The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  We are struggling for:

  1. freedom for prisoners to organize themselves.

  2. wages established in law, the right to training and work, a workers’ association and the right to strike.

  3. retirement benefits and health insurance.

  4. health care provided in hospitals by doctors who are not prison employees; a free choice of doctors.

  5. self-government with the right to fulfill any function.

  6. unlimited right to visitors—without observation.

  7. freedom to assemble unobserved.

  8. abolition of the use of force, all special treatment, and isolation.

  9. abolition of youth detention.

  10. mixed institutions

  11. abolition of house arrest.

  12. abolition of mail censorship.

  13. abolition of forced medication.

  14. free access to political information from all national and foreign publications and media available outside of prison.

  FOR A REVOLUTIONARY PRISONERS’ MOVEMENT! VICTORY TO THE PEOPLE’S WAR!

  The RAF Prisoners September 1974

  Third Hunger Strike

  IF SOMEONE UNDERSTANDS THEIR SITUATION—HOW CAN THEY BE STOPPED?

  This is our third hunger strike against special conditions and the extermination strategy being used against political prisoners in the Federal Republic and West Berlin; against the counterinsurgency program of imperialism’s machinery of destruction, the BAW, the BKA’s Bonn Security Group/State Security Division for the annihilation of revolutionary prisoners and prisoners who have begun to organize and struggle in the prisons.

  We can only be kept down if we stop thinking and struggling. People who refuse to stop struggling cannot be kept down—they win or they die, rather than losing and dying.

  Resistance against the extermination strategy, the special conditions and the counterinsurgency program means resistance against:

  • dehumanization through years of social isolation;

  • the torturous re-education program and the pressure to cooperate in the brainwashing units—Ronald Augustin has been held in the Hannover prison dead wing since early May;

  • the new acoustically sealed cells in Berlin-Tegel, Berlin-Lehrter Strasse, Bruchsal, Essen, Cologne, and Straubing, based on the model of the Hamburg DFG Research Project,1 which are constantly watched by cameras and are always overheated, and where one is under constant acoustic and video surveillance;

  • delays during every visit, total isolation, eliminating even the possibility of shouting to other prisoners in the Berlin-Moabit dungeon, the Essen dungeon, the Straubing dungeon, the Perungesheim dungeon, the Fuhlsbüttel dungeon, and the Mannheim dungeon, or being under video observation in the soundless bell jar at Hamburg remand centre—where one is kept in restraints for days on end;

  • attempted murder by withholding water during hunger strikes in Schwalmstadt, Munich, Hamburg and Cologne;

  • concentration units for political prisoners in Lübeck, Stuttgart, and Berlin;

  • being shackled during yard time in Hamburg and Lübeck;

  • being placed in special cells directly beside the main prison entrance in Cologne-Ossendorf for the past two years—there is never silence; the same is the case in Berlin-Moabit;

  • psychiatric research and the threat and use of forced drugging in order to carry out further investigations;

  • cells with plexiglass dividers for meetings with lawyers in Hannover, Stuttgart, and Straubing, making any political discussion impossible;

  • periodic confiscation of defense materials—records and mail—by the Bonn Security Group/State Security Division;

  • the Bonn Security Group’s cell raids tied to media hate campaigns against the lawyers representing political prisoners;

  • criminalizing lawyers who represent political prisoners;

  • the withholding and manipulation of files by the BKA;

  • the prompt relaxation of isolation conditions only once the prisoner is in the clutches of the police and is being groomed as an infiltrator or a crown witness; in Cologne-Ossendorf, Jan Raspe has refused yard time, because he is only permitted yard time with an ever-changing selection of prisoners, which is disorienting and prevents communication. All these special rules continue to be applied so as to allow the police (Security Group) to structure and control the prisoners’ contacts.

  • the terrorizing of relatives with house searches, spies, verbal abuse and surveillance before and after visits, to pressure them into behaving with the prisoners in a way that serves the interests of the police.

  In isolation, the hunger strike is our only possible form of collective resistance to imperialism’s counterstrategy. Revolutionary prisoners and prisoners who have begun to organize themselves to fight are to be psychologically and physically, that is to say politically, destroyed. Disarmed, imprisoned, isolated, this is our only option for asserting our psychological and spiritual strength, our identity as people, so that the stones the ruling class has thrown at us may land on their own feet.

  To struggle is to turn weakness into strength.

  Isolation is the favored weapon for executing prisoners who decide not to let themselves be destroyed by prison, who struggle against the human experiments, the brainwashing, the imperialist extermination program. Most of all, they hope to use prison isolation to liquidate political awareness and resistance. As to the other prisoners, they still don’t understand how completely oppressed they are, although they are just as poor and downtrodden as we and have nothing to lose but their chains.

  We encourage all prisoners being held in isolation to join us in the struggle against isolation.

  The abolition of isolation is the condition that we must all struggle for if prisoners’ self-organization, revolutionary politics, and prison liberation struggles are to have any real possibility of expressing proletarian counterviolence—in the context of the class struggle here, in the context of the liberation struggles of the peoples of the Third and Fourth Worlds, in the context of proletarian internationalism and a united anti-imperialist liberation front in the prisons and in the stockades developed for political prisoners in those parts of the world controlled by imperialism.

  ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE THROUGH VIOLENT CONQUEST!

  FREEDOM THROUGH ARMED ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGLE!

  The RAF Prisoners September 13, 1974

  The Expulsion of Horst Mahler

  At this point, we have nothing more to say about Horst Mahler’s attempt to buy his freedom with denunciations of the RAF (Baader liberation trial). The problem with Horst Mahler has always been that he is a filthy, bourgeois chauvinist, who has transferred the ruling class arrogance which he picked up as a lawyer within the imperialist system—an arrogance that he made his own—to the proletarian revolutionary movement, and this well before the RAF. Already, in connection with the militant student movement in Berlin in 1967/68, he could only understand the political solidarity he received as a left-wing lawyer in terms of it being a cult of personality devoted to him.

  He imagined that he could continue his previous bourgeois life in the guerilla—issuing orders, manipulating the weaknesses of others, and demanding privileges, much as the oppressor deals with the oppressed in a lawyer’s chambers. So—because he hadn’t learned anything and didn’t want to—he remained incapable of collective, protracted, patient work. He was not prepared to crawl out of the careerist slime. He never really understood the RAF’s collective learning, working, and discussion process: the intensity of work in a fighting group, the unity of physical and intellectual labor, the abolition of the separation between private and professional life, the determination to act, to struggle—in a word, the way in which the guerilla works. For him, all that signified the loss of his privileges, which he found—because of his smug self-image; the caricature of the professional bourgeois politician—unacceptable.

  Mahler never participated in the RAF’s practice, in i
ts concrete politics, in its tactical decisions, in its structure—nor did he participate in much else either. With his arrogant politics, he simply didn’t get it. In 1970, he was already little more than a bourgeois wreck, tolerated—because of his illegal status—by the RAF’s nascent politico-military organization. Yet he remained a liability to our practice, in part because of his vanity, his ignorance, his class-specific subjectivity, and his carelessness.

  He himself made his expulsion from the RAF, which had been a long time coming, inevitable. He did this with his authoritarian and possessive claims to a leadership position over the other RAF prisoners, with his elitist inability to understand criticism and self-criticism as anything but power tactics, and with his ongoing, revisionist, empty, private writings. With these writings he attempted to go behind the backs of the RAF and the RAF prisoners, and sought to acquire some prestige for himself in the eyes of the left, prestige that does not reflect his true role in the RAF. His writings read like a legal argument with a confused structure, and do not reflect the politics, action, practice, experience, or tactical concepts of the RAF.

  The RAF only found out about Mahler’s publication when it turned up on the market. He knew he could not speak for the RAF. The guerilla expresses its theory, its strategy and its internationalism through its actions. Nothing but theoretical discussions that do not address concrete action will be marketed under the conditions enforced by imperialism. Given the existence of the political police, the Verfassungsschutz and the intelligence services, the theory and practice of armed struggle cannot be discussed in public. That would only provide the government’s counterinsurgency units with grist for the mill. And Mahler doesn’t deal with this issue—with armed struggle—except in the form of a parlor debate, as he himself has written often enough.

  Mahler will continue to be unable to offer any information about the RAF that is anything other than an example of his infantilism, his ambition, and his careerism. And he will doubtless exploit his association with the RAF’s politics in his relationship with Red Aid e.v. and the Roter Fels1 group, an e.v. branch in Tegel.

  Our understanding of the RAF prisoners’ relationship with these groups—KPD/AO, Red Aid e.v.—will remain unchanged as long as they restrict themselves to questions of solidarity. (Because their solidarity does not lie with the offensive politico-military strategy, but rather—and even this only rhetorically—with the fundamentally defensive position of the RAF prisoners: the struggle against extermination in prison.) For instance, the KPD/AO denounced the 1970 liberation of Baader as CIA-orchestrated and practically delivered us up during the manhunt of 1972. This situation will not change until this party understands that the urban guerilla constitutes a stage in the protracted people’s war.

  The justice system and the media have associated Mahler with the RAF, and Mahler is trying to use this association with the urban guerilla, and with the actions and practice of the RAF, and the example it sets for these groups, in an effort to obstruct and prevent his expulsion. In a fit of pique, this consistent revisionist and opportunist is simply doing this to get back at us.

  The fact of the matter is that, with his recent publication, he is trying to use his experiences with the RAF in order to aid state security’s psychological warfare campaign within the legal left—just like Ruhland, Sturm, and Homann—and he is doing this with material provided by the cops—because he himself knows nothing about the RAF and its discussions. He quotes from BKA reports about the raids of RAF prisoners’ cells, and in so doing he associates himself with the false allegations and lies found in the Bonn Security Group’s reports. What he provides as quotes from the RAF are almost all quotes from himself. Like any filthy criminologist, he plays around with notes that offer no information about the RAF’s politics—but which denounce, personalize, and falsify the RAF’s politics, treating them as a psychological issue.

  In his opening statement at the Baader liberation trial, he put his new persona on public display. He could not have come up with a more obvious method of using this trial to side with the justice system and to distance himself from armed politics, the guerilla in the metropole, and the RAF, given that state security and the BAW do not want this trial to focus on the evidence, but on destroying the RAF politically, destroying the urban guerilla concept in the Federal Republic. That is to say, they want this trial to focus on psychological warfare.

  He, who has found a way to get out of isolation, says that there is no extermination imprisonment, and this at a time when more than 40 political prisoners in West Germany and West Berlin have begun a hunger strike, with which we are determined to smash the imperialist states’ extermination strategy: the use of isolation against the prisoners of the RAF and other anti-imperialist social revolutionary groups, as well as against all those prisoners who have begun to organize resistance and have therefore been placed in isolation. Because he doesn’t want to struggle, because he is afraid of this hunger strike, he attempts to liquidate it, making a political program out of his miserable egotism and attempting to stir up the legal left against the RAF, all to serve his own interests. And he does this at a time when the RAF’s prison struggle—against the extermination of political prisoners, for the right of prisoners to organize and to launch a revolutionary prisoners’ movement—requires solidarity from the legal movement. Not paternalism and not just words on paper, but solidarity through which they themselves might develop a genuine anti-imperialist practice.

  Horst Mahler has consciously chosen to collaborate with the BKA and the Berlin justice system, and to act as a puppet for the political police in Wiesbaden and Bonn. He remains what he has always been: a cynic, a chauvinist and a mandarin, now acting openly on behalf of state security—a politically inconsequential and essentially ridiculous figure.

  Monika Berberich for the RAF Prisoners

  September 27, 1974

  Holger Meins’ Report on Force-Feeding

  Since September 30 (12 days) force-feeding has been occurring here daily. It takes place in the sickbay (in a one-storey building in B wing—a sort of annex—I am celled in A wing, in the middle of the first floor). I am escorted by 5-6 of the greens.1

  During the first week, I attempted different forms of active resistance every day. Selective and timely.

  5-6 greens, 2-3 medics, 1 doctor. The greens grab, push, and drag me to an operating chair. Really it’s an operating table with all the bells and whistles: it can be swiveled in any direction, etc., and can be folded into an armchair with a headrest and foot- and armrests.

  Strapped down: two pairs of handcuffs and foot shackles, a 30 cm wide strap around the waist, two leather straps with 4 belts from the elbow to the wrist on the left arm, on the right arm another two at the wrist and elbow, and one across the chest. Behind me a green or a medic who holds my head firmly against the headrest with both hands on my forehead. (In the case of active resistance at head level, two others, one on the left, one on the right, hold on to my hair, my beard, and my neck. In this way, my entire body is immobilized, and if it’s necessary another holds my knees or shoulders. The only possible motion is muscular movement “inside” the body. This week they tied the belts and straps very tightly, so that blood accumulated in my hands, which turned bluish, etc.).

  The mouth: On the right the doctor on a stool with a small crowbar about 20 cm long, one end a curved needle, the other a curved spatula wrapped with adhesive tape. This goes between the lips, which are pulled apart with fingers at the same time, and then between the teeth (that’s pretty easy in my case, given that I’m missing three teeth) forcing them apart, either by applying pressure or by pushing the spatula against the gums.

  (Biting the teeth together is still relatively difficult—a strong point of resistance—and leads to minor injury to the teeth or gums. Against the strength of the jaw they use three different grips: forcing them apart with fingers under the lips while simultaneously pulling on the beard both above and below the mouth; applying heavy pressure be
low the ears and the jaw joint, which really hurts; sharply pressing a stiffened finger against the muscles that run forward from under the ears, while using a stiffened finger to push the carotid artery, the windpipe, and the vagus nerve against the muscle and kneading and squeezing them against each other, which, in fact, was not the most painful method, but took more than a day to heal.)

  When the jaws are pulled far enough apart, the medic on the left sticks—shoves—the clamp between the teeth. It is a shear tongue-like rubber-coated object, 2 fingers thick with a wingnut at its joint, with which the jaws are pried open. The tongue is pulled forward and forced down with forceps, or the doctor uses a finger with a steel sheath on the fingertip.

  Force-feeing: A red stomach pipe (not a tube) is used, about the thickness of a middle finger (in my case between the joints). It is greased, but doesn’t manage to go down without causing me to gag, because it is only between 1 and 3 mm narrower than the digestive tract (this can only be avoided if one makes a swallowing motion and remains completely still). The slightest irritation when the pipe is introduced causes gagging and nausea and the cramping of the chest and stomach muscles, setting off a chain reaction of extremely intense convulsions throughout the body, causing one to buck against the pipe. The more extreme and the longer this lasts, the worse it is. A single gag or vomiting reflex is accompanied by waves of cramps. They only abate or decrease if one is very focused and remains very still, forcing oneself to breathe deeply and normally. Under the circumstances, resistance makes this completely impossible. It is only possible through quiet concentration and self-control, which in these conditions of direct compulsion always means self-repression and self-discipline. This is the reason for the restraints used in this form of force-feeding, because the body “naturally” reacts.

  When the pipe is in the stomach, a wider funnel is attached to it and a normal cup (about a quarter-litre capacity) is used to gradually force down small amounts of the sludge. It is some type of meat slop, murky, slimy, and fatty—in any event, it contains vitamins, glucose, eggs, and finely chopped stuff—with a thick, brownish, greasy residue (about 1 or 2 tablespoons). The intake lasts about 1½ to 3 minutes. A full cup is always poured in, even when the gagging is extreme, causing the entire body to cramp for at least 5 to 6 minutes each time without any relief. The funnelling is only possible with “relative calm.” During heavy gagging and/or cramping, the slop pours out of the funnel at the top. When the pipe bucks up in the throat—and in the digestive tract as a result—it can lead to choking fits, which have occurred twice so far (but didn’t pose a serious health risk). The gagging, the cramping, and the swallowing are of course painful, particularly to the larynx, which is pressed against the pipe with every swallow and gag. The iron lever has led to small injuries to the gums, the inside of the lip looks as if it has been bitten in one place and has a whitish inflammation as a result of the clamp, and the back of the throat is “irritated.” The larynx constantly hurts a little bit, and I have a sore throat.