It is the morning of October 18, 1977, shortly before eight. Guards at the Stammheim prison in Stuttgart are distributing breakfast. They open cell number 719 – and on the floor lies Andreas Baader in a pool of blood. Next door, in cell 716, Gudrun Ensslin hangs from the window grille. In another cell, Jan-Carl Raspe sits leaning against the wall with a gunshot wound to the head, still breathing. Irmgard Möller is bleeding from four stab wounds to the chest. Only she survives. And to the end she will claim one thing: "It was not suicide."
A love that set Germany on fire
To understand why that night still sends chills down spines, we must go back ten years. To 1967, when two people met in West Berlin who did not belong together at all – and yet could no longer do without each other.
Gudrun Ensslin was the daughter of a Protestant pastor from Swabia. A bright, educated student of German studies, engaged to the publisher Bernward Vesper, with whom she had a small son, Felix. Andreas Baader was the exact opposite: a restless kid from Munich without a completed education, a petty criminal, a seducer in a leather jacket who loved fast cars and grand gestures. Ensslin left her fiancé and child for him.
In April 1968, together they set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt am Main as a protest against the Vietnam War. When Baader was arrested in 1970, he was freed from a guarded visit at a Berlin library by an armed group that included Ensslin and the well-known journalist Ulrike Meinhof. That day the Red Army Faction – RAF – was born. The press began calling them "Bonnie and Clyde," and an entire generation of young Germans admired them as passionately as the rest of the country hated them.
Bank robberies followed, bomb attacks on American bases, police stations, and newspaper offices. Dead and wounded. In June 1972, Baader's and Ensslin's journey ended in handcuffs – and a few years later behind the walls of Stammheim.
A fortress on the seventh floor
For the RAF prisoners, the state built a special section in Stammheim – the entire seventh floor, separated from the rest of the prison, guarded day and night. Right next to the prison, a new courthouse was built solely for their trial. It was then one of the most expensive and closely watched trials in the history of the Federal Republic.
Dark chapters unfolded behind those walls. In May 1976, Ulrike Meinhof was found hanged in her cell on a rope braided from a towel. Even then there was talk of murder. And even more horrifying is what came many years later: in 2002 it emerged that her brain had been secretly preserved after the autopsy for scientific examination – without the family's knowledge.
In April 1977, the verdict came: life imprisonment for Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe. It seemed the story was over. But outside, the final, desperate act was being prepared.
German Autumn
On September 5, 1977, an RAF commando ambushed the car of Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the employers' association, in Cologne. They shot his driver and three police officers and kidnapped him. The demand was clear: release the prisoners from Stammheim. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's government refused. The prisoners were completely cut off from the world – a contact ban applied even to their lawyers.
Then, on October 13, four Palestinian hijackers allied with the RAF seized the Lufthansa plane "Landshut" on the route from Mallorca to Frankfurt. On board were over 80 passengers, many returning from vacation. The plane circled over the Mediterranean and the Middle East; in Aden the hijackers shot Captain Jürgen Schumann. Finally the aircraft landed in Mogadishu, Somalia.
Seven minutes past midnight
On the night of October 17–18, the German counterterrorism unit GSG 9 stormed the plane. The operation lasted only a few minutes. Three of the four hijackers died, all hostages survived. The news of the liberation was broadcast by radio that same night. Germany rejoiced.
And on the seventh floor of Stammheim, where the prisoners were not supposed to have any radio or connection to the world, silence fell. A silence that ended in the morning with the discovery of three dead bodies.
What the guards found
According to the official investigation, the prisoners took their own lives when they realized no one would free them anymore. But there are too many things in that story that do not add up.
Baader died from a gunshot wound fired from behind into the back of his head. A very unusual angle for a suicide. Moreover, other spent bullets were found in the cell.
Raspe had a gunshot wound to the temple and died later that day in the hospital.
Ensslin hung from a speaker cable tied to the window grille.
Möller had four wounds in her chest from a prison bread knife. She survived and until her death claimed that she had not tried to kill herself and that she had heard nothing that night until she woke up covered in blood.
How could pistols get into the most heavily guarded prison in the country – to people who were not even allowed to see their lawyers?
Weapons in the record player
The official answer is: one of the lawyers smuggled the pistols in hollowed-out files before the contact ban. Baader's weapon was allegedly hidden in a record player, and other hiding places were found in the cell walls. And the prisoners learned of the news from Mogadishu thanks to a small radio and a makeshift "telephone" that Raspe assembled from the prison's electrical wiring.
For some, this is a logical explanation. For others, a fairy tale. Why would the guards, who regularly searched the cells, overlook the weapons and the entire system of wires? And why did it later emerge that the prisoners' conversations had been secretly wiretapped in the past – but from that key night, allegedly, no recordings exist?
The investigative committee, forensic experts, and later historians mostly lean toward the version of collective suicide – the last, dramatic gesture of a group that wanted to die as martyrs and cast suspicion on the state. But complete proof that would silence all doubts was never found.
Buried together
The day after the discovery, October 19, police found the body of Hanns Martin Schleyer in the trunk of a green Audi in Mulhouse, France. The kidnappers had shot him. The German Autumn ended in blood on both sides.
And then came a scene that not even a novelist could have invented. Many people did not want the terrorists to receive any grave at all. Stuttgart's mayor Manfred Rommel – son of the famous Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who himself was forced to commit suicide during the war – however decided that they would be buried in the city cemetery. In his words, every enmity should end with death.
Thus, on October 27, 1977, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin were laid to rest side by side, together with Raspe, in the Dornhalden cemetery. Lovers who began to burn together in 1968 also went into the earth together. Hundreds of sympathizers came to the funeral, many with covered faces, and police cordons stood around them.
Blurred images
Germany never forgot the night in Stammheim. The painter Gerhard Richter created a cycle of fifteen gray, blurred paintings about it in 1988 with the simple title "18. Oktober 1977." Dead bodies, a cell, a shelf with books, a record player, a funeral. As if looking through a fogged glass – and that blurring captures the whole story better than any report from an investigative committee.
It is a story about love that turned into violence. About ideals that ended with dead drivers, police officers, and a pilot. About a state that was afraid and defended itself. And about one night on the seventh floor when the lights went out and no one – except those who were there – ever found out with certainty what really happened in the silence of the corridors.
Maybe it was suicide. Maybe not. But when you walk past the gray walls of Stammheim today, it is hard not to hear the questions that have remained hanging in the air since October 18, 1977.