German Autumn

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "German Autumn" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

German Autumn
Part of the Cold War
Date 5 September – 18 October 1977 Location West Germany, Somalia, other countries Result West German victory
Belligerents
West Germany	Red Army Faction Revolutionary Cells  Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Commanders and leaders
Helmut Schmidt H.-J. Wischnewski Ulrich Wegener	Andreas Baader  † Gudrun Ensslin  † Jan-Carl Raspe  † Zohair Y. Akache  †
Casualties and losses
7 dead, 4 injured

The German Autumn (German: Deutscher Herbst) refers to the period and political atmosphere in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) during September and October 1977. This period was marked by a series of attacks by the Red Army Faction (RAF), a far-left militant group designated as a terrorist organization by the West German government. The German Autumn included the kidnapping and murder of German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181, and the suicides of the imprisoned leading members of the first generation of the RAF. These events represented the final act of the RAF's so-called "Offensive 77". The German Autumn is considered one of the most serious crises in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The term "German Autumn" is derived from the 1978 film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), a collage of several documentaries by eleven directors of the "New German Cinema." The film critically examines the state's reaction to terrorism from different perspectives.^[1]

In 1977, the activities of the so-called second generation of the RAF reached their peak. However, the events before September are generally not considered to be part of the German Autumn.

On 7 April 1977, the Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback, his driver Wolfgang Göbel, and the head of the Federal Prosecutor's Office's motor pool, Georg Wurster, were shot dead in their car by the RAF's "Ulrike Meinhof Commando" (Kommando Ulrike Meinhof) from a motorcycle in Karlsruhe.

On 30 July 1977, Jürgen Ponto, the spokesman for the board of Dresdner Bank AG, was murdered in a failed kidnapping attempt. RAF member Susanne Albrecht, who knew Ponto personally, visited him accompanied by Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar. Unaware of Albrecht's political radicalization, Ponto received her unsuspectingly at his private home on Oberhöchstadter Strasse in Oberursel. When Ponto resisted the kidnapping, Klar and Mohnhaupt shot him several times, fatally wounding him. The three then fled in the getaway car driven by Peter-Jürgen Boock, which was waiting in front of Pontos' villa.^[2]

On 25 August 1977, an attack on the Federal Prosecutor's Office building in Karlsruhe failed.

On 5 September 1977, the President of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations (Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände, BDA) and the Federation of German Industries (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie, BDI), Hanns Martin Schleyer, was kidnapped in Cologne. His driver and three police officers were murdered.^[3] The kidnappers demanded the release of eleven imprisoned RAF terrorists.

As the German government did not give in to the blackmail—unlike with the kidnapping of Peter Lorenz two years earlier—terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), allied with the Red Army Faction (RAF), tried to increase the pressure by hijacking the Lufthansa plane "Landshut" on 13 October 1977. After an odyssey through the Middle East and the murder of the pilot, Captain Jürgen Schumann, the plane landed at Mogadishu International Airport, the capital of Somalia. Here, the Landshut was stormed by the West German counter-terrorism unit GSG 9 on 18 October at around 00:05 Central European Time (CET). Later that morning, a special report on Deutschlandfunk announced that "all hostages have been freed. We do not yet know whether there were any dead or injured among them..." All 87 hostages were rescued, including four of the five crew members. Three of the hijackers were killed and one hijacker was seriously wounded.^[4]

Shortly afterward, in the early morning hours of 18 October 1977, known as the "Night of death in Stammheim", RAF members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, who were imprisoned in Stuttgart-Stammheim supermax prison, reportedly took their own lives. Irmgard Möller, who was also imprisoned there, survived an alleged suicide attempt,^[5] sustaining multiple stab wounds to her chest.^[6] The kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer was subsequently murdered by his captors. His body was found on the evening of 19 October in the trunk of a green Audi 100 GL, parked on a side street in Mulhouse, Alsace, France, close to the German and Swiss border.

During the German Autumn, West German political parties engaged in heated arguments. The opposition, comprising the center-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU), suspected that the ruling social-liberal coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) under Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD) was ideologically close to the terrorists. In response, the coalition accused the opposition of hysterical overreactions and of attempting to transform the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) into a police state.^[7]

Despite these differences, at the beginning of the Schleyer kidnapping, Chancellor Schmidt convened the so-called Great Crisis Committee (Großer Krisenstab), which included members of all parliamentary groups in the West German Bundestag. Historian Wolfgang Kraushaar later described this period as an "undeclared state of emergency" (state of exception). One result of the cross-party consensus was the "Contact Ban Act" (Kontaktsperre) passed in the autumn of 1977, which allowed for a contact ban for prisoners, including discussions with lawyers.^[8] SPD politician and lawyer Hubert Weber welcomed this act, stating that "The Federal Republic is not in a state of emergency," and thus it was wrong for the courts to strain the legal definition of an emergency.^[9] Additionally, the Code of Criminal Procedure (Strafprozessordnung) was amended to limit defendants to appoint a maximum of three defense attorneys.

• Eager, Paige Whaley (2008). From Freedom Fighters to Terrorists: Women and Political Violence. Aldershot, England & Burlington, VT: Ashgate. doi:10.4324/9781315583358. ISBN 9780754672258.
• Geronimo (2012). Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement. Translated by Kuhn, Gabriel. Oakland, CA: PM Press. ISBN 9781604860979. Originally published as Feuer und Flamme. Zur Geschichte der Autonomen (in German). Berlin & Amsterdam: Edition ID-Archiv. 1990. ISBN 9783894080044.
• Goldsmith, Melissa Ursula Dawn (16 December 2002). "Montage, Music and Memory: Remembering Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978)". Kinoeye. 2 (20). ISSN 1475-2441. Archived from the original on 2003-08-26.
• Herf, Jeffrey (Fall 2008). "An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany". Telos (144): 8–37. ISSN 0090-6514. Archived from the original on 2021-10-05.
• Kielmansegg, Peter Graf (2000). Nach der Katastrophe. Eine Geschichte des geteilten Deutschlands. Berlin: Siedler. ISBN 9783886803293.
• Möller, Irmgard (1992-05-17). "Irmgard Möller "Ich will nicht anders leben"" [Irmgard Möller "I don't want to live any other way"]. Der Spiegel (Interview) (in German). Interviewed by Manfred Ertel; Bruno Schrep. Hamburg: SPIEGEL-Verlag Rudolf Augstein. Retrieved 2024-09-17.
• "Red Roses from Roter Morgen". Time. Vol. 110, no. 7. 15 August 1977. Archived from the original on 2021-10-05.
• Smith, J.; Moncourt, André (2008). Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win: The Red Army Faction's 1977 Campaign of Desperation. Oakland, CA: PM Press. ISBN 9781604860283.
• Usselmann, Rainer (Spring 2002). "18. Oktober 1977: Gerhard Richter's Work of Mourning and Its New Audience" (PDF). Art Journal. 61 (1): 4–25. doi:10.1080/00043249.2002.10792104. JSTOR 778164. S2CID 191489383. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2021-10-05.
• Stubbe da Luz, Helmut (19 April 2022). Extreme Situationen, schnelle Entscheidungen: Helmut Schmidt gegen Sturmflut und RAF-Terror. Edition Falkenberg. ISBN 9783954942657. Retrieved 2 August 2024.

• 1977: the German Autumn Chronology of the main events, statements by the RAF