The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (89 page)

June 22, 1977
RAF prisoners Hanna Krabbe, Bernd Rössner, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, and Lutz Taufer begin hunger strike for association with the prisoners in Stammheim.
RAF members Sabine Schmitz and Verena Becker break their hunger strike when they are assured that they will be allowed association with other RAF prisoners.

June 27, 1977
The Stuttgart OLG bars attorney Klaus Croissant from representing defendants in trials related to state security.

July 1, 1977
RAF members Willi-Peter Stoll and Knut Folkerts rob a gun store in Frankfurt, making off with fifteen revolvers and three pistols. Kurt Rebmann becomes Siegfried Buback’s successor as Attorney General.

July 7, 1977
RAF prisoners Helmut Pohl, Wolfgang Beer, and Werner Hoppe are moved to Stammheim.

July 8, 1977
Attorney Klaus Croissant, facing increasing harassment, flees to Paris, and holds a press conference at which he requests political asylum.

July 12, 1977
Attorney Klaus Croissant files a formal request for political asylum in France.

July 16, 1977
West Germany requests that France extradite Klaus Croissant.

July 20, 1977
The Düsseldorf OLG sentences RAF members Hanna Krabbe, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, and Bernd Rössner to two life sentences for their respective roles in the April 24, 1975, Stockholm Embassy action.

July 27, 1977
RAF prisoner Waltraud Boock begins a hunger strike for application of the Geneva Convention governing POWS and for association with RAF prisoners in Stammheim.

July 30, 1977
Jürgen Ponto, the President of West Germany’s largest bank, the Dresdner Bank, is shot and killed in his home. Susanne Albrecht, who is the sister of Ponto’s goddaughter, is recognized. She goes underground along with Angelika Speitel, Silke Maier-Witt, and Siegrid Sternebeck. Immediately following the shooting RAF prisoners are searched and the Contact Ban is applied.

August 8, 1977
A special unit brutally breaks up the month-old Stammheim group, marking the renewal of draconian prison conditions.

August 9–September 2, 1977
RAF prisoners participate in the 5th collective hunger strike in response to the attack on the Stammheim prisoners and the Ponto assassination. Some of the prisoners escalate to a thirst strike almost immediately.

August 12, 1977
RAF member Elisabeth von Dyck is named as a suspect in connection with the Ponto assassination.

August 13, 1977
Berufsverbot
is requested against attorney Kurt Groenewold.

August 14, 1977
Susanne Albrecht issues a communiqué on behalf of the RAF regarding the July 30 assassination of Ponto.

August 15, 1977
The office of attorneys Arndt Müller and Armin Newerla (previously Klaus Croissant’s office, which they have taken over) is firebombed while under 24-hour-a-day police surveillance.

August 20, 1977
Attorney Armin Newerla is arrested along with six other people.

August 22, 1977
Attorney Armin Newerla and the six other people arrested are released, but charges of supporting a terrorist organization are laid against Newerla and one other person.

August 25, 1977
A RAF commando carries out a failed missile attack against the BAW office in Karlsruhe. The rocket failed to ignite due to a technical failure.

August 30, 1977
Attorney Armin Newerla is rearrested and his office is searched and documents are seized.

September 2, 1977
Following the breakdown of negotiations between Amnesty International and the Federal Government, the prisoners call off their hunger and thirst strike.

September 5, 1977
West Germany’s top Industrialist, and former SS officer, Hanns Martin Schleyer is kidnapped from his limousine in Cologne, by the RAF’s Siegfried Hausner Commando. His chauffeur and three bodyguards are killed.

September 6, 1977
A total Contact Ban is instituted against all political prisoners.

September 13, 1977
At the funeral of Schleyer’s driver in Cologne, North Rhein-Westphalia Prime Minister Heinz Kühn delivers a speech warning the kidnappers that Schleyer’s death will have repercussions for the prisoners.

September 19, 1977
RAF member Angelika Speitel is involved in a shootout with police in Den Haag, Holland.

September 22, 1977
RAF member Knut Folkerts, a suspect in the Buback assassination, is arrested with a large sum of money and a false passport in Utrecht, Holland, following a shoot-out in which police officer Arie Kranenburg is killed. Brigitte Mohnhaupt manages to get away.

September 28, 1977
The Hamburg LG sentences RAF members Christa Eckes, Helmut Pohl, and Wolfgang Beer to seven years, five years, and four and a half years in prison, respectively.

September 29, 1977
Parliament votes 371 to 4, with 17 abstentions, ratifying the Contact Ban.
The editors of
Arbeiterstimme
(Workers’ Voice), the newspaper of the KBW, are sentenced to six months in prison for publishing an anonymous article entitled “Buback Shot—Enough Reasons, But What’s The Purpose.”

September 30, 1977
The BKA, through attorney Denis Payot, states that all of the countries visited by Hans Jürgen Wischnewski declined to accept the prisoners. Attorney Ardnt Müller is arrested and the documents remaining in his office are seized.
A representative from the BAW flies to Paris with information he claims proves defense attorney and political exile Klaus Croissant’s role in the RAF. Croissant is arrested.

October 2, 1977
Volker Speitel and Rosemarie Preiss, workers in Klaus Croissant’s office, are arrested on a train in Puttgarden.

October 8, 1977
Twenty thousand people participate in a demonstration in Bonn to protest the state’s threat to ban three Maoist organizations, the KBW, the KPD, and the KPD/ML.

October 13, 1977
A four person PFLP (EO) group calling itself the Struggle Against World Imperialism Organization, hijack a Lufthansa airliner en route from Majorca to Paris, taking it first to Rome, then to Cyprus. They issue a communiqué saying their action is meant to reinforce the demands of the Siegfried Hausner Commando. Attorney Hans-Christian Ströbele’s home and office are raided.

October 16, 1977
Denis Payot receives a communiqué from the SAWIO demanding the release of the eleven prisoners demanded by the RAF’s Siegfried Hausner Commando, as well as the release of two Palestinians held in Turkey, and fifteen million U.S. dollars, to be delivered by Schleyer’s son Eberhard.

October 17, 1977
The hijacked jetliner arrives at Mogadishu, Somalia.
Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski and the GSG-9 fly to Mogadishu.
The trial of Rolf Pohle begins in Munich.

October 18, 1977
The jetliner in Mogadishu is stormed and three of the four hijackers are killed, the fourth is badly injured, and one passenger dies of a heart attack.
Shortly thereafter a state official announces the “suicides” of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin and the attempted “suicides” of Jan-Carl Raspe and Irmgard Möller. Raspe subsequently dies of his wounds. Only Möller survives to refute the state’s suicide contention. In West Berlin, thirty-eight apartments, bookstores, and printing shops are searched and forty people taken into custody.
Info-BUG
and its printers Firma Agit-Druck are amongst those targeted, and the radical newspaper now finds itself banned.

October 19, 1977
The DPA News Agency in Stuttgart receives the final communiqué from the kidnappers, saying that Schleyer has been executed. His body is found in the trunk of a green Audi 100 in the border town of Mülhausen, France, just where the RAF said it would be. Attorneys Otto Schily and Hans-Heinz Heldmann hold a
press conference to denounce the state’s suicide story regarding the prisoners.

October 20, 1977
The Contact Ban is lifted.

October 27, 1977
Ensslin’s parents bury Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader in Stuttgart. Several hundred supporters attend the funeral.

November 2, 1977
At Klaus Croissant’s extradition trial in Paris, fifteen attorneys from all over West Europe plead that he not be extradited.

November 9–13, 1977
The 2JM kidnaps industrialist Walter Palmers in Vienna. He is released in exchange for a ransom of thirty-one million shillings, which was divided amongst the 2JM, the RAF, and a Palestinian group.

November 11, 1977
RAF members Christof Wackernagel and Gerd Schneider are arrested in Amsterdam. A year later they will be extradited to West Germany.

November 12, 1977
RAF prisoner Ingrid Schubert, one of eleven prisoners demanded in exchange for Schleyer, is found hanged in her cell in Munich. The state claims it is suicide but supporters believe it is a murder.

November 16, 1977
The French Court of Appeals rules that Klaus Croissant be extradited to West Germany.

November 17, 1977
Klaus Croissant is extradited from France to West Germany and immediately imprisoned in Stammheim.

November 19, 1977
RAF prisoner Irmgard Möller begins a hunger strike for association with RAF prisoner Verena Becker.

November 28, 1977
The trial of RAF member Verena Becker begins. She is charged with attempted murder, robbery, and membership in a terrorist organization.

December 20, 1977
In Utrecht, Holland, RAF member Knut Folkerts is sentenced to twenty years in prison. He is later extradited to West Germany.

December 28, 1977
The Stuttgart OLG sentences RAF member Verena Becker to life in prison.

1978
January 18, 1978
The trial of attorney Kurt Groenewold on charges of helping organize the RAF prisoners’ illegal communications system begins in Hamburg.

January 21, 1978
RAF member Christine Kuby is arrested in a shootout with police in a Hamburg drugstore. Kuby and a police officer are injured. Kuby was attempting to use a forged prescription to buy narcotics for fellow RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock, a drug addict.

January 28, 1978
The Tunix Congress is held in West Berlin. A broad cross section of the left meets to discuss how to proceed after the German Autumn.

February 1, 1978
RAF prisoners held in Holland begin a hunger strike, demanding an end to isolation and bans on visits, free access to literature, and to be flown to a country of their choice.

February 9, 1978
RAF prisoners in Hamburg begin a hunger strike, demanding POW status, association, the return of confiscated writings of Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader, and an independent investigation into the murders of the RAF prisoners.

March 3, 1978
Deutschland im Herbst
(Germany in Autumn), a film examining the events surrounding the Schleyer kidnapping and the Stammheim deaths, with segments by several West German directors, including Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, premieres. The events will thereafter be known as the
Deutscher Herbst
(German Autumn).

March 9, 1978
Former defense attorney Klaus Croissant’s trial begins. Croissant refuses to distance himself from his former clients, but, rather, publicly identifies himself with them ideologically.

March 10–April 2, 1978
RAF prisoners participate in the organization’s sixth collective hunger strike, demanding POW status, association, the release of seriously ill RAF prisoner Günter Sonnenberg, and the end to the psychological warfare against the RAF.

April 26, 1978
The Stuttgart OLG sentences Günter Sonnenberg to two life prison sentences.

May 11, 1978
RAF member Stefan Wisniewski is arrested at Orly Airport in Paris. He is in possession of a letter from RAF prisoner Karl-Heinz Dellwo criticizing the Schleyer kidnapping, along with forty capsules of narcotics for RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock, a drug addict.

June 30, 1978
RAF members, Sieglinde Hofmann, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Rolf Clemens Wagner, and Peter-Jürgen Boock are arrested in Yugoslavia.

July 10, 1978
The Hamburg OLG sentences attorney Kurt Groenewold to two years probation and a fine of 75,000 DM for supporting a criminal organization.

September 6, 1978
RAF member Willi-Peter Stoll is shot dead by police in a Düsseldorf restaurant.

September 15, 1978
Former RAF member Astrid Proll, who has been living under the name of Anna Puttick in London, is arrested by British police. She is extradited less than a year later to West Germany.

September 24, 1978
RAF members Angelika Speitel and Michael Knoll are wounded and arrested in a shoot-out in which police officer Hans-Wilhelm Hansen is killed. RAF member Werner Lotze escapes. Michael Knoll subsequently dies of his injuries.

November 1, 1978
RAF members Rolf Heissler and Adelheid Schulz shoot and kill Dutch border guards Dionysius de Jong and Johannes Goemans at the Kerkade border crossing into Holland.

November 6, 1978
Former RAF prisoner Wolfgang Beer along with supporters Peter Alexa, Mathias Böge, Simone Borgstedde, Ingrid Jakobsmeier, Rosemarie Priess, Helga Roos, and four other people, occupy the offices of DPA, demanding that the newswire run something about the life threatening prison conditions in which Karl-Heinz Dellwo and Werner Hoppe are being held. They are all arrested and sentenced to a year in prison.