Stefan Wisniewski

Stefan Wisniewski (born 8 April 1953) is a former member of the Red Army Faction (RAF).

Early life Wisniewski was born in 1953 in Klosterreichenbach, a part of Baiersbronn, Baden-Württemberg, in the Black Forest. He was the son of Gisela, a widowed refugee from East Prussia, mother of three, and of Stanislaw Wisniewski from Kutno, a former forced labourer in German Arbeitseinsatz during World War II, who died on 9 October 1953 in Tübingen. His father had not returned to Poland, believing he would not like the communists in power there. During his youth, Wisniewski's mother warned him not to mention his father's past, since a number of former SS and SA members lived in the village.

In 1968, Wisniewski abandoned an apprenticeship as electrician, and was then forced in 1969–1970 to live in reform school, from which he fled seven times within a year. At the time, other future members of the RAF, Ulrike Meinhof (Bambule) and Gudrun Ensslin, protested also against such institutions. After his release, he moved to Hamburg, where he became an engineer on a ship. In the course of his travels, he said, he got to know the plight of the Third World.

RAF In Hamburg, Wisniewski became involved in the left-wing scene. He protested the detention of RAF members and participated in squattings and in the protests against the conservative Springer press. After the death of Holger Meins, a member of the RAF, as the result of a hunger strike in 1974, Wisniewski joined the group. In 1975, he participated in the West German Embassy siege. In the summer of 1976, Wisniewski was in a training camp of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Southern Yemen. The same year, Polish writer Hanna Krall interviewed him and wrote a story about him. Becker was later convicted of assisting the (still officially unknown) murderers and sentenced to four years in prison.