Word: berliner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...chill of a Berlin winter's night, a man bound by tape to a bench in Wilmersdorf park struggled to free himself. Eventually, the man escaped his bonds, walked out of the park, found a telephone booth and called his wife. "Hello, Marianne. This is Peter," he said. The caller was Peter Lorenz, chairman of West Berlin's Christian Democratic Union and the party's candidate for mayor of the city. Six days earlier, he had been kidnaped by a gang of militant young anarchists, whose daring act startled all of West Germany (TIME, March...
...Berlin police were quickly able to identify the blonde Fiat driver as Angela Luther, 34, a suspected supporter of West Germany's notorious Baader-Meinhof gang of radical terrorists. Scarcely 24 hours after the kidnaping, however, the West German news agency DPA received a better explanation-a letter from the kidnapers and a photograph of the captured Lorenz-of what had happened. The kidnapers identified themselves as the "June Second Movement," referring to the day in 1967 when police shot and killed a member of a crowd of students protesting a visit to West Germany by the Shah...
...curiously not including gang leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. They also wanted authorities to annul all verdicts handed down against demonstrators who had violently protested the death by prison hunger strike of a gang member named Holger Meins. One result of the violence was the murder of West Berlin Supreme Court President Giinter von Drenk-mann. It is suspected that he was killed in retaliation for Meins' death (TIME, Dec. 9). Unless the six prisoners were released, provided with $52,200 in cash and flown out of West Berlin on a special jet, Lorenz, according to the note...
Occupying Powers. Government authorities set up crisis centers in Bonn and West Berlin, and police launched a search for Lorenz and his kidnapers, also broadcasting an appeal over nationwide television for "convincing evidence" that Lorenz is still alive. On Saturday an anonymous caller told C.D.U. headquarters that Lorenz would be released after all demands had been met, but there was no way of knowing if the caller was really one of the kidnapers. Lorenz also sent two letters to his wife saying that he was well and hoped to be with her soon...
...respond. For one thing, whether they agreed to the demands or not, the timing of the transaction was bound to affect the election outcome. For another, the use of a 707 jet to fly the freed terrorists to safety would bring U.S., French and British representatives in West Berlin into the picture, since the occupying powers still control the air traffic into and out of the western sector of the city. At week's end the West Berlin government took a first step toward a solution by releasing two prisoners who had been arrested during the riots that followed...