The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

GERMANGUERILLA.COM

  Many of the texts in this book—as well as supporting documents providing added contextualization—were first published to this website, devoted to archiving documents and analysis about the urban guerilla in the Federal Republic of Germany.

  Come by and visit to see as our work proceeds on our second volume.

  1 http://labourhistory.net/raf/

  2 http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/PolitischeStroemungen/Stadtguerilla+RAF/RAF/raf-texte+materialien.PDF

  1 Markus Wolf and Anne McElvoy, Man without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster (New York: Times Books, 1999), xi.

  2 Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949 (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983).

  3 William D. Graf, “Anti-Communism in the Federal Republic of Germany,” Socialist Register (1984): 167.

  4 Women Against Imperialist War (Hamburg), “War on Imperialist War,” in Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, War on the War Makers: Documents and Communiqués from the West German Left (San Francisco: John Brown Book Club n.d.), 21

  1 There has been much written over the past thirty years about the ways in which the non-Jewish German working class benefited from the Third Reich’s policies, enjoying the position of a labor aristocracy. The most noteworthy book on this subject is Götz Aly’s Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial war, and the Nazi Welfare State; translated by Jefferson Chase, 1st U.S. ed. (New York: Metropolitan, 2007).

  2 “How to Fight Communism,” March 25, 1948, OMGUS in Patrick Major, The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 247.

  3 Graf, “Anti-Communism,” 169.

  4 Werner Hülsberg, The German Greens: A Social and Political Profile. Translated by Gus Fagan. (London: Verso, 1988), 22.

  5 Karl Heinz Roth, L’autre movement ouvrier en Allemagne 1945-78. Translated by Serge Cosseron. (Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1979), 50.

  6 Hülsberg, 22-3.

  7 Ibid., 23.

  1 Ibid., 24.

  2 Ibid., 22.

  3 Roth, 47.

  4 Major, 174, 192.

  5 Hülsberg, 25.

  1 Roth, 121.

  2 David Haworth, “Why German Workers Don’t Ask For Raises,” Winnipeg Free Press, December 11, 1968.

  3 Hülsberg, 25.

  4 Graf, “Anti-communism,” 183.

  5 William Graf, “Beyond Social Democracy in West Germany?” Socialist Register (1985/86): 118.

  6 “Die Integration der Bundesrepublik ins westliche Bündnissystem,” http://www.kssursee.ch/schuelerweb/kalter-krieg/kk/integration.htm.

  7 Women Against Imperialist War, 22.

  1 Regarding all these, see The Neo-colonialism of the West German Federal Republic (German Democratic Republic: Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, 1965), 20-35, 39-45, 62-65, 82-85.

  2 Madeleine G. Kalb, The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa from Eisenhower to Kennedy (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 193.

  3 Frieder Sclupp, “Modell Deutschland and the International Division of Labour: The Federal Republic of Germany in the World Political Economy,” in The Foreign Policy of West Germany: Formation and Contents, ed. Ekkert Kruippendorf and Volker Rittberger (London: SAGE Publications, 1980).

  4 Quoted in The Neo-colonialism of the West German Federal Republic, 96-7.

  5 Daniel Ganser, NATO’s Secret Army: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 190-211.

  6 Hülsberg, 15.

  1 German Bundestag, Administration, Public Relations section, Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Berlin, 2001), 22.

  2 Ibid., 23.

  3 Sebastien Cobler, Law, Order and Politics in West Germany (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1978), 76.

  4 Ibid., 74.

  5 Wolfgang Abendroth, Helmut Ridder and Otto Schonfeldt, eds., KPD Verbot oder mit Kommunisten leben (Hamburg: Rororo Taschenbuch Verlag, 1968), 38.

  6 Graf, “Anti-communism,” 179.

  1 Ibid., 180.

  2 Cobler, 183-184.

  3 Ibid., 80.

  4 David Childs, From Schumacher to Brandt: The Story of German Socialism 1945-1965 (New York: Pergamon Press, 1966), 49.

  5 Patrick Major, The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 170.

  6 Ibid., 115.

  7 Ibid., 116.

  1 Ibid., 133.

  2 Ibid., 226.

  1 Paul Hockenos has noted that for some Protestants, their religion may have made them particularly receptive to the first postwar protest movements, due to feelings of marginalization within the new truncated state: whereas Protestants had outnumbered Catholics by nearly two to one in prewar Germany, there was rough parity between the two religions in the FRG. See Paul Hockenos, Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: an Alternative History of Postwar Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22. Despite this fact, the churches remained overwhelmingly anticommunist and hostile to left-wing politics.

  2 As one deputy from the neo-nazi Socialist Reich Party put it, “First we were told that guns and ammunition were poison and now this poison has turned to sweets which we should eat. But we are not Negroes or idiots to whom they can do whatever they want. It is either they or us who should be admitted to the insane asylum.” [Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 65.]

  3 For the sake of clarity, it should be remembered that in the years between the Nazi defeat and the establishment of the FRG, there was a large strike movement in favour of nationalization of the country’s largest industries. This movement, which initially seemed to have the wind in its sails, was opposed by the Allied occupiers. Its fate was sealed when the new trade unions obediently redirected it towards token co-management and de-cartelization. As such, it provides a stark example of workers’ political activity sabotaged by their putative left-wing representatives even before the occupation had ended. (Roth, 50-51; Hülsberg, 29-32; Childs, 67-84.)

  4 Major, 145.

  5 Ibid., Hülsberg, 33.

  6 Bernd Langer, Art as Resistance. Translated by Anti-Fascist Forum. (Göttingen: Aktiv-Dr. und Verl., 1998), 8.

  1 Hülsberg, 34.

  2 Hockenos, 42-3.

  3 Nick Thomas, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (New York: Berg, 2003), 33.

  4 Cobler, 134.

  5 Thomas, 35.

  6 Hülsberg, 38.

  1 Graf, “Beyond Social Democracy,” 104-5.

  2 Hockenos, 31.

  1 Ibid., 29.

  2 Jean-Paul Bier, “The Holocaust and West Germany: Strategies of Oblivion 1947-1979” New German Critique 19, Special Issue 1: Germans and Jews Winter (1980): 13.

  3 Karin Bauer, Everybody Talks About the Weather… We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 27.

  4 Ibid., 30.

  5 “My Mother, The Terrorist”, Deutsche Welle [online], March 14, 2006.

  6 Hockenos, 34-35. See also Dagmar Herzog, “‘Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together’: Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany,” Critical Inquiry 24, 2: Intimacy, (Winter 1988): 402-403.

  7 Eberhard Knodler-Bunte, in Herzog, 416.

  8 Hülsberg, 39.

  1 Thomas, 94. See also Gretchen Dutschke, Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schönes Leben (Köln: K&W, 1996), 60-61.

  2 Jutta Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biographie (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007), 180-181.

  3 David Kramer, “Ulrike Meinhof: An Emancipated Terrorist?” in European Women on the Left: Socialism, Feminism, and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present. Jane Slaughter and Robert Kern, eds. Contributions in Women’s Studies. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press 1981), 201.

  4 Roth, 101.

  5 Ibid., 100.

  6 There was one autobahn through the GDR connecting the city to th
e Federal Republic, which the East Germans were obligated by international agreements to keep open. The highway ran through desolate countryside, and was flanked by East German armed forces at all times.

  1 For many examples of just how careful the Federal Republic had to be in imposing itself in West Berlin, see Avril Pittman, From Ostpolitik to reunification: West German-Soviet political relations since 1974 (Cambridge, England & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32-62.

  2 Hilke Schlaeger and Nancy Vedder-Shults, “West German Women’s Movement,” New German Critique 13 (Winter 1978): 61.

  3 Hockenos, 80.

  4 Eckhard Siepmann in Herzog, 427.

  5 Kommune 1 in German.

  6 G. Conradt and H. Jahn, Starbuck Holger Meins, directed by G. Conradt. (Germany: Hartmut Jahn Filmproduktion, 2002).

  1 “Women in the SDS; or, Or Our Own Behalf, (1968)” in German Feminist Writing, eds. Patricia A. Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 160.

  2 Thomas, 111-112.

  3 Ibid., 114.

  4 Christian Semler in Hockenos, 69.

  5 The Springer chain consisted of conservative tabloids, among them Bild, Berliner Zeitung, and Berliner Morgenpost. They led a campaign to smear progressive students as “muddle heads,” East German spies, and storm troopers—at times even crossing the line and advocating vigilante violence. As Jeremy Varon notes, “Springer publications accounted for more than 70 percent of the West Berlin press and more than 30 percent of the national daily newspaper market. As the press fed a climate of anti-student hysteria, the reaction of the media to the New Left itself became a major object of protest.” [Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 38-39.]

  1 Hockenos, 68.

  2 Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon. Translated by Anthea Bell. (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1987), 44.

  3 Thomas, 115.

  4 Aust, 44.

  5 George Lavy, Germany and Israel: Moral Debt and National Interest (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 154.

  6 Tariq Ali, Street fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (New York: Verso, 2005), 243.

  7 While one cannot mention Dutschke today without referring to the “long march,” the phrase is interpreted wildly differently by different writers. The description offered here is Herbert Marcuse’s, as it appeared in his 1972 essay “The Left Under the Counterrevolution” in which he endorsed the concept while crediting it to his former student Dutschke. [Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 55-57]

  1 Ali, 246.

  2 Thomas, 170.

  3 Bommi Baumann, Terror or Love? The Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla (London: John Calder Publications, 1979), 41.

  4 Thomas, 171.

  5 Ibid., 176.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Baumann, 41.

  1 Thomas, 180.

  2 Hockenos, 88.

  3 Aust, 65-6.

  4 Ibid., 64.

  1 Associated Press, “Student ‘Army’ Battles With Berlin Police,” Fresno Bee, November 4, 1968.

  2 Tegeler Weg is a fashionable street in West Berlin where the Bar Association was located.

  3 Associated Press, “Student ‘Army’.”

  4 George Thomson, “Berlin police, leftists battle,” Lowell Sun, November 4, 1968.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Aust, 145.

  7 Associated Press, “Woman gets Jail for Slapping Bonn Chief,” Fresno Bee, November 8, 1968.

  8 Associated Press, “Hit Kiesinger; Term Suspended,” European Stars and Stripes, August 26, 1969.

  9 Heinemann had in fact held a cabinet position for the CDU as early as 1949, a post he left, along with the CDU, in the early fifties in protest against Adenauer’s rearmament policies. When Ulrike Meinhof was sued for slander by CSU leader Franz Josef Strauß in 1961 as a result of a konkret article, Heinemann agreed to take on her case, successfully defending her—the two had become allies if not friends during the peace movements of the 1950s.

  1 Cobler, 154-155.

  1 Thomas, 144.

  2 Ostpolitik: the FRG’s official policy towards the GDR and the east bloc.

  3 Hülsberg, 42-43.

  4 Baumann, 50.

  1 Ibid., 59.

  2 Tilman Fichter, interview by Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “The anti-Semitism of the 68ers,” die tageszeitung, October 25, 2005. The action was intended to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. See Baumann, 60-61 and 67-68.

  3 Baumann, 76.

  1 Aust, 51, 58.

  2 Ibid., 58.

  3 Ibid., 58.

  4 Ibid., 62.

  5 Astrid Proll, Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67-77 (Zurich: Scalo, 1998), 8.

  6 Aust, 60.

  7 Andreas Elter “Die RAF und die Medien: Ein Fallbeispiel für terroristische Kommunikation,” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung [online], August 20, 2007. Brecht, the famous communist playwright, had stated that “Small timers rob banks, professionals own them.”

  8 Aust, 51-2.

  9 A law student at the University of Frankfurt, “Danny the Red” had been barred from France in 1968 for his symbolic leadership role in the May events of that year (it was his expulsion which had provoked students to occupy Nanterre University). Today, a respectable politician in the German Green Party, in 1969, he was (in) famous around the world, the very personification of anarchist student revolt. As we shall see in Section 11, (Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Left…), he would play an important role in deradicalizing a section of the movement in the mid-seventies.

  10 Associated Press, “Cohn-Bendit Jailed; Court Brawl Follows,” European Stars and Stripes, November 1, 1968.

  11 European Stars and Stripes, “New Violence Hits Frankfurt,” November 2, 1968.

  1 Proll, 8.

  2 Aust, 73.

  3 Associated Press, “West Berlin Publisher is Sentenced,” Danville Bee, February 16, 1970.

  4 Aust, 77.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Baumann, 77-78.

  7 Herzog, 425.

  8 Baumann, 75.

  9 Eileen MacDonald, Shoot the Women First (London: Arrow Books Ltd., 1991), 209-210.

  1 Ralf Reinders, Klaus Viehmann, and Ronald Fritzsch, “Zu der angeblichen Auflösung der Bewegung 2. Juni im Juni 1980,” http://www.bewegung.in/mate_nichtaufloesung.html. This is an excerpt from a much longer document which, along with the 2JM’s declaration of the merger, will appear (translated) in our second volume, The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Vol. II: Dancing with Imperialism: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

  2 Jutta Ditfurth, interview by Arno Luik, “Sie war die große Schwester der 68er,” Stern 46 (2007).

  3 Aust, 81.

  4 Ibid., 47.

  1 According to several accounts, Linke was accidentally shot by the man at the scene. Apparently, he had two weapons, an air gun and a real gun, and he intended to scare him with the former, but got confused as to which was which. (MacDonald, 213.)

  2 Aust, 6-9.

  3 Neil Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed by Violence of Berlin Gunmen,” Winnipeg Free Press, July 4, 1970.

  4 Ibid., Becker, 125.

  5 Aust, 15-16.

  6 Ben Lewis and Richard Klein, Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror (United Kingdom: a Mentorn production for BBC FOUR, 2002).

  7 Ibid.

  8 Proll, 10.

  9 Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed.”

  1 Datenbank des deutschsprachigen Anarchismus: Periodika, “Agit 883,” http://projekte.free.de/dada/dada-p/P0000921.HTM.

  2 Helen Chapin Metz, Library of Congress Federal Research Division, Israel, a Country Study (Whitefish, Montana: Keesinger publishing 2004), 110.

  3 Cengiz Candar, “A Turk in the Palestinian Resistance,” Journal of Palestine Studies 30, no. 1. (Autumn, 2000): 68-82.

  4 Baum
ann, 59: “There was a split when people got back from Palestine. The Palestinian faction said, ‘things don’t make sense the way they’re going now. We have to really start with the armed struggle.’ That meant giving up the Blues, the whole broad open scene.”

  5 Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed.”

  6 Butch Lee, Jailbreak Out Of History: The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman (Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2000), 25.

  1 Aust, 99-100. Bäcker would claim that based on their questions, it was clear the East Germans were already well informed about the group’s activities. In November 1972, Bommi Baumann was similarly detained at the East German border while in possession of false identification papers; he was similarly questioned, and provided information on almost one hundred people in the West German underground before being released. Jan-Hendrik Schulz “Zur Geschichte der Roten Armee Fraktion (RAF) und ihrer Kontexte: Eine Chronik,” Zeitgeschichte Online, May 2007.

  2 Ditfurth, 290. See Appendix V—Strange Stories: Peter Homann and Stefan Aust, pages 557-558.

  3 Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “Stasi soll RAF über Razzien informiert haben,” September 29, 2007.

  4 Aust, 99, 101.

  5 Kommune 2 was another West Berlin commune, one with a more “serious” and “intellectual” reputation than the yippiesque K.1.

  6 Reinders, Viehmann, and Fritzsch.

  7 Aust, 108.

  8 Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.

  1 Aust, 111-112.

  2 Ibid., 140.

  3 Associated Press, “Paper reports plot to kidnap Willy Brandt,” European Stars and Stripes, February 13, 1971.

  4 See page 84.

  5 Associated Press, “Terrorists Take Child as Hostage,” Troy Record, February 25, 1971.

  6 Associated Press,“Wrong Boy Kidnaped, Released; Ransom Paid,” Panama City News Herald, February 27, 1971.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Associated Press, “Kidnaped German Boy, 7, Freed After Ransom,” European Stars and Stripes, February 29, 1971.

  9 Associated Press, “Police Hunting SS Member’s Son in Kidnapings,” European Stars and Stripes, March 2, 1971.

  1 United Press International, “Professor Endangered by Kidnapper’s Threat,” Dominion Post, April 25, 1971.

  2 United Press International, “West German Professor Admits Kidnaping Hoax,” European Stars and Stripes, April 27, 1971.