Although this was the first mention of the Red Army Faction or, as it quickly became known, the ‘Baader-Meinhof Gang,’ it was to be another full year before they issued their full manifesto, ‘Concept of the Urban Guerrilla’ ( Das Konzept Stadtguerilla) by which time RAF members had taken themselves off to Jordan where they trained at a PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) camp. Here they learned the tactics of terrorism, how to use firearms, throw hand grenades and build bombs, after which they returned to Germany to begin stockpiling arms.
At this point the SPK were just beginning to commit their own acts of random violence. In mid-February 1971, Siegfried Hausner and Carmen Roll attempted to bomb a train on which the Federal Republic’s president was traveling. Their plans went completely awry, however, when Carmen Roll turned up late at the station, thus missing the opportunity of placing the bomb (a small, homemade device) on the train.
In June 1971, Doctor Huber, who had moved his offices to his home in Wiesenbach, became aware that the police had begun monitoring the comings and goings of his patients. Two of these, Ralf Reinders and Alfred Mahrländer, were of particular interest to the authorities, so when they were stopped by officers on their way to Huber’s home, it wasn’t surprising that one of them, Reinders, pulled out a pistol and shot one of the policemen in the shoulder. Reinders and Mahrländer both escaped, but were arrested shortly afterwards.
Following this incident, seven members of the SPK, including Doctor Huber and his wife, were placed under arrest on suspicion of forming an illegal organization as well as for buying weapons and explosives. Although present at the time of the police raid, Carmen Roll and Klaus Jünschke both managed to evade capture.
It was as this point that Jünschke, along with several other SPK members, staged a bank robbery during which a policeman was shot and killed. Then, on September 25, 1971, two police officers, Helmut Ruf and Friedrich Ruf (not related), approached an improperly parked car on the Freiburg-Basel autobahn. Inside sat Holger Meins and Margrit Schiller, both SPK members and both in possession of firearms. Knowing they would be arrested if the police searched them, both terrorists took the decision to fight and opened fire on the policemen. Friedrich Ruf was wounded in the hand, while Helmut Ruf was far more seriously injured. Schiller and Meins then made their escape, leaving the authorities to search their abandoned car – a search that uncovered two underground publications of some significance. The first was entitled, ‘Concept of the Urban Guerrilla,’ while the second had the seemingly innocuous title of ‘Road Traffic Ordinances,’ although its undercover title was, ‘Concerning the Armed Struggle in Western Europe.’ The former, of course, had been written by Ulrike Meinhof, a fact which led officers to believe that SPK members were now beginning to affiliate themselves to the RAF.
Shortly after the Freiburg-Basel autobahn shooting, on October 22,1971, Margrit Schiller was captured by the police in Hamburg, but not before she had spent some time in an RAF safe house which she described as being more than a little exciting. Here, all the higher echelons of the Baader-Meinhof group met up, talked politics, argued, laughed and rested amongst a general mayhem of guerrilla-style equipment, such as a radio that could monitor police frequencies as well as bomb-making equipment and guns.
Schiller’s arrest was itself by no means uneventful. She had been staying in Hamburg for a few days, trying to lie low but, on exiting a subway station one night, she noticed a police patrol car was following her. Schiller ducked into the basement garage of a nearby shopping complex, waited a while, then came out from an exit on the far side of the building, only to realize she was being followed once again by the police. Trying to avoid them she took shelter in an abandoned house, but later had to come out in order to meet up with two other SPK members, Irmgard Möller and Gerhard Müller. Naturally, the police were waiting and no sooner had Schiller begun to walk away from the house than two officers – Schmid and Lemke – drove their car onto the pavement in front of her. Schiller, who by this time had been joined by Möller and Müller, fled to a nearby park with the officers in pursuit. Schmid then grabbed Schiller by the arm at which point she pulled out a gun. Möller and Müller, seeing their comrade in distress, opened fire, hitting Schmid who fell unconscious to the ground. Lemke meanwhile had been wounded in the foot, but limped back to the patrol car to alert his colleagues, only to find that someone had stolen it. The delay cost Schmid his life, for by the time the two officers were taken to hospital, he was already dead.
Hamburg’s entire police force was put on full alert, a move that paid dividends for not long after two plainclothes officers soon spotted a woman in a phone box whom they suspected to be one of the fugitives. The officers waited outside the box for the woman to exit, at which point she was placed under arrest. Her name, according to her identity papers, was Dörte Gerlach, but what really gave the game away was the discovery of a fully loaded gun in her handbag. Gerlach/Schiller was taken to a police station, where she was formally identified and charged with murder.
Less than a week later, police raided an apartment in the same residential district as the phone box. What they found inside was a fully operational terrorist cell with approximately 2,600 rounds of ammunition, detonators, explosives, wiring, walkietalkies and even police uniforms. Yet despite the confiscation of all this equipment, the violence continued.
On December 22, 1971, SPK members (many of whom were now working for the RAF) were involved in one of the bloodiest actions taken by their organization when they robbed the Bavarian Mortgage and Exchange Bank, seizing DM 133,987. On that morning, a man entered the bank, placed a tape recorder on a desk and switched it on so that loud pop music blared out. Seconds later, three people dressed in anoraks with balaclavas covering their faces burst in. Two of them carried submachine guns, while the third carried a pistol. The three terrorists threatened bank staff and customers alike while ordering them to remain calm. Directly outside the building, a red Volkswagen minibus had parked illegally, something which drew the attention of a police officer called Herbert Schoner. Schoner approached the vehicle to talk to the driver, only to be met by a hail of gunfire. He was shot several times, one bullet blasting into his back, yet he still managed to crawl towards what he thought would be a safe haven, the Bavarian Mortgage and Exchange Bank. On entering the building, instead of finding sanctuary, Schoner was met by one of the robbers who shot him in the chest. He died at the scene.
The robbers, realizing they had just killed a police officer, took off in the red minibus along with their spoils. They had succeeded in pulling off a major bank robbery and, even though one of their number, Klaus Jünschke, had been identified by a witness to the robbery, all of the terrorists appeared to have got away with, quite literally, murder.
Ulrike Meinhof (left) and Gudrun Ensslin (right) had both enjoyed comfortable, middle-class upbringings, although Meinhof had suffered the trauma of losing both her parents at a very young age. Their privileged lives, however, were something that they certainly had in common with most of their SPK terrorist comrades.
At this point, though it was abundantly clear that the SPK were still operative, it was also apparent that many of their number had begun aligning themselves with the RAF, which was a much larger, more high-profile outfit. In 1972, the RAF decided to mount a ‘May Offensive’, which included the staging of not one but a string of major terrorist events over a two-week period. Two US military bases were attacked, as were police stations in two of Germany’s biggest cities and the offices of Axel Springer, who owned most of Germany’s conservative tabloids. The first bombing (carried out by, among others, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin) took place at the Headquarters of the US Fifth Army in Frankfurt and killed one soldier while injuring thirteen other American servicemen. The next day, a second bomb exploded, this time outside the Augsburg police station. Fortunately, no one was killed, but the bombing spree was not finished. Later that day yet another bomb exploded next to the Bavarian Federal Police Headquarters in Munich, demo
lishing at least twenty-five vehicles. Shortly afterwards, the RAF placed a bomb under the car of Wolfgang Buddenberg, a judge who had signed numerous arrest warrants against members of the group. Buddenberg did not get into the car on that day, but his unfortunate wife did, suffering extremely serious injuries in the blast. On May 19 the RAF bombed the Springer corporation offices, an attack that left seventeen workers injured. Finally, on May 24, a car loaded with 400 pounds of TNT was driven into the Headquarters of the US Army Supreme European Command site in Heidelberg, killing three American soldiers and injuring five others.
The RAF presented various ‘justifications’ for these attacks, but the main cause, so they said, was retaliation for the increased bombing of Vietnam by the United States. They maintained that West Germany should no longer be a safe place from which the American military could operate; indeed, the only way the violence would stop would be if the US withdrew from Vietnam altogether. Ultimately, however, the only people who found themselves unable to operate within Germany were the terrorists, for after the ‘May Offensive’ the police mounted a massive hunt for all RAF and SPK members. Over 130,000 officers were involved, patrolling the streets, checking border crossings and sifting through the mass of evidence that was coming in from the general public. The pay-off was enormous. In late May in Frankfurt, a resident alerted police, having grown suspicious of three of his neighbors whom he saw mixing an unidentified substance at the back of their house. On June 1, 1972 all three suspects were arrested; Andreas Baader, Holger Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe. The substance they had been mixing was an explosive. On June 7, a shop assistant in Hamburg noticed a young female customer acting suspiciously with what appeared to be a heavy object secreted in her handbag. Again, the police were alerted and the woman, Gudrun Ensslin, was placed under arrest. The object in her bag turned out to be a gun. Finally, on June 15, the authorities captured yet another major Red Army Faction player. The previous evening, a left-wing teacher had received a visit from a friend asking if he could accommodate two acquaintances for a short period. The teacher, though suspicious, agreed, and let the two stay, but later decided to call the police who immediately placed the apartment under surveillance. The next day one of the two guests, Gerhard Müller, left the apartment to use a telephone booth outside on the street, only to be pounced on by several officers, who then also placed the second fugitive, Ulrike Meinhof, under arrest. At first the police were unaware of the identity of either of their captives, and although they soon worked out who Müller was, it took a little longer to establish Meinhof’s identity.
There were no previous fingerprints from Meinhof to match up with those of their new captive but the police found an old copy of Stern magazine in which an article on Meinhof had appeared, accompanied by a photograph. The photograph was of an X-ray of her skull taken after an operation she had undergone back in 1962, when a metal clip was placed over an engorged blood vessel. The police now took an X-ray of their captive’s skull and, on comparing the two, found they were identical. The authorities were ecstatic. They had captured one of Germany’s most wanted terrorists. To cap it all, three weeks later they arrested Irmgard Möller and Klaus Jünschke.
It was at this time that a subtle change occurred within the RAF, SPK and even the ‘2 June Movement’ in that, rather than using their aggression as a protest against the Federal Republic and the United States governments, their terrorist activities were instead increasingly tied to the release of their comrades and to their hatred of the judicial system. With practically all of the RAF’s main players in prison, those left behind became known as second-generation terrorists – men and women who weren’t active during the late 1960s, but who were nonetheless determined to carry on the fight. And one subject exercised their minds more than any other – what they saw as the systematic mistreatment of their imprisoned colleagues.
For much of the time the detainees were kept in solitary confinement – a policy that took its toll on many prisoners, including Astrid Proll, who had been arrested in May 1971. Proll spent nearly five months in almost complete isolation in the Women’s Psychiatric Section of the prison. Starved of any kind of mental stimulation, confined to a bare white room with no pictures on the walls, with no one to talk to and with barely any outside noise to listen to, her treatment was likened to shock therapy.
Meinhof was also kept under similar conditions, for a period of eight long months, during which she wrote a poem, ‘From the Dead Tract’ (‘Aus dem Toten Trakt’) that put into words the extreme torture such a punishment exacted. ‘You can no longer identify the meaning of words,’ she wrote. ‘Visits leave behind no trace.’
Margrit Schiller, who was serving out a long stretch in Lübeck prison, believed she too was in the ‘dead tract’ and if there was any doubt as to how severe this punishment truly was, one only has to refer to an account by Heinz Brandt, (a survivor of Auschwitz) who in addition to his time in a concentration camp had also suffered long periods of solitary confinement in East Germany where he was imprisoned over a period of some years.
As crass and paradoxical as it may sound, my experiences with strict, radical isolation were worse than my time…in a Nazi concentration camp … [in] the camp, I still had the basis for human life, namely communication with my fellow inmates … We were able in the camps to see, not only outrageously fascistic and sadistic mistreatment, but also the possibilities for resistance and collective life among the prisoners, and, with this, for the fulfillment of the fundamental need of a human being: social existence.7
So severe was the treatment that the inmates’ only recourse was to stage a series of hunger strikes, starting in January 1973. These were extremely tough times for the detainees, but in respect of their mistreatment and their fight to improve prison conditions they were at least supported by their respective attorneys, and by legal organizations such as the ‘Committees Against Isolation Torture in the Prisons of the FRG.’
Now a new fight began – trying to forcefeed those prisoners who were refusing to eat. Doctors strapped inmates to their beds, clamped their mouths open and pushed tubes down their throats and nostrils into their stomachs. Again, SPK member Margrit Schiller was subjected to this institutionalized violence, stating that some doctors and prison guards were deliberately brutal in their technique, often leaving her and her fellow protestors bruised and bloodied.
Meanwhile, outside the prisons, ex-SPK members who had now fully integrated with the Red Army Faction mounted further guerrilla activities, most of which were designed to bring about the release of their comrades.
On November 10, 1974, the Federal Republic’s Supreme Court President, Günter von Drenkmann, was killed in a botched kidnap attempt. Then, on April 24, 1975, several former SPK members stormed the West German Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, taking twelve hostages. Among the terrorists were: Siegfried Hauser, Hanne-Elise Krabbe, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, Bernhard-Maria Rossner and Ullrich Wessel. They ushered their hostages – who included the Ambassador and the economics, military, cultural and press attachés to the embassy – into the library, then searched the rest of the building for remaining staff members, completely missing one of the secretaries who had hidden in a cupboard inside Room 306.
While all this was occurring, Swedish police, having been alerted to the situation, immediately moved into the ground floor of the embassy where they set up an operational center. This angered the terrorists to the point that they demanded the police withdraw otherwise they would shoot one of the hostages – the military attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Baron Andreas von Mirbach. The police refused and the terrorists bound Mirbach’s hands before leading him towards the top of the upper-floor stairwell, where they shot him, first in the leg, then in the head and chest, throwing him towards the police who dragged the dying man away. The authorities quickly evacuated the ground floor and took up a less antagonistic position outside the building.
With the police out of the way, the terrorists decided to place massive amounts of TNT ex
plosive in the embassy’s basement. They then made contact with a German press agency and informed them of their demands. First and foremost, they wanted twenty-six of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists (including Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof) released. Back in Germany, however, the government, led by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, was not prepared to be blackmailed by the terrorists and made it clear that they would not negotiate. This attitude prompted the terrorists to state that they would begin to execute one hostage every hour until the government started to release their friends. One hour passed by and nothing happened, but then Doctor Heinz Hillegart, the embassy’s economic attaché, was taken to a window and shot in the back. The attaché’s body was left hanging out of the window, a sign for everyone watching not to take the terrorists’ threats lightly.
What happened next was a freak accident. A short-circuit in the electrical wiring of the detonators caused some of the TNT in the basement to explode and two of the terrorists died. The others survived the explosion but in the ensuing mayhem were swiftly captured by the police. Terrorist Siegfried Hausner, who had suffered terrible burns after the TNT explosion, was flown directly to Stammheim Prison’s hospital wing, but died a few days later from his injuries.
In total the siege had lasted ten days, during which time two hostages had been killed and three terrorists had died. Some of the hostages later claimed that they had formed ‘friendships’ with their captors and even felt a certain sympathy for their cause. This was not an emotion shared by the majority of people living in Germany where, on May 21, 1975, the trial of Baader, Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe began.
The Most Evil Secret Societies in History Page 20