becker. In: Zeit Online , August 20, 2009.
  14. ↑ Ex-RAF terrorist Becker arrested. In: Spiegel Online , August 28, 2009.
  15. ↑ Thomas Moser: Verena Becker and the Buback attack, RAF and the protection of the constitution. Federal Agency for Civic Education , April 11, 2011, accessed on December 2, 2011 (interview with Wolfgang Kraushaar ).
  16. ↑ cf. Ex-RAF member released from custody. In: Focus Online , December 23, 2009.
  17. ↑ Decision of the BGH to repeal the arrest warrant (1 BJs 26 / 77-5 StB 51/09) of December 23, 2009 (PDF; 124 kB)
  18. ↑ Buback's son welcomes charges. focus.de, April 8, 2010, accessed December 2, 2011 .
  19. ^ Indictment: Verena Becker played a key role in the Buback murder. Der Tagesspiegel, April 21, 2010, accessed on December 2, 2011 .
  20. ↑ Trial against ex-RAF member begins in Stammheim. In: Reuters , September 30, 2010.
  21. ↑ Michael Sontheimer: "Sola has hit hard" In: Spiegel Online , February 14, 2011.
  22. ↑ Former RAF terrorist arrested. In: Focus Online , August 28, 2009.
  23. ↑ Verena Becker breaks her silence in the Buback trial. In: Welt Online , May 14, 2012 (accessed May 14, 2012).
  24. ↑ Gisela Friedrichsen : Verena Becker's lawyers demand acquittal In: Spiegel Online , June 26, 2012 (accessed on June 27, 2012).
  25. ^ Christian Rath: Acquittal for ex-RAF officer demanded. In: Die Tageszeitung , June 26, 2012 (accessed June 27, 2012).
  26. ↑ Detention for ex-terrorist Becker for aiding and abetting ( memento from July 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) In: tagesschau.de , July 6, 2012 (accessed on July 6, 2012).
  27. ↑ 6. Criminal Senate will decide on parole with regard to Verena Becker's remaining sentence. Press release of the OLG Stuttgart of February 3, 2014, accessed on March 5, 2014
  28. ↑ 6. The criminal senate has suspended the remaining sentence against Verena Becker on probation . Press release of the OLG Stuttgart of February 20, 2014, accessed on March 5, 2014.
  29. ↑ Press release on the Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart, decision of July 6, 2015, Az. 6 Ws 2/15
  30. ^ A b c Wolfgang Kraushaar: An RAF trial as a farce. In: Die Tageszeitung , June 7, 2011.
  31. ^ A b Marcus Klöckner: The RAF and the secret services. In: Telepolis , November 10, 2010 (interview with Wolfgang Kraushaar ).
  32. ↑ a b Meeting of Buback and Baumann 3SAT Kulturzeit, June 7, 2011
  33. ↑ Gerd Koenen: Rainer, if you only knew! In: Berliner Zeitung , July 6, 2005.
  34. ↑ Willi Winkler : The state was evil. In: Die Zeit , May 2, 1997 (interview with Horst Mahler ).
  35. ↑ Horst Mahler : Opinion of the respondent in the proceedings German Federal Government and others against NPD. ( Memento of April 3, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In: extremismus.com , August 30, 2002, p. 31 (PDF).
  36. ↑ Willi Winkler : Exactly that bit of the working class. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 18, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Becker, Verena
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Becker, Verena Christiane
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German terrorist, former member of the June 2nd Movement and the RAF
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin - Wilmersdorf