The German Autumn of 1977, Day by Day

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.

1 October 2026 · Part of Cold War — a guide to 17 articles →

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.

The offensive before the autumn

The 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.

Behind 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 describes the verdict; the autumn was, in effect, the group's answer to it.

Chronology

5 September: Cologne

On 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.

The 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. The demand was the release of imprisoned members of the group, who were to be flown to a country of their choosing.

The state's answer

The 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.

Press 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.

13 to 18 October: the Landshut

On 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.

In 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.

Shortly 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.

The night at Stammheim

The 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.

The 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.

19 October: Mulhouse

With 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.

What the autumn changed

The 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. Our record of these operations places the 1977 attacks in the sequence of the whole.

For 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 brought a different generation of protesters into the streets, and it was not finally resolved until the fall of the Berlin Wall removed the world in which the group had operated.

Conclusion

The 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.

Frequently asked questions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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