by J. Smith
Grappling with this, the RAF would combine insights from the Frankfurt School and other European Marxist intellectuals with the anti-imperialism of their day, arguing that the First World working classes suffered a unique form of psychological/cultural oppression, the “twenty-four-hour-workday,” saturated with “consumer terror.” That oppression notwithstanding, according to their subjectivist anti-imperialism, material issues in the metropole no longer qualified as the primary contradiction; the battlefield had shifted to the Third World, and the national liberation movements now constituted the global vanguard. While it was not exempt from contradictions and class oppression, for various reasons (social democracy, consumerism, and integration into the state, to name a few) the metropole, imperialism’s “safe hinterland,” had become a place where people could only be mobilized for revolution through a personal breakthrough, for instance, the realization that life under capitalism is alienating, that commodities are no replacement for communities, or that living off the blood of others is unacceptable.7
While aspects of this analysis could be found in The Urban Guerilla Concept, a countervailing focus on poverty in West Germany was evident in Serve the People: Class Struggle and the Guerilla, released in May 1972.8 These ideas would find their ultimate synthesis in The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle, released in November 1972.9
In this document, material divisions within the FRG were acknowledged, but described as secondary to the question of consciousness, of each person’s capacity to make a personal and explicit break with the dominant society. Although not ever stated as such, it was understood that part of this strategy was the idea that correctly applied violence could jumpstart such a process. Guerilla attacks were thus conceptualized as a way to demoralize the enemy and inspire people to make a break with the system. Although the goal was not to provoke repression, it was expected that the state’s attacks could be turned to the guerilla’s advantage, exposing imperialism’s fascist core and leading to even greater disenchantment. As such, it was hoped that the guerilla would serve as a spark plug, if not as the flame that would start a prairie fire. Years later, Christian Klar would explain:
…I think that the RAF was active and provided inspiration at exactly the right moment. By that I mean, not acting from a base, but on the basis of the existing contradictions, acting to create a rift in society’s ideology, an ideology that presents the bourgeoisie as representing shared political interests—creating a rift around that. In that regard the urban guerilla tactic was effective. The other thing, as far at the mass base goes, is, of course, the solidarity with anticolonial struggles occurring on other continents—and an identification with them.10
Or, more bluntly, as Helmut Pohl would later recall:
I have to say that we had no faith in agitation among the masses. We did not take this K-group11 revolutionary strategy seriously. Our project was different from that of traditional communist parties. We set about the process of developing the guerilla and of polarizing society through our actions. From our point of view, the guerilla was the small motor that would jumpstart the large motor. It was necessary to build and anchor this small motor.12
At some future point, when imperialism had been beaten back around the world, its chickens come home to roost, it was predicted that social divisions would reassert themselves within the metropole, and that these would once again provide a basis for revolutionary action. It was then that the work done on the basis of this radical subjectivity would truly bear fruit. As explained in The Urban Guerilla Concept:
[The urban guerilla struggle] is based on the analysis that by the time the conditions are right for armed struggle, it will be too late to prepare for it. It is based on the recognition that without revolutionary initiatives in a country with as much potential for violence as the Federal Republic, there will be no revolutionary orientation when the conditions for revolutionary struggle are more favorable, as they soon will be given the political and economic developments of late capitalism.13
SEVEN YEARS OF STRUGGLE AGAINST THE STATE
Shortly after Baader’s liberation in 1970, RAF members traveled to Jordan, in the Middle East, where they received weapons training from Al Fatah, part of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The RAF would make extensive use of various Arab countries as rear base areas throughout its existence, places where one could go not only for training but also to hide when Europe got too “hot.”
Upon returning to the FRG, the guerilla once again seized the public spotlight, carrying out a series of bank robberies and preparing for campaigns to come.
Successfully evading the police, the RAF began to take on the aura of folk heroes for many students and leftists who were glad to see someone taking things to the next level. Thousands of people secretly carried photographs of RAF members in their wallets. Time and time again, as the cops stepped up their search, members of the young guerilla group would find doors open to them as they were welcomed into people’s homes, including those of not a few middle-class sympathizers. Newspapers at the time carried stories under headlines like “Celebrities Protect Baader Gang” and “Sympathizers Hamper Hunt for Baader Group.”
Shortly after a firefight in July 1971, in which RAF member Petra Schelm was killed by police, one opinion poll found that 40 percent of young people were prepared to describe the RAF’s motives as political, not criminal; 20 percent indicated that they could understand efforts to protect fugitives from capture; and 6 percent stated that they themselves would be willing to conceal a fugitive.14
What Is a Rear Base Area?
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.1
For the RAF and other West German guerilla groups, two countries in particular emerged as favored travel destinations in this regard: Lebanon and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. The former was home to a large number of Palestinian refugees, and served as a base of operations for several revolutionary organizations. The latter was the only self-described Marxist-Leninist country in the Middle East, which had earned the admiration of progressive people around the world for its social and economic reforms.2
In both countries, it was not the government that provided sanctuary for the European guerilla, but a Palestinian organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (External Operations), or PFLP (EO). Having split from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the early 1970s, this was a small armed organization devoted to carrying out attacks throughout the world.3
Throughout the 1970s, PFLP (EO) training camps in the Middle East served as sanctuaries for many West European guerillas. Indeed, most RAF members involved in the ‘77 offensive had spent time in these camps, where they not only learned how to use various weapons, but were also able to meet with other revolutionaries from around the world.
_____________
1 Butch Lee, Jailbreak Out of History: The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman (Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2000), 25.
2 Joe Stork, “Socialist Revolution in Arabia: A Report from the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen,” MERIP Reports 15 (March 1973): 1-25; Maxine Molyneux, Aida Yafai, Aisha Mohsen, and Noor Ba’abad, “Women and Revolution in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen,” Feminist Review 1 (1979): 4-20.
3 Moncourt and Smith, 559-561.
Then, in 1972, immediately following the release of Serve the People at that year’s May Day demonstrations, the group turned things up a notch, carrying out a series of bombings that would come to be known as the “May Offensive.” Targets included police stations and U.S. army headquarters, to protest killer cops and the ongoing war in Vietnam, as well as an attack on the Hamburg offices of the
Springer Press, accused of racism, Zionism, and inciting violence against the New Left. Four American soldiers were killed, and dozens of other people, including civilians, were injured. The attacks were not only unprecedented in West Germany—Western Europe itself had not seen anything like it in the postwar period.15 While many people may have been turned off by this escalation, others saw it as an inspiring example of what could be done.
There followed a wave of repression, as an army of police, supported by both West German and U.S. intelligence units, set up checkpoints and carried out raids across the country.
Within a few weeks ten members of the RAF—almost the entire guerilla—had been captured. Besides the alleged leadership (Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Ulrike Meinhof), the police arrested Klaus Jünschke, Irmgard Möller, Gerhard Müller, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, and Bernhard Braun.16 A supporter, Katharina Hammerschmidt, also ended up behind bars after she chose to turn herself in. These eleven joined several other combatants from the RAF and 2JM who had already been picked up over the previous two years.
Holger Meins captured
The state, having apprehended its armed adversaries, was not content to simply remove them from the field. Instead, it hoped to render them ineffective not only as combatants, but also as spokespeople for anti-imperialist resistance. To this end, it set up special “dead wings” inside its prisons, where captured guerillas were subjected to severe isolation, with the clear hope that if this did not induce them to recant, it might at least drive them insane.
Isolation—which at its worst took the form of sensory deprivation—had been developed by an unholy alliance of secret services, penal authorities, doctors, and psychologists working in Western Europe and North America, their goal being to find a form of “clean torture,” i.e., one that could break a prisoner without leaving physical marks. The RAF and other guerillas in West Germany would be among the first test-subjects for this program.
Astrid Proll, a RAF member who had been picked up on bogus charges of shooting at a police officer in 1971, was one of the first to be so confined. She was held for four and a half months in an empty section of Cologne-Ossendorf,17 with her cell painted white and acoustically sealed, receiving absolutely no sensory stimuli or contact with other inmates. Her physical and mental health deteriorated to such a point that she could barely walk, and the state was obliged to release her to a sanitarium in the Black Forest, where she stayed for a year before escaping and making her way to England. Even when recaptured years later, Proll remained scarred by her ordeal. In 1978, she wrote:
Not even today, six years later, have I completely recovered from that. I can’t stand rooms which are painted white because they remind me of my cell. Silence in a wood can terrify me, it reminds me of the silence in the isolated cell. Darkness makes me so depressive as if my life were taken away. Solitude causes me as much fear as crowds. Even today I have the feeling occasionally as if I can’t move.18
Ulrike Meinhof was held in these conditions for 237 days following her arrest in 1972. After eight months of this torture, she wrote:
I finally realized I had to pull myself out of this, I myself had no right to let these frightful things keep affecting me—it was my duty to fight my way out of it. By whatever means there are of doing that in prison: daubing the walls, coming to blows with a cop, wrecking the fitments, hunger strike. I wanted to make them at least put me under arrest, because then you get to hear something—you don’t have a radio babbling away, only the bible to read, maybe no mattress, no window, etc.—but that’s a different kind of torture from not hearing anything. And obviously it would have been a relief to me…19
Opposition to isolation and the various “dead wings” quickly became the most important issue for the RAF’s supporters, and would remain so throughout the 1970s. In this way, despite capture and isolation, the guerilla managed not only to survive, but in a sense even turned things around, for through the strategic use of hunger strikes, they would call attention to both their conditions of incarceration and their strategy of anti-imperialist armed struggle. Indeed, the hunger strikes became a way for the prisoners to maintain their dignity as well as their political identity.20
Beginning with the RAF’s third hunger strike in 1974, a key demand was “association” for political prisoners. As explained in our first volume:
The prisoners had come to the conclusion that the demand for integration [into general population], while it had undeniable appeal given the high esteem in which the New Left held marginalized groups like social prisoners, was simply not going to work. As a result, integration was dropped, and the struggle was now defined as one against isolation and for the association of political prisoners with each other…
In practical terms, association meant bringing together political prisoners in groups large enough to be socially viable, fifteen being the minimum number normally suggested. Political prisoners in some other European countries, such as Italy and Northern Ireland, had already won such conditions for themselves, and so it was hoped that this might prove a realistic goal.21
After six weeks on hunger strike, on November 9, 1974, RAF member Holger Meins died, setting off protests across West Germany. Thousands met in university auditoriums in West Berlin to discuss how to respond, while thousands more braved the ban on demonstrations and took to the streets, battling police with stones and bottles, with protesters in Frankfurt and Mannheim smashing the windows of court buildings.22
The next day, in the course of a failed kidnapping attempt meant to avenge Meins and potentially even win the freedom of some prisoners, the 2nd of June Movement shot and killed the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court, Judge Günter von Drenkmann.
RAF-prisoner support groups had already been established, an International Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners in Europe (Internationales Komitee zur Verteidigung politischer Gefangener in Europa, IVK) working alongside various Committees Against Torture as well as a Relatives Committee in the FRG, but now the prisoners’ struggle would serve to gain them more than just sympathy: it would win new recruits. For, in the eyes of many German leftists, the RAF had come to symbolize resistance to the imperialist state, to the “new fascism” or “fascist drift.”
Following the death of Meins, the prisoners would continue their third hunger strike until a regenerated RAF issued a communiqué addressed to them, in which it ordered them to start eating again. The guerilla promised that they would carry out the necessary actions on their behalf, explaining that the prison struggle “is now something that we must settle with our weapons.”23
This would soon come to pass: on April 25, the RAF’s “Holger Meins Commando” seized the top floor of the West German embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, taking twelve hostages and killing the military and economic attachés. They demanded the release of twenty-six West German political prisoners, including all of the captured members of the RAF.
The KPD/ML, while hostile to the RAF, was one of the only Marxist-Leninist parties to support the 1974-1975 hunger strike. Graffiti reads, “Holger Meins, the people will avenge you.”
Under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the West German government refused to give in to the commando’s demands, and as police were preparing to storm the building, the explosives the guerilla had laid detonated. The state and media would claim that the explosives went off due to some error on the part of the commando; the guerilla would suggest that the police intentionally triggered the explosion. One RAF member, Ulrich Wessel, was killed on the spot. Police rushed in, and RAF members Siegfried Hausner, Hanna Krabbe, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, and Bernd Rössner were all captured.
Despite the fact that he had a fractured skull and burns over most of his body, Hausner was only hospitalized for a few days. Then, over the objections of doctors in Sweden and Germany, he was flown to Stammheim prison in the FRG where he died soon after.24
The state was confronted with the fact that from within prison the RAF’s
“first generation”25 had managed to inspire its own successors. Chancellor Schmidt went so far as to state that “anarchist guerillas” now posed the greatest threat the Federal Republic had encountered during its twenty-six-year history. Destroying the prisoners, or at least undercutting their support, became a top priority.
Fear mongering was stepped up: claims were made that the RAF had nuclear weapons and was intent on kidnapping children to exchange for the prisoners. No story was too preposterous, as those few members who had been broken in custody were paraded out as state witnesses, alleging all kinds of horrors. Proof, or even mildly convincing evidence, was no longer deemed necessary.
These dirty tricks were complemented by the rapid growth of the state’s repressive infrastructure. In September 1971, a new Chief Commissioner was appointed to the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA; Federal Criminal Bureau): Horst Herold, former chief of the Nuremberg police and an expert on the new methods of using computerized data processing as a law enforcement tool. Under Herold’s leadership, the BKA was transformed from a relatively unimportant body into the West German equivalent of the FBI. By the end of the 1970s, its budget had grown sixfold and its staff tripled, as it became one of the most advanced political police forces in the world.26
In 1975, Herold authored a document entitled “The Principles of Disinformation in Combating Terrorism.” Arguing that “Disinformation is a new form of struggle that must be further developed and that should take its place beside other forms of combating war-like activities,” he proposed that false information be fed to “the press, radio, and television” and circulated within the radical left. The objective was to “create dissent within oppositional groups, so as to destroy them,” with “making the terrorists appear less heroic” being listed as one means.27
By 1979, Herold’s computers contained files on 4.7 million individuals and over three thousand organizations, as well as photos of 1.9 million people and 2.1 million sets of fingerprints.28 While it has since become routine for such data to be available at the touch of a police keyboard, in the 1970s this represented a simply unheard of level of surveillance.
