RAF suicides in custody: Stammheim's night of death

The skyscraper with the folded facade looks strangely distant from the surroundings. Suddenly it looms behind a cozy residential area, lush pastures all around. Secluded, isolated - the Stuttgart correctional facility on the outskirts of the Stammheim district. "Hygiene, security of the supervisory staff and security against breakouts are perfect," explained the "Abendschau" reporter on September 17, 1963, the day after the prison was handed over. At that time, the JVA Stuttgart was Germany's most modern and most expensive prison.

In fact, it should cost the state dearly.

When law enforcement officers unlocked the cells on the seventh floor at about eight in the morning on October 18, 1977, they discovered four RAF prisoners who had been killed or seriously injured. In cell 716 Jan-Carl Raspe sat slumped on his bed, bleeding from a bullet wound in his head, he died a few hours later. In cell 719, Andreas Baader was dead on the floor with a gunshot wound in the neck, Gudrun Ensslin had hanged himself in the neighboring cell 720 with a loudspeaker cable on the window cross. Irmgard Möller lay in cell 725 on her bed with severe stab wounds in the chest, she was the only one to survive.

"Did you say shot?"

Horst Bubeck, then deputy prison officer, informed the judge Eberhard Foth by phone. "Did you say shot?" Asked the boy, completely stunned. "It seemed very impossible to me that the prisoners shoot themselves with guns in the correctional facility," Foth later recalled in a TV interview.

To date, the JVA Stuttgart was considered the safest prison in Germany, the seventh floor occupied by the terrorists as a jail in jail. The public was shocked: How could the prisoners get their arms under strict surveillance? And how do you agree on a common suicide despite being blocked?

There was a radio in the cell of the skilled Raspe. The prisoners had so short-circuited the intercoms to the prison staff that they could talk to each other from cell to cell. The investigators reconstructed that Raspe heard the news of the liberation of the hijacked Lufthansa aircraft "Landshut" in Mogadishu shortly after midnight and had informed his fellow prisoners about the manipulated system. The imprisoned terrorists had already announced their common suicide to their accomplices several times outside - this time they did.

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In addition to the weapons, the investigators also discovered explosives in the cells. The weapons, they concluded, had smuggled lawyers into the detention center: they had dismantled the accomplices in freedom and hidden the items in cavities that were cut into the RAF defenders' files - the only item that had not been subjected to close inspection.

Little by little it became clear that the RAF prisoners were instrumental in planning the assassinations of "Offensive 77": Brigitte Mohnhaupt, one of the leading minds of the second generation, had the last months of a four-year sentence on the 7th floor of the prison together with Baader, Ensslin and Raspe - and had been instructed extensively by them.

Legend of the state murder

The security precautions were waste overnight. The Stuttgart flagship suddenly appeared as "Swiss cheese made of concrete", as journalist Stefan Aust put it.

Irmgard Möller recovered from her stab wounds in the correctional hospital on Hohenasperg at the end of October 1977. Because of the acute risk of suicide, she was guarded by a law enforcement officer in the room, with the door of the cell always open. Peter Jesse, then 19, was sitting in front of her hospital room. He started his training as a prison officer on April 1, 1977. Guarding Möller's hospital room was his first direct contact with the RAF.

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On one of these days the call from outside came through an open window "Irmgard, we love you. Keep it up!" - "That spinner," Möller murmured. Jesse laughs incredulously when he remembers it. Today he is 59 years old and has been the prison's executive officer for 17 years.

Möller always claimed that the state executed her fellow prisoners - no more than a legend of the left-wing radical scene. Even more plausible is the thesis of suicide under state supervision: Stefan Aust was able to view files from the State Criminal Police Office in Baden-Württemberg, according to which secret service technicians installed microphones in two visitor cells at the JVA Stuttgart in March 1975. Accordingly, three additional cells were bugged in May. There is also evidence of built-in microphones in cells 718 and 719 - Ulrike Meinhof lived in cell 719 until her suicide on May 9, 1976, afterwards Andreas Baader.

What did the authorities really know?

Some things still seem puzzling, unclear or unbelievable. If the cells were actually bugged: didn't the state listen in the hot phase of "German Autumn" when it was a matter of life and death for the kidnapped employer president Hanns Martin Schleyer and for the 91 hostages of the "Landshut"?

The night of death of Stammheim sealed the myth of the JVA Stuttgart. Terror cell, solitary confinement, judicial scandal - these catchphrases continue to have an effect today. The myth also shaped the second generation of the RAF and led the JVA Stuttgart to further inmates:

• The group of RAF members and supporters around Siegfried Haag, Roland Mayer, Arndt Müller and Achim Newerla, which the federal prosecutor called "Mayer-Haag Bande": Haag had defended Andreas Baader and Holger Meins. Deeply horrified by the starvation of mine, he plunged into illegality and recruited members of the second generation of the RAF. He is said to have been involved in the planning of the attack on the German embassy in Stockholm. When he was arrested in November 1976, the investigators found weapons and encrypted notes on the attack on Siegfried Buback, on the planned kidnapping of Jürgen Ponto and Schleyer.
• Verena Becker and Sieglinde Hofmann: When Becker was arrested in May 1977, the weapon was found with which Federal Attorney General Siegfried Buback and his companions Wolfgang Göbel and Georg Wurster were shot. Hofmann was involved in the kidnapping of Schleyer and in 1979 on the attack on NATO commander-in-chief Alexander Haig and was arrested in 1980.
• Adelheid Schulz and Brigitte Mohnhaupt: Both were involved in the planning and execution of "Offensive 77". They were arrested together in 1982 when they tried to dig an RAF depot with weapons and false documents.

Peter Jesse has seen them all. As a law enforcement officer in Stuttgart, he looked after her from 1979 to 1984 and accompanied numerous terrorists to court hearings. In their manners, the second generation of the RAF was hardly inferior to its predecessors: the prisoners were taciturn and dismissive - unless they wanted something. "If objects were not returned to their original location during detention room checks, there were loud protests," said Jesse.

In the video: SPIEGEL editor Michael Sontheimer about the "German Autumn" 1977:

Video

THE MIRROR

After the suicide of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe, conversions were to remove all hiding places: the cell floors were poured out, the walls were provided with hard plaster, skirting boards were torn out. The toilet and sink made of stainless steel without cavities and beds made of all-plastic were installed, too heavy to move.

Communication within the group, however, could hardly be prevented. "The flow of information continued to go through the lawyers," says Jesse, for example the transmission of information and demands from the other prisoners; the peer pressure was sometimes clearly noticeable. When Jesse reminded one of the prisoners that the visits to the lawyer were voluntary and that he did not have to go there, the latter waved them away: That was required.

Welcome kick in the abdomen

The RAF continued to maintain its paranoia: "Meals such as creamy dessert variants were often not accepted because they suspected that psychopharmaceuticals had been added," said Jesse. After all, if Ulrike Meinhof had entered the prison service manager Horst Bubeck as a greeting on arrival at the correctional facility, there were no assaults against the officials during Jesse's service.

The inmates tried several times to play their old trump card: With short explanations to the prison officers, they announced a hunger strike and immediately gave up their meals. But the campaigns never had as much impact as in 1974, when Holger Meins died of the consequences.

Nevertheless, they were nerve-wracking, especially for those involved - especially when the prisoners had to be force-fed: "We were viliously insulted as 'Eyrich's henchmen' and 'murderers'," says Jesse (Heinz Eyrich was then Minister of Justice of Baden-Württemberg). Force-feeding, a painful, controversial procedure, was abolished in the 1980s. Today, it is only carried out when the patient can no longer decide about himself.

Siegfried Haag, Adelheid Schulz, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Sieglinde Hofmann and numerous other former RAF terrorists have been released or pardoned in recent years and plunged into a mostly inconspicuous life. The seventh floor of the JVA Stuttgart is no longer a terror floor. Ordinary detainees are sitting here today.

The detention center is getting on in years, and a new building has been under construction right next door since 2016. The history-laden building was to be demolished - but because Baden-Württemberg's prisons are overcrowded, the RAF high-rise must remain for the time being. Together with the new building, there would be space for over 1,100 prisoners, making the JVA Stuttgart the largest prison in the country. The "Stuttgarter Nachrichten" praised the new building with well-known superlatives: "Stuttgart is building the super jail."