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Europe
Red Army Faction Terrorists' Prison Sentences Near Completion
2007-01-19
Germany is considering the release of two of the principal leftist terrorists who mounted a campaign of kidnapping and assassination 30 years ago and created one of Germany's worst political crises of the 1970s. Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar are both serving life terms but qualify this year to apply for parole for good behavior.

Neither has explicitly renounced a belief in violent revolution, but supporters say the 57-year-old woman and 54-year-old man will not go back underground to fight the state, but instead seek personal fulfillment after spending half their lives in custody.
While their victims are still dead.
Death has already claimed the founders of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a group of students and intellectuals who planned to engineer a communist uprising by the West German working class.

The RAF's plan involved high profile assassinations. The bizarre theory was that by assassinating senior business and justice officials, they could provoke the government into establishing a police state, which would make communism seem a desirable alternative to the masses. But they had no popular support.

West Germany preserved democracy and gradually caught most of the middle-class terrorists. Leaders Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin committed suicide in jail in 1976 and 1977.
Suicide? Some say ... not.
How exactly did the West Germans 'preserve democracy'? How did they 'catch' the terrorists?
The writer glosses over the hard work and sacrifice of many a police officer, judge, anti-terrorist specialist and soldier. To them: thank you.
Mohnhaupt and Klar have served longer terms in custody than any other former RAF terrorists and are among only four still serving out jail terms. The rest have been gradually paroled and are living out unremarkable lives in German cities.
As far as you know.
A panel of state superior court judges is set to give Mohnhaupt a hearing on Jan. 22 to consider if she should be granted parole from her five life terms and 15-year term, all concurrent, when she reaches the point on March 26 of having served 24 years. She has already made nine excursions from prison, with armed police watching her, to prepare her for a changed world that is connected by the Internet and only dimly remembers communism.

As part of the RAF "second generation" after the founders' suicides, she led a particularly nasty 1977 Red Army Faction kidnap in which Hanns Martin Schleyer, head of the West German employers' federation, was seized from his car, and found dead 44 days later. Schleyer's widow, Waltrude, called this week for the terrorists to be kept in jail, pointing out they had never shown contrition. In 1993, Mohnhaupt sent a statement from jail opposing an RAF surrender.
I'm with Waltrude on this one: until she makes a complete confession, alocution and statement of remorse she can stay in prison.
Posted by:mrp

#3  I remember our Battalion Commander's wife in Germany bore a striking resemblance to one RAF terrorist woman. Since public posters showed their photographs, this meant that her husband had to wear his uniform when the two of them went out on the town, to help avoid misunderstandings.

I also remember the suicides in prison, and how the German newspapers reported them with a straight face. The "suicides" were in retaliation for an RPG attack on the Commander of US Forces Europe's car.

That in itself wasn't as bad as that the RPG had killed the Commander's driver, who was on loan from the Munich Chief of Police. That made it personal.
Posted by: Anonymoose   2007-01-19 18:29  

#2  To the 1968ers that run Germany and the German media these people are heros, they will walk the day it's allowed.
Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom   2007-01-19 17:45  

#1  Suicide? Some say ... not.

Cold and flu season?
Posted by: tu3031   2007-01-19 16:54  

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