Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
A hostage crisis that kept all of Germany on the edge of its seat took place on October 31, 1994. At 4 a.m. that Monday, the felons Raymond Albert and Gerhard Polak took a police officer and his female colleague hostage in Stuttgart. They then, armed with a pistol and a fake hand grenade, robbed a Volksbank in Fulda, Hesse. The hostages served as human shields during the robbery. Afterward, they got into their car with their hostages and 250,000 marks in loot and fled. A movie-worthy car chase through Hesse, Thuringia, Saxony, and Saxony-Anhalt ensued, during which the two kidnappers repeatedly took new hostages until a shot fired into the air ended the nerve-wracking odyssey. But first things first. On October 10, 1994, 34-year-old Raymond Albert, also known as “Rambo-Albert,” and 36-year-old Gerhard Polak, better known as “Knast-Schlosser” from the legendary Fuhlsbüttel prison—short for “Santa Fu”—escaped. The prison was known for its liberal prison system and high escape rate, which earned it the nickname: “Santa Fu – you’re out!” Yet who were these two felons, anyway? Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Raymond Albert belonged to the former East German elite unit, where he had not only completed training as a lone fighter, paratrooper, and combat swimmer, but also held a license to kill. His duties also included the potential kidnapping of Western politicians. He was also one of 100 divers in the former GDR capable of attaching explosive charges to enemy ships. In short, he was a human fighting machine, but at the same time a passionate amateur poet. However, over the years he had turned his back on the GDR regime and subsequently went astray, which led to prison sentences. Then he committed his greatest mistake. In 1991, he killed the 32-year-old owner of the Stuttgart pub “Bierteufel” by strangling him. To ensure no one could trace him, he set the owner’s head on fire and severed it not with a machete, but with a meat tenderizer, then buried it in the forest. However, in the media, the rolling knife became a machete, which is why Raymond was dubbed the “Machete Killer” by the media. For this murder, Raymond Albert received a life sentence, which he served at the Santa Fu prison in Hamburg. There he met the Swiss Gerhard Polak, a trained auto mechanic who was serving a four-year sentence for extortion and whose reputation as a prison escapee preceded him. Since Polak worked in the prison’s metal shop, he had no trouble obtaining the tools needed for their planned escape from Santa Fu on October 10. The two felons sawed through the bars of their prison cells on the fifth floor and rappelled down using an electrical cable. With the help of a homemade ladder, they scaled fences and the wall. Their escape was not noticed until 5 hours after they fled, which is why disciplinary proceedings were initiated against two correctional officers, as they had not noticed a thing. Coincidence? During their escape, they hatched a plan to rob a bank, which they carried out on October 31, 1994. After fleeing with the two police officers as hostages and their loot, they were pursued by 500 police officers and special task forces from the Federal Border Guard. During their wild chase through four federal states, they occasionally swapped out their hostages. Thus, the police officers were replaced by a father with his two children, and they in turn were replaced by an elderly couple. Throughout, they always took tender care of their hostages and even apologized to them. When they accidentally shot a passerby in the forearm near Hötzelsroda, they even drove him to the hospital and slipped 10,000 marks into his jacket pocket. But after more than 1,000 kilometers and nearly 42 hours on the run, both kidnappers were at the end of their strength. That is why, on November 1, the completely worn-out Gerhard Polak fired a shot into the air at a campground near Heisterbach in the Westerwald as a sign of surrender. Shortly thereafter, Raymond Albert also surrendered. Both were tried before the 5th Criminal Chamber in Stuttgart, where they were convicted of robbery, hostage-taking, and extortion. Gerhard Polak was sentenced to 13 years in prison and Raymond Albert to 15 years. Thus ends the story of the caring hostage-takers.
