The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  2 The Hauptverwaltung für Aufklärung—the foreign intelligence arm of the MfS.

  3 Ibid., 159.

  4 Stefan Wisniewski, We Were So Terribly Consistent… A Conversation About the History of the Red Army Faction (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2008), 27. Opinions vary about why the South Yemeni government chose this moment to take its distance from the West European guerillas. The late Fred Halliday suggested that the PDRY’s reticence to get involved was due to the fallout from their having agreed to provide refuge to prisoners freed in a 2nd of June Movement hostage exchange in 1975. (Fred Halliday, Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen 1967-1987 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 76-77.)

  5 Schmeidel, 194, n.36.

  A banner at the funeral of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe: “Against Deaths in Prison! Against Skyjackings! Peace to the Hovels, War to the Palaces!”

  _____________

  1. Joyce Marie Mushaben, From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations: Changing Attitudes toward the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 176-177.

  2. According to most accounts, this murder constituted the defining moment in the birth of the 1960s generation’s revolt in West Germany. An unexpected and almost unthinkable twist to this story came to light in 2009, when journalists uncovered proof that police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras, who had killed Ohnesorg, was at the time an informant for the Stasi, and a secret member of the East German Socialist Unity Party.

  3. Irmgard Möller, interviewed by Dagmar Brunow and Luka Skywalker, “Zur Mythenbildung nicht geeignet,” Testcard, May 12, 2003.

  4. The persistence of so many Nazis in power also played a part in this process, as RAF prisoner Lutz Taufer would later explain, “In the context of Auschwitz and Vietnam, it was politically and morally justifiable to join with these forces in an uprising, taking up arms even in the center. The fuzzy relationship that the politicians, finance, the justice system, and the military had to the fascist past, as well as their clear position in favor of the genocide in Vietnam, made it an open question whether or not fascism could creep back in Germany. In this sense, armed struggle in the Federal Republic was a form of belated resistance.” (Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Knut Folkerts, Lutz Taufer, Thomas Ebermann, Rosita Timm, and Hermann L. Gremliza, “Sie wollen uns auslöschen,” konkret June 1992).

  5. Mushaben, 167. As RAF member Rolf Clemens Wagner would later put it, “Throughout the world, the critique of the Vietnam War was also a critique of the capitalist system.” (Helmut Pohl and Rolf Clemens Wagner, interviewed by junge Welt, “Wir wollten den revolutionären Prozeß weitertreiben,” junge Welt, October 17, 2007. This interview has been translated and is available at http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/07_10.html.)

  6. Knut Folkerts, interviewed by Wolf-Dieter Vogel, “Im Politik-Fetisch wird sich nichts Emanzipatives bewegen lassen,” Jungle World, October 1997.

  7. RAF, “The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle,” in André Moncourt and J. Smith, The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Vol. I: Projectiles for the People (Oakland: PM Press, 2009), 222-223.

  8. As a consequence of creative page design, while this text was initially titled “The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle,” it became more commonly known as “Serve the People,” although this had in fact been intended as the original document’s subtitle.

  9. All three of these texts are available in English in our first volume, and also on the German Guerilla website, www.germanguerilla.com.

  10. Christian Klar, interviewed by Günter Gaus, “Günter Gaus im Gespräch mit Christian Klar,” Angehörigen Info, February 15, 2002.

  11. So called because of the ubiquitous “k” (for “communist”) in their names, the K-Groups were those Marxist-Leninist parties and pre-party formations that emerged from the decline of the APO.

  12. Helmut Pohl and Rolf Clemens Wagner, interviewed by junge Welt.

  13. RAF, “The Urban Guerilla Concept,” in Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 97.

  14. Allensbach Opinion Poll, published in Spiegel, July 26, 1971.

  15. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 163-169.

  16. Ibid., 170-172.

  17. The formulation used in Germany is to put the city name first, and then the name of the prison, usually the name of the neighborhood in which the prison is located. So Cologne-Ossendorf refers to the prison in the Ossendorf neighborhood of Cologne.

  18. Friends of Astrid Proll, Astrid Proll: The Case Against Her Extradition (London: 1978), 8.

  19. Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, translated by Anthea Bell (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1987), 246.

  20. As Rolf Clemens Wagner would later recall, “My experience is—and I’ve heard the same thing from other prisoners—that one feels the best during hunger strikes. Not physically, but because one is active and struggling in unity with others.” (Helmut Pohl and Rolf Clemens Wagner, interviewed by junge Welt). Or as Karl-Heinz Dellwo once put it, “With our hunger strikes we have transcended a torturous reality and reconstituted ourselves as subjects.”

  21. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 253-254.

  22. United Press International, “Gunmen Kill German judge,” Hagerstown Morning Herald, November 11, 1974.

  23. RAF, “Letter from the RAF to the RAF Prisoners,” in Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 338.

  24. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 332-335.

  25. The periodization of the RAF into “generations” was at the time resisted by the guerilla and its supporters. In Christian Klar’s words, “The ‘generations,’ that was never our understanding. That’s based on the needs of the people pursuing us, who after 1972 or 1977 had to explain why, after we were ‘smashed,’ it nonetheless continued. One must instead work through the actual stages and the changes in the political situation.” (Christian Klar, interviewed by Süddeutsche Zeitung, “Die RAF gehört in eine ganz bestimmte Zeit…” Angehörigen Info 194, May 16, 1997). See also Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 336.

  26. Ibid., 181.

  27. Helmar Büchel and Ulrike Demmer, “Krieg der Lügen,” Spiegel, April 11, 2009. Such psychological warfare techniques were by no means unique to West Germany—rather they had become a standard fare in countries around the world by this time. This has been perhaps best documented in the United States, where in 1971 activists broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and made off with files detailing the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. Of course, when confronted with evidence of such activities, the state’s preferred tactic is to dissimulate and downplay. As such, in 2009, when Herold was contacted by Spiegel about the BKA’s dirty tricks he merely admitted it was possible he had written such a document, but claimed not to recall any actual cases where its suggestions were implemented. Former Baden-Württemberg LKA president Kuno Bux, who had met with the police and Verfassungsschutz to discuss the paper in 1975, would insist that “we dropped the disinformation concept, because it was neither legally nor politically viable.”

  28. Ibid.

  29. It should be noted that even as they condemned this as a transparent move to bar them from proceedings, the prisoners insisted that they were unfit to stand trial because of the isolation conditions, not the hunger strikes themselves.

  30. Sebastien Cobler, Law, Order and Politics in West Germany (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1978), 207.

  31. Gerard Braunthal, Political Service and Public Loyalty in West Germany: The 1972 Decree Against Radicals and Its Consequences (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 160-161.

  32. Philip Jacobson, “Show Trial,” Sunday Times Magazine, February 23, 1975, 21.

  33. Deutsche Welle [online], “Journalists Unearth Rare Terrorism Trial Tapes from 1970s,” July 31, 2007.

  34. United Press International, “Urban Guerilla Leader Hangs Herself in Cell,” The Hayward Daily Review, May 10, 1976.

  35. Winnipeg Free Press, “Uneven Contest,”
May 19, 1976.

  36. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 441-443.

  37. Ibid., 381-388.

  38. Throughout this book we will refer to “RAF prisoners” to indicate prisoners who had previously been active in the RAF. It should be kept in mind that the prisoners (as well as the RAF) were always clear that once captured, a guerilla was no longer a member of the RAF. As Irmgard Möller explained, “When you are arrested and are no longer armed, and you’re as aboveground as you can get, you can no longer struggle as a RAF member, given that you have been captured. You’re still a part of it all, though no longer part of the organization.” (“NDR/Arbeiterkampf Interview mit Christine Kuby, Irmgard Möller, Hanna Krabbe und Gabriele Rollnik, May 16, 1992,” in ID-Archiv im Internationalen Institut für Sozialgeschichte/Amsterdam, wir haben mehr fragen als antworten: RAF diskussionen 1992-1994 [Berlin-Amsterdam: Edition ID Archiv, 1995], 33-46.)

  39. RAF, “The Assassination of Attorney General Siegfried Buback,” in Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 490.

  40. Jürgen Dahlkamp, Carsten Holm, Sven Röbel, Michael Sontheimer, and Holger Stark, “Operation Zauber,” Spiegel, July 9, 2009; Michael Sontheimer, “Logik des Krieges,” Spiegel, May 14, 2007.

  41. Pohl and Beer had been captured along with Ilse Stachowiak, Margrit Schiller, Eberhard Becker, Christa Eckes, and Kay-Werner Allnach, on February 4, 1974. Hoppe had been captured three years earlier following a firefight with police.

  42. Spiegel, “Sicher gestört,” February 27, 1978.

  43. Holger Meins, “Holger Meins’ Report on Force-Feeding,” in Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 293.

  44. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 259.

  45. Frankfurter Rundschau, August 15, 1977, quoted in “The Stammheim Deaths,” Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review, no. 4.

  46. RAF, “The Attack on the BAW,” in Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 496-497.

  47. Jan-Carl Raspe, “Statement Breaking Off the Fifth Hunger Strike,” in Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 495.

  48. See the RAF’s explanation to this effect on pages 246–247.

  49. RAF, “The Schleyer Communiqués,” in Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 498.

  50. On the PFLP (EO), see the sidebar on page 23, and also Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 559-561.

  51. Schumann had been caught sending out coded messages about the situation on board, and when the guerillas allowed him to leave the plane to quickly check the aircraft was not damaged after the rough landing in South Yemen, he refused to come back for over an hour, during which time he communicated with the security forces about the situation. Schumann was posthumously awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit, and a Lufthansa pilot school in Bremen was named in his honor, as was a street in the Bavarian city of Landshut. (The hijacked airliner was called the Landshut.)

  52. Karl-Heinz Weidenhammer, Mord oder Selbstmord? Das Todesermittlungsverfahren: Baader, Ensslin, Raspe, (Kiel: Malik Verlag, 1994).

  53. For a detailed discussion of the inconsistencies and irregularities in the state’s version of events, see Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 511-520.

  54. Although subjected to the Contact Ban, Möller had been moved to one of the few cells where the connection to the prison radio had not been disconnected. In a book-length interview with former taz journalist Oliver Tolmein, she has explained that she had a pair of earphones with which she could connect to the prison radio and sometimes hear the news. (Oliver Tolmein, RAF—Das war für uns Befreiung: Ein Gespräch mit Irmgard Möller über Bewaffneten: Kampf, Knast und die Linke [Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1997], 100.)

  55. Irmgard Möller, interviewed by Manfred Ertel and Bruno Schrep, “Irmgard Möller: Ich will nicht anders leben,” Spiegel, May 5, 1992.

  56. Monika Berberich, interviewed by Initial, “Interview zur Geschichte der RAF,” Initial, October 6, 2002.

  57. Associated Press, “German Leftists, Police Battle after Paper Raided,” Waterloo Courier, October 24, 1977.

  58. United Press International, “Crusade Against Terrorism Urged,” Newport Daily News, October 25, 1977.

  59. Margit Mayer, “The German October of 1977,” New German Critique 13 (Winter 1978): 155.

  60. Braunthal, 162.

  2

  Twilight of the Seventies Guerilla

  THE GUERILLA FLED.

  Having lost their gambit of winner-take-all, the combatants were now among the most wanted fugitives in Europe. Once again, they sought refuge abroad, regrouping in Iraq, where the PFLP (EO) maintained autonomous bases, and from which they could easily travel in and out of South Yemen, still a safe haven the recent contretemps notwithstanding.1

  The first arrests occurred in Holland. Christof Wackernagel and Gert Schneider were in Amsterdam, unaware that their safehouse had been identified and was under constant observation. On November 11, the two men were followed as they left the apartment; when they realized that they had been surrounded by police, they drew their weapons and began to fire, even throwing a hand grenade. Sharpshooters took them out: one guerilla was hit in the chest and stomach, the other survived a bullet to the head.

  Schneider was being sought in connection with the Schleyer kidnapping, Wackernagel in connection with firebombing a courthouse in the city of Zweibrücken, in Rhineland-Palatinate. Along with Knut Folkerts (arrested just weeks earlier), there were now three RAF members in Dutch prisons.

  Next, on January 21, 1978, Christine Kuby was captured following a shootout with police in a Hamburg pharmacy. The circumstances surrounding this arrest—she had been attempting to use a forged prescription to buy narcotics—pointed to a problem that had been festering in the RAF for some time: the drug habit of Peter-Jürgen Boock, a man who had played an important part in organizing and carrying out the ‘77 campaign.

  As Boock, and his addiction, would play an important part in determining the RAF’s fortunes in 1978, as well as in the historiography that would be built up around the group, and even in legal proceedings taking place as this book was being written over thirty years later, it is worth reviewing his history with the guerilla in some detail.

  Boock’s connection to the RAF was both personal and longstanding. He had first met Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in Frankfurt back in 1970—he was a teenager who had just run away from reform school, and at the time the future guerilla leaders were trying to organize young delinquents along antiauthoritarian lines. Boock had wanted to join them when they went underground, but his involvement had been rejected: not so much on account of his age (some other members were also in their teens), but rather because of his drug habit, a curse which only worsened with the passing years.

  Nevertheless, by the mid-1970s the original leadership was largely removed from the field, and the fact that Boock had known them on the outside and remained committed to seeing them freed made him a particularly valued supporter. As Monika Berberich would put it years later, pulling no punches: “There was a hierarchy in the support scene, with the prisoners or the people the prisoners particularly trusted at the top. P. Boock and V. Speitel2 are examples of supporters that the prisoners had a privileged relationship with in spite of widespread outside criticism.”3

  Peter-Jürgen Boock

  In August 1972, Boock moved into a collective house with Klaus Dorff and Waltraud Liewald, both of whom had contact with the guerilla. In 1974, the three went underground. The group, which Rolf Clemens Wagner and Jürgen Tauras later joined, intended to free Baader, and entered into contact with both the RAF and the Revolutionary Cells with this plan in mind. Dorff and Tauras were arrested in 1976, at which point the RZ broke off contact, and Boock, Liewald, and Wagner joined the RAF.4

  Within a short time, Boock was in South Yemen preparing for the upcoming offensive.

  Boock would tell his comrades that he needed drugs to cope with pain from intestinal cancer, which he claimed to be dying from. While some had their doubts about this story, initially he was sheltered from criticism by the prestige he enjoyed for having known Baader and Ensslin, and also due to the relations
hip he had begun with Brigitte Mohnhaupt, at the time one of the senior guerillas in the field. Yet the situation was becoming untenable, especially when drugs became scarce and he began going through withdrawal. Kuby’s arrest underscored the perils of sending combatants to procure narcotics, and so the decision was made to seek medical treatment.5

  Meanwhile, the arrests continued: next was Stefan Wisniewski, apprehended on May 11, 1978, at Orly airport in Paris, as he attempted to board a plane to Yugoslavia. Not only was Wisniewski in possession of a large quantity of painkillers, he was also found to be carrying a letter from Karl-Heinz Dellwo that had been smuggled out of prison. The fact that Wisniewski had been picked up on his way to Yugoslavia was an indication that there might be other guerillas in that country. A fact that was confirmed the next day when Boock and three other RAF members—Mohnhaupt, Wagner, and Sieglinde Hofmann—were arrested transiting through Zagreb. As the French newspaper Libération reported:

  The arrests in Yugoslavia were the result of close cooperation between German and Yugoslav police. The movements of the four were being closely watched by West German secret agents, who subsequently informed the Yugoslav authorities. According to Agence France Presse, these arrests are related to the arrest of Stefan Wisniewski… carried out by French police at Orly airport, as he was boarding a plane to Yugoslavia.6

  The West German agents involved were likely members of a Zielfahndung unit, the “target search” squads that tracked—and where possible, apprehended—members of the RAF. With the help of Ulrich Wegener, head of the GSG-9, the Zielfahndung had been established as a direct consequence of the RAF’s ‘77 offensive, just one week after Mogadishu. It incorporated agents from various LKAs, operating under the aegis of the BKA and relying heavily on the latter’s state-of-the-art computer system. As detailed elsewhere:

  The new unit, formed by the [BKA], was initially composed of 90 investigators operating in small teams on Zielfahndung (Target Searches). Its working method is for each team to take one terrorist and immerse itself in his life, using the Wiesbaden computer, whose data banks contain ten million pages of information about terrorist suspects, to provide information about a target which even he doesn’t know. No item of information is too trivial for the target search teams. If they know that a suspect always telephones his mother on her birthday, her telephone is tapped, if he supports a certain football team, investigators will travel to the team’s matches inside and outside Germany.7