Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [166]
The third generation’s first attempt at atrocity was a failure. A twenty-five-pound bomb was found in a car parked within the NATO academy at Oberammergau. An alert German instructor noticed a slovenly US soldier hurriedly leaving the site, and quickly asked guards whether the man had parked a car there. The site was evacuated. A technical failure prevented the bomb from going off. The explosives had come from a quarry in Belgium, stolen by the French terror group Action Directe six months earlier. Shortly afterwards a bilingual communique announced that the two groups were acting in concert. As if to demonstrate this, on 25 January 1985 Action Directe terrorists shot dead general Rene Audran, head of weapons exports in the French Defence Ministry. Responsibility was claimed by a Commando Elisabeth van Dyck, its name commemorating the RAF terrorist shot by police earlier. A week later, a young messenger girl rang the doorbell of the Starnberger See home of Ernst Zimmermann, head of MTU, manufacturers of engines for Tornado fighters and Leopard tanks. The messenger, with a letter Zimmermann had to sign for, was followed by a young man with a gun, who after tying Zimmermann to a chair shot him dead. This was the handiwork of Commando Patsy O’Hara, named after an Irish National Liberation Army terrorist who had starved himself to death in the Maze prison. Two things were significant about these attacks. The victims were not symbolic targets like Ponto or Schleyer. They were what the RAF called ‘bearers of functions’, that is men who were key players in their respective defence sectors. Secondly, the international martyr nomenclature was intended to forge alliances with other European terrorist groups so that a ‘West European Guerrilla’ would confront an increasingly integrated EEC and NATO. How successfully this was done can be gauged from the fact that an attack was named after Vincenzo Spano (an Action Directe terrorist who was alive in a French jail) when in fact it was intended to commemorate Ciro Rizatto, a Red Brigades terrorist killed in a bank robbery. The RAF corrected the mistake in a further communiqué.37
In August 1985 the third generation detonated a 126-kilogram car bomb inside the US Rhein-Main airbase in Frankfurt, killing two Americans and injuring twenty-three others. The night before an attractive German woman lured a twenty-year-old US soldier from the Western Saloon on his base in Wiesbaden. He body was found the following morning, shot in the back of his head. He had been killed so that the RAF could use his ID to get the bomb on to the Frankfurt base. A roadside bomb was used to murder Karl Heinz Beckurts, the leading German industrialist and advocate of nuclear power, together with his chauffeur, both of whom resembled charred puppets flecked with blood by the time the police found them. RAF Fighting Units simultaneously attacked material targets, including the Cologne offices of the German secret service. On 10 October 1986 RAF terrorists executed Gerold von Braunmuhl, deputy to foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, as he arrived home late from work in a taxi. Responsibility was claimed by the Commando Ingrid Schubert, this one commemorating the RAF terrorist who had hung herself in Munich’s Stadelheim prison three weeks after the group suicide in Stammheim. When the RAF claimed that Braunmuhl had been chosen because of his representative status -the RAF was now going for the state itself and especially those connected to the ‘pan-German EEC’ - the dead man’s brothers published a moving letter, in Germany’s main left-wing newspaper, asking who had appointed them to murder people. Shortly afterwards, Action Directe murdered Georges Besse, the head of Renault, in what turned out to be the group’s denouement. In February 1987 French police arrested the four Action Directe leaders at a farmhouse near Orleans. Co-operation with the RAF ceased.
On 20 September 1988, RAF gunmen disguised as road surveyors