The Lorenz Kidnaping: A Rehearsal?

In the chill of a Berlin winter's night, a man bound by tape to a bench in Wilmersdorf park struggled to free himself. Eventually, the man escaped his bonds, walked out of the park, found a telephone booth and called his wife. "Hello, Marianne. This is Peter," he said. The caller was Peter Lorenz, chairman of West Berlin's Christian Democratic Union and the party's candidate for mayor of the city. Six days earlier, he had been kidnaped by a gang of militant young anarchists, whose daring act startled all of West Germany (TIME, March 10). In the end, Lorenz was released because government officials reluctantly decided to comply with the terrorists' demands.

Lorenz's call to his wife triggered a vast manhunt. Within minutes, police roadblocks sealed off the southwest section of the city, in which Wilmersdorf park is located. Special flying squadrons raided known leftist hangouts--cafes, clubhouses and homes; doors were smashed in, safes and filing cabinets broken open.

West Berlin officials offered a reward of $65,500 for information leading to the arrests of eight suspected members of the Second of June Movement, the terrorist gang that claimed credit for the kidnaping.* All the suspects have been on police posters for more than a year. They are accused of being responsible for a wide variety of terrorist acts, including the murder last November of West Berlin Supreme Court President Guenter von Drenkmann and a number of bank robberies, arsons and attempted assassinations of politicians and police officials.

Drug Injections. Although more than 200 left-wing extremists were swept up by police dragnets, all were released within 24 hours for lack of evidence. At week's end Berlin officials conceded that they had few clues and no real leads to the kidnapers--continuing proof of the skill with which the entire abduction plot was executed.

At a press conference following his release, Lorenz said that the terrorists --after overpowering him and his chauffeur while he was driving to C.D.U. headquarters--immediately sedated him with drug injections. He was kept under heavy guard in what Lorenz described as a "cell" --a 7-ft. by 10-ft. room, containing only a bed, a chair and a table--located in a Berlin cellar. Said he: "I have no idea where it was." Lorenz insisted that he had not been tortured and that considering the circumstances, his treatment by the abductors was "correct."

He was allowed to read the newspapers and thus learned that the C.D.U. had captured 43.9% of the vote in Berlin's local elections, thereby becoming the city's largest party. This was not enough, however, to elect Lorenz as mayor. Social Democratic Incumbent Klaus Schuetz will keep the job, even though his party fell to second place --with 42.7% of the vote--because it can form a coalition with the Free Democrats, who garnered 7.2% of the vote.

The kidnapers maintained their anonymity by negotiating with the police solely by letters mailed through the post or delivered to third parties, and demanding that the authorities respond via television. In response to the kidnapers' demands, West German and West Berlin officials agreed to free six anarchists who had been imprisoned for crimes ranging from attempted murder to membership in an illegal organization. Curiously, one of the six, Horst Mahler, elected to remain in jail on the ground that the kidnapers' use of random violence was useless in fomenting revolution in Germany.

Heinrich Albertz, an Evangelical minister and former Berlin mayor, volunteered to act as a hostage, in compliance with the kidnapers' demand. Along with the freed prisoners, he boarded a Lufthansa Boeing 707 at Frankfurt airport. After being denied landing rights at Tripoli, Damascus and Addis Ababa, the jet was finally able to put down in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, where the leftist regime guaranteed the anarchists' safety.

Returning to Berlin, Albertz appeared on television and read a handwritten message from the freed prisoners; it apparently contained a code word signifying that they were safe. Six hours later, Lorenz's wife received the phone call from the booth near Wilmersdorf park.

Almost as soon as he was free, politicians began to second-guess each other about the handling of the case. Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt apparently had urged a tough stance in dealing with the terrorists. Ultimately, he yielded to Mayor Schuetz and the Berlin C.D.U. leadership, who argued that everything should be done to protect Lorenz because they feared the kidnapers would kill him. Nevertheless, Schmidt's opponents, notably Bavarian Conservative Franz Josef Strauss, renewed their now standard attacks on the Chancellor and his party for being soft on radicals, negligent about internal security and lacking the political will to combat anarchists. On television, Schmidt responded that leaders of all political parties had agreed to the steps taken to free Lorenz; he scheduled a major Bundestag debate this week on the state of internal security.

Some officials fear that the kidnapers, emboldened by their success, may strike again. Federal Interior Minister Werner Maihofer warned that the Lorenz episode may have only been a "dress rehearsal for the freeing of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof'--the anarchist gang leaders who are to stand trial May 21 in Stuttgart on charges of murder and grand larceny. Berlin courts previously found Baader guilty of arson and Meinhof of attempted murder.

* The movement takes its name from an incident on June 2,1967, in which West Berlin police killed a student demonstrating against a visit by the Shah of Iran to West Germany.

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