by J. Smith
3 Jürgen Rieger is a lawyer whose career has been devoted to defending those charged under Germany’s anti-Nazi laws. Ironically, in 2006, both Rieger and Mahler, the latter by this time a Holocaust denier himself, would end up working on the legal defense team of neo-nazi publisher Ernst Zundel, who was charged in connection with the publication of Holocaust denial literature.
4 Aust, 144.
5 Associated Press, “Berlin Cops, Leftists Clash for 2nd Night,” European Stars and Stripes, May 17, 1971.
1 Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader Meinhof Gang (London: Panther Granada Publishing, 1978), 307.
2 When Goergens was finally released in May 1977, she did not return to the guerilla. Schubert, as we shall see, never made it out of prison alive.
3 Becker, 307
4 Baumann, 63.
5 Macdonald, 214-215.
6 Aust, 142.
7 Cobler, 113.
8 tageszeitung “30 Jahre Deutscher Herbst ‘Die RAF war nicht ganz so schlicht,’” Deutschlandradio, October 17, 2007.
1 Earlier that summer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit had received an eight-month suspended sentence for getting through security at a protest against the German Book Trade’s “Peace Prize” being bestowed upon President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal.
2 An oath of fealty to Hitler and the NSDAP that all people working in the public sector were obliged to swear. Millions of people swore this oath for no other reason than to retain their employment.
3 Ernst Niekisch, briefly involved in the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919, went on to become a leader of German chauvinist “National Bolshevism”—it is unclear why Proll singles him out as an example of the Weimar regime persecuting leftists, although under the Nazis he would be sentenced to life imprisonment for “literary high treason” in 1937.
4 Ernst Toller was a Bavarian Jew and an anarchist who was imprisoned for his role on the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. (He subsequently went into exile, eventually committing suicide in his hotel room in New York City in 1939.)
5 On April 1, 1924, Hitler was sentenced to five years for his November 8, 1923, attempted fascist coup, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. He was pardoned and released in December of 1924, having served less than a year of his sentence.
6 Luxemburg and Liebknecht were leading figures in the failed 1918 German communist uprising. They were both captured, tortured, and murdered by rightwing militias, the Freikorps.
1 Franz von Liszt (not to be confused with his cousin, the composer Franz Liszt) was a Prussian law professor whose work heavily influenced the 1882 Marburger Program, a conservative document that influenced the 1933 Nazi German Prevention of Crime Act.
1 Gerhard Zoebe was the judge in this case.
2 A judge in Frankfurt who often presided over trials against left-wing defendants.
3 In 1964, seven year-old Timo Rinnelt of Wiesbaden was kidnapped and murdered. Some years later, his neighbour, a twenty-seven year-old man, was arrested for the crime. In 1968, he received a life sentence.
4 Jürgen Bartsch, a German serial killer, who as a child suffered both emotional and sexual abuse, was responsible for four brutal child murders in the 60s.
5 Walter Griebel was the prosecutor in the case at hand.
6 In German “unter vier Augen”; this is an obvious reference to the Nazi term for a meetings involving only Hitler and one of his close associates. The content of these discussions was meant to stay between the two men.
1 Hammelsgasse, a street in an upper class neighbourhood in Frankfurt, could be translated literally as Mutton Alley; a play on words referencing sheeps being led to the slaughter is intended.
1 Roughly forty cents.
2 Roughly $11.20.
3 Steal Me.
1 German has two forms of the singular you; du, which is used with social inferiors, younger people, and very close friends, and Sie, which is the polite form of address. What the writer is saying is that patronizing behaviour should be answered with patronizing behaviour.
2 Roughly thirty cents.
3 Max Güde, a former Nazi, and at the time a member of parliament for the CDU.
4 A reference to a poem by Soviet poet Samuel Marschak about a woman bringing her valued possessions with her to the train station, the title of which in German is Die Sieben Sachen (which would translate as “Seven Suitcases” in English).
1 A neologism combining the author Thorwald Proll’s last name and solidarisch, the German word for solidarity.
2 The version of this text on Ronald Augustin’s website is dated March 1968, however we believe this is an error, as the arson in question was only committed in April 1968.
3 Places where disenfranchised youth could be found. RAF members had previously worked with such young marginalized youth in the “apprentices collectives.” Some of these young people became members of the RAF and were involved in the action to free Baader.
1 A reference to Georg Linke, the sixty-four-year-old librarian at the Institute for Social Studies who was shot during the action to free Baader. This shooting led to substantial criticism, even from otherwise sympathetic leftists.
2 A reference to the Hand Grenade Law passed shortly after Baader’s prison break, whereby police in West Berlin were equipped with hand grenades, semi-automatic revolvers, and submachine guns.
3 Kurt Neubauer was a member of the SPD and the Berlin Senator for Youth and Sports.
4 General William Westmoreland was Commander of the U.S. troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 and army Chief-of-Staff from 1968 to 1972.
5 A neighborhood in West Berlin.
6 A working-class suburb of West Berlin.
7 The women’s prison at Plötzensee.
1 This version is close to that in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 15. Please note, however, that in keeping with the German translation, the ending here differs slightly from the standard English translation, which reads simply “achieved a great deal in our work.”
2 Ibid., 230.
1 The Freikorps were right-wing paramilitary groups that sprang up in the period following World War I; many were later integrated into the Nazi rise to power. The Feme was a secret medieval court which meted out the death sentence, the bodies of its victims generally being left hanging in the streets.
2 Eduard Zimmermann was TV moderator for the German equivalent of Crimewatch. This program was used in the search for RAF members.
3 Günther Voigt was a West Berlin arms dealer. A pistol that could be linked to him was dropped during the Baader liberation. Voigt fled to Switzerland where he gave an interview that led to his arrest, claiming he was involved in the liberation of Baader.
4 Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss playwright and essayist.
1 Berlin refers to the Knesebeckstr. arrest mentioned above. On December 21, 1971, RAF member Ali Jansen was arrested following a shootout at a police roadblock in Nuremberg. On February 10, 1971, police in Frankfurt opened fire on Astrid Proll and Manfred Grashof, who escaped unharmed.
2 Friedrich Zimmermann (CDU) was, at this time, the Chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary faction.
3 Expelled from the Italian Communist Party in 1969, Il Manifesto was an influential group in the Italian autonomist movement, having 6,000 members in 1972. They advocated council communism, whereby decisions would be made by workers’ councils, not by a vanguard party or state. Il Manifesto was extremely influential for the entire European New Left. The quote comes from a manifesto of 200 theses issued by the group in 1971.
1 Rainer Barzel was, at this time, the party Chairman of the CDU.
1 An SDS campaign encouraging soldiers to desert from the Bundeswehr, the West German Army.
1 Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967). The first of these two paragraphs comes from pages 299-300, the second from page 304.
2 Marxists Internet Archive “Lenin’s What is to be Done? Trade-Unionist P
olitics and Social Democratic Politics,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm.
1 George Lukacs was an influential Hungarian Marxist philosopher and art critic. His work greatly influenced the New Left of the 60s and 70s.
2 Mao Tse-Tung “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_1.htm.
3 Regis Debray was a French Marxist intellectual and a proponent of foco theory, the theory that a small group of guerillas could act as an inspiration to revolutionary activity. He joined Che Guevara on his ill-fated Bolivian adventure.
1 Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 74.
2 A campaign to stop the building of a massive dam in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. The right-wing Portuguese government had plans to settle over one million European colonists in the African country. By 1969, five German companies were implicated in the project. There were protests in the FRG, particularly in Heidelberg, against the project when the U.S. Minister of Defense Robert McNamara visited the country.
1 Stokely Carmichael was a prominent militant in the Black Liberation Movement in the United States, playing a leading role in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and then the Black Panther Party.
2 Westdeutscher Rundfunk, West German Radio.
1 The Red Cells were an independent university-based Marxist organization.
2 Willy Weyer (SPD) was, at this time, the Minister of the Interior for North Rhine Westphalia and a key proponent of the militarization of the police force.
3 At the time a member of Gruppe 47, Günter Grass is one on the most significant German post-World War II authors and a noted liberal.
1 Unlike North America, suburbs in Northern Europe are generally occupied by the subproletariat and poorly paid immigrant workers.
2 Gauche Prolétarienne was a French Maoist organization that, in 1968, began attempts to build a factory-based guerilla group. They were banned in 1970.
3 Eldridge Cleaver was the Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party. When the party splintered into warring factions, he went into self-imposed exile in Algeria. He is the author of several books, including Soul on Ice, from which this quote is drawn.
1 He would eventually receive a ten year sentence for allegedly shooting at police. (Associated Press, “German Draws 10-year term,” European Stars and Stripes, July 27, 1972.)
2 Baumann, 53.
1 Varon, 199.
2 Margrit Schiller in Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.
3 Helmut Pohl’s Testimony at the Stammheim Trial, July 29, 1976. This testimony is available on the internet at http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/76_0708_mohnhaupt_pohl.html#22.
4 Philip Jacobson, “Show Trial,” Sunday Times Magazine, February 23, 1975, 17.
5 Aust, 141.
1 United Press International, “U.S. Hunts German Terrorists,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, July 23, 1978.
2 Becker, Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Please note that this book, written by a right-wing South African journalist, is counterinsurgency tripe. Nevertheless, it has been used for specific details like dates and places, when no other source is available.
1 LA Times—Washington Post Service, “West Germany’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ Have Country in an Uproar,” The Lawton Constitution, December 3, 1972. Margrit Schiller being dragger into press conference by Hamburg police. could not in fact be tied to any RAF actions, and so was simply charged with illegal possession of a firearm and false identification papers. In February 1973, she received a twenty-seven-month sentence, but was released pending an appeal, at which point she went back underground, only to be captured again in 1974. (United Press International, “Raided Flat is Suspected Anarchist Hq.” European Stars and Stripes, October 28, 1971; European Stars and Stripes “Released from Custody,” February 11, 1973; Associated Press, “Raids in German Cities Smash New Terror Ring,” European Stars and Stripes, February 5, 1974.)
2 The Georg von Rauch House still exists today, housing approximately forty itinerant youth at any given time.
3 Baumann, 95.
4 Vague, 42-43.
5 United Press International, “Paper Says Macleod was a British Spy,” European Stars and Stripes, July 3, 1972.
6 Associated Press, “Trial starts in Munich for accused Meinhof-gang munitions supplier,” European Stars and Stripes, September 26, 1973. Pohle went to trial in 1973, charged with possession of firearms and support for a criminal organization under §129; during the trial, he spit at reporters and refused to acknowledge his court appointed lawyers. While he denied the charges against him, and repeatedly claimed that he was not a member of the RAF, he maintained solidarity with the guerilla. In 1974, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison, a term which he did not serve without some interruptions.
7 Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union, “Nachruf auf Rolf Pohle,” https://www.fau.org/artikel/art_040308-182546.
1 Aust, 190.
2 Ibid., 190-191.
3 Cobler, 41.
4 Robert Spaemann, “Kaffee, Kuchen und Terror,” Die Zeit [online], 19 (1998).
5 Aust, 140.
6 Ruhland testified against Horst Mahler, Ali Jansen, and Astrid Proll amongst others. Several years later, after the Stammheim deaths, Ruhland was once again trotted out as an “old comrade” of the prisoners in order to explain how they must have felt suicidal. (United Press International, “Suicide Victim Died of Despair— Comrade,” Raleigh Register, November 14, 1977).
7 Heinrich Hannover, “Terrorsitenprozessen,”http://www.freilassung.de/div/texte/kronzeuge/heinhan1.htm.
8 Andreas Eichler, “Die RAF und die Medien.” This document is reprinted in this volume: Andreas Baader: Letter to the Press, see pages 120-121.
1 Tilman Fichter, interview by Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “The anti-Semitism of the 68ers.”
2 Komitees gegen Folter, Der Kampf Gegen die Vernichtungshaft (n.p.) (n.d.), 131.
3 Gabriele Goettle, “Die Praxis der Galaxie,” die tageszeitung, July 28, 2008.
4 In 1977, Grashof received a life sentence for murder and other offenses; Grundmann received four years on lighter charges (Associated Press, “2 German Terrorists Given life,” European Stars and Stripes, June 3, 1977.)
5 Becker, 273.
6 David Binder, “‘Republic of West Berlin’ Suggested by Radical Group,” Charleston Gazette, November 7, 1968. Whereas young men living in West Berlin were already exempt from the draft, those who lived elsewhere and had already been drafted were liable to prosecution if they deserted.
7 Aust, 203.
8 Ibid., 181.
1 Ibid.
2 Gerard Braunthal, Political Service and Public Loyalty in West Germany: the 1972 decree against radicals and its consequences (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 36-37.
3 Monica Jacobs, “Civil Rights and Women’s Rights in the Federal Republic of Germany Today,” New German Critique 16 Special Feminist Issue (Winter 1978): 166.
4 Braunthal, 42.
5 Ibid., 43.
6 Georgy Katsiaficas, Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 64.
7 Ibid.
8 Aust, 192.
9 Time Magazine [online], “Battle of Berlin,” July 3, 1972.
10 Rote Armee Fraktion, Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF, (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997), 82.
1 See Appendix V—Strange Stories: Peter Homann and Stefan Aust, on pages 557-58.
2 United Press International, “Meinhof-Al Fatah Ties Described,” European Stars and Stripes, October 19, 1972.
1 Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, confessed to the 1933 Reichstag fire under Gestapo torture. It remains unclear if he was, in fact, guilty. Karl-Heinz Ruhland, a fringe member of the
RAF, under pressure from the BKA and with coaching from the BAW, provided clearly fabricated testimony against RAF prisoners during a series of trials.
2 This phrase, which will reoccur in a number of different forms in RAF documents over the years, comes from a speech Mao gave at the Meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. in Celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution on November 6, 1957: “‘Lifting a rock only to drop it on one’s own feet’ is a Chinese folk saying to describe the behaviour of certain fools. The reactionaries in all countries are fools of this kind. In the final analysis, their persecution of the revolutionary people only serves to accelerate the people’s revolutions on a broader and more intense scale. Did not the persecution of the revolutionary people by the tsar of Russia and by Chiang Kai-shek perform this function in the great Russian and Chinese revolutions?”
1 Although not referenced as such by the RAF, this is a quote from 30 Questions to a Tupamaro (see page 128, fn 1).
1 The Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS) was a Maoist student organization based in the refugee communities and active on university campuses throughout the western world.
2 Ludwig Martin, Attorney General from 1963 until 1974, when he was replaced by Siegfried Buback.
3 Roughly $6 million.
4 Almost $69 million.
5 The G-3 is an assault rifle and the MG-3 is a machinegun.
6 This is a reference to the so-called Warshauer Kniefall, the “Warsaw Genuflection,” Brandt’s December 1971 public atonement at the monument commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
7 Amir Abbas Howeida, Prime Minister of Iran during the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi. He was executed in 1979 following the Islamic revolution.
1 The Tupamaros were a guerilla group in Uruguay at the time. This short interview started circulating as an internal document in 1967, and was first made public in a Chilean journal in mid-1968. Within a few years, it had become a text of some importance to the revolutionary edge of the New Left in the metropole.
1 Bayerischen Rundfunk: Bavarian Broadcasting, the public radio station in Bavaria.