Kidnapping Schleyer's abduction was planned by
Siegfried Haag, but he was arrested in 1976, so his replacement,
Brigitte Mohnhaupt, carried out the abduction. On 5 September 1977, an RAF "commando unit" attacked the
chauffeured car carrying former
Nazi SS officer Schleyer, then president of the
German employers' association, in
Cologne, just after the car had turned right from Friedrich-Schmidt-Strasse into Vincenz-Statz-Strasse. His driver, Heinz Marcisz, 41, was forced to brake when a baby carriage suddenly appeared in the street in front of them. The
police escort vehicle behind them was unable to stop in time, and crashed into Schleyer's car.
Peter-Jürgen Boock and
Sieglinde Hofmann had pushed the carriage on the street to appear as if they were friends meeting with a baby. The driver of the police escort vehicle, Reinhold Brändle, 41 and a third police officer, Helmut Ulmer, 24, who was in the second vehicle were also killed. The hail of bullets riddled over twenty bullet wounds into the bodies of Brändle and Pieler. Schleyer was then pulled out of the car and forced into the RAF assailants' own getaway van.
Imprisonment and killing Schleyer was hidden in a
highrise in
Erftstadt (Liblar) near Cologne. The police came very close to finding him, but due to lack of internal communication did not rescue him. Several local police officers were convinced that Schleyer was held in the aforementioned highrise close to the
autobahn, and one investigator had rung the doorbell of the apartment in question. The RAF demanded that the government release imprisoned members of their group. The government refused to give into RAF's demands or negotiate aside from strategical negotiations, hoping that the police would manage to free Schleyer in the meantime. On 13 October, the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181. Part of the hijackers demands were the release of the same imprisoned members of the RAF that Schleyer's kidnappers had made Schleyer's widow,
Waltrude Schleyer, campaigned against clemency for his kidnappers and other members of the RAF. She died on 21 March 2008, in
Stuttgart. ==References==