Gabriele von Lutzau (born in 1954) worked as a flight attendant on Lufthansa flight 181, which was on its way from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt am Main when, on Oct 13, 1977, Palestinian terrorists from the PFLP-SC, a splinter group of the “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine”, hijacked the plane and put the crew and its passengers through a five-day ordeal. After several stopovers, the Landshut landed in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. There it was stormed by the GSG9, a special unit of the German Federal Border Police, on October 18, 1977. The episode left the pilot killed by the terrorists, von Lutzau injured, and three terrorists killed by the special unit. The hostages were all rescued.
The terrorists’ goal was to blackmail the German government into releasing several RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion/Red Army Faction) members. Five weeks prior, the RAF had kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the German Employers’ Associations (BDA) and of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), and had demanded in exchange for Schleyer the release from German prisons of leading members of the terrorist group—Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, and Gudrun Ensslin, among others. The German government under Helmut Schmidt (SPD) did not meet this demand. The hijacking by the RAF-aligned Palestininian terrorist group was then intended to raise the pressure on the German government, which however still refused to cooperate with the terrorists, launching instead the extensive operation, involving the British Special Air Service, to free the hostages.
Despite her young age of 23, Gabriele von Lutzau (then Gabriele Dillmann) was a pillar of strength and hope for the other hostages and was dubbed the “Angel of Mogadishu” (Engel von Mogadischu) by the German tabloids for her courageous behaviour. Along with the rest of her flight crew, she was awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz). Today, she has acquired an international reputation as a sculptor, principally of figures in beechwood, and has shown her work in numerous exhibitions in Germany and throughout Europe.
We spoke to Gabriele von Lutzau 47 years after the event, which she remembers vividly.
Café Américain: You recently posted an entry on X that you wrote in connection with the recent “empathy” with Palestinian terror among many German leftists. You wrote: “Some of the Landshut passengers were selected as ‘dirty Jews’, given numbers and told to voluntarily report the next morning to be shot. I was one of them”. Can you tell us—in broad strokes—how you experienced these 5 days as a hostage?
They were five days and five nights of pure horror.
The reign of terror of Akache—the leader of the four-man terrorist squad—consisted of screaming, beatings, mock shootings, and also murder: he killed our pilot, Jürgen Schumann. Akache’s flickering madman’s gaze was with us all the time.
Crew members and passengers were arbitrarily singled out and “made into Jews” for trivial reasons, such as having a Junghans watch, or a Montblanc ballpoint pen—a star as a symbol was enough, regardless of whether it had five or six points. He needed an occasion for the humiliations and torture that followed. We were yelled at to “Confess! You are Jewish!” every hour or so. The terrorists were “selecting” between Jews and non-Jews, taking the Nazi regime as example—all of that on a Lufthansa machine, a German airplane.
The plane was then wired with plastic explosives, and female passengers had to take off their nylon tights. The terrorists cut them up and used them to tie up the crew and passengers. The terrorists then doused us all with duty-free alcohol and perfume from the on-board shop. To make us burn better, they said.
During the negotiations for the release of the RAF prisoners, we were the bargaining chip. We thought that if the negotiations had failed, we would have been burned to death. But nobody could see with whom they were negotiating. We were left in the dark. They only addressed us to yell “Dirty Jews” at us, myself—a non-Jew—included.
They did it for their own amusement and for the efficiency of the planned murders.
We were on an odyssey from one airport in the Middle East to the next. On October 16, 1977, at Aden Airport (then South Yemen), on a strip of sand next to the runway [as the local government had blocked all runways and the plane was unable to reach any other airfield due to a lack of fuel], Schumann left the plane with the hijackers’ permission, so that he could check the landing gear. When he came back, Akache shot him in the head. Right in the middle of the aisle, next to where I was.
But my job was to look after the passengers. When you have a job, it’s easier to cope with being at the mercy of others, also with the violence and the hatred. After five days and nights we were freed by the GSG9, a special unit of the border police. My heroes.
Incidentally, the only real Jewish woman sat next to me most of the time. But that’s another story.
CA: The student movement of the 1960s wanted to come to terms with Auschwitz and German collective guilt. In your opinion, how does this fit in with the anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that the RAF – which, as you know, emerged from the student movement – and the Palestinians later advocated?
The left radical youth of the 1970s certainly struggled with the guilt of the previous generation. By showing solidarity with the Palestinians instead, however, they were able to blame the Jews for their own fate. In this way, they absolved both their parents’ and their own generation from the guilt for the genocide of Jews.
Even today, I still hear from people I was sitting with at a village festival recently, when I confessed my shock about October 7th: “Well, they won’t have been innocent of it”. Well, this certainly separates the wheat from the chaff. You know by the blame-shifting who the real antisemites are. In my view, the late Hermann L. Gremliza was correct when he said that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.
CA: You recently left the SPD, the German Social Democratic Party, of which you were a member for 50 years. Can you tell us how this came about?
I was recently invited to the Committee on Economic Affairs and Cooperation to report on how anti-Semitism can also affect non-Jews, retelling my 5 days of horror as a hostage in the hands of Palestinian terrorists. That I was called a “dirty Jew” and given a number. That one by one, we were told to report for shooting in the morning.
The only person in the room who actively tried to prevent my testimony by shouting at me, mocking, and intimidating me in front of everyone was the SPD member of the committee, a woman of Moroccan origin. After she couldn’t prevent my testimony, because all the other representatives of the parties wanted to hear what I had to say, she tried to interfere by turning her back on me and chatting and giggling loudly with her assistant.
After the event, I went to my SPD office in my hometown and handed in my party card.
CA: You have been working as an artist—a sculptor – for many years. What experiences have you had with the German art scene since Oct 7, 2023?
If you clearly take the side of Israel now, you have no chance with official cultural foundations and museums—in short, in the cultural sector worldwide. Well-meaning people from the art scene advised me with a sad look not to apply in the first place. I wouldn’t stand a chance. The left-wing art scene worldwide has become thoroughly anti-Semitic. Any other view of it would be naïve.
For example, if I want to exhibit my 77 Soul Birds [a collection of wooden sculptures representing the 77 young people murdered on the Norwegian island of Utøya and in Oslo by Anders Breivik in 2012] in the Negev Desert, I can’t do it without official, logistical and financial support. Some foundations can be approached for exactly that. If you don’t take an anti-Israel stance, the doors slam shut.
The Museum of Modern Art in Tel Aviv would also be perfect. But I cannot do this without financial and logistic support.
Maybe one day. I keep hoping.
