It is always said that the probability of becoming a victim of a hijacking is statistically extremely low. For 19-year-old Diana Müll, this probability was probably far lower, purely arithmetically. The fact that she was on board the Lufthansa plane “Landshut” from Mallorca to Frankfurt on October 13, 1977 was due to a chain of coincidences.
The then 19-year-old from Giessen had won a beauty contest. She was young, full of life and saw the terror year 1977, when the left-wing extremist RAF gang challenged the state to the extreme, like many citizens: terrible, but without any connection to their own lives. As a prize for winning, she and other beauty queens were invited to Mallorca for a week; they had a good time “and we celebrated, with everything that goes with it,” she says today. They partied so long that they almost missed their Lufthansa flight, actually they shouldn’t have boarded at all, but their host chattered with the officials until they were all allowed on board the Boeing 737 “Landshut”. .
“And that,” says Diana Müll, “was my undoing.”
Three horrific days later she felt a cold gun muzzle on her head, a terrorist leader with the alias “Mahmud” threatened to shoot her. Diana, 19 years old, from Giessen, he told the Dubai authorities outside, would be the first to die if the plane was not refueled. Diana Müll stood in the open door of the plane. He counts to ten now. At “nine” the tower announced that refueling was allowed. “The cold spot on my skin,” says Diana Müll, “I can still feel it today.”
Co-pilot Jürgen Vietor (left), passenger Diana Müll (second from right) and GSG9 member Aribert Martin (right) spoke as contemporary witnesses in the LMU about the hijacking of the “Landshut”.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf/Stephan Rumpf)
It is completely silent in the lecture hall of the LMU main building as she tells her story. Many older people can still see the television pictures of the “German Autumn”, the kidnapping of the employer president Hanns Martin Schleyer by the RAF and the “Landshut” by an allied Palestinian terrorist command, the liberation of the hostages in Mogadishu by the special unit GSG 9, as if that were the case all not already 45 years ago. For the many young students in the lecture hall it is like a journey through time, the interest in the eyewitness talk about the “Landshut” kidnapping is enormous. In addition to Diana Müll, the then co-pilot Jürgen Vietor and the former GSG-9 policeman Aribert Martin are also taking part.
Today, the contemporary witnesses form a close community, they keep the memory alive and work to ensure that the wreck of the “Landshut”, which is now in Friedrichshafen, becomes an appropriate place of remembrance. They just spoke to students there. The Munich event was organized by the city, the Historical Seminar of the LMU and the Bavarian State Center for Civic Education. After a number of previous speakers that was not easy to overlook in retrospect, the three contemporary witnesses spoke, and the evening became a prime example of why educational work through contemporary witnesses is so important. In short, they described what terror means. And history suddenly got a face.
Diana Müll speaks openly about the torments of humiliation. How the toilets were blocked and the hostages had to relieve themselves in their seats, the heat, the screaming, the stench; how the terrorists ripped away their hand luggage and the young women could no longer get their birth control pills, so that their periods started, blood everywhere, says Diana Müll.
Jürgen Vietor reports how he had to climb over the corpse of pilot Jürgen Schumann; how “Mahmud” simply shot Schumann in Aden while one of his accomplices ate an apple unperturbed. As the passengers watched the murder, “even the small children,” says Vietor. Schumann went to the runway in Aden that night to check the tires on the landing gear, but stayed away for an hour. “It’s a black box,” says Vietor, “we never found out.” The pilot wasn’t allowed to explain anymore.
On October 18, the freed hostages arrived at Rhein-Main Airport in Frankfurt.
(Photo: Roland Witschel/picture alliance/dpa)
Aribert Martin considers people like Diana Müll and Jürgen Vietor to be the real heroes, as he says. They had to endure days of agony. “We from the GSG 9 weren’t the heroes,” he explains, “we did our job.” He was only briefly afraid when they pried open the door of the plane that night in Mogadishu: “I was afraid that we might be blown up. But not before man-to-man combat, our training had prepared us for that. And that we managed it.”
Despite the happy liberation, many of the “Landshut” hostages never let go of what they experienced. And many, like Diana Müll, faced another ordeal: insurance companies that didn’t pay for therapy; Lufthansa, the authorities, who saw no reason for compensation or victims’ pensions. In the end, Jürgen Vietor, who comments on such things with sarcastic humor because they might be easier to bear, says: “People, make sure you don’t become victims. Rather become perpetrators, everyone is interested in them. Victims always have the ass card .”