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.
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.”
The La Belle discotheque after the terrorist bombing, April 5, 1986
If the Federal Republic’s terrorist movement had its origins and favorite terrain in West Berlin, so did the West German Hausbesetzer (squatters) scene of the 1970s and 1980s. Though squatters staked out territory in other cities in the Federal Republic as well, they congregated in greater numbers in West Berlin than anywhere else. In addition to a burgeoning “alternative scene,” they found there a large stock of vacant buildings in line for demolition or renovation. Many of these structures were owned by speculators who had evicted the tenants and were holding the properties as tax write-offs. The buildings were generally derelict and squalid, which made them all the more attractive to the squatters. The epicenter of the squat scene was Kreuzberg 36, the scruffier of the two Kreuzberg postal districts. Here the influx of mainly Turkish Gastarbeiter in the 1960s had driven out many of the middle-class residents, while the close proximity of the Wall kept property values low. The ur-squat in Kreuzberg was the former Bethanien Hospital, a rambling brick complex that was scheduled for demolition despite having considerable architectural significance. While various citizens’ groups struggled to get the demolition order rescinded (which eventually happened), homeless people from the area, along with runaways from all over Europe, moved in and set up house. Dubbing their squat the “Rauhaus,” (rough house) they filled it with junk furniture and installed a sign on the roof saying Yankees Go Home!—which did not stop GIs from coming there to buy drugs. Residents of the upper floors had a good view of one of the watchtowers at the Berlin Wall. Some of the women complained that whenever they went to the communal toilet East German guards ogled them through their binoculars. One woman became so irritated by this that she bought a toy machine gun and pointed it at a guard, sending him diving for cover.