Inside GSG 9 (Germany's Tier 1 Counter Terrorist Unit) | Martin Herzog | Ep. 383

This episode dives into the rise of modern counterterrorism in Germany, tracing how the failures of Munich ’72 led to the creation of GSG-9. Our guest, Martin Herzog, breaks down the Lufthansa hijacking, the Mogadishu raid, and the evolution of state response to terrorism. A sharp, detailed look at one of the most defining counterterror operations in European history. Buy Martin's book about GSG 9 here: https://a.co/d/gicXE0m Today's Sponsors: Wild Alaskan Company⬇️ https://wildalaskan.com/HOUSE Get $35 off your first order! GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 25% off! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 00:00 – Start 01:52 – Munich ’72 Failure 06:43 – Birth of GSG-9 14:52 – Ulrich Wegener & Early Leadership 24:47 – Building a Unit From Scratch 39:04 – Rise of RAF Terrorism 56:22 – The German Autumn Begins 1:01:59 – Lufthansa Hijacking Begins 1:14:14 – Murder of Captain Schumann 1:28:01 – Mogadishu Assault Planning 1:32:57 – The 8-Minute Raid 1:43:22 – Aftermath & GSG-9 Legacy Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:59Speaker 03

  The Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 1:12Jack Murphy?

  Hey folks, welcome to episode 383 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, here with today's guest, Martin Herzog. He is the author of GSG9: From Munich to Mangadishu, The Birth of Germans' Counterterrorism Force. Martin is an author, journalist, academic. I read this book just this week. I hope you guys will go and pick it up. I thought initially, as I was telling Martin before we started the show, I thought I had read all about this subject already. But when I picked up this book and started reading through it, I realized there's a lot I didn't know. And so we're going to talk about the Munich massacre, the origin of GSG9, how that came about, and about, I guess it really is the very first

• 1:57Jack Murphy?

  successful aircraft takedown. And is it the first one that was ever done successfully in Mangadishu?

• 2:06Speaker 05

  Hi Jack, yeah, thanks for having me on the show. And yes, I think it is actually the first takedown and to this day, I think arguably the most complex that ever happened. So yeah, it was a first for everybody involved, I guess.

• 2:26Jack Murphy?

  And it showed the Western world, I think, that it's possible to fight back against terrorism, that they weren't helpless, that there was a way. We'll get into the implications of all of it during this show. I'm excited to talk about this. Like I said, there's a lot going on actually, and there's a lot of ancillary things around that hijacking that are connected to it that we'll get into. But Martin, if you could first tell us a little bit about your background, what kind of like, you know, I know your background is in journalism. How did that kind of take you into this subject of, you know, the German military and police force in this case?

• 3:03Speaker 05

  Well, I studied philosophy and history and politics here at the University of Cologne, where I'm based. And I naturally am very much interested in the history. And I came across GSG9, I think it was in 2007. That was the year when the Mogadishu, the Mogadishu operation was 35 years. They kind of celebrated this anniversary and of course, there was a lot of media coverage about that. And so I was working for WDR, that's the public broadcaster here, and they asked me

• 3:48Speaker 05

  to do a TV piece and I did a radio piece about that. And I came in touch with a couple of the veterans who had been founding members of the GSG9 in 1972, just after the Olympic massacre, but who have also participated in the Mogadishu operation. So that was when I first got interested in this whole matter. And then over the years, I went deeper and deeper into that matter and did a couple of... of segments for TV, radio documentations. And in twenty eighteen, I think it was, or twenty nineteen, I did a deep dive interview with Dieter Fox,

• 4:32Speaker 05

  who is one of the, of those who founded the GSG nine and who was also very, very tightly participating in the Mugadi sho operation. And so he told me the whole story, which I realized I only had covered part of it. And that was mainly the days in between the hijacking of this Lufthansa plane LH one eight one, the Lanzut, that's the name of the aircraft. And it was hijacked on October thirteenth, nineteen seventy seven, and it was liberated five days later. And the story, what happens in between, that was something that fascinated me.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  And Dieter Fox was one, was the one guy who accompanied the commander of GSG nine, Ulrich Wegener, all these five days when it was, the abduction of an aircraft developed into an odyssey throughout the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and then finally ended up in Mugadi sho in Africa. So that was very fascinating. And I thought, well, this, this is a story that has not been told in any great detail in Germany, surprisingly, because I thought, I, I looked it up and thought there must be literature about that. But there wasn't. And so I thought, well, this is a story that is much more than for a twenty minute radio show.

• 5:59Speaker 05

  And so I started researching the book. I asked Dieter Fox if he was happy to support me. And so through him and then through GSG nine headquarters here close by, and they are based not far from Cologne, I was able to really dive very deeply into the history, in the founding history and the story of the Mugadi sho operation. And finally, write a book about that, which was then published in twenty twenty two. And well, now you have just said that you read this week the, the English version of this,

• 6:40Speaker 05

  these first five years of GSG nine from nineteen seventy two to nineteen seventy seven.

• 6:47Jack Murphy?

  And this book is available now through Casemate. People can go and find it?

• 6:54Speaker 05

  Yes, that's that's the case. You can buy it online. I think in all the the big online departments you can find it and also in good bookstores everywhere in the US and in the UK as well. It's a little bit hard to get your fingers on it when you're in Germany, but people living here probably will refer to the or will rather go for the for the German version of the book, I imagine.

• 7:25Jack Murphy?

  So let's go back in time to 1972. We have to imagine for our younger audience, this is before the War on Terror, before 9/11. This is a time in the 70s where terrorism is sort of a newish thing, international terrorism, and taking of hostages and hijackings is something that's becoming a weekly or monthly occurrence. And then one of the big catalyzing events of terrorism that happened at that time was what later became known as the Munich Massacre. Most of our viewers are probably familiar with that event through the Steven Spielberg film,

• 8:05Jack Murphy?

  but I'd like to hear your description of that event. What happened? And what went wrong? And what were some of the lessons learned out of it?

• 8:18Speaker 05

  So the the Olympic Games in Munich were in 1972 were the first after the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany. And they were very monumental and very, well, you could say, rather

• 8:37Speaker 05

  Grim Olympic Games, so that was all for the purpose of the propaganda of the Nazi regime. And this time around, Germany wanted to do it differently. They wanted to create happy games. They wanted to create jolly games. That was the expression, heitere Spiele, jolly games. So they wanted to present, you know, it was shortly after the invention of the color TV, so it was very colorful. They wanted to create a very, very nice environment, welcoming the international community. They wanted to present Germany as a modern, open, liberal state to the world stage. So they planned for everything and they had a very, very nice Olympic stadium.

• 9:22Speaker 05

  I can strongly recommend whenever you're in Munich, visit it, the Olympic stadium is still magnificent. It's very, very beautiful. And so everything was planned for, but for the, but not for the security measures. Barely any existed. There was, maybe, or not maybe, there was a fence, a two-meter fence around the Olympic village, and that was about it. There were no further measures. There were no contingency plans for any criminal or let alone terrorist activities. There were no plans for crisis staffs should something happened. Nothing whatsoever.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  And so, but nobody, nobody thought, I mean, you, you mentioned it. It was a time of rising terrorist activities, skyjacking of airplanes, and the German homemade terrorism of the Red Army faction. We probably talk about that a little bit later on. It was, it was rampant, but nobody expected for anything to happen on such an event, because it was a happy sports event, what, what should happen there? So, nobody cared for it, so, and the first two weeks went fine. The weather was great. The games were on

• 10:45Speaker 05

  and everybody was happy. It was the first live event that was really televised around the globe 24/7. And then on September 5th.

• 10:59Speaker 05

  In the night of September 5th, Palestinian Commando entered the Olympic Village, went to the to the location of the Israeli delegation, and they took the Israeli delegation hostage, killed two of them right away. And they demanded, they took them hostage and demanded the liberation of some 230, I think it was Palestinian fighters from Israeli prisons, a couple from Turkish prisons and German RAF terrorists from German prisons.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  So that were their demands. And over the day, I mean, as I said, nobody really thought that something like that could happen so haphazardly. They established a crisis staff with police forces and ministers and the mayor of Munich and the mayor of the Olympic Village. And they tried to gather police forces and tried to do well something, because nothing was planned. It was all very, they were, you know, in over their heads. Nothing really worked out.

• 12:25Speaker 05

  And they tried, in the afternoon, they tried an assault, but that was, you know, as I said, it was televised live all over the world. So on every TV set, you could see what was happening there. And nobody bothered to shush away the journalists and the TV cameras. So everything was really broadcast live worldwide. So when they tried to sneak up on this, on the delegation's,

• 13:01Speaker 05

  on the delegation's house, the Israeli delegation's house.

• 13:07Speaker 05

  They could, inside the house, there were TV sets, in every delegation, there were TV sets. So they could watch the sneaking up of the policemen who tried to, yeah, go there. They were dressed in, in, uh, um, World War Two helmets and had old guns that were also probably from the Second World War. And they didn't know how to approach, they didn't know anything. And, um, uh, well, the, the orders are not, uh, really, uh, known what they actually said, but it was, was something along the line, well, get in there and then see what you can do. That was basically their, their strategy, that was all their orders that were given to them.

• 13:51Speaker 05

  So within minutes, this all fell apart and, uh, the, the terrorists said, no, well, don't, uh, don't even think about it. And, uh, so this, this didn't take, um, take long for them to, to detect and to, to, uh, well, uh, end it, basically. Um, and, uh, so the problem was that the Israeli government said, uh, well, you, to the, to the German government, of course, there were consultations between the German and the Israeli government. And the Israeli government said, well, do whatever you want, but we will not, uh, uh, agree to any prisoner exchange.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  And, uh, so, um, yeah, the German government was left to their own devices. Um, additionally, there was the problem that the German governi- government was not in power, really, of, uh, the situation, uh, in, because, um, uh, in Germany, police, not unlike in the States, is, uh, authority of the states, of the, uh, of the, the lender, the provinces. So it was the Bavarian province that was responsible for the police there and all the action there and the Munich City Police. So, um, the, the federal government couldn't do very much, really.

• 15:12Speaker 05

  And so there was the Minister of the Interior, Hans Dietrich Gencher, who was there and who was there to advise, but he didn't have any authority of what should happen or not. So this dragged on. There are a lot more details, very interesting details, but it dragged on for the whole day. And in the evening, finally, it was agreed to fly the terrorists with their hostages to Cairo. That's what they told the terrorists. So the idea was to fly them with helicopters to the nearby military airport of Fürstenfeldbruck

• 15:53Speaker 05

  and from there, put them into an aircraft and fly them to Cairo. That's what they told them, but that was not what the plan was. There were a couple of policemen, no special forces. There were no special forces. There were just regular police cops. And they were given a couple of,

• 16:16Speaker 05

  of, I think, two submachine guns and otherwise just like pistols. And they were told, okay, go into this aircraft that is parked there, that is ready for the terrorists, dress up as Luftwaffe employees, stewards, and when they come in, then you, you know, you just get control of the situation and seize them or kill them. That was the plan.

• 16:48Speaker 05

  These guys, when they were told that, and there were not even all the uniforms for them to dress them accordingly, and they would know that 12 people, Luftwaffe people in one tiny plane would raise suspicion by the terrorists right away. They didn't have the right weaponry. They were not trained for such a situation. So they quickly talked amongst each other and decided, no, we will not go on such a suicide mission and left the aircraft in Fürstenfeldbruck just at the time when the helicopters with the terrorists were arriving. So the helicopters landed.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  The terrorists got out of the helicopter, two of them, the leader and another one, and they went into the aircraft and saw that it was empty and they suspected a trap. Of course they did. And then they came out and signaled as much to the other terrorists. And that was the moment when the fire, when the firefight began, because there were like five sharpshooters. That's a very, well, that's a very big word for these guys because that was just guys with some rifles and they were placed around the area where the

• 18:09Speaker 05

  helicopter was, was sitting. And nobody knew who gave the order because there were no radio contact, they didn't have any, any radio on them. So at some point, they just started shooting and this shooting lasted for almost two hours. And the final result was that, that all, that, that all terrorists, save three, it was all in all, there were eight, so five terrorists were killed, and everybody of the Israeli delegation. Two, both helicopters that landed there were blown up with everybody inside. And so in total,

• 18:54Speaker 05

  it was, one German police officer was killed as well. And so all in all, finally, there were sixteen dead bodies and a police that was completely in over their heads, who completely, it was a complete disaster, complete failure. And this whole scenery was witnessed by Hans Dietrich Genscher, the Minister of the Interior. He sat there, couldn't do anything. And next to him was his liaison officer to the Bundesgrenzschutz, the border guards, that was Ulrich Wegener at the time. He also witnessed the whole thing. And when it finally...

• 19:38Speaker 05

  Was clear that this was an absolute and utter disaster. Um, they both came to the conclusion that in order to prevent something from happening again, something like that from happening again, it needs, there need to be some unit that is able to deal with such threats and, and such terrorist attacks. That's when basically that when the idea came up to create GSG nine and within three weeks, a GSG nine was founded and came into existence.

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• 23:53Jack Murphy?

  And GSG9 being an acronym, you can tell us exactly what it means, but it's one of the Border Patrol unit sections, or I don't want to say platoons, but one of their elements. Was this counterterrorism unit placed within the Border Guards because they were the force that had federal authority around Federated Germany? As opposed to, you mentioned earlier, the different provinces of Germany each had their own thing going on?

• 24:22Speaker 05

  Yes, it was a very complicated situation. And without something like the Olympic massacre, the massacre at the Olympic Games in Munich, probably GSG9 would never have come into existence. Because as you said, Bundesgrenzschutz, the border guard, is federal. And it was, at the time, it was still very paramilitarily organized. Because they were basically a force to protect the border to Eastern Germany and the Eastern Bloc. And but the Minister for the Interior, Genscher,

• 25:06Speaker 05

  wanted to make it a real police force. And so this was part of it. So it came in very handy that they had a paramilitary background, on the one hand, but that they were a police force and they were federal. In normal times, probably, he would have had a hard time arguing for such a thing with his colleagues on the provinces. Because they were very, very suspicious. And they were very, very keen on keeping their authority in terms of police and security. And that was, you know, that was a result of the Second World War. It, you know, the decentralization of Germany give the provinces a lot of power

• 25:49Speaker 05

  in terms of culture, of education, but also, most importantly, in terms of security and police forces. So they wanted to federalize that in order to have not such a centralized force. And so they were also the German ministers of the interior of the provinces. They were really keen on keeping this authority and not handing over too much of that power to the federal state. But yeah, that was the reason why.

• 26:25Speaker 05

  Why the Bundesgrenzschutz, the BGS, the Border Patrol was chosen to house such a unit. They had helicopters, they had what they thought was all the equipment that they would ever need. Turned out, they didn't. They needed different staff, completely different equipment, different weaponry, but that at the time, they thought was ideal to, yeah, to bring a special unit and to create a special unit like the GSG9.

• 27:02Speaker 05

  And for the name, just quickly, there were, up to this time, there were seven Grenzschutzgruppen, GSG, Grenzschutzgruppe, one to seven, and there was a, so that means Border Patrol Group. And there was a helicopter unit, that was the eighth, and then came GSG9. As a very small unit, but they had regimental status, which gave them access directly to the Minister of the Interior. So they didn't have to, they were not a subgroup within one of the existing groups.

• 27:43Speaker 05

  And so, Wegener, who was the liaison officer for the Border Patrol to Minister Genscher, he had a direct line and kept it that way by having GSG9 being placed in this kind of, on the same level as the much bigger other groups within the Border Patrol.

• 28:06Jack Murphy?

  And part of that, or a big part of it, was because of that personal relationship between those two?

• 28:12Speaker 05

  Yes. He was working for Genscher for the last three years. I think 1969 was when they met, and...

• 28:26Speaker 05

  He was, uh, Wigner was, was very much in high regard with, uh, with Genzer. And so they worked together for three years. He liked his very direct, uh, hands-on approach, no-nonsense approach, talking clearly, uh, not trying to, um, to, to soften things, uh, but, uh, just like a very direct approach. He liked that. And so it was the natural choice, it seems, for him. Um, and there was no other competition in terms of leadership or anything like that, something that would take place certainly today.

• 29:05Speaker 05

  Um, but it was just, uh, he was just named as the one who would create G9 and that was basically it, yeah.

• 29:14Jack Murphy?

  So tell us a little bit more about Wagner and, you know, you told us why he was selected, but who was this guy as a person? Um, where, what was his background?

• 29:25Speaker 05

  His background was, uh, military. Um, he was, uh, born, uh, in the late 1920s in Jutoburg. That's a little town southeast of Berlin. And, uh, that was a garrison city. And, uh, his father was a soldier. He served with the Reichswirt. That was the predecessor of the Wehrmacht, of the Third Reich. So, um, he very early came into contact, in touch with, uh, the, the military. And, uh, he was also, um, his father was very conservative. Uh, they were very Prussian in their, in their whole approach.

• 30:10Speaker 05

  He liked that very much. He was, uh, he liked punctuality and, uh, and, and values and, uh, keeping to your word. And these, these, all these, uh, values that, um, are connected with, with Prussian and German, um...

• 30:29Speaker 05

  Well, how do you say that? Uh, that, that, he, he was very, very Prussian in that sense. Uh, very conservative, uh, but, uh, not very keen on the National Socialists that were just coming on in the nineteen thirties. Uh, his father didn't like, uh, the whole ideology. Um, he was very patriotic, very nationalist, but he didn't like the ideology of, uh, antisemitism of the, uh, NSDAP, the, uh, National Socialist Movement. And, uh, he liked the whole, the, the Hitler cult and all that surrounds it. Uh, he, he clearly disliked that.

• 31:09Speaker 05

  Um, Ulrich, um, being a young kid at the time, he saw himself, um, in, in a position that he needed to join the Hitlerjugend, the Hitler Youth. And, uh, but, uh, so because everybody was, was going there, so he thought, I have to go as well. And, uh, in his memoirs, he writes that, uh, he had to apply the Hitler, Hitler salute, that was a necessity, but he didn't like it too much. He was certainly no resistance fighter, uh, against the Nazi regime, uh, but he was kind of swimming along with it.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Um, when the war was almost over, uh, he was, uh, just at the age that he could be drafted and was sent, uh, to defend the, the eastern front, but that was a very short episode and then the war was over. And, uh, yeah, he was left in the eastern part of Germany that was controlled by the Soviet Union. And, um, he hadn't been really a resistance fighter against the Nazis, although he didn't like them, but he surely was anti-communist. So, uh, he founded a, kind of a little resistance movement himself, basically, um, printing

• 32:30Speaker 05

  letters and, and, and leaflets and, um, yeah, spreading them. And, uh, it didn't take long until the Volkspolizei, the People's Police of Eastern Germany, uh, caught him and, uh, put him on trial, very short trial, and eighteen months later, he was allowed to leave prison. So um he was in a situation where he thought, well, what do I do now? And he went to Western Germany. Uh returned for a short period, but then finally went to to the western part of Germany, where he ended up, um after his incarceration, he was very, very thin and and uh yeah,

• 33:11Speaker 05

  he uh had um uh barely, he was bones and and skin, basically. And he ended up in an uh in a camp, in a refugee camp in southern Germany and was uh a little bit, yeah, you know, he he got better after a couple of weeks. And then there were uh people looking for personnel for the local riot police. And that's when he joined the police. And a couple of years later, he decided whether to go to the newly established Bundeswehr, so the National Army, or the Bundesgrenzschutz, the Border Guard. He applied for both and he just ended up with the Border Guards because uh the acceptance

• 33:55Speaker 05

  letter uh arrived first from the Border Guards. So that's how he got into the the force. And then he um worked his way up through the ranks, basically, uh in the coming years and and decades. And he he obviously spoke very good English. So um he was sent to the uh to Bavaria, to the border in the east. And so uh every time American um army officers came to inspection, uh he was sent there to give them the tour. And so he was kind of the the interpreter of uh this this unit that he was serving with. Uh yeah, and so he um worked up his his way through the ranks.

• 34:38Speaker 05

  And then there was a a big maneuver in nineteen sixty-eight called Falleks sixty-eight. And uh he was uh sent to Bonn, uh to the Ministry of the Interior, uh as a liaison officer to prepare for this um for for for this big um maneuver, military maneuver, that the Border Patrol was part of and was taking part in. And that's when he met Genscher and that was then when he became his liaison officer over the limited time, beyond the limited time that was connected with this maneuver.

• 35:23Speaker 05

  And that's how he, yeah, how they met and how they got to know each other.

• 35:29Jack Murphy?

  So I would love to ask you how Ulrich Wagner went about establishing GSG9, having to build this unit from scratch essentially. And for context, for our American viewers, 1972, this is five years before the United States even began creating Delta Force. The unit was started in 77, I think, fully activated in 1980. So we, as Americans, did not know how to do this stuff either in 1972. There's no textbook, really, that he can go to and read. How did he start to put this capability together?

• 36:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was the first big question. As I said, the unit was established, or the, at least the legal work for the unit was established within a couple of weeks after the Olympic massacre in Munich. So the letter of the Ministry of the Interior went out on the 26th of September, which was three weeks, up to the day, three weeks after the massacre in Munich. So he had a couple of ideas, but as you said, there is no textbook for it. There were, in the US, there were the first SWAT teams kind of being created, but they didn't really seem to know what they were doing with it. The British

• 36:51Speaker 05

  had some experience with the SAS, the Special Air Service, and there were basically only the Israelis who really had operational experience in this field. And so...

• 37:06Speaker 05

  What Wigner did, and that was is really something out of the ordinary, is he he went to Genscher and asked him to go to Israel and ask the Israelis how they do that stuff. And you can imagine, just a couple of weeks after the whole Israel delegation, Olympic delegation, has been murdered on German ground and with the complete and utter failure of German security forces, that they probably wouldn't be too pleased about hearing, you know, now as a German, he wants to learn about all that.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  So Genscher told him that that he was crazy, that they would probably, that they would certainly not have him. But they did, and they said, yes, let's, you can come over, we have a course, a training course, and you can participate. And that was really something out of the ordinary, because there, as a side note, just a couple of weeks, just on the day before Wigner went to Israel, there was another abduction of a German aircraft to Yugoslavia.

• 38:27Speaker 05

  And the demand of the terrorists was to liberate those three surviving terrorists from Munich. And the German government, well, they they didn't hesitate one moment, they just released the prisoners. So you can imagine that the Israeli government was not too amused about that. They really, really were disappointed, and the Israeli-German, West German, one must say, there was an East German state as well, but the West German-Israeli relationships at that point were on an absolute low. So, and in this situation, Ulrich Wegener...

• 39:05Speaker 05

  Goes to Israel and takes part in this two-week course. And he is not received very well in the beginning. But within one week, they realized that Wigner is very serious about what he wants to learn. He knows exactly what he wants to learn. He asks questions. He doesn't say much. He just asks questions and is only stops asking question when he's really, really satisfied with the answers. And they respect that. And over the time, there are, there are even friendships

• 39:45Speaker 05

  that are being developed out of that. And even lifelong friendships came out of it.

• 39:51Jack Murphy?

  One that jumped out at me, Martin, was his, one of his friends in Israel was Yanni Netanyahu, who, which seems, seems very natural, like knowing what I've read about the two of them. They sound like very similar take-charge leaders, you know?

• 40:07Speaker 05

  Right, exactly. Yeah, there are a couple of names that stand out. One of the unit leaders, one who was ordered to stand by, that was another little side story of the Olympic story in 1972. There was a unit on standby in Tel Aviv in order, they, they were ready to go in there and solve the situation, but they were not allowed because the German government didn't allow foreign forces on German ground. So they never did that. And the leader of that unit was Ehud Barak, who later then became Prime Minister of Israel, of course.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  And so he was also on that course. And also from there, there was a friendship with Wigner that developed from this point on. And since then, there has been a very close relationship between the Israelis and GSG9 in Germany. And up to this day, it's, it's very, very close. Because they said, you know, of course, that was a disaster, what happened there in 1972 in Munich.

• 41:21Speaker 05

  But you know, we have to make sure that we're fighting on eye level with the Germans, that something like that might not happen again. And so they were open and as they said, I've spoken to Ruven Caspi, who was also, um, I'm not sure if he was in that first cause, but he was a lifelong friend and who established a special force, anti-terror force for himself. And he told me we went much, much further with the Germans than with any other nationality because we knew that they could do the job, that they would, if they set their mind to it, they would be very, very good in what they're doing.

• 42:03Speaker 05

  And they understand, understood how you go about special operations and counter-terrorism measures. And so that's how this relationship was established. And as I said, it's, it's still stands today.

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• 45:58Jack Murphy?

  There were some unique things that Wagner took away. One of the things you talk about in the book is how he task organized his unit into smaller strike groups. Where did that kind of idea come from? Was that German or Israeli?

• 46:12Speaker 05

  Neither. He came back from this two-week trip with a bag full of ideas. And then, of course, the next question is, okay, how do we implement that into German necessities and German structures? How do we incorporate that? And so he started wondering, okay, how do I organize this whole thing? And he looked through the literature and couldn't really find something. And then he basically crossed the aisle to the opposing side.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  And he read a book by Marigella is his name. That was The Handbook for the Guerrilla War. That was very, very popular in leftish, well, extremely-left violent circles. And so there were...

• 47:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was a, it was a small book, basically, just like forty, fifty pages long. It was not an official print. It was only, you know, black copies that were circulating. And so they, um, he suggests that there needs to be fire squads. In order to, um, to be flexible and to do the things that, uh, that a guerrilla, a guerrilla, um, group has to do, uh, you need to organize yourself in fire groups. And that they, they consist of no more than five or six people. And they work more or less autonomously. Initiative is the key word here.

• 48:07Speaker 05

  So, uh, there's, there's nothing without initiative. Of course, they are connected to each other and they have to follow orders. But in the situation, uh, they have to decide for themselves what is best. And they have to act autonomously and also get into the initiative and don't just wait for orders from above. And so, uh, Wegener more or less took this idea one-on-one and just implemented that. And he created, uh, not fire groups, as Marie-Gerlach told, uh, said, uh, as Marie-Gerlach told it, um, but he named them SETs, Spezial Einsatz Trupps, Special Operation Team.

• 48:50Speaker 05

  And that was the nucleus of GSG9. So there were, um, five man-strong SETs and they would be part of one of the three, uh, GSG9 units, operational units. And, um, the idea was that everybody has to be able to rely on everybody else within this group. Trust is a key word for that. And, uh, also the, um, the possibility, uh, and capability that each member of the group can, uh, do the job of each other member of the group. So that, uh, you know, you can, uh, you can rely on each other. And if one member is, uh, well...

• 49:37Speaker 05

  Is taken out or is not part of the group anymore. The group is still able to act and to work together. So that was the the basic idea. And Wigan got that from a guerrilla, a guerrilla handbook.

• 49:53Jack Murphy?

  And then he also faced all kinds of problems with sourcing equipment, right? Like the pistols were inadequate, the holsters for the pistols were inadequate. The repelling harnesses were inadequate. How did he go about the, you know, testing and evaluation and development of the gear that the unit was to use?

• 50:14Speaker 05

  Well, that's, that's, of course, something that Wigan didn't do just by himself. So we have a couple of those veterans, some that I had the opportunity to interview as well. And they told me that they basically did nights on end with brainstorming, thinking about, okay, you know, what do we have? What is the equipment? What is the weaponry that we have? And what do we want to do? And what we can, what can we use for that? What we want to do? And the answer was basically nothing. So they said, well, we didn't need heavy armament.

• 50:56Speaker 05

  We didn't need heavy armed vehicles. We need fast vehicles. We need helicopters. In terms of the uniform, you know, they had, they had nice uniforms from the border guards with nice pockets and shiny buttons and all that stuff. And they said, well, for what we are going to do, if we have to, you know, if we have to go out on a night, we can't, can't have shiny buttons. They had a nice. A nice tie, a bow tie, no, not a bow tie, a tie. And you know, what happens with a tie?

• 51:39Speaker 05

  You get strangled by the bad guy, so off with it. So they started to redesign their own uniforms. They took their working uniforms that they had. And then they started, literally, with needle and thread, to rework their uniforms, to make them adequate for what they had in mind, what they would do, so that it could move, that it could fight. You know, if you go into a close quarter fight, you need to be able to move. So, and since, as we have established already, since there was no textbook, and no, nowhere where you could see how it's done,

• 52:24Speaker 05

  it was just trial and error. And then at some point, Wigner would come in and he would look at it and say, yeah, fine, okay, let's do it like that. And that was very much out of the ordinary, because the Bundesgrenzschutz, the border patrol, was very much, very traditional, very conservative. And you just wouldn't do certain things, like the headgear. They had a very nice cap, you know, it looks a little bit like a baseball cap, but it's not it. And they said, well, you know, when we move, it just falls off. It's no use, this cap. So what headgear can we use? And Wigner brought back from Israel a beret.

• 53:06Speaker 05

  And so they said, okay, then let's have a beret. That's cool, and it sticks on your head when you move. So let's have a beret. And they were able to actually, to actually have that inspected by the inspector general of the Bundesgrenzschutz, the highest ranking officer. When he came for inspection, he first said, well, you've completely gone nuts. You can't run around in with that headgear, because nobody had that at the time. Nobody was wearing berets. And that was very, very unusual, either in the army nor in the border patrol.

• 53:49Speaker 05

  The Border Guard, so that was very out of the ordinary, but then they convinced him to do it anyway. And that stuck with it and it didn't take long until other units within the Border Patrol were also wearing berets and up to this day, that's the case.

• 54:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I was just checking, seeing the pictures of some of the heads of GSG9, the pictures you have in your book. They're wearing berets, so that's a tradition that stuck around.

• 54:18Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And they're very proud of their berets and also being like the first ones. As the GSG9 has been the first ones with a lot of stuff. And that is true for their uniforms, that's true for their equipment. They kind of served as a, yeah, as a think tank and workshop for the whole of the Border Guard. So what they developed and what they, what they deemed serviceable, soon would make their way to other units as well of the Border Guard.

• 54:59Speaker 05

  And that is also true for the weaponry, of course, because what they had wouldn't serve them any good in any counter terrorist, counter terrorist operation. So they talked to Heckler and Koch and to other manufacturers of weaponry and gave them their specifics. And basically, a lot of new developments were exclusive, not exclusively, but were first of all made for GSG9 and they put it into service like sharpshooting rifles and so on. And then they made their way to the other units of the Bundesgrenzschutz.

• 55:44Jack Murphy?

  So to kind of switch gears a little bit, I want to ask you about the Red Army faction or the Bader-Mainoff gang. Who were they and what were they up to in Germany at this timeframe? Because this is, of course, going to play into what we talk about next.

• 56:03Speaker 05

  Right, the Bader Meinhof Gang, which was then later termed or called itself Red Army Faction, RAF, so not to be confused with the Royal Air Force, they were a result of the 1968-69 demonstrations, the protests against the Vietnam War in Germany. There were big protests in the US, of course, but there were also in Germany. And there was a big left-wing movement. And some of those who protested there, most of them stayed, of course, illegal,

• 56:47Speaker 05

  but some moved into illegal terrain. And the Bader Meinhof Gang was one of those terrorist cells that established in the late 1960s, early 1970s. And so Bader was...

• 57:13Speaker 05

  I'm just forgetting the first name of... Andreas, was his name. Andreas Bader was the head of the whole thing. Basically, yeah, the male head of the gang. And Ulrike Meinhof was the intellectual figurehead of this gang. And they came into existence, as I said, in the late 1960s, beginning 1970s, and committed... In the beginning, it was more like arsonist attack, but then soon turned into deadly attacks against politicians and against institutions. And just in the...

• 58:01Speaker 05

  In the spring of nineteen seventy-two, there was a six-week-long offensive, nineteen seventy-two, they called it, with a lot of attacks and killings. If I remember correctly, it was eight people were killed in that time against the state, the West German state. And they were, by the summer, they were all incarcerated, all members of this gang were incarcerated and waiting for trial. And that was then when the Olympic massacre happened in the summer.

• 58:40Speaker 05

  And so, of course, the terrorists demanded the release also of these terrorists of the Red Army faction of the Baader-Meinhof gang, who had been trained before by Palestinian terrorists. And so there was a very, very close connection between the German terrorist RAF faction and other German terrorist groups and Palestinian terrorists, groups like the PFLP. And so that's what it came about, and it was clear when GSG-9 was established that RAF

• 59:19Speaker 05

  would be one of their, yeah, most exquisite opponents, and that it would be necessary to mainly fight against them, that when a terrorist threat would arise, it would probably be the RAF that they would have to go against.

• 59:38Jack Murphy?

  Was there, I mean, this is probably a little controversial, but was there ever any connections between the RAF and any of the Warsaw Pact intelligence services?

• 59:50Speaker 05

  Sorry, you were blocked out for just ten seconds.

• 59:53Jack Murphy?

  I was just asking, this is a little controversial, but was there ever any evidence of the RAF working in tandem with any of the intelligence services in the Warsaw Pact?

• 1:00:07Speaker 05

  Yes, there is. It's not controversial. That is well established that there was cooperation. I'm not sure if that was already in the early years, like 1972 or even 1977. I know that there was cooperation in the 1980s and a lot of, or quite a few of those RAF combatants, terrorists, they went to the GDR, to Eastern Germany, to live there to avoid

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  being captured in West Germany. So, yeah, there are close connections to the Stasi, the Staatssicherheit. I think it is established that there were the connections. How deep they were, I think this is not completely uncovered so far. I'm not sure if it will be uncovered, because the documents have been destroyed as far as I know. So there might be not much to discover anymore. There is, but I think the documents are just missing.

• 1:01:22Jack Murphy?

  And also, in the lead up to what we're working up to here, is there was another incident too where there was a demands for several RAF terrorists to be released. They were sent to third countries, but then they came right back to Germany and went back to their life of crime, right?

• 1:01:41Speaker 05

  Right. That was in 1975, when the, that was not RAF, that was the Revolutionäre Zellen, the Revolutionary Cells, when they abducted the candidate, the conservative candidate for the mayor of Berlin for a couple of days. And so they demanded the release of hostages, sorry, the release of prisoners from German prisons. As it's always the case, the, this whole endeavor of the German terrorists soon turned into a liberate the guerrilla guerrilla,

• 1:02:24Speaker 05

  you know, so they fought for the release of their prisoners. And there were RAF prisoners as well that were supposed to be released. And they were very close connected, the Revolutionary Cells and the RAF. Partly the personnel was the same, different name, but same people. So that was the abduction of this candidate. And the German government, under Helmut Schmidt, it will become important in a moment. He, they decided, and Helmut Schmidt decided to say, okay, we will give in. We release these prisoners. We demand that they leave Germany and never come back.

• 1:03:09Speaker 05

  That was what was, what was agreed. And so the, the, the candidate for the mayor of Berlin, he was, he was released. And the prisoners were released and they were put into aircraft and sent away into the destinations. They, they gave, they probably, most of them in the middle of, Middle East. Countries in the Middle East who would receive them. But it didn't take very long for them to just show up in Germany again. And then continue their terrorist career. And that was the moment when Helmut Schmidt Chancellor, when he decided, okay, we, we will not play this game again.

• 1:03:53Speaker 05

  We, next time, we will remain strong and will not give in to the demands. Because this just leads to an encouragement to commit further terrorist attacks, to have more abduction and press free more prisoners from their side. So this is a game we cannot win if we give in. And that was the moment when he decided, okay, next time we will do it differently.

• 1:04:23Jack Murphy?

  All right, so let's jump into the next time in this whole sequence of events that kind of culminates with this pretty epic GSG nine operation in Mogadishu. To start at the beginning, tell us about the kidnapping of the head of the employers association.

• 1:04:44Speaker 05

  That was in September, on September 5th, 1977. And if you remember, the attack on the Olympic team, the Israel Olympic team, was on 5th September, the 5th, 1972. So it was to the day, five years after that terrible event in Munich. And so Hans Martin Schleyer, who was an industrial leader, he was called the boss of the bosses in Germany. So he was a very high-ranking, industrial, very powerful person. He was abducted here in Cologne.

• 1:05:30Speaker 05

  And basically, if you see the photos from the crime scene, it looks like a Hollywood movie. And so his personal detail and his driver,

• 1:05:46Speaker 05

  four people sitting with him in his car were shot. They were killed. And he himself was abducted by the Red Army faction. One must say, this wasn't the first incident in this year. It was the third abduction or killing in this year. Couple of months before, the Attorney General, Bubak, he was killed on the street by RAF. Then, a couple of weeks later, Jürgen Ponto, the boss of the Deutsche Bank, was killed. And as it turned out later,

• 1:06:28Speaker 05

  that was the first attempt to abduct one political figurehead, or not a political, but a financial figurehead. But the abduction failed, and so they just killed him. And now, this was the third one. And this was the beginning of what now is called the Deutsche Habsburg. The Deutsche habt's the German autumn. And that was the six weeks that would lead from the abduction of Hans Martin Schleyer to then the operation in Mogadishu. That's when it started and it was a situation and atmosphere here in Germany. I can't remember it, I was five years old at the time, but from my parents and from

• 1:07:13Speaker 05

  everybody who has consciously witnessed this time was really scared because it was a very spooky atmosphere. When Hans Martin Schleyer was abducted, this triggered the largest search operation in German history. Tens of thousands of policemen were involved. You had checkpoints established, cars were searched, when, you know, wanted posters everywhere. When you looked alike, a little bit like people from the RAF, or if you drove a car of the same make that they would be known to be driving, then you would be stopped

• 1:07:57Speaker 05

  and searched with submachine guns, officers with submachine guns standing by, something that has never happened before in Germany. You know, German police was usually, you know, you're a friendly cop on the corner and you would not be threatened with anything more than a truncheon. So this was really an extraordinary situation and that went on for weeks on end because he was abducted and never found. And GSG9 was involved in the search for Hans Martin Schleyer. They searched apartments, they searched whole buildings, but they never succeeded. Sometimes they seemed to have been very close.

• 1:08:43Speaker 05

  With, you know, entering rooms, uh, empty beds, the bed still warm, coffee warm, a cigarette still smoking on the table. And so they seemed to have been sometimes very, very close, um, but they never got to him. And then on October thirteenth, nineteen seventy seven, there was the news that, uh, an aircraft has changed its its course over France. And it was obviously abducted. And that's when the the Mugadishu story began.

• 1:09:20Jack Murphy?

  And so tell us about that. Did GSG nine get pulled off of the search because that was a Lufthansa aircraft?

• 1:09:28Speaker 05

  Right. Um, it was not clear at the beginning, was it really an abduction, a skyjacking? Um, that that took a couple of hours. But at the time, uh, GSG nine was just busy as well. Uh, again, here in Cologne, there's a very, very big, um, residential building called the Uni Centre. It's close to the University of Cologne, a lot of students live there. And it's a, a complex of some nine hundred sixty, I think, uh, apartments there, so a huge building. And GSG nine was there, um, the whole day, searching from the ground up, from the top down, from the inside and from the outside.

• 1:10:12Speaker 05

  Um, and they were like climbing with letters outside from balcony to balcony, going into the apartment and and searching for Hans Martin Schleier because there was a car parked in the basement that obviously was, uh, rented by, um, by the Red Army faction. So they suspected and there was a suspicious apartment there that they had searched before. And so there was the suspicion that he was, uh, stashed somewhere in one of these more than nine hundred apartments. So the whole day, they were searching this whole building. Uh, and in the afternoon, when they were almost finished, the news came in, uh, that , uh, this plane has been deviating from its original course.

• 1:10:57Speaker 05

  They were started in Majorca, uh, island of Majorca, so it was a tourist plane by Lufthansa, mostly German, uh, passengers on board on their way back to Frankfurt. But they deviated and then ended up in Rome. And so while they were on their way to Rome, GSG9, Ulrich Wegener, he got the information from the crisis staff in Bonn, which had been established after the abduction of Hans Martin Schleier, the industrial boss. And he was ordered to, yeah, take action and start the pursuit of this Lufthansa aircraft to see what is possible. By that time, it was not clear

• 1:11:41Speaker 05

  that there would be an actual liberation operation. But they should just, you know, prepare for the eventuality.

• 1:11:50Jack Murphy?

  And the, as I recall, the Italians weren't a lot of help as they just wanted the aircraft out of their country as fast as possible. So by the time Wagner got out of Germany, the terrorists, the hijacked aircraft was heading to Cyprus?

• 1:12:06Speaker 05

  That's correct, yes. That was not the only government, though the Italians, that were happy when the plane took off again, when they could get rid of them. Because, you know, that's always quite a big inconvenience if you have a foreign aircraft on your soil with hostages and terrorists on board. So how do you react? What do you do? So, yeah, the Minister of the Interior of Italy just allowed for the aircraft to be refueled and then was very thankful that they soon left and went to Cyprus.

• 1:12:47Speaker 05

  And when, so when Wagner and 20, 20 people of the GSG9, when they were on their way to Rome, they heard the news, okay, now we have to go to Cyprus. When they arrived in Cyprus, they already knew that the aircraft was, again, had taken off and was heading towards the Middle East, where they tried to land in Lebanon and in other countries. I think four or five countries who denied the landing of the aircraft because nobody wanted to have them. And so finally, they ended up in Dubai. But that was, you know, that was almost a day later.

• 1:13:29Speaker 05

  And Wegener then ended up in, with the plane in Turkey.

• 1:13:38Speaker 05

  In Ankara, because they were supposed to, it was not only GSG9 on the airplane, but also people from the Ministry of the Interior, from the Bundeskriminalamt, the federal crime administration, or criminal administration, and all these guys on board, and they had the order to ask the Turkish government what they thought of the whole thing, because the demand of the terrorists was to liberate a couple, to liberate the German RAF terrorists, but also a couple of Turkish terrorists.

• 1:14:20Speaker 05

  So they went to Ankara to ask, okay, what do you guys think of it? And how do you want to participate? And the Turkish just said, well, you do whatever you think you have to do and keep us out of the whole thing. And so they were in Ankara, where they were detected by a camera team. And soon enough, not only the Turkish public, but also the German public knew that GSG9 was in pursuit of the aircraft. And that was, of course, not a good thing. So they were ordered back to Germany. They couldn't do that.

• 1:15:03Speaker 05

  And officially, the Turkish government said, well, of course, we don't allow a German army unit in Ankara on our soil. We can't have that. So they couldn't officially just leave them there. So they had to send them back. Of course, it was a police unit, but that didn't matter at this very moment. So what happened was that most of the GSG9 had to go back. But Weygner talked to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and he got the okay to select a couple of people

• 1:15:45Speaker 05

  to take up the pursuit again in a smaller aircraft. And that's what he did. He chose his adjutants. Adjuncts, yeah. Like his deputy. I'm sorry?

• 1:16:01Jack Murphy?

  Like his deputy, his executive officer?

• 1:16:04Speaker 05

  Exactly, yeah. And he chose Dieter Fox, for whatever reason, never known to this day, but he wanted to have him on his side. So three GSG nine guys then took up the pursuit of the abducted aircraft. And yeah, that developed into an odyssey because they first ended up in Dubai. And there they had the idea that they could do something and start a liberation attempt. But they ran into trouble because the Sheikh of Dubai,

• 1:16:49Speaker 05

  he didn't like the idea and he said, well, if there will be a liberation attempt, I will have my Rangers do that. And maybe you can show them how you do that so they can do it in a better fashion. And of course, GSG nine had trained for the liberation of aircraft for years on end. That was something they really specialized in because as we said in the beginning, there were a lot of skyjacking incidents in the late 1960s and 1970s. And it was clear from the outset that skyjacks,

• 1:17:30Speaker 05

  skyjackings will be the most probable situation scenario that GSG nine would have to deal with. And so for days on end and nights on end, they practiced aircraft assaults and did it over and over again, very, very detailed, very, very specific in what they did and how they did it and learn every detail because it's the details that count in such a situation. You know, the liberation of an aircraft is basically the highest level of liberation that you can have.

• 1:18:12Speaker 05

  A room is difficult, a car or bus is even more difficult. A train, very, very difficult. Boat, yes, one more step. But since you don't know what is going on inside an aircraft and you only have those tiny windows and usually the blinds are shut in situations like that. You have no idea what is going on and you only have very few access points. So you really have to train and exercise a lot in order to be able to do that. So now they're in Dubai and they are being told, well, okay, show our Rangers in an afternoon how you deal with such a threat, how you do an aircraft assault.

• 1:18:57Speaker 05

  And that's what they tried and that's what they tried to teach them, but it failed. And they tried to convince the Sheikh that it would be better if the Germans did it. But he would not have it and would just insist that his people would do it. And but before this actually could put into practice,

• 1:19:28Speaker 05

  the Lanzut, that's the name of the aircraft, it took off again. And nobody would know where they would be going. And so they followed them once again and went to Aden and where the aircraft was touching down again. They didn't get, they were not allowed to land there, but they did it anyway. The runway was blocked by tanks.

• 1:20:04Speaker 05

  But the copilot, he set down the aircraft on, basically on the.

• 1:20:15Jack Murphy?

  It was like a dirt strip adjacent to the runway, yeah.

• 1:20:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And so they thought that the landing gear was affected by that because it was just, you know, it was just a sand track that they were landing on. They had to. They didn't have any fuel left in the tanks anymore. So they sat down there on the tracks and the captain of the aircraft, Captain Schumann, he said, well, I have to check the landing gear. And he was allowed by the terrorists to step outside and check the landing gear. But he didn't return for more than half an hour, almost an hour. And

• 1:21:00Speaker 05

  so the terrorists got nervous. And when he finally came back, he, the leader of the terrorists, got very, very angry and shouted at him and had him kneel before him, kneel before him in the middle aisle of the aircraft. You must imagine like passengers left and right and in the middle of the middle aisle, he would have him kneel and ask him, what did you do? What did you do? And he said, nothing. I just checked the gear. And then the terrorist, leader of the terrorists executed him.

• 1:21:35Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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• 1:22:05Speaker 09

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• 1:23:29Speaker 05

  ...with a shot in the head. So that was the moment when GSG9 learned of that mass, of that assassination, of that killing, that they knew, okay, it's very improbable that we reach a solution, a peaceful solution. It will be a violent solution necessary in order to end this whole thing. So GSG9 was not allowed to touch down in Aden. They deviated. And then finally, the man who took off from Aden and a couple of hours later, they ended in Mogadishu.

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  What I've told now took place over four days. So this is basically a very concise, even though I've talked for quite a bit. This is a concise, very, very shortened version of what happened there in these five days. But yeah, that was, that was the story that led to Mogadishu. And in Mogadishu, of course, Weigner then tried to convince the president of Somalia.

• 1:24:50Speaker 05

  A dictator of the name Bara, that was his name. He tried to convince the dictator to have GSG9 do the raid. And it was more or less like a déjà vu for him because the president said, no, I have my own people. I have Rangers here, they can do that. You can show them how to do it. And so, once again, he ordered his guys to show the guys there on the ground how to do it. And it was even worse than in Dubai. And at some point, the commander, the Somali commander said, okay,

• 1:25:35Speaker 05

  I agree, we can't do this, you do that. And then it took some convincing of the president until he finally agreed. Okay, we have a foreign force, the German police force on Somali soil, conducting this operation. But finally, he agreed. And that was the point when they called in the rest of the GSG9 force that had been waiting in the Mediterranean in the meantime. And so, they negotiated with the terrorists a couple of hours. So that GSG9, they told them basically, okay, we have reached an agreement.

• 1:26:18Speaker 05

  We set your prisoners free, we follow your demands. And but we need to, you know, bring all our, the prisoners from German prisons together and have to put them on an aircraft to then send them over to Somalia. So that takes a while. And that was the story that they told them. They never planned to do anything like that. It was just the explanation to gain time in order to get the GSG9 to Somalia, to Mogadishu. And well, when they arrived, it was almost night.

• 1:26:56Speaker 05

  And they they started preparations for the assault. And all the time, the passengers on the plane, they were there and their situation was very, very miserable. Very miserable because they had spent the last five days on this plane. And starting after two, three days, the toilets were clogged. It was really a disaster. They had no possibility to go to the toilet. They were forced to soil their seats. You can imagine what that means.

• 1:27:36Speaker 05

  They, the terrorists had taken all that, the, the, the purses and the hand baggage from the female terrorists. Sorry, from the female hostages. So what happened? The, a lot of young ladies were on board and they didn't have the, the anti-reception.

• 1:28:00Jack Murphy?

  The birth control medication.

• 1:28:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, the, the, the medication, they didn't have that. So they started to get their menstruation. And so, you know, all, all of this happened on board during this time. And it was really nasty inside. And of course it was hot, they were, they were sitting on the runway. They were only open to, only able to open the door, one door at a time. So there was no really exchange of air. It was really, really a terrible condition for the hostages. And so, yeah, in this situation, the preparations for the assault on the night of the 18th of October then began.

• 1:28:47Jack Murphy?

  And so Wagner is on the ground with, I believe it was the German chargé. That's having to go through the political process and they get, they have to go and get the okay from Helmut Schmidt, correct?

• 1:29:01Speaker 05

  Yes, ultimately, it was Helmut Schmidt's decision. He had to give the order. And he was back in Bonn at the crisis staff. And one has to imagine that, of course, the telecommunications system back then was much more rudimentary than it is today. You had that telephone lines where you had to shout into the speaker in order for somebody on the other end to hear anything. And so maybe a telex, but that was about it. So he was reliant on the information that he was getting from the chargé d'affaire. Libal was his name.

• 1:29:46Speaker 05

  And of the, well, he was Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski. He was the minister of state, who was also sent there to negotiate with the president of Somalia. And he was on the plane for a couple of days. And he was very well-known in the Middle East. He spoke the Arabian language and was very close as well with the Palestinians, not so much, but with Arabian states and with the Israelis as well. So he was basically the chief negotiator in the cabinet of Helmut Schmidt. And he dealt with the president in the first place.

• 1:30:29Speaker 05

  And so, yeah, he would then say, okay, I have Schmidt on the line, Helmut Schmidt. And you have to give now the order to actually do that. And that was a very tough decision for the chancellor. Because he knew that a lot of things can go wrong in such an operation. They didn't know if they had explosives on board. They, I think, yeah, they knew that there were explosives, but were they hot? Were the doors, for example, did they put explosives on the doors?

• 1:31:12Speaker 05

  So when they would open the door, that they would go off? Would they maybe? Yeah, blow off the whole, the plane, that was a risk that he was taking and he had to make the decision to say, yes, uh, we are gonna do that. So it was for him, it was politically a big gamble. His resignation letter was already written, uh, was just needed the signature. So, uh, if that whole operation had gone sideways, he would have stepped down the next morning. So it was a pivotal moment, uh, for this government and to be honest, uh, for the whole, um, for the whole country of Western Germany.

• 1:31:52Jack Murphy?

  And I think.

• 1:31:52Speaker 05

  It's hard to imagine how, how it would have turned out if this operation had gone wrong.

• 1:31:58Jack Murphy?

  Didn't, uh, Dieter tell you that if it had gone south, the entire unit would probably be finished at that point?

• 1:32:04Speaker 05

  Yes, uh, that is, uh, what Dieter Fox told me. He's very convinced of that and he has discussed that with Ulrich Wegener several times, he told me. Um, and I've talked to politicians, I've talked to, uh, former Minister of the Interior, uh, who said, who denies that, who says, no, no, of course not. Um, you know, things can happen and maybe, um, if this had gone, if this had gone sideways, G39 would probably not have been, uh, abolished. But having said that, um, that would really have been the least

• 1:32:48Speaker 05

  of Germany's problems at that point because, uh, this, as I said, this was really a pivotal moment, uh, in the history of, of Germany, of Western Germany, at least, but I think for all of the Ger- all of Germany. Um, because this was really a test for the German state, for the rule of law, for the German democracy, this whole German autumn, um, this, as it is called today, um, that was. Putting Germany, the West German state to the test. And if that had failed, as I said, I think the abolition or the

• 1:33:30Speaker 05

  ending GSG nine would have been the least of the problems that would have come out of it.

• 1:33:36Jack Murphy?

  And before we get into the assault of the aircraft, one thing I want to mention that the terrorists who took over the aircraft was a Palestinian group. But they were doing this ostensibly, sort of like as a favor to the RAF, right?

• 1:33:52Speaker 05

  That's, that's right. It was kind of a terror joint venture, so to speak.

• 1:33:58Speaker 05

  The, the relationships between, yeah, the relationship between the Red Army faction and the PFLP was quite close. As I said, the top members of the Baader-Meinhof gang had been trained in Palestinian camps. And so there were close relationships between the two. And there was also an agreement also with Japanese terrorist groups that in situations like these, they could call in each other and to do jobs for them. And this is, this is exactly what happened.

• 1:34:35Speaker 05

  It was about the, the whole abduction of Hans Martin Schleyer was an RAF, the Red Army faction operation. They wanted to have their prisoners released, the original founding members of Red Army faction. And so when this didn't work out, when the abduction dragged on for weeks on end, they decided to step up a bit to up the ante. And, and then hired basically PFLP to abduct the Lufthansa flight LH 181.

• 1:35:19Speaker 05

  And that's how it happened. Yeah, it's, it's surprising that, you know, it's, they, they had, their demands were the release of German prisoners. Why? Yeah, because of this tight connection.

• 1:35:31Jack Murphy?

  And as Wagner is preparing for the assault, there's one final detail I'd like to mention. I thought it was very interesting. He noticed one of his men didn't have body armor. And so he takes off his and gives it to one of his men, and then he personally leads the assault on the aircraft. And like, when I read that, I was like, okay, I understand immediately why these guys loved him.

• 1:35:55Speaker 05

  And that's, this is exactly the reason why, yes. They were very happy because they received anti-bullet vests, new anti-bullet vests from the British. They supported the whole, the whole operation quite a bit. And one of the things they brought along were these vests. But they were one short of these vests. So Wagner had one. And as you said, he just took it off, gave it to one of his, one man without the vest, and then said, okay, I'll be in the front, and everybody after me. And that's why, why they loved him, really.

• 1:36:40Speaker 05

  They admired him deeply, because he was not one to be in the background, and, and, you know, being on the commander's hill far away where the bullets can't reach them. But he was the one to say, okay, I'm, I'll be in the assault group. He didn't go in as the first one. He was, I think, the third or fourth one. But because they had set rules for who opens the door, who holds the, the ladders, who goes in first, and so on. So they, they wouldn't disrupt that. But then Wagner went in, and he is the only one to

• 1:37:21Speaker 05

  be known to have killed at least one of the terrorists. Otherwise, it is not known who executed the terrorists.

• 1:37:35Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so walk us through the actual assault. They have the chancellor of Germany says, this is a go, you got the green light. How did they decide when to execute this assault and go through with it?

• 1:37:49Speaker 05

  So, um, they would approach the aircraft from the rear end, uh, so that nobody who was, uh, maybe accidentally look outside would be able to see them. Uh, the approach took them about an hour. So they started at, uh, eleven at night, a local time, and, uh, it took them an hour, uh, to go there. There were like some twenty, uh, GSG nine men, uh, carrying six letters, two always, uh, having, uh, two carrying six letters, two of each, and, uh, surrounding, surrounding dunes, sand dunes, there were snipers.

• 1:38:34Speaker 05

  Uh, so they, uh, had of course, um, I'm not sure how many there was, like, uh, three or four sniper groups that would, uh, secure the approach, uh, would start firing if accidentally a terrorist would look out of the window, uh, or during the assault, uh, when somebody tried to escape, they had the order to, uh, uh, terminate the threat. And, uh, so they approached very, very slowly, very, very silently, and Dieter Fox told me that it was really nerve-wracking because they thought, because they were highly, um, sensible to every noise, every, every little, uh, squeak and crack,

• 1:39:19Speaker 05

  and thought, well, they must hear us, they must hear us, um, which they didn't. Uh, nobody looked out of the, the, the window, nobody looked out of the door, they were not detected. And, uh, then when they finally reached the aircraft, they had another problem because there were strong lights from the, uh, uh, from the apron, um, lighting up the, uh, the, the aircraft, so their shadows, uh, would cast under the...

• 1:39:51Speaker 05

  Uh, under the body of the, uh, the aircraft. And so if then somebody looked out, they would see, okay, they are shadows. There must be somebody underneath, uh, the aircraft. But also that didn't happen luckily. And so what they did is they, uh, checked, uh, with, uh, microphones, um, uh, on the, the body of the, the plane and, uh, checked, uh, noises. They tried to make sure by the negotiation team that the terrorists would be in the front of the aircraft, in the cockpit.

• 1:40:27Speaker 05

  And, um, then they leaned the letters against the hull of the aircraft very, very slowly, very silently. They crept up the, uh, it was a Boeing seven three seven, so not, not a, a huge aircraft. So they had to be really careful not to start shaking the aircraft. You know, if you, if you tread a little bit or if you push a little bit, it starts shaking. So that nobody inside notices it and it's really silent. And that took, uh, quite a while until everybody was in position.

• 1:41:05Speaker 05

  And, um, as a distraction, uh, they had ordered, not ordered, but they had agreed with the Somali, uh, air force to, uh, light a fire just before the beginning of the operation in front of the cockpit. So that was a destruction measure. And, um, then, uh, two, uh, stun grenades were thrown by British SAF officers who were there to support, uh, the operation. And that's when it started. As soon as they exploded, uh, all six doors were opened at the same time.

• 1:41:44Speaker 05

  They stormed in and, um, started the firefight, um, which lasted not longer than about a minute. And then it was over. Three, uh, of the terrorists were dead. Two were dead, uh, at once. One died on the way to the hospital and one, uh, Ms. Andravis, uh, was severely injured but survived. And, uh,

• 1:42:13Jack Murphy?

  She was the one in that iconic photograph.

• 1:42:15Speaker 05

  Basically the end. Sorry?

• 1:42:17Jack Murphy?

  She was the one in that iconic photograph where they're taking her off in the stretcher and she's like covered in blood and everything.

• 1:42:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, and shouting, "Kill me, kill me." Um, yeah, uh, she was, um, uh, she was actually put on trial back in the nineteen nineties. It took that long until there, there was a-

• 1:42:36Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 1:42:36Speaker 05

  A trial against her. Uh, but, um, uh, she was, uh, also sentenced, uh, in, in Germany, but, um, she was living in Norway, I think, by the time, and, um, Norway would not, um, uh, would not deliver her to the German authorities. So, yeah, a very weird thing, so she survived. But, uh, three of them were dead. One was, at least one was killed by, um, Ulrich Wagner, um, and it is not known who, who else, uh, fired deadly shots against one of the terrorists. So, the hostages were evacuated.

• 1:43:18Speaker 05

  Um, one of the terrorists was able to, uh, to throw two hand grenades, one of which exploded and, uh, injured, uh, one of the stewardesses. Um, but, uh, the other one, uh, was just got caught, uh, in, under the seats and it was, still the next morning it was only found, it was still hot. Uh, but, uh, yeah, it didn't, uh, go off, so, uh, that was luck. And, uh, yeah, uh, apart from this injury and a pa- a, a cou- a couple of scratches, uh, from the evacuation procedure, nobody was really hurt. Uh, one of the GSG nine guys was very, very lucky because when they started, when they

• 1:43:59Speaker 05

  tried to open the door in the front on the right side, uh, it was blocked, so they just could open it a little bit. Uh, the specialty with the Boeing seven three seven doors is you have to first push them in before you can open them. So they could push them, could push the, the door open a little bit, just a crack, and that was when one of the terrorists, uh, saw that and fired probably blindly a shot through this crack, and it hit one of the GSG nine officers in the neck, and it went through. The the whole neck, but it didn't hit any arteries or So crazy. Just failed to hit anything that was vital.

• 1:44:44Speaker 05

  And so with just basically a couple of stitches and a neck thing around his neck, he he survived and he was he was good a couple of days later. So that was the only, yeah, not casualty, but the only injury that GSG nine guys suffered. One bullet got stuck, I think, in an armor plate. But that was about it. And so eight minutes after the beginning of the assault, Ulrich Wegener was able to to finish to end the operation and to give a telephone call to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt,

• 1:45:28Speaker 05

  who was really, really happy that this was a happy ending for him. And he's not known to be a very sentimental guy, but that was the moment when he actually went into the next room to to cry. He was really done with his his nerves. And yeah, that basically saved his chancellorship. He went on to be Chancellor of Germany until nineteen eighty two. So that was a a big relief for everyone, not only for the chancellor, but of course for all of Germany. And when GSG nine returned to Germany the next day, they were welcomed as heroes, which they were.

• 1:46:14Speaker 05

  But that was really out of the ordinary, one must say, because German reverence for for heroism was strongly discouraged still to this day. So we we're not big in that. And that was one of the very few moments that the national pride could really, yeah, be taken out. And and everybody could say, well, now today I'm proud to to be German because these guys really did the job.

• 1:46:46Jack Murphy?

  And the sort of epilogue to this story is what happened with the RAF prisoners who thought they were going to get released? And what happened to, was it Schaler, the Employers' Association leader?

• 1:47:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, that is the sad part because everybody was relieved. Everybody was happy that this hostage situation came to a happy end. And the next morning, the news were full of it, of course, and there were extra issues of newspapers being printed and everybody was happy that that was the talk of the day, of course. But in the afternoon, it was clear that this operation had more repercussions. And so the news came out that the prisoners of the Red Army faction, that they had committed suicide in their cells.

• 1:47:42Speaker 05

  Nobody knows up to this day how they got the information really that this operation of GSG9 was successful.

• 1:47:52Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:48:07Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:48:18Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:48:23Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:48:30Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

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• 1:49:50Speaker 05

  There was no hope for them to be released. But somehow they did it and they were able to commit suicide. So that was that. But that again meant that the destiny of Hans Martin Schleyer was also, yeah, coming to an end. And he was found two days later in the trunk of a car in close to the border in France. And he was shot dead because they realized this game had come to an end and they would not get their prisoners free.

• 1:50:30Speaker 05

  They were dead, so there was no use anymore for their hostage. So they killed him and, as I said, put him in a trunk and called the local press to tell where to find them.

• 1:50:46Jack Murphy?

  One of the other kind of outcomes of this operation was you talk a little bit about how it changed this sort of hijacking or skyjacking culture. That this was the first time it really showed that, yes, we have a countermeasure. Yes, we can fight back. And aircraft hijackings started to drop off quite abruptly.

• 1:51:09Speaker 05

  That's true. And of course, it's the question how much of it was contributed by this operation in Mogadishu by GSG9. We can see the security measures in airports being ramped up at the same time.

• 1:51:29Speaker 05

  It starts before the Mogadishu incident, but then really picks up afterwards. So the question is, of course, you know, how much did that contribute to the to the reduced or to the lower numbers and receding numbers of skyjacks afterwards. But it's pretty clear that this this operation in Mogadishu by the GSG9 contributed quite a bit. Because at this point, they knew, terrorists knew that there was a force that could meet them and could just take them, take them out.

• 1:52:12Speaker 05

  And of course, other countries saw that this was a success. And of course, there was a lot of interest afterwards in the GSG9 as a force and as a teacher, as an instruction team for the establishment and the inception of other special forces in other countries. So within a year, there were more than 60 requests from 60 different countries asking for advice, for training, for improvement of their own forces that were more or less in the phase of being established at the time

• 1:52:54Speaker 05

  or for the new development of their own GSG9, so to speak. And yeah, in my book, I call it, it was kind of an act of a midwifery that GSG did there for quite a lot of different special forces, be they military or police in origin.

• 1:53:17Jack Murphy?

  And Charlie Beckwith, as he was standing up Delta Force, came to learn from them. And you wrote that they have, I guess it makes sense because they're police officers. They have a very tight relationship with the FBI hostage rescue team.

• 1:53:32Speaker 05

  Yes, that was very early. From the inception of GSG9, they tried to establish good connections to the FBI and the hostage rescue team and have very good relations up to this day. Yeah. And yeah, Charlie Beckwith, he came in 1977, a couple of weeks after Mogadishu. He came to Germany and he wanted to establish what was to become Delta Force afterwards. He was still in the process of getting the go for his force.

• 1:54:14Speaker 05

  And so he traveled to the UK because he was a formerly associated with the SAS. So he came to the UK to learn from them. And then he heard from, he heard of the GSG9 feet in Mogadishu and he came to Germany to learn from the Germans. And shortly after that, German officers, one of them being Dieter Fox, went to Fort Bragg and, well, yeah, trained were part of the selection process for candidates for Delta

• 1:54:56Speaker 05

  Force and also brought a couple of quite good German weapons with them to see what maybe Delta Force could make use of them.

• 1:55:08Jack Murphy?

  And yeah, and later on, they went to the Heckler and Kuk MP5. So I guess they sold, yeah, sold some guns. So I'd like to, there's a couple of chapters you mentioned that didn't make it into the English version of your book, but I'd love to ask you about it in this interview. In 1993, GSG9 and Germany is still dealing with the RAF. And there was this, you know, as you told me, a sort of a political crisis in 1993 in the aftermath of a shooting. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

• 1:55:47Speaker 05

  Sure, um, that was, um, yeah, in the, in the, in the years after the German reunification. And so there was this little town of Bad Kleinen in eastern Germany. And, um, that's, it was the end of a long observation, um, mission that GSG9 was not particularly involved, but a lot of other, um, crime fighting institutions in Germany. So that was a big thing and they were going after, um, one of the two, or two of the figureheads of RAF.

• 1:56:27Speaker 05

  Um, as we have established, uh, in 1977, the leading figures of RAF, uh, committed suicide after Mogadishu. So they are called the first generation of RAF. The ones who tried to liberate them are called the second, uh, generation. And this now was the third generation of RAF terrorists, uh, that the German state was now looking for. So they got a hold of them and they knew that, uh, this RAF couple, they would be in Bad Kleinen on the central station, or well, central station on the train station of Bad Kleinen, very small town in eastern Germany.

• 1:57:06Speaker 05

  And, uh, they wanted to, um, uh, to, to, um, apprehend them there and, uh, make sure, um, they get incarcerated. So they called in GSG9. This whole thing went sideways, uh, because of, uh, a lot of different, uh, a lot of details that I can't go into right now. That's, that's a little bit too complicated for, uh, for such a podcast like this. Uh, the whole operation went sideways and, uh, in the end, um, one of the terrorists was, uh, apprehended.

• 1:57:43Speaker 05

  And the other one made an escape, went up from the the underpass where they were supposed to be apprehended and he could escape, ran up the stairs to the platforms and started shooting while running, turning around, shooting, and he shot the first GSG9 operative that was following him, and that was Michael Neffzeller, and he was killed on that day. So that was a lucky shot, and it, he was hit in the heart and he died a couple of hours later. And so there was a wild shooting, there were like some like,

• 1:58:28Speaker 05

  something like 150 shots being fired. You must imagine on a Sunday with full platforms, you know, people roaming everywhere, a lot of bullets ended up in trains. So there was a lot of chaos, a lot of, a lot of things happened all at once, within a couple of seconds. And the result was that this terrorist, Wolfgang Grams, he was lying with his back on the tracks and he was hit by several bullets and one was shot to his head. And it soon turned out that he had, that the bullet that went through his head was coming from his

• 1:59:12Speaker 05

  own gun. So he killed himself. But there were a lot of inconsistencies and a lot of, in the aftermath, of this whole thing, there was a lot of discussion that would soon come up, a lot of mistakes that were taking place with the CSI operation in the aftermath, cleaning the whole thing up. There were jackets being cleaned that shouldn't have been cleaned because they had to serve, you know, the jacket of Wolfgang Grams. Uh, and there were like traces uh on his hands that had been wiped off uh and and

• 1:59:53Speaker 05

  uh a lot of things happened which should not happen uh in the um uh in the aftermath of of such an operation, uh particularly when two people die. So uh that was all a pretty big disaster and soon GSG nine came into the suspicion that it was not Wolfgang Grams who had committed suicide uh with his last breath, but that uh one GSG nine operative had taken his gun from his hands and had uh shot him from short discon- distance, so uh uh uh execution by the state. And this caused a huge uproar and a big, big scandal.

• 2:00:38Speaker 05

  Um, all of this evaporated, all of this didn't turn out to be true. Um, the GSG nine was completely washed off every accusation in the end, but only after more than a year. So in the meantime, there was a huge political scandal that developed, particularly in in uh in in a situation in Germany and with our historical background and uh, you know, the the idea we we don't have the the capital punishment, uh we, you know, it's some somebody dying and the suspicion of somebody dying by the hand, not in an in an, by the hand

• 2:01:20Speaker 05

  of a of a state actor, not in an emergency, but after the situation is clear, he's he's is is is clearly lying on the tracks, he's has no uh possibility to to defend himself and then being executed like that, that was a big uproar, the suspicion of that was a big, big uproar. And that led to the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, it led to the firing of the Attorney General in Germany, it led to the firing of the uh Vice President of the Bundeskriminalamt, the federal uh crime investigation institution in Germany.

• 2:01:59Speaker 05

  So uh, you know, that that it was really an uproar and it was a state crisis and all connected to the question. Has GSG9, an operative of GSG9, willfully and intentionally executed a human being, be he terrorist or whatever, you know, after the situation is done? That is not something that should happen. So there was a big debate and it took a very, very long time. And yeah, Germany, GSG9 really came into a very, very bad situation where even the

• 2:02:44Speaker 05

  the end of GSG9 was being discussed shortly, but that was one of the topics.

• 2:02:49Jack Murphy?

  And how did the Red Army faction eventually collapse? Like, how did that organization get dismantled?

• 2:02:59Speaker 05

  Well, I, it's, I, I can tell you what factually happened. Why it happened is a little bit difficult and I'm not sure if anybody has a good answer to that. They became irrelevant, basically. This, this, after the, the death of one of their head figures, Wolfgang Grams, they didn't really commit any, any major acts. There was a bombing attack against a newly built prison, but that was, you know, nobody was hurt.

• 2:03:40Speaker 05

  It was just the, the prison wall that was a big hole in it and that was it. And then by 1998, they declared their self dissolution. Can you say that? I'm, I'm not sure.

• 2:03:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:54Speaker 05

  They just wrote one of their very famous, infamous letters and with a lot of left-wing, anti-imperialist rhetoric, pages over pages, where they didn't declare that anything, that they're sorry for anything. They just declared it doesn't make sense to go on with.

• 2:04:19Speaker 05

  With armed action, with terrorist attacks. Of course, for them it was not terrorist attacks. For them, it was just a fight against imperialism. So, but they said, it doesn't make any sense anymore. And we tried to find other ways to fight against imperialism and the fascist German state. And that was that. And then it was never heard from them again, apart from a couple of old RAF members, who then started their private career with bank robberies and other stuff. So, but I was just, you know, more or less just criminals. And this story is going on up to today.

• 2:05:03Speaker 05

  But the RAF, the Red Army Faction as a terrorist group, has been ended in 1998 with this letter of resignation, so to speak.

• 2:05:15Jack Murphy?

  So, let's talk a little bit about GSG9 today. You have the opportunity to go and visit them at their home base and to interview the commander. Actually, it seems like maybe two commanders you got to interview. Tell us a little bit about, you know, what the unit is like today and what they do.

• 2:05:34Speaker 05

  Sure, yeah. I actually got to talk to four commanders. So, the current one, Robert Hameling, which I actually will visit tomorrow and talk to him. I will present one of my books to him. And so, his predecessor was Jerome Fuchs. Up to 2023, he was the commander of GSG9. I talked to his predecessor, the predecessor, Olaf Lindner, who is now the president of the parent organization of GSG9, the Polizeidirektion 11 in Berlin.

• 2:06:13Speaker 05

  And I talked to one more commander who was commanding GSG9 in the 1990s. So, yeah, I had the opportunity to meet the guys also, you know, the rank and file of them. And so it's very interesting there. Their headquarters is still in St. Augustine. St. Augustine is a very small town close to Bonn, and Bonn was the Cold War capital of West Germany. So that's how they were placed there in a border guard garrison. That just came in handy when they were established.

• 2:06:55Speaker 05

  They wanted to be close to Bonn, and that was the right place to go. And so they have remained there for the last 50 years. But of course, after the reunification of Berlin, the capital moved from Bonn to Berlin. And now the action is there. And while in Germany, things take a while sometimes. So the capital moved there in the mid of the 90s. And some five, six years ago, there was a dependency. A branch was opened up in Berlin of GSG9, so they spread out to there. Now, GSG9 is facing new challenges.

• 2:07:41Speaker 05

  The whole of Germany and the whole of Europe is facing new challenges. And that is to do with the war in Ukraine and the Russian threat. So the Baltic Sea comes into focus. And just this year, they have opened up another branch right on the coast of the Baltic Sea. So their maritime unit that they always had is now permanently situated there. So they have now spread from St. Augustine here in the middle of Germany, or West Germany, to the north and to Berlin.

• 2:08:16Speaker 05

  And have spread out to engage with the threats that are now occurring there, particularly on the Baltic Sea. That this is something that really comes into focus in recent years. And that is something that will probably be a main focus in the next years of GSG9's.

• 2:08:44Speaker 05

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• 2:08:45Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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• 2:10:41Jack Murphy?

  I, there's, I just want to ask you if there's anything else you want to talk about before we wrap up the interview today, Martin. There's lots of interesting stuff. I hope people will go and read the book. There's a chapter in here about East Germany's version of GSG9, which is pretty interesting. Anything else you want to talk about?

• 2:11:04Speaker 05

  Oh, there's, as you said, there's, there are so many things. I mean, um, one thing that we haven't talked about, talked about really in detail, a little bit maybe, is that GSG9 is a police force. And that is something that is really what fascinates me with GSG9. Because, you know, we have, as a police force, we are, the GSG9 is much more limited to the, um, to the rules and the laws that are being set by the constitution. And the, the German constitution is, is very strict indeed, um, in terms of what you can

• 2:11:49Speaker 05

  do and what not, what you cannot do. So what I find very fascinating is how they are able to, on the one hand, do the job, get the job done, uh, that they need to do, they need to be, uh, tough and, and have to be able to also apply lethal force. But, uh, on the other hand, they are restricted and limited by the German constitution. And, uh, so if, this is, this goes back again to the German history and we are, we are very cautious, um, to allow lethal force being applied in whichever situation there might be.

• 2:12:28Speaker 05

  So there are very limited, um, uh, options when it's actually justified, uh, to apply lethal force. And, um, what I find fascinating is, um, how, um, GSG9 has managed to bring these two sides together. Uh, the, the, uh, being limited on the one hand, but then making the best of this limitation and, uh, and, and trying to, um...

• 2:12:57Speaker 05

  To act always in accordance with the constitution. And that leads to a different mindset than special forces in the military might have. The mindset is not, well, we go in and liberate the hostages, that too, of course. But we save lives. Our upper and foremost interest and objective is to save lives, even the ones of the terrorists. If I don't have another option, this is what the GSG9 guys tell me. You know, I can only go by what they tell me, but this is very consistent.

• 2:13:40Speaker 05

  Be it the old veterans or be it the ones, the operatives that are with GSG9 today. They very consistently say, we have to try to save lives, not because we have pity with the terrorists or because of some sentiment, but because we need him for the trial. We need to bring him to court. And so that, again, then, is a different mindset, which results in different tactics. And I find fascinating that this actually works. So their whole mindset is, we try to avoid using lethal force.

• 2:14:22Speaker 05

  We try to avoid using our guns. Every operation, be it just an exercise or an actual operation, if we find ourselves in a situation where we have to use our guns, if we have to shoot, then afterwards, in the debriefing, we will discuss very intensely what could we have done in order to avoid it. We don't see having to use our weaponry.

• 2:14:52Speaker 05

  Uh, fire firearms is not a failure, but it is something that we need to work on so we can avoid it the next time. I find that very fascinating, um, because of course, uh, this puts you in even greater danger if you go in and try to liberate a, um, a hostage, um, and you have to make this decision in this, you know, microsecond that it is. Um, where do I put place the bullets? Uh, when you talk or, you know, when you talk to special forces people of on the military side,

• 2:15:35Speaker 05

  um, I hear and I read that, uh, it's very common to say, okay, we put two bullets in, in each terrorist, uh, just to make sure that, uh, he will not be a, a problem afterwards, you know, in whatever respect, particularly when you do room clearing, for example, and you have to go in the next room, you don't wanna have somebody even half dead behind you. So you make sure that he will not be able to act. That is not the mindset that they have. Uh, they, they, uh, really go in and try to save, um, lives, even the lives of the perpetrator, of the terrorist. And if I can add a, a little anecdote that I also, uh, write about in my book,

• 2:16:19Speaker 05

  I also talked to Renate Bonan, who is the, uh, the medical officer, uh, for the, um, uh, uh, operational medicine department of GSG nine, and he was, uh, she was called in to, uh, a hostage situation here in Cologne, at the central station in Cologne a couple of years ago. Um, that was, uh, not, uh, the GSG nine that was operating there, but, uh, one of the S A cars, the special forces of the, uh, the province here. So, um, it was a hostage situation in a pharmacy, and a guy took a couple of employees hostage, and the whole thing dragged on for a couple of hours,

• 2:16:59Speaker 05

  and they decided, okay, we have to go in and, uh, solve this problem by, with violent means. Uh, so they did, and Renate Bonan, as the medical officer, she, uh, afterwards, she counted eighteen holes in this guy's body, entry and exit wounds, but all of them in the periphery. In the arms, in the legs, nowhere lethal. So when she told me, I asked her, well, yeah, well, good luck. And she said, uh-uh, good work. And that is the spirit that these, these units work, be it the, the special units of the lender

• 2:17:42Speaker 05

  or the special unit GSG, GSG nine. Uh, they don't aim for the kill, they aim for the, uh, the saving of, of lives. I find that very, very impressive. This guy survived. He had eighteen holes in his body where they were not supposed to be, but he survived. And, uh, that, I, I, I imagine there was also a little bit of luck involved in that, but, uh, you know, they were not aiming for the kill. They were aiming for this, the saving of the hostages and the saving the life of the terrorist.

• 2:18:18Jack Murphy?

  It's, uh, actually, it's, as far as I know, for our police officers, it's actually mandatory. If they're going to shoot at a criminal, they're shooting center mass. No trick shots allowed.

• 2:18:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, um, I mean, and there is this, um, this saying, uh, among special forces, uh, probably not among, uh, special forces, a man who deserves being shot deserves being killed. Um, and, um, I can understand from a military point of view, uh, that this makes a lot of sense. Um, but, um, uh, yeah, and, and of course, from a normal police officer, you will not be able to demand that, uh, he will, uh, he would put a, a shot, uh, in the periphery. Um, you know, they just don't have the training. How could they do that? So they of course are aiming for the safe shot, not say for the perpetrator, but safe for stopping him.

• 2:19:16Speaker 05

  So, uh, I can understand that, but these guys are trained, uh, to a point that they actually can make this decision and can judge, um, in, in, for the sake of the, um, of the hostage and for the sake, uh, hopefully of the perpetrator, um, whether to, um, make a, a lethal shot, to give, uh, fire a lethal shot or a non-lethal shot. And again, I find that quite impressive.

• 2:19:49Jack Murphy?

  Well, I hope everyone will go out and read the book. Again, it's called GSG9 From Munich to Mangadishu: The Birth of Germany's Counterterrorism Force. I really enjoyed it. Got all my notes and underlines in here as I read through it. It was really cool. And because of Martin's background, you know, he was able to get access to all of these leaders in the unit and all this source material in German. And I think you're really seeing it in English for the first time, I suspect, in this book, which definitely makes it worth going and picking up. The people who watch this podcast will want to have this one in their library for sure. Martin, thank you for joining us this afternoon. I imagine this evening for you in Germany.

• 2:20:31Speaker 05

  Yes, that's right. Yeah. It's 10:30 at night right now.

• 2:20:36Jack Murphy?

  Okay. Well, we'll let you get to bed. Appreciate you coming on the show and doing this interview. And look us up anytime you're in the neighborhood or writing another book.

• 2:20:47Speaker 05

  I will do so. Thank you so much for having me. It was great fun talking to you. Thank you very much.

• 2:20:52Jack Murphy?

  And everyone else out there, we'll see you next time.

• 2:20:56Jack Murphy?

  Hey, guys. I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Team House Podcast, the Eyes On Podcast, and the High Side News Outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox, and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Eyes On and the Team House and whatever's topical or current on the High Side. So it's another way for us to get the information out to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really know what you're going to get. So this is a once a week email. It'll slide into your inbox and it will have, you know, the greatest hits of that week.

• 2:21:37Speaker 06

  It's really good. I'm checking it out.

• 2:21:40Jack Murphy?

  The website for it is teamhospodcast.kit.com/join. Teamhospodcast.kit.com/join. Go there and you enter into your email list or you enter your email into the little thing on the website and you're good to go. And that'll be it. So we really appreciate your support and hope you'll consider signing up.

• 2:22:05Jack Murphy?

  The link will also be down in the description if you're looking for it there. And that's teamhousepodcast.kit, K-I-T, Kilo, India, Tango.

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  Hi, I'm Jenna Ushkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

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  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:29:31Speaker 11

  You know what? It sucks to be bored. But when I get on my phone and play real casino games on spinquest.com, the time flies by. That two-hour wait at the DMV seems like 10 minutes. Play your favorite spots, live blackjack, live craps with a live dealer. New players, $30 coin packs are on sale for $10. Play spinquest.com and you'll never be bored again.

• 2:29:55Speaker 01

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:30:01Speaker 13

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:30:37Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Ushkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:30:51Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:31:02Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:31:07Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:31:13Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:31:34Speaker 11

  Hanging out at the pool is great. Relaxing and playing Vegas-style games on my phone at the same time. Drinking one hand and a blackjack in the other. It's all at Spinquest. Over 1,000 games, including your favorite slots and table games. Be cool with this summer special. New players get $30 coin packs for 10 at spinquest.com.

• 2:31:57Speaker 01

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:32:04Speaker 13

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:32:41Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:32:56Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:33:07Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:33:12Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:33:18Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:33:37Speaker 00

  Hey, guys. Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Kris Mornings Pumpkin Spice Latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over 1,000 different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players, a $30 coin package for just $10. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com and download the app today.

• 2:34:02Speaker 01

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:34:08Speaker 02

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:34:45Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:34:59Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:35:10Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:35:15Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:35:21Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:35:41Speaker 00

  Hey, guys. Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris Mornings Pumpkin Spice Latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over 1,000 different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players, a $30 coin package for just $10. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com and download the app today.

• 2:36:05Speaker 01

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:36:11Speaker 10

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:36:39Speaker 14

  ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, Study Mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:37:07Speaker 15

  Yo, it's Bluff here. I've been giving out king-size candy bars to all the kids all day, and luckily karma was right around the corner. This Halloween, Spinquest is giving away a scary-good deal: $30 for $10 coin pack. They have over 1,000 games available, and with instant cash prize redemptions, there's no waiting like those other schmucks. Don't miss out. Go to Spinquest.com or download the app right now.

• 2:37:30Speaker 01

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit Spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:37:37Speaker 10

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.