Gabriele Rollnik

Gabriele Rollnik (born 1950) is a German former terrorist.

She became a member of the 2 June Movement, which had been named after the date, in 1967, on which the student Benno Ohnesorg was fatally shot by a policeman in West Berlin during a demonstration against a visit by the Shah of Iran.

She was sentenced to a fifteen-year jail term in 1981 and released on 14 September 1992 (pre-conviction detention between 1978 and 1981 being taken into account).

Life Gabriele Rollnik was born and grew up in Dortmund. Her father was a policeman. During her final year she began to work on a dissertation concerning the "compatibility of family and working life", Her practical involvement included renting a retail premises at Schenkendorfstraße 7 where she opened a "second-hand shop", the basement of which became the "People's Prison" Those involved, along with Rollnik, were Monika Berberich, and Inge Viett. Berberich, a qualified lawyer, was a member of the Red Army Faction, while the other three all came from the 2 June Movement. Details of her involvement in the Vienna kidnapping remain vague, but Rollnick was evidently "of continuing interest" to the West German authorities. Rollnik herself seems never to have told the authorities very much about the Palmers kidnapping. However, after she had finally been found and arrested, a trial took place in 1980/81, in the course of which evidence was provided by prosecutors of lengthy police interviews and judicial investigations involving local accomplices, recruited and employed in Vienna by the West German kidnappers. From this evidence it became apparent that a trio of women Inge Viett, Gabriele Rollnik and Juliane Plambeck, had all participated prominently in carrying out the kidnap conspiracy.

Extracting comrades from prisons remained a top priority, and on 27 May 1978 Rollnik was involved in another jail break, this time from the outside. The escaping prisoner was her old lodger-lover, Till Meyer, who was liberated from the In the end, she began to hallucinate and "hear voices". After her release she suffered continuing problems with vision and balance which she attributed to the hunger strikes. One concession apparently resulting from a hunger strike involved prisoners being permitted to talk by telephone to convicted terrorists in other prisons. While Rollnick was in prison she first spoke to , a Red Army Faction member. (While they were in jail the RAF and 2 June Movement finally agreed to merge.) She was released in 1992 and the two remained in contact, although Dellwo remained in jail for another three years. They came face to face in 1995 on a river boat on the Elbe that had been rented for seven hours to host a "release party" of approximately 200 left-wingers who had been extremist activists during the 1970s and were now coming to the end of their prison sentences. Rollnick and Dellwo subsequently teamed up and have been together since that time.

One of the concerns that had fuelled the terrorist wave that hit West Germany in the 1970s was a conviction that far too many former Nazis had quietly returned to positions of power and influence in the political and security establishments, and other fulcra of state power. By the time the surviving terrorists had served their lengthy sentences, the passage of time had removed most of these. Reunification meant that after 1990 there was no longer an alternative German model for those who favoured Soviet-sponsored "Socialism" over US-sponsored "Capitalism". For this, and other reasons, there seems never to have been any question of a return to lawlessness following release. Instead, building on the university studies that she had not competed, Rollnick turned to care and social work. Her first regular job involved employment as a care worker in a retirement home. After a year, helped by a friend, she found a job in a children's home in Hamburg's traditionally run-down St. Pauli district. During five years working here, she resumed her studies, gaining a qualification in psychotherapy for children and young people, and later (finally) graduating with a degree in social sciences.