The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  The most outlandish story is the one about the “first arrest in the Kroesen case.” Of course, Helga Roos has been a thorn in the cops’ side for some years now. She has struggled politically in the anti-imperialist movement and on behalf of the prisoners from the guerilla. She had nothing to do with the action of the Gudrun Ensslin Commando. It wasn’t her, but two of our men who bought the tent from the Kaufhof1 at the Paradeplatz in Mannheim early in the afternoon on September 14 (the day before the action). Their books can verify this. It’s true that we were on the hill for several days before the action, but we didn’t use the tent there. Nor did she ever bring us any cocoa. If there was a bottle with her fingerprints on it there, then the cops planted it or put her fingerprints on it afterwards, as has already happened in Ireland. This is also meant to create the impression that we get in position and then “sympathizers” come to serve us.

  Gabriele Gebhard was arrested, because Gisela Dutzi is said to have lived with her while she was underground. Anyone who knows anything about the Heidelberg-Mannheim scene knows that the police know that address. It seems obvious that nobody from the underground would live there. Another fascinating detail is that Gabriele is supposed to have worked on the Sigurd Debus Commando’s statement. Really.

  During the last hunger strike, two guys were arrested in Heidelberg. After our action against Kroesen, the cops looked at two men they said they had seen driving a motorcycle behind Kroesen. They claimed a success in their manhunt when they conveniently found the license plate number in the notebook of one of the two. The fact of the matter is that no motorcycle was ever used in preparing for this action. In the case of one of the two men, Karl Grosser, who at the time of the attack had already spent five months in prison, an order to detain him was issued due to his “updated status,” with the fabrication: “participation in the Kroesen attack.” He had as little to do with the action against Kroesen as he did with the Ramstein action.

  All these fabrications are absurd. Obviously, apart from those of us who actually carry out the actions, nobody knows when, where, or what we are planning.

  In the case of both actions, from beginning to end, only RAF people were involved in surveillance, planning, and execution. There are many ways we can cooperate with people living aboveground, but working as closely and as intensely on a concrete action as the police allege in this case isn’t one of them. If we have such a relationship with someone, it is because he is one of us.

  The “threat of a manhunt” that they are subjecting us to would be funny, except for the fact that it means the extermination machinery is going to be directed against people who aren’t prepared to deal with it. What we have here is an attack against a structure that they know nothing about.

  What began with the arrests of Sabine Schmitz and Johannes Thimme in 1976 and continued with the arrests Christine and Harald Biehal a little later, and the over fifty arrests during the hunger strike, the “black bloc,” all of that, has now taken on a new dimension. This indicates a new repressive line, with which they hope to destroy that which they cannot control, this is why they’ve started using the formulation “the aboveground RAF.” No such thing exists or could exist. What has sprung up is the beginning of an anti-imperialist movement in the FRG—isolated circles, “antifascist groups,” Third World groups, women’s groups, prison groups, antimilitary groups, etc.—this movement sees itself existing in the context of the strategy of the guerilla in the metropole. It is understood that fundamental resistance—every political step that is meant to be serious—must stay outside of the state’s control. It has been obvious to everyone for years now that when people who live aboveground want to meet, they must outmaneuver state surveillance if they don’t want the Verfassungsschutz and the political police to see who meets who where and about what. Of course they have no choice, faced with the preventive state security strategy that intends to destroy these developments before they have taken shape.

  Naturally, that is intolerable for state security. So now their starting point is the criminalization of comrades who have nothing to do with our actions—by connecting them to the actions if they disappear for a few weeks, cut their hair, shake off surveillance—in short, if they engage in “conspiratorial behavior.” But if they criminalize these things, then they are in the process of laying the political groundwork for a police state: it is meant to become normal in this state for everyone to be under control and registered at all times and to accept it—and to be criminalized if they try to avoid it.

  Red Army Faction

  November 7, 1981

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  1. Kaufhof is a department store chain in Germany.

  Out and In: Viett, Beer, and Eckes

  Over the winter of 1981-1982, two final guerillas went East, taking advantage of the MfS retirement plan.

  That summer, just before the Ramstein bombing, Inge Viett had been trekking around Paris, where she was in the process of consolidating the 2JM’s supplies with those of the RAF.1 It was a hot summer day, and she did not know that it was against the law to ride a scooter without a helmet. She took off when a cop tried to pull her over, but failed to lose him. Ducking into a parking garage, when the cop followed she surprised him with her gun drawn. He reportedly looked at her with a puzzled expression on his face before going for his own weapon: she put a bullet in him, and officer Francis Violleau would never walk again.2 For Viett, who had already been wrestling with doubt, this close call proved to be the final straw: she left for South Yemen, where she spent several months before finally deciding that she had spent enough time in the guerilla. She contacted Harry Dahl, who arranged for her to receive a new identity in the GDR.

  The other RAF member who went East during this period was Henning Beer, who had never recovered from the shock of seeing his older brother die in a car crash in 1980. He had practically been raised by Wolfgang, and following the latter’s arrest in 1974 had been essentially adopted by Wolfgang’s friends in the Hamburg squatting scene—a number of whom subsequently passed over into the guerilla.3 It was while the RAF was preparing to assassinate Kroesen that the younger Beer had had a breakdown; he was taken to a safehouse in Leuven until arrangements could be made for him to cross over.4

  Viett and Beer were to be the last RAF members to take this path.

  These two losses were compensated by one last reinforcement from prison: Christa Eckes had first made news as a teenager in 1970, when she was expelled from high school for starting a political action group that handed out questionnaires about students’ sexuality and protested the transfer of a popular teacher. Her mother had hired Kurt Groenewold, the left-wing lawyer, to force the school to readmit her daughter: a fateful decision, as Groenewold would soon be known as one of the RAF’s leading attorneys. Eckes was involved in the 1973 defense of the Ekhofstraße squat in Hamburg, and then in 1974 was arrested along with other RAF members on February 4 in that same city.5 She was the last of these “2.4” defendants to be released, in 1981, after the prisoners’ eighth hunger strike.

  Upon her release she briefly made contact with supporters in the scene before returning underground.6

  Inge Viett (opposite page) and Christa Eckes

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  1 Peters, 564.

  2 Viett, 239-241. Violleau would spend two years in the hospital, and after his release remained essentially bedridden. His wife Yolaine had to turn him every two hours to avoid bedsores, and she in turn had to be hospitalized after three months for exhaustion. Their two children spent two years in a police orphanage. Peters, 565.

  3 Wunschik, 225-226. Peters, 563.

  4 Wunschik, 329.

  5 “Ihr gerader Weg in den Untergrund,” Hamburger Abendblatt, February 5, 1974

  6 Alexander Straßner, Die dritte Generation der “Roten Armee Fraktion”: Entstehung, Struktur, Funktionslogik und Zerfall einer terroristischen Organisation (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2003) 106-107.

  7

  Planting Seeds i
n May

  ONCE AGAIN, THE RAF HAD asserted its place on the radical left, and yet nothing more would be heard from the organization throughout the winter of 1981-1982. As such, it was the aboveground movement that ran with the momentum created by the year’s events.

  As we have seen, no matter what the issue—Startbahn West, the squats, the antinuclear or the antimissile campaigns—the radical edge was defined by the Autonomen, alongside and in uneasy alliance with the anti-imps, who by this time consistently formed a much smaller and more hardline faction.

  Prison conditions remained a priority, all the more so as militants were now finding themselves threatened with arrest and imprisonment under §129a on charges of being “aboveground RAF members.” Along with the new focus on NATO, repression would remain an important radicalizing factor, as increasing numbers of people became personally acquainted with prison conditions in the FRG.

  It was not only in the cells, but also on the streets, that the state’s violence polarized the situation. One of the most brutal examples in this period occurred just after the RAF’s summer attacks, Tuwat, and the Haig demonstrations, at a time when the movement had the wind in its sails. On September 22, 1981, the West Berlin police and the new CDU city government took their revenge; at the behest of Senator Heinrich Lummer, several squats were cleared in a series of perfectly synchronized raids. In the process a squatter was chased into the street by a police baton charge, where he was struck by a bus and dragged for two blocks. Klaus-Jürgen Rattay, eighteen years of age, died on the spot.1

  That evening there were demonstrations and attacks against banks, police stations, and real estate developers across the FRG. Not surprisingly, the largest took place in West Berlin. As one observer recorded:

  Slowly, what began as a chant became a deafening roar: “Lummer is a murderer! Lummer is a murderer!” Passers-by and the few tourists watched the never-ending stream of demonstrators. As they passed a Berlin flag on the Kurfürstendamm the demonstrators lowered it to half-mast. As it approached the Potsdamer Straße, the front of the demonstration passed the first of the evicted houses. From its windows the police began shooting volleys of teargas into the crowd. It had started.

  In the following eight hours, some of the most intense street fighting that West Berlin had ever seen since the war took place. Again and again the columns of police troop carriers were attacked with paving stones and petrol bombs and were forced to retreat. When they attempted to counter attack they were foiled by the rows of barricades that crisscrossed the streets. At the height of the fighting it was hard not to believe that a civil war was going on—burning barricades, ambulances rushing to and fro from the area, burnt out cars and looted shops in tear gas and smoke filled streets. At around three o’clock, when a lot of the demonstrators had left the area, the tide began to turn, and police felt confident enough to leave the safety of their troop carriers and to start taking possession of the streets again. But it was only at dawn the next day that they could announce that they had the situation in control.2

  The following day, the Senate issued a statement that no more houses would be cleared that year. Yet this did little to cheer the West Berlin scene, shocked by what they saw as the police murder of one of their own. For a minority, the September events seemed to indicate that more drastic methods were required, but for most a period of despair set in.

  Over the next few years, the government would employ a combination of negotiations and repression to isolate the more radical squats, stymieing the movement’s forward march, and yet it would take most of the decade to truly neutralize the threat. Throughout the 1980s, buildings and even entire city blocks remained occupied, providing a material base for different ways of life and action against the system, islands of resistance that could loom as large as continents in the movement’s psychic geography.3

  West Berlin, 1981. (Photo: Peter Homann)

  While West Berlin had been the movement’s epicenter, the two most important and well-known squats were in the FRG proper. In Hamburg, several city blocks of apartment buildings had been taken over on Hafenstraße (“Harbor Street”), which as its name indicates runs alongside the city’s historic waterfront. The complex would grow to eventually include a café, a movement info-center, a library, a soup kitchen, two pubs, and an occasional pirate radio station, all of which served to turn the Hafenstraße squats into an important center for Autonomen politics, known around the world.4 Less famous perhaps, the Kiefernstraße squats in Düsseldorf were almost as large, and would serve as an organizing hub for anti-imps. (In typical fashion, the militant women’s movement penetrated these categories without negating them, radical women living throughout both squats, each of which would also eventually have a women- or lesbian-only building.) Both Hafenstraße and Kiefernstraße were founded in 1981, and both would soon be stigmatized as “RAF nests,” squatters who lived there all considered potential “aboveground RAF members” by the forces of law and order.

  Meanwhile, on the armed terrain, the Revolutionary Cells continued to take the lead, fully exploiting the breakthrough their clandestine-aboveground and movementist strategy afforded them. The RZ would carry out attacks every month: against gentrification in January, Startbahn West in February, gentrification, anti-worker initiatives, and the sterilization of Third World women in March, and so on. The actions only increased in number, as the entire movement was successfully brought to a new level of confrontation.

  The RAF remained silent during this period, but far from inactive, as a process of discussion and research that had been going on for some time now neared completion. As we have seen, there had been years of reflection, not only about whether or not to continue the armed struggle, but also about how to renew the guerilla’s ties to the movement. Events seemed to be showing that the underground-all-the-way strategy had been bested by the RZ’s “after hours” fluidity. Especially as every month brought new RZ attacks, which both the Autonomen and the capitalist media compared favorably to those of the RAF, who some now referred to as “grandpa’s guerillas.”

  Indeed, those RAF members at large did have a lot of experience under their belts, in both the aboveground movements and in the guerilla. Individuals like Heidi Schulz and Christian Klar had come up through the 1970s squatting scene, the prisoner support movement, and the disastrous ‘77 offensive. Others, such as Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Helmut Pohl, could trace their involvement all the way back to the so-called “first generation,” and had done hard prison time, surviving hunger strikes and isolation. Yet while they had experienced the hopes and shortcomings of the APO, and could provide a personal connection to the guerilla’s history, their ideas had continued to evolve. In the period since ‘77 they had been grappling with these developments, discussing them internally and also with trusted supporters; eventually, as part of this process, they had begun to reexamine some of the guerilla’s historic suppositions.

  This discussion process would eventually take form in a new document, The Guerilla, the Resistance, and the Anti-Imperialist Front, appearing in the spring of 1982. More commonly known as the May Paper, this was the first major theoretical document to be released by the RAF in almost ten years, and as such it was widely read both within the scene and throughout the broader left, especially after taz published a slightly edited version in its July 2 edition.5

  Building on observations that can be found in other statements dating from the attack on Haig, including even the 2JM’s dissolution statement, the May Paper presented three main arguments.

  First, that the guerilla and the militant left (the “resistance”) should unite in a single front. How this unity would work was unclear, given that the RAF was underground and continued to reject the idea of creating a legal organization. Nor was it discussed how the existence of such a front would play out in regard to the state’s claims that there were aboveground RAF members. Despite these silences, the May Paper unambiguously reasserted that there was an important place reserved for the militant left
in the RAF’s anti-imperialist strategy. Clearly, the guerilla was trying to find a solution to the fact that some people who had been supporting them wanted to become politically active on a more militant level without going underground. A related question was how to broaden and deepen the mobilization and at the same time replenish the “pond” in which the guerilla was swimming.

  While everything was left vague, what such a front might look like had been presaged in the mobilizations of previous years, in the way in which anti-imps would carry out low-level actions during hunger strikes and following each RAF attack. As the May Paper explained,

  While establishing the nucleus of this new guerilla structure over the past two years, we have found that this coordination springs up spontaneously quite easily and that it is powerful—both subjectively and objectively—in material terms, opening up possibilities for attack. On the other hand, we have found that it is difficult to maintain the momentum necessary for this strategy to transcend the boundaries between separate political initiatives, actions, and limited practical contexts. That is the roadblock that must now be dismantled.

  Besides taking a page from the RZ’s playbook, the front idea may have also drawn on the negative experience with the GDR exiles. While Susanne Albrecht had been involved in militant support work for years before going under, and had participated in some of the guerilla’s heaviest actions, she was the exception, for most of those who had gone East had been comrades who might have made good supporters, who might even have been suited for the level of activity engaged in by the RZ, but who found it difficult to cope with what it meant to be in the RAF. As we have seen, some of these individuals would claim to have never participated in any attacks: they apparently joined in the heat of the moment around ‘77, and having taken this step found that there was no turning back—they had no choice but to remain underground or face lengthy prison sentences. Had they surfaced, §129a would have been the least of the charges against them. It has been said that the other RAF members described the dropouts as “our mistakes,”6 and resolving the problem of what to do with them had finally fallen to Viett and the Stasi. The proposed front provided a place for militants who were not ready or suited for the underground, and as such, it might be hoped that it would prevent this problem from reoccurring.