Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [168]
After further brief encounters, the agent and Hogefeld agreed to meet in a small town in Mecklenburg-Hither Pomerania, where Hogefeld planned a short vacation. In June 1993 the agent and Hogefeld spent a weekend in a damp seaside bungalow, watched by large numbers of undercover policemen who also overheard their conversations through bugs in the walls. A plan to snatch Hogefeld as she took a bus to the station was aborted at the last minute in order to see who she had arranged to meet. At a small town called Bad Kleinen, Hogefeld and the agent were joined by Wolfgang Grams. The police decided to spring the trap, code-named Operation Wine Harvest. As the three left the cafe, seven men in jeans and blousons surrounded Hogefeld, while a ‘passenger’ put a gun to her neck shouting ‘Hands up!’ Wolfgang Grams reacted faster, sprinting up nearby steps to the platforms, and pulling out a 9 mm pistol. He put four shots into twenty-five-year-old Michael Newrzella, one of his GSG-9 pursuers, who later died. There was a furious gun battle between Grams and the other GSG-9 men during which some forty-four shots were fired. A female train driver was shot in the arm. Badly wounded, Grams tried to flee along the tracks until he collapsed. There was some controversy over claims that GSG-9 men put a couple of extra bullets into his head, although after an inquiry they were exonerated. In fact, the wounded Grams had shot himself dead.
The dramatic events in Bad Kleinen effectively signalled the end of the RAF. With Hogefeld arrested and Grams dead, there may have been as few as three further RAF terrorists on the run in Germany, although no one could be sure. There were bitter divisions among the RAF prisoners, with some opting to make their peace with the authorities, leaving a tiny implacable group led by Brigitte Mohnhaupt. In the mid-1990s the once feared terrorist organisation only appeared in the form of readers’ letters to left-wing newspapers and magazines as they sought to set this or that historical issue straight. In 1997 former RAF members held a reunion in Zurich. Surveying their middle-aged faces, whose younger selves had adorned so many ‘wanted’ posters, journalists were reminded of a conference of school teachers, or rather of polytechnic lecturers, which at least semi-identified where this delusive Red plague had begun, namely in the left universities of the Western world. On 20 April 1998 Reuters received a brief communique: ‘Almost twenty-eight years ago on 14 May 1970 the RAF emerged in the course of an act of liberation. Today we conclude the project. The urban guerrilla, in the form of the RAF, is now history.’ Five sides of single-spaced type reviewed the RAF’s history. There was an honour roll of the twenty-six who had ‘died in the armed struggle’. In his retirement, Horst Herold, who had done more than anyone else to combat RAF criminality, remarked that this paper was ‘the tombstone erected by the RAF itself’.
Not quite, however, because on 30 July 1999 a jeep and a VW Passat were used to block in an armoured security vehicle as it delivered money to Duisberg-Rheinhausen banks. The guards found themselves staring into a bazooka shouldered by one of the masked assailants. The robbers made off with one million Marks. Perhaps the third generation were arranging their pensions as there have been no further signs of life from the Red Army Faction since. By contrast, much has been heard from Horst Mahler. Following the intervention of Gerhard Schroder, Mahler was allowed