The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  Further observations: “The RZ is good. In part, because they are not an organization the state can capture”; and, “A good action is one which doesn’t require a multi-page communiqué, like the RAF’s. Also, one can’t conceive of the RZ as a sort of party the way one can the RAF.”

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  1 Hans-Wolfgang Sternsdorff, “Tränengas ist der dritte Bildungsweg,” Spiegel, October 24, 1983.

  For many radical women, opposition to state violence in the form of nuclear missiles and isolation prison cells—and even support for the guerilla—was already a logical extension to resisting everyday male violence. As a flier released after the German Autumn had declared, “Stockholm, Drenkmann, Buback, Ponto [were] an unbroken chain of screams. Screams of women…. The consciousness of patriarchal society prevails everywhere. And then suddenly it breaks down. It’s perfectly clear why women are attacking. As always. There are many kinds of self-defense.”63

  Writing as the Revolutionary Feminist Cells, women from the RZ milieu had made a similar point years earlier:

  We are sick of the daily oppression and destruction and we will assault them before they assault us. The concept of the Revolutionary Cells developed through many years of experience with West German imperialism and patriarchy. Experiences like these: The walk home at night. The fear of being raped. The experience of a woman confronted not only with an economic-clique, but with the oppressive thinking of men. “I’m less than men,” etc. Finally, I defend myself. At night I hit his face. The next time I shall defend myself better; teargas—jiu jitsu. I defend myself because it is my only chance, I use violence. Violence against violence.64

  Such views were held by many women in the radical left, and seemed to take their most exemplary form with the Rote Zora guerilla formation emerging from the RZ as an autonomous women’s armed group. At the same time, for some of these women, the RAF was particularly important, as its prisoners (many of whom were women) were facing the heaviest repression, and its struggle remained the most intense.

  The prime expression of aboveground feminists grappling with the RAF’s brand of anti-imperialism was the group Women Against Imperialist War, which as we have seen had been active during the 1981 prisoners’ hunger strike. WAIW consisted of groups active in several cities, including Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, which brought together women from the anti-imp and Autonomen scenes. As explained in the call-out for a Hamburg WAIW meeting in September 1980, “We are women from throughout the FRG, who are engaged in a common struggle against imperialist and patriarchal domination and who, as a result, want to live and struggle with women with whom we can develop a revolutionary perspective.”65

  As they explained elsewhere, in a document translated into English as part of WAIW’s work to build ties with the North American antiimperialist left:

  When we got together as “Women Against Imperialist War” two years ago, it was very important for us to discuss the politics of the RAF and of the prisoners from the RAF. It was our aim to develop a new political offensive out of the women’s movement, a movement most of us came from. An offensive that brings our fight against male violence and male supremacy together with our fight against the state and imperialism. We knew that we did not want for ourselves quiet islands within the system, because doing that would mean not to attack male violence and the state, not to abolish it, but to just bypass it. This is why the RAF’s politics are so important to us: the comrades from the RAF and their politics do not bypass reality, do not bypass imperialist structures of violence, do not bypass alienation. This is because it is a politics that does not lie and deny reality by making compromises, that does not align itself with the system, but takes the perspective and possibility of liberation from imperialism, our liberation as people, very seriously and fights.66

  For women as for men, anti-imperialist strategy had never eschewed struggles within the FRG, but had understood these as occurring in the context of a global war, one that was made visible by the national liberation movements in the Third World, and the guerilla in the First. As such, anti-imps were keenly aware of the clashes taking place abroad, most specifically in Central America (Nicaragua and El Salvador) and the Middle East (Iran, Turkey, and, of course, Palestine). At home, the anti-imperialists’ main interest in West Germany’s domestic affairs had always been prison conditions and other forms of repression, for it was there that the conflict with the state was laid bare. Within this context, groups like WAIW would struggle to add an antipatriarchal component to anti-imperialism. The prevalence of violence against women provided an alternate lens with which to expose the lie of “peace” in the metropole. Further dimensions were added to this analysis, when, starting in 1982, the questions of population control and eugenics increasingly served to tie these two systems of domination together conceptually for many radical women.67

  The explicitly gendered concerns of WAIW were a significant departure from the RAF’s traditional analysis and provided a breath of fresh air and space for women who had been active in the feminist movement to find common ground with the guerilla. Yet the import of this development would be overshadowed by an even greater change in the anti-imperialist worldview.

  Since Bremen, many anti-imps had begun showing interest in the opposition to the deployment of short- and medium-range missiles, NATO’s Double-Track strategy of anti-Soviet brinksmanship. Strictly speaking, this campaign would not have fit into the RAF’s traditional analysis, which considered the conflict between imperialism and the Third World to be paramount. Nevertheless, the antimissile movement and the anti-imps did share a common adversary in the form of U.S. imperialism, as well as an opposition to NATO and U.S. military power within Europe. In this way, the antimissile movement was able to complement an orientation built around solidarity with the national liberation movements. As new forces buoyed the left, with Cruise missiles and Bremen as their reference points, this view quickly gained ground. So much so that for many anti-imps, any superpower sabre-rattling eventually came to be seen as “imperialist,” whether directed against the Third World or the USSR, or even against the people of Europe.

  Unlike WAIW’s antipatriarchal innovations, this shift in emphasis, decentering the Third World and drawing more heavily on anti-American and anti-NATO sentiment, was not limited to the support scene; in fact, it could be discerned as early as the RAF’s Haig communiqué, and would only become more apparent in the years following.

  The new approach was facilitated by the fact that U.S. and NATO forces were not indifferent to the West German radical left. There was talk of CIA agents being stationed in West Berlin to deal with the movement,68 and the revelations that during the squatter battles of late 1981, the U.S. military commander had offered to assist the police against the rioters69 and that the CIA had infiltrated squatter protests.70 There had been frequent NATO training exercises simulating civil unrest in the FRG, and many felt that either the Atlantic Alliance or the CIA was likely behind the false flag attacks that had dogged the guerilla throughout the 1970s.

  Such views were reinforced when Ronald Reagan assumed the U.S. presidency in 1981, his new secretary of state being Alexander Haig: the man whom the RAF had tried to assassinate, and who had subsequently—and somewhat predictably—become a strong advocate of a more aggressive “antiterrorist” strategy. Soon after his appointment, Haig announced that “International terrorism will take the place of human rights in our concern because it is the ultimate abuse of human rights.”71 As one anti-imp noted, “Reagan’s open declaration of war against ‘international terrorism,’ and the way in which this war is being carried out… make one thing clear: war has been declared against us—a war that only one side can win: us or them.”72

  Nor were such claims pure hyperbole; as recounted in the NATO journal The Atlantic Community Quarterly,

  A lively debate occurred in the German press in the spring of 1981 following reports that the United States planned to send to Germany special antiterrorist task forc
es, which until then had operated only in the Panama Canal Zone and other sensitive areas. Although the specific purpose of the task forces was reported to be guarding nuclear installations, the task forces were said to have been trained in Florida in tactics for combatting urban guerrillas and to have studied the strategies and methods of the Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Cells.73

  Anti-imps drew conclusions which they then applied directly to the prisoners’ struggle. Believing the Stammheim prisoners to have been murdered, many suspected a NATO death squad of carrying out the executions. Events in other countries shaped people’s understanding of what might occur in the FRG. While it took place thousands of miles away, the 1980 military coup in Turkey (see sidebar) was a particularly poignant example for German radicals. Not only because it corroborated claims that NATO would prefer a military dictatorship in any of its member states rather than risk revolution,74 but also because Turkey was the birthplace of many of the FRG’s “guest workers,” and the Federal Republic soon emerged as one of the junta’s most vocal and enthusiastic supporters.

  Patsy O’Hara, INLA POW and martyr who died on hunger strike on May 21, 1981.

  Closer to home, Northern Ireland provided another example. There, prisoners from the Irish Republican Army and the socialist Irish National Liberation Army had been struggling for years to regain official recognition as POWs, after this status had been withdrawn by the UK’s Labour government in 1976. In 1980, faced with a new hardline Tory government, seven prisoners had participated in a first hunger strike, which ended after fifty-three days with no concessions being made. Less than three months later, on March 1, 1981, they embarked upon a second hunger strike. By the time it was called off, on October 3, 1981, ten of their number would be dead.

  The NATO Coup in Turkey

  For West German anti-imperialists, a particularly horrific example of what the Atlantic Alliance was prepared to sanction came on September 12, 1980, as NATO generals carried out a coup d’état in Turkey.

  The NATO coup was supported by the neofascist Grey Wolves, paramilitaries who were already responsible for hundreds of political murders throughout the 1970s, during which time they had been supported by and integrated into NATO’s counterinsurgency plans for the region.

  Immediately following the coup, wages and salaries were frozen despite an inflation rate of 130 percent. In the years to come, state-owned industries and services would be privatized, the currency devalued, and state expenditures for welfare, health, and education drastically reduced. Workers lost the right to strike and bargain collectively for years to come.1 Meanwhile the Grey Wolves were used to launch a genocidal war against the Kurdish minority which left tens of thousands dead and countless others raped and tortured.

  The NATO coup was followed by over six hundred thousand arrests, political incarceration being a major element of the new government’s crackdown against the left. Most of those arrested were tortured, and over five hundred were sentenced to death.2

  In the FRG, the expulsion of Turkish and Kurdish communists back to Turkey underscored the RAF’s position that the Atlantic Alliance had become the headquarters for world reaction.

  Pictures of some of those murdered or simply “disappeared,” placed outside Ankara courthouse over thirty years after the coup.

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  1 Justus Leicht “Twenty Years Since the Military Coup in Turkey” World Socialist Website, September 27, 2000.

  2 Hürriyet Daily News, “Turkey’s 1980 Coup Facts,” April 4, 2012; Firat Cengiz, “Turkey’s 1980 Coup Lives on its Legal System.” The Guardian, April 11, 2012.

  With both British and West German governments facing simultaneous hunger strikes demanding a special status and association for political prisoners, it was only natural for RAF and Republican prisoners to view each other as comrades engaged on the same side in a greater conflict, ultimately against the same foes. INLA prisoner Patsy O’Hara— one of those who would die during the 1981 hunger strike—had sent a solidarity message to the striking RAF prisoners saying just this: “To achieve our aim, our hope for socialism, we cannot, I believe, limit ourselves to national boundaries. Our perspective is internationalist, that is the nature of socialism…. Together with the other INLA-IRSP prisoners on the blanket I send you the warmest greetings and I hope that your struggle will succeed without loss of life.”75

  In a telegram to the FRG Relatives Committee, the Irish Republican Socialist Party had no trouble drawing the connection between how the Irish and West German prisoners were being treated:

  The Irish Republican Socialist Party completely opposes the German government, which hopes to break the will of your political prisoners. We completely support your prisoners’ demands and the purpose of your campaign. While recognizing that your struggle differs from ours, we support your right to better prison conditions. We condemn the brutal torture experienced by the prisoners during the hunger strike, particularly the barbaric forcefeeding, which was responsible for the death of the Irishman Michael Gaughan, who hunger struck in an English prison.

  For an end to repression. Victory to the women and men on hunger strike. Venceremos.76

  The declarations of solidarity went both ways, WAIW and other groups routinely expressing support for the Irish hunger strikers.77

  Just as the prisoners in these different contexts viewed one another as comrades, each government would encourage the other to maintain its hard line against their demands, and NATO was indeed one structure which tried to elaborate a multinational strategy against attempts to have the Geneva Convention and other international legal agreements applied to captured revolutionaries.

  For the RAF prisoners and their supporters, there even seemed to be a smoking gun, as an article in the October 1980 NATO Review warned against recognizing prisoners’ political status, specifically lamenting “governments conceding to terrorist convicts the privileged status of political prisoners,” and “yielding to demands… for official enquiries, or international investigations, into alleged ill-treatment of terrorist suspects or convicts.” As the article’s author, Paul Johnson, argued, “The terrorists succeed when they provoke oppression; but they triumph when they are met with appeasement.”78

  While articles in the NATO Review are not policy documents, and the comments on political status were part of a long laundry list of advice from Johnson, the piece did reflect a definite consensus that had taken shape throughout Western Europe and North America. While he had previously served as editor of the New Statesman, at the time that he wrote this article, Johnson was in fact a close advisor and speech-writer for Margaret Thatcher, recently elected prime minister of Great Britain, and as such the woman who would preside over the Irish prisoners’ deaths in the months to come. RAF supporters would often refer to this passage as a “NATO directive” against the prisoners—an exaggeration, perhaps, but one that nonetheless matched the overall reality of the situation.79

  This understanding of NATO’s role as a key instrument of imperialism was shared by revolutionaries throughout Europe; for instance, following the May 1980 busts in Paris, supporters had written in to Libération outlining the way in which,

  This Europe of cops is not just the dream come true of Herold’s gang, it is one part of the military and political project of the U.S.A.; the NATOization of all of Europe, meaning as a bloc totally integrated within the U.S.A.’s war strategy, obviously directed against the people of the Third World, but also against those here who refuse to submit…. Putting into place sophisticated and large-scale means to oppose the armed movements, especially the RAF, is a manifestation of this “struggle.” This is particularly the case so far as the RAF is concerned, as it has been struggling precisely and directly against this Europe under Germano-American hegemony: and concretely so in ‘79 against the instigator of this plan, General Haig, at the time the head of NATO, who they attempted to assassinate with the Andreas Baader Commando.80

  One result of this perspective was that the stru
ggle for the prisoners could be framed as one part of the struggle against NATO—and struggling against NATO as a means to support the prisoners. Indeed, NATO was beginning to appear as the very embodiment of imperialism in Western Europe, in a way that built upon and highlighted the Alliance’s very real involvement in counterinsurgency operations around the world. As RAF prisoners held in Stammheim would explain in a 1984 statement:

  The revolutionary struggle in Western Europe faces a unified system centralized by NATO. The revolution in Portugal is threatened with NATO intervention. Spain has been integrated into the EC and NATO against the wishes of the population, institutionalizing the fascist generals. The NATO putsch in Turkey. Ireland and Italy experience NATO counterinsurgency. The formation of this unstable unified system makes destroying NATO the orientation for the revolutionary strategy in Western Europe.81

  At the same time, choosing to focus on NATO only made good tactical sense; Birgit Hogefeld, an anti-imp who would later join the RAF, was quoted in Spiegel explaining how the RAF’s ideas suited the mood that was sweeping the country.82 The question of new missiles being stationed in the FRG was provoking widespread opposition, and antipathy toward NATO was combining with a latent anti-Americanism and concerns about Ronald Reagan, who was beating the war drum from the other side of the Atlantic. This all seemed to offer a chance for the anti-imps to reach out to the radical left, just as some on the radical left saw it as an opportunity to reach out to “ordinary Germans.”

  Finally, attacking NATO, and elevating the East-West conflict to the same level as that between North and South, was in step with an ideological turn taking place throughout the West German left. The GDR and the other real existing socialist states suddenly appeared in a more sympathetic light. As Helmut Pohl has explained,