Kidnapping and murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer

The car that never reached its destination

It was a late summer afternoon when the sedan eased out of the Grandhotel in Cologne and into the city streets. Hanns Martin Schleyer, a man who had spent decades at the center of West German industry, sat inside with the routine of an important life — a driver, an escort of police officers, the minor rituals of security and status. What happened next lasted a handful of minutes but would alter the country’s course for weeks and echo for decades.

As the car turned toward the highway, a commando leapt from hiding. In the flash of violence that followed, Schleyer’s driver and three policemen — the men assigned to protect him — were shot and killed at the scene. Schleyer himself was seized, loaded into another vehicle, and removed from public view. The image that lingered was simple and chilling: a high-profile civilian taken from the middle of the city, his security detail murdered in the street.

That abduction on September 5, 1977, was the opening act of what Germans would come to call the German Autumn — a sequence of linked crises that stitched together terror, counterterror, and state authority into a single traumatic narrative.

A target made of past and power

To understand why Schleyer was picked, you need to hold two halves of his life in your mind at once. On one hand he was a leading industrialist — president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA) and of the Federation of German Industries (BDI) — a man who spoke for the captains of West German business and for what many saw as the postwar establishment. On the other hand, Schleyer’s biography carried a darker register: early membership in Nazi-era organizations, which critics and opponents would point to as evidence of a continuity between wartime authoritarian institutions and postwar elite structures.

The Red Army Faction (RAF), the urban guerrilla outfit that had risen in the late 1960s, framed Schleyer as an emblem. To the RAF’s militants, he embodied the intertwining of state power, corporate influence, and a past they rejected. By 1977 the RAF had moved from isolated bombings and robberies into ever more dramatic, hostage-driven operations aimed at forcing political concessions: the release of imprisoned comrades, attention to their cause, disruption of the institutions they held responsible for oppression.

The West German government, led by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, had announced a clear policy line: no concessions, no negotiations with terrorists. That stance made the Schleyer operation a gamble — the RAF hoped a high-value hostage could force a reversal. The government’s calculus, meanwhile, locked the state into confrontation.

Ambushed on a city street

Witness reports and later investigations reconstruct the ambush with grim clarity. The attack was swift and professional. As Schleyer’s car left the Grandhotel, at least three masked members of an RAF abduction commando sprang into action. The men guarding Schleyer — long familiar with public threats — were outgunned and overwhelmed. The driver and three policemen were killed, their bodies left at the scene; Schleyer was taken.

The murder of law-enforcement officers in daylight on a Cologne street stunned a nation. For many, it was not only an attack on a public figure but an assault on the state itself. The RAF announced that Schleyer was in their custody, and with that announcement the kidnapping became both a criminal case and a political message.

What followed was a sustained campaign of communications: letters, recordings, and manifestos that mixed ideological demands with what looked like the grammar of ransom. The core demand was simple from the RAF’s perspective: release leading detained members, especially those held in high-security custody at Stammheim Prison.

A crisis becomes international: Landshut and Mogadishu

As September shifted into October the Schleyer case hardened into a national emergency. The RAF’s demands met a wall of official refusal. Then, on October 13, a separate but connected drama exploded into the headlines. Lufthansa Flight 181, the Landshut, was hijacked by militants who demanded the release of RAF prisoners. The hijacking turned the German crisis into an international one: the plane was forced across Europe and Africa, a slow-motion ordeal of refueling stops, tense negotiations, and increasingly violent turns.

On board the Landshut, terror deepened. The pilot, Jürgen Schumann, was murdered by the hijackers during the course of the ordeal. The plane finally came to a stop in Mogadishu, Somalia, where West German and Somali authorities prepared for a decisive move. On October 18, German special forces — the GSG 9 unit, one of the country’s few internationally recognized counterterror teams — stormed the aircraft in a night raid. The rescue freed most of the hostages and ended the hijacking. The operation was hailed as a tactical success and showcased how a state could project force to rescue hostages abroad.

But the jubilation over the Mogadishu assault arrived at the same time as other, darker news.

The day the prison went quiet

The morning of October 18 brought a report from Stuttgart-Stammheim Prison that would convulse the country. Three leading RAF prisoners — Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe — had been found dead in their cells. A fourth prisoner, Irmgard Möller, was seriously injured, surviving multiple stab wounds. Authorities quickly characterized the deaths as suicides; the official storyline held that the three had taken their own lives.

That account has remained controversial ever since. For some the prison deaths were proof that detained RAF leaders had chosen death over release. For others, the circumstances — the timing, the physical evidence, the restrictions in high-security custody — raised questions about possible state responsibility, negligence or cover-up. The emotional sequence was immediate: the GSG 9 had just ended a hijacking that had demanded the prisoners’ release; within hours the prisoners were dead.

For the RAF operatives holding Schleyer, the prison deaths were interpreted as confirmation of their worst fears and as justification for retaliatory action. Communiqués and actions in the hours after paired together: the state had shown it would not back down, and camped within the underground guerrilla logic, the only answer was decisive violence.

A body in the trunk

On October 19, 1977, police found Schleyer’s body in the trunk of his car in the French border region near Mulhouse. The official investigation concluded he had been shot while in captivity. The man who had been taken at gunpoint in early September was dead.

The mechanics of the killing have been reconstructed through forensic work and testimony. What remains broader and more consequential is the meaning the event took on. For many Germans the image of Schleyer’s body was proof of how far political violence could reach: an industrial leader found dead in a foreign field, the result of a campaign aiming to upend the state. For sympathizers of radical left causes, the sequence of imprisonment, the contested deaths at Stammheim, and the state’s refusal to negotiate were cited as factors that led to terrible decisions.

In immediate terms, the Schleyer case left a toll of at least five deaths directly tied to the abduction: the driver and three policemen killed on September 5, and Schleyer himself. The broader crisis — including the Landshut hijacking and subsequent operations — added further casualties and injuries.

The country after the storm

The German Autumn forced a reckoning. Politically, the Schmidt government’s hard line — refusing to negotiate with terrorists — was both bolstered and criticized. Many applauded the refusal to bow to violence; others argued that the state’s posture, prison conditions in Stammheim and the opacity of special operations demanded scrutiny.

Institutionally, the crisis transformed security policy. GSG 9’s success in Mogadishu became a model for counterterror units worldwide. Police and intelligence services were reorganized, funding increased, and high-risk detainee rules tightened. Stammheim itself became emblematic of a new era of fortified custody for militant prisoners, and debates over civil liberties intensified: how much power should the state have to prevent and respond to terrorism without eroding the democratic norms it protects?

The legal aftermath produced prosecutions, long trials, and a web of investigations that stretched into the 1980s. The RAF itself fractured, diminished, and ultimately dissolved, but the trauma it left — the deaths, the fear, the unresolved questions — lingered.

Memory, contested facts, and the long shadow

Years of scholarship, declassification, and journalistic digging have deepened the record but have not overturned the core facts: Schleyer was abducted by RAF operatives on September 5, 1977; he was murdered in October; the Landshut hijacking and the GSG 9 raid on October 18 were pivotal linked events; and three leading RAF prisoners were found dead in Stammheim on October 18. Names remain fixed in that ledger: Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe among the dead, Irmgard Möller the survivor; Jürgen Schumann the murdered pilot of Flight 181.

Yet controversy clings to the margins. The exact circumstances of the Stammheim deaths — suicide as the official finding, alternative theories proposed by critics — have produced inquiries, court challenges and a persistent debate over the state’s role. For some families, activists, and scholars, there remain unanswered questions about who knew what and when, about the opacity of security operations and the balance between secrecy and accountability.

Beyond the factual disputes, the German Autumn reshaped cultural memory. It marked a rupture in postwar West Germany’s narrative: an era when political violence, once largely episodic, had threatened to remold the public sphere. It forced citizens to ask how to defend democracy without becoming what it fought; how to protect the public without silencing dissent; how to keep the line between law enforcement and overreach from blurring.

An empty chair and the work of remembering

The image that often accompanies retellings of this episode is small and domestic: an executive office emptied, a leather chair pushed back as if the occupant simply stepped away. That ordinary absence underscores the human consequence. Schleyer’s death was not only a political outcome but a personal loss — a life ended violently, colleagues and family left to carry his name into the long debate that followed.

The German Autumn was more than a sequence of crises. It was a test of institutions, an argument about values, and a painful lesson in how democracies respond to those who seek to destroy them from within. Decades later, historians still sift the documents, prosecutors still wrestle with evidence, and the public continues to weigh the hard choices made in those autumn weeks of 1977. The facts are recorded; the meanings remain contested. The empty chair still invites questions that have shaped modern Germany’s memory of its own vulnerability and resilience.