The Stammheim inmates kept abreast of the efforts to free them by listening to a transistor radio that had been smuggled into their high-security cell. Within hours after learning about what had happened in Mogadishu, they decided to commit collective suicide. Baader and another prisoner, Jan-Carl Raspe, used smuggled pistols to do the job. Gudrun Ensslin hanged herself with a speaker cable. Irmgard Möller stabbed herself in the chest with a kitchen knife. Alone among the group, Möller survived. Later she insisted that she had not tried to commit suicide, and she questioned whether any of her colleagues had died by their own hand.
News of the deaths at Stammheim provoked violent protest demonstrations across West Germany. The largest and most violent protests occurred in West Berlin, where it had all started. As they had after the alleged “state executions” of Meins and Meinhof, rioters burned cars, looted shops, and attacked police. The violence gave politicians in Bonn another reason—if they needed one—to be relieved that they were not trying to govern the country from the chaotic precincts of the former German capital.
In the wake of the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof leaders, terrorism abated in West Germany, but it did not disappear, especially in West Berlin. In 1982 terrorists blew up the French Cultural House on the Kurfürstendamm. Throughout the 1980s there were bomb scares at American military installations in the city, which led to much tighter security precautions. As one American officer recalled: “They put fences around the PX, and they closed the outpost film theater on one Saturday morning because there was a report that terrorists were going to drive a truckful of explosives into this theater full of American kiddies watching the Saturday matinee. You had to open your trunk and the hood of your car just to get into the PX parking lot.” Unfortunately, there was no such tight security on the night of April 5, 1986, at the La Belle discotheque, a popular hangout for U.S. servicemen, especially blacks. On that night a terrorist group with connections to Libya placed plastic explosives in the club. The blast killed a young black GI and a twenty-eight-year-old Turkish woman; 229 people, including seventy-nine Americans and four Arabs, were wounded. Two months later another GI, whose legs had been blown off in the explosion, died from his wounds. In retaliation the Reagan administration ordered air attacks against the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi, which killed over one hundred people. Berlin seemed unable to escape its association with political extremism and terrorist carnage: now the smashed La Belle disco became a regular stop for tourist busses on their way to the nearby Wall.
Documents that became available after the fall of the Wall revealed that the La Belle bombers had operated out of East Berlin and received assistance from the Stasi. In fact, throughout the 1980s fugitive RAF members found a safe haven in East Germany. The Stasi paid their bills and gave them false identity papers. Among the protected fugitives were Susanne Albrecht, who had helped with the Ponto murder, and Christian Klar and Silke Maier-Witt, who were involved in the Schleyer kidnapping. The order to provide them sanctuary came directly from Ho-necker and Mielke, who, according to Markus Wolf, may have been reminded “of their own youth in Germany as underground fighters against the Nazis.” However, Wolf believed that the GDR bosses would have been disabused of this fantasy had they actually spent any time with these “hysterical children of mainly upper-middle-class backgrounds. [The young terrorists’] style of combat rarely demanded that they show the bravery and ingenuity that had enabled the Communist Party and its intelligence networks to keep operating in Germany under Hitler.”
