Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [164]
The German police were in luck too. A year later two mushroom pickers combing a wood near Frankfurt came upon a dip containing two large plastic boxes. In addition to the Heckler & Koch used to shoot Schleyer’s bodyguards, there were ninety-one identity cards, fifteen passports, 55,000 DM in cash and Polaroid photos of Schleyer. Among the thousand or so items the boxes contained, there were coded documents and maps showing the location of eleven similar depots. Despite the freezing temperatures, some two thousand police officers were used to stake out these depots. The first terrorists to appear with their plastic shovels were Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Adelheid Schulz, who were seized by GSG-9 men. The women had a plastic bag with them in which was the Polish-manufactured submachine gun used to kill two Dutch customs officers two years earlier. Five days later, undercover policemen disguised as people out for a walk in the woods followed Christian Klar as he made for the depot code-named ‘Daphne’. He was surrounded by three hundred and fifty waiting policemen and arrested. This effectively meant the end of ‘the old RAF’ as it was known in police circles, or, to be more accurate, of the ‘second generation’.
Unknown to the West German police, the ranks of the RAF had already been depleted by several ‘drop-outs’, or Aussteiger in German. In 1979, a total of eight RAF members had indicated that they were no longer prepared to engage in terrorism, symbolically handing their weapons over to Klar or Mohnhaupt. Some of them were nervous wrecks, others felt guilty about their victims, especially if they were bystanders killed in the crossfire. Sigrid Sternebeck was one of those who had the realism to see that ‘we live in central Europe, not under a Fascist dictatorship with a population living at subsistence levels that is ripe for revolution’. Her colleague, the former nurse Monika Helbing, was plagued by thoughts of their dead comrades. Helbing’s husband, Ekkehard Freiherr von Seckendorff-Gudent, since 1977 the RAF’s group doctor, also wanted to get out.
What to do about these failures presented the RAF leadership with a serious problem. If they were caught by the police, they would very likely break as they had already demonstrated their scruples and lack of fortitude. There was talk of despatching the group to Angola or Mozambique, a forlorn prospect, although they did begin to study Portuguese. The terrorist Inge Veitt came to the rescue. After the second of her two spectacular breakouts from Berlin’s Lehrte Strasse women’s prison - in one she sawed through the bars, in the second she used knotted blankets as a rope - she had been commissioned to spring two male 2 June Movement terrorists from Berlin-Moabit prison. En route through East Berlin’s Schönefeld airport she was stopped by frontier guards who, after disarming her, handed her over to the genial, purple-nosed major ‘Dirty’ Harry Dahl of the Ministry of State Security. ‘Good day, comrade!’ he announced at their first encounter. Shortly afterwards a rearmed Veitt was on her way to West Berlin on the S-Bahn. Harry and his superiors, Erich Mielke and ultimately president Erich Honecker, solved the problem of the eight RAF drop-outs, all of whom were equipped with new identities for their fresh start in the German Democratic Republic. There were several reasons why the GDR’s leaders decided to harbour terrorists.
They feared that some terrorist group might spoil a big state occasion just as Black September had done in Munich, and so were keen to know the inner workings of such groups. They liked having some of the fiercest opponents of