The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (9 page)

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Walworth’s theory is his suggestion that the earth’s core may not be a mass of molten iron, as geologists believe. If volcanic activity is caused by the “electrified solar wind” acting upon the earth’s magnetic field and setting up tremendous stresses just below the surface, then presumably the centre of the earth is relatively cool and solid. Presumably science should one day be able to develop “depth sounders” that could prove or disprove this unorthodox notion. As far as the human race is concerned, it would probably be a relief if Walworth proved to be mistaken, since his theory also involves another catastrophic eruption over the next thousand years or so, followed by an ice age that would re-create the conditions that destroyed Atlantis.

3

The Baader-Meinhof Gang

Suicide or Murder?

On the afternoon of Thursday, 13 October 1977, four Palestinians seized control of Lufthansa Flight LH181 as it flew from Majorca to Frankfurt. Two men and two women held the passengers and crew at gunpoint and forced the pilot to change course for Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport. After wiring the aircraft with explosive charges, they issued their demands in the name of the Struggle Against World Imperialism Organization.

Few informed sources were surprised when the Palestinian hijackers’ main demand turned out to be the release of “all German political prisoners”; it was an open secret that Palestinian paramilitary organizations had close links with the left-wing revolutionary terrorists in West Germany. The demand was later reduced to the release of eleven high-ranking members of the Red Army Faction (RAF; generally referred to by the nickname Baader-Meinhof) then in custody in the GDR.

Over the next three days the hijacked jet was flown on to Cyprus and then Dubai to keep the security forces from launching an attack. Then, on Friday, 16 October only hours before the ransom deadline expired, it was flown to Aden in Yemen.

Shortly after landing, the pilot, Jurgen Schumann, asked permission to inspect the front landing gear, which he thought had been damaged by the last touchdown. He checked the gear, found it to be still serviceable, and started to walk back, but on the way he made the mistake of speaking to a group of airport security men. As he re-entered the aircraft he was made to kneel down and was “executed” in front of the other hostages with a shot through the back of the head. Schumann’s body was dumped onto the runway, and the co-pilot was forced to fly them to Mogadishu Airport in Somalia.

As the deadline the terrorists had set for the destruction of the jet approached, the West German government played for time. They
offered to release the eleven prisoners and fly them to Mogadishu to join the Palestinians; they would then be given a substantial sum of money and a jet to fly them wherever they chose. The leader of the hijackers, who called himself Martyr Mahmoud, agreed to extend the deadline to facilitate the arrangements but added, “There must be no tricks. This will not be another Entebbe”.

By “Entebbe” he was referring to a similar hijacking that had taken place a year earlier. An Air France jet had been seized on a flight from Tel Aviv to Paris and had been flown to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. The hijackers, five Arabs and two Germans, had negotiated with the president of Uganda, Idi Amin, demanding the release of fifty-three pro-Palestinian terrorists held in Israel and around the world; these had included two members of the Baader-Meinhof gang and four from the affiliated Second June Movement, imprisoned in West Germany.

Two days later three army transport planes had landed unannounced at Entebbe; several squads of Israeli commandos had poured out onto the runway and gone on to storm both the hijacked jet and the airport’s main building. During the hour’s fighting that ensued, twenty Ugandan soldiers, one Israeli commando, three hostages, and all seven hijackers had been killed. The remaining hostages had been rescued.

Martyr Mahmoud’s misgivings in the case of the Mogadishu hijacking proved justified. At two o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, 18 October the newly formed West German antiterrorist squad, the GSG-9, stormed the hijacked airliner. Lighting an oil drum under the front of the aircraft to distract the terrorists, they forced the rear emergency exits and tossed in stun grenades. In the resulting confusion they engaged the hijackers in gunfire over the heads of the crouching passengers. Within minutes three of the terrorists were dead, including the leader, and the fourth was badly wounded. This time only one of the ninety hostages was hurt in the cross fire, and the GSG-9 squad suffered no casualties.

The Mogadishu hijack was the third attempt within a year to force the German authorities to free members of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Entebbe had been the first. The second had occurred five weeks before the Mogadishu incident. On 5 September 1977, a sixty-one-year-old German industrialist, Dr Hans-Martin Schleyer, had been kidnapped in Cologne by the RAF; his driver was killed by submachine gun fire; so were three armed guards who were driving immediately behind him. His ransom demand included the same eleven RAF members later demanded by the Mogadishu hijackers. (In fact, both ransom notes proved to have been written on the same typewriter.)

The Mogadishu hijack ended at 2:15 on the morning of Tuesday, 18 October 1977. Shortly after 7:30 the same morning, guards at Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart, West Germany, began to take breakfast around to the prisoners in the seventh-floor cells. Baader-Meinhof terrorist Jan-Carl Raspe, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of four American soldiers in a bombing incident, was found propped up in bed with a bullet wound in his head. He was still alive but died a few hours later. Three cells away, Andreas Baader, the leader of the gang, was found dead with a gun lying beside him. Gudrun Ensslin, Baader’s mistress, was found hanging from the barred window of her cell. The fourth RAF terrorist, Irmgard Moller, was found lying in bed with four stab wounds in her chest. She underwent emergency surgery and survived.

That evening the West German minister of justice, Traugott Bender, announced that the three RAF leaders were dead and that a fourth was seriously ill. They had apparently entered into a suicide pact when the news from Mogadishu had made it plain that they had no immediate hope of release. And although Bender insisted that there was no suspicion of foul play, most of the world press took the view that the terrorists had been “executed” to circumvent further hijackings or kidnappings. In fact, Schleyer was murdered by his kidnappers a few hours later – they shot him three times in the head and cut his throat – and his body was found in a car trunk in Mulhouse, France, the next day.

The Baader-Meinhof story, which ended so abruptly that October morning in 1977, began in the late sixties, with the death of a student named Benno Ohnesorg, who was shot by a West Berlin policeman in a protest demonstration against the visit of the shah of Iran. This event soured the whole tone of political debate in Germany. The sixties had been marked by left-wing protest – against the atom bomb, against the Vietnam War, against capitalism in general – but it had remained basically peaceful.

Ohnesorg’s killer, Detective Sergeant Kurras, was tried on a manslaughter charge seven months later but was acquitted on a plea that the heat of events at the protest had affected his judgment. The radical Left was incensed by the verdict, which confirmed their view that Germany was still a fascist state. On the day after the shooting, Gudrun Ensslin, a tall, attractive blond dressed in the habitual black sweater and jeans of the revolutionary Left, addressed a meeting of the Socialist German Students Union (SDS) in Berlin. Shrilly emotional to the point of tears, she insisted that the “fascist state” was out to kill them all. It was stupid
to aim for a peaceful resolution, she told them; in order to survive they would have to fight violence with violence: “It’s the generation of Auschwitz – you can’t argue with them”!

Ensslin, born in 1940, was the daughter of an Evangelical pastor who was also a Communist. She had studied philosophy at Tübingen, then moved to Berlin with the left-wing writer Bernward Vesper, with whom she had a son.

In 1967, not long after her impassioned address to the German students, Ensslin met a good-looking, dark-eyed young man named Andreas Baader at a demonstration. At the time Baader was living with – and off – a female action painter named Elly Michell, who bore him a daughter. But this did not prevent him from spending the night with Gudrun Ensslin, who had recently acted in a porno movie called
Das Abonnement
(Subscription).

Baader was entirely without political convictions; he was more interested in fast cars and women. But his own lack of money and success made him an easy convert to the notion that society was rotten and could be improved only by bloody revolution. He deserted his action painter, Ensslin deserted her writer-lover, and together they moved to Frankfurt, where the leftist student movement operated on a more sophisticated level than its Berlin counterpart. Ensslin tended to do the talking at the meetings while Baader, still out of his depth, maintained a tough but silent image. Ensslin was very much the intellectually dominant partner and referred to Baader as her “baby”.

It was soon decided, however, that action must replace words. On 2 April 1968, Baader and Ensslin entered the Schneider department store just before closing time. They exited shortly, leaving behind their shopping bags. At midnight fire broke out on three floors but was soon put out by the fire brigade. The following evening Baader and Ensslin were arrested at the apartment of a friend – the police spoke of a “concrete denunciation” – and identified by employees at the department store. Two other militants – Thorwald Proll and Horst Sohnlein – who at the same time had planted a bomb that failed to go off in another department store were also arrested. All four were sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for arson. At the trial Ensslin declared, “We don’t care about burned mattresses. We are worried about burned children in Vietnam”.

Fourteen months later all four were released pending the outcome of an appeal. They now discovered that they had become heroes within extreme-Left circles. When the time came to hear the appeal-court verdict, only Sohnlein turned up; the others – Baader, Ensslin, and Proll
– had fled to Switzerland. They returned secretly in 1970, and in April of that year Baader was arrested as he was on his way to dig up a cache of arms hidden in a cemetery. This time he was sent to Tegel Prison in West Berlin.

There he was visited by a well-known left-wing journalist named Ulrike Meinhof, who had covered the arson trial and interviewed Ensslin and Baader at the time. In a subsequent article she had stated: “It is better to burn a department store than to own one”.

At thirty-six – nine years Baader’s senior – the divorced Ulrike was something of a celebrity; she had written plays for radio and television, was a popular talk-show guest, and was the mother of twin daughters. In recent years, while lecturing part-time at Berlin’s Free University, she had become increasingly involved in extreme-Left student groups. Her apartment was frequently used for their meetings, and these were often attended by associates of Baader and Ensslin. Among these was Horst Mahler, Baader’s defense lawyer and the founder of the RAF. (Baader had been in Mahler’s car when arrested.) It was Mahler, together with the still-fugitive Ensslin, who convinced Meinhof to help in a plan to free Baader.

The authorities had given Baader permission to write a book on maladjusted juveniles and to conduct his research at the German Institute for Social Questions in the West Berlin suburb of Dahlem – a concession that hardly seems to support Ensslin’s assertion that they were confronting a ruthless fascist state.

Another member of the rescue group, Peter Homann, later claimed that no political motive was behind the plan. Gudrun Ensslin desperately wanted her “baby” back, and the others wanted to help her, that was all. It was only later, when they were all on the run, that the idea of becoming full-time revolutionary terrorists seems to have occurred to them, partly through the logic of necessity.

On 14 May 1970, Ulrike Meinhof walked into the German Institute for Social Questions. The librarian who opened the door told her it was closed that morning. Meinhof replied that she already knew this; she had been given permission to work with Andreas Baader on his book. Since she was a well-known journalist, the librarian took her word for it. Baader was brought in and his handcuffs removed. Soon the doorbell rang again, and two young women entered, explaining that they needed to do some research. Moments later a masked man rushed into the room waving a gun; the two women produced guns from their bags, and in the gunfire that followed – mostly aimed at the floor – Baader and Meinhof leapt from a window and into an Alfa Romeo, driven by Thorwald
Proll’s sister, Astrid. A librarian had been seriously wounded in the gunfire.

Mahler now arranged for the group – which included Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin, and himself – to escape from Germany to the Middle East, where they were trained in terrorist tactics by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). It was at this point that they decided to call their movement the Red Army Faction, after the Japanese Red Army terrorist group.

Back in Germany, Mahler organized bank raids to finance the movement. Mahler himself was arrested in October 1970. In May 1972 the RAF planted bombs at the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Army Corps in Frankfurt, killing a colonel and injuring thirteen others. Damage was estimated at more than a million dollars. An anonymous phone call stated that the bombing was in retaliation for Vietnam. The following day suitcases containing time bombs exploded in the police station in Augsburg, Bavaria, injuring five policemen. Three days later the wife of a judge was injured by a car bomb in Karlsruhe. On 19 May, two time bombs exploded in the offices of the right-wing publishing house of Springer in Hamburg. And on 25 May 1972, bomb explosions at the American army base in Heidelberg killed three and injured five.