by J. Smith
In the wake of the May Offensive, numerous RAF members are arrested in a series of separate incidents. Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe, Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Jünschke, Irmgard Möller, Gerhard Müller, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, and Bernhard Braun are all captured, and Katharina Hammerschmidt, a supporter being sought, turns herself in on her lawyer’s advice.
November 1972
The RAF releases a major document entitled Die Aktion des Schwarzen September in München—Zur Strategie des antiimperialistischen Kampfes (The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle). In it, they use the Black September attack in Munich as a starting point for a sweeping discussion of anti-imperialist resistance in West Germany and throughout the world.
1973
January 17–February 16, 1973
Forty prisoners from the RAF participate in the first collective hunger strike, demanding an end to isolation and the closing of the dead wing at Cologne-Ossendorf prison.
May 8–June 29, 1973
Eighty prisoners from the RAF participate in the second collective hunger strike, demanding integration into the general prison population and free access to political information.
November 16, 1973
The Revolutionary Cells (RZ) attacks ITT in West Berlin in response to the company’s role in the September 11 Chilean coup. This is the first action by a new guerilla group that will quickly take its place alongside the RAF and the 2JM as a force to be reckoned with.
1974
February 4, 1974
In simultaneous predawn actions, RAF safehouses in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and the Netherlands are raided. RAF members Helmut Pohl, Ilse Stachowiak, Christa Eckes, and Eberhard Becker are arrested in Hamburg, while Margrit Schiller, Kay Werner-Allnach, and Wolfgang Beer are arrested in Frankfurt.
September 13, 1974
Ulrike Meinhof announces the third collective hunger strike of the prisoners from the RAF while testifying at Andreas Baader’s trial. For the first time, the prisoners demand association with one another rather than integration into the general prison population. Meinhof releases a Provisorisches Kampfprogramm für den Kampf um die politischen Rechte der gefangenen Arbeiter (Provisional Program of Struggle for the Political Rights of Imprisoned Workers), the only RAF document ever issued in which prisoners in general are addressed.
September 27, 1974
Monika Berberich reads a statement expelling Horst Mahler from the RAF during a trial at which she is testifying. Mahler has by this time joined the Maoist KPD/AO.
November 9, 1974
RAF member Holger Meins dies after two months on hunger strike. Demonstrations break out all over West Germany.
November 10, 1974
Günter von Drenkmann, president of the West Berlin Supreme Court, is killed during an attempted kidnapping by the 2JM. A communiqué explains the action was in retaliation for the death of Holger Meins.
November 11, 1974
In Berlin, a mass demonstration to support the prisoners and protest the death of Holger Meins draws 15,000 people.
November 18, 1974
Holger Meins is buried in the family grave in Hamburg. Five thousand people attend the funeral. As Meins’s coffin is lowered into the ground, student leader Rudi Dutschke, in what will become an iconic moment in West German left history, steps forward, and standing over the grave, gives the clenched fist salute, shouting, “Holger, the struggle continues.”
December 7, 1974
A bomb explodes in Bremen Central Station, and five people are injured.
December 9, 1974
The RAF issues a communiqué denouncing the Bremen bombing as a police action.
1975
January 1975
The Internationales Komitee zur Verteidigung politischer Gefangener in Europa (IVK) is founded by lawyers of political prisoners.
January 1, 1975
The Lex Baader-Meinhof (Baader Meinhof Laws) come into effect. Among other things, the laws allow the court to exclude defense attorneys who are suspected of forming a criminal association with their clients and allows trials to continue without the accused present if the reason for the absence is deemed to be the fault of the prisoner, e.g., the result of illness due to hunger striking.
January 20, 1975
Spiegel publishes an interview with prisoners from the RAF Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, and Jan-Carl Raspe.
February 2, 1975
The RAF writes a letter to the hunger striking prisoners asking them to call off their hunger strike and promising to pursue the struggle from there on in.
February 18, 1975
The construction site of the planned Wyhl nuclear power plant is occupied in the opening salvo of what will become a powerful antinuclear movement in West Germany. This initial occupation is soon cleared by police.
February 23, 1975
Over 20,000 people reoccupy the nuclear power plant construction site in Wyhl.
February 27, 1975
The 2JM kidnaps Peter Lorenz, CDU candidate for mayor in West Berlin. The Lorenz kidnappers demand the release of six imprisoned guerillas: Rolf Pohle, Rolf Heißler, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, Verena Becker, Ina Siepmann, and Horst Mahler. All except Mahler, who declines to be released, will be flown to sanctuary in South Yemen, and Lorenz will be released unharmed.
March 20, 1975
Elisabeth von Dyck is arrested along with Petra Krause and three Swiss citizens in Zurich, Switzerland.
April 24, 1975
The RAF’s Holger Meins Commando, which includes a number of former SPK members, occupies the West German Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden and demands the release of twenty-six political prisoners. During a tense standoff, the guerilla executes the West German Military and Economic attachés. Police storm the building after explosives the guerilla had laid detonate. RAF member Ulrich Wessel is killed, and Siegfried Hausner, Hanna Krabbe, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, and Bernd Rössner are all captured. Hausner, who is seriously injured, is denied appropriate medical care; he will die ten days later.
June 4, 1975
The European Commission of Human Rights declares that prisoners from the RAF have been held in unacceptable conditions since 1972.
June 29, 1975
RAF supporter Katharina Hammerschmidt dies of cancer in a West Berlin hospital, having been held in prison and denied adequate treatment until it was too late.
1976
March 16, 1976
The Hamburg LG sentences RAF member turned state witness Gerhard Müller to ten years in prison. In exchange for his cooperation, Müller is never charged with the murder of police officer Norbert Schmid. Instead, he is released after six and a half years, paid 500,000 DM, and relocated to the U.S.A. RAF member Irmgard Möller is sentenced to four and a half years.
May 9, 1976
RAF member Ulrike Meinhof is found hanged in her cell. The state claims it is a suicide. Fellow prisoners and supporters assert that she was murdered. An International Investigatory Commission into the Death of Ulrike Meinhof will be established and will eventually rule that the evidence indicates murder. Bombings and demonstrations will occur throughout Western Europe for several weeks in response to Meinhof’s death.
June 27, 1976
A mixed commando made up of members of the PFLP (EO) and of the RZ hijack an Air France airliner traveling from Tel Aviv, Israel to Paris, France, and divert it to Entebbe, Uganda, demanding the release of fifty-three political prisoners in Israel, West Germany, France, Switzerland, and Kenya. The West Germans demanded were RAF members Werner Hoppe, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Ingrid Schubert, and 2JM members Ralf Reinders, Fritz Teufel, and Inge Viett.
July 1976
The influential French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique interviews prisoners from RAF and their attorneys.
July 4, 1976
An Israeli special operations force storms the airliner in Entebbe, killing the four guerillas, three hostages, and a
squad commander, as well as forty-five Ugandan soldiers. RZ members Wilfred Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann lose their lives in the action.
July 7, 1976
RAF member Monika Berberich and 2JM members Juliane Plambeck, Gabriele Rollnick, and Inge Viett overpower a guard and escape from the Lehrter Straße Women’s Prison in West Berlin.
July 21, 1976
RAF member Monika Berberich, who escaped from a West Berlin prison with three other women on July 7, is rearrested.
October 30, 1976
Eight thousand people participate in the first occupation of the proposed nuclear power plant site in Brokdorf. The occupation is broken up with what the mainstream radio station NDR refers to as “unbelievable brutality.”
November 13–14, 1976
Forty thousand people participate in a renewed occupation of the proposed nuclear power plant site in Brokdorf. Approximately 1,000 people are injured by police clearing the site, some seriously.
1977
February 8, 1977
RAF member Brigitte Mohnhaupt is released from prison and immediately goes back underground.
March 19, 1977
Twenty thousand people demonstrate against the construction of a nuclear power plant in Grohnde.
March 29–April 30, 1977
Prisoners from the RAF begin their fourth collective hunger strike, demanding to be treated as guaranteed by the Geneva Convention, association in groups of no less than fifteen, abolition of isolation, an international investigation into the deaths of Holger Meins, Siegfried Hausner, and Ulrike Meinhof, and an end to psychological warfare through false flag actions and communiqués.
April 7, 1977
The RAF’s Ulrike Meinhof Commando assassinates Attorney General Siegfried Buback, his driver, Wolfgang Göbel, and a bodyguard, George Wuster.
April 28, 1977
The Stuttgart Oberlandesgericht (Land Court of Appeal—OLG) finds RAF members Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader guilty of six murders and thirty-four attempted murders in connection with six bomb attacks. Baader is sentenced to life plus twenty years, Raspe to life plus ten years, and Ensslin to life plus six years.
April 30, 1977
The minister of justice for Baden Wurttemburg agrees to meet the prisoners’ demand for association. In response, the prisoners end their hunger strike. Shortly thereafter work begins on the seventh floor of Stammheim to allow association with additional prisoners from the RAF.
May 3, 1977
RAF members Günter Sonnenberg and Verena Becker, the latter a former 2JM member, are arrested in Singen. Following a firefight, Sonnenberg is shot in the head and Becker in the leg.
July 8, 1977
Klaus Croissant, an attorney who has defended imprisoned RAF members, flees to Paris to escape increasingly threatening harassment. He holds a press conference at which he requests political asylum.
July 30, 1977
Jürgen Ponto, the president of West Germany’s largest bank, the Dresdner Bank, is shot and killed in his home. The RAF claims responsibility. Susanne Albrecht, who is the sister of Ponto’s goddaughter, was recognized, and so signs her name to the communiqué.
August 9, 1977
Prisoners from the RAF participate in their fifth collective hunger strike in response to an attack on the Stammheim prisoners. Some of the prisoners escalate to a thirst strike almost immediately.
August 22, 1977
The RZ attacks the MAN installation in Nuremberg in response to the company’s role in the production of nuclear weapons, particularly in South Africa.
August 30, 1977
The RZ carries out attacks against the Klein and Schanzlin & Becker AG installations in Frankenthal in response to the role that both companies play in the production of nuclear weapons.
August 25, 1977
A RAF commando carries out a failed missile attack against the BAW office in Karlsruhe. The missile failed to launch due to a technical error.
September 2, 1977
Following the breakdown of negotiations between Amnesty International and the federal government, the prisoners break off their hunger and thirst strike.
September 5, 1977
West Germany’s top industrialist, and former SS officer, Hanns Martin Schleyer is kidnapped from his limousine in Cologne by the RAF’s Siegfried Hausner Commando. His chauffeur and three bodyguards are killed.
September 22, 1977
RAF member Knut Folkerts, a suspect in the Buback assassination, is arrested in Utrecht, Holland, following a shootout in which police officer Arie Kranenberg is killed.
September 24, 1977
Fifty thousand people participate in an antinuclear demonstration against a fast breeder reactor in Kalkar.
October 2, 1977
Volker Speitel and Rosemarie Prieß, workers in Klaus Croissant’s office, are arrested on a train in Puttgarden.
October 13, 1977
A four-person PFLP (EO) group calling itself the Commando Martyr Halimeh of the Struggle Against World Imperialism Organization hijacks a Lufthansa airliner en route from Majorca to Paris, taking it first to Rome, then to Cyprus. They issue a communiqué saying their action is meant to reinforce the demands of the Siegfried Hausner Commando.
October 18, 1977
The Lufthansa airliner, which has made its way to Mogadishu, is stormed and three of the four hijackers are killed, the fourth is badly injured.
Shortly thereafter a state official announces the alleged suicides of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin and the attempted suicides of Jan-Carl Raspe and Irmgard Möller. Raspe subsequently dies of his injuries. Only Möller survives, and she refutes the state’s suicide contention.
October 19, 1977
The Siegfried Hausner Commando issues a final communiqué, announcing that Schleyer has been executed. His body is found in the trunk of a green Audi 100 in the border town of Mülhausen, France.
October 25, 1977
Hanns Martin Schleyer is buried.
President Walter Scheel describes the war against the RAF as a war of civilization against barbarism.
October 28, 1977
Chancellor Schmidt addresses the Institute for Strategic Studies in London, England, requesting that NATO respond to the Soviet Union’s deployment of SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe. This speech will subsequently be viewed as the origin of NATO’s “double-track” strategy.
November 9–13, 1977
The 2JM kidnaps industrialist Walter Palmers in Vienna. He is released in exchange for a ransom of 31 million shillings, which is divided amongst the 2JM, the RAF, and a Palestinian group.
November 11, 1977
RAF members Christoph Wackernagel and Gert Schneider are arrested in Amsterdam.
November 12, 1977
RAF prisoner Ingrid Schubert, one of eleven prisoners demanded in exchange for Schleyer, is found hanged in her cell in Munich. The state claims it is suicide, but friends and family believe it is murder.
November 17, 1977
Attorney Klaus Croissant, who has defended imprisoned RAF members, is extradited from France to West Germany and immediately imprisoned in Stammheim.
November 19, 1977
Irmgard Möller begins a hunger strike for association with fellow prisoner from the RAF Verena Becker.
November 23, 1977
Thomas Gratt and Othmar Keplinger, two Austrian students active in the Arbeitskreis politische Prozesse, are arrested in connection with the 2JM’s Palmers kidnapping.
November 28, 1977
The trial of RAF member Verena Becker begins. She is charged with attempted murder, robbery, and membership in a terrorist organization.
Arbeitskreis politische Prozesse founder Reinhard Pitsch is arrested in connection with the 2JM’s Palmers kidnapping.
December 20, 1977
RAF member Knut Folkerts is sentenced to twenty years in prison in Utrecht, Holland.
Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, who had been close to the 2JM for years
, and Christian Möller are arrested following a shootout with Swiss border guards at the Swiss border with France.
December 28, 1977
The Stuttgart OLG sentences RAF member Verena Becker to life in prison.
1978
January 18, 1978
The trial of attorney Kurt Groenewold on charges of helping organize the illegal communications system used by prisoners from the RAF begins in Hamburg.
January 21, 1978
RAF member Christine Kuby is arrested in a shootout with police in a Hamburg drugstore. Kuby and a police officer are injured. Kuby was attempting to use a forged prescription to buy narcotics for fellow RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock, a drug addict.
January 27–29, 1978
The Tunix Congress is held in West Berlin. A broad cross section of the left meets to discuss how to proceed after the German Autumn.
February 1, 1978
Prisoners from the RAF held in Holland begin a hunger strike, demanding an end to isolation and bans on visits, free access to literature, and to be flown to a country of their choice.
March 9, 1978
Former defense attorney Klaus Croissant’s trial begins. Croissant refuses to distance himself from his former clients.
March 14–April 20, 1978
Prisoners from the RAF participate in the organization’s sixth collective hunger strike, demanding to be treated according to the Geneva Convention’s guarantees for POWs, association, the return of the confiscated writings of Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, Andreas Baader, Irmgard Möller, and Ingrid Schubert, and an independent investigation into the murders of prisoners from the RAF.
March 25–April 4, 1978
The Third International Russell Tribunal meets in Frankfurt to examine the human rights situation in West Germany, particularly as regards the Berufsverbot. The tribunal is derided by the state and the media.
March 26, 1978
Waddi Haddad, leader of the PFLP (EO), dies in East Germany. Sources close to the U.S. and Israeli counterinsurgency structures will confirm that he had been poisoned by Mossad. Following his death the PFLP (EO) will dissolve, some of its remnants becoming the PFLP (SC), the May 15 group, and the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (FARL).
