By DPA
Berlin : Hanns Martin Schleyer had almost reached home when his driver braked hard to avoid a car that cut in front of him and a pushchair that rolled across the other side of the road.
The police escort vehicle following the head of West Germany’s powerful employers’ association did not have time to stop and slammed into the back of Schleyer’s Mercedes. Suddenly a group of terrorists appeared from nowhere and peppered the two cars with bullets from sub-machineguns, killing the industrialist’s chauffeur and his three bodyguards.
Schleyer was uninjured in the ambush, but dragged from his car and help captive for 43 days by the killers, members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), formerly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang.
The attack in the city of Cologne on Sep 5, 1977, triggered events known as the German Autumn which culminated in a plane hijack, the prison suicides of three RAF leaders and Schleyer’s murder.
Thirty years on, the nation is still fascinated by the urban guerrilla movement’s campaign against the then West German state that left 30 people dead during one of the most explosive periods in Germany’s post war history.
Some experts see a comparison to the recent kidnappings of Germans in Iraq and Afghanistan, while others point to the wave of Islamic terrorism that led to the Madrid train bombings in March 2004 and the London underground attacks just over a year later.
There have also been revelations in the past few months that the RAF had planned to abduct West German chancellor Willy Brandt and fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld in the 1970s.
In April, German authorities reopened the investigation into the 1977 murder of federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback after a former RAF terrorist claimed he had new information about the killing.
It has never been made clear who actually shot and killed Buback, or who was responsible for the shooting of Schleyer, whose body was found dumped in the trunk of a car in Mulhouse, France.
One of those convicted in the Buback killing, Christian Klar, remains in prison after his plea for a presidential pardon was turned down in May because he did not show sufficient remorse.
Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who was found guilty as an accomplice, was released on parole in March after serving 24 years of a life sentence. Eva Haule, another convicted terrorist who spent 21 years in jail, followed her to freedom in August.
Founded by Andreas Baader and journalist Ulrike Meinhof in 1970, the RAF grew out of the student protest and anti-Vietnam war movements in the 1960s.
In addition to targeting prominent Germans, the RAF also attacked US military installations and staged a string of bank robberies to finance their activities.
The group had many sympathizers, but only a small “hardcore” who chose to go underground to achieve their political objectives. What they lacked in numbers, they made up for in brutality.
German Nobel Literature Prize laureate Heinrich Boell spoke of a “war” of “six against 60 million citizens” in West Germany.
The RAF’s 1977 campaign of terror “was the greatest domestic challenge in the history of the former Federal Republic of Germany,” according to Wolfgang Kraushaar of the Hamburg Institute of Social Research.
“The history of the RAF also showed that you only need a few terrorists who are prepared to go to any length in order to make a state nervous,” he said.
After Meinhof was captured along with Baader, his girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe in 1972, the group began directing the operations of a second generation of terrorists from their cells on the seventh floor of the fortress-like Stammheim prison near Stuttgart.
“At no time during the RAF campaign did it have as much magnetism as it did in prison,” wrote author Stefan Aust in his seminal work, The Baader Meinhof Complex, which is soon to be turned into a film.
“Only in prison did the group develop the political presence it never possessed before. The extreme security measures gave the prisoners a political meaning they never achieved through their writings and actions,” Aust said.
After Schleyer was seized the RAF tried to blackmail the German government into releasing their leaders and other imprisoned members of their group.
When it became clear the government would not agree to a prisoner exchange, the RAF sought to exert more pressure by hijacking a Lufthansa airliner with the help of Arab sympathizers in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
After a long odyssey through the Arabian Peninsula and the execution-style killing of the plane’s captain, the hijackers and their hostages landed in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.
On Oct 18, a task force of German commandos stormed the Boeing 737, killing three of the hijackers and freeing the passengers.
Hours later, Baader, Ensslin and Raspe were found dead in their cells. The official investigation concluded that they all committed suicide using handguns smuggled into prison by one of their lawyers. Meinhof had hanged herself 17 months earlier.
A day after the suicides, Schleyer’s body was discovered. Months later, it was disclosed that 48 hours after the kidnapping, police located the apartment where he was being held but failed to carry out a search.
Germans will soon find themselves confronted by the dramatic events once more when filming of “The Baader Meinhof Complex” starts at the end of the summer in Berlin.
An earlier courtroom drama about the two-year trial of the RAF leaders, called Stammheim, won the top prize at Berlin’s international film festival in 1986.
The RAF dissolved itself on April 20, 1998. In addition to Klar, who was arrested in 1982 and cannot be released until 2009, another former RAF member remains in prison. She is Birgit Hogefeld, who was given three life sentences in 1996.