Inge Viett
Inge Viett was a member of the West German left-wing militant organisations "2 June Movement" and the "Red Army Faction ", which she joined in 1980. In 1982 she became the last of ten former RAF members who escaped from West to East Germany and received support from state authorities, including the Ministry for State Security.
After reunification and her conviction for attempted murder, she was sentenced to a thirteen-year jail term, but was released early in 1997. By that time she had, while still in prison, published her first book. Described sometimes in sources as a "retired terrorist", Viett differed from other leading participants in West Germany's extremist-terrorist wave of the 1970s to the extent she was willing to talk about, and indeed to write about, those events from the activist perspective. Her participation in street demonstrations and apparent absence of contrition over her involvement with left-wing militancy continue to attract media interest and comment.
Life
Early years
Inge Viett was born in Stemwarde, a short distance to the east of Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Prussia, Germany, later in the British occupation zone. The authorities removed her from her mother's care and she spent her early years, between 1946 and 1950, living in an orphanage in Schleswig-Holstein. In March 1950 she was placed with a foster family in a village of three hundred souls near Eckernförde. Viett would later describe the experience, especially with regard to her foster mother's attempts to bring her up, as "very burdensome". Her comments on the wider community in the area were more damning. At one stage she was raped by a local farmer. She attended school in the village. When she was fifteen she ran away from the foster family. With the support of the local minister she obtained a place for a year in a Youth Facility at nearby Arnis where she was taught about house-keeping and child-care. The authorities then intervened to have her sent to train as a child-care assistant. Viett herself wanted to train to be a sports-teacher and found the training for work as a child-care assistant "ghastly". The situation led her to a suicide attempt. The training nevertheless continued, and during her final "practical" year she was sent as a children's carer to a prosperous family in Hamburg. Here Inge Viett suffered on account of the authoritarian propensities of the father. She also had a good relationship at the time with a twenty year old supporter-trainer in Schleswig who took on responsibility for her progress and made it possible for her to attend the sports school. In addition, she became involved with an Afro-American soldier. In 1963 she embarked on a Sports and Gymnastics course at Kiel University, but after six terms - shortly before graduation - she broke off these studies.Now she moved back to Hamburg, struggling with a succession of casual jobs. For two months she worked as a stripper in the city's St. Pauli quarter. During this period her appreciation crystallised that "capitalism was the cause of social injustice". With her partner she then moved again, setting up home in Wiesbaden where she worked as a graphics assistant. After the two women's relationship broke up she took work in a succession of support roles, working variously as a tour guide, film cutter, domestic servant, and barmaid.
Außerparlamentarische Opposition
In 1968 Viett relocated to the Kreuzberg district in West Berlin where she moved in to what one source described as "a women's apartment" at number 22 "Eisenbahnstraße" with three other politically aware women, Waltraut Siepert, Anke-Rixa Hansen, and Ursula Scheu. With the others she took part in meetings, demonstrations, and other actions of the APO, a group of mainly student aged political activists committed to expressly "extra-parliamentary" opposition to the West German political establishment. She later wrote that a defining element in her own politicisation was a trip lasting several months that she took to North Africa. She was deeply impressed by the contrast between the poverty she encountered there and the prosperity of many in the west, along with accompanying excesses. During a street demonstration she was arrested by a civilian official after involvement in throwing a paving stone, and was held overnight in police custody. This brief experience of imprisonment, she later asserted, marked a deep break with her past. Professionally she was at the time undertaking an internship with a film copying business in order to be able to embark on an apprenticeship at a later date. But her night in the police cell led her to hand in her notice in order to devote herself to her political activism.Participation in militant actions followed. In the early 1970s an arson attack on the vehicle fleet of the Axel Springer publishing house failed because of "technical difficulties". She learned how to prepare and use Molotov cocktails. In December 1971 Viett was one of the "squatters" involved in the occupation of the so-called Georg von Rauch House, close to her home in Berlin-Kreuzberg. When police made a move towards the house, and took up positions directly in front of it, it was her fellow squatters who prevented her from throwing Molotov cocktails at them from the roof.
Other actions in 1971 were directed against the display windows of wedding dress shops and sex shops. On at least one occasion she undertook her actions with fellow activist Verena Becker: people clearing up the broken glass of the shop windows found printed calling cards had been left behind with the mysterious warning, "Die schwarze Braut kommt". Beauty pageants in department stores were also targeted. She became involved in organised theft campaigns against department stores, sending the items stolen to those who had been arrested. During the early 1970s she moved to the "Liebenwalde Street" commune, described as a centre of "Schwarze Hilfe".
2 June movement
She ended up as a member of the 2 June Movement, recruited by Bommi Baumann. She moved back to her former home at 22 Eisenbahnstraße in order to escape the state surveillance to which the "Liebenwalde Street" commune was presumed to be subject. It was at the Eisenbahnstraße that she and the three others formed an activist cell which later grew to number seven members. They needed to finance their activities so started with an attack, in which Viett participated, on a bank. That was unsuccessful and had to be aborted, but a later bank attack succeeded.Following the "Bloody Sunday" killings in Derry, in January 1972 the group planned a bomb attack on a British officers' casino in Berlin. The conspirators intended that the bomb should explode during the night of 2 February 1972, but in the event it was placed by one of them, identified as a student, Harald Sommerfeld, outside the door of the adjacent address, which was a British Yacht Club. Sommerfeld omitted to activate the fuse and the bomb was found by the boat builder and Yacht Club concierge, Erwin Beelitz. Beelitz took the bomb and placed it in a clamp, apparently intending to work on it. The bomb now exploded, killing Beelitz. Viett later described her reaction as one of shock. She did not consider herself responsible for the death of Beelitz, however, which she characterised as a fatal accident.
On 7 May 1972, Viett was one of a number of people arrested at Bad Neuenahr in connection with alleged terrorist activities. Others detained included Ulrich Schmücker. She was held in the penitentiary at Koblenz for four months and then transferred to a women's prison along the Lehrter Straße in Berlin. From January 1973 she was participating in a five-week nationwide prisoners' hunger strike in support of demands for better conditions. Later that year, using a file that a fellow inmate had smuggled into the establishment, she was able to escape through the barred window of the first-floor television room which the prisoners were permitted to use for two hours each week. She moved for a few days into a women's residential collective and resumed her links with the 2 June Movement, devoting herself to a reorganisation of it. She also took the opportunity to learn to use a gun in Berlin's Grunewald and Tegel forest. Early on the group now attacked a gun shop, thereby upgrading their weapons collection.
They then planned the kidnap of a prominent member of the political establishment as a way to apply pressure for the release of prisoners. Viett was centrally involved in the planning. Following the death of Holger Meins during the hunger strike campaign, there was a perceived need for a swift reaction. They selected as their kidnap target Günter von Drenkmann, the chairman of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce. However, the attempt, launched on 10 November 1974, went wrong. Von Drenkmann was shot, and a few hours later died in hospital. Their next target was Peter Lorenz, lead candidate for the CDU in the forthcoming Berlin elections. Again, Viett was centrally involved in the planning and implementation of the Lorenz kidnap. The result of the action was that several terrorist members of the 2 June Movement were released. Lorenz was released on 4 March 1975.
After this Viett and a fellow "2 June" member fled to Beirut intending to meet up with prisoners who had been released and with other contacts who had fled to South Yemen. She spoke with Ali Hassan Salameh and with Abu Iyad, but apparently without any concrete results. After several weeks she returned to Europe. That was followed by a further visit to Lebanon where she undertook a military training course covering technical aspects of weapons, before again returning to Berlin. Later in the summer of 1975 the 2 June Movement undertook two bank attacks in West Berlin, during at least one of which they attracted additional headlines by distributing "chocolate kisses" to bank customers caught up in the raid.
A further arrest followed on 9 September 1975. Viett was detained in a police exercise that also led to the arrests of Ralf Reinders und Juliane Plambeck. In a succession of further arrests the police now rapidly captured almost all the members of the 2 June Movement. Viett found herself back in the same cell that she had occupied before at the women's prison in Berlin's Lehrter Straße. An escape attempt on 24 December 1975 failed. She was part of a successful escape plan that was implemented on 7 July 1976 which involved getting hold of duplicate keys and overpowering two prison officials. Those who escaped also included Gabriele Rollnik, Monika Berberich and Juliane Plambeck. Berberich was recaptured while Viett and the other two travelled to Baghdad where, this time, they were reunited with some of the freed prisoners from 1975. She travelled in South Yemen where she spent three months in a Palestinian training camp. Here she adopted the cover name "Intissar".
Returning to Europe, Viett and other members of the movement went to Vienna where the businessman Walter Palmers was kidnapped for ransom. He was released against a payment of slightly more than 30 million schillings. Viett escaped to Italy. Then, with the intention of carrying out another prisoner-release exercise in West Berlin, she travelled via Prague and Berlin-Schönefeld, to West Berlin. She was approached, while still in East Berlin, by officers of the Ministry for State Security who, much to her surprise, knew her real identity. A two-hour discussion followed. Since the erection in 1961 of the Berlin Wall, travel between the two halves of Berlin had been severely restricted, but during her discussion Viett received assurances from Colonel Harry Dahl that the East German authorities would not be collaborating with the West German police in her case, and that she could therefore be assured of free access to the German Democratic Republic. This level of backing from the East German authorities would later turn out to be more important than would necessarily have been apparent when Viett received the assurances.
On 27 May 1978, a "2 June commando group" succeeded in extracting Till Meyer from West Berlin's Moabit Jail. Viett then travelled with Meyer and the commandos to East Berlin, using the Friedrichstraße frontier crossing. Weapons concealed on their bodies proved problematic, and Viett pleaded with the officials, recalling her earlier meeting with the Ministry for State Security officials. The group were permitted to enter East Germany, although the weapons had to be handed over. They then travelled on to Bulgaria. On 21 June 1978 Till Meyer, Gabriele Rollnik, Gudrun Stürmer and Angelika Goder were recaptured by a West German anti-terrorism unit at Burgas Airport. However, Viett and two others managed to evade capture and travel to Sofia, from where they moved on to Prague.
At Prague she was interrogated for three days by the Czechoslovak authorities. She then quoted a "cover name" and demanded to be put in touch with the East German authorities. As a result, three Ministry for State Security officers from East Germany turned up, removed her from her prison cell and took her back to East Germany. For two weeks she was accommodated in a Ministry property: then she was taken to Berlin Schönefeld Airport from where the authorities arranged a flight to Baghdad for her. She stayed in Baghdad for three months before returning the Europe where Inge Viett settled in Paris. She later described her own mood and that of fellow group members at this time as "somewhat resigned".