German Autumn

The German Autumn (Template:Lang-de) was a set of events in late 1977, revolving around the kidnapping and murder of industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, then president of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations (BDA) and the Federation of German Industries (BDI), by the Red Army Faction (RAF), and the hijacking of the Lufthansa aeroplane Landshut by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The murder of the banker Jürgen Ponto on July 30, 1977 marked the beginning of the German Autumn. It ended on October 18, with the liberation of the Landshut and the death of the leading figures of the first generation of RAF terrorists in their prison cells.

The term "German Autumn" is derived from the 1978 film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), which is a German film-collage in the form of a short film with news-report format. An omnibus film, it collectively covered the social atmosphere during the time of the RAF terrorism, while offering different critical perspectives and arguments pertaining to the situation. The directors involved were Heinrich Böll, Hans Peter Cloos, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Maxmiliane Mainka, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupé, Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Schubert and Bernhard Sinkel. Kluge and Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus edited the film.

On July 30, 1977, Jürgen Ponto, the head of Dresdner Bank, was shot and killed in front of his house in Oberursel in a kidnapping that went wrong. Those involved were Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Christian Klar, and Susanne Albrecht, the last being the sister of Ponto's goddaughter.

Hanns-Martin Schleyer in captivity.

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, 41, was forced to brake when a baby carriage suddenly appeared in the street in front of them. The police escort vehicle behind them was unable to stop in time, and crashed into Schleyer's car. About 20 masked RAF members sprayed machine gun and machine pistol bullets into the two vehicles, killing Marcisz and a police officer, Roland Pieler, 20, who was seated in the backseat of Marcisz's car. The driver of the police escort vehicle, Reinhold Brändle, 41 and a third police officer, Helmut Ulmer, 24, who was in the second vehicle were also killed. The hail of bullets riddled over twenty bullet wounds into the bodies of Brändle and Pieler. 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 West 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 aeroplane Landshut on October 13 with the help of the allied Palestinian group PFLP. After a long odyssey through the Arabian Peninsula and the execution-type killing of Captain Jürgen Schumann, the hijackers and their hostages landed in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.

After political negotiations with the Somali leader Siad Barre, the West 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. Only one GSG 9 member and one flight-attendant were injured; of the hijackers only Souhaila Andrawes survived.

On the same night, three of the imprisoned RAF members – Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader – were found dead in their cells. In response, Hanns-Martin Schleyer – taken to Belgium through the Netherlands – was shot and killed by his kidnappers. His body was found on October 19 1977 in the trunk of a car in Mulhouse, France.

The official investigation into the deaths of the imprisoned RAF members concluded that they had committed suicide: Baader and Raspe using handguns smuggled into the Stammheim maximum security prison by their lawyer Arndt Müller, Ensslin by hanging herself. 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. On November 12, Ingrid Schubert was found hanged in her cell.

After the Landshut crisis, the West German government stated that it would never again negotiate with terrorists.

See also

• Lufthansa Flight 181
• RAF
• [Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith, "Montage, Music and Memory Remembering Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978), Kinoeye 2, no. 20 (16 December 2002): p. 1. Available at "http://www.kinoeye.org/02/20/goldsmith20.php".]