Death
The Red Army Faction's second generation made several attempts to free Ensslin and her comrades from prison. One attempt involved the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer on 5 September 1977, and a proposed prisoner exchange. When this failed to work, the RAF orchestrated the hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner on 17 October. After the airplane was stormed by a German anti-terrorist unit, Schleyer was killed.
Hours later, in a night that became known as "Death Night", Ensslin, Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in the high security block of Stammheim Prison. Like Meinhof, Ensslin was found dead by hanging in her cell. Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe shot themselves. A fourth member, Irmgard Möller, stabbed herself four times in the chest with a stolen knife. She survived her suicide attempt and has since stated that the deaths were not suicide, but rather extrajudicial killings undertaken by the German government of the time, a claim strongly denied by the German governments former and present. The exhaustive study of the RAF by Stefan Aust (revised in 2009 as "Baader-Meinhof: the inside story of the RAF") is categorical in finding the deaths suicides. On 27 October 1977, Ensslin was buried in a common grave with Baader and Raspe in the Dornhalde Cemetery in Stuttgart.
Read more about this topic: Gudrun Ensslin
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“And death i think is no parenthesis”
—E.E. (Edward Estlin)
“A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep, careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come; insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)