• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 817 0

narrowly missed state secretary for finance Hans Tietmeyer as he was driven to work. A year later they were all too successful when they used a seven-kilogram bomb attached to a parked bicycle to kill the Deutsche Bank chief Alfred Herrhausen as he was driven in a convoy of three armoured vehicles to work. One of the most charismatic and powerful businessmen in Germany, Herrhausen had been affectionately known as ‘Don Alfredo’ by his friend chancellor Kohl. The attack had been meticulously planned, with terrorists posing as a road-working gang laying a long command wire to an infra-red system which triggered the explosion as Herrhausen’s car crossed the beam made by a light and a reflector. The terrorists had also found a way of focusing the explosion precisely on the rear seats of the car. Police remarked that Herrhausen would have died even if he had been in a tank. His killers have never been caught. One may wonder where the expertise evident in this attack was learned other than in the GDR. On 27 July 1990, Hans Neusel, the state secretary in the Interior Ministry responsible for internal security, narrowly escaped death when a bomb exploded as he drove by. The fact that he was driving saved his life, as the bombers had assumed he would be travelling in the rear of a chauffeur-driven car. Following the outbreak of the first Gulf War, in January 1991, RAF terrorists stationed on the Königswinter bank of the Rhine opened fire on the US embassy in Bonn, smashing a number of windows and sending the cleaners scurrying, before disappearing in a VW Passat.

Nineteen ninety-two finally brought significant developments which signalled that the end of terrorist violence was at hand. In the teeth of bitter opposition, but in line with advice from the secret service, justice minister Klaus Kinkel announced that the state must be ready for ‘reconciliation’ in appropriate cases, releasing terrorist prisoners in return for the RAF abandoning violence. This was less of a concession than conservatives feared, for all prisoners were entitled to parole having served two-thirds of their sentences, which meant after fifteen years for those serving life. Kinkel and his advisers were trying to sever the Gordian knot whereby the real or imagined plight of RAF prisoners served as the main recruiting sergeant for future terrorists. The secret service also agreed with the prisoners’ desire to be held in one jail, although for different reasons. Given how easily even small groups of terrorist inmates could dominate a prison, this was a calculated risk. They hoped that this policy would divide and disaggregate the terrorist prisoners, opening rifts between hardliners and moderates and weakening the organisation. This gesture elicited a response from the RAF in April 1992. Cheekily suggesting that Kinkel had revealed divisions within the ruling apparat, the RAF ruefully acknowledged that the world had changed since the collapse of socialism and the end of the Cold War. It also admitted that it had little or no public support for its campaign of terror. The group promised to ‘de-escalate’ its campaign and to cease killing prominent business or government figures. A longer follow-up paper published in August more explicitly renounced political murder. Between early 1992 and September 1993, the authorities released nine RAF prisoners.

That this did not mean the end of RAF attacks was dramatically evidenced when on the night of 26-27 March 1993 a masked RAF team broke into a newly built prison, scheduled to be opened five days later. Apart from three security guards who were eating chips and drinking beer, and seven prison guards who, to save money, were sleeping in otherwise empty cells, the building was unoccupied. Although the prison had six-metre perimeter walls, the RAF team had used aluminium and rope ladders to scale them. As the security men and guards were bound and loaded on to a VW truck, the reasons for this bizarre raid on an empty prison became evident. The terrorists drove a green truck into the prison. Shortly after 5 a.m. five separate