The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1
Page 14
The fate of both the Black Panther Party and Gauche Prolétarienne2 resulted from an incorrect understanding of the contradiction between the constitution and legal reality and the increased intensity of this contradiction when organized resistance occurs. And this incorrect understanding prevents people from seeing that the conditions of legality are changed by active resistance, and that it is therefore necessary to use legality simultaneously for political struggle and for the organization of illegality, and that it is an error to wait to be banned, as if it were a stroke of fate coming from the system, because then the banning will constitute a death blow, and the issue will be resolved.
The Red Army Faction organizes illegality as an offensive position for revolutionary intervention.
Building the urban guerilla means conducting the anti-imperialist struggle offensively. The Red Army Faction creates the connection between legal and illegal struggle, between national struggle and international struggle, between political struggle and armed struggle, and between the strategic and tactical aspects of the international communist movement. The urban guerilla means intervening in a revolutionary way here, in spite of the weakness of the revolutionary forces in the Federal Republic and West Berlin!
Cleaver said, “Either you’re part of the problem or your part of the solution. There is nothing in between. This shit has been examined and analyzed for decades and generations from every angle. My opinion is that most of what happens in this country does not need to be analyzed any further.”3
SUPPORT THE ARMED STRUGGLE!
VICTORY TO PEOPLE’S WAR!
Red Army Faction
April 1971
Flier denouncing the murder of Petra Schelm, who was shot in the head by police. Hamburg Red Aid 1971.
4
Building a Base and “Serving the People”
WITH SAFEHOUSES AND SUPPORTERS IN several cities, and dozens of guerillas living underground, the RAF patiently built up its organization over two years, a period during which there occurred several clashes with police, leaving two members dead and many more in prison.
The state’s first serious attempt to eradicate the RAF had begun shortly after the publication of The Urban Guerilla Concept in 1971. Named Aktion Kobra (“Operation Cobra”), it involved three thousand heavily armed officers patrolling cities and setting up checkpoints throughout northern Germany.
On July 15, 1971, a new line was crossed when RAF members Petra Schelm and Werner Hoppe were identified by police in the port city of Hamburg. A firefight ensued, and while Hoppe managed to surrender,1 Schelm was shot dead. A working class woman who had entered the guerilla though the commune scene, moving on from the Roaming Hash Rebels to the RAF,2 she was nineteen at the time.
There was widespread outrage at this killing, and in an opinion poll conducted shortly thereafter by the respected Allensbach Institute, “40 percent of respondents described the RAF’s violence as political, not criminal, in motive; 20 percent indicated that they could understand efforts to protect fugitives from capture; and 6 percent confessed that they were themselves willing to conceal a fugitive.”1
In the wake of the APO, the RAF began to take on the aura of folk heroes for many young people who were glad to see someone taking things to the next level. As one woman who joined the group in this period put it, “For the first time, I found a theoretical foundation for something that, until then, I had only felt.”2
Or in the words of Helmut Pohl, who stole cars for the guerilla at this time:
What was clear was the drive, the resolve, quite simply, the search for something new—something different from the shit here. That was what made it attractive and created the base of support. This existed from the beginning, and there is no way it could have been otherwise.3
Thousands of students secretly carried photographs of RAF members in their wallets, and time and time again, as the police stepped up their search, members of the young guerilla group would find doors open to them, as they were welcomed into people’s homes, including not a few middle class supporters—academics, doctors, even a clergyman.4 Newspapers at the time carried stories under headlines like “Celebrities Protect Baader Gang” and “Sympathizers Hamper Hunt for Baader Group.”5
The guerilla continued to attract new members, including several former members of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), a radical therapy group that had carried out some armed actions before its leading members were arrested in July 1971 (see sidebar on next page).
On October 22, there was another shooting in Hamburg, but this time a police officer was killed. Margrit Schiller, a former SPK member who had joined the RAF, was being pursued by two policemen when Gerhard Müller (also formerly of the SPK) and a female RAF member came to her defense: in the ensuing melee, officer Norbert Schmid was shot dead.
The Socialist Patients’ Collective
While the RAF was forming, other groups in the Federal Republic were also experimenting with armed politics. One of these, the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), started as a radical therapy group based at Heidelberg University in southwest Germany. Under the leadership of psychiatrist Wolfgang Huber, the group adopted the slogan, “The system has made us sick: let us strike the death blow to the sick system!”
In tying together political radicalism and psychotherapy, the SPK were not as odd as they might be considered today. As already mentioned, the student left was deeply indebted to the Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism, and the Frankfurt School in turn was deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, as were philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and revolutionary theorists like Frantz Fanon, all of whom greatly influenced sixties radicals. As such, there was much enthusiasm about psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy within the New Left, and this was nowhere more true than in West Germany.
According to government officials, the SPK held that only the maladjusted can survive in modern society, and the insane are actually too sane to live under present social conditions.1 The SPK members began carrying out armed attacks after Huber was fired from his post at the university in February 1970, burning down the State Psychiatric Clinic, robbing banks, and even trying (unsuccessfully) to plant a bomb on a train in which the president of the Federal Republic was traveling. In July of 1971, Huber, his wife, and seven SPK members were arrested on charges of having formed a criminal association and illegally procuring arms and explosives.2
Many of the SPK members who remained at large would go on to join the RAF.
Schiller was nevertheless captured, and a macabre scene played out as police called a press conference to display their trophy. Millions of television viewers watched, amazed, as the young woman—clearly unwilling to play the part assigned to her—was carried in front of the cameras by a pack of cops, her head pulled back by her hair so that all could see her face as she struggled to break free.1
Police searches and checkpoints increased as the hunt for the guerilla continued. On December 4, police in West Berlin stopped a car carrying Bommi Baumann and Georg von Rauch, leading figures in the nascent 2nd of June Movement anarchist guerilla. Von Rauch was immediately shot and killed, which many people took as proof that the cops had adopted a policy to “shoot first, ask questions later.” Thousands participated in demonstrations protesting this killing, and an abandoned nurses’ residence at the Bethanien Hospital was occupied and renamed the Georg von Rauch House.2
(Subsequent to leaving the guerilla, Baumann told an interviewer from Spiegel that von Rauch had fired his weapon first, though he later backtracked, claiming instead, “I no longer know who first pulled the trigger.”3 All of this was viewed with some suspicion, many observers feeling that Baumann’s move to an anti-guerilla position rendered it tantamount to counterinsurgency propaganda.)
Georg von Rauch, murdered by police in West Berlin.
“The Police: Genscher’s Killer Elite or the New Stormtroopers?”
The “shoot first” hypothesis would be given further credence
on March 1, 1972, when Richard Epple, a seventeen-year-old apprentice, was mowed down by police submachine gun fire after a car chase through Tübingen. Epple had run a police checkpoint because he was driving without a license—he had no connections to the RAF or any other guerilla group.4 Later that year, in Stuttgart, a Scottish businessman, Ian McLeod, was similarly killed by police fire as he stood naked behind a bedroom door. Depending on who one believes, Macleod was either completely unconnected to the RAF, or else was himself a British intelligence agent intent on infiltrating the group—in either case it was clear the police shot without cause or provocation. Hundreds of people took to the streets to protest this police murder.5
The next bust occurred as 1971 came to a close: on December 17, Rolf Pohle was arrested in a gun shop in Neu-Ulm attempting to buy thirty-two firearms which the police claimed were meant for the RAF.6 Pohle had been a young law student in Munich in the days of the APO. He had organized legal aid during the 1968 Easter riots,7 and had been subjected to heavy police harassment ever since, eventually pushing him to join the underground.
On December 22, exactly two months after officer Schmid’s demise, another cop was killed. Several RAF members were robbing a bank in the small military city of Kaiserslautern—the nearest police station had literally been blocked from interfering, guerilla helpers barricading its entrance with cars. By plain bad luck for all concerned, police officer Herbert Schoner spotted the parked getaway van as he passed by the bank, just as it was being relieved of its funds. When Schoner knocked on the van’s window, he was shot twice—he managed to draw his gun before he was finished off by a third bullet.1
In the immediate aftermath of December 22, there was no publicly available evidence to tie the robbery or Schoner’s death to any political organization. To all appearances, this was simply a “normal” crime. Nevertheless, the very next morning, the Bild Zeitung led the charge: “Baader-Meinhof Gang Strikes Again. Bank Raid: Policeman Shot,” screamed the headline.
The Springer Press was merely doing what was by now a tradition, tarring the radical left with any and all crimes and misdemeanors. (Except, of course, that in this case they were right.)
The progressive Gruppe 47 intellectual Heinrich Böll, perhaps the most important author in postwar Germany, was flabbergasted, and publicly accused the anti-RAF smear campaign of bearing all the hallmarks of fascism. While condemning their violence, he tried to put the RAF into perspective, famously describing their struggle as a “war of six against sixty million.”
Böll’s words may have been appreciated by the RAF, but he was certainly no supporter. Of course, this was not the way the right saw things, and he became the target of a hate campaign, branded an apologist for murder and a terrorist sympathizer,2 to which he replied that those accused of sympathizing were simply “people who have committed the criminal sin of making distinctions.”3 He and his family would experience unusual levels of police harassment for years to come. At one point, for instance, as he was entertaining guests from out of town, police with submachine guns raided his home, claiming they suspected Ulrike Meinhof of being on the premises. (To the cop in charge, Böll declared that if Meinhof ever did show up he would shelter her, but only on condition that she not bring any guns into his house. In his words, it would be the Christian thing to do.)4
It wasn’t only the streets that were being policed, but also the cultural and political parameters of debate, and the RAF was being placed clearly beyond the pale.
A second, and at least initially less successful move to solidify public opinion against the RAF was the trial of Karl-Heinz Ruhland, which came to a close in March 1972.
Ruhland had been peripheral to the RAF when he was captured in December 1970. Soon after his arrest, he started providing the police with information, the location of safehouses and the names of those who had sheltered the guerilla.5 When brought to trial on charges relating to a RAF bank robbery, much was made of his class status as a manual worker who was never fully accepted by the other members of the group, all in a fairly transparent ploy to show the guerilla up as hypocritical middle class revolutionaries with no real affinity for the proletariat.
Ruhland provided the police with their first real break, however slight, into the world of the RAF, a service for which he received a relatively lenient sentence of four and a half years. Although even the corporate press had to admit that he did not make a very convincing witness, often changing his testimony to fit the latest police theory, he would remain a fixture in future RAF trials6 until someone more convincing could be turned. In retrospect, his significance appears to be as a template for future state witnesses to come.7
In the meantime, guns continued to blaze as the police and guerilla played an increasingly deadly game of hide and seek. Following a narrow escape, Andreas Baader even sent off a letter to the non-Springer press that he authenticated with his thumbprint, essentially to thumb his nose at the cops, and to prove that he was still alive.8
Then, on March 2, police in the Bavarian city of Augsburg killed Tommy Weissbecker and captured Carmen Roll (a former SPK member). Weissbecker was the son of a Jewish concentration camp survivor,1 and had cut his teeth in the Hash Rebels scene before gravitating to the RAF. Twenty-three years old, he was never given a chance to surrender.
Tommy Weissbecker, murdered by Augsburg police on March 2, 1972.
The killing took place as the two left Weissbecker’s apartment. It was later revealed that the police had had him under surveillance since February, renting an apartment above his, and had been listening in on him just before he went out. This would suggest to many not a chance identity check, but a carefully staged murder.
In retaliation, the 2nd of June Movement bombed the police headquarters in West Berlin and, as in the case of Georg von Rauch, an empty building in Berlin was occupied and renamed the Tommy Weissbecker House.
While in custody Roll was drugged, apparently in the hope that she would provide police with information; as part of this chemically assisted interrogation, on March 16 the prison doctor gave her such a large dose of ether that she almost died.2
News of Weissbecker’s murder spead quickly. In Hamburg, RAF members Manfred Grashof and Wolfgang Grundmann feared this meant the safehouse they were staying at—which had been rented by Weissbecker—might also be compromised. RAF policy in such situations was to simply leave the house and never return, but Grashof, whose speciality was producing false documents, decide to risk one trip back to gather some items he needed. When he and Grundmann returned, three cops were sitting inside in the dark. As soon as the guerillas opened the door, even before they turned on the lights on, a cop panicked and started shooting.3 Grashof was shot three times. He returned fire, aiming blindly in the dark, and hit police commissioner Hans Eckardt, fatally wounding him.4
Grundmann had come to the RAF from Schwarze Hilfe, or Black Aid, a support group for anarchist political prisoners in West Berlin.5
As for Grashof, he had come to West Berlin in 1968 as an army deserter, and had joined with Horst Mahler in the Republican Club arguing that the semi-city be turned into an official refuge for others fleeing military service.6 He had been with the guerilla from the beginning, being particularly close to Petra Schelm and especially upset by her death.
Despite his injuries, Grashof was moved from the hospital to a regular prison cell by Federal Supreme Court Judge Wolfgang Buddenberg, who had been put in charge of all RAF arrests. After two months, he was moved into isolation, only allowed to exercise for a half hour each day, and even then only with his wrists handcuffed behind his back. As a result of this treatment, his wounds opened up again, but he did not die.7
All of this unfolded within a context of increasing and increasingly visible police control and new repressive legislation. After having offered the carrot of amnesty and limited reforms, Brandt’s SDP-FDP coalition was now showing that it also knew how to wield the stick.
In September 1971, a new Chief Commissioner was appoi
nted to the BKA (Federal Criminal Bureau): Horst Herold, former Chief of the Nuremberg police, and an expert on the new methods of using computerized data processing as a law enforcement tool. Under Herold’s leadership, the BKA was transformed from a relatively unimportant body into the West German equivalent of the FBI. Over the next decade, he would oversee a six-fold increase in the BKA budget, and a tripling of its staff as he personally pushed West Germany to the worldwide forefront of computerized repression.8
By 1979, Herold’s computers contained files on 4.7 million names and 3,100 organizations, including the photos of 1.9 million people and 2.1 million sets of fingerprints.1 While today it is routine for such data to be available at the touch of a police keyboard, in the 1970s this represented a simply unheard of level of surveillance and technical sophistication.
One of Herold’s first moves was to set up a “Baader-Meinhof Special Commission,” and hunting for the RAF remained his utmost priority throughout his tenure.
The significance of these changes in the BKA was overshadowed, though, by a new clampdown on the legal left, arguably the greatest since the ban on the KDP, as the Interior Ministers Conference passed the Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Act) on January 28, 1972. The new legislation was supported by all three major political parties, as well as all the major trade unions.2 Known as the Berufsverbot (Professional Ban) by its opponents, its intention was to bar leftists from working in the public sector. The potential targets of this ban included some 14% of the workforce, not only government bureaucrats, but also anyone employed by the post office, the railways, public hospitals—and most importantly university professors and school teachers.3