Stammheim as a Building: A Courtroom Built for a Trial

West Germany built a windowless, bulletproof courthouse from scratch for one 1975 trial, and its successor still hosts security cases today.

17 September 2026 · Part of Cold War — a guide to 16 articles →

In 1975, West Germany did not have a courtroom secure enough to try the imprisoned leadership of the Red Army Faction, so the state of Baden-Württemberg built one from nothing, on the grounds of Stuttgart's Stammheim prison, in time for the trial to open that May. The windowless, reinforced building was never meant to be a public monument. It became one anyway, and outlived its own verdict by more than four decades before it was finally demolished.

Why the state built a courtroom instead of using one

Stuttgart already had a functioning Higher Regional Court. What it did not have was a way to move four defendants from a high-security prison wing to that courthouse, several times a week, for a trial expected to run for years, without creating a standing opportunity for a rescue attempt. The indictment rested on the RAF's 1972 May offensive against American military and West German police targets; our record of these operations documents the offensive in full.

The solution was architectural rather than procedural: put the courtroom next to the cells, so that no journey through the city was ever necessary. The federal agency's dossier on the trial states this directly — a new building beside the prison replaced the transport risk with a fixed, defensible perimeter. It was, in effect, an admission that the ordinary machinery of West German justice could not accommodate a trial the state considered existential.

A windowless building in a matter of months

Construction moved fast by the standards of German public building. A single-storey, windowless hall of reinforced concrete and steel went up on the prison grounds through 1974 and into early 1975, with cabling strung over the roof to obstruct any attempt to approach or land near the building from the air. Reporting at the time put the cost of the building alone at around twelve million Deutschmarks, more than half of an overall trial budget estimated at roughly twenty million — extraordinary sums for what was, functionally, a single room built for a single case.

Inside, the courtroom held space for the panel of judges, prosecutors, a large defense team, journalists and the public, all separated from the four defendants by security glass and armed guards. There were no windows to the outside world — only artificial light and poured concrete, in a building designed to keep the outside out rather than to let anything in.

Chronology

What the design argued, before anyone said a word

A courtroom is supposed to be neutral ground on which guilt is decided, not assumed. The Stammheim building argued something different before a single witness was called: that the men and woman inside it were already, by the state's own engineering, treated as a threat requiring a fortress. Security glass separated the dock from counsel and the public gallery. Cameras and armed personnel were a fixture rather than an exception. The defense argued repeatedly, across the trial's 192 sessions, that the physical setting itself compromised the presumption of innocence — a complaint the digital edition of the trial protocol preserves in the defense's own recorded objections, not as later commentary but as a running feature of the proceedings.

That tension — a building whose every wall makes a claim about danger, in a system that is supposed to presume none — did not end with this trial. It is close to the argument a legal scholar made in 2026 about the courthouse's successor on the same ground, describing the site as a stage on which the state performs its own confidence as much as it adjudicates a case.

The room was not as private as it looked

The building's isolation was meant to keep threats out. It also, for a period in 1975 and 1976, kept a secret in: investigators had placed listening devices in defendants' cells to monitor conversations with their lawyers, a fact that only became public in 1977. When it emerged, several of the defendants' own chosen lawyers — including Otto Schily, later a federal minister — walked out of the proceedings and refused to take further part until they had assurances that client conversations were no longer monitored. The affair briefly threatened the legitimacy of a trial the state had already spent enormously to secure, and it remains the clearest evidence that the building's defenses were not only aimed outward. A parallel, quieter version of the same instinct — a Cold War state widening its own surveillance reach under pressure — runs through the contemporaneous expansion of NSA wiretapping in the United States and through the intelligence-sharing habits NATO built up across the same decades.

A verdict, and a building that kept working

The trial ended on 28 April 1977 with life sentences for the surviving defendants, closing a case that had also cost one defendant's life — she died in her cell in May 1976, before the verdict was reached, in a death that remained disputed. The courtroom itself did not close with the case. Baden-Württemberg's judiciary kept using the same high-security hall for other proceedings that required its particular defenses for decades afterward, through the years in which Germany remained a country divided by the wider Cold War the RAF had positioned itself against, and beyond. A building raised for one case became, by default, the state's standing answer to any case it judged comparably dangerous.

Replaced, not forgotten

By the 2010s the 1975 building was outdated by the standards it had itself set: modern high-security courtrooms needed different technology, different accessibility, and better conditions for juries, judges and the public than a windowless concrete hall from the height of the Cold War could offer. Baden-Württemberg built a new courthouse immediately next to it, opened in April 2019 at a reported cost of around €29 million and designed by the Berlin firm Müller Reimann Architekten under the state's own property and construction office. The old building stood empty afterward. Stuttgart's monument-protection authority weighed whether the courtroom where a defining trial of the Federal Republic had unfolded deserved formal preservation, and ultimately granted permission for its demolition rather than requiring it be kept as a memorial — a decision that treated the building as infrastructure that had done its job, not as a site owed permanence.

The same address, a different decade

The new courthouse did not retire the symbolism that came with its location. In 2025 and 2026, the state security chambers sitting on the same ground in Stammheim heard an unrelated high-security case, and press coverage reached instinctively for the comparison to 1975 — the same address, the same architecture of glass separation and restricted access, applied to a different generation of defendants and a different kind of alleged offense. As with the earlier proceedings that once filled our account of the third generation's unsolved cases, the honest position is that some of what happens inside a courtroom like this stays genuinely contested, and a record built to explain the building should say so rather than adjudicate it. What the echo confirms is narrower and more durable: a state that builds a fortress for one trial tends to keep the fortress.

Conclusion

The Stammheim courtroom was never meant to outlast its case, yet it stood for more than forty years, hosted trials its builders never anticipated, and was replaced only by another high-security courthouse built on the same logic next door. Its real subject was never only the four defendants tried inside it — it was how a democracy builds space for judging people it has already decided are dangerous, a question the Kommando statement's claims of responsibility never had to answer and the state could not avoid.

Frequently asked questions

Why did West Germany build an entirely new courtroom instead of using Stuttgart's existing court? Moving the defendants repeatedly across the city to the Higher Regional Court's normal building was judged too great a security risk, so the state built a windowless courtroom directly beside the prison holding them, eliminating the transport route rather than trying to secure it.

What was discovered about the defendants' cells during the trial? In 1977 it emerged that investigators had installed listening devices in defendants' cells during 1975 and 1976 to monitor privileged conversations with their lawyers. Several defense lawyers, including Otto Schily, walked out of the proceedings in protest until they received assurances the surveillance had ended.

What happened to the 1975 building after the trial ended in 1977? It remained in continuous use by Baden-Württemberg's judiciary for other high-security cases for decades, was finally replaced by a new courthouse that opened in April 2019, and was subsequently demolished after the city's monument-protection authority granted permission.

Is the Stammheim site still used for high-security trials today? Yes. The new courthouse that replaced the 1975 building in 2019 sits on the same ground beside the prison and has continued to host state security cases, including an unrelated trial in 2025–2026 that drew renewed comparisons to the original 1975 proceedings.

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