The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  It was a significant turning point, and was recognized as such at the time.

  THE GUERILLA IN PARIS: PUTTING DOUBTS TO REST

  Between 1977 and 1981, seven RAF members who had been arrested on February 4, 1974—dubbed the “2.4 group” by police—completed their sentences and were released from prison.19 While most of these never returned to the underground, there were some for whom the RAF continued to represent the best course of resistance to the system that had tried and failed to break them in its isolation wings.

  As we have seen, Wolfgang Beer had been released in 1978, and had subsequently participated in the dpa occupation. Upon completing his one-year sentence for this, he returned to the RAF.

  Another of those arrested in 1974, Helmut Pohl completed his sentence in September 1979. While often treated as a marginal figure in the RAF’s history, Pohl was in fact one of the earliest guerillas, and was also one of the most steadfast; it is no surprise that upon his release, he lost little time in joining up once again with his comrades in the underground.20

  As Pohl would later recall, the RAF he found in 1979 was paralyzed by doubt to such an extent that people who wanted to join were being told it would be better if they devoted their energies to local, above-ground activism. The priority within the group was to work on its internal dynamics and political orientation.21 Indeed, for two years, the RAF had been stymied as to how, or even whether, to continue. Although the Haig attack represented a step out of this morass, it had failed, and the subsequent Swiss tragedy had revived these questions. What was the point of integrating new members when so much remained uncertain?

  This was compounded by the killings of von Dyck and Stoll, and the near-fatal shooting of Heißler, all of which served as a reminder of how dangerous the guerilla struggle could be, and seemed to indicate that West German police had adopted an unofficial policy of taking no prisoners.

  This was the context, after Haig, in which the RAF regrouped in Paris, a location that offered one important advantage, namely its proximity to the FRG. Yet before good use could be made of this, the group’s internal problems finally had to be addressed.

  In the time around the ‘77 offensive, several members of the anti-imperialist left had joined the guerilla under intense, and less than ideal, circumstances. Susanne Albrecht, Sigrid Sternebeck, and Silke Maier-Witt had all been close friends, moving together from the Hamburg squats to the prisoner support scene. Albrecht was recruited in order to help in the ill-fated attempted kidnapping of her sister’s godfather, Jürgen Ponto. Given that it seemed increasingly likely aboveground supporters might be rounded up at any time, Sternebeck and Maier-Witt had followed her underground soon after. Ralf Friedrich, who had worked in Klaus Croissant’s law office, joined the RAF in November 1977 out of fear that he would soon be targeted by the same kind of repression as the lawyers—he would later insist that he spent his entire time underground in France.22 Monika Helbing had also joined in ‘77 as a result of a police raid following the Buback assassination,23 and was followed in 1978 by her partner Ekkehard von Seckendorff-Gudent.24 Werner Lotze and Christine Dümlein had joined in the summer of 1978.25 (It does not appear that von Seckendorff-Gudent or Dümlein ever participated in any RAF actions.)26

  These were people who had been faced with difficult choices. Like everyone else, the defeats of ‘77 weighed heavily on them, as did the continued setbacks of 1978 and ‘79. While some had participated in the attack on Haig, there was widespread dissatisfaction with how the guerilla struggle was panning out. Some of these individuals had decided they wanted to leave the RAF. In other cases, the rest of the guerilla decided they were not suited to the group, and they were told they would have to go.27

  Safehouses, paid for out of the RAF’s war chest, were being maintained to house these dropouts, but this was obviously not a permanent solution. Those who were staying with the RAF now began searching for a long-term retirement plan of sorts for their former comrades, all fugitives who figured prominently on police “most wanted” lists.28

  Added to this was the case of Peter-Jürgen Boock, whose elaborate lies and serious drug addiction had been exposed in 1978. At first the other guerillas had taken the understandable position that they could not continue working with him, and efforts had been made to find a place where he would be safe from capture, but would not be able to cause them any further grief. He would have none of it, adamantly rejecting exile. Shockingly, he managed to win over his comrades, and it was agreed to reintegrate him: he was brought back to Europe after the Haig attack and is one of those who participated in the bloody Zurich robbery gone bad. After that, like the other guerillas, he remained in hiding in Paris.

  It was not long, however, before there were signs that Boock had started using again, and the decision was made to send him into exile, willing or not. The need for a retirement plan became all the more pressing. As we shall see, the solution would come from an unexpected quarter.

  The RAF had been joined in the French capital by the 2JM’s anti-imperialist faction—the only 2JM members still on the street. Years later, writing from prison, Inge Viett would remember this as a depressing period, for even more than the RAF, the 2JM was struggling with doubts and indecision. As the oldest and most experienced member on the outside, Viett felt responsible for the group’s survival, but also saw little point in carrying out any further military actions.29

  Before this crisis could be addressed, the state intervened, and in so doing settled matters for Viett and her comrades.

  In the spring of 1980, with the help of Chalid Dschihad, a BND mole in the PFLP (Special Command) (a successor-group to the PFLP (EO)), a safehouse was uncovered on Flatters Street in Paris’s Latin Quarter.30 West German agents placed it under surveillance, hoping to apprehend as many guerillas as possible. French police moved in on May 5, capturing five women: 2JM members Ingrid Barabaß and Regina Nicolai, RAF member Sieglinde Hofmann, and two other Germans, Karin Kamp-Münnichow and Karola Magg. Hofmann was being sought in connection with the Ponto killing, Nicolai was a suspect in the Palmers kidnapping and Till Meyer breakout, and Barabaß in the Palmers kidnapping. Kamp-Münnichow and Magg had no charges pending against them and were in fact unknown to police, yet were arrested and held along with the others.31

  Once the women were in custody, Zielfahndung agents dressed like movers entered the flat, stripping it clean and carting everything—kitchen utensils, railway timetables, empty bottles, cigarette butts, etc.—back to Wiesbaden, to be catalogued and fed into the BKA’s computers.32

  The five women were held for two months in strict isolation at the High-Security Wing at Fleury-Mérogis prison—Libération described it as “the German prison model that is bit by bit becoming the European model, spreading to Italy and France”33—with no visits, reading material, mail, or contact with one another or other prisoners. Having been subjected to physical violence during their initial interrogations,34 they were now subjected to strip searches by male guards. At first, the women were handcuffed with their arms behind their backs during their court appearances, and even when provided with legal documents to review—in the words of the cop in charge, “One can read perfectly well with handcuffs on.”35 At the same time, whenever they were brought before a judge they were surrounded by a battalion of police from the GIGN unit (specialized in hostage situations), and observers and supporters alike had to pass through metal detectors and submit to searches before they could enter the court.36

  The women’s lawyers concentrated their efforts on challenging these conditions, as well as trying to ascertain who exactly had ordered them, as the French attorney general denied having made any such request.37 To little avail, although they did manage to have the women’s handcuffs removed in the courtroom.38 As for the prison administration, its response was laconic: “We don’t see why they protest their conditions so much, it’s not like they’re going to be here for very long.”39

  Indeed, such was the case: on July 10 the court ruled t
hat the six could be extradited to the FRG, as the RAF and 2JM were apparently “not political organizations.” When the ruling was read out the courtroom exploded into violence between supporters and police, who beat people with billy clubs and bicycle chains, as well as setting off a smoke grenade.40 The next morning, the women were on a plane to Munich; in the case of Hofmann, her extradition was done with the assurance that she would not be charged with the Ponto killing—a stipulation that would be ignored as soon as she was in West German custody.

  The morning of the women’s extradition, the Paris offices of the Bundesbahn, the West German railway company, were rocked by an explosion. (This was in fact the third time the company’s Paris offices had been targeted over the years in solidarity with the RAF.)41 Just afterwards, police noticed a suspicious-looking car parked by a red light, and took off in pursuit when they saw three men jump in and depart at high speed. They had soon captured Jean Paul Gérard, Michel Lapeyre, and Frédéric Oriach, three revolutionaries from the French guerilla group the Noyaux armés pour l’autonomie populaire (Armed Nuclei For Popular Autonomy) who had themselves only recently been released from prison; the three would acknowledge their responsibility for the attack, carried out in solidarity with the West German guerillas.42

  With the Flatters Street arrests, the 2JM was for all intents and purposes wiped out, Viett and Juliane Plambeck being the only known combatants still at large. The two soon came to the conclusion that the only way to continue the struggle would be to join the RAF.43 There had been discussions about this for years,44 and these had already been pursued in Paris prior to May 5, but, according to Viett, the RAF remained highly critical of what they considered the opportunism of the 2JM’s traditional social revolutionary, “populist” approach. But the anti-imperialists had already rejected this orientation, and so, united by their condition of shared weakness, it was decided that the rump 2JM would publicly declare that it was dissolving itself into the RAF. The dowry in this marriage of last resort was to take the form of a public repudiation of much of the 2JM’s history.45

  Inge Viett (left) and Juliane Plambeck, the only 2JM members remaining at large following the 1980 Paris arrests.

  The 2JM’s dissolution statement is an unpleasant document, as self-criticisms tend to be, especially when they result from outside pressure. All the more so, given the disingenuous nature of what is written: as we now know, there was not much of a 2JM left to dissolve in 1980, just two survivors from the anti-imperialist faction stranded in Paris, looking for a way to continue. The historic 2JM was much better represented in the angry rejoinder the document provoked from Ralf Reinders, Klaus Viehmann, and Ronald Fritzsch, who were being held together at Moabit prison in West Berlin. During a trial statement delivered on June 10, Gabriele Rollnik, who had herself been sympathetic to the anti-imperialists, went straight to the point: “The 2nd of June Movement cannot be dissolved by someone reading a leaflet.”46

  Nonetheless, with Viett and Plambeck’s rallying to the RAF, the 2JM was no more. Although there were some isolated low-level actions by a “Friends of the 2nd of June Movement,” including the bombing of the Berlin-Kreuzberg municipal offices,47 these soon petered out. While important elements of the politics it represented did persist, resonating in the actions of the Revolutionary Cells and even the Autonomen, these lacked the proletarian and class-oriented perspective the early 2JM had tried so hard to embody. It was, in that sense, a tradition that had failed to find fertile ground in the new Model Germany.

  There is a sad postscript to this unpleasant document.

  Life underground implies constant illegality, as one’s fugitive status makes legal means of acquiring certain things more risky than simple theft. Automobiles in particular were required by the guerilla, and new ones were always being sought in order to keep one step ahead of the authorities. In the village of Flein, in Baden-Württemberg, on July 25, 1980, Heidi Schulz, Juliane Plambeck, and the two Beer brothers had just stolen a BMW—Schulz and Henning Beer took off in the stolen car while Plambeck and Wolfgang Beer followed in another vehicle. Tragedy struck as they rounded a corner just outside of the town of Unterriexingen: Plambeck lost control of her car, crossing over the median into oncoming traffic and colliding head-on with a dump truck. The two guerillas were dead before police arrived on the scene.48

  Juliane Plambeck had been active in the Munich Red Aid, a prisoner support group,49 before joining the 2JM. She was arrested in 1975 and charged in connection with the Lorenz kidnapping. After she and the other women prisoners escaped in 1976,50 she continued her work with the guerilla, being one of those involved in the Palmers kidnapping in 1977. She had turned twenty-eight less than two weeks before her death.

  Wolfgang Beer had only recently been released from prison following the stint that had resulted from the dpa occupation. Choosing to return underground to the RAF, it was on his recommendation that his younger brother Henning—who had repeatedly tried to join the RAF, only to be refused each time—had been brought into the guerilla.51 Witnessing his brother’s death, Henning Beer now fell into a deep depression.

  Wolfgang Beer

  When police realized who the dead occupants of the car were, the Zielfahndung descended on the scene, bagging and tagging over two thousand items for computer analysis. Eager to exploit the situation to their full propaganda advantage, the police noted that Lothar Späth, the president of Baden-Württemberg, lived only a few hundred meters from the crash site, which had also occurred on a route that Rebmann regularly used52—it was soon being trumpeted that the guerilla had been working on a new “terrorist spectacular.”53 Thousands of police scoured the surrounding countryside and nearby towns in the days following.54

  There was now only one 2JM member left from the “historic” liquidation of the 2JM “to continue the anti-imperialist struggle within the RAF—as the RAF.” Viett would later claim that she never felt personally close to the guerillas she now found herself with, that there was not the same sense of affinity or trust that she had shared with the 2JM women she had lived and worked with for years.55 Nevertheless, she would soon prove pivotal in resolving the key issue facing the RAF, namely, what to do with those members who either wanted out or whom the core group no longer felt they could work with.

  Various solutions had already been discussed, including the possibility of the eight relocating to one of the new national states in Africa. Viett was asked to use her contact with Colonel Harry Dahl of the Stasi to see if he could help them broker such a deal. However, when he heard of the plan he pointed out that, as white people, the former guerillas were liable to stand out like a sore thumb. He had a better idea, suggesting that the eight relocate to East Germany. The RAF had never considered that, but when Viett presented them with the offer, it seemed to solve all their problems. She was sent back to the GDR, where she spent ten days as a guest of the state, making the necessary arrangements.56

  Ralf Friedrich and Sigrid Sternebeck were the first to go. They were given instructions to travel from Paris to Italy, then to Austria, where they were provided with new passports. From there they flew out to Czechoslovakia, and then to East Berlin. At Schönefeld airport, they were picked up and driven to Pankow, where they were interviewed about their personal histories.57

  Everything having proceeded smoothly, these first two were followed by Susanne Albrecht, Silke Maier-Witt, Werner Lotze, Christine Dümlein, Monika Helbing, and Ekkehard von Seckendorff-Gudent. They became citizens of the German Democratic Republic at a champagne dinner in the town of Briesen in September 1980. They were provided with false identities, and once they had mastered their cover stories they were dispersed across the country.58

  As Helmut Pohl would recall, years later:

  People wanted to leave, but to where? Through contacts to the GDR it was possible to provide them with good conditions—otherwise they would have ended up in prison. Given the existing reality, the comrades in the GDR really did offer them the best possible conditions…. T
he defectors weren’t sent off to some secluded area. They received professional training and were able to study. The GDR really went all out.59

  There was, however, one dropout who would not be making the trip East: Peter-Jürgen Boock. Boock would later claim that he had wanted to break with the RAF ever since the Zurich bank robbery, but that during this period he was essentially the RAF’s prisoner, disarmed and kept under constant watch. Intent on avoiding exile, a short while before the transfers East began, he claims to have sabotaged a gas boiler in the safehouse where they were staying, so that a repairman would have to be called. In this situation, where the others couldn’t use their weapons, he apparently jumped out a window and made his way back to West Germany.60

  (According to a public statement made in 1988 by several RAF prisoners, Boock’s resistance to exile was due to the fact that the kind of drug scene he was dependent on did not exist outside of the metropole.)61

  Despite this hiccup in the plan, the overall problem seemed to be solved. Buoyed by this resolution, the RAF began to make arrangements to test the waters for a more active partnership with the Stasi. Already for years, the guerilla had benefited from transit through East Berlin and tolerance from the GDR’s security apparatus. The Stasi was also able to inform West Germans when the names they were using on phony ID had been detected and entered into police computers, and when their depots were under surveillance.62 Within a couple of years, the East Germans would be providing the RAF with weapons training, as well as a safe place to meet and make plans. It was a far cozier relationship than any of the guerilla’s supporters could have imagined, and one that flew in the face of the radical left’s hostility to the “real existing socialist” regime.