THE search for kidnapped German businessman Hanns Martin Schleyer was getting nowhere when an anonymous tip was sent to a leftist French newspaper based in Paris, directing police to a green Audi parked in the town of Mulhouse, near the border of Germany and Switzerland.
There officers found a blood-smeared car, but no sign of Schleyer. Fearing the tip-off had been a trap, bomb disposal experts were called. They made their way into the boot of the car through a back seat and found Schleyer’s body. He had been shot dead the previous day, on October 18, 1977.
It was a tragic and grisly end to a drawn-out abduction drama masterminded by the Red Army Faction (RAF), a leftist German terrorist group which terrorised Europe in the 1970s.
The group was born in the tumult of the ’60s among university students and political radicals who believed West Germany had never been completely de-Nazified after the war and was run by a fascist government, a puppet of the imperialist US. The students used increasingly violent methods of protest, hoping to spur a government response that would spark a revolution.
A core group of radicals came together, headed by high school dropout Andreas Baader. Their spokesman became journalist Ulrike Meinhof, after she helped Baader escape from custody in May 1970. They funded their activities with bank robberies and trained with Palestinian terrorists in Jordan.
Initially known as the Baader-Meinhof gang they conducted robberies and bombings until Baader and comrades Jan-Carl Raspe and Holger Meins were captured after a gunbattle in June 1972. Meinhof was arrested elsewhere at about the same time. While in prison she declared her support for the Palestinians who kidnapped and killed athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in September.
Trials of the gang members dragged on for years. Meinhof committed suicide in 1976 before hers ended, but by then a new generation had taken over the RAF’s nefarious activities.
In 1975 politician Peter Lorenz was kidnapped by an RAF affiliate group, who demanded the release of RAF and other prisoners (none of whom were on trial for murder), including Red Army founder Horst Mahler and Rolf Heissler (who soon became an RAF member.) Lorenz’s life was saved, but the German government realised its mistake as RAF incidents escalated.
In July 1977 Jurgen Ponto, chairman of the Dresdener Bank, was killed in a botched kidnap attempt by the radicalised daughter of a friend.
The culmination was the abduction of Schleyer. As head of the German Employers Association and a Nazi party member and SS officer during World War II, Schleyer was a symbol of everything the RAF hated.
On September 5, 1977, his chauffeur-driven Mercedes was ambushed by a car coming from the opposite direction and a woman pushing a stroller into the street, which forced the Mercedes to swerve and brake. Two police following Schleyer’s car were unable to stop in time and crashed into his rear.
RAF terrorists jumped out of a VW bus, killed Schleyer’s chauffeur Heinz Marcisz, police officer Roland Pieler, who was sitting with Schleyer, as well as the two police in the car behind, Reinhold Brandle and Helmut Ulmer. Schleyer was bundled away and demands issued for the release of RAF prisoners.
German chancellor Helmut Schmidt insisted there would be no negotiations. Security was tightened around Baader and the other prisoners, because it was assumed they had orchestrated the kidnapping.
On October 13 members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked a German Lufthansa airlines plane, forcing it to fly to Mogadishu in Somalia and demanding the release of RAF prisoners. The German government responded by sending an elite police tactical response team (set up after the Munich massacre) which, on October 18, freed the hostages and killed three of the four hijackers.
Word of the failed hijacking reached Baader, Raspe and another comrade Gudrun Ensslin who all committed suicide.
When Schleyer’s kidnappers heard this news they murdered Schleyer and dumped his body in Mulhouse. He was found on October 19. It became known as the deutscher Herbst (German Autumn).
Nobody was convicted of Schleyer’s murder but a former RAF member who took part in the kidnap claimed Heissler was one of Schleyer’s killers. Heissler was arrested in 1982 for another murder and for belonging to the RAF. He stayed behind bars until 2001.
Another RAF member suspected of the killing was Stefan Wisniewski who was arrested in 1978 and convicted of murder and other crimes in 1981. He is still in prison.
The RAF officially disbanded in 1992, in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union.
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