According to the RAF’s “Concept City Guerrilla Manifesto,” the group intended to bring about the Maoist millennium by destroying parliamentary pluralism and the worldwide reign of “American imperialism.” Since this could not be accomplished by legal means, the band committed itself to violence and terror. Over the next few years, the RAF placed explosives in U.S. military installations around Germany, bombed the British Yacht Club in West Berlin, robbed banks, bombed the Springer building in Hamburg, and targeted prominent West German business leaders and politicians for kidnapping and murder. Among the early victims of an RAF subgroup calling itself “Movement Second June” (in honor of the martyred Ohnesorg) was the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court, Günter von Drenckmann, who was shot dead at close range in his home.
In 1972 Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin, along with three other gang members, were run to ground in Frankfurt and imprisoned in Stuttgart. One of the group, Holger Meins, starved himself to death before he could be tried. When news of his death reached West Berlin, sympathizers of the Baader-Meinhof cause went on a violent rampage. As the city’s jails filled with arrested rioters, the Movement Second June struck again, this time kidnapping Peter Lorenz, chairman of the West Berlin CDU. The group demanded a collective pardon for the demonstrators and the release of six terrorists from local prisons, including the left-wing lawyer Horst Mahler. Lorenz was released only after the terrorists—minus Mahler, who chose to stay in his cell—were flown to Aden in South Yemen with DM 20,000 each.
Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin were put on trial in 1975, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment in Stammheim (Stuttgart), a maximum security facility built especially for them. On May 9, 1976, Ulrike Meinhof was found hanging by a towel in her cell. She was buried at the Church of the Holy Trinity in West Berlin’s Mariendorf district. Thousand of mourners, claiming that she had been murdered by her guards, attended her funeral. Pastor Helmut Gollwitzer, who had also officiated at Ohnesorg’s burial nine years before, eulogized Meinhof as “the most significant woman in German politics since Rosa Luxemburg.”
The death of Meinhof and the incarceration of the other gang members did not bring an end to the wave of terror that was sweeping over West Germany; on the contrary, in revenge for Meinhof’s “murder” and in hopes of forcing the release of Baader and Ensslin, members of the gang staged a series of the most spectacular acts of terror yet. On April 7, 1977, Siegfried Buback, the chief federal prosecutor, was shot dead in Karlsruhe as he drove to work. The killers identified themselves as the “Kommando Ulrike Meinhof.” About four months later, on July 30, a young woman named Susanne Albrecht and two accomplices appeared at the Frankfurt-area home of Jürgen Ponto, chief of the Dresdner Bank. Since Albrecht was a good friend of his daughter, Herr Ponto let the trio in. One of them shot him five times as he went to get a vase for the flowers they had brought him. He died shortly thereafter in a Frankfurt hospital. Two weeks later Susanne Albrecht sent a letter to several newspapers saying that Ponto had been executed for having committed crimes of genocide against the peoples of the Third World. In September Hanns-Martin Schleyer, president of the West German Association of Employers, was pulling into the driveway of his Cologne home when five masked figures ambushed his car and an accompanying police vehicle. The attackers killed Schleyer’s chauffeur and two policeman before pulling the businessman from his car and racing from the scene. The kidnappers sent the government pictures of Schleyer with a sign on his chest saying “Prisoner of the RAF,” along with a note promising to kill him if the RAF prisoners were not released from Stammheim. While German federal police searched frantically for Schleyer, a group of Palestinian terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa plane en route from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt with eighty-six people on board. The hijackers likewise demanded the immediate release of “our comrades” in Stammheim, who were “fighting against the imperialist organizations of the world.” The plane was forced to fly to Rome, Cyprus, Dubai, and Aden, where the pilot was murdered in cold blood. The saga finally ended on October 17 in Mogadishu, Somalia, when a commando team dispatched by the German government managed in a brilliant operation to rescue the hostages and kill most of the terrorists. Two days later Hanns-Martin Schleyer was found dead in the trunk of a car in the French town of Mulhouse.
