{"generated":"2026-10-13T15:24:57.504Z","canonical":"Every record points at the human page on this site, and that page is the canonical copy. The derived files here are served with `X-Robots-Tag: noindex`: fetch them freely, but the article page is the one that belongs in an index or a citation.","article":{"url":"https://writesidesofhistory.com/the-german-autumn-of-1977-day-by-day/","markdown_url":"https://writesidesofhistory.com/agents/articles/the-german-autumn-of-1977-day-by-day.md","json_url":"https://writesidesofhistory.com/agents/articles/the-german-autumn-of-1977-day-by-day.json","slug":"the-german-autumn-of-1977-day-by-day","title":"The German Autumn of 1977, Day by Day","description":"In 44 days of 1977, a kidnapping, a hijacked airliner and three deaths in a prison cell pushed West Germany to the limits of its own law.","era":"modern","topics":["cold-war"],"published":"2026-10-01","words":1657,"image":{"url":"https://writesidesofhistory.com/images/generated/the-german-autumn-of-1977-day-by-day.webp","alt":"Cologne — The German Autumn of 1977, Day by Day"},"sources":[{"id":"bpb-zweite-generation","type":"scholarly","author":"Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung","title":"Die zweite Generation der RAF (1975–1981)","publisher":"bpb.de, dossier Die Geschichte der RAF, article 49268","year":2007},{"id":"bpb-opfer-der-raf","type":"institutional","author":"Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung","title":"Die Opfer der RAF","publisher":"bpb.de, dossier Die Geschichte der RAF, article 49314","year":2007},{"id":"bpb-lernort-landshut","type":"institutional","author":"Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung","title":"Lernort Landshut","publisher":"bpb.de, educational site on the hijacking of the Lufthansa aircraft Landshut","year":2017},{"id":"bundesregierung-dokumentation-1977","type":"primary","author":"Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung","title":"Dokumentation zu den Ereignissen und Entscheidungen im Zusammenhang mit der Entführung von Hanns Martin Schleyer und der Lufthansa-Maschine Landshut","publisher":"Bonn: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung","year":1977}],"licence":"Quote freely, with attribution to Writesides of History and a link to the article url. The articles are written and published by Writesides of History, which is both author and publisher.","cite_as":"https://writesidesofhistory.com/the-german-autumn-of-1977-day-by-day/","questions":[{"question":"Why is it called the German Autumn?","answer":"The name was taken up in Germany for the weeks between the kidnapping of Hanns Martin Schleyer on 5 September and the events of 18 and 19 October 1977. It covers the kidnapping, the hijacking of the Landshut and the deaths at Stammheim as one connected crisis."},{"question":"Who carried out the hijacking of the Landshut?","answer":"Four Palestinian militants took the aircraft on 13 October 1977, claiming to act in solidarity with the imprisoned RAF members. Three were killed when the GSG 9 stormed the aircraft in Mogadishu, and one woman was wounded and arrested."},{"question":"Did the Stammheim prisoners kill themselves?","answer":"The official investigations concluded that three prisoners took their own lives on the night of 17 to 18 October 1977. Doubts about how the weapons reached the cells have persisted, and the question has never been settled to the satisfaction of all observers."},{"question":"Who killed Hanns Martin Schleyer?","answer":"His body was found in Mulhouse on 19 October 1977, and the group that kidnapped him claimed responsibility in its own statements. Which individual fired the shots has not been established in a way all accounts accept, so this article does not name anyone."}],"markdown":"**For forty-four days in the autumn of 1977, from the kidnapping of an employers' president in Cologne on 5 September to the discovery of his body in France on 19 October, West Germany was governed by a crisis staff, a news blackout and a single question: how far may a democracy go to save the lives of its hostages? The weeks have been known ever since as the \"German Autumn\", and what the state decided in them is still argued over today.**\n\n## The offensive before the autumn\n\nThe autumn did not begin in September. The Red Army Faction's second generation had spent the spring and summer of 1977 on what the group itself called an offensive, and the federal agency for civic education treats these months as the peak of its violence. On 7 April the Federal Prosecutor General, Siegfried Buback, was shot dead in his car in Karlsruhe, together with his driver Wolfgang Göbel and the judicial officer Georg Wurster. On 30 July Jürgen Ponto, chairman of Dresdner Bank, was shot at his home in Oberursel during a kidnapping attempt that went wrong.\n\nBehind both attacks stood the same demand. The leading figures of the group had been sentenced to life at Stammheim on 28 April, and the people outside wanted them out. Our article on [the courtroom built for that trial](https://writesidesofhistory.com/stammheim-as-a-building-a-courtroom-built-for-a-trial/) describes the verdict; the autumn was, in effect, the group's answer to it.\n\n## Chronology\n\n| Date | Event |\n|---|---|\n| 5 September | Hanns Martin Schleyer is kidnapped in Cologne; his driver and three police officers are killed |\n| From 6 September | Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's crisis staff meets in Bonn |\n| 30 September | A law is rushed through that allows contact between prisoners and the outside world to be cut off |\n| 13 October | The Lufthansa aircraft Landshut is hijacked on a flight from Mallorca to Frankfurt |\n| 16 October | The pilot, Jürgen Schumann, is shot dead in Aden |\n| 17–18 October | The aircraft lands in Mogadishu; the GSG 9 storms it shortly after midnight |\n| 18 October | Three imprisoned leaders of the group are found dead or dying at Stammheim |\n| 19 October | Schleyer's body is found in the boot of a car in Mulhouse |\n\n## 5 September: Cologne\n\nOn the evening of 5 September, Schleyer's car was stopped on a street in Cologne by a car blocking the road and a pram standing in the carriageway. His driver Heinz Marcisz and the police officers Reinhold Brändle, Roland Pieler and Helmut Ulmer were shot dead. Schleyer was president of both the employers' association and the federation of German industry, which made him one of the best-known businessmen in the country. He was also a former SS officer, a past the kidnappers used and that his family and many historians have since had to confront.\n\nThe kidnappers signed their demand with a Kommando name, as the group did for almost every operation. The mechanism is explained in our piece on [how the RAF wrote its own record](https://writesidesofhistory.com/the-kommando-statement-how-the-raf-wrote-its-own-record/). The demand was the release of imprisoned members of the group, who were to be flown to a country of their choosing.\n\n## The state's answer\n\nThe reply of the Schmidt government was a mixture of delay and law. A crisis staff, with leaders of the opposition included, met almost daily. Officials negotiated through an intermediary in order to gain time while the police searched for the hostage, and the government's own documentation records that the state's aim was to keep contact open without conceding the central demand. At the same time the prisoners at Stammheim were cut off. A hurriedly passed law allowed all contact between certain prisoners and the outside world, including their lawyers, to be broken. It was a sharp departure from the ordinary practice of a state governed by law, and legal scholars have debated it ever since.\n\nPress and broadcasters were asked to restrain their reporting. Many complied. Looking back, the cooperation of the newsrooms is one of the more striking features of the weeks, and one that had no real parallel later in the republic's history.\n\n## 13 to 18 October: the Landshut\n\nOn 13 October four Palestinian hijackers took over a Lufthansa Boeing 737, the Landshut, shortly after it left Mallorca for Frankfurt. They said they were acting in solidarity with the imprisoned RAF members and added demands of their own. The aircraft, with more than eighty passengers and a crew of five, then flew a long route, landing at Rome, Larnaca, Bahrain, Dubai and Aden.\n\nIn Aden, on 16 October, the hijackers shot the captain, Jürgen Schumann, who had left the aircraft to inspect it. The co-pilot, Jürgen Vietor, then flew the aircraft on to Mogadishu in Somalia. The government had in the meantime sent the minister of state Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski to negotiate, and had secured the agreement of the Somali authorities to an operation by the GSG 9, the federal border police's new counter-terrorist unit, which had been formed after the Munich Olympics of 1972.\n\nShortly after midnight on 18 October, the unit stormed the Landshut. Three of the four hijackers were killed, one woman was wounded and arrested, and all the passengers survived. It was the clearest success the state achieved in the whole of the autumn.\n\n## The night at Stammheim\n\nThe news reached Stammheim the same night. By the next morning three of the leading imprisoned members of the group, two men and one woman, were dead in their cells, and a fourth prisoner had been wounded but survived. The official investigations concluded that the three had killed themselves, and that is the account endorsed by the courts and by the government.\n\nThe circumstances have been challenged since. How weapons and ammunition had reached prisoners held in one of the most heavily guarded buildings in the country, and whether the cells had been bugged in the way the earlier scandal suggested, are questions that supporters of the group and a number of independent observers kept alive for decades. We do not choose between these readings here. The official finding is suicide; the questions about the security failure that made it possible were never fully laid to rest.\n\n## 19 October: Mulhouse\n\nWith the Landshut freed, the kidnappers' leverage was gone. On 19 October a message was passed on that Schleyer had been killed, and his body was found that day in the boot of a car in a street in Mulhouse, in French Alsace. He had been held for forty-four days. Exactly who fired the shots has not been settled in a way that satisfies every account, so this article names no one.\n\n## What the autumn changed\n\nThe immediate result was a hardening. The group's second generation had failed in its central aim, and the prisoners it had tried to free were dead. The group continued, and its later years, which produced far fewer convictions than attacks, are covered in [the third generation](https://writesidesofhistory.com/the-third-generation-twenty-years-of-attacks-and-almost-no-convictions/). Our [record of these operations](https://writesidesofhistory.com/datasets/red-army-faction-attacks/) places the 1977 attacks in the sequence of the whole.\n\nFor the Federal Republic the autumn was a test of whether the state could defend its citizens without becoming what its critics said it was. Contact bans, press restraint and a crisis staff acting outside the normal channels were accepted by most of the public at the time, and have been questioned since. The tension continued into the early 1980s, when [NATO's response to the SS-20 missiles](https://writesidesofhistory.com/natos-ss20-missile-crisis-response/) brought a different generation of protesters into the streets, and it was not finally resolved until [the fall of the Berlin Wall](https://writesidesofhistory.com/the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall-end-of-an-era-and-the-dawn-of-german-unity/) removed the world in which the group had operated.\n\n## Conclusion\n\nThe German Autumn is best understood as two crises that ran together: a kidnapping by a German group and a hijacking by Palestinian militants acting on its behalf. The state met both with determination and with measures that sit awkwardly beside its own constitutional principles. It saved the passengers in Mogadishu and lost the hostage in Mulhouse, and it remains disputed what the deaths at Stammheim say about the prison system. Where the evidence runs out, as it does for several of the killings of 1977, the honest account is to say so.\n\n## Frequently asked questions\n\n**Why is it called the German Autumn?** The name was taken up in Germany for the weeks between the kidnapping of Hanns Martin Schleyer on 5 September and the events of 18 and 19 October 1977. It covers the kidnapping, the hijacking of the Landshut and the deaths at Stammheim as one connected crisis.\n\n**Who carried out the hijacking of the Landshut?** Four Palestinian militants took the aircraft on 13 October 1977, claiming to act in solidarity with the imprisoned RAF members. Three were killed when the GSG 9 stormed the aircraft in Mogadishu, and one woman was wounded and arrested.\n\n**Did the Stammheim prisoners kill themselves?** The official investigations concluded that three prisoners took their own lives on the night of 17 to 18 October 1977. Doubts about how the weapons reached the cells have persisted, and the question has never been settled to the satisfaction of all observers.\n\n**Who killed Hanns Martin Schleyer?** His body was found in Mulhouse on 19 October 1977, and the group that kidnapped him claimed responsibility in its own statements. Which individual fired the shots has not been established in a way all accounts accept, so this article does not name anyone.\n\n## Recommended reading\n\n- Karrin Hanshew, *Terror and Democracy in West Germany* (2012) - the political history of how the Federal Republic argued over the limits of defending a democracy, with the autumn of 1977 at its centre. [View on Amazon →](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1107017378)\n- Jeremy Varon, *Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence* (2004) - the comparative history of revolutionary violence in West Germany and the United States. [View on Amazon →](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0520241193)\n- Sarah Colvin, *Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence, and Identity* (2009) - reads the group's own writing as writing, which helps explain the statements that accompanied the kidnapping. [View on Amazon →](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1571134158)"}}