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home, it was forced to brake hard when a woman pushed a blue pram into the road. The car with the bodyguards crashed into the back of Schleyer’s car. Both vehicles were raked by submachine-gun fire. Peter Jürgen Boock recalled how his Heckler & Koch seemed to zip through the thirty shells in its magazine in a couple of seconds. Willy Peter Stoll jumped on the bonnet of the second car and emptied his gun into the men inside. All of them died. One of the killers, Stefan Wisniewski, the juvenile-delinquent son of a wartime forced labourer, who had developed a social conscience as a merchant seaman on voyages around the Third World, explained why the chauffeur had been shot too. Although not armed, this son of the proletariat had once done an evasive-driving course, which cost him his life.36

Schleyer, who miraculously survived this ferocious assault, was dragged out and rushed away in a VW camper van. Using an underground garage for cover, the terrorists moved him to the modified trunk of a big Mercedes and took him to the underground car park of an apartment block. Apartment number 104 at Zum Renngraben 8 had been rented, by a woman paying in cash, a few months before. Schleyer was kept in one of the bedrooms, although the 108 strands of his hair subsequently found in a wardrobe suggest that he may have been subjected to conditions far worse than anything the Stammheim prisoners could imagine. Tape machines recorded his interrogation. The former wartime SS officer and economic adviser in occupied Bohemia-Moravia turned out to be bravely jovial under the circumstances, shaking his head in a bemused fashion at the incredible ignorance his captors demonstrated about the higher workings of the German economy. Although the RAF knew about his wartime past, they never used this as a justification for his abduction.

As the police concentrated on identifying high-rise buildings with underground parking, and anyone who rented them, or purchased furniture, for cash, the kidnappers made their demands known through letters sent to clergymen and calls from random telephone booths. They wanted the release of all the major RAF prisoners, who were to be flown to destinations they selected, with 100,000 DM allocated to each prisoner, and two independent guarantors that there would be no attempts to recapture them. In Bonn, chancellor Helmut Schmidt, opposition leader Helmut Kohl and other members of Schmidt’s crisis-management team resolved to free Schleyer, while not giving in to the kidnappers’ demands. Tragically for Schleyer this was never going to be the case, despite the fact that the day after his kidnapping an alert policeman had visited Zum Renngraben 8, quickly ascertaining from a landlord that a single woman had rented apartment 104, revealing a 10 cm thick bundle of banknotes as she paid the deposit and rent. This information was passed around various police departments, where nobody troubled to check the woman’s name, which was false, or her previous address in Wüppertal, which did not exist. By mid-September the kidnappers had moved Schleyer - hidden in a laundry basket - to an apartment they had rented in the Hague. Another potential hideaway was found in Brussels, for the RAF was realising that, if you kidnap someone, all police information systems effectively stopped at national borders.

While the kidnappers and the authorities conducted complex negotiations, which the latter obviously sought to delay, the majority of the RAF kidnap team flew to Baghdad, leaving Stefan Wisniewski in charge of the smaller team guarding Schleyer. In Baghdad, Wadi Haddad was most concerned to persuade Brigitte Mohnhaupt that the Bonn government should give each freed RAF prisoner one million DM, ten times the original sum requested. A surprise German fellow guest, Johannes Weinrich - a close associate of Carlos the Jackal - thought of putting further pressure on the German government either by storming the German embassy in Kuwait or by hijacking a Lufthansa tourist flight from Palma to Frankfurt. Wadi Haddad told Mohnhaupt that both operations