On Thursday, February 27, 1975, West Berlin was just three days away from electing a new parliament. The Social Democrats had run the isolated half-city for almost 20 years, but now the conservatives had good chances to take over; Peter Lorenz, a lanky politician with thick black glasses, was leading in the polls.
Lorenz left his home in Zehlendorf at 8:52am, heading toward the city centre in the passenger seat of his black Mercedes. And then… he disappeared. The next time anyone saw him was on a Polaroid photo, looking disheveled without his signature specs, holding a handwritten sign: “Prisoner of the June 2 Movement”.
Here today and gone tomorrow
At 8:55am, as the candidate’s official car sped down Quermatenweg, with forest on one side and mansions on the other, a four-tonne truck pulled into the intersection. The driver slammed on the brakes, and a tiny red Fiat, driven by a petite woman with long blonde hair, smashed into the back bumper.
As the chauffeur got out to look at the dent, many things happened at once. A street sweeper emerged from the forest and knocked the driver over the head – his broom turned out to be a metal rod. Four large young men got into the car, with one right on Lorenz’s lap.
The whole city, the whole country was following the saga in real time.
The enormous politician thrashed around mightily, knocking out the windshield. “He had damn long legs!” one of the kidnappers recalled in an interview 20 years later. To keep him still, they injected him with a sedative and reminded him of judge Günter von Drenkmann, who had been shot during an attempted kidnapping four months earlier.
Lorenz accepted his fate as the stolen car hurtled down the AVUS motorway without a windshield. When they arrived in Charlottenburg, the kidnappers abandoned the car in an underground garage on Kantstraße. Lorenz was placed into the trunk of a different car and later moved into a big oak commode in a small truck. As he got his bearings, the almost-mayor found himself in a Volksgefängnis or “people’s prison” – a stuffy basement with a high ceiling that had been soundproofed to turn it into a leftist jail.
Lorenz asked to speak to the boss – the last group to detain him had been the Red Army during the Battle of Berlin. But the four young prison guards, in blue boiler suits and masks made out of white bedsheets, told him there was no boss.
The June 2 Movement had emerged from West Berlin’s antiauthoritarian youth rebellion of 1968. Every Berliner at the time got the reference: on June 2, 1967, at a protest against the Shah of Persia, a policeman shot and killed the student Benno Ohnesorg. This shooting radicalised a generation.
As Ralf Reinders, one of the kidnappers, recounted: “You could defend yourself against beatings, to some extent. But the fact that someone was simply gunned down, that went a bit further.” Inspired by the Tupamaros in Uruguay and their urban guerrilla strategy, some activists decided to take up arms. The name June 2 was like a manifesto: “This date will always be a reminder that they shot first!”
In contrast to the dogmatic, intellectual Red Army Faction (RAF), the June 2 Movement emerged from lumpenproletarian counterculture. They started as the satirically-named Central Council of Roaming Hash Rebels, using sticks and molotov cocktails to defend cannabis locales from police raids. Their later armed group had a ‘populist’ vibe: at one of their bank robberies, they handed out candy to the customers.
Back in the basement, Lorenz wasn’t having the worst time of it. Most of the kidnappers had been in prison themselves, and were determined their people’s prison would be more humane. Lorenz could close a curtain when he needed to use the bathroom, and was given daily papers, but with news about the abduction censored. They tried to interrogate him about the CDU’s corrupt dealings with real estate speculators but soon gave up and instead played chess with their prisoner.
The June 2 Movement sent demands to the press: they wanted the release of two random people who had been arrested at a demonstration, alongside six imprisoned members of different armed groups. The latter were to be released from prison and put on a plane with full tanks and a four-man crew, accompanied by Heinrich Albertz, a protestant chaplain and former West Berlin mayor. The deadline was Monday at 9am – otherwise “the inviolability of the prisoner [would be] at risk”.
A day like this
The West Berlin and West German governments formed crisis task forces. They had to use radio and TV broadcasts to reach the kidnappers, who had written: “No secret negotiations! Nothing must be hidden from the people!” The whole city, the whole country was following the saga in real time. By Saturday, the two demonstrators were released.
On Sunday, the West Berlin elections took place, and Lorenz’s CDU got 43.9% of the vote. He learned the results when his captors climbed down the ladder, announcing: “Congratulations, Herr Lorenz, it looks like you will be the next mayor!” (In the end, the SPD formed a coalition with the FDP to stay in power.)
The next morning at 10am, an hour past the deadline, a Boeing took off from Frankfurt. One prisoner had rejected the offer of being flown out. The other five, plus Albertz, first passed over Libya, then Ethiopia, before setting course for Aden. Once they were admitted to the People’s Republic of South Yemen, they handed an envelope to Albertz, who flew back to West Germany and read out a message on television that ended with the words: “A day like this, as lovely as today!” That was the code to release Lorenz. In the basement, the guards and their prisoner opened a bottle of wine and raised their glasses to the success of the action.
At one of their bank robberies, they handed out candy to the customers.
On Tuesday, March 4, at 11pm, Lorenz was again put into a car – but not into the commode – with his eyes covered. At Volkspark Wilmersdorf, silent and dark, he was led to a big tree. The June 2 Movement gave him three dimes for the payphone, and everyone shook hands, with the now freed politician expressing his hope they would meet again under different circumstances. They never did. At a press conference the next day, Lorenz reported that his captors had fixed a button on his pants, and generally acted “correctly”, despite the inherent violence of the situation.
It took eight months for police to discover the prison in the Kreuzberg basement – by that time, all the styrofoam soundproofing had been stuffed into blue trash bags and scattered around West Berlin. At Schenkendorfstraße 7 in Kreuzberg, around the corner from the Marheineke market hall, the June 2 Movement had been running a second-hand clothes shop for several months. The CDU’s Kreuzberg office was across the street – the massive police compound on Friesenstraße was up the road. Today, the space is used by a Diakonie office helping people who care for their loved ones – and the basement, Lorenz’s former prison cell, is for file boxes.
Twenty days later, the June 2 Movement distributed 30,000 copies of a 10-page pamphlet across West Berlin, ‘The Kidnapping from Our Perspective…’ With the help of 120 sympathizers, the flyers were gone in less than 30 minutes. As Reinders said, this logistical feat “shocked the cops more than anything!” In the movement’s folksy style, the flyers included lyrics to a song about the kidnapping.
They also published a letter from “Frau Busch” to Lorenz, who had tried and failed to get help for her disabled daughter. The kidnappers had taken 700 marks from Lorenz’s wallet and sent it to the woman. They simultaneously reported secret plans, found in Lorenz’s briefcase, to raise prices on the BVG and carry out layoffs in state companies. The action, which ended without anyone being hurt, was quite popular in Berlin’s Eckkneipen.
The June 2 Movement had entered into a standoff with the Federal Republic of Germany – and won. Yet their technical brilliance could only go so far once thousands of police were brought to Berlin for a manhunt. Within the next six months, everyone had been arrested – even though two successfully escaped from Berlin’s women’s prison the next summer. Most of them were sentenced to 15 years in prison.
We were reminded of West Germany’s history of left-wing terrorism one year ago, when Daniela Klette, a member of the last generation of the RAF, was arrested in her apartment in a different part of Kreuzberg. The Lorenz kidnapping was the most successful action ever carried out by a left-wing armed group in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany – but it also showed the limits of the urban guerrilla strategy. The next time you’re in a secondhand clothes shop, though, you might catch yourself wondering what’s going on in the basement.
