German Autumn
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The German Autumn (German: Deutscher Herbst) was a set of events revolving around the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the hijacking of the Lufthansa airplane Landshut, by the Red Army Faction (RAF) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) respectively, in late 1977.
On September 5, 1977, an RAF "commando unit" attacked the chauffeured car carrying Hanns-Martin Schleyer, then president of the German employers' association, in Cologne. His driver, Heinz Marcisz and three police bodyguards Reinhold Brandle, Roland Pieler and Helmut Ulmer were killed in the attack, and Schleyer was abducted and held prisoner in a rented apartment in an anonymous residential neighborhood near Cologne. He was forced to appeal to the center-left German government under Helmut Schmidt for the "first generation" of RAF members (then imprisoned) to be exchanged for him. Police investigations to locate Schleyer proved unsuccessful.
When it became clear that the government was unwilling to entertain a further prisoner exchange given the experience of the kidnapping of Peter Lorenz two years earlier, the RAF tried to exert additional pressure by hijacking the Lufthansa airplane Landshut on October 13 with the help of the allied Palestinian group PFLP. After a long odyssey through the Arabian Peninsula and the killing of Captain Jürgen Schumann, the terrorists and their hostages landed in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.
After political negotiations with the Somali leader Siad Barre, the German government was granted permission to assault the plane. This was carried out on October 18 by the special task force GSG 9, which had been formed after the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis. All hostages were freed without injuries; only one terrorist aboard survived.
In response, Hanns-Martin Schleyer – taken to Belgium through the Netherlands – was shot and killed by his kidnappers. At the same time, founding RAF members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe – all imprisoned in Stuttgart-Stammheim – were found dead in their cells. The official investigation concluded that they all committed suicide, although it failed to establish how the handguns that were used entered the maximum security prison of Stammheim. Irmgard Möller, who was imprisoned with them, survived with four knife wounds in her chest. She later claimed that the suicides were actually extrajudicial killings.
After the Landshut crisis, the German government stated that it would never again negotiate with terrorists.
See also
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