The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  Both women would be recruited into the 2JM. Becker was arrested in 1972, at the age of nineteen, and charged in connection with the bombing of the British Yacht Club in West Berlin,45 for which she received a six-year sentence, only to be subsequently freed in the 1975 Lorenz exchange, at which point she switched over to the RAF. As we have seen, she would next be arrested in 1977, along with Günter Sonnenberg, in the town of Singen.

  Meanwhile, Viett remained with the 2JM, but by 1976 she too had become a strong proponent of rapprochement with the RAF.

  This new direction was pushed forward by the sad reality that even the vibrant West Berlin scene was not able to shelter the guerilla from repression, and by the fact that several members of the 2JM were essentially living with RAF combatants in the PFLP (EO)’s Middle East camps.46 The political and logistical pressures that resulted from the RAF’s German Autumn simply accelerated this process, and behind the scenes the 2JM would effectively split into two factions, the one “social revolutionary” (or “populist” to its detractors), the other “anti-imperialist.”

  Anti-Imperialism Defined

  The anti-imperialist position that would attract so many radicals of the APO generation was always most closely identified with the RAF of the 1970s. Knut Folkerts would explain the group’s position as follows:

  Our assessment was that anyone who based an analysis on the conditions in the metropole, developing a worldview from that perspective, could not arrive at a valid appraisal of the situation. One must start from global conditions, or one can only arrive at the chauvinistic perspective of the relatively privileged.1

  Criticisms that the RAF ignored “domestic” contradictions due to this “global” focus are overly simplistic, and ignore the effort the RAF devoted to integrating both realities into a comprehensive critique. In this regard, it is worth highlighting these comments by Brigitte Mohnhaupt about anti-imperialism, internationalism, and social revolution:

  Given that they address the same thing, these concepts cannot be placed in contradiction to one another—otherwise they become a caricature of themselves: internationalism reduced to appeals for solidarity with revolution somewhere else, so the question of whether people want revolution for themselves doesn’t raise its ugly head; anti-imperialism as research into imperialism, where the abstractions fail to address the practical question of how to resist it; social revolution as a synonym for social questions that must be addressed to meet people’s needs, which can only end in reformism so long as the key question is ignored, namely what power relations need to be destroyed for people around the world to have their needs met. This approach only blocks any learning process or practice that could lead to a united attack.2

  _____________

  1 Knut Folkerts interviewed by Vogel, “Im Politik-Fetisch wird sich nichts Emanzipatives bewegen lassen.”

  2 See Strategic Thoughts, page 310.

  It must be kept in mind that despite the terms used to describe these two political camps, everyone involved would have welcomed a social revolution, just as they all were opposed to imperialism. In the context of the West German far left, in no small part due to the influence of the RAF, “anti-imperialism” represented an identification with the Third World national liberation struggles and translated into a deep pessimism about the short-term prospects for mass revolutionary movements in the metropole. In its extreme form, such anti-imperialism could lead to the view that the guerilla in the metropole should merge with or act under the leadership of Third World revolutionaries abroad. (While the RAF never held such a position, as we shall see, certain combatants from the Revolutionary Cells explored this strategy with tragic results.)

  To be a social revolutionary, on the other hand, meant to prioritize seeking a base and a field of political action within one’s own society—this was the view that some critics would accuse the RAF of having repudiated with its 1972 document Black September. Social revolutionary politics had defined the 2JM for years, but in the aftermath of the 1975 Lorenz kidnapping it had come to be rejected by increasing numbers of 2JM fighters outside of prison.47

  Within the 2JM, this split would finally be consummated during the group’s 1978 trial, in which Ralf Reinders, Fritz Teufel, Ronald Fritzsch, Gerald Klöpper, Andreas Vogel, and Till Meyer faced charges related to the Drenkmann killing and Lorenz kidnapping. Presiding was Judge Friedrich Geus, well-known to the sixties generation for having acquitted killer cop Karl-Heinz Kurras of the June 2, 1967, shooting death of Benno Ohnesorg—the very murder from which the 2JM had taken its name. While the accused maintained their innocence, they were equally outspoken in their support for armed struggle and revolutionary politics in the FRG, no matter how differently they may have come to conceive of these.

  This was the context in which the anti-imperialist faction made its move, carrying out what one newspaper described as “the first serious action by proponents of ‘armed struggle’ since Stammheim and Mogadishu.”48 As reported by UPI:

  Two women terrorists posing as lawyers invaded an “escape-proof” jail Saturday, freed one of Germany’s most wanted men and casually strolled out with him under the noses of patrolling police.

  One police guard taken hostage in the meticulously planned raid at the Moabit prison was shot in the leg. The terrorists all escaped unharmed…

  [T]he two women used lawyers’ identity cards to get into the prison and timed their raid to coincide with visits by Meyer’s and Vogel’s real lawyers.

  Once inside, the women pulled out pistols and shouted to Meyer and Vogel to leave the unlocked cells where they were conferring with their lawyers. Meyer ran free but a guard grabbed a pistol from one of the two women and locked himself in the cell with Vogel. He sounded an alarm that alerted guards in the prison but not the police patrols outside.

  The two women then took another guard hostage and forced other guards to open a security door that led to an unguarded front door.

  “To show they meant business they shot their captive in the leg,” [Minister of Justice Jürgen] Baumann said.

  The plot was so carefully planned and prison controls so lax that the two young women then simply strolled out of the prison’s main entrance onto a busy thoroughfare under the eyes of police patrols, got into a Volkswagen bus with waiting accomplices and drove off.

  The bus later was found abandoned not far from the prison. The prison had been billed as “escape proof” after undergoing a $2 million renovation.49

  The entire operation, from the time the women arrived at the prison to the time they left, took only six minutes. Almost immediately, police swarmed over the scene, soon locating the minivan, abandoned, a half-mile away—but the guerillas were all long gone. Certainly unknown to the raiders, the action was all the more galling for the state, as Baumann, who had replaced Oxfort as West Berlin’s justice minister, had scheduled a visit that morning with his colleague from Baden-Württemberg, to show off “one of the most secure prisons in Europe.”50 Just as his predecessor had been forced to resign following the guerilla women’s breakout in 1976, Baumann too would feel compelled to step down after the 1978 jailbreak.51

  A West Berlin movement publication celebrates the Till Meyer jailbreak.

  The Meyer liberation action established the predominance of the anti-imperialist faction. Not only was it carried out over fears of being perceived as the work of a “free-the-guerilla guerilla” (like the RAF), the unavoidable profile of such an action was sure to bring more heat down on the West Berlin scene, making it even more difficult for those who hoped to pursue a social revolutionary strategy. What’s more, the group that carried out the action styled itself the “Nabil Harb Commando,” honoring one of the PFLP (EO) fighters who had died in Mogadishu52—this despite the fact that the “populist” 2JM and its traditional supporters had been highly critical of skyjackings, which they rejected as inhumane.53 As Gabriele Rollnik would later explain:

  There were other political prisoners in Moabit, but we decided upon Till Mey
er and Andreas Vogel, because they both agreed with our politics. The other men had criticized us, saying we had broken with the old 2JM. Communication with them was very difficult or had ceased altogether. They thought what we were doing was completely incorrect. They didn’t understand why we weren’t carrying out social revolutionary actions in Berlin any more. For us, the struggle had reached a new stage and had to be carried out taking into account the international context. Till Meyer and Andreas Vogel agreed with this decision, so they were the object of our liberation action.54

  According to Klaus Viehmann, the Meyer liberation was in fact the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, splitting the organization and prompting Viehmann himself to leave. He was arrested just one week later, driving a car that the Nabil Harb Commando had left him. As he has explained, this was the result of a double slip-up: his erstwhile comrades hadn’t told him the car was stolen, and he hadn’t thought to ask. He would eventually be convicted of participation in the Meyer liberation, the Palmers kidnapping, and a series of bank robberies, and would spend a total of fifteen years in prison, much of it in isolation.55

  As for Meyer and the women from the Nabil Harb Commando, they split up, seeking shelter in various East Bloc countries, with the intention of regrouping in the Middle East. A misjudgment, as the guerilla’s relationship to the world of “real existing socialism” remained ambiguous in this period, just weeks after the RAF’s Zagreb arrests. As such, one month after the breakout, on June 21, Meyer was recaptured, along with Rollnik, Gudrun Stürmer, and Angelika Goder, at the Golden Beach holiday resort in Bulgaria.

  Federal Minister of the Interior Gerhart Baum publicly boasted that the arrests were the work of a Zielfahndung squad—though there was also the story that a vacationing West German prison guard had recognized Meyer relaxing on the beach.56 According to Rollnik, it is also possible that Bulgarian intelligence had betrayed them to the FRG, as there was already a high level of cooperation between the two countries around drug trafficking. As the guerillas were making daily calls to West Berlin, there is also the theory that they were located through telephone surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency.57

  Regardless of how they were found, there is little mystery about the details of their capture. Sitting in a café, the four were suddenly swarmed by heavily armed assailants in civilian clothing; overpowered, they were whisked off to a nearby bungalow, where they were tied up and left lying on the floor for several hours. Once the guerillas realized that they were dealing with Germans, they demanded to speak to the Bulgarian authorities, which they were allowed to do, but to no avail: the Bulgarians were cooperating, and all requests for asylum fell on deaf ears. Chained hand and foot, in the middle of the night they were brought to the airport, where they were loaded onto a Lufthansa plane along with a couple of dozen more German police. The icing on the cake was a representative of the Bonn Security Group, who introduced himself with a mocking, “My name is Scheicher. Now, let’s go home to the Reich!”58

  Upon their return, Rollnik was placed in isolation in Cologne. It took a thirty-day hunger strike for her to be transferred to Berlin, where she was able to have some contact with Berberich and other political prisoners. (In 1980, she, Berberich, Goder, and Stürmer would all be transferred to the new high-security wing at Moabit prison.)59

  The arrests in Bulgaria, like those of the RAF fugitives in Yugoslavia, were said to augur a new era of East-West cooperation against “terrorism.” Indeed, it seems clear that sections of the East Bloc security apparatus were cooperating with the West. But the world of international espionage is a murky one where double- and triple-crosses are not uncommon and political factors constantly force matters into their own mould, and so two further possibilities bear consideration.

  First, it is possible that the Zielfahndung opted to seize and remove the guerillas from Bulgaria as a result of the fact that Yugoslavia was still holding onto Mohnhaupt, Boock, Hofmann, and Wagner. Belgrade’s refusal to extradite the four was turning into a serious wrinkle in the FRG’s much-hoped-for “antiterrorist” rapprochement with the East, and preventing a repeat of this problem was clearly in Bonn’s best interests.

  Second, in both the case of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, it is possible that the Eastern authorities only went along with capturing the guerillas because they had been “caught out” by the Zielfahndung, which had located its targets independently. This would have placed the governments in question in the uncomfortable position of having to brazenly admit to sheltering the guerillas or else make a show of cooperating. In this light, it is possible that Belgrade’s insistence on trading for the Croatian nationalists held by the FRG—as much as they wanted the Croatians—was intended to provide a convenient excuse for eventually releasing the West Germans.

  Further evidence of the complex relationship between the guerilla and the various East Bloc nations came just days after the Golden Beach busts. On June 27, Viett, her longtime companion and fellow 2JM member Regina Nicolai, and 2JM member Ina Siepmann, found themselves detained while transiting through Czechoslovakia on their way to Baghdad.60 The three were questioned extensively about the 2JM’s attitude toward the socialist countries, the strength of anticommunism in the West German left, and their reasons for traveling to the Middle East—but the FRG was never informed that they were being detained. After three days, the guerillas tired of this and requested that the GDR be informed that Inge Viett was in custody. As soon as this was done, three agents from Department XXII (Terrorism) of the MfS were sent to retrieve the 2JM fighters, bringing them to the GDR where they were entertained by Colonel Harry Dahl, Major Helmut Voigt, and his understudy Gerd Zaumseil.61 The women remained in the GDR for two weeks, before continuing on to Baghdad.62

  Viett had apparently first made contact with the Stasi after breaking out of prison in 1976. Now the East Germans had gotten her out of a bind, and it would seem that each side was apt to view the other with favor. A situation that would not be without its consequences.

  But for the moment, the 2JM, like the RAF, was in crisis. For all the beauty of the 1978 jailbreak, Meyer was now back in prison, as were several other members. The group had split, and post-’77, their experience with the Austrian students served as an object lesson as to the challenges of integrating new recruits, never mind carrying out new actions.

  Discretion being the better part of valor, keeping a low profile and staying out of the country struck those left as the wisest option to pursue.

  THE REVOLUTIONARY CELLS

  Unlike the RAF and the 2JM, West Germany’s third guerilla group did not emerge from West Berlin, but from the self-styled “antiauthoritarian” wing of the post-APO left in Frankfurt, the same scene that also gave rise to the Spontis.

  Dubbed “the after work guerillas,” the Revolutionary Cells adopted a very different approach from either the RAF or the 2JM. Anybody could carry out an action within the context of the RZ’s politics—defined as anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and “supporting the struggles of workers, women, and youth”63—and claim it as an RZ action. In line with this, the Cells did not field underground militants, but rather advised comrades to maintain their aboveground existence while carrying out clandestine activities. Finally, within the FRG, the group purposefully stopped short of carrying out lethal attacks, the sole fatality during their entire nineteen-year existence being a politician who bled out when an RZ cell kneecapped him. (The group subsequently issued a communiqué explaining that they had not meant to kill him.)

  Apart from bombing the Chilean consulate, the offices of El Al, police stations, U.S. army bases, government buildings, and bosses’ cars, for years the RZ also forged public transportation passes which were broadly distributed, and food vouchers which were passed out to homeless families. While some of these actions were relatively high-level, requiring as much planning and risk as the RAF’s bombings, in general RZ attacks were considerably less heavy, as can be seen by this partial list from the period covered by
this volume:

  In April 1979, pesticides were used to destroy the garden at the Frankfurt home of IGM Chairman Eugen Lorderer, and stink bombs were dumped on the floor of IGM Vice Chairman Hans Mayr’s house—workers at IGM had recently experienced a defeat after six weeks on strike.

  In November 1979, sugar was put in gas tanks and tires were slashed at the Seeland Trucking Company, involved in building a nuclear power plant.

  In January 1981, four trucks belonging to Bilfinger and Berger, a Frankfurt construction company involved in gentrification, were torched.

  In May 1982, the Mercedes belonging to the head of the Frankfurt Real Estate Office was torched in protest against gentrification.

  In November 1982, stinking liquid was poured into the home of George Luze, managing editor at the Braunschweiger Zeitung, for his role in driving competing newspapers out of business.

  As indicated by the above, RZ actions were carried out around a variety of issues and could at times be considered little more than vandalism. (One wag, comparing them to the RAF, dubbed them the “property destruction faction.”) Unlike the illegal activities carried out by the RAF’s support scene—which were timed and determined in the framework of the RAF’s own campaigns, with the militants taking their lead from the guerilla—the Cells tended to take their direction from the social movements themselves. What prevented all this from simply dissolving into a sea of movementism was the ideology and identity established when an action was claimed by the Cells. Furthering this process, ever since May Day 1975, people in the Revolutionary Cells milieu had been issuing an annual newspaper, Revolutionärer Zorn (Revolutionary Rage), which helped establish a common framework for RZ actions and politics; it was immediately banned under §88a, but widely read in the scene regardless.