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Europe | ||||
Red Army Faction Terrorists' Prison Sentences Near Completion | ||||
2007-01-19 | ||||
Germany is considering the release of two of the principal leftist terrorists who mounted a campaign of kidnapping and assassination 30 years ago and created one of Germany's worst political crises of the 1970s. Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar are both serving life terms but qualify this year to apply for parole for good behavior. Neither has explicitly renounced a belief in violent revolution, but supporters say the 57-year-old woman and 54-year-old man will not go back underground to fight the state, but instead seek personal fulfillment after spending half their lives in custody.
The RAF's plan involved high profile assassinations. The bizarre theory was that by assassinating senior business and justice officials, they could provoke the government into establishing a police state, which would make communism seem a desirable alternative to the masses. But they had no popular support. West Germany preserved democracy and gradually caught most of the middle-class terrorists. Leaders Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin committed suicide in jail in 1976 and 1977. Suicide? Some say ... not. How exactly did the West Germans 'preserve democracy'? How did they 'catch' the terrorists?
As part of the RAF "second generation" after the founders' suicides, she led a particularly nasty 1977 Red Army Faction kidnap in which Hanns Martin Schleyer, head of the West German employers' federation, was seized from his car, and found dead 44 days later. Schleyer's widow, Waltrude, called this week for the terrorists to be kept in jail, pointing out they had never shown contrition. In 1993, Mohnhaupt sent a statement from jail opposing an RAF surrender.
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Posted by:mrp |
#3 I remember our Battalion Commander's wife in Germany bore a striking resemblance to one RAF terrorist woman. Since public posters showed their photographs, this meant that her husband had to wear his uniform when the two of them went out on the town, to help avoid misunderstandings. I also remember the suicides in prison, and how the German newspapers reported them with a straight face. The "suicides" were in retaliation for an RPG attack on the Commander of US Forces Europe's car. That in itself wasn't as bad as that the RPG had killed the Commander's driver, who was on loan from the Munich Chief of Police. That made it personal. |
Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-01-19 18:29 |
#2 To the 1968ers that run Germany and the German media these people are heros, they will walk the day it's allowed. |
Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2007-01-19 17:45 |
#1 Suicide? Some say ... not. Cold and flu season? |
Posted by: tu3031 2007-01-19 16:54 |