The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  There were always many women playing central roles in the RAF. It is difficult to imagine Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, or Astrid Proll putting up with the kind of sexist libertinage which has been documented in the West Berlin anarchist scene. Indeed, during her own period in the wild depths of the counterculture, Proll had not gone to K.1 but had chosen to live in a women’s only commune, helping to form a short-lived female version of the Hash Rebels, the Militant Black Panther Aunties.9

  These various explanations, however, are not only difficult to evaluate, they also risk obscuring the fact that cooperation between the anarchist guerilla scene and the Marxist-Leninists would continue throughout the seventies, many members of the former eventually joining the RAF, while a few individuals continued to carry out operations with both organizations. Certainly, from what can be seen, a high level of coordination and solidarity existed between the groups at all times. While their supporters might occasionally engage in unpleasant disputes, the actual fighters seem to have maintained good relations even as they traveled their different roads.

  Ultimately, in the early 80s, the 2nd of June Movement would publicly announce that it was joining the RAF en masse. This provided the opportunity for some 2JM political prisoners who opposed the merger to give their own explanation as to why they had always chosen to fight separately. Although these observations were made over ten years later, they help shed light on relations in these early days:

  The contradiction between the RAF and the 2nd of June at that time was the result of the different ways the groups had evolved: the 2nd of June Movement out of their members’ social scene and the RAF on the basis of their theoretical revolutionary model. And, equally, as a result of the RAF’s centralized organizational model on the one hand, and our autonomous, decentralized structures on the other. Another point of conflict was to be found in the question of the cadre going underground, which the RAF insisted on as a point of principle.

  As such, the immediate forerunners to the 2nd of June Movement were always open to a practical—proletarian—alternative; an alternative that had nothing to do with competition, but more to do with different visions of the revolutionary struggle.

  There was strong mutual support and common actions in the early period of both groups… At the time both groups proceeded with the idea that the future would determine which political vision would prove effective in the long run.1

  So, during this germinal period, friendly contacts were maintained even as differences were clarified between the various activists who were choosing to take the next step in the struggle.

  For shelter and support, those who were underground became dependent on the goodwill and loyalty of friends and allies who maintained a legal existence. One of those who occasionally sheltered Baader and Ensslin was Ulrike Meinhof, who was already feeling that their commitment and sense of purpose contrasted sharply with what she experienced as her own increasingly hollow existence as a middle class media star, albeit one with “notorious” left-wing politics. At the same time, Meinhof continued to work with young people in closed institutions, specifically girls in reform school, with whom she began producing a television docudrama.

  While Meinhof eventually became world famous for what she did next in life, it is worth emphasizing that her time as a journalist was far from insignificant. As her biographer Jutta Ditfurth has argued:

  With her columns, and above all with the radio features about things like industrial labor and reform school children, Meinhof had an enormous influence on the thinking of many people. Much more than she realized. She took on themes that only exploded into view years later. For instance, the women’s question. When women in the SDS defended themselves from macho guys, they did it with words and sentences from Meinhof’s articles. She could formulate things succinctly.2

  Baader was captured in West Berlin on April 3, 1970, set up by a police informant.3 Peter Urbach had been active around the commune scene for years, all the while secretly acting on behalf of the state. He was particularly “close” to the K.1 commune, and had known Baader since at least 1967. While the bombs and guns Urbach supplied to young rebels never seemed to work, the hard drugs he provided did their job nicely, showing that even as theories of the “liberating” effects of narcotics were being touted in the scene, the state knew on which side its bread was buttered.4

  While it has always been stressed that there were neither hierarchies nor favorites amongst the various combatants, Baader seemed to bring with him a sense of daring and possibility which would always make him first amongst equals, for better or for worse. As such, following his capture, all attention was focused on how he could be freed from the state’s clutches.von Seckendorff

  A plan was hatched, whereby Meinhof would use her press credentials to apply for permission to work with Baader on a book about youth centers, an area in which by now they both had some experience. The prison authorities reluctantly agreed, and on May 14 Baader was escorted under guard to meet her at the Institute for Social Issues Library in the West Berlin suburbs.

  This provided the necessary opportunity. Once Baader and Meinhof were in the library, two young women entered the building: Irene Goergens, a teenager who Meinhof had recruited from her work with reform school kids, and Ingrid Schubert, a radical doctor from the West Berlin scene. They were followed by a masked and armed Gudrun Ensslin, and an armed man. Drawing their weapons, these rescuers moved to free Baader. When an elderly librarian, Georg Linke, attempted to intervene, he was shot in his liver.1 The guards drew their weapons and opened fire, missing everyone, and all six jumped out of the library window and into the getaway car waiting on the street below.2

  Barely a month after his arrest, Baader was once again free.

  The library breakout made headlines around the world, both Meinhof and Ensslin being identified as likely participants. Journalists tried to outdo each other in their sensationalist tripe, describing the one as a middle class poseur and the other as a former porn actress.3 Headlines continued to be made when a neofascist arms dealer, Günther Voigt, was arrested and charged with selling the guerilla their guns.4 Then, French journalist Michele Ray declared that she had met with Mahler, Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader in West Berlin—she promptly sold the extensive interviews she had taped to Spiegel.5

  The group had made an impression. Its first action had struck a chord. Yet this was very much a mixed blessing, as Astrid Proll, who had driven the getaway car during the jailbreak,6 would later explain:

  I think we were all very nervous; I remember some people throwing up. Because we weren’t so wonderful criminals, we weren’t so wonderful with the guns, we sort of involved a socalled criminal who could do it so much better than we, and… he was so nervous that he shot somebody. He didn’t kill him, but he shot him very very badly, and that was really really very bad for the whole start of it.7

  As she elaborated elsewhere:

  After a man had been severely hurt… we found ourselves on wanted lists. It was an accident that accelerated the development of the underground life of the group. Ulrike Meinhof, who had so far been at the fringes of the group, was all of a sudden wanted on every single billpost for attempted murder against a reward of DM 10,000… When we were underground there were no more discussions, there was only action.8

  In what would be a recurrent phenomenon, the state made use of the media frenzy around the prison-break to help push through new repressive legislation—in this case the so-called “Hand Grenade Law,” by which West Berlin police were equipped with hand grenades, semiautomatic revolvers, and submachine guns.9

  This was all hotly debated on the left, prompting the fugitives to send a letter to the radical newspaper 883, in which they explained (somewhat defensively) the action and their future plans. At the insistence of the radical former film student Holger Meins who was working at 883 at the time and who would later himself become a leading figure in the RAF, the newspaper published the statement, making it the first public docume
nt from the guerilla. (Even without Meins’ support, it would have been odd for 883 to not publish the text: Baader, Meinhof, Mahler, and Ensslin had all formerly served in the editorial collective, as had several other individuals who would go on to join the guerilla.)1

  The Red Army Faction had been born.

  The next year was spent acquiring technical skills, including a trip to Jordan where more than a dozen of the aspiring German guerillas received training from the PLO. While this first trip may not have had great significance for the group, given the subsequent importance of its connection with certain Palestinian organizations, it may be useful to examine the context in which it occurred.

  At the time, Jordan contained a very large Palestinian refugee population, one which had swollen since the 1967 Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; by 1970, the Palestinians constituted roughly 1,000,000 of the country’s total population of 2,299,000.

  Based in the refugee camps, the PLO managed to constitute itself as a virtual parallel state within the country. Indeed, many considered that revolution in Jordan could be one step towards the defeat of Israel, an idea expressed by the slogan, “The road to Tel Aviv lies through Amman”—a sentiment which worried King Hussein, to say the least—as did the increasing use of Jordanian territory as a rear base area for all manner of Palestinian radical organizations.2

  In September 1970, the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine skyjacked three western aircraft, landing them in Dawson’s Field, a remote desert airstrip in Jordan. This provided Hussein with the excuse he needed, and the PLO soon came under attack from the monarch’s armed forces, supported by Israel. By the time a truce was brokered, between 4,000 and 10,000—Yassir Arafat would claim as many as 20,000—Palestinians had been killed, including many noncombatants. (This would be remembered as “Black September,” and it was in memory of this massacre that the PLO’s unofficial guerilla wing would adopt that name.)

  Prior to this, the Palestinians’ Jordanian bases were important sources of inspiration and education for revolutionaries, not only in the Arab world, but also in many European countries. While the largest number of visitors came from Turkey3—many of whom would stay and fight alongside the Palestinians—there were also Maoists, socialists, and aspiring guerillas from France, Denmark, Sweden, and, of course, West Germany. (It would be claimed that members of the Roaming Hash Rebels scene had already received training from the Palestinians, and Baumann has pointed to this as a turning point in its transformation into a guerilla underground.)4

  Even during their Middle Eastern sojourn, the RAF continued to make headlines in Germany, Horst Mahler sending a photo of himself waving a gun and dressed like a fedayeen to a radical newspaper with the message, “Best wishes to your readers from the land of A Thousand and One Nights!”5

  Juvenile theatrics aside, this trip signaled the very public beginning of an aspect of the RAF which would bedevil the police, namely, their proficient use of foreign countries as rear base areas. As has been discussed elsewhere:

  Rear base areas are little discussed, but essential to guerillas. This is something precise: a large area or territory, bordering on the main battle zone, where the other side cannot freely operate. Either for reasons of remoteness or impenetrable mountain ranges, or because it crosses political boundaries.6

  The RAF would make extensive use of various Arab countries as rear base areas throughout their existence, places where one could go not only to train, but also to hide when Europe got too “hot.” During the 1970s at least, it does not seem to have been the governments of these countries which provided the group with aid and succor, but rather various revolutionary Palestinian organizations which were deeply rooted in the refugee populations throughout the region. In this way, in the years following the Palestinians’ defeat at the hands of Jordan’s armed forces in 1970, Lebanon and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen emerged as homes away from home for more than one West German revolutionary.

  Another source of foreign support, of course, was the “communist” German Democratic Republic—East Germany—from which the RAF and other guerilla groups would receive various forms of assistance over the years. As far as the RAF is concerned, it is unclear exactly how or when this relationship began. Certainly if it existed in the early seventies, this was very secret, and indeed unimagined on the radical left, for which the “other” German state remained a corrupt and authoritarian regime, alternately “Stalinist” or “revisionist,” but in any case one from which little good could come.

  And yet it is known that, as early as 1970, the GDR did choose to knowingly allow the guerilla to pass through its territory, for instance on flights to and from the Middle East. After the first trip to Jordan, it even detained one member—Hans-Jürgen Bäcker—and questioned him about the underground for twenty-four hours, but then released him.1 Clearly, by the end of the decade, this policy had been extended to provide other sorts of assistance. It has also been claimed that even at the time of the 1970 training expedition, there were plans to relocate Meinhof’s twin daughters to East Germany if their father won custody away from her sister.2

  Given the unpopularity of the GDR, why was this aid accepted, and what effects did it have on the RAF?

  The answer to the first of these questions is easy enough to guess: at first, East German “aid” seems to have been very limited in scope, really little more than turning a blind eye to what was going on.3 Who could complain about that?

  Eventually, as we will see, more substantial favors would be forthcoming: shelter, training, even new identities—and yet, for most of its history, there is absolutely no indication that the RAF was choosing its targets or formulating its ideology to please foreign patrons. This would become more debatable near the end, but certainly in the 1970s, the RAF - Stasi connection seems to have been casual if not ephemeral.

  At most, one might perhaps argue a case of the GDR egging the guerilla on as a way to get at the Americans, in the context of the ongoing conflagration in Vietnam.

  Certainly, throughout the 1970s, the Palestinian connection was of far greater importance, and yet the guerilla’s first visit to the Middle East ended on an unpromising note: according to several reports, the West Germans were far from ideal guests, and the Palestinians eventually sent them on their way.

  They returned to West Berlin—via the GDR—as the summer of 1970 came to an end.4

  The group now set about obtaining cars and locating safehouses. New contacts were made, and new members were recruited, among them Ilse Stachowiak, Ali Jansen, Uli Scholze, Beate Sturm, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe, this last being an old friend of Meinhof’s, and himself a founding member of Kommune 2.5 Some of these individuals would soon think better of their decision and drop out at the first opportunity, others would determine the very course of the RAF, and in some cases give their lives in the struggle.

  But first, the young guerilla needed to acquire funds, and to this end a daring combination of bank raids was planned in cooperation with members of the Roaming Hash Rebels scene.6 Within ten minutes, on September 29, three different West Berlin banks were hit: the revolutionaries managed to make off with over 220,000 DM (just over $60,000) without firing a shot or suffering a single arrest.7 As Horst Mahler’s former legal assistant Monika Berberich, who had herself joined the RAF, would later explain, “It was not about redistributing wealth, it was about getting money, and we weren’t going to mug grannies in the streets.”8

  The “triple coup” was a smashing success. Things were looking good.

  Then, on October 8, police received an anonymous tip about two safehouses in West Berlin: Mahler and Berberich, as well as Ingrid Schubert, Irene Goergens, and Brigitte Asdonk, were all arrested. (It was suspected that Hans-Jürgen Bäcker had snitched to the police. He was confronted and denied the charge, but quickly parted ways with the guerilla. The fact that he was left unmolested should be taken into account when evaluating later claims that the RAF exec
uted suspected traitors or those who wished to leave its ranks.)1

  Following these arrests, the RAF moved to transfer operations outside of West Berlin, and members of the group began crossing over into West Germany proper. During this period, the fledgling guerilla burglarized the town halls of two small towns, taking blank ID cards, passports, and official stamps for use in future operations.

  On December 20, Karl-Heinz Ruhland and RAF members Ali Jansen and Beate Sturm were stopped by police in Oberhausen. Ruhland, who was only peripheral to the group, surrendered while Jansen and Sturm made their getaway. The next day Jansen was arrested along with RAF member Uli Scholze while trying to steal a Mercedes-Benz. (Sturm soon left the guerilla, as did Scholze when he was released one day after his capture. Ruhland cooperated with police, helping to reveal the location of safehouses and testifying in court against RAF members. Jansen received a ten year sentence for shooting at police.)

  On February 10, 1971, Astrid Proll was spotted by Frankfurt police along with fellow RAF member Manfred Grashof. The police opened fire in a clear attempt to kill the two as they fled; luckily, they missed. Subsequently, the cops involved would claim that they had shot in selfdefense, yet unbeknownst to them the entire scene had been observed by the Verfassungsschutz, who filed a report detailing how neither of the guerillas had even drawn their weapons. This fact would remain suppressed by the state for years.2