The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  In the wake of these arrests, houses were searched throughout the FRG, and several anti-imps were arrested, including Dag Maaske and Karin Avdic who had worked on the 1978 Russell Tribunal, as well as Peter Alexa, who had been one of the dpa occupiers. (Most of these would be released almost immediately, with the exception of Maaske, police claiming that his fingerprints had been found on a sketch recovered at the Wiesbaden depot.)40 It was a major setback for the RAF, and one that some saw as indicative of even deeper problems. In his 2007 book Das Projektil sind wir, Karl-Heinz Dellwo was characteristically blunt:

  With their arrests, an infrastructure created over years was swept away, because the central depot contained a list of numerous other depots. Those of us in Celle viewed this with a mixture of sadness and solidarity, as well as anger…. The central depot indicated a clear hierarchy. All experiences with resistance structure indicate that one must organize independent circles, so that if one of them collapses the rest remain intact…. The collapse of the structure brought the defeat of 1977 to its ultimate conclusion. A military defeat was, so to speak, added to the political and moral setbacks without the latter ever being addressed.41

  The 1982 arrests were a disaster for the RAF, which had finally been hitting its stride for the first time since ‘77.

  To all appearances, the initiative had passed to the state.

  Verena Becker and the Verfassungsschutz

  At some point in 1981, Verena Becker, who had been captured along with Günter Sonnenberg in 1977, began providing the secret police with information. Among other things, Becker claimed that Stefan Wisniewski had been the shooter in the Buback assassination—a story that was suppressed by the Verfassungsschutz in order to avoid legal complications, as Knut Folkerts was already serving a life sentence for this crime.1

  The reasons why Becker provided information are difficult to ascertain, though subsequent reports would point to the harsh prison conditions that she, like the other RAF prisoners, was subject to. Similarly, there are serious doubts about how trustworthy her claims were, some suspecting that she simply provided misinformation in order to diminish her own responsibility and curry favor with her captors.

  The Verfassungsschutz would pick Becker up from prison with a civilian automobile under the pretext of bringing her to a medical clinic, while in fact she was taken to an apartment in Cologne where she was debriefed for days on end. Although she received no immediate benefit in terms of her prison sentence, she was paid 5,000 DM, which she spent on language courses2—a paltry sum indeed, considering that the Verfassungsschutz was at the time offering up to a quarter-million DM to any RAF members at large who might turn themselves in.

  Regardless of why she did it, Becker was clearly torn by her decision to cooperate with the state. At some point in 1982 she managed to get word to the other RAF prisoners about what she had done, and according to some accounts offered to kill herself.3 The others took their distance from her, but sent word discouraging her from doing herself any harm. Strikingly, there was no public condemnation, and the matter was hushed up. While the prisoners now knew that Becker could not be trusted, they made no move to exclude her from what support they were receiving from the outside.

  While it has been reported that her interrogators were mainly interested in the RAF’s internal structure, the exact details of what Becker divulged remain unknown; when the story broke almost thirty years later, in 2007, the Verfassungsschutz was characteristically tight-lipped about what they had learned from their informant, whose debriefing was codenamed Operation Zauber (“Operation Charm”).

  Indeed, they have even refused requests from the BAW for copies of their files.4

  Verena Becker from a mugshot (right) and while being escorted by police following her 1977 arrest (opposite page)

  _____________

  1 For more on this see pages 273–274. Ironically, in 2010, at a time when Becker and Peter-Jürgen Boock were each making public statements accusing other RAF members of involvement in the Buback hit, Becker herself was brought up on charges related to the killing. She would go to trial in 2012 and was found guilty, receiving a sentence of four years for aiding and abetting. As two and a half years of that are considered served as part of her previous life sentence, she is expected to be released in less than a year. Tagesschau.de “Haft für Ex-Terroristin Becker wegen Beihilfe,” October 5, 2012.

  2 Dahlkamp et al., “Operation Zauber.”

  3 Werner Mathes and Rainer Nübel, “‘Verräterin’ bot RAF Selbstmord an,” Stern, April 25, 2007.

  4 Christian Rath, “Verena Becker will raus,” taz, November 19, 2009.

  _____________

  1. Jackson, 15; Grauwacke, 59.

  2. Jackson, 16.

  3. Geronimo, 105; Jackson, 17, 22-27.

  4. “Ten meters without a head.”

  5. Peters, 528.

  6. Viett, 220.

  7. Indeed, female RAF prisoners who corresponded with WAIW would routinely reject this kind of politics.

  8. Autonome und Knast-Gruppen BRD und West-Berlin, “Guerilla und Widerstand—eine ‘Front’,” radikal no. 108 (September 1982): 2.

  9. Dellwo (2007), 173.

  10. Antiimperialistischer Kampf “Zum Mai-Papier der RAF,” no. 3: 5.

  11. See for instance, the Fragment Regarding the Soviet Union written by Gudrun Ensslin in Stammheim Prison on January 19, 1976, available at http://www. germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/76-01-19-ensslin.html.

  12. See for instance, the September 1982 communiqué by the anti-imps who firebombed the NATO weapons depot and Faber and Schnepp in Grebenhain-Oberwald in Vogelsberg district, Hessen; “Kommunique,” in Marat, 103.

  13. Antiimperialistischer Kampf , “Zum Mai-Papier der RAF,” no. 3: 8, 9.

  14. Tolmein, 147-148.

  15. William Safire, “Changing Relations between U.S., Bonn,” New York Times in European Stars and Stripes, March 1, 1982.

  16. Jackson, 18.

  17. Ibid., 20.

  18. Ian Q.R. Thomas, The Promise of Alliance: NATO and the Political Imagination (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 126.

  19. Associated Press, “West German Bombs Precede Reagan Visit,” The Wisconsin State Journal, June 2, 1982.

  20. Associated Press, “Protesters Decry U.S. Arms Policies,” The Capital (Annapolis, MD), June 10, 1982. As part of this campaign, Bourns Ketronic Flugtecknik in Hamburg was firebombed on June 4, and the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut in Tübingen was bombed on June 5.

  21. United Press International, “Thousands Protest Reagan’s Visit to Bonn,” Logansport Pharos-Tribune, June 10, 1982.

  22. “Summary of a Brochure by Autonomist and Anti-imperialist Groups,” in Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, 12.

  23. Ibid.; Geronimo, 113.

  24. “Summary of a Brochure by Autonomist and Anti-imperialist Groups,” in Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, 12-13. This source also explains that police had in fact drawn up a list of 500-800 people to arrest preventatively, but as they noted, “When the pigs came on the night before the 11th, they found houses empty. Most comrades had preferred to sleep elsewhere. Only 29 people were arrested that day.”

  25. Alexander, 261.

  26. Jackson, 21.

  27. Ibid.; J.I. Kominicki, “Hecklers Fail to Dampen Berlin Welcome,” European Stars and Stripes, June 12, 1982; Grauwacke, 73-74.

  28. Alexander, 261.

  29. “Redebeitrag: Zur Entwicklung der Antiimperialistischen Front in der BRD seit Bremen,” in Marat, 99.

  30. Grauwacke, 74.

  31. Alexander, 264.

  32. Ibid., 263-264.

  33. Ibid., 265.

  34. Mushaben, 220. These observations about social movement dynamics seem è propos: “the reactions of established political actors typically reinforce divisions among the activists, which leads to a twin process of moderation and radicalization,” (Koopmans, 645) and subsequently, “The presence of a radical minority may in turn stre
ngthen the moderate faction’s tendency toward moderation and institutionalization.” (Ibid., 655).

  35. See Appendix III: For Us It Was a Question of Learning Explosives and Shooting Techniques, page 339.

  36. Spiegel, “Die alte RAF ist zu Ende gegangen.”

  37. Ibid.

  38. Spiegel, “Knarren im Wald,” November 15, 1982.

  39. United Press International, “West Germans Nab Terrorist,” Tyrone Daily Herald, November 17, 1982. Twenty years after the fact, Klar remembered the media speculation that he was “glad” to be captured, and addressed it thus: “It was meant to mock someone they had long sought and had finally gotten. When one is arrested and there is no room for negotiation, it gets nasty. That’s the case, and one must deal with it. I saw it this way at the time: more retaliation against someone who has been taken prisoner. It is perhaps also a projection, one that I often experienced afterwards in this general context from the taz milieu, which always pontificates about the extreme pressure of being underground and all that sort of thing.” (Christian Klar, interviewed by Günter Gaus.)

  40. Verwandtentreffen am 13. November 1982 in Frankfurt.

  41. Dellwo (2007), 173.

  The Guerilla, the Resistance, and the Anti-Imperialist Front

  We are going to discuss what we have learned in recent years, and what we want to do as a result. What we have to say will, of course, be general in nature.

  We believe that it is now possible and necessary for the revolutionary strategy to enter a new stage in the imperialist centers.

  First, we will outline some discussions, initiatives, and actual steps taken over the past two or three years to prepare the terrain from which to act.

  An idea and a concept have taken form from which we can proceed. The first concrete steps indicate possibilities that would be effective: THE GUERILLA AND THE RESISTANCE UNITED IN A SINGLE FRONT.

  Our vision is to bring together the options already explored in different areas and different scenes, often in a diffuse fashion and with only a vague underlying plan, so as to bring them to a new level of struggle, that is to say, to make them effective and strategic. If this is not done now, then all the new, productive, and open developments—the unprecedented developments—risk losing their clarity and degenerating.

  WE SEE ‘77 AS A POINT OF TRANSITION FOR THE GUERILLA FROM THE FIRST STAGE TO THE NEXT.

  The conflict between the guerilla and the state in ‘77 was the catalyst for a new political situation here. Within the dialectic of attack and reaction, the conditions of struggle were transformed. And just as the conditions have changed, so can and must the form of struggle change. After ‘77, nothing was as it had been before: not the state, not the left, not the role of the FRG in international politics, not the role of armed struggle in the center within the international class struggle. We made errors in ‘77, and the offensive was turned into our most serious defeat. We have some things to say about this.

  The situation today—which developed as a result of the confrontation, and which can be seen more clearly now than was previously the case—shows that neither the errors nor the defeat were decisive.

  In a fundamental way, the ‘77 offensive marked the end of the struggle we had been waging since ‘70 and forced us to make some decisions.

  During the entire period of struggles that gave birth to the RAF and allowed it to grow, we concentrated on one question of power: whether the prisoners, whom the state had used both to represent the RAF and as a pretext for its own policies, would be freed. In the same way, more generally, the struggle to implement the urban guerilla concept, the question of whether the armed struggle could actually take root in the FRG, thereby opening up a revolutionary perspective, is fundamentally a question of power. This question has been at the heart of all the actions, skirmishes, manhunts, and media campaigns over the past years. That is why the government has reported our “collapse” hundreds of times. That is why most leftists’ whining has focused on the “hopelessness” of armed struggle. Isolation, the high-security wings, and the Stammheim show trial were meant to destroy what had been built. And then there was ‘77.

  Today, we have no doubt that they decided to let Schleyer die, to risk a hundred people being blown up in Mogadishu, and to liquidate the Stammheim prisoners, because they really hoped and believed that they could be done with it once and for all, or at least for a while.

  The unfolding dialectic that has changed everything reveals the nature of the guerilla and of the state, and how the struggle will unfold.

  It almost worked, but the irony is that it actually created a situation in which we can continue the struggle in different and better conditions.

  Throughout this final endeavor, in which there were no longer any limits—as a result of the suppression of the ‘77 offensive, whereby the state had us by the throat and intended to finish us off—the state had to openly use all its power to repress the entire spectrum of opposition, to repel all criticism, and to establish itself as a social system that cannot be questioned, with all the subtle ramifications that implies. This meant that in the autumn of ‘77, all real opposition was faced with a new situation and new operating conditions, both in terms of the existing reality and in terms of the prospects for future struggle. This forced everyone to fundamentally redefine their relationship to power—or else renounce their identity.

  At that point, the objective situation was reduced to the most basic issue. Subjectively, many people suddenly had the life-altering realization that if the guerilla had actually come to an end, then all of their hopes and dreams for a different life would have also disappeared. That there would no longer be any clear perspective. That there is only hope as long as there is struggle. That they wanted and needed the guerilla, and that our defeat was their defeat. Once you realize that the guerilla is necessary, the leap to a new consciousness is easy. If the guerilla struggle is all there is, making it material can only mean—on whatever level possible—situating yourself within the guerilla’s strategy.

  This leap in consciousness was the personal, living moment within real people where the conditions of struggle here changed: IN FAVOR OF DEVELOPING A REVOLUTIONARY FRONT IN THE METROPOLE.

  There has been an effort over the past seven years to introduce into this political desert—where everything is fake, for sale, conditioning, lies, and falsehood—a spirit and a morale, to introduce a practice and a political orientation in favor of an irreversible disruption and destruction of the system. The guerilla. On the basis of ties to and identification with the struggles in Southeast Asia, in Africa, and in Latin America, an effort has been made to violently assert the existence of the guerilla and to root it here. What Che called the stage of survival and implantation manifested itself here as the stage in which the concept was established, made headway, and was taken up—even if at a given point the existing illegal armed groups were destroyed. Above all, it is a concept that is violently imposed. In every regard. And in isolation. Not only against a repressive apparatus without historical precedent, but also against the ideas of people we would rather be cooperating with. In this one-dimensional landscape, which has existed for generations, the idea of liberation has difficulty breaking through thick layers of corruption, alienation, and emotional and psychological deformation to reach people’s hearts and minds.

  At this point, the question of whether to take up arms and struggle in the FRG and Western Europe has been resolved. It’s obvious. That does not mean that the guerilla’s future is guaranteed: that is never the case, but the existence of guerilla politics now constitutes the basis upon which the struggle will develop.

  THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AUTHENTIC REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY IN THE IMPERIALIST CENTER IS A REALITY IN THE INTERNATIONAL CLASS WAR.

  In the context of the international liberation struggle, the isolated guerilla struggles are seen to be a concrete factor in daily conflicts. It is now necessary to turn our full attention to the situation here and to proceed in an inverse
movement, bringing resistance in the metropole to the front line of the international class war.

  It is a strategy that has its roots here. In the existential hunger for a different life, in the overall experience of the imperialist center, and in the necessity of resistance here. AS A RESULT THE REVOLUTIONARY FRONT IN THE METROPOLE IS A SIGNIFICANT FACTOR ALONGSIDE THE STRUGGLES IN ASIA, AFRICA, AND LATIN AMERICA.

  This means that from the moment one sides with the guerilla and the struggle for liberation within the anti-imperialist struggle, one has reached a radical turning point. To struggle within the context of an open, strategic concept, where each person, based on the gravity of his or her own situation, based on his or her own history and subjective process, can arrive at the common goal of the destruction of the imperialist system and the revolutionary overthrow of society through concrete struggle in the context of the guerilla’s politics. To be part of the revolutionary front here. This means that right from the start they share our objective of building the front in the center. That is what we mean by: struggle together in a front.

  If one wants to, one can differentiate our line of action prior to ‘77 from that of today, in that, prior to ‘77, it was always a question of what would lead directly to armed struggle or what would prepare for this step, and now what matters is that the guerilla and the militant and political struggles unite as integral components of a developing strategy in the metropole.

  What we are saying is that even if the illegal armed organization is at the heart of this strategy, it will not be strong enough until armed politics, militant attacks, the struggles that result from all forms of oppression and alienation, as well as the political struggle, are all united to identify and carry out a conscious attack against the weak points in the imperialist center.