The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  The decree also dramatically increased the visibility of the Verfassungsschutz political police—the so-called “Guardians of the Constitution”—as the names of all applicants for public sector jobs were now sent to this agency, which determined on the basis of its own files whether a special hearing was necessary to gauge the applicant’s loyalty to the state. Not only did the Verfassungsschutz comb open sources—speeches, pamphlets, doctoral theses, etc.—for names, but it also engaged in covert surveillance, telephone taps, and a network of informers which was said to include students hired to note who among their classmates held radical views.4 (Little surprise that the agency’s president until 1972 was Hubert Schrübbers, who had spent the early forties as a Nazi prosecutor notorious for seeking harsh sentences against antifascists, which would certainly have meant confinement in a concentration camp.)5

  As Georgy Katsifiacis has noted, “the decree resulted in loyalty checks on 3.5 million persons and the rejection of 2,250 civil service applicants. Although only 256 civil servants were dismissed, the decree had a chilling effect.”6 So much so that according to one survey carried out in the city of Mannheim, “84 percent of university students there refrained from regularly checking leftist materials out of public libraries for fear of being blacklisted.”7

  Obviously, those students who had refused the SPD’s amnesty in 1971 found themselves among the first to be targeted. While most of these people would no doubt have rejected the RAF’s politics, fears about the guerilla were exploited to help push through the legislation. As Heinz Kühn, SPD President of North Rhine-Westphalia, put it, “We could hardly have Ulrike Meinhof employed as a teacher, or Andreas Baader in the police force.”8

  In the wake of the sixties student movement, the state was establishing the conditions under which erstwhile rebels would be allowed to join the establishment. As its corollary, this rollback included ongoing attacks on the universities themselves. For instance, in early 1972, the Free University hired the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel as professor of economics: the Berlin Senate responded by vetoing this appointment,9 and despite student strikes, Mandel was barred from entering the FRG. (This ban was only lifted in 1978.)10

  In this context, in April 1972, the RAF released its second theoretical statement, Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle. As with The Urban Guerilla Concept, this text was distributed in magazine form at the May Day demonstrations that year.

  In a text almost twice as long as the previous one, the RAF was trying to provide an analysis of the previous year’s events, both within the left and within the Federal Republic as a whole. Considerable energy was spent analyzing the unsuccessful workers’ struggles in the chemical sector in 1971 and the failure of the legal left to respond to class oppression within the FRG. These weaknesses were pointed to as so many factors underscoring the necessity for armed politics.

  A real attempt to find a strategic connection between class oppression, working class struggle (outside of the unions, of course) and the guerilla is apparent in all the RAF’s theoretical documents in this period.

  This will not always be the case. In contradistinction to its anti-imperialism, this class orientation at times approximated left-communism in its focus on working class self-activity and alienation. Partly, the explanation for this can be found in the political experiences and trajectories of the core members of the RAF at this point: the sixties revolt and the APO, with their grounding in not only Marxism-Leninism and anti-imperialism, but also Frankfurt School Marxism, the “apprentices collectives,” and, via the SPK, radical therapy.

  At the same time, the period between 1969 and 1973 was one of heightened class conflict in the FRG, beyond and at times against the trade union leadership, with wildcat strikes often being led by women, youth, and immigrant workers. Combined with the sudden turn of many former APO comrades to the new “proletarian” K-groups, this created a context in which it would have been difficult to elaborate a revolutionary strategy without dealing with the question of the working class.

  As we shall see later on, some of the ideas in this document were soon qualified, if not rejected, while others were sharpened, finding their place in the centre of the RAF’s worldview.

  Finally, Serve the People provides the RAF’s response to Karl-Heinz Ruhland, who had been turned into an instrument of police propaganda. Similarly, two drop-outs from the guerilla, Beate Sturm and Peter Homann, were also excoriated as traitors.

  Unlike Ruhland, Sturm’s main crime seems to have been that, subsequent to leaving the RAF, she contacted the media, providing Spiegel with a highly unflattering portrait of the group.

  Homann’s story, on the other hand, was more complex; some controversy about his falling out with the group remains even today. While there are radically different versions of the circumstances, it is clear that he was on very bad terms with his erstwhile comrades upon his return from the Jordan training trip in 1970. Immediately after this, he and his friend Stefan Aust traveled to Sicily where Meinhof’s seven-year-old twin daughters were being cared for by comrades. Pretending to be members of the RAF, the two men took Meinhof’s girls with them, delivering them to their father, konkret editor Klaus Rainer Röhl.

  It seems likely that this direct intervention to thwart Meinhof’s plans for her children played some part in provoking his denunciation as a traitor in Serve the People. There are contradictory versions of why Homann did what he did,1 but regardless of the facts surrounding this initial “treason,” he would fully earn the sobriquet later that year, going so far as to provide the police with information, and to testify against the guerilla in court.2

  In retrospect, Serve the People is significant not so much in its contents, but in its timing, by which it serves as the end of a chapter. With its explanations of the bank robberies and the painstaking preparations undertaken, it allowed the guerilla to deal with some preliminary questions before moving on to grander schemes.

  It would be the last theoretical document produced by the RAF outside of prison for almost ten years.

  Andreas Baader: Letter to the Press

  The cops will continue to fumble about in the dark, until circumstances oblige them to see that the political situation has become a military situation.

  Marighella

  The truth of the matter is that no further information has come out about the group since the first twenty were trained in Jordan. The RAF’s work is clandestine. The “security forces,” the security agencies, the police, the BND, the Verfassungsschutz, the BAW, Spiegel, and the Springer Press know nothing.

  They know nothing about the size, the number of members, the organization, the firepower, or the tactics of the group. Everything written about us by the police state for public consumption over the past year and a half is false, is speculation, or is counterpropaganda with the objective of discrediting the theory and practice of the urban guerilla and driving a wedge between us and our base.

  I haven’t considered turning myself in. No RAF members have considered turning themselves in. So far no RAF prisoner has provided testimony. Announcements of successes against us have only been about arrests or killings. The guerilla’s strength lies in the determination of each of us. We are not on the run. We are here organizing armed resistance against the regime of the propertied classes and the ongoing exploitation of the people.

  The RAF’s current activities are directed towards the formation of politico-military cadre, acquiring better arms and training for revolutionaries, and the anchoring of the group in a sympathetic scene that is ready to support armed resistance. The tactical line that we are currently following is to develop the propaganda of the urban guerilla through the revolutionary organizations that are still legal and to develop broadbased logistical support amongst all layers of the population.

  None of us see any subjective or objective basis for betraying the struggle to which we have committed ourselves; not Genscher’s dirty amnesty deal, not Ruhland, the Social Democrats’ van der Lubbe
,1 not the extensive militarization of the police, not prison, not torture, and not the police terror against the population. “The stones they have thrown will fall at their own feet.”2

  If the price for our lives or our freedom is to be the betrayal of the anticapitalist struggle, there is only one response: we won’t pay it.

  The armed struggle does not develop from one headline to the next. The politico-military strategy of the urban guerilla is based in the resistance to parliamentary democracy’s fascist drift and the organization of the first regular units of the Red Army in the people’s war. The battle has just begun.

  Andreas Baader

  January 24, 1972

  Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle

  Everyone dies, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said, “Though death befalls all men alike, it may be heavier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.” To die for the people is heavier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascist and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.

  Mao tse Tung

  “The armed struggle is a technical issue and therefore requires technical knowledge: training, morale and last of all practice. In this area, improvisation has cost many lives and led to failed attacks. The ‘spontaneity’ that some people romanticize, speaking vaguely about the people’s revolution and ‘the masses,’ is either simply a dodge or it indicates that they have decided to rely upon improvisation during a critical phase of the class struggle. Every vanguard movement must, if they want to remain true to themselves at the decisive moment in the class struggle, analyze and understand the violence of the people, so as to correctly direct it against oppression, thereby achieving the goal with the least sacrifice possible.”1

  ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

  20,000 die every year because the stockholders of the automobile industry only care about profit and, therefore, don’t stop to consider technical safety issues for automobiles or road construction. 5,000 people die every year at their workplace or on their way to or from it, because the owners of the means of production only consider their profits and don’t care about an increase or a decline in the number of accidental deaths. 12,000 commit suicide every year, because they don’t want to die in the service of capital; they’d rather just get it over with themselves. 1,000 children are murdered every year, as a result of living in low quality housing, the only purpose of which is to allow the landlord to pocket a large sum.

  People treat death in the service of the exploiter as normal. The refusal to die in the service of the exploiter leads to what people think of as “unnatural deaths.” The desperate actions of people, coping with the working and living conditions that capital has created, are perceived as crimes. People feel there’s nothing to be done about the situation. To ensure that the incorrect perspective of the people is not replaced with a correct perspective, the Federal Minister of the Interior, the Länder Ministers of the Interior and the BAW have set up police death squads. Without this incorrect perspective about crime and death, the ruling class could not maintain its rule.

  Petra, Georg, and Thomas died in the struggle against death at the hands of the exploiters. They were murdered so that capital could continue killing undisturbed, and so that people would continue to think that nothing can be done about the situation. But the struggle has begun!

  “Murdered—The Struggle Continues”: poster protesting the police killings of Petra Schelm, Thomas Weissbecker, and Georg von Rauch.

  I. PERSIA AND THE

  CONTRADICTION WITHIN THE NEW LEFT

  Brandt has flown to Tehran to visit the Shah and calm his remaining distress about the greeting he received from West German and West Berlin students during the summer of 67; to inform him that the left in the Federal Republic and in West Berlin is dead, that what remains will soon be liquidated, that the Confederation of Iranian Students1 is effectively isolated, and about the Foreigners Act that is in the works and that will allow for their legal liquidation.

  In this way Brandt has revealed the true nature of his foreign and domestic policies; they are the foreign and domestic policies of the corporations meant to control foreign and external markets and to determine who holds political power

  In Tehran Brandt said, “The foreign policy of the Federal Republic must be based on its own interests and must remain free of ideological bias.” The interests of the Federal Republic in Persia are the interests of the German enclave in Tehran, which is to say Siemens, AEG-Telefunken, Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Bank, Mannesmann, Hochtief, Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz, Merck, Schering, Robert Bosch, the Bayerische Vereinsbank, Thyssen, Degussa, and others. They are the ones that had the greetings to the Chancellor published in Tehran’s newspapers.

  The Shah also contributed a statement to the daily press celebrating the Chancellor as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, because the Shah also has no ideological biases; concerning cheap labor in Iran, concerning stable political conditions in Iran, not to mention raw materials and certain nearby markets.

  Under “ideological biases,” the Chancellor and the Shah subsume the interests of the German and Persian peoples regarding the relationship between their two countries. Three days before Brandt’s arrival, four comrades were murdered in Tehran and Thomas Weissbecker was murdered in Augsburg. A week after Brandt’s return, nine death penalties were carried out against comrades in Tehran. Meanwhile, Attorney General Martin2 praised the police officers for so impressively proving their worth in the manhunts in Augsburg and Hamburg.

  German capital in Persia is taxed at a lower rate than other capital in Persia. German development aid credit finances German projects in Persia; and the imperial arsenal in Persia is to be modernized with the help of the German military. A 22 million DM3 investment in the Persian arms industry in 1969 meant 250 million DM4 in follow-up orders for the German arms industry. The Shah’s regime plans to use G-3s and MG-3s5 in the struggle against “crime” in Persia, so that in the future wages will remain low, political conditions will remain stable and the conditions of exploitation will remain favorable for German capital. Meaning that pressure for increased wages at home can be handled with threats to move production out of the country. Pressure will also be applied to the public at home, because antifascist protest against the Shah threatens the foreign policy interests of the Federal Republic of Germany.

  After prostrating himself in Poland,6 the Chancellor now prostrates himself before the murderous Shah. The repression of the Polish, Russian, Czech, and Hungarian peoples by German fascism is no longer gong on. The repression of the Persian people under German imperialism is what is going on now. The Nuremberg Conventions are no longer in effect, but laws against Iranian students, against Greek, Turkish, and Spanish workers, who all come from countries with fascist regimes, are a current reality. German corporations profit from the fascism in these countries, controlling foreign workers here with the threat of what the fascism at home means for them. They are safe from the death penalty, which imprisoned comrades here are spared, but which is enforced in Persia, Turkey, Greece, and Spain.

  The West German left met Brandt’s Persian trip with silence. They left him free to babble twaddle. They let Howeida7 babble twaddle about how the death penalty is only used against common criminals. Given that the Shah is sensitive, given that the 2nd of June disturbed the relationship between Germany and Iran, given that the Shah’s reputation is hardly stellar, as would have to be the case, given that, as everyone knows, enemies of the people dread being called enemies of the people, given that one can presume that even Brandt wasn’t all that comfortable with the hypocrisy, given that German capital is predisposed to fascism, and given that it’s relatively easy to demonstrate the connection between fascism in Iran and German capital in Iran… given all these things, nobody can defend the relationship without presenting themselves in a poor light.

  The intellectual left came to the conclusion that only the proletarian mas
ses can change the current situation, that only the West German masses can expropriate the profits that the corporations make from the Shah’s fascism—a situation from which the Shah’s fascism also profits. With this realization, the left stopped criticizing the Shah’s fascism and the domination imposed by West German capitalism in the Third World. With the realization that the resistance of the West German masses against the rule of capital would not be sparked by the problems of the Third World, but only by the problems developing here, they stopped posing the problems of the Third World as a factor in politics here.

  This shows both the dogmatism and the parochialism of a section of the left. The fact that the working class in West Germany and West Berlin can only think and act in the national context, while capital thinks and acts in a multinational context, is first and foremost an example of the splitting of the working class, as well as of the weakness of a left that only focuses on capital’s domestic policies in its critique and ignores capital’s foreign policy, thus internalizing the split in the working class. They tell the working class only half of the truth about the system, about what capitalist policy means for the working class on a daily basis and what it means for wage demands in the foreseeable future.

  The contradiction facing the New Left is that their basic economic analysis and political assessment is more radical and incisive than anything produced by the West German left prior to the 66/67 recession. This left experienced the end of the postwar reconstruction phase and the strengthening of West German imperialism and understood that they had to base themselves on the extraordinary class struggle, which led to them restricting their propaganda and organizational efforts to the national context. As a result, they have an unimaginative and narrow view of what revolutionary methods of intervention are possible.

  In their efforts to give a scientific orientation to the anticapitalist protest—which reaches into the schools, the unions and the SPD— to maintain and develop their position in the high schools, they used Marxism to make the history of the working class more accessible to teachers and students. They hoped in this way to gain a foothold in the factories and schools.