The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  This is the case because of two coinciding factors:

  Nationally, it is the tactic of resistance against fascism in the form of the terrorist national security state.

  Internationally, in the strategic sub-centre of the U.S.A.—the Federal Republic—it serves an offensive function on behalf of the anti-imperialist liberation struggles.

  Naturally, this tactical understanding is also the line the prisoners are asserting at the trial, about which it is still possible to say:

  It is not enough to talk loudly about fascism—but presenting a defense at this trial makes sense if it clarifies the necessity and the possibility for armed resistance as a factor in political opposition here in the FRG—and this must be the case if it needs to be smashed as brutally as is the case in Stammheim.

  And one must add—if it weren’t for the RAF, what would anyone in France, Italy, Holland, or the Scandinavian states know about the reactionary role of social democracy in the Federal Republic?

  Q. Is there not a danger of a collective conviction of the accused, as the prosecution evidently has difficulty proving the guilt of each individual on the basis of the evidence? And how is your concept of the “principal guiding function” for the Stammheim trial to be understood?

  A. They were already convicted before the trial began, by the media hate campaign, by the prison conditions, by isolation, by sensory deprivation, by deprivation of water, by the attempt at a stereotactical intervention, by drugging during interrogation, etc.—and by statements made by the Chancellor during the parliamentary debates after the Stockholm action. State security murdered four prisoners in a single year: Holger Meins, Katharina Hammerschmidt, Siegfried Hausner, and Ulrike Meinhof. Meanwhile, isolation units have been built in about 15 prisons. There are not four, but about 120 prisoners who, in this context, are subjected to the same prison conditions, and, out of these 120, 4 have been selected to support the “ringleader” construct.

  In the last weeks before Ulrike’s murder, this treatment was focused on two of the prisoners, Andreas and Ulrike, as part of the psychological warfare strategy of personalizing revolutionary politics, and the policy of the intelligence services in all counterrevolutionary projects of cutting off the head.

  Andreas is the prisoner against whom state security concentrated their hate campaign, because he organized both the collective politics of the group, even in the situation of complete isolation in prison, and the all-out defensive strategy. When the trial began, he no longer had a lawyer and he faced three counts of attempted murder.

  Since 65, Ulrike had played a guiding ideological role for the revolutionary left in the Federal Republic. She was to be broken in the dead wing through white torture, pathologized, and eventually turned into a cretin with a brain operation, so as to be used in the trial as evidence against the RAF’s politics and against the broader anti-imperialist struggle in the FRG. Because the group struggled as a group, and we could still mobilize public opposition, this project had to be abandoned.

  Then Ulrike was killed—as on each previous occasion when a conflict with the prisoners came to a head and became public knowledge, a RAF cadre was executed:

  • Holger Meins, to break the hunger strike.

  • Siegfried Hausner, during the action in Stockholm to free the prisoners, when the embassy was blown up by the Hamburg MEK to conceal their entry. Siegfried led the group and laid the explosives. He could have proved that the explosion was caused by West German state security. State security knew this when they removed him from the hospital in Stockholm. In order to liquidate him, they chose not to bring him to a hospital, but rather to keep him completely out of the public eye—for example, a visit from his lawyer, which he had demanded—they brought him to Stammheim’s hermetically-sealed hospital ward—where, without qualified medical attention, he died.

  • Ulrike Meinhof, before the decisive intervention in the trial, by which the whole doctrine of the show trial was in danger of being turned against the BAW and the government.

  Since the latest guerilla attack against the U.S. Headquarters in Frankfurt,1 every day we must be prepared for the possibility that a prisoner may be murdered.

  All of the legal proceedings against RAF prisoners are part of one single focused operation. The decision of the BAW to organize the trials separately reflects the information they have. In a regional trial, in which the BAW had no business, a former federal prosecutor suddenly appeared to organize the prosecution’s strategy along the lines of the BAW’s principal guiding function. There is the example of the former Federal Prosecutor Kirsch, who turned the trial in Kaiserslautern into a vehicle for the hate campaign against Andreas.

  Stammheim’s principal guiding function is to set the tone for the entire judiciary. The Stammheim measures establish a legal vacuum in which all trials are expected to run smoothly, even those with less propaganda value, less manipulation of the facts, and less witness preparation.

  The Stammheim measures have a bottom-up effect. The court can and does proceed with the assumption that the higher authorities will sanction each of its measures. There is no appellate authority. The entire state—a monstrous counterinsurgency machine—stands behind the court.

  The prisoners do not deny their responsibility for the RAF’s attacks against the U.S. military installations in the Federal Republic or their policy of using military means against the U.S. genocide in Vietnam; not one RAF prisoner denies this. The defense strategy is to expose the role of the Federal Republic as a strategic sub-centre, and the fact that this role is both a necessary condition for and a function of the aggressive human rights violations and the belligerence of the U.S. war machine in Vietnam.

  The Federal Republic is totally integrated into U.S. foreign policy and military strategy, both actively and passively. The Federal Republic is a supply base, a training center, a troop transfer point, a centre for the U.S. electronics and logistics used in Vietnam, a staging point, and rear base area in the war against Vietnam. From this it follows conclusively that, since the failure and disintegration of the opposition to the Vietnam War, everyone in the Federal Republic had and has, under human rights law, the right to armed resistance. These prisoners are prisoners of war. Furthermore, when all means of protest against isolation torture available within this state have been exhausted, we must do what is necessary so that the prisoners are recognized as prisoners of war by the United Nations and the International Red Cross, and that, as a result, the prison conditions established in the Geneva Convention are applied.

  Naturally, the prisoners don’t deny that they were and are organized in the RAF, that they have struggled and still struggle as part of the RAF—if one can put it that way at this point—and that they have contributed to its analysis and strategy both conceptually and in practice.

  What the national security state hopes to achieve with Stammheim, false witnesses, the manipulation of files, and the totally obscure charges—because “joint responsibility” does not exist in the Criminal Code here—is a blatantly farcical conviction, in which the true dimensions of the confrontation are meant to be overshadowed by proving concrete participation in the actions. The goal of neutralizing the politics of the conflict in an underwater ballet of thousands of BKA experts is also, therefore, absurd, because, given the documents and the facts that are known to us, no criminal indictments are possible.

  Because the conflict is political, the state insists on understanding it in military terms: the moral, psychological, and physical extermination of “the enemy”—as Prinzing once let slip—at the level of criminalistics. What would be best in the view of the BAW would be one big high treason trial against all RAF prisoners. The clichéd elements of high treason—threatening the existence of the Federal Republic and its constitutional order by violence or threat of violence—are present in all the court decrees, charges, etc. against this group. But to do so would mean admitting that there exists fundamental political opposition within the Federal Republic and tha
t revolutionary politics are possible even in this state.

  That would not fit into the concept developed by social democracy. Their plan is to “quietly” and “decisively” maintain that the State of Emergency is the “normal state of affairs,” and they do this by all manner of manipulation, psychological warfare, repression, control, registration, police penetration of society and its social neutralization, and covert police actions. The normal state of affairs in the Federal Republic should be one in which there is no opposition to the presence of the U.S. military machine, U.S. capital, the state, or social democracy. That is wishful thinking, given that the RAF is a result of the politicization of the Vietnam opposition and of the proletarianization and declassing that occurred in the 60s, and which led to an offensive break with the legality of the imperialist state.

  Stammheim, where a mass of falsified and fabricated criminal details are meant to undermine the political content of the confrontation, makes it clear what the issue is in the Federal Republic: fascism. The filthy, old political machine we know so well, in a new and more monstrous form—no longer as a function of national monopoly capitalism, but as part of the globalization of U.S. capital.

  The prisoners say that it is because of the strategic function that the Federal Republic plays for U.S. capital that the urban guerilla can destabilize things here—and it makes no difference how small a minority they are. Their strategy clarifies why it is extremely difficult to develop a revolutionary position in the Federal Republic, as well as why it is necessary to do so. That it is possible has been proven in the six years since the first action.

  11

  Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Left… (an intermission of sorts)

  IN 1976, THE RAF REMAINED a recognized part of the revolutionary left. Years of psychological operations may have seriously compromised it in the eyes of liberals and the general public, but the state had failed to completely isolate it despite all its efforts to do so. The group benefited from sympathy in some quarters, and a smaller number of people even found its struggle inspirational.

  Yet, the left itself was changing; the RAF, with its core cadre in prison and its supporters focused almost solely on their release, was not in a position to follow these developments as closely as it should have.

  With the collapse of the APO, many leftists turned towards the Social Democrats, the SPD acquiring over 200,000 new members between 1969 and 1974.1 For all the youthful exuberance of the sixties movement, in the end, many students had been integrated into the system. The situation only worsened, the SPD’s drift to the right accelerating in 1974 when an espionage scandal forced Brandt to relinquish the Chancellor’s office to Helmut Schmidt.

  Nevertheless, throughout the 1970s, the numbers of people organizing politically outside of the establishment continued to grow, albeit in a less culturally spectacular way than in the preceding decade.

  THE K-GROUPS

  As we have already seen, the APO as it had existed was incapable of rising to the challenge posed by the Social-Liberal Coalition, and many of those who retained their radical opposition to capitalism found themselves joining one of the many newly-founded Marxist-Leninist organizations, the K-groups. These had much in common with other new communist parties which sprang up throughout the western world at this time, combining an enthusiastic (if somewhat unhealthy) esprit de corps with a more conservative approach to political organizing. As elsewhere, Maoism in the FRG peaked in the first half of the 1970s, declining rapidly near the end of the decade.

  As the years wore on, some of these Marxist-Leninist organizations would develop positions reminiscent of the postwar KPD’s “patriotic communism.” The Bavaria-based Arbeiterbund, for instance, held that the German nation was divided and oppressed by both U.S. imperialism and Soviet “social imperialism,” and thus advanced the troublesome slogan, “Germany to the Germans.”

  The RAF’s insistence that West Germany was itself an oppressor nation, and that even its working class constituted a labor aristocracy, would contrast sharply with this.

  “Forward in the struggle for the rights of the working class and the people—Forward in the struggle for the victory of socialism”

  The K-groups could not be expected to offer any substantial support to the RAF given their opposition to guerilla activities in the First World, which most of them perceived as adventurist and even counterrevolutionary. Perhaps of equal importance, their “anti-revisionist” trajectory and uncritical support for China’s foreign policy led many Maoists to oppose those national liberation movements in the Third World which received aid from the East Bloc countries. Eventually, some K-groups would even go so far as to support the same anticommunist guerillas that the United States was backing at the time.

  Despite these differences, certain K-groups—notably the KPD/ML—did offer important and much appreciated support to the prisoners during their third hunger strike in 1974.

  THE SPONTIS AND THE REVOLUTIONARY CELLS

  If the K-groups represented one answer to the APO’s shortcomings, other militants, especially those who remained based in the universities and the counterculture, had set out on a very different trajectory. Anarchism, anti-vanguardist Marxism, and even simple “actionism” revealing a bias against any political theory, combined and fed into the sponti scene. These activists placed great store in the politicization of everyday life, and one’s personal liberation from authoritarian institutions—a process which they felt could only be made possible in spaces freed from capitalist domination. Later in the decade, parts of this scene would be instrumental in spreading the ideas of autonomist communism from Italy to the Federal Republic.

  In the early seventies, the spontis lead militant squatters’ movements in Frankfurt and Hamburg, although these were unfortunately unable to survive repeated police attacks. More than one RAF member came out of these squatting scenes1 that during their brief existence played a role similar to that of the communes in the APO days, providing spaces where people could create their own cultures and relationships while being pulled in a militant direction by the very fact that they were living in illegal conditions.

  Poster for a sponti demonstration: “The LHG Struggles Against the Education Factory”

  In 1974, the movement acquired its own national newspaper, Info-BUG,2 based in West Berlin. The other important newspaper associated with the spontis was Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s Pflasterstrand, founded in 1976 and based in Frankfurt. Informationsdienst, more radical than Pflasterstrand and also with a broader appeal, was yet another regular movement publication that had been coming out of that city since 1973.

  The spontis formed the radical edge of the undogmatic left, and of all the various non-guerilla scenes, they were closest to the RAF. As a result of their squatting experiences, the Frankfurt scene in particular had had to develop a capacity to defend itself from the police, and had even built up a fighting squad, the Putz Group,1 whose job it was to take on the cops at demos. In regular training sessions, the Putz members practiced stone-throwing, one-on-one combat, unarresting comrades, and, according to some accounts, the use of molotov cocktails. As one former member recalled, “We had the complete gear that the cops had, except for guns.”2

  According to one historian of the period, there was a great deal of overlap and cross-pollination between the spontis and squats and the circles in which the guerillas and their supporters moved.3 Perhaps for this precise reason, the most acrimonious debate over armed politics occurred within this scene.

  Shortly after Holger Meins’ death in 1974, the organization Revolutionary Struggle, led by Cohn-Bendit and his friend Joschka Fischer, had joined with the squatting council and other sponti groups to issue a declaration of unambiguous solidarity with the guerilla.4 Shortly afterwards, however, Revolutionary Struggle issued another statement, “Mass-Militancy vs. the Guerilla,” meant to initiate debate over the most appropriate use of political violence in the scene and questioning the logic of clandestine armed struggle.5

>   At the same time, another guerilla organization had formed which represented the politics and practice of the sponti scene far better than the RAF: this was the Revolutionary Cells, or RZ.

  The RZ’s first actions were carried out in November 1973, two months after a CIA-backed coup had toppled the socialist Allende government in Chile. On the weekend of November 16 and 17, bombs went off at the offices of an ITT subsidiary in both West Berlin and Nuremberg, causing over $200,000 in damages.6

  A communiqué explained:

  The Revolutionary Cells claim responsibility for the attack on the ITT branches in Berlin and Nuremberg on November 16 and 17, 1973. We attacked the ITT branches, because ITT is responsible for the torture and murder of women, workers, and peasants.

  As early as 1971, ITT wanted, with the help of the then head of the CIA, McCone, who also sat on ITT’s Board of Directors, to prevent Allende’s electoral victory, using ITT’s own domestic politics section, the news services, and the counterintelligence services, while, of course, supported by the mass murderer Nixon. Towards this end, ITT provided the CIA with 1 million dollars. ITT allowed the assassination of the much-loved General Schneider, so as to provoke a putsch. This was unsuccessful, because the Chilean people knew that they had to fight for their freedom and that the ruling class would use all the means at its disposal to oppress the people—the capitalist system—they don’t give a shit how many people must die in the process.7

  These were the opening salvos of one of West Germany’s most interesting, and least known, guerilla groups.

  Dubbed “the after work guerillas,” the RZ adopted a very different approach from either the RAF or the 2JM. Anybody could carry out an action within the context of the RZ’s politics—defined as anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and “supporting the struggles of workers, wimmin and youth”8—and claim it as an RZ action. In line with this, the Cells did not field underground militants, but rather advised comrades to maintain their “legal” existence while carrying out clandestine armed activities. Finally, the group’s domestic wing purposefully stopped short of carrying out lethal attacks, the sole fatality during their entire nineteen-year existence being a politician who bled out when an RZ cell knee-capped him in 1981. (The group subsequently issued a communiqué explaining that they had not meant to kill him.)