Holger Meins
Born
Holger Klaus Meins

(1941-10-26)26 October 1941
Hamburg, Germany
Died9 November 1974(1974-11-09) (aged 33)
Wittlich Prison, Wittlich, West Germany
Cause of deathStarvation
OrganizationRed Army Faction

Holger Klaus Meins (26 October 1941 – 9 November 1974) was a German cinematography student who joined the Red Army Faction (RAF) in the early 1970s and died on hunger strike in prison.

As a revolutionary

Meins became an important member of the RAF and was seen as a leading figure. He was very involved in the group's clandestine work, for instance hiring a metal sculptor to design a grenade casing and bomb mould designed which could be placed under a woman's dress, giving the impression that she was pregnant, telling the sculptor that it was a prop for a film project.[1]

On 1 June 1972, Meins and Andreas Baader, along with Jan-Carl Raspe, went to check on a storage garage in Frankfurt where they were storing explosives. The police had been surveilling the garage after a tip from a local resident. Meins and Baader entered the garage and were immediately surrounded. The police blocked the exit of the garage and fired tear gas grenades into the garage via a back window. Baader threw the tear gas back out. The stand-off did not last long after Baader was severely wounded when shot in the hip; Meins surrendered soon after. All three men were arrested.[2]

In prison, Meins and the other RAF prisoners launched several hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. Meins died by starvation on hunger strike, on 9 November 1974. Although Meins was 1.83 meters (6'0") tall, he weighed only 39 kg (86 lbs) at the time of his death.[3]

Aftermath

Burial site for Holger Meins.

Meins's death sparked many protest actions across Europe, with many turning violent. RAF members grew more opposed to the German state. Hans-Joachim Klein, who acted as chauffeur for Jean-Paul Sartre in a meeting with Andreas Baader[4] and became a militant, claimed that Meins's death showed him "the impotence of legality", and said that carried a copy of Meins's autopsy photo as a reminder.[5]

The RAF members who carried out the West German Embassy siege in Stockholm in 1975 named their group the "Holger Meins Commando" in his honor.[6]

Representation in other media

See also

References

  1. ↑ Aust, Stefan (2008). The Baader-Meinhof Complex. p. 151. ISBN 9781847920454.
  2. ↑ Aust, Stefan (2008). The Baader-Meinhof Complex. p. 167. ISBN 9781847920454.
  3. ↑ Sontheimer, Michael (8 November 2007). "Holger, der Kampf geht weiter!". spiegel.de. Der Spiegel. Retrieved 23 January 2014.
  4. ↑ Varon, Jeremy (2004). Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. University of California Press. p. 268.
  5. ↑ Varon, Jeremy (2004). Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. University of California Press. p. 231.
  6. ↑ Aust, Stefan (2008). The Baader-Meinhof Complex. p. 224. ISBN 9781847920454.
  7. ↑ "Fernsehen: Straubs »Moses und Aron«". Der Spiegel. No. 13/1975. 23 March 1975. Retrieved 6 November 2021.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.