Astrid Proll

Astrid Huberta Isolde Marie Luise Hildegard Proll
Astrid Proll speaking in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, May 2011
Born	(1947-05-29) 29 May 1947 (age 69) Kassel, Germany
Other names	Anna Puttick
Organization	Red Army Faction

Astrid Huberta Isolde Marie Luise Hildegard Proll (born 29 May 1947, in Kassel, Hesse, the daughter of an architect) was an early member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Proll was the younger sister of Thorwald Proll and met Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin through him; Thorwald left the group relatively early in its history, after being involved in firebombings in Frankfurt in 1968. Proll was involved in bank robbery. She was the getaway driver for Andreas Baader when he escaped from police custody with the help of Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Ingrid Schubert, Irene Goergens in 1970.

Proll, along with Manfred Grashof, was stopped by police on 10 February 1971 but managed to get away. However in Hamburg on 6 May of the same year, Proll was finally arrested after a pump attendant at a petrol station recognised her from a wanted poster and alerted the police. She attempted to flee but was surrounded by armed officers and arrested. Once she was detained, her run-in with the police in February was turned into an attempted murder charge even though she never even fired a shot. She was imprisoned but released on health grounds (being kept in complete acoustic isolation in prison caused her health to deteriorate) and transferred to a sanitorium.

While at the sanatorium, Proll was required to report to the police, but she soon escaped and went underground. Given contact details of people in London she decided to go to England, arriving there at the age of 26. In London, a marriage to Robin Puttick allowed her to obtain new identity documents as Anna Puttick. With these she obtained a variety of jobs. She worked for six months as a park-keeper for Hackney Council, and for a year in Lesney's toy factory. From there she took a Hackney Council-sponsored welding course in car mechanics, using her skills to train young and black people as part of a drug-rehabilitation initiative. During this time, she tried to maintain a low profile in spite of working as a mechanic, an atypical female occupation then and now.