"Landshut" -Entführung 1977: Five days in fear of death

Diana Müll's life decided in an airplane door. Martyr Mahmud, the self-proclaimed "Captain," pressed a 19-year-old gun to his temple and began counting to ten. Very slowly. Opposite stood Souhaila Andrawes. "She held a hand grenade in her hand and grinned at me," Müll remembers the day 1977, when she was the first hostage of the hijacked Lufthansa machine die.

With 85 other tourists and five crew members, the young woman from Giessen had been abducted on the return flight from Mallorca. Four Palestinian terrorists had seized flight LH 181 on October 13. They wanted to increase the pressure on Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to release in the exchange for the prisoners of conscience detained by the Red Army Fraction (RAF) Hanns Martin Schleyer.

The events of the fall of the German state still dominate garbage 40 years later. Till this day, she says, tears come to her in a few moments: "I spent the first few years eating in all the stories, then I had to be treated to get it out again." For the first time, she has once again gone through the board door of the Landshut.

Her five-day odyssey was recorded in the book "Mogadishu" together with journalist Christine Bode: "There are many stories about the 'Landshut', but so far no written narrative from the Landshut." For garbage, today 59, it should be a final stroke. The memory of the martyrdom remains.

"Shame is luxury"

In Mallorca, Diana Müll, then beauty queen of the island disco "Graf Zeppelin", had previously spent carefree days. At the end of the season, the disco had invited the title holders of the summer to another holiday. "We participated in the Miss election because we did not have any money, but we heard that there was a bottle of sparkling wine if you joined in. So the evening was saved," says Diana Müll. The journey was on top of that. Today she says: "If I would rather have paid my own beer."

When Captain Mahmud, who is actually Zohair Youssif Akache, threatened Diana with garbage, she should have been home by now, in her new apartment - she had just moved out with her parents. Instead, she was trapped on the plane, flying all over the Middle East.

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31 pictures

Previously, the German left-wing terrorists of the 1970s had attacked state and economic representatives or the US military. "All of a sudden simple holidaymakers in Majorca were affected, that was a shock," says historian Hanno Balz, who has researched the debate on the RAF. Fear and violence marked the days aboard the Landshut. The hostage-takers shouted and made threats, in the meantime handcuffing the passengers and showering them with alcohol (read a log of the events here).

Diana Müll suddenly got her period like many other passengers. "I learned all too soon that shame is a luxury that you can not afford in the face of death and terror," she writes in the book, saying about the scenes described there, "I did not want to detract from the horror" - the The seats were wet, the clothes stuck, the whole plane smelled of urine.

Terrorist release was not an option for the government

The Boeing 737 was out of fuel, stopover in Dubai - after Rome, Cyprus and Bahrain the fourth stop. Terrorist Mahmud had Diana bring garbage: "At first, he asked my friend how old she is, and when she said 16, he let her go." Was age important to him? "Maybe it has to do with the look, so I thought about it for a long time, maybe it was just coincidence," she says. It was only by chance that she got the plane on Mallorca, the door had to be opened again because of the delay.

In the open board door, clearly visible from the outside, the abductor in Dubai began to count. The muzzle of the weapon felt icy cold for garbage. "After a short time, I had a real numbness," she writes. Mahmud negotiated with the tower about refueling. Officially, Dubai's airport had been closed, the "Landshut" not welcome here.

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Mogadishu: The kidnapping of the Landshut and my dramatic liberation

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The German government was unwilling to negotiate with the terror command. "The public already suspected that the wild travel activities of Minister of State Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski were just a distraction maneuver," said historian Balz. "It was extensively reported despite news blackout." The Special Representative appointed by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was only ever to ensure that the respective governments did not accept the terrorists.

Garbage remembers, "I told my girlfriend, I do not think he does that," when it said that the RAF prisoners should be released. In retrospect, Schmidt did not take offense. "You can not do that - the RAF had been in control of Hanns Martin Schleyer for a long time, nobody was exchanged, but hoped", Diana Müll admits, "we already have it".

For Schmidt was after the abduction of the Berlin CDU politician Peter Lorenz is clear: There must be no further exchange of prisoners - State Reason. "At that time, the government lost control, and the release of the prisoners was broadcast live for several hours," says historian Balz. That the RAF got involved in the kidnapping action of the Palestinians, he categorized as "a desperate act and absolute misjudgment."

Last stop Mogadishu

When terrorist Mahmud arrived at nine, Diana concluded her garbage with her life: "I knew I had to make up my mind for the last picture." At ten came the redemption - the tower refueled the machine. Garbage collapsed, fainted. But she lived.

The situation got worse, the Landshut took off with an unknown destination. Great hopes were placed by the Popular Front terrorists for the liberation of Palestine (PFPL) in the socialist brother state of South Yemen; There were training camps of the terrorists there. But when the government blocked the runway in Aden and Captain Jürgen Schumann had to put the machine on a sand track next to it, the kidnappers realized that no place wanted to take them.

Schumann took a tour of the plane and spoke to the Yemeni Air Force chief Ahmed Mansur, as film writer Maurice Philip Remy found out about ten years ago. Therefore, the German captain came back too late. There followed threats and humiliations until kidnapper Mahmud murdered him by the head. For hours Schumann's body lay in the aisle.

With new fuel the machine flew on to Mogadishu. Through its special representative, nicknamed "Ben Wisch", the federal government now negotiated directly with the Somali government, said in addition to police training and financial aid - diplomatically threaded so that later weapons could be purchased, as the historian Tim Geiger found out. Somalia landed the GSG 9.

"Operation Fire Magic": All hostages rescued

Under the leadership of Ulrich Wegener, the then-new special unit sneaked into the night on 18 October 1977 and stormed the plane at 0.05 o'clock. "Head down, where are the pigs?" Shouted the men with the blackened faces and opened the fire. Three of the four hostage-takers died, only Souhaila Andrawes survived injured.

The hostages could all be saved. While still on the plane, Diana Müll was asked if she was one of the beauty queens - the officials had bet on who would free her.

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10 pictures

With the successful hostage rescue of Mogadishu, the "Offensive 77" of the RAF had failed, their attempt to extort imprisoned terrorists. That same night, the RAF leaders Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe committed suicide in the high-security prison Stuttgart-Stammheim, as Ulrike Meinhof had done before. Also on 18 October the abducted Hanns Martin Schleyer was murdered.

Helmut Schmidt said in retrospect, he had the resignation request for the case of failure of the rescue operation already in the desk. He remained chancellor - even though he had acted with news blackout and the investigative measures on the fringes of the constitutional breach. The SPIEGEL headline: "The admired German". Many saw it differently then.

According to historian Balz, for the RAF the hostage liberation meant a military as well as a "revolution-moral" defeat - "it took several years to find one again". At its launch in the early 1970s, the Baader-Meinhof group, which emerged from the student revolt, still found many sympathies with young Germans. After the further radicalization, after the killings of Siegfried Buback and Jürgen Ponto in 1977, after the abduction of Schleyer and the "Landshut" remained almost only the fear of attacks.

"Customers came to see me"

Diana Müll, then a saleswoman in a department store, suffered for a long time under the abduction. "Then the customers came to see me, so I always hid behind the shelf and finally told my boss I had to get out of there." She could not stand it any longer and later became self-employed with a beauty salon. Garbage got help, flies until today mostly with tranquilizers.

When Souhaila Andrawes, arrested in Norway and extradited to Germany, was tried in Hamburg in 1996 for kidnapping, the terror of Diana Müll came to life again: "I sat on a wooden bench in front of the hall, she came to me with two crutches. That's when I told my mother that when she gets closer, I kick the crutches away. "

How the "Landshut" returned to Germany

The "Landshut" is back: The disassembled machine landed on Saturday, September 23, 2017, at Friedrichshafen Airport. In the Dornier Museum you should be able to visit them in the future.

Three survivors of the 1977 "Landshut" deportation : Jürgen Vietor (left) was co-pilot of the aircraft 40 years ago, and Gabriele von Lutzau was Lufthansa's flight attendant and Diana Müll (center) as a passenger on board. Together, they spent five days in dread.

The hull of the "Landshut" was in the retrieval in an Antonov 124, the largest ever produced in series cargo aircraft.

Several thousand onlookers had arrived for the arrival of the machine in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance.

A man photographs the spectacle from the cockpit of the Antonov 124.

In the future, his exhibition will be enriched with one attraction: the Boeing 737-200 will be on display in the David Dornier Museum in Friedrichshafen.

Most recently, the Landshut stood for years on a plane cemetery in Fortaleza, Brazil, and was rotting away.

Two turbines of the "Landshut": The retrieval of the machine was sometimes more difficult than expected.

The empty interior of the machine: In the next two years, the aircraft is to be restored.

On October 13, the beginning of the abduction drama marks the 40th anniversary. For five days, the kidnappers, Palestinian terrorists, held the 86 passengers and the crew.

On October 18, 1977, the German elite unit GSG 9 stormed the "Landshut" at the airport of Mogadishu and freed the hostages, who arrived safely at the Rhein-Main airport in Frankfurt.

Garbage controlled itself. Other survivors broke marriages, and some have alcohol problems. Her book describes garbage as another therapy. "I also did that a bit for my family," she says.

The reunion with the "Landshut" 2017 was easier for Diana Müll. The Federal Foreign Office bought the aircraft, which as a discarded freighter last rotted in Fortaleza for years to exhibit it in Friedrichshafen, Baden-Württemberg. With the "Bild" garbage and other survivors flew to Brazil. On the arrival of the machine on Lake Constance, she was even surprised by the former GSG-9 man who had taken her out of the machine.

Historian Balz warns, however, in front of a "Memorial Disneyland" in the technically oriented Dornier Museum. "There's nothing authentic about the plane except the steel hull," he says. Even Diana Müll could hardly orient herself during her visit to Fortaleza, there were no seats left. But after 40 years, she says, when she walked through the front door for the first time, she got goose bumps.