The German Autumn

 

Part I: The Children of ‘68

Listen, and I’ll tell you about the year 1977, when terror wore a human face and flew across the Mediterranean on wings of steel and desperation. But first, you need to understand something about the 1970s—that decade when the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams like a cheap suit bought on credit.

Everywhere you looked, there were angry young people with guns and manifestos. In Palestine, they called themselves the PFLP. In Ireland, the IRA. Spain had ETA, fighting for the Basques. Italy had the Red Brigades, who would later drag Aldo Moro from his car like a sack of potatoes and pump him full of bullets. And in Japan—Jesus Christ, in Japan—there was Fusako Shigenobu and her Japanese Red Army, proving that revolutionary rage knew no borders.

But this story is about Germany. West Germany, to be specific. The good Germany, the democratic one, the one that was supposed to have learned its lesson.

They called themselves the Red Army Faction, though the newspapers preferred “Baader-Meinhof Gang,” after two of their founders. Andreas Baader was a pretty boy with dead eyes and a taste for fast cars. Gudrun Ensslin was his lover, burning with the kind of righteous fury that could set the world on fire—and nearly did. And then there was Ulrike Meinhof, the journalist turned terrorist, the one who should have known better.

These were the children of Nazis, you see. The sons and daughters of the generation that had cheered Hitler, that had looked the other way when the trains rolled east with their human cargo. And that knowledge ate at them like acid. They looked at their parents’ comfortable homes, their Mercedes sedans, their fat bellies and selective memories, and they hated. God, how they hated.

In 1968, when the students took to the streets, these kids decided that marching wasn’t enough. They wanted blood. They wanted revolution. They wanted to burn down the whole rotten structure and start over.

So they made bombs. They robbed banks. They killed.

The West German government, led by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt—a man with all the warm charm of a Prussian drill sergeant—refused to bend. No negotiation. No mercy. Just the iron fist in the iron glove.

And that’s when things got interesting. Because the RAF went shopping for allies, and they found them in a Palestinian doctor named Wadie Haddad.

Part II: The Doctor’s Prescription

Haddad was a piece of work, let me tell you. Born in Safed, fled to Lebanon in ‘48 when the whole Middle East went up like a Roman candle. Christian by birth, Marxist by choice, terrorist by profession. He had a medical degree and a taste for spectacular violence—aircraft hijackings were his specialty, his art form.

In 1970, the RAF’s founding members broke out of jail and ran like rabbits all the way to Jordan, where Haddad’s PFLP ran training camps for would-be revolutionaries. There, in the desert heat, these German kids learned to field-strip Kalashnikovs and dream of bringing the war home.

And oh, they brought it home, alright.

1977 was the year it all came to a head. April 7th, Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback—former Nazi, current pain in the RAF’s ass—was stopped at a red light in Karlsruhe when a motorcycle pulled up alongside his Mercedes. The prosecutor, his driver, and his bodyguard never saw the next green light. The RAF had a policy, you see: they didn’t kill civilians. Just symbols of power. Just the right people, in their twisted calculus.

July 30th brought the murder of Jürgen Ponto, a banker who made the mistake of being home when his goddaughter—a RAF member—came calling with two friends and a gun.

Then September 5th. Hanns Martin Schleyer, former SS officer turned captain of industry, president of the German Employers’ Association. They took him in broad daylight, killed four men in a hail of automatic weapons fire, and spirited him away to a hidden cell where he would wait, and hope, and eventually die.

But the RAF couldn’t do this alone. For the grand finale, they needed their friends from the Middle East.

They needed Haddad.

Part III: Landshut

The Boeing 737 was seven years old in October 1977, wearing its age well, named Landshut after some Bavarian town most of the passengers had never visited. On Thursday the 13th—and yes, it was a Thursday the 13th, because this world has a sick sense of humor—it lifted off from Palma de Mallorca with 86 souls aboard, mostly German tourists with sunburns and souvenir keychains, heading home to Frankfurt.

Thirty minutes into the flight, four people who weren’t who they seemed to be stood up with guns.

The leader called himself Captain Martyr Mahmud, though his real name was Zohair Youssif Akache, and he was Palestinian and he was serious. With him: Suhaila Sayeh, another Palestinian; Wabil Harb and Hind Alameh, both Lebanese. They called themselves Commando Martyr Halimah, after some dead hero whose name meant nothing to the terrified tourists suddenly staring down the barrel of revolutionary justice.

“He pointed his pistol at Jürgen Schumann’s head and kicked me in the ribs,” co-pilot Jürgen Vietor would later recall, and you could hear the echo of that kick in his voice years later, the way trauma has of never really leaving, just waiting in the dark corners of your mind like a patient spider. “ ‘Out! Out! Out!’ ”

Captain Schumann was at the controls. Mahmud wanted him to fly. Mahmud wanted a lot of things: eleven RAF members released from German prisons, two Palestinians from Turkish jails, fifteen million dollars in ransom. Small demands, really, for 91 lives.

Landshut became a flying prison, bouncing from city to city like a steel ball in a pinball machine designed by a sadistic god. Rome first—the Italians refueled them and waved goodbye, wanting no part of Germany’s nightmare. Then Cyprus, where the PLO tried to negotiate and Mahmud told them, in so many words, to go to hell. His war, his rules.

Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad—all said no. Doors closed. Wheels up. Keep flying, Captain. Keep flying or die.

Bahrain let them land in the predawn hours of October 14th, but only briefly. Then Dubai, where the real horror began.

Part IV: The Oven

Two days on the tarmac in Dubai, under the desert sun that turned the 737’s aluminum skin into a griddle and the cabin into something approximating hell. No food. No water. The chemical toilets overflowing. The passengers—German tourists who’d just wanted some sun and sangria—slowly cooking in their own fear and sweat.

Captain Schumann was brave. Too brave, maybe. He asked to inspect the landing gear, stepped out for a smoke, and dropped a cigarette pack on the tarmac. Inside: notes, intelligence, anything that might help the German authorities understand what they were dealing with.

The hijackers, sloppy with heat and exhaustion, opened the doors. Photographers with telephoto lenses captured it all from a safe distance, the way we always document disaster when we’re not the ones living through it.

Then came Aden, South Yemen, where the runway was blocked and Landshut had to land on sand like some wounded bird seeking refuge in the wrong nest.

Mahmud let Schumann out to check the plane. But when the captain took too long, suspicion bloomed like a poison flower in Mahmud’s mind. And when Schumann climbed back aboard, Mahmud shot him in front of everyone.

Some deaths are private. This one was public, intimate, obscene. The passengers watched their captain die, and they knew—really knew—that they might be next.

Co-pilot Vietor took the controls. Mahmud offered him freedom: fly us to Mogadishu, then go. But Vietor stayed. Some men discover their courage in the strangest places.

Part V: Mogadishu

The Somali capital didn’t want them. According to The New York Times, the government refused landing rights—until Landshut appeared in their airspace anyway, a flying crisis they couldn’t ignore.

On the ground in Mogadishu, the endgame began.

Mahmud and his crew doused the passengers with alcohol. “You’ll burn better,” they said, and Jesus Christ, can you imagine? Can you imagine sitting there, reeking of duty-free booze, knowing that in a few hours you might become a human torch, a political statement made flesh and flame?

One flight attendant managed to radio the tower: “We know this is the end.”

But outside, in the Somali darkness, something else was stirring.

Part VI: Fire Magic

Operation Feuerzauber—Fire Magic. The Germans have a word for everything, even for the impossible.

GSG 9, West Germany’s elite counterterrorism unit, formed after the Munich Olympics massacre of ‘72 when the whole world watched Israeli athletes die on live television. This was their moment. Their test. Their chance to prove that the good guys could win.

Two British SAS operators came along, bringing stun grenades—magical little devices that could turn a room into temporary hell, all light and sound and confusion. And the Somalis provided a distraction, bless them.

The negotiators lied. They said the RAF prisoners were being released. Stalled for time. And at exactly 12:05 AM on October 18th, while Mahmud was distracted by a fire lit in front of the plane, the commandos struck.

Three seconds to breach the door. Explosives, stun grenades, then the GSG 9 operators pouring through like avenging angels. Six seconds of blindness for the hijackers. Six seconds that felt like six hours.

When it was over—and it was over fast—three hijackers were dead, including Mahmud. The fourth critically wounded. All 86 hostages alive. One GSG 9 operator slightly injured. One flight attendant with minor wounds.

The mission commander radioed a single word: “Frühlingszeit!” Springtime.

Victory, right? Happy ending?

Wrong.

Part VII: Stammheim

Because while the hostages were being freed, while the world was cheering, while GSG 9 was becoming legendary, something else was happening in Stammheim Prison back in Germany.

October 18th, 1977. Morning. Andreas Baader in a pool of blood, bullet in his brain. Gudrun Ensslin hanging from a window grating. Jan-Carl Raspe shot dead. Irmgard Möller stabbed but alive.

The government called it coordinated suicide. The left called it murder.

And you know what? Forty-some years later, we still don’t know the truth. Maybe we never will. Maybe the truth died with them in those cells, or maybe it’s buried in some classified file that’ll stay locked until everyone who cares is dead and buried too.

But here’s what we do know: weapons in a high-security prison. No fingerprints on the guns. Total isolation, yet perfect coordination. And Möller, the survivor, insisting until her dying day that she didn’t try to kill herself, that they were murdered.

Believe what you want. Truth is subjective. Death is not.

Part VIII: The Trunk

For the RAF members still free, still fighting, their leaders’ deaths meant one thing: betrayal. The hostage exchange was dead. Which meant Hanns Martin Schleyer, former SS officer, current captive, was worthless now.

So they killed him.

They put a bullet in his head and stuffed him in the trunk of a green Audi—German efficiency to the last—and abandoned the car in Mulhouse, France. Tempo magazine reported it on November 5th. By then, the German Autumn was over. By then, everyone was exhausted, horrified, numb.

The most intense phase of West Germany’s domestic terror war had ended. Not with a bang or a whimper, but with the smell of a corpse in a car trunk, discovered by some French cop who’d just wanted to get through his shift.

Epilogue: Memory

Landshut flew for years after Mogadishu. They repaired her, put her back in service, like maybe regular flights and regular passengers could cleanse the memory of those five days in October. Like maybe she could forget.

But machines don’t forget any more than people do. In 2008, she was retired to Fortaleza, Brazil, left to rust and decay in the tropical heat, slowly being reclaimed by nature and time.

Then in 2017—forty years later, a full generation, long enough for the survivors’ children to have children of their own—Germany bought her back. Brought her home. Not as a trophy, but as a reminder.

“To this day, the rescue of Landshut remains a living symbol of a free society that cannot be defeated by fear and terror,” Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said.

Pretty words. True words, maybe.

But I think about those passengers sometimes, the ones who survived Mogadishu. I wonder if they still fly. I wonder if they still trust the person sitting next to them on airplanes. I wonder what they hear when they close their eyes at night—the roar of engines, the crack of gunfire, Mahmud’s voice screaming orders in broken German.

I wonder if they ever really came home at all.

Because here’s the thing about terror: it doesn’t end when the guns stop firing. It lives on in the survivors, in the children who grew up without fathers, in the nightmares that come decades later without warning. It lives in the spaces between what we remember and what we forget, what we know and what we suspect.

The German Autumn ended in October 1977.

But for some people, it never ended at all.

And maybe that’s the real horror—not the hijacking, not the murders, not even the unanswered questions about Stammheim.

The real horror is that terror works. It changes us. It makes us afraid. And fear, once planted, grows in the dark like mushrooms in a cellar, feeding on whatever it can find.

Landshut is in a museum now, a monument to courage and survival.

But the terror?

The terror is still flying.