Birgit Hogefeld

Birgit Hogefeld (born 1956 in Wiesbaden) was a member of the West German terrorist group The Baader-Meinhof Gang also known as the Red Army Faction.

As a terrorist

Hogefeld joined the Red Army Faction late in the eighties (around 1984) long after its founding members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof were dead. She became the girlfriend of fellow terrorist Wolfgang Grams and moved in with him.

In 1993 Hogefeld and Grams arrived at a train station in Bad Kleinin where a group of GSG 9 officers were waiting to arrest them (they had got a tip-off from a fellow GSG 9 officer who had infiltrated the RAF). According to the GSG 9 men, Hogefeld and Grams immediately started firing at them as soon as they saw them, and that Grams shot dead an officer named Michael Newrzella and then committed suicide and fell on the train tracks. However it was later revealed that Grams did not commit suicide but was shot dead by GSG 9 officers even after he had surrendered. The controversy surrounding his death and its cover-up cost a lot of German politicians their jobs.

In any case Hogefeld was arrested. She described the arrest in a letter;

I saw a pistol pointed at me and laid on the ground. Three men then covered me with their weapons, and it was clear to me that I better not make any false moves if I wanted to remain alive (...) For example, one of them ran up to me, yanked my head up and hit me in the face.1

She has been convicted of the attempted assassination of Hans Tietmeyer, former President of the Deutsche Bundesbank as well as other terrorist activities. In November 1996 she was given three life imprisonment sentences and is currently (2006) incarcerated in a Frankfurt detention centre.