Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann

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Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann (born 1951 - died 1995) ^[1] was a West German anarchist terrorist associated with J2M and the Second Generation Red Army Faction. She was the wife of the J2M terrorist Norbert Kröcher.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Terrorism 3 Imprisonment & Death 4 References

[edit] Early life

Kröcher-Tiedemann was born in Ziegendorf in Mecklenburg, Germany in 1951. She studied at a high school in Bielefeld before moving to Berlin to study Politics and Sociology. At that time she was associated with communes in Berlin and was opposed to Americans occupying Germany after World War II. ^[2]

[edit] Terrorism

It is not clear at what point Kröcher-Tiedemann went underground, but in 1973 she shot a policeman in a Buchen carpark after he tried to arrest her for stealing number plates.^[3] She was subsequently arrested and was sentenced to eight years in prison.^{[citation needed]}

However as a result of the Peter Lorenz kidnapping, she was freed two years later in 1975 and flown to Yemen. ^[4]

On 20 December 1975 she accompanied Carlos the Jackal on a raid of the OPEC headquarters in Vienna. There she murdered two people: One was a policeman named Anton Tichler and the other was a plainclothes Iraqi security guard who had managed to grab hold of Kröcher-Tiedemann. While attempting to control her, Kröcher-Tiedemann produced a second gun and shot the man through the head. ^[5]

The raid was successful and on December 22, 42 hostages as well as the hostage takers where flown to Algiers, then Tripoli and then Algiers again. All the hostages were freed and the terrorists were all given asylum. ^[6]

In November of 1977, Kröcher-Tiedemann working again with J2M, kidnapped an Austrian millionaire named Walter Palmers, and successfully managed to obtain a $2 million ransom in exchange for his freedom.

Kröcher-Tiedemann showed up again in December 1977 when she shot two Swiss customs men after they attempted to arrest her at Porrentruy, near the Swiss border. Both survived, however one would remain paralysed for the rest of his life. She was subsequently arrested and when her baggage was searched, weapons, forged I.D. papers, blueprints of the Israeli embassy in Berlin and $20,000 (of Palmer's ransom money) were found. ^[7]

[edit] Imprisonment & Death

Kröcher-Tiedemann spent the next 10 years in a Swiss prison, and in 1987 she was extradited back to Germany, where she was charged with her part in the OPEC raid. However many witnesses were afraid to testify against her for fear of retaliation and due to a lack of evidence she was acquitted in May of 1990.

Kröcher-Tiedemann was released from prison in 1991, and suffered from ill-health. She was operated on 5 times in 1992. On the 7 October 1995 Kröcher-Tiedemann finally succumbed to cancer and died at the age of 44. ^[8]

[edit] References