Killer's release stirs anger in Germany

BERLIN -- She was a young leftist with a machine gun and bizarre thoughts about changing the world, but that was 30 years ago, when Brigitte Mohnhaupt helped lead a terrorist gang whose assassinations of politicians and industrialists mesmerized postwar Germany.

Mohnhaupt again rattled the public consciousness yesterday when she was released from prison as an unrepentant convicted murderer. Once a brazen and unrelenting mastermind for the anticapitalist Red Army Faction, or RAF, the 57-year-old stepped back into a nation still agitated by a bygone era of bombings, fanatical screeds, and urban guerrillas.

"There is huge debate over her release," said Butz Peters, a lawyer who has written two books about the RAF, a band of disciplined, well-armed radicals who killed 34 people after emerging from the university protests of the 1960s. "The injured German soul of that time has not healed. "

Mohnhaupt was serving five life sentences in southern Bavaria. A court recently ruled that she was eligible for parole after serving a minimum of 24 years. Her release and the prospect that one of her accomplices, Christian Klar, may receive a presidential pardon have outraged conservative lawmakers and prompted calls of forgiveness from left-leaning politicians. German law states that no matter what the crime, a person deserves a second chance.

"Neither Mohnhaupt nor Klar are of any danger to Germany," said Alexander Strasser, a political scientist at the University of Regensburg.

A recent poll, however, found that 66 percent of respondents believed the militants should serve their full life sentences. Known to most of Germany from her wanted poster, which showed a broad-faced woman with light hair and thick mascara, Mohnhaupt finds herself at the center of a debate over a legal system rooted in European liberalism that prides itself on tolerance and compassion.

Her case also has revealed that vestiges of extreme leftist politics resonate among certain intellectuals who never realized their anarchist dreams.

"The people are against releasing Mohnhaupt and Klar," said Gabriele von Lutzau, who was a flight attendant on a Lufthansa jet hijacked by RAF-inspired Palestinian militants in 1977. "The RAF wanted to free the masses, but the masses wanted them thrown into the dungeon and the key tossed away. How many people do you have to kill before they don't let you walk free?"

The RAF went through several incarnations between 1968 and when it disbanded three decades later. It was a violent spinoff of a student movement that demanded Germany account for its Nazi past, denounce capitalism, and oppose US power. Public support for the RAF evaporated quickly in the face of the group's bombings and kidnappings, which unnerved a divided nation that was rebuilding from World War II and navigating the dangerous politics of the Cold War.

The terrorists turned the country into a film noir landscape where television news carried images of bullet casings and blanket-draped bodies. It was a time that also foreshadowed a new generation of politicians, including Joschka Fischer, a cabdriver turned street protester who would become Germany's foreign minister, and Gerhard Schroeder, a young lawyer who represented an RAF member and would be elected chancellor in 1998.

Mohnhaupt and Klar surfaced as two of the RAF's main leaders in the mid-1970s. During their tenure, the group stormed the West German Embassy in Sweden, tried to forge bonds with other European extremists, and killed several leading German citizens, including federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback and banker Juergen Ponto, whom Mohnhaupt and Klar shot at least five times after delivering flowers to his home.

Neither Mohnhaupt nor Klar has apologized or given details about the RAF's inner workings or which members carried out certain killings. Their reticence has left criminal cases unresolved, including bombings and attacks on US bases in Germany. Furor and bewilderment concerning the imprisoned terrorists' fate intensified in January when a letter in which Klar called for the overthrow of capitalism was read at a political conference.

"Considering the gravity of this wrongdoing, I can't imagine that the victims and those affected will consider it justice when a criminal like this walks around in freedom," Gunther Beckstein, the conservative interior minister of Bavaria state, said of Mohnhaupt's crimes.