by J. Smith
Then, with teeth bared: we’re “mistaken,” with “foolish ideas,” which have “totally overshadowed our relationships and experiences”—this is the babble of psycho-cops; we have only ourselves to blame if we’re isolated (“…you have isolated yourselves…”)—the Federal Constitutional Court said the same thing in their ruling, in which they legally sanctioned torture; and finally—and this is consistent—we are “throwing away our lives”—which is an endorsement of the state’s claim that Ulrike committed suicide—as with the deaths of Holger, Siegfried, and Katharina, who are “themselves responsible.”
In Müller’s case, it took state security three years using isolation, torture, and brainwashing to bring him to the point where he presented this idiotic SS1 construct as his own experience—also precisely on the theme chosen here: the structure of the group. These leftists arrive at these conclusions on their own, facing no concrete threat, just their own naked fear. Their solidarity with us could cost them the ridiculous privileges that they cultivate in their idyllic counterculture.
One must also understand the method adopted in this letter, with its introduction and explanation about why it was written now, or rather why it wasn’t written sooner (“an unrealistically hostile response—objective cop/state security action”) which is meant to suggest that this letter can in no way be that, and which thereby pre-empts any critique which says that that is in fact exactly what it is.
Given the way the letter is constructed, precisely following the pattern and techniques of psychological warfare, it is possible that it is not only objectively a state security product.
Monika Berberich
January 10, 1977
Andreas Baader: On the Geneva Convention
The demand for the application of the Geneva Convention is a necessary vehicle for our politics, because the dead wings, isolation, and stress manipulation are being used to break the group in prison, to prepare for show trials, and to gain information, or more accurately, to gain informants. It has been clear since 72, when, for example, Schmidt said in a government statement that the goal of the countertactic is to use prisoners who have been turned to infiltrate the illegal structures. It is clear that this is easier in prison, where state security and the state security psychiatrists have total control over our living conditions, and where electronic surveillance is easier than it is in the scene, which can respond to repression with semi-conspiratorial measures and a system of filters, which set in motion a process of polarization.
There is a history of illegal resistance groups and there is a history of police tactics. If we don’t understand the latter, and if we don’t recognize them in the measures against us, we will be defeated by the old reality that the police apparatus has a linear learning process and the illegal groups learn by acting, learning in leaps and bounds.
We don’t believe that this demand on the part of the prisoners will be achieved. We’ve never said that we did. What will be achieved is that the demand will raise awareness and resistance against the international counterinsurgency line in West Europe, which has now become government policy: the criminalization of the urban guerilla (ISC Report2). In any event, what the guerilla is addressing here and what it is struggling for is international awareness. Everything must be concentrated on exposing and disrupting the American strategy in West Europe, which is being carried through by the scripted domestic and foreign policies of the FRG.
None of that is new. The weapons used against the prisoners aren’t all bad, because the aggressive way in which they use special laws, special courts, special handling, all the special measures in this trial to destroy us, while at the same time denying that they are doing so, will expose the system internationally and will isolate it.
By publicizing these measures, which are forbidden by the Geneva Convention (because it is a set of rules for emergency situations that establishes how human rights should be understood in intra-state conflicts, which the discourse no longer addresses) people will be mobilized and radicalized around the critical issue: that the state is at war (which Maihofer made very clear in Karlsruhe) and, therefore, is in a dialectic that—because war frames the question of legitimacy along military lines—destroys the ideological justification of the constitutional state itself.
All of this is about this process and not just a tattered piece of paper. Through it runs the horizontal and vertical learning and polarization process, which is necessary for the struggle to develop. It is the terrain on which we can very concretely organize our logistics, our information, and the defense of our underground members and the prisoners.
POW status on its own will never be enough to protect against the coercive psychological and spiritual destruction of the “irregulars”—and if it is ever forced through, it will not be because the prisoners can force the state to exercise its monopoly of violence according to the legal rules of civil war, but as a result of the international character and concrete reality of the liberation wars, which also address these demands.
Andreas Baader
June 2, 1977
13
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win
NINETEEN SEVENTY SEVEN IS OFTEN described as the moment of truth in the RAF’s battle against the West German state—for better or for worse. In fact, most histories of the RAF actually stop after this point, or mention all that came afterwards as a barely interesting epilogue.
Such a perspective is mistaken, and amounts to closing the book before the story is even half done. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that 1977 was a year like no other, representing an attempt to push things to a qualitatively higher level. As events reached their climax in a bloody series of events known as “The German Autumn,” every sector of society was shaken to the core.
As debate over the RAF’s struggle played itself out in the pages of Info-BUG, state psychological operations continued unabated in the corporate press. Newspapers repeated police allegations that RAF supporters had murdered a banker, his wife and three children, and also that the guerilla was planning to kidnap the Canadian ambassador.1 In January, police claimed they found and defused a bomb at the Weisbaden train station, presumably another false flag attack.2
Then, on February 9, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who had been captured following the May Offensive, was released from prison: her four-and-a-half-year sentence for illegal possession of firearms1 and membership in a criminal association had come to an end. She immediately went underground, rejoining the guerilla.
On March 29, prisoners from the RAF and the 2nd of June Movement began their fourth hunger strike, demanding POW status, association in groups of no less than fifteen, an end to isolation, an international investigation into the deaths of Holger Meins, Siegfried Hausner, and Ulrike Meinhof, and an end to false flag actions and communiqués. Initially, thirty-five prisoners participated, but soon the number refusing food surpassed one hundred, and some even began refusing liquids.
The irony was that the hunger strike for POW status, which the RZ had feared would limit itself to an elite group, managed to rally more prisoners than any previous hunger strike. This was grim testimony to the number of combatants who had been captured, along with the number of supporters who were now serving time under §129.
At the same time, the guerilla was not going to let the prisoners wage this battle on their own.
On April 7, as Attorney General Buback was waiting at a traffic light in Karlsruhe, two individuals pulled up on a motorcycle alongside his Mercedes. One of them then pulled out a submachine gun and fired, riddling the Attorney General’s car with bullets.
Siegfried Buback, the man who had come to personify the judicial attacks against the guerilla, had been assassinated.
The RAF immediately issued a communiqué claiming responsibility in the name of the “Ulrike Meinhof Commando” explaining Buback’s responsibility for the deaths of Meinhof, Hausner, and Meins.
Along with the Attorney General, his chauffeur Wolfgang Göbel and bodyguard Georg Wu
rster were also killed. Even some of the prisoners’ own lawyers were shocked, Otto Schily declaring on their behalf that they viewed “this senseless and brutal murder with the utmost horror and revulsion.”2
Within a day, police announced that Günter Sonnenberg, Christian Klar, and Knut Folkerts (all of whom were formerly active in the prisoner support scene) were being sought in connection to the attack, and a bounty of 200,000 marks3 was being offered for information leading to their capture.4
This assassination occurred not only in the context of Buback’s continuing attacks against the lawyers, but also two weeks before the end of the Stammheim show trial in which Baader, Ensslin and Raspe were found guilty of various offenses relating to the May Offensive of 1972.
As has been noted elsewhere:
This attack marked a shift to a strategy that would be marked by an overwhelming focus on assassinations of key members of the state apparatus and the business elite. Although this might not have been recognized at the time, it was a shift to an entirely new phase in the RAF’s practice.5
Or, as Knut Folkerts later testified, the assassination “showed that we knew who they were, that we could attack them, and that there was nothing they could do to stop us.”6
The hunger strike continued, the prisoners consolidating their support. Soon relatives of the prisoners began a solidarity hunger strike, and on April 17, Peter’s Church in Frankfurt was occupied and turned into a hunger strike information center. As the number of prisoners refusing food reached one hundred and twenty, more outside supporters began a second solidarity hunger strike in a Bielefeld Church. On April 27, relatives of political prisoners held a demonstration at the United Nations headquarters in Switzerland demanding the application of the Geneva Convention. The next day, Amnesty International added its voice to that of eighty clergymen and two hundred and forty-five lawyers, all urging the government to abandon its hard line.
Finally, on April 30, it was announced that the prisoners would be granted limited association. Years of struggle seemed to have finally paid off. In response to this victory the prisoners agreed to call off their hunger strike.
The seventh floor of Stammheim prison—where Baader, Raspe, and Ensslin were held along with Irmgard Möller, who had been transferred there in January of that year—was soon being renovated to allow up to sixteen prisoners to be housed together.
At the same time, the hunt for the guerillas in the field continued.
On May 3, Günter Sonnenberg and Verena Becker were captured in the German-Swiss border town of Singen. (In the two years since she had been freed in exchange for Lorenz, Becker had moved from 2JM to the RAF.) A woman had tipped off the police after spotting the two as they sat in a café: she recognized Sonnenberg from the wanted posters that had gone up throughout Western Europe following the Buback assassination.
When the police arrived on the scene, the guerillas tried to play it cool, innocently pretending to have left their ID papers in their car. While being escorted from the café—presumably to retrieve these phantom id papers—they drew their weapons and shot the two cops, commandeered a car, and took off.1 Pursued by squad cars alerted to the incident, they took a wrong turn and ended up in a field. This forced them to ditch their vehicle and try to escape on foot.
At this point, one of the guerillas dropped a submachine gun—as it would turn out, the same weapon that had been used to kill Buback. A cop picked the weapon up and fired: Becker was hit in her leg, while Sonnenberg was critically injured, struck by bullets in his torso and head. His wounds were such that it took several hours before he could be positively identified, and days later it was still unclear if he would survive.2
As a result of his injuries, Sonnenberg suffered brain damage, and is prone to epileptic seizures to this day. Years later, he would recall his condition following capture:
I didn’t know anything except my name. I could neither read nor write, nor formulate things in any form. Words and concepts were utterly foreign to me. Even things having to do with daily life—like plate and spoon, bed and sink, book and radio—I no longer knew these words and concepts.3
Two days later, on May 5, Uwe Folkerts (Knut’s brother) and Johannes Thimme were both arrested in Holland, the police claiming that they had been involved in the Buback assassination, as well as with alleged plans to seize hostages to exchange for the prisoners.4
Throughout the summer, different RAF prisoners would go back on hunger strike for various periods of time, demanding the association they had been promised.
At the same time, the state was not letting up on its attacks against the lawyers. In one particularly incredible move, attorneys Armin Newerla and Arndt Müller were charged with attempted murder on the grounds that they did not discourage their clients Verena Becker and Sabine Schmitz5 from hunger striking.6 On July 8, Klaus Croissant fled the country: on June 26 he had been subjected to a partial Berufsverbot, and there were signs he might be arrested at any time. Pieter Bakker Schut, Ronald Augustin’s Dutch attorney, suggested he go to the Netherlands, but Croissant chose Paris, where he held a press conference four days later, requesting political asylum.7 The lawyer pointed to the years of harassment he had endured, and noted that with the ongoing confrontation things were getting worse: he was facing a third arrest and, as he was now subjected to the Berufsverbot, could neither defend himself nor continue to defend his clients except from outside the country. His home, office, and telephone had all been bugged, and surrounding buildings were used for physical surveillance, which included state agents openly photographing everyone who entered his office. On December 15, 1976, one of his secretaries had been offered several thousand DM by the Verfassungsschutz in exchange for copies of legal notes and a list of his clients. Finally, he pointed to the fact that he was followed to and from his office by uniformed police, which he described as a form of psychological terrorism.8
As we shall see, while Croissant’s plea would raise international awareness about what was happening in the Federal Republic, it would not be sufficient to keep him safe. Nevertheless, for the time being he was allowed to remain in Paris, as the French authorities tried to decide how to handle the affair.
The next attack occurred on July 30 in the wealthy Frankfurt suburb of Oberursel. Three RAF members, including a young woman named Susanne Albrecht, came with red roses to the door of a thirty-room villa belonging to Jürgen Ponto.1 One of the most important businessmen in West Germany, Ponto had direct ties to many Third World governments and had served as an advisor to South Africa’s infamous apartheid regime. He was also godfather to Albrecht’s sister and a close friend of her parents.
The guerillas attempted to abduct the businessman, but when he resisted they opened fire, shooting him five times. He died on his kitchen floor.
As Albrecht had been recognized by Ponto’s wife, she signed her name to the guerilla’s communiqué for this action. She was sought for this attack along with Angelika Speitel, Silke Maier-Witt, and Siegrid Sternebeck. With the exception of Speitel, who had been underground for some years now, the women had all been active together since 1974, meeting through the Hamburg squats, Red Aid, and the Committees Against Torture. They had all known members of the Holger Meins Commando who had carried out the ill-fated Stockholm action in 1975. All four went underground immediately.
(A political storm ensued when it was learned that Ponto had never been warned that police knew Albrecht was close to the RAF. This led the FDP Federal Minister of the Interior Werner Maihofer to famously state that, “There is no capitalist who does not have a terrorist in his own intimate circle of friends or relations.”)2
On August 8, Helmut Pohl, Wolfgang Beer, and Werner Hoppe, who had been moved to be with the others in Stammheim just a month earlier, were transferred back to Hamburg. The precise excuse used was a “fight” with guards—essentially a set up whereby the guards provoked an incident and used it as an excuse to attack and beat all of the prisoners on the floor.3 It appeared that Buback’s
replacement, Kurt Rebmann, had moved to reverse his previous agreement for association.
In reaction to these shenanigans and to the attack on Ponto, all RAF prisoners went on hunger strike, some escalating to a thirst strike almost immediately.
It was only days before the force-feeding began.
Defense attorneys Newerla and Müller began organizing public support for the striking prisoners, and became subject to even heavier levels of harassment and outright repression. On August 15, the lawyers’ offices were bombed, almost certainly with the collusion of the police who had the premises under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Müller and assistant Volker Speitel were there at the time, but were not injured.4 Newerla was subsequently arrested when multiple copies of the left-wing magazine MOB which supported the prisoners were found in his car: he was charged with “supporting a terrorist organization” under §129a.5
The new Attorney General staked out the “hard-line” position for which he would be remembered. “I know that the population is not at all interested if these people go on hunger and thirst strikes,” Rebmann told the press. “The population wants these people to be hit hard, just as hard as they have earned with their brutal deed.”
He was asked about the possibility of prisoners dying. “That is always a bad thing,” he answered, “but it would be the consequence which has been made clear to them and their lawyers and which is clear to them. The conditions of imprisonment don’t justify such a strike; they are doing very well considering the circumstances.”6