Read The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History Online
Authors: J Smith
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 PrieÃ, 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 9â13, 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.
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 27â29, 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 14âApril 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 25âApril 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).
April 10, 1978
The trial of 2JM members Ralf Reinders, Fritz Teufel, Ronald Fritzsch, Gerald Klöpper, Andreas Vogel, and Till Meyer in connection with the Drenkmann assassination and the Lorenz kidnapping begins in West Berlin under Judge Geus, the same judge who acquitted police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras in the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg. Reinders, Teufel, and Fritzsch assault their court-appointed attorneys.
April 26, 1978
The Stuttgart OLG sentences Günter Sonnenberg to two life terms in prison.
May 11, 1978
RAF member Stefan Wisniewski is arrested at Orly Airport in Paris. He is in possession of a letter from Karl-Heinz Dellwo, a prisoner from the RAF, and forty capsules of narcotics for RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock.
May 12, 1978
RAF members Sieglinde Hofmann, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Rolf Clemens Wagner, and Peter-Jürgen Boock are detained in Yugoslavia.
May 27, 1978
Two armed women pretending to be attorneys and calling themselves the Nabil Harb Commando break 2JM member Till Meyer out of Moabit Prison in West Berlin. Plans to break 2JM member Andreas Vogel out at the same time are thwarted.
June 1, 1978
The law establishing that meetings between political prisoners and their attorneys will take place through a glass partition comes into force.
June 5, 1978
2JM member Klaus Viehmann is arrested in West Berlin.
June 8, 1978
Gerhart Baum (FDP) replaces Werner Maihofer as minister of the interior.
June 21, 1978
2JM members Till Meyer, Gabriele Rollnick, Gudrun Strumer, and Angelika Goder are arrested by heavily armed West German police in Varna, Bulgaria. Bulgarian police do not intervene and the four are flown back to West Germany.
June 27, 1978
2JM members Inge Viett, Regina Nicolai, and Ina Siepmann are detained in Prague, Czechoslovakia. After several days, the East German MfS intervenes to gain their release.
July 10, 1978
The Hamburg OLG sentences attorney Kurt Groenewold to two years' probation and a fine of 75,000 DM for supporting a criminal organization.
July 25, 1978
In what will come to be known as the Celle Hole scandal, intelligence agents blow a hole in the wall of Celle prison in an effort to
break Sigurd Debus, a captured guerilla, but not a RAF member, out of prison in the hope that he will establish contact with the underground while under police surveillance.
August 1978
Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Khaddafi travels to the FRG for medical treatment; he meets with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and agrees to deny sanctuary to members of the West German guerilla, and to pressure the PLO to do the same.
RAF members Christian Klar, Heidi Schulz, and Willy Peter Stoll narrowly escape police after chartering a helicopter to check out possibilities for a prison break.
August 4, 1978
RAF member Wolfgang Beer is released from prison.
September 6, 1978
RAF member Willy Peter Stoll is shot dead by police in a Chinese restaurant in Düsseldorf.
September 21, 1978
Karl-Heinz Dellwo begins a hunger and thirst strike demanding transfer to another prison and integration into the general prison population.
September 24, 1978
In a shootout in a wooded area outside of Dortmund, police officer Hans-Wilhelm Hansen is killed and RAF member Michael Knoll suffers fatal injuries, dying on October 8.
Angelika Speitel is injured and arrested. Werner Lotze manages to escape.
October 1978
Prisoners from the RAF being held in Holland, Knut Folkerts, Gert Schneider, and Christof Wackernagel, go on hunger strike; the Dutch state secretary of justice responds by extraditing the three to the FRG.
November 1, 1978
RAF members allegedly shoot and fatally injure Dutch border guards Dionysius de Jong and Johannes Goemans at the Kerkade border crossing in Holland.
November 6, 1978
Eleven people calling themselves the “Willy Peter Stoll and Michael Knoll Commando” are arrested after occupying the offices of the
deutsche presse-agentur
(dpa) in Frankfurt in an attempt to send out a message about the prisoners' conditions, especially those of Werner Hoppe and Karl-Heinz Dellwo. The eleven will receive one-year prison sentences as a result of this occupation.
November 17, 1978
When the West German government refuses to exchange them for eight exiled Croat fascists being held in Germany, Yugoslav authorities release RAF members Sieglinde Hofmann, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Rolf Clemens Wagner, and Peter-Jürgen Boock, who were arrested on May 12. They depart to the Middle East.
December 14, 1978
The Stuttgart OLG sentences Volker Speitel to three years and two months in prison and Hans-Joachim Dellwo to two years in prison for supporting a terrorist organization. Both decide to cooperate with the police in exchange for reduced sentences, new identities, and relocation to another country.
December 15, 1978
The International Investigatory Commission into the Death of Ulrike Meinhof releases its findings, which indicate that Meinhof was dead before being hanged.
January 1979
The Russell Tribunal holds a second round of hearings, this time addressing political censorship, prison conditions, and the power wielded by the
Verfassungsschutz
in the FRG.
The beginning of the “second oil shock.”
Representatives of the PLO, including the organization's security chief Ali Hassan Salameh, meet with West German officials in Austria, hammering out an agreement to cooperate to prevent guerilla attacks in Western Europe and to help locate members of the RAF abroad.
January 16, 1979
The Shah of Iran flees the country; the monarchy will collapse in the coming weeks as rebel forces overwhelm troops loyal to the old regime.
January 22, 1979
Ali Hassan Salameh, PLO security chief and liaison with the CIA, is assassinated by the Mossad in Beirut.
February 1979
Amnesty International sends a
Memorandum on Prison Conditions of Persons Suspected or Convicted of Politically Motivated Crimes in the FRG
deploring the ongoing use of isolation on political prisoners.