Former RAF terrorist Rolf Heissler dies: Obituary and his controversial history

Heissler was considered one of the most brutal RAF men. Whether Heissler shot employer president Hanns-Martin Schleyer will probably never be clarified.

Former RAF terrorist Rolf Heissler is dead. This is reported by the “Bild” newspaper after obituaries about Heissler appeared in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” and the “Frankfurter Allgemeine” over the weekend.

According to this, Heissler, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of two Dutch customs officers, died on May 18 in a hospital in Offenbach.

In an obituary published in the “SZ”, companions of Heissler said that he had experienced a “long political history”. “Started with the student movement in Munich, after 1975 in the RAF, then over 20 years in prison, most recently in the Gallusviertel in Frankfurt.”

Heissler was considered an absolute hardliner within the Red Army faction: Because of his brutal actions, he was forgiven with the code name “Fury” (in German: Furie). In the meantime he was married to the RAF leader Brigitte Mohnhaupt, which is how he got into the terrorist group.

In 1971, Heissler had to go to prison for a bank robbery, but was then released by the terrorist organization “Movement June 2nd”. As an exchange, the then Berlin CDU chairman Peter Lorenz was released. In 1978 he and a companion murdered two customs officers at a passport control in the Netherlands.

Investigators accused Heissler of actually executing the two men. He was arrested in his home city of Frankfurt am Main a year after the crime in a explosive police operation in which he himself had been seriously injured by a shot in the head. He was finally released on parole in 2001.

Heissler was also suspected of being responsible for the kidnapping and murder of employer president Hanns-Martin Schleyer in autumn 1977, which has not been solved to this day. Ex-RAF member Peter Jürgen Boock had claimed that Heissler fired the fatal shots together with Stefan Wisniewski. In 2013, however, the federal prosecutor’s office dropped the investigation into the murder case: Boock’s statements could not be confirmed.