Inge Viett

Inge Viett (12 January 1944 – 9 May 2022) was a member of the West German left-wing militant organisations "2 June Movement" and the "Red Army Faction (RAF)", 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, Viett 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 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 people 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. With her partner she then moved again, setting up home in Wiesbaden where she worked as a graphics assistant. With the others she took part in meetings, demonstrations, and other actions of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition, 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. Viett learned how to prepare and use Molotov cocktails. In December 1971 she was one of the squatters involved in the occupation of the Georg von Rauch Haus, close to her home in 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. 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 (loosely: Black support).

2 June movement Viett 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. From January 1973 (sources are inconsistent as to precise dates ) 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. Their next target was Peter Lorenz, lead candidate for the CDU (party) 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" (marshmallows coated in chocolate) to bank customers caught up in the raid.

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 (then in East Berlin), 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 East Germany. (An attempt to free Andreas Vogel at the same time failed.) 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 Stasi 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.

In Prague Viett 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 (Stasi) 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 Stasi property: then she was taken to Berlin Schönefeld Airport from where the authorities arranged a flight to Baghdad for her. An issue arose concerning eight "drop out" RAF members who no longer wished to participate in the group's violent activities and had become stranded without credible identity papers in Prague. Viett sought help from her Stasi contacts to have these individuals conducted to safety in "Black Africa". The Stasi expressed concern that the proposal was impractical on several levels, not least because the RAF "drop outs" might disclose what they knew of links between the East German ministry and the West German terrorist group. Instead the eight were invited to relocate to East Germany where they were issued with new identities and coached till they had mastered their cover stories, before being distributed across the remoter corners of East Germany and permitted to start new lives, albeit under surveillance, and without being able to contact one another.

Viett was identified from finger prints found on her moped and on her abandoned handbag, but by that time she had returned to the house in Namur. She then took another trip to South Yemen. By this time she was nurturing increasing doubts over the effectiveness of the "armed struggle". She realised that the RAF was socially isolated, and that even within the political left, any messages from its "actions" really only reached the most marginalised groups. She undertook and completed an apprenticeship in printing and copying and took a job at the printing shop at 32 Riesaer Straße in Dresden. the Stasi's sub-department for counter-terrorism.

Dresden years Colleagues must have realised quickly that their new comrade from the west was well connected. Just six months after taking her job, she acquired a car.

Arrest in Magdeburg and conviction in Koblenz

"Ein Land, das sich die Werte, für die ich lebte, auf seine Fahnen, seine Verfassung und Gesetze geschrieben hat: Antifaschismus, Solidarität, Völkerfreundschaft und Kollektivität. Für diese gesellschaftlichen Ziele hab ich all die Jahre in der DDR mit großer Kraft gelebt und gearbeitet. Es sind die wichtigsten Jahre in meinem Leben.""A land that had inscribed the values for which I have lived on its flags, in its constitution and in its laws: anti-fascism, solidarity, the friendship of peoples', collectivism. I have worked and lived for these social objectives during my years in the German Democratic Republic with all my strength. These are the most important years in my life." A neighbour had recognised her and reported her to the police as one of the terrorist suspects. She was held for four weeks in East Germany and then handed over to the West German authorities.

Till 1990 prosecutors in West Germany had been unable to unravel with sufficient precision the roles of individual RAF members for the series of terrorist murders that took place in 1977. After 1990, with the suspected ex-terrorists extracted from East Germany, prosecutors were able to offer reduced sentences in exchange for information that could be used to secure convictions in court.

The unbowed radical On 24 February 2007, Viett published a piece in Junge Welt in which she contextualised and defended the terrorism of the RAF. The "political-military struggle" was at that time "the appropriate expression for [their] opposition to capitalism". Looking back, she lamented the way that in the appetite for liberation "the guerilla fight in West Germany and in all the imperialist countries excluded from the headlines the more experienced, intelligent, persistent and constructitive aspects" of the movement. The "armed actions" by the RAF represented one element as "class struggle from below". Forty years ago there was a small collection of people who took the decision to take up the struggle against the German elite and their power structure. Viett asserted that they were motivated by anti-colonialism and national liberation movements.

On 28 July 2008, Viett was briefly arrested at a demonstration against the German army being held at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. A few months later, following criticism by politicians, she was quoted in the Berlin edition mass market Bild newspaper defending her involvement, "That was an anti-militarist action. And every anti-militarist action is good." Eventually she faced trial, on 22 October 2009. Noting that she was "a pensioner",

On 8 January 2011, Viett participated in a panel discussion at the International Rosa Luxemburg Conference in Berlin. The press were in attendance. She called for the construction of a "revolutionary communist organisation with secret structures". That was all part of a "",

Death Viett died on 9 May 2022 in Falkensee.

Published output (selection)

Einsprüche! Briefe aus dem Gefängnis. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 1996, Nie war ich furchtloser: Autobiographie. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 1997. Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag Reinbek 1999. Cuba libre bittersüß: Reisebericht. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 1999, Morengas Erben: eine Reise durch Namibia. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2004,