The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  The Zielfahndung learned what kind of cigarettes their target smoked, his or her sexual proclivities, relationships, blood type, dental records, and much more. Acquaintances, relatives, and former friends were all contacted for background information. If tape recordings of the target’s voice existed, they were studied. The target’s schoolwork from university or high school was reviewed and compared with movement documents—something as trivial as a recurring grammar mistake, a spelling error or favorite catchphrase would be filed away as evidence.8

  Such targeted manhunts and data mining are the stuff of everyday repression today, but in 1978 they represented a new, hitherto unheard of, level of sophistication on the part of the state. Yet, while the BKA’s enormous computer files were a cause for ongoing concern on the part of civil libertarians, the existence of the Zielfahndung teams and their activities would remain largely uncontroversial.

  It was not only in terms of police science, though, but more importantly as an example of improved East-West cooperation, that the Zagreb arrests were touted as a breakthrough by the state. For the guerilla, this was a bitter pill indeed, as the Eastern zone suddenly appeared not quite so safe as had been previously assumed.

  It was an alarming situation; nevertheless, it all soon proved less damaging than was initially feared, for the Yugoslav government would not deliver the captured combatants without receiving something in return. Talks were initiated with Bonn, and it was proposed that the four RAF combatants be exchanged for eight Croatian nationalists being held by the FRG.9 The West German government balked, and there followed a lengthy period of negotiations. It took six months, but finally the FRG made it clear that there would be no trade, dismissing the evidence against the Croats as inconclusive. In a convenient case of tit for tat, on November 17, Belgrade announced that it found the evidence against the RAF prisoners similarly inconclusive, and allowed the guerillas to depart to a country of their choosing.

  According to a joint statement made ten years later by several RAF members including Hofmann, Mohnhaupt, and Wagner, the four had only been passing through Yugoslavia en route to a hospice where Boock’s “cancer” could be properly treated.10 Although Boock had made it clear that he didn’t like this idea, he could not refuse outright without making his comrades suspicious. While in captivity, however, they made an interesting discovery, as they were all required to undergo mandatory medical examinations—examinations that revealed that Boock was not in fact suffering from cancer but was simply a junkie stringing his comrades along. The revelation obviated any need for a hospice, and so upon their release the disillusioned guerillas returned to the Middle East.

  During the period of their detention, however, the other guerillas had not been idle, and there are indications that an action was being planned for later in 1978.11 In August, Christian Klar, Heidi Schulz, and Willy Peter Stoll narrowly escaped after chartering a helicopter to fly over the Odenwald mountains. It has been alleged that they were carrying out reconnaissance for an action to break Stefan Wisniewski out of the prison where he was being held in Frankenthal. It was apparently the second time the three had chartered the helicopter, and the pilot had contacted the police after becoming uneasy with the photos his passengers were taking, all the more so when they asked him about landing in the prison yard for a scene in a film they claimed to be working on.12

  Not long thereafter, on September 6, one of the three was recognized while dining in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Düsseldorf. The police were called, there was an exchange of fire, and Stoll was shot dead. A guerilla who had participated in the ‘77 campaign, Stoll had initially studied as a tax advisor before being drawn to join the RAF through prisoner support work in 1976.13

  A few days later, thanks to a tip from neighbors, police identified the apartment Stoll and the others had been using. Apart from a coded diary, a small arsenal (including an improvised rocket launcher), and fingerprints of six suspects,14 police also claimed they found evidence of a plot to kidnap a business magnate from the Ruhr area.15 Indeed, it would later be said that Stoll had been carrying out surveillance on Deutsche Bank president Friedrich Wilhelm Christians, with just such a plan in mind.16

  Willy Peter Stoll

  Hundreds more tips poured in, and a second safehouse was soon located. According to police, Klar, Schulz, and Silke Maier-Witt’s fingerprints were identified, along with papers that included the name of Wolfgang Grams, a student who would now be accused of acting as a courier between the guerilla and aboveground supporters. Grams was promptly arrested under 129a17 and would spend 153 days in remand.18 He was not the only one picked up in the sweeps occurring at this time: Christine Biehal and Leila Bocooc would be arrested in September, and Biehal’s husband Harald would be arrested in November, charged with membership in a terrorist organization under §129a.19

  Later that month, police surprised three RAF members engaged in target practice in the woods outside of Dortmund. The guerillas opened fire, killing officer Hans-Wilhelm Hansen and wounding his partner, who nevertheless managed to get off one long burst from his submachine gun as he fell. Angelika Speitel was shot in the leg and Michael Knoll received gunshot wounds to the head, lower abdomen, and liver, while Werner Lotze managed to get away unharmed, grabbing the dead cop’s submachine gun as he escaped.20 While Speitel would recover from her wounds,21 Knoll would not. He died in the hospital on October 7.

  Angelika Speitel

  The next encounter between the guerilla and its pursuers occurred on November 1, when Rolf Heißler and Adelheid Schulz were identified crossing into Holland. A firefight ensued and Dutch border guards Dionysius de Jong, nineteen years old, and Johannes Goemans, twenty-four, were both shot dead.

  Several former RAF members who subsequently chose to cooperate with police have claimed that the RAF was considering a number of new actions in this period. Besides the stories about potential jailbreaks and kidnappings that we have already detailed, there are others even more daring, or foolhardy, depending on how one sees these things. For instance, Maier-Witt would later claim that following the killings and the arrest in Düsseldorf and Dortmund, there was talk of a retaliation action. According to this tale, the idea would have been to lure police to a trap set with land mines.22 Less outrageously—and, given subsequent events, more believably—it has also been said that there were plans to kidnap a high-ranking NATO officer.

  Whatever may have been planned, the fact of the matter is that the constant arrests and killings were keeping the guerilla off balance, preventing it from going on the offensive. Perhaps not surprisingly, several members began to doubt the wisdom of even continuing with the armed struggle. Depleted and dazed, the RAF’s future seemed less certain than ever before.

  As such, this is perhaps an appropriate point for us to turn our attention to the fortunes of the other main guerilla groups and their supporters in the FRG.

  THE 2ND OF JUNE MOVEMENT

  The 2nd of June Movement, with its roots in the communes of the West Berlin counterculture, had been active for almost as long as the RAF. While the latter had developed its positions in a series of lengthy manifesto-style documents grounded in Marxism-Leninism, the 2JM’s approach was more accessible and even light-hearted in tone. These qualities were perhaps most famously expressed in a 1975 bank robbery, during which they distributed pastries to customers and employees while the bank’s registers were being emptied. Even during trials, the court statements of 2JM defendants could include clever jokes, and it was not for nothing that they became known as the Spaßguerilla, or “fun guerilla.”23

  The 2JM’s initial strategy was to seek out contradictions within the metropole, to ground their struggle in their own society. While repeatedly acting in solidarity with the RAF, they were critical of the way in which the latter framed its struggle so much in terms of the international context. As 2JM member Werner Sauber argued in 1975:

  The RAF has failed to orient itself around the forms of struggle of the most exploited: women,
foreigners, and young German unskilled laborers. A practical debate about the connection between the armed struggle and the militant proletariat is something the RAF refuses. Instead, the comrades act as a revolutionary “secret service” that sees its basis solely in the liberation movements on the Three Continents. Their anti-imperialist concept as such is that it makes the most sense for them to attach themselves to a Third World liberation struggle and struggle against the metropole on that basis. As a result, however, the RAF are neither fish in the sea nor birds in the sky. They have only worked with marginalized groups or with the left to gain more support for anti-imperialist terrorism, not to develop a strong class struggle of the oppressed in the metropole.24

  Being like “fish in the sea” or “birds in the sky”—i.e., remaining grounded and camouflaged by a larger sympathetic mass—was a priority for the early 2JM, and for that reason the group tried to restrict its activities to West Berlin, the scene from which it had developed and that its members knew best. As we have seen, graduating from bank robberies and firebombings, in a 1974 kidnapping gone awry, the 2JM killed Berlin’s Supreme Court Judge Günter von Drenkmann in retaliation for the death of RAF prisoner Holger Meins. More successfully, in early 1975, the group kidnapped CDU mayoral candidate Peter Lorenz, demanding 120,000 DM and the release of six political prisoners. After five days of negotiations, the state acquiesced and the prisoners were granted safe passage to South Yemen.25

  Some presumed 2JM members, from left to right: Anne Reiche, Inge Viett, Ralf Reinders, Werner Sauber, and Till Meyer.

  These actions were relatively well received in the radical scene, but of course this alone could not shield the guerilla from state counterattack. Indeed, the heat that followed the Lorenz abduction kept the 2JM hemmed in for years to come, a situation that was aggravated by a general lack of agreement as to what strategy to pursue going forward.

  It started with the capture of 2JM members Gerald Klöpper and Ronald Fritzsch in West Berlin on April 28, 1975, just weeks after Lorenz had been released. Then, on May 9, Werner Sauber was killed in a late-night shootout with police in a Cologne parking garage. One police officer, Walter Pauli, also died in the exchange. Two other men, Karl-Heinz Roth and Roland Otto, were arrested, but not before Roth (a former SDS leader and important left communist intellectual) was shot and seriously wounded. (Both Roth and Otto would face charges, but were ultimately found not guilty of Pauli’s murder.)26

  Next, on September 9, 2JM members Inge Viett, Juliane Plambeck, and Ralf Reinders were captured in West Berlin. A few days later, 2JM members Fritz Teufel and Gabriele Rollnik were similarly apprehended. All were suspected of involvement in the Lorenz kidnapping, with Plambeck accused of killing Judge von Drenkmann as well. Viett had been sought since escaping from prison two years earlier by sawing through her cell bars; she had been first captured in 1972 asleep in a car with other guerillas and a certain quantity of explosives. (They had allegedly been planning to bomb the Turkish consulate.) These arrests would be followed with the capture of Andreas Vogel, on March 26, 1976, also charged in connection with the Lorenz kidnapping.27

  The 2JM had been dealt one blow after another, but it was not yet down for the count. Several guerillas remained on the outside, and in less than a year, with their help, Viett would once again manage to escape—this time from Lehrter Straße prison, in the company of Plambeck, Rollnik, and RAF member Monika Berberich. As the Associated Press would report:

  The women locked themselves out of their cells early Wednesday. When two female guards came through the cellblock on a routine inspection, Miss Viett pulled a gun on them. They bound and gagged the guards with bedsheets and locked them in an outer room of the library. The prisoners climbed out onto the third-story roof from the library, made their way to a corner of the building by hanging onto window bars and dropped over the wall to the outside where a getaway car was apparently waiting.28

  The question of just how the women had managed to acquire a gun and keys to their cells would provoke some consternation among partisans of the state, and lead to the resignation of West Berlin’s SPD minister of justice and deputy mayor, Hermann Oxfort.

  The July jailbreak put a number of experienced combatants back on the street. Viett, Plambeck, and Rollnik soon made their way to the Middle East, passing through Iraq to the PFLP (EO)’s base in South Yemen.29 Berberich was less fortunate, as just two weeks later, while on her way to arrange a meeting between the 2JM and the RAF, she was recaptured after unexpectedly bumping into her brother walking down the street: he had been under constant BKA surveillance since her escape. Before she could flee she was taken back into custody,30 and the meeting between the 2JM and the RAF—most likely to discuss closer cooperation—had to be postponed.

  It was in the wake of the RAF’s failed ‘77 offensive that the 2JM would carry out its largest fundraiser since Lorenz: on November 9 of that year, several guerillas kidnapped stockings-magnate Walter Palmers in Vienna, dragging him from his car as he arrived home for dinner.

  This was an action that the guerillas had been preparing prior to Schleyer’s abduction by the RAF, and due to the added heat caused by the latter there was some debate about whether or not to proceed. They decided to persevere, but because Austria was a relatively safe zone and provided a convenient route into Italy, they tried to disguise the political nature of the kidnapping, hoping that it would be reported as a merely criminal endeavor.31 Initially at least, the ruse worked, and in the days that followed, both Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and police chief Otto Kornek publicly discounted the possibility that any guerilla group might be involved.32

  West German newscaster Eduard Zimmermann announces Palmers’s kidnapping: the guerillas hoped this might seem the work of non-political criminals.

  According to Viett, it was only once they had Palmers that they realized with some unease that he was in fact not as young as he looked in his photos; in her words, “we suddenly had an old man on our hands.”33 Despite this potential complication, all went smoothly—in fact, Palmers would thank his captors for the good treatment he received34—and he was released unharmed four days later, his son having delivered the 31 million shillings ransom.35 The 2JM took the money and divided it three ways, giving sorely needed funds to the RAF and to a Palestinian resistance group.

  It wasn’t long, however, before police found their first clue that this had been no merely criminal abduction. Ten days after Palmers’s release, two theater students were arrested crossing into Italy from Switzerland: Thomas Gratt and Othmar Keplinger were already known as members of the Arbeitskreis politische Prozesse (APG; Political Trials Working Group), a political prisoner support group in Vienna. Upon searching their vehicle, border guards found two weapons previously used in guerilla actions, money from the Palmers ransom, as well as the typewriter the ransom note had been typed on. At the same time, police received a tip implicating Reinhard Pitsch, a philosophy student who had founded the APG the year previously, as having made the ransom call to Palmers’s family; he was arrested on November 28.36

  It would seem that the 2JM had recruited three supporters, barely out of their teens (in fact, Keplinger was only nineteen), to help out with the logistics of the operation, such as procuring getaway cars and train tickets, and making the necessary phone calls, the hope being that their Austrian accents would help obscure the German guerilla’s presence. While well-intentioned, the three students were clearly not prepared to deal with the consequences of working with the guerilla; Pitsch was interrogated and abused by the police for the better part of five days before being brought before an investigating judge, and it was reported in the newspapers that he provided extensive information. Both he and Gratt were denounced as traitors in the support scene.37 Pitsch was sentenced to six and a half years, of which he would serve three years and eight months, and Keplinger was sentenced to five years, which the courts later reduced to four years—he served his entire sentence. Gratt—who had guarded Palmers, and had been
fully integrated into the 2JM38—would be sentenced to fifteen years, of which he would serve thirteen.39

  Left to right: Reinhard Pitsch, Othmar Keplinger, and Thomas Gratt.

  Gratt and Keplinger’s bad luck at the border would be repeated on December 20, as Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann attempted to cross into Switzerland, accompanied by Christian Möller. They were both captured and found to be in possession of weapons, phony IDs, and money from the Palmers action—but not before Kröcher-Tiedemann had seriously wounded two border guards.40 (Three weeks later, a grenade went off in the Bern office of the prosecutor responsible for this case. The action was claimed by a Benno Ohnesorg Commando, which promised further attacks if the two were extradited from Switzerland to the FRG.)41

  This left Inge Viett as one of the most senior 2JM combatants on the street. Over the next years, she would play an important part in determining the course of the West German guerilla; not only the 2JM, but the RAF as well.

  Born in 1944, Viett had been one of the millions of European children orphaned in the chaos of the war and its aftermath. Taken in by a family in Schleswig-Holstein, from a young age it was clear that her function was to provide manual labor, her status little different from that of a farm animal. Sleeping on a bed of hay (shared with her foster-sister) in the same annex where pigs were butchered, her childhood as recounted in her autobiography reads like an unhappy Dickens novel, replete with deprivation and abuse.42 Leaving this “home” in her late teens, she traveled widely, and would later credit time she spent in North Africa for her political awakening.43 Upon returning to the FRG, Viett joined the APO, where she met other radical women, including Verena Becker, with whom she would go on nighttime excursions smashing the windows of sex shops and bridal stores.44