WEST GERMANY Red Roses from Roter Morgen
German terrorists strike at a new kind of victim
It was an inconvenient moment for late-afternoon callers. Frankfurt Banker Jurgen Ponto, 53, and his wife Ines were packing to catch a vacation flight to Rio de Janeiro. Still, the visitor was special —Susanne Albrecht, 26, Ponto's godchild and the daughter of a Hamburg lawyer who had been his boyhood friend. She was bearing a bouquet of red roses. So it was that the chairman of the Dresdener Bank, West Germany's second largest, stopped packing long enough to receive Albrecht at his 30-room villa in the wealthy Frankfurt suburb of Oberursel. With her through the iron gate came another young woman and a young man in a gray flannel suit.
Mrs. Ponto greeted the three visitors in the living room and left them with her husband. Minutes later, she and the chauffeur heard raised voices, then gunshots. They rushed into the room to find Ponto mortally wounded by five shots in his head and chest. Albrecht and her accomplices were fleeing across the lawn of the estate. Police theorized that they had planned to kidnap Ponto, and that he had resisted.
Two days later a mysterious caller informed the Frankfurt office of Reuters news agency that Ponto had been murdered by a radical group known as Roter Morgen (Red Morning). The caller threatened more executions unless "political prisoners" held by the "exploiting class" were freed. Police scarcely needed to be told that radicals were responsible. So many killings have been carried out by terrorist organizations spawned from West Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang -17 since 1969—that the file on these radicals has been computerized.
The computer tapes disclosed that Albrecht had been involved in far-left political activities since 1973. She had eve once been caught carrying electric cable —of a kind used with explosives—acros the German-Dutch border. The red ros bouquet, moreover, has served as a racical trademark; three years ago, a Wes Berlin judge was greeted at his doorstep by a girl carrying similar flowers. Moments later, he was shot dead.
From mug shots Ponto's widow and chauffeur identified the second woman a Eleonore Maria Poensgen, 23, another radical from an upstanding family. Police arrested her, but witnesses placed he elsewhere at the time of the shooting. Investigators thereupon turned their search toward a look-alike 22-year-old nurse named Adelheid Schulz who, like Poensgen, had a dossier in the computer.
While the hunt went on, Germans angrily debated on what to do about the string of political killings. Until now, the most prominent victims have been government officials such as Public Prosecutor Siegfried Buback, who was shot down on a Karlsruhe street in April by two men on a motorcycle. Now, for the first time, the target was an eminent figure in the business community.
Some Germans urged harsher criminal laws and increased police activity, but that aroused the specter of a fascist state, which the terrorists insist they already are fighting. Observed the Frankfurter Rundschau last week in an uncharacteristically black mood: "Everybody knows that Bonn is not Weimar. But occasionally we doubt whether the second attempt to establish a civilized state on German soil will succeed."