The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  At 11:00 PM on October 17, sixty GSG-9 agents stormed the airliner: guerilla fighters Zohair Youssef Akache, Hind Alameh, and Nabil Harb were killed, and Souhaila Andrawes was gravely wounded. One hostage suffered a heart attack and died, but, given how many were saved, the operation was considered a great success. All the more so, as it was the GSG-9’s first officially acknowledged mission.

  The next morning, at 7:00 AM, a government spokesperson publicly announced the resolution of the hijacking.

  One hour later, Bölling announced the “suicides” of Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader, and the “attempted suicides” of Jan-Carl Raspe and Irmgard Möller. Raspe died of his wounds soon after.

  The following day, almost as a statement of victory, the government lifted the Contact Ban.

  To all appearances, the prisoners had been killed in retaliation for the guerilla’s actions. The Siegfried Hausner Commando issued a communiqué announcing that it, in turn, had executed Schleyer. On the evening of October 19, police recovered his body in the trunk of a car in the French border town of Mullhaus, just where the RAF had said it would be.

  After forty-three days, the most violent clash between the antiimperialist guerillas and the West German state had come to its bloody conclusion.

  As the RAF would later acknowledge: “We committed errors in 77 and the offensive was turned into our most serious setback.”1

  It would take some time for the guerilla to formulate the lessons to be drawn from this unprecedented defeat.

  18.10.77—Gudrun, Andreas, and Jan were murdered in Stammheim—Solidarity with the Political Prisoners’ Struggle

  Fourth Hunger Strike

  “THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND THEIR SITUATION

  ARE UNSTOPPABLE.”

  Given the fact that the state has turned treatment outside of the legal norms into a permanent exception

  and

  that six years of state security justice has proven that when it comes to us, whether in manhunts or in prison, human and constitutional rights aren’t worth the paper they’re written on,

  we demand

  on behalf of the prisoners from the anti-imperialist groups struggling in the Federal Republic, treatment under the minimum guarantees of the 1949 Geneva Convention, specifically Articles 3, 4, 13, 17 and 130.2

  Which, for the political prisoners in Hamburg, Kaiserslautern, Cologne, Essen, Berlin, Straubing, Aichach, and Stammheim would mean, at a minimum, and in keeping with the testimony of all expert witnesses at RAF trials, that the prisoners be brought together in groups of at least 15 and that they be allowed to interact freely with one another.

  Concretely, we are demanding:

  1. The abolition of isolation and group isolation in the prisons of the Federal Republic and the closing of special isolation wings, which are meant to destroy prisoners, and where any communication is recorded and analyzed.

  2. Investigations into the deaths of Holger Meins, Siegfried Hausner, and Ulrike Meinhof by an International Commission of Inquiry, support for the work of this Commission, and the publication of its findings in the Federal Republic.

  3. The government must publicly and clearly acknowledge that the claims that:

  • the RAF planned to set off three bombs in downtown Stuttgart (June 72);

  • the RAF planned to poison the drinking water in a large city (Summer 74);

  • the RAF stole mustard gas and planned to use it (Summer 75);

  • the Holger Meins Commando set off the explosives in Stockholm themselves (April 75);

  • the RAF planned to contaminate Lake Constance with atomic waste (September 75);

  • the RAF planned attacks against nuclear power plants and planned to make use of nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological weapons (since January 76);

  • the RAF planned a raid on a playground to take children hostage (March 75).

  are psychological warfare fabrications, used to legitimize an aggressive police force and state security apparatus, to disrupt solidarity with the resistance groups, and to isolate and destroy them; that all of these claims are false and that the statements released by the police, intelligence agencies, and the judiciary in this regard are baseless.

  The hunger strike

  is an example of our solidarity

  • with the hunger strike of prisoners from the Palestinian resistance for prisoner of war status;1

  • with the hunger strike for political status of the IRA prisoners in Irish and English prisons, status they are denied on the basis of a European antiterrorism law put forward by the Federal Republic;2

  • with the demand of the ETA prisoners and other antifascist forces in Spain for an amnesty;3

  • with all those taken prisoner in the struggle for social revolution and national self-determination;

  • with all those who have begun to fight against the violation of human rights, the miserable conditions and the brutal repression in the prisons of the Federal Republic.

  ARM THE RESISTANCE!

  ORGANIZE THE UNDERGROUND!

  CARRY OUT THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST OFFENSIVE!

  The RAF prisoners

  March 29, 1977

  The Assassination of Attorney General Siegfried Buback

  For “protagonists of the system” like Buback, history always finds a way.

  On April 7, 1977, the Ulrike Meinhof Commando executed Attorney General Siegfried Buback.

  Buback was directly responsible for the murders of Holger Meins, Siegfried Hausner, and Ulrike Meinhof. In his function as Attorney General—as the central figure connecting and coordinating matters between the justice system and the West German news services, in close cooperation with the CIA and the NATO Security Committee—he stage-managed and directed their murders.

  Under Buback’s regime, Holger was intentionally murdered on November 9, 1974, by systematic undernourishment and the conscious manipulation of the transportation schedules from Wittlich to Stammheim. The BAW calculated that they could use the execution of a cadre to break the prisoners’ collective hunger strike against exterminationist prison conditions, after the attempt to kill Andreas through the manipulation of force-feeding failed due to the mobilization of public pressure.

  Under Buback’s regime, Siegfried, who had led the Holger Meins Commando, was murdered on May 5, 1975, as the MEK (Mobiles Einsatzkommandos) detonated the explosives at the German Embassy in Stockholm. While he was under the exclusive jurisdiction of the BAW and the BKA, he was delivered to the FRG and his life was put in danger as he was transported to Stuttgart-Stammheim, thereby assuring his death.

  Under Buback’s regime, Ulrike was executed in a state security action on May 9, 1976. Her death was staged as a suicide to make the politics that Ulrike had struggled for seem senseless.

  The murder was an execution; it followed the BAW’s attempt to render Ulrike a cretin through a forced neuro-surgical operation, after which she was to be presented—destroyed—at the Stammheim trial, so as to condemn armed resistance as an illness. This project was prevented by international protests.

  The timing of her murder was precisely calculated:

  • before the decisive initiative in the trial, the defense motion that would have explained the 1972 RAF attacks against the U.S. Headquarters in Frankfurt and Heidelberg in light of the FRG’s participation in the U.S.A.’s aggressive human rights violations in Vietnam;

  • before Ulrike could be called as a witness in the Holger Meins Commando’s Düsseldorf trial, where she would have testified about the very extreme form of torture that they used against her for 8 months in the dead wings;

  • before her sentencing—at which point critical international public opinion, which had developed as a result of the Stammheim show trial and the cynical use of imperialist violence, would have been informed of the role of the federal government and its executive organs. This would have caused all of this to rebound against them.

  Ulrike’s history, in a way that is clearer than that of many combatants, is
a history of resistance. For the revolutionary movement, she embodied an ideological vanguard function, which was the target of Buback’s showpiece, the simulated suicide: her death—which the BAW used in propaganda to show the “failure” of armed struggle—was meant to destroy the group’s moral stature, its struggle, and its impact. The BAW’s approach, which they have followed since 71 with manhunts and operations conducted against the RAF, follows the counterinsurgency strategy of the NATO Security Committee: criminalization of revolutionary resistance—for which the tactical steps are infiltration, disrupting solidarity, isolating the guerilla, and eliminating its leadership.

  Within the imperialist FRG’s anti-guerilla counterstrategy, the justice system is a weapon of war—used to pursue the guerilla operating underground and to exterminate the prisoners of war. Buback—whom Schmidt called “an energetic combatant” for this state—understood the conflict with us as a war and engaged in it as such: “I have lived through the war. This is a war using different means.”

  We will prevent the BAW from murdering our fighters in West German prisons, which it intends to do simply because the prisoners will not stop struggling and the BAW sees no solution except their liquidation.

  We will prevent the BAW and the state security organs from retaliating against the imprisoned fighters for the actions of the guerilla outside.

  We will prevent the BAW from using the prisoners’ fourth collective hunger strike for minimum human rights as an opportunity to murder Andreas, Gudrun, and Jan, which psychological warfare since Ulrike’s death has been openly promoting.

  ORGANIZE THE ARMED RESISTANCE AND THE

  ANTI-IMPERIALIST FRONT IN WESTERN EUROPE.

  WAGE WAR IN THE METROPOLE AS PART OF THE

  INTERNATIONAL WAR OF LIBERATION.

  Ulrike Meinhof Commando

  April 7, 1977

  Statement Calling Off the Fourth Hunger Strike

  In recent days, all efforts to break the hunger strike of the remaining 100 prisoners through force-feeding—with extreme brutality in the case of Hamburg-Holstenglacis—have failed. After the prison doctor in Stammheim and the anaesthetist they brought in refused to forcibly administer psychiatric drugs or narcotics to the prisoners, the prison warden, today, April 30, 1977, at 12 o’clock, read us a “Binding Declaration from the Ministry of Justice” to the effect that, “after considering the opinion of medical advisors, there will be an immediate centralization in Stammheim of all political prisoners—i.e., §129a prisoners—including those from other Länder in the Federal Republic, and that to this end work will be done to create the prison space necessary.”

  This decision is based on a cabinet resolution.

  This fulfils the major demand of the hunger strike.

  The RAF prisoners are calling off their strike.

  “Whoever is not afraid of being drawn and quartered will pull the emperor off his horse.”

  Gudrun Ensslin

  for the RAF prisoners

  April 30, 1977

  The Assassination of Jürgen Ponto

  In a situation where the BAW and state security are scrambling to massacre the prisoners, we haven’t got a lot of time for long statements.

  Regarding Ponto and the bullets that hit him in Oberursel, all we can say is that it was a revelation to us how these people, who launch wars in the Third World and exterminate entire peoples, can stand dumbfounded when confronted with violence in their own homes.

  The “big money” state security smear campaign is bullshit, as is everything that has been said about the attack.

  Naturally, it is always the case that the new confronts the old, and here that means the struggle for a world without prisons confronting a world based on cash, in which everything is a prison.

  Susanne Albrecht

  on behalf of a RAF Commando

  August 14, 1977

  Statement Breaking Off the Fifth Hunger Strike

  Over the past week, we learned from a member of Amnesty International that the International Executive Committee’s mediation process—to establish more humane prison conditions, in line with the doctors’ demands, and to bring the hunger strike to an end—had broken down, because “the situation had hardened.” And, “following the attacks against the BAW and Ponto, the authorities had received instructions from above to make an example of the prisoners.”

  That is in keeping with Rebmann’s announcement.

  As a result, the prisoners have broken off their strike on the 26th day—so as not to facilitate the murderous plan. They arrived at this decision after they were openly made hostages of state security, and taking into account the federal government’s efforts—arrests, raids, and detentions at the borders—to disrupt the grievance at the Human Rights Commission in Strasburg regarding human rights violations in the Federal Republic.

  Jan-Carl Raspe

  for the RAF prisoners

  September 2, 1977

  The Attack on the BAW

  All the theories about the apparatus which we used to prevent the federal prosecutors from sitting comfortably in their offices musing about how to arrange the next murder of a political prisoner, or planning a manhunt or a show trial or raids against citizens and lawyers who sympathize with us, or fabricating all of the lies and the hatred of the “information offensive”—are false.

  It wasn’t used to create a bloodbath—in this nest of reactionary violence, which already during the communist trials of the fifties sided with the ongoing fascism—or as part a “new strategy” or the “arms race between rival guerilla groups” that we read about.

  Nor was it used to attack Rebmann, although he appears to be even more unscrupulous, more brutal, and a more loathsome demagogue than Buback.

  It was simply meant as a warning, in a situation where over forty political prisoners were on hunger strike, because when he was Undersecretary for the Ministry of Justice in Baden-Wurttemburg, Rebmann promised to allow the prisoners’ association in groups of 15. As Attorney General, he has reversed himself and broken this promise.

  The group that previously existed in Stammheim is now smaller instead of larger, and the prisoners are now—after five years of isolation—once again totally segregated from one another, despite the fact that doctors, Amnesty International, the World Council of Churches, the League for Human Rights, and the Association of Democratic Jurists have all demanded that they be granted association, because isolation causes illness and, with time, death—that is to say, as a form of imprisonment, isolation constitutes torture and is a violation of human rights.

  We proceeded from the view that following Buback’s removal from office because of the murders of Holger, Ulrike, and Siegfried, and given the complete isolation the hunger strike provoked, Rebmann felt a need to distinguish himself by using the situation to execute Andreas, Gudrun, and Jan.

  We agree with the prisoners’ decision to break off their hunger and thirst strike, and we ask them to not resume it for the time being, not until we know whether the sanctimonious gang of murderers—the Ministers of Justice, judges, prosecutors, and cops—will choose to remain as arrogant in the face of our weapons, which we can use, as they do in the face of the weapons the prisoners have at their disposal.

  The moral appeal of a hunger strike is useless, because this state’s political violence is not in danger of becoming “fascistoid” or of showing “fascist tendencies,” but is transforming itself into a new fascism, one that differs from National Socialism only inasmuch as it represents American and German monopolies, and can therefore proceed more aggressively, more powerfully, and more subtly than German capital during its barbaric nationalist period.

  Whether they are part of the justice system, the executive, the political parties, the corporations, or the media, the greasy elite understand only one language: violence.

  The misery and humiliation in the state security wings and the barbarism of force-feeding is for them no more than their own sick in-joke for the lunchroom.

&nb
sp; Should it be taken up again, they intend to use the strike to kill you, just like now, because we need you, and they want to take every trace of morality and solidarity that the sacrifice of your struggle has produced and bury them under a mountain of shit, a mountain of cynical rumormongering and propaganda.

  They’d like to have a good long laugh at our expense. Those who understand the struggle in the isolation holes (the dungeons, the torture of force-feeding)—those who understand the prisoners’ determination, know that it is possible to be free. We will not make any further demands, and the ongoing activity and solidarity of the RAF will not be limited to communiqués.

  We repeat: should a prisoner be murdered—and death in an isolation cell is nothing other than murder—we will respond immediately, both inside and outside of Germany.

  Should Andreas, Gudrun, and Jan be killed, the apologists for the hard line will find that they are not the only ones with weapons at their disposal. They will find that we are many, and that we have enough love—as well as enough hate and imagination—to use both our weapons and their weapons against them, and that their pain will equal ours.

  “THE SOLIDARITY OF THE PEOPLE

  IS GROUNDED IN REVOLT.”

  RAF

  September 3, 1977

  The Schleyer Communiqués

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1977

  The federal government must take steps to ensure that all aspects of the manhunt cease—or we will immediately shoot Schleyer without even engaging in negotiations for his freedom.

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1977

  On Monday September 5, 1977, the Siegfried Hausner Commando took Hanns Martin Schleyer, the President of the Federal Association of German Industries and the President of the Employers Association, captive. Regarding the conditions for his release, we will repeat our first communiqué to the federal government, which we have learnt has been suppressed since yesterday by the security staff. That is, all aspects of the search for us must be immediately discontinued or Schleyer will be shot immediately. As soon as the manhunt stops, Schleyer will be released under the following conditions: