The Rote Zora group claimed responsibility for over 40 bombings
A member of a German left-wing feminist guerrilla group was handed a suspended two-year prison sentence on Monday for her role in two failed bombings 20 years ago.
Adrienne Gerhäuser, 58, had admitted that she “knowingly and willingly” attempted to bomb the Berlin Genetic Technical Institute in 1986 and a clothing factory in Bavaria in 1987 on behalf of the Rote Zora movement.
Gerhäuser, a photographer, handed herself over to the police late last year after two decades on the run with her boyfriend, who is also suspected of aiding terrorist activities.
She told the Berlin court that the attacks were motivated by her political beliefs at the time, including a fierce opposition to genetic engineering and solidarity with striking female factory workers in South Korea.Gerhäuser said she had provided alarm clocks for two bomb detonators. But in both cases the devices failed to go off and no one was injured.
The sentence was widely expected. The Berlin court had said that because Gerhäuser had turned herself in, this was the maximum penalty she could expect. She was convicted of membership in a terrorist group and two counts of attempting to cause an explosion.
The Berlin judge who handed down the suspended sentence said Gerhäuser was no longer “motivated to manifest her political views violently.”
Named after a German children’s book about a female Robin Hood-like character, Rote Zora was a women’s splinter group that broke away from the so-called Revolutionary Cells network in 1986. It claimed responsibility for 45 bombings and cases of arson between April 1977 and February 1988 with the aim of bringing about “violent, radical change in German society” but tried to avoid casualties.
Germany will this year be commemorating the “autumn of terrorism” 30 years ago in 1977, when murders and kidnappings by the Red Army Faction (RAF) reached their climax.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2444055,00.html
Rote Zora, like the RAF, was part of a violent leftist current that was aided by the East German Stasi secret police. Among the groups sponsored were the Socialist Patients Collective (SPK), inmates of mental asylums steeped in Marxist teachings by sympathetic psychologists and let loose on West German targets. Frau Gerhäuser’s sentence would nearly be unbelievable, considering the present awareness of terrorism across the West, whose governments make use of the concern to increase their powers, and Germany’s ongoing imprisonment of people who non-violently express political views deemed politically incorrect. However, Frau Gerhäuser is a member of a protected political species: a politically-correct far left-wing baby boomer. Many in Germany’s legal and political elite come out of this general milieu, and see the likes of Gerhäuser as “misguided” in their actions, despite their hearts being in the “right place.” The ideological descendants of such groups make up the “anti-fa” gangs who attack patriots with police and government protection, serving, like the SPK and RAF, as unofficial arms of a secret state.