by J. Smith
All of this was a transparent attempt to discredit the RAF by pathologizing Meinhof: “It would be so embarrassing,” Zeis mused at the time, “if it turned out that all the people began to follow a mad woman.”7
It was only through public protests organized by the prisoner support group Red Aid, which mobilized many doctors, that the government was forced to drop its plan.8 Yet as we shall see, this was not the last time that the state would seek to score a propaganda victory by attacking and discrediting the woman who was routinely described as the RAF’s chief theoretician.
On top of imposing internal isolation, the state did all it could to cut the prisoners off from the outside world. They were limited to visits from lawyers and family members. Visits from family members were overseen by two state security employees who recorded all conversations, the contents of which could be introduced at trials, sometimes followed by analysis from a psychologist. Political letters, books, and packages were routinely withheld.
Starting in 1975, everyone arrested under §129 in connection with “political crimes” would be held under the so-called “24-Point Program.” This formalized many of the conditions that had been imposed unevenly up until then, while also adding new restrictions. The program specified, among other things, that the prisoners were banned from all common activities. The prisoners now received one hour of solitary yard time each day, which was immediately interrupted if they failed to heed an order, insulted a staff person, or caused any damage. The prisoners were permitted to keep twenty books in their cells. Visits were limited to people cleared by the authorities, and could only last a maximum of thirty minutes (the standard was two such visits a month). It was prohibited to discuss activities of the so-called “terrorist scene” or its support groups (the latter was a grab bag for all revolutionary organizations), prison revolts, or hunger strikes. All visitors were searched, and this included lawyers.1
In a statement regarding such isolation, Till Meyer and Andreas Vogel, both 2nd of June Movement prisoners who were subjected to these conditions for years, wrote:
With the isolation wings, years of isolation have been carried to the extreme and the process of extermination has been perfected: the perfection of spatial limitation and the total isolation, electronic observation with cameras and microphones (openly in each cell)—and we are guarded by special corps (corps who are trained in psychology and conditioned through BKA training).2
RAF prisoner Helmut Pohl would express himself similarly:
Isolation represents a more intense version of the situation which dominates on the outside, which led us to engage in clandestine armed struggle in the first place. Isolation represents its pure state, its naked reality. Whoever doesn’t find a way to struggle against this situation is destroyed—the situation controls him and not the other way around.3
As Andreas Baader described it:
Isolation aims at alienating prisoners from every social relationship including their history, their history above all… It makes the prisoner unconscious or kills him or her.4
Professor Wilfried Rasch of the Institute of Forensic Psychiatry at the Free University of Berlin, who was called upon to examine the RAF prisoners, had this to say about the isolation conditions in which they were held:
The high security wing has simply the quality of torture, that is to say, an attempt to use special measures to achieve something amongst the prisoners through difficult or unbearable conditions, specifically, a change of heart, a defection.5
Even those visits that were permitted were designed to add to the prisoners’ stress-level. Eberhard Dreher, held on charges of supporting the 2nd of June Movement, described the closed visiting conditions:
[T]he screen offers a pretense of contact, simultaneously limiting the contact to visual contact and making the contact unfamiliar due to the reflective quality of the glass… Further pain is created by the lack of air and the particular acoustics. The construction of ventilators would rectify this problem… To make oneself understood, one must speak very loudly. One’s own voice within the aquarium-like cabinet is amplified into an acoustic mountain crashing down directly onto one’s own head.6
Dreher further described the effect of one such visit with his lawyer as follows:
After… forty minutes, I had a splitting headache and, with the consent of my lawyer, had to break off the visit. I had a headache, needed air, was fed-up, wanted to be in my cell in peace.7
In 1978, the European Commission of Human Rights would observe that their prison and trial conditions had contributed to Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader all developing “problems of concentration, marked fatigue, difficulties of expression or articulation, reduced physical and mental performance, instability, diminished spontaneity and ability to make contacts, depression.”1
If the results of imprisonment in the isolation wing were horrifying, isolation combined with sensory deprivation was even more destructive, as is indicated in Ulrike Meinhof’s harrowing description of her ordeal in Cologne-Ossendorf (see Ulrike Meinhof on the Dead Wing, pages 271-73).
Early on, it became clear to the prisoners that their only hope lay in resistance, and so on January 17, 1973, forty captured combatants from the RAF and other guerilla groups began a hunger strike, demanding access to independent doctors and transfer to the general population.2
This first hunger strike lasted four and a half weeks, and was only called off when Attorney General Ludwig Martin agreed to move Meinhof out of the dead wing—a promise which was not kept, and was likely never meant as anything but a ploy.3
Nevertheless, even though the hunger strike did not achieve any immediate victory, it did manage to break through the wall of silence surrounding prison conditions, galvanizing support from a section of the far left. In a way that was perhaps impossible to foresee, it marked the beginning of a strategy which would give the RAF a new lease on life.
Support had so far come mainly from the Red Aid network, a situation which was less than satisfactory in the eyes of the prisoners, as Red Aid offered solidarity while remaining critical of the RAF’s politics. Furthermore, within Red Aid, the focus on the RAF prisoners had begun causing dissension, especially in Munich, as Bavaria held a large number of prisoners from the antiauthoritarian scene, and it was felt that they were being neglected, too much energy being spent defending the Marxist-Leninist RAF.
Thus, following the first hunger strike in April 1973, several lawyers came together with some of the RAF’s closest political sympathizers to set up the Komitees gegen Folter (Committees Against Torture) that would take over support work for the prisoners in the future, while promoting the RAF’s particular brand of anti-imperialist politics. This political orientation was no great liability for the legal left, as even many liberals were not yet ready to completely repudiate those who engaged in armed struggle.4
Several lawyers took leading roles in the Committees, Hans-Christian Ströbele, Klaus Croissant, Otto Schily, Siegfried Haag and Kurt Groenewold being their most prominent members. It was Groenewold who took the lead in establishing the Committees, their Hamburg headquarters being a block away from his office.5
As it turned out, the decision to set up the Committees proved fortuitous. Due in part to ongoing tensions between antiauthoritarians and others, the Maoist KPD/ML managed to take control of Red Aid at a national conference in April 1974. This was the second successful attempt by a K-group to move in on the network: the KPD/AO had already formed a rival “Red Aid registered association” to capitalize on its reputation. While the KPD/ML and KPD/AO may have been occasionally sympathetic to the RAF prisoners, they were definitely hostile to their politics, and so the RAF would have been at a disadvantage had they remained dependent on either Red Aid network for support.
Committees Against Torture were established West Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Kassel, Cologne, Munich, Münster, Stuttgart, Tübingen, and Heidelberg6—the latter in particular being a magnet for former SPK members.7 Backed by
many progressive intellectuals, they worked to focus public attention on the prisoners’ struggle and the destructive conditions in which they were held, setting up information tables, issuing leaflets, and holding teach-ins.8 The hope was to win the support of people with their roots in the sixties antiwar movement, people who shared much of the RAF’s analysis and could be expected to express political solidarity, particularly for the idea that the captured combatants were political prisoners who had acted in the context of an international anti-imperialist movement.
The Lawyers
Hans-Christian Ströbele had helped to found the West Berlin Socialist Lawyers Collective along with Horst Mahler in 1968.1 He was an SPD member in the early seventies, and, in 1978, would be a founding member of the Alternative List, a forerunner to the left wing of the Green Party, in which he would also be active as an elected member of the Bundestag from 1985 to 1987 and again from 1992 on.
Klaus Croissant was a member of the Stuttgart Socialist Lawyers Collective; he had been under surveillance by the state from at least May 1972, suspected of having himself located safehouses for the RAF.2 Over the years, he became one of the prisoners’ most ardent and notorious advocates—disgusted at what he saw of West German “justice,” he would eventually begin working with the East German Stasi in the 1980s. He would unsuccessfully run for mayor of Berlin-Kreuzberg on the Alternative List ticket, before joining the Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (Party of Democratic Socialism)—the successor to East Germany’s SED—in 1990.
Lawyers Klaus Croissant, Otto Schily, and Hans-Christian Ströbele at a press conference in 1974.
Otto Schily was a committed civil libertarian, deeply concerned about the rule of law. He had befriended Rudi Dutschke while studying in West Berlin, and had been active in circles around the SDS.3 Probably the only one of the lawyers to take pride in referring to himself as “bourgeois,” Schily would join Ströbele in the Green Party in the 1980s, before crossing over to the Social Democrats in 1989. In 1998, years after he had left our story, Schily was appointed Minister of the Interior, the former civil libertarian now in charge of domestic repression. As such, he was personally responsible for the highly repressive “antiterrorist” legislation that was passed in the FRG in the wake of September 11, 2001.4 The legislation earned him a “Big Brother Award”, a negative prize presented to those who excel in rolling back civil liberties.
Siegfried Haag was a court-appointed attorney. While he had not been prominent in the APO or the political left previously, he was so moved by the prisoners’ plight that he would eventually make their struggle his own.
Kurt Groenewold, the son of a wealthy property owner, had previously represented Ulrike Meinhof in her divorce from Klaus Rainer Röhl in 1968. He was active in the Hamburg Socialist Lawyers Collective, defending cultural radicals like the composers Ernst Schnabel and Hans-Werner Henze for their oratorio to Che Guevara, Floß der Medusa. He also defended the poet Erich Fried, who was accused of slandering the West Berlin police when he described the shooting of Georg von Rauch as a “preventive murder” in a letter to Spiegel.5 In recent years, Groenwold has written extensively about the legal and civil rights ramifications of the state’s response to the armed movements in West Germany in the 70s and 80s.
While the Committees welcomed support from many intellectuals and celebrities who still rejected the prisoners’ politics, by and large militants were expected to toe the RAF line. While some involved did have their own quiet reservations in this regard, it is equally clear that many others were sincerely won over to the guerilla’s politics. The state certainly contributed to this process, as activists would find themselves the object of police surveillance, raids, and even in some cases criminal charges, simply for disseminating information about the conditions in West German prisons.1
In subsequent years, the underground would include several veterans of this prisoners’ support scene, and even some from their legal team, a fact which the state would exploit time and again to attack the RAF’s lawyers. While most of the legal support team never did join the guerilla despite their increasing horror at the Kafkaesque trials and inhumane prison conditions, it is clear in retrospect that work in the Committees did constitute a rite of passage into the RAF for an astonishing number of future guerillas.
It is, of course, equally true that the overwhelming majority of those who were active in this scene never joined the guerilla, and while they remained operational, the Committees Against Torture always limited themselves to nonviolent forms of protest and popular education.
Before long, they got their first opportunity for such public activity: on May 8, 1973—the anniversary of the defeat of the Third Reich—sixty prisoners throughout the Federal Republic began a second hunger strike. The Committees stepped up their activities, organizing for lawyers to engage in a solidarity hunger strike and holding a demonstration outside the Federal Court in Karlsruhe.2
The Committees’ most significant event occurred on May 11, when they held a teach-in where several high-profile supporters spoke out against isolation torture. Heinz Brandt, an official from the IG Metall trade union, described the isolation conditions that the prisoners were subjected to as even worse than what he had suffered during four years in a Nazi concentration camp:
As crass and paradoxical as it may sound, my experiences with strict, radical isolation were worse than my time… in a Nazi concentration camp… [I]n the camp, I still had the bases for human life, namely, communication with my fellow inmates… We were able in the camps to see, not only outrageously fascistic and sadistic mistreatment, but also the possibilities of resistance and collective life among the prisoners, and, with this, for the fulfillment of the fundamental need of a human being: social existence.3
Dutch psychologist Dr. Sjef Teuns described isolation and sensory deprivation as programmed torture. Dr. Christian Sigrist, who had worked alongside anticolonial freedom fighters in Africa, described the West German torture system as part of the worldwide counterstrategy against anti-imperialist combatants.
This last point was certainly as important to the prisoners as the former two. The RAF viewed human rights campaigns as being worse than useless; indeed, they viewed such humanitarianism as an attack on their fundamental principles. When Red Aid had put out leaflets accusing the state of denying the prisoners’ basic human rights, Baader had angrily objected that, “Because our comrades are half-dead they can’t think we’re anything else ourselves. They’re twisting the thing the same way the pigs twist it worldwide: Violence is taboo…”4
Similarly, Baader would later find it necessary to criticize defense attorney Otto Schily in this regard:
We certainly can’t agree with the argument regarding torture as it is developed by Schily in his petition […] In reacting to revolutionary politics, the state does not know what to do except torture, and in doing so it exposes itself as an imperialist state. The indignation of degenerate bourgeois antifascism only masks this. The latter is already so weak, corrupted by social democracy, and locked in revisionism, that it can no longer express itself in a meaningful way.5
On May 24, 1973, fourteen days into the second hunger strike, the prison authorities began withholding water from Baader, despite a court decision two days earlier forbidding such tactics, as even short term water deprivation under a doctor’s supervision can seriously damage one’s health.1 Indeed, after several days without water and in critical condition—suffering kidney pains, a sore throat, and difficulty seeing—Baader was forced to end his hunger strike. Apparently pleased with their success, the authorities targeted Bernhard Braun next, attempting to have him placed in the so-called “dry cell,” but his lawyer managed to intervene and have this blocked.2
The hunger strike continued until June 29, when the District Court in Karlsruhe ordered the release from isolation of two prisoners.3 (Although accounts are vague on this point, there is some indication that the two were former SPK members Carmen Roll and Siegfried Hausner.)4
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Yet, soon after these two prisoners had their conditions relaxed for health reasons, another RAF prisoner was effectively sentenced to death by medical neglect.
Katharina Hammerschmidt had fled to France in 1971, but when the May Offensive had ended in a wave of arrests, she had turned herself in, returning to face the relatively minor charges relating to her having located safehouses for the guerilla. Despite the fact that she had surrendered voluntarily, she was remanded to the West Berlin Women’s Prison while awaiting her trial.
In August 1973, Hammerschmidt underwent a routine medical exam, which included some x-rays. These revealed an abnormal growth in her chest, but the prison doctors took no steps to evaluate whether this was benign or malignant. In fact, they did not even inform her of the results.5
In September, Hammerschmidt began to complain of intense pain in her chest and throat. She had difficulty breathing and it hurt to swallow, yet the prison doctors simply told her that if the symptoms continued, more x-rays would be taken in another three months.
Press Release from Baader’s Lawyers
Even though Baader was doing well, at noon on May 22, 1973, the prison doctor, Dr. Degenhardt from Kassel, came to his cell with a squad of ten guards in order to force him to swallow a solution through a tube as thick as of one’s thumb. Three times Baader requested a spoon so that he could take the solution on his own. Despite this fact, the doctor ordered the guards to hold him down. Pinching his nose, he then forced the tube into his mouth, down his throat and into his digestive tract. Baader vomited and almost suffocated. The tube opened up his throat and his digestive tract and he vomited blood. After this torture Dr. Degenhardt gave him three intravenous injections and he then lost consciousness for eight hours.