The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  The prisoners say that in the legal vacuum of these proceedings, the lawyers are like chickens with their heads cut off. They are no match for the pragmatism, military in its precision, which extends over the whole repressive legal structure, from the government to the lawless terror of state security—just as was the case in 1933.

  Either one sides with the prisoners’ politics, the anti-imperialist struggle—because the persecution of the lawyers is also part of the struggle to eliminate these politics—or one succumbs to the repression. Some become opportunists, submitting themselves to the directives and threats that are present in each of these trials, where they function to prevent attempts to clarify the facts and organize solidarity. Others pull back, take flight, or fall silent, sometimes going so far as to no longer present the line that was developed by the defense team long ago.

  Jan’s lawyer, in a state of psychological distress, resigned from his mandate in the current Stammheim trial at the very moment when the key defense motion was to be presented—the basis for resistance in human rights law and for the application of prison conditions as mandated for prisoners of war in the Geneva Convention.1 He had worked on it for three years. The evidentiary motion had as its theme the opposition to the Vietnam War between 67 and 72 and the political conclusions the RAF had arrived at as a result.

  This means that the threat of the Disciplinary Committee, that is to say, the threat of the Berufsverbot, has caused these lawyers to abandon their professional principles and duties, it has prevented them from struggling to assure the minimum level of human rights for their clients, all in order to avoid risking their own position within the legal profession. The heightened repression has brought them back in line; they accept the dismantling of the defendants’ rights. It’s grotesque. As political lawyers, they are, therefore, completely corrupt.

  Besides the barriers with which the BAW has institutionally—through parliament, the courts, the board of the Bar Association, the LAWs, the law schools, etc.—made it difficult to accept a mandate in these proceedings, it has become almost impossible to find lawyers who are prepared to come to Stammheim. Fear reigns.

  The confiscation of 90% of the files—over 1,000 file folders—is part of this mix of terror and fear. The suppression of the evidentiary files was necessary in order to be able to actually charge the prisoners. It is part of determining the outcome. Besides, the selective use of files is necessary for the BAW’s ringleader construct. But, above all, the publication of the files would shed light on the manhunt that occurred between 1970 and 1972, the extent of the police investigation, and the size of the police apparatus, of which one is aware—the government continually crows about it—but which one cannot visualize.

  “One thinks away from it,” filmmaker Kluge2 recently said, and rightly so. The Bonn Security Group, with the Verfassungsschutz, the BND, the Military Counter-Intelligence Service, and the CIA, investigated the entire West German left, which, as a result, is now fully identified and within the grasp of state security. They have monitored telephones all the way to the top of the ministerial bureaucracy,3 spied on people, and sown suspicion. Trade unions, party youth sections, writers, journalists, and ministers were spied on. Were the files to become public, people would see how much control the police have over society and the state, the degree of mistrust and insecurity, the massive lack of legitimacy. Seeing this, they would see how fragile the consensus is within the state, this state that lacks national identity and legitimacy, this state inflamed by its chauvinism and its dependency on the U.S.A. It would be public incitement to resistance.

  Q: The mass media in the FRG more or less ignores the trial. Before the trial began, there were a series of press campaigns against the RAF, the defense attorneys, and sympathizers. Is this the result of psychological warfare?

  A: The total synchronization of the mass media is a prerequisite for this police trial. Buback prepared a judicial press conference for the BAW in Karlsruhe; institutional press conferences are normally only held by the federal government and Länder bodies. They are an instrument for what is called “offensive information,” which is another expression of information policy making use of police tactics. At the same time, Buback also has a network of state security journalists at his disposal in the media, in the corporate editorial boards, and in the public institutions, who ensure that the trial is not simply ignored. The reports that appear are all similarly structured. Never a word of what the prisoners say. The defense line is falsified, with the result that witnesses’ testimony is twisted around to mean the opposite of what was said.

  For example, the fact that the witness Hoff is completely discredited doesn’t appear in the newspapers. Hoff’s appearance had been trumpeted by the BAW in a press campaign that lasted months, his testimony was described as crucial to establishing the facts. What was published was that he, speaking for the government, denied the testimony of another witness who unmasked him. Hoff was a militant from the Frankfurt scene who was involved in the SDS at the time of the student movement between 67 and 71, and who had worked for the Algerian liberation movement in the early 60s. In prison he was bribed with promises and turned. Now he stammers exactly what state security has trained him to say, none of which confirms what the BAW has been claiming through press headlines for the past six months. The joke was that he really couldn’t incriminate Andreas. But on that day when he admitted in Stammheim that he could not even identify Andreas, all the German press printed that he had identified him.

  There are also a couple of dozen other examples from significant points during the trials. For example, it was reported in the media that the prisoners had taken responsibility for the attack on the Springer Building. In fact, they had, in their explanation about the attacks against the U.S. Headquarters in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, expressly stated that they didn’t know about the attack on the Springer Building and did not approve of it conceptually.1 But these are only details. What one had with Hoff was a programmed, brainwashed police recording, not a high point, but a pile of shit.

  One must understand what happened. Hoff had so thoroughly memorized the testimony that had been formulated by the investigating judge that every time the word “pause” appeared in the transcript, because his dinner came or whatever, he came to a standstill. On the other hand, he could not repeat a single sentence from the transcript. He did not understand the content of his testimony. One could read along and see how he got stuck in a passage and was only able to get past the pauses with his lawyer’s help, and at other times had to be stopped. A macabre spectacle. Prinzing treated him obsequiously and assiduously. He was accompanied 24 hours a day by a “psychological caretaker” from the BKA, and during the breaks in the trial he went over his lines with his BKA interrogators. On the other hand, the BAW immediately threatened witnesses who disputed Hoff’s story with the complete disruption of their lives: Berufsverbot and the withdrawal of their passports. The trial is a government operation, and so the coverage is seamless propaganda, completely structured by the government.

  A comparison to the Third Reich’s Reichsschrifttumkammer2 or the Volksgerichtshof3 reporting is accurate. The only difference is that the forms of manipulation have now been perfected; the instruments of psychological warfare are more difficult to see through than the fascist propaganda of that time.

  Q: What attitude do the democratic and anticapitalist forces in the FRG have towards the RAF trial?

  A: The left is afraid. The small, subversively-inclined groups push away the trial. They know it’s their trial, that in the end it’s the Vietnam opposition of the 60s which is to be liquidated. They know that state security’s psychological war against the RAF, in which the trials play a role and Stammheim is the key, is directed against all opposition, and, as such, against them as well. And the terror is effective. They agonize. They are angry, but stick their heads in the sand.

  It’s gone so far that Informationsdienst, which published, in the Federal Republic, the names of a fe
w CIA agents from the U.S. embassy in Bonn, does not dare to publish prisoners’ texts that have already been read in public. Of the Maoist groups, the KBW has at least criticized the trial from a legal point of view. They don’t understand that the violations of the law, the legalization of isolation torture by the Federal Supreme Court and the Federal Constitutional Court are signs of war and fascism. With their stupid dogmatism, they misrepresent the prisoners’ politics and defend democratic rights, which were never real in the Federal Republic, and which are embedded in the Constitution only as a vehicle for anticommunism. But that doesn’t work for the state apologists who define themselves according to Lenin’s organizational model or according to the pre-party formation model.

  The KPD and the KPD/ML, as Maoists, are entirely submissive to Peking. They openly support the U.S. military strategy; the strengthening of NATO and the Bundeswehr so as to entrench the hegemony of West German imperialism in Western Europe. Defense of the Fatherland. The RAF thinks otherwise: they attacked the U.S. presence in the Federal Republic and the politics of the Brandt/Scheel and Schmidt/Genscher governments, which served the interests of U.S. capital in the Federal Republic, that strategic sub-center of U.S. imperialism. One cannot regret the fact that these sects ignore the trial, given that the reactionary content of their political practice makes their anti-imperialist rhetoric purely abstract.

  For as long as it has existed, the DKP has been licking the boots of social democracy. They are doubtless the most corrupt communist party, at least in Western Europe. As far as I know, one thing that has contributed to this—and this is why, for example, Ulrike, who had previously fulfilled important functions for the illegal KPD, broke with them—is the way in which this party began to adjust its political line to accommodate the SPD so as to facilitate its legalization.

  The problem is the overall depoliticization of the left. In fact, at no time during the campaign against the Berufsverbot was the question of the state addressed; what sort of state it is and whose state it is that the left is publicly sanitizing. The left, claiming a strategic perspective, began the march through the institutions in 68—although the ambivalence as to whether “a revolutionary career perspective” was not simply another term for “an official’s salary” was already apparent at the time. The hue and cry about the Berufsverbot disguised their objective. State security must preserve the entire civil service so as to—and this is the case in the trials—shift the whole institution to the right. The extremely aggressive way in which they pursue this objective, without running up against any resistance, is a function of the postfascist state in the Federal Republic. Part of this is the structure of the state and its unbroken continuity with the Third Reich, which includes the political hygiene practiced through the eradication of opposition between 33 and 45, and after 45 the gagging, paralyzing, and integrating of the groups emerging from illegality, groups which had been corrupted in exile and which were eventually brought under the control of the U.S. occupying power, the CIA, etc. during the Cold War.

  The qualitative leaps which take place as fascism develops have not been grasped. Not so long ago even Amnesty International, an active anticommunist organization, or anti-Soviet in any event, that acts primarily in a way that is supportive of the FRG, complained that people no longer dare to sign petitions opposing torture in Latin America and South East Asia out of fear of being registered with the Verfassungsschutz. And they will be registered. The fear is well founded.

  The full extent of the problem is apparent in the process of adopting a new Verfassungsschutz law in Lower Saxony. Almost all other Länder already have such a law, in accord with the principles issued centrally by the Interior Ministers Conference. The law decrees that all employees and officials of the civil service and radio and TV corporations have a duty to provide information to the Verfassungsschutz. At the same time, the BKA, equipped with the largest database in the world, is screening the entire left. What is taking place is, in practice, the almost complete control and registration of the political scene in the Federal Republic, which is a more far-reaching process than the physical internment that has taken place in Chile. The political climate resembles that which follows a fascist putsch. Accordingly, panic rules.

  The fact that the guerilla and the prisoners from the RAF do not have this problem of fear is the result of having a political coherence that has its political history, but not its political center, in the Federal Republic. Its identity is international.

  If the fascist drift is to be understood at all in the Federal Republic, then it will be understood through the guerilla struggle. The guerilla struggle tempers the demoralization of the left, allowing one to develop a self-critical relationship with one’s own corruption; and it does that through Stammheim, through the prisoners’ struggle, and through resistance. However, within this state, the fact that the enormous repression in the prisons has not broken the prisoners has very little impact on the overall depoliticization of this left.

  Q: What is the significance of the RAF trials in the current political and economic situation in the FRG?

  A: The prisoners say the trials are irrelevant. State security is in total control of the terrain. The trials are thoroughly preprogrammed. One must fight because one must always fight, but the machine demonstrates that nothing can be achieved at this level. But the procedural measures, including the dressing up of military methods and goals as the rituals of normal criminal proceedings, are an organic expression of the break in U.S. capital’s strategy since its defeat in Vietnam. The intensity of the whole thing indicates the defensive position of U.S. capital and the resistance to its strategy since Vietnam.

  Within the FRG, the trials are meant to accustom the population to the State of Emergency, so that it is accepted as normal and those who resist can be destroyed. That is the lesson state security hopes to impart with these trials. And at home, it works. Abroad, it doesn’t. Abroad, the exceptional character of repression in the FRG has been recognized, and the government’s domestic policies, which in the FRG are always a function of U.S. foreign policy—that has been the strategic function of the FRG for American capital since 45, or at least since its founding in 1949—are recognized as dysfunctional.

  This is exactly what social democracy is meant to hide: the fact that today, serving the interests of international U.S. capital, West German imperialism is no different than the old fascism—this time without a reactionary mass mobilization, but rather as an institutional state strategy (over which U.S. capital has total control). This only became clear in the state’s reaction to the politics of the RAF.

  The prisoners say the preventive counterrevolution only makes sense when its relationship to the global system is considered: the repression within the state is a function of the strategic role the FRG plays for American capital. Just as its strategic operations in Europe and in the Common Market are a function of U.S. capital’s defensive action in the Third World, as are those in the Mediterranean states of Europe and North Africa which are meant to secure military control of Middle Eastern oil—by assuring the existence of counterrevolutionary forces, which they control in these states. In this global system, the legal attacks on anti-imperialist politics in the FRG have political relevance, because they completely unmask social democracy. The RAF was clear that this was how it would unfold and that the SPD was the transmission belt of the new fascism. The RAF analyzed and anticipated this development long before it became obvious to world opinion in Portugal.1

  Brandt wrote in a letter to Palme:2 “Social democratic politics anticipate catastrophe so as to prevent it.”

  The RAF says that the strategic project of U.S. imperialism that is carried through by German social democracy and the Socialist International3 represents the smooth unfolding of the fascist drift within civilian state structures. This is the “unique nature” of their relationship. Here in a social democratic police state, that with socialist rhetoric and through the usurping of the old antifascism is celebrated
as Modell Deutschland, this policy was forced to take an extremely developed form. That this was due to a social revolutionary guerilla representing positions held by a tiny minority has nothing to do with provocation. The armed struggle here has a tactical quality—it is a factor which clarifies reality and represents the only option for proletarian resistance to the reactionary integration of Western Europe, which the U.S. is pushing through using West German social democracy.

  On this topic, a statement from the prisoners:

  The entire discussion turns on this perspective. Mediated by the political-military attack, the repressive structuring of the entire capitalist machine becomes central to the system, and in this way the response to its decisive crisis is already anticipated.

  Through the attack, capital’s internal strategy is certainly and simultaneously disrupted by the obligation to react. They must mobilize their forces and dialectically this provokes an overall understanding of resistance that includes the concept of revolution. An experience and an understanding of imperialism in the metropole reveals the clear necessity for fundamental opposition, both nationally and internationally. And it also develops a strategic line: the internationalism of the guerilla as the form of proletarian politics that is antagonistic to capitalist development in the context of the class war.