The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  As detailed in Section 6, Black September: A Statement from Behind Bars, much has been made of an article which appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on December 15, 1972, entitled “Ulrike Meinhof läßt sich nur die Stichwort geben.”

  In order to allow readers to judge the rendition in the CIA funded Encounter magazine, we have reprinted the last section of this article in German, alongside our own version and George Watson’s:

  FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG

  “Ohne dass wir das deutsche Volk vom Faschismus freisprechen—denn die Leute haben ja wirklich nicht gewußt, was in den Konzentrationslagern vorging –, können wir es nicht für unseren revolutionären Kampf mobilisieren”, sagt sie. Die Linke sei nach dem Krieg in bezug auf den Faschismus “fahrlässig dumm und dreist vorgegangen. Man habe die Personen in den Vordergrund gerückt, aber nicht tiefer geblickt. “Wie war Auschwitz möglich, was war Antisemitismus?” Das hätte man damals klären müssen, anstatt gemeinsam Auschwitz als Ausdruck des Bösen zu verstehen, meint Ulrike Meinhof.

  “Das Schlimmste ist, dass wir uns alle Kommunisten und andre, darin einig waren.” Doch jetzt hat sie erkannt, dass Antisemitismus in seinem Wesen antikapitalistisch sei. Er mache sich den Haß der Menschen auf ihre Abhängigkeit vom Geld als Tauschmittel, ihre Sehnsucht nach dem Kommunismus zu eigen.

  “Auschwitz heißt, daß sechs Millionen Juden ermordet und auf die Müllkippen Europas gekarrt wurden als das, als was man sie ausgab—als Geldjuden.” Finanzkapital und Banken, “der harte3 Kern des Systems” des Imperialismus und Kapitalismus, Hätten den Haß der Menschen auf das Geld und die Ausbeutung von sich ab und auf die Juden gelenkt. Diese Zusammenhänge nicht deutlich gemacht zu haben, sei das Versagen der Linken, der Kommunisten gewesen.

  Die Deutschen waren antisemitisch, also sind sie heute Anhänger der RAF. Sie wissen es nur nicht, weil man vergessen hat, sie vom Faschismus, vom Judenmord, freizusprechen und ihnen zu sagen, dass Antisemitismus eigentlich Haß auf Kapitalismus ist. In der Tat eine bemerkenswerte Erklärung für das Scheitern der “Baader-Mahler-Meinhof-Gruppe“, die sich Ulrike Meinhof da zurechtgezimmert hat. Dadurch ist es möglich, auch den Münchener Anschlag des “Schwarzen September” zu preisen. Sie fühle eine “historische Identität” mit den Juden im Warschauer Getto, die waffenlos einen Aufstand versuchten und sich hinschlachten ließen, bekennt sie. “Wir haben das ganze Blabla durchbrochen. Wir haben eine gewisse Ermutigung für die Linke dargestellt, die freilich wieder den Bach ‘runtergegangen ist, weil sie uns alle verhaftet haben.“

  GEORGE WATSON’S ACCOUNT FROM “RACE & THE SOCIALISTS,” ENCOUNTER 47 (NOVEMBER 1976)

  In December, 1972, for example, Ulrike Meinhof of the West German “Red Army Faction” appeared between a judicial hearing and spoke up publicly for the Good Old Cause of revolutionary extermination. “How was Auschwitz possible, what was anti-Semitism?” she asked from the dock. According to a newspaper account:

  People should have explained that, instead of accepting Auschwitz collectively as an expression of evil. The worst of it is that we were all agreed about it, Communists included. But now she [Meinhof] had recognized that anti-Semitism was essentially anti-capitalist. It absorbed the hatred of men for their dependence on money as a means of exchange, and their longing for communism…

  How much was socialism, and how much national-socialism in her passionate defense?

  Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed, and thrown on the waste-heap of Europe, for what they were: money-Jews (Geldjuden). Finance capital and the banks, the hard core of the system of imperialism and capitalism, had turned the hatred of men against money and exploitation, and against the Jews. The failure of the Left, of the Communists, had lain in not making these connections plain…

  And so Marxism and racialism could be proposed once more as philosophical comrades, in our own times, and the link yet again made plain:

  Germans were anti-Semitic, and that is why they nowadays support the Red Army Fraction. They have not yet recognised all this, because they have not yet been absolved of fascism and the murder of the Jews. And they have not yet been told that anti- Semitism is really a hatred of capitalism.

  OUR TRANSLATION

  “Unless we absolve the German people of fascism—that the people really didn’t know what was going on in the concentration camps—they can’t be mobilized for our struggle,” she said. After the war, the left, in dealing with fascism, were “negligent, stupid, and insolent.” They dealt with the people in the foreground, but didn’t look any deeper. “How was Auschwitz possible; what was antisemitism?” That is something that someone should have clarified at the time. Instead of collectively understanding Auschwitz as an expression of evil, Meinhof stated.

  “The worst thing is that all of us, communists as well as others, were united in this.” However, she now recognizes that antisemitism can in it’s own way be anticapitalist. It separates the hatred of people about their dependency on money as a means of exchange from their desire for communism.

  “Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were murdered and carted off to Europe’s garbage heap, dispensed with as money Jews.” Finance capital and banks, “the hard core of the system” of imperialism and capitalism deflected the hate of the people for money and oppression from itself and transferred it to the Jews. Not having made this connection clear was the failure of the left and the communists.

  Germans were antisemitic, therefore they are today RAF supporters. Only they don’t know it, because they’ve forgotten that they must be absolved of fascism and murdering Jews, and that antisemitism is in reality hatred of capitalism. In this regard Ulrike Meinhof ably constructed a remarkable statement about the failure of the Baader-Meinhof Group. With it, it is also possible to praise the Black September attack in Munich. She claimed to feel an “historical identity” with the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, who attempted an unarmed uprising leading to their defeat. “We have broken through the entire blah blah. We have provided the left with obvious encouragement, which they have voluntarily allowed to dissipate, because we’ve all been arrested.”

  APPENDIX II

  The European Commission of Human Rights and the RAF Prisoners

  In its July 8, 1978 decision, the European Commission of Human Rights noted the following effects on the health of Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader as a result of their prolonged imprisonment under conditions of single or small-group isolation:

  (i) State of health

  In September 1975:

  19. The applicants are in a state of physical and mental exhaustion (Dr. Mende). Their blood pressure is low. Their weight is about 70% of that of a normally healthy person of the same age and build (Dr. Müller). They present the following symptoms in varying degrees: problems of concentration, marked fatigue, difficulties of expression or articulation, reduced physical and mental performance, instability, diminished spontaneity and ability to make contacts, depression (especially noted by Dr. Rasch).

  In April 1977:

  20. The decline in both physical and mental health is very pronounced in Ensslin (concurring opinion by Dr. Rasch, Dr. Müller, and Dr. Schröder): loss of weight, very low blood pressure, premature aging, severe difficulties of expression and lack of concentration, motor disturbances. The deterioration in the condition of Baader and Raspe is perceptible, though less spectacular: decrease in activity and spontaneity, emotional regression, problems of articulation, hesitancy in speech. They are nevertheless fit for detention.

  (ii) The Causes

  21. The experts ascribe the applicants’ state of health to a series of factors and circumstances: the particular conditions of their imprisonment, the length of the detention on remand, hunger strikes, tension generated by the trial and the applicants’ wish to defend themselves, etc.. The importance attached to these different factors varies from one report to another.

  The particular conditions of imprisonment

  22. There is no sensory isolation strictly speaking, such as
can be brought about by a substantial reduction in stimulation of the sensory organs. On the other hand, the applicants are subjected to evident social isolation. The international literature on criminology and psychology indicates that isolation can be sufficient in itself to gravely impair physical and mental health. The following conditions may be diagnosed: chronic apathy, fatigue, emotional instability, difficulties of concentration, diminution of mental faculties, disorders of the neuro-vegetative system. Opinions differ on the precise scale of these phenomena. There are no reports in the literature of situations comparable to that of the applicants (Dr. Rasch), affording a better assessment of the psychiatric effects. From the standpoint of internal medicine, certain analogies can be found in case-studies of elderly and isolated persons, persons kept alive artificially in intensive care units, and long-term prisoners (Dr. Müller and Dr. Schröder). However, certain experts state that they have little personal experience of the physical and mental effects of normal imprisonment (Dr. Müller and Dr. Schröder).

  From: European Commission of Human Rights, Decisions and Reports 14 (Strasbourg: June 1979), 96-97. As wikipedia tells us, “From 1954 to the entry into force of Protocol 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, individuals did not have direct access to the European Court of Human Rights; they had to apply to the Commission, which if it found the case to be well-founded would launch a case in the Court on the individual’s behalf. Protocol 11 which came into force in 1998 abolished the Commission, enlarged the Court, and allowed individuals to take cases directly to it.”

  APPENDIX III

  The FRG and the State of Israel

  In order to appreciate the relationship between the West German radical left and the Palestinian resistance, it may be helpful to take a brief look at the history of West German support for Israel.

  Although the two countries did not exchange embassies until the mid-1960s, there had been contact and cooperation well before then. Throughout this period, this contact was understandably marked by the recent genocide that had almost ended Jewish civilization in Europe, and had led to the creation of the Israeli colonial state in 1949. Contrary to expectations, however, the two countries would quickly become close allies, for regardless of the feelings of many citizens, each one had its own reasons to use the Holocaust as a stepping-stone to future goals.

  The first official agreement between the two governments came about in 1952, when the FRG signed the Luxembourg Agreement, promising to deliver a total of three billion marks worth of reparations (mainly in the form of goods) to Israel over a period of fourteen years.1 The FRG was literally building the Israeli economy, helping to provide the west with its beachhead in the Middle East.

  By the end of the decade, the Luxembourg Agreement was supplemented by a plan to give—not sell—arms and materiel to the Israeli military. What started as motor vehicles, training aircraft, and helicopters was soon extended to include anti-tank rockets and other shooting weapons.2 By the mid-sixties, the FRG was delivering “aircraft including Noratlas transporters, Dornier DO-27 communication planes and French ‘Fouga Magister’ jet trainers, anti-aircraft guns with electronic homing devices, helicopters, howitzers, submarines, and speedboats.”3 Some claimed that 5,000 Israeli officers and soldiers had been trained by the Bundeswehr in West Germany.4

  Right from its inception, Israel was engaged in ethnic cleansing: harassing, terrorizing, and murdering Palestinians in order to free up more land for Jewish settlers. Through its financial and military assistance, the FRG was directly complicit with this process, almost right from the start.

  Unlike the reparations payments, the military aid and training was kept strictly secret. The Israeli government feared that its own population, which included a large number of Holocaust survivors, would vote them out of office if they learned that they were being armed and trained by the very Germans who so recently had carried out genocide against their people. The West German government was also wary of domestic repercussions, as the idea of getting involved in an international flashpoint like the Middle East was expected to be unpopular so soon after the Second World War. But much more importantly, the West German government was worried that such military support would alienate Arab governments, especially Egypt, perhaps even pushing them closer to the Soviet Bloc.

  As it turns out, this is exactly what happened.

  On October 26, 1964, the Frankfurter Rundschau broke the story. Despite initial denials from both Bonn and Tel Aviv, within days, both governments were forced to admit that military arms and training had been provided since 1959. Reaction across the Arab world was quick in coming, one Egyptian journalist observing that “Germany, who wants to make up for the sins of the Nazi regime, makes the Arabs pay with their security.”5 Within a year, Egypt’s Nasser had arranged for the East German leader Walther Ulbricht to visit Cairo, and the FRG’s contacts throughout the Arab world suffered greatly.

  Nevertheless, though the arms shipments were cut off in 1965, the FRG remained Israel’s staunchest European ally. The opportunity to prove this came soon enough.

  On June 5, 1967, Israel attacked Egyptian forces in the Sinai and the Gaza Strip with air strikes and tanks, beginning what became known as the Six Day War. (Just two weeks previously, the FRG had delivered a final shipment of 800 troop transports.)6 Soon, both Syria and Jordan entered the conflict in support of Egypt. Nevertheless, thanks to its far greater military capacity, Israel quickly routed all three Arab armies, seizing the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. As a measure of the military imbalance, barely 1,000 Israeli soldiers lost their lives in this conflict, compared to over 11,000 Egyptians, 700 Jordanians, and 2,500 Syrians.

  Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the newly occupied territories, swelling the numbers in the hellish Jordanian refugee camps, while over 600,000 remained as newly colonized subjects of the racist Israeli state.

  Back in the FRG, the Six Day War provided the occasion for a strangely unhealthy—but highly revealing—identification with the Israeli aggressors. The SPD, the CDU, and the Springer Press all went into overdrive, whipping up war frenzy throughout the country, even as Bonn professed that it would not intervene. As Chancellor Kiesinger, the former Nazi, explained it, “our non-intervention, i.e. neutrality in the sense of international law, cannot mean moral indifference or indolence of the heart.”1

  City governments sent hundreds of thousands of marks in donations, and hundreds of thousands more were contributed by individual citizens to the German-Israeli Society,2 while the West German Federation of Trade Unions invested three million marks in Israeli bonds, “as a visible expression of solidarity with and confidence in Israel.”3 Parallel to this, development aid credits to Israel’s Arab neighbors were frozen and German development aid workers were flown home.4

  Hundreds of volunteers were recruited and flown from Munich and the NATO Rhine-Main Airport to support Israel in the war zone.5 While the West German government insisted that these volunteers were only engaged in “non-military” activities, East German newspapers claimed that many were in fact serving as soldiers.6

  In newspapers and magazines, most especially the Springer Press, the Israeli attack was described in eerily nostalgic terms. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was praised as a new “desert fox,”7 a term that had previously been reserved for Erwin Rommel, Hitler’s Commander-in-Chief in North Africa. Israel was now the “brother nation,” with the Israelis dubbed the “Prussians of the Middle East,” and Jerusalem being “the Berlin of the Middle East.”8 The Israeli offensive was approvingly referred to as a “Blitzkrieg,” and in Spiegel it was announced that “Jews are not as anti-Semites wanted to see them. On the contrary, danger seems not to develop the evil but the noble qualities”—which is the kind of compliment that isn’t one, when you think about it. A Die Welt writer was similarly forthright, admitting that Israel had “overcome our anti-Semitism.”9

  Other than actual neo-nazis, the only German support for the
Palestinian side at this time came from the APO. The SDS was already pro-Palestinian,10 but it was this war frenzy that pushed the entire New Left to become anti-Zionist.11 This fact, along with the odd identification with Israel on the part of the militaristic German right-wing, should be remembered when considering the assertion comrades would soon make that Israel represented the “new Nazism”: while obviously incorrect, such a claim was at least partly a reaction against a reinvigorated German chauvinism projecting itself onto the racist Jewish state.

  As such, anti-Zionism became a defining element of the radical left, and, as the 1970s dawned, it was shared by the K-groups, the spontis, and most certainly the guerilla.

  APPENDIX IV

  The Geneva Convention: Excerpts

  Art. 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

  1. (1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

  To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

  (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

  (b) taking of hostages;

  (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;

  (d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.