Astrid Proll

Astrid Huberta Isolde Marie Luise Hildegard Proll (born 29 May 1947) is a German woman who was an early member of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang). She is a photo editor and author.

As a Baader-Meinhof member Proll was the younger sister of Thorwald Proll. They were children of an architect. They met Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin through him; Thorwald left the group relatively early in its history, after being involved in firebombings in Frankfurt in 1968.

Proll was involved in bank robbery. She was the getaway driver for Andreas Baader when he escaped from police custody with the help of Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Ingrid Schubert, Irene Goergens in 1970.

Proll, along with Manfred Grashof, was stopped by police on 10 February 1971 but managed to get away. However, in Hamburg on 6 May of the same year, she was finally arrested after a pump attendant at a petrol station recognised her from a wanted poster and alerted the police. She attempted to flee but was surrounded by armed officers and arrested. Once she was detained, her run-in with the police in February was turned into an attempted murder charge even though she never even fired a shot. She was imprisoned but released on health grounds (being kept in complete acoustic isolation in prison caused her health to deteriorate) allowed her to obtain new identity documents as Anna Puttick. With these she obtained a variety of jobs. She worked for six months as a park-keeper for Hackney Council, and for a year in Lesney's toy factory. From there she took a Hackney Council-sponsored welding course in car mechanics, using her skills to train young people as part of a drug-rehabilitation initiative. During this time, she tried to maintain a low profile, although there was speculation that to distance herself from the Red Army Faction she had joined her local Liberal Party. She has worked, as recently as 1999, as a picture editor in the United Kingdom.

During a radio chat show, when asked if she was "terribly ashamed" of being associated with the RAF, Proll said she was not, but went on to say that she did disapprove of their increasingly violent acts. Interviewed by Iain Sinclair for his book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, she said that she would like to settle in Britain but did not have the money to do so.