by J. Smith
An atomic power plant that couldn’t be prevented despite construction site occupations and demonstrations can still be neutralized if the power pylons are knocked over.
A crane is only a useful tool for a real estate speculator until it is torched.
A slumlord that lets a living space be destroyed gets a sense of what it’s like when his own digs are “renovated.”
A Municipal Planning and Building Control Office encounters certain difficulties with further deforestation if its offices burn down.
A prison warden learns less about daily life in prison from petitions and protest letters than from a couple of bullets in the leg.
All the small and large enemies of the people can no longer bask in their glory if they are made to fear being held accountable for their scummy behavior!
No aspect of everyday struggle can be overlooked when pursuing the long-term goal of uniting all of the resistance groups. Only in this way can a broad, militant, revolutionary movement develop, and through a protracted process of disruption of all of the ruling structures—economic, political, and military—carry through the social revolution in the metropole.
We can never lose sight of this goal—the social revolution—which today seems so utopian, otherwise we will lose ourselves in sects, transcendental theories, and political irrelevance.
Now a final comment regarding the Dissolution Paper:
Social revolutionary politics—which are represented by the 2nd of June Movement, among others—cannot be “dissolved” like some petit bourgeois gardening group.
Reinders, Viehmann, Fritzsch
Berlin-Moabit
June 1980
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3. In 1972 Andreas Baader had affixed his thumbprint to a letter to the press to prove its authenticity. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 113, 120-121.
4. A reference to the series of arrests in which many 2nd of June Members were captured, as detailed on page 58.
5. Gewerkschaft öffentliche Dienste, Transport und Verkehr (Public Service, Transport, and Transit Union).
6. Gerhart Baum, the FDP minister of the interior from 1978 to 1982. See chapter 8.
7. The occupation of a projected nuclear waste disposal facility site at Gorleben, in Lower Saxony, had been violently cleared by police earlier in June 1980. The protesters had opted for a course of strict nonviolence, to the disgust of many Autonomen.
8. Both Westend in Munich and Dreisameck in Freiburg were sites of militant struggles for affordable housing.
9. The America Houses are cultural centers funded by the U.S. government that can be found in many cities in Germany. They were repeatedly targeted by militant left protests from the late 1960s through the 1980s.
The Deaths of Wolfgang Beer and Juliane Plambeck
Wolfgang and Juliane—their deaths are hard for us, especially in such an absurd accident. They had prepared for a different death, not this brutal, daily metropolitan waste.
The bullshit the press is cranking out is really too much. Anyone who ever had anything to do with Wolfgang knows who he was. For him, the most important thing was to learn through and from the attack—living underground, aboveground, or in prison. It was something he also taught others. His clarity about the hows and whys of his undertakings, his militancy, and his political thinking were important to us—the RAF—for eight years.
Juliane wanted the guerilla in the FRG unified, and that’s how we came to be with her. She was someone who through her openness and political radicalism could clear the bullshit out of the way. The decisiveness and the enthusiasm with which she embraced this new chapter had a strong effect on us all.
Regarding the filthy way the BAW and the BKA are making use of their deaths, we can only say that Rebmann doesn’t concern us right now—he already brags enough about attacks against him—and neither does Späth.1 Nor do we intend to blow Schmidt up. Naturally, we’re still here, which they know better than they let on in their propaganda. “Proving our capacity to act” and “desperate actions” aren’t really our thing. The ‘77 offensive opened up possibilities for a new step. Concretely, it is necessary for us to restructure for the next step in the development of our strategy to create politico-military unity between the armed underground and the legal structures in the anti-imperialist movement. Then we’ll decide upon our course of action.
Red Army Faction
July 26, 1980
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1. A reference to police claims that the RAF were planning an attack at the time of Beer and Plambeck’s accident. See page 134.
6
The ‘81 Offensive
THE AUTONOMEN HAD BURST ONTO the scene and the RAF had regained its sense of purpose, but not much had changed in the FRG’s tombs, the 1978 and ‘79 hunger strikes notwithstanding. Yet again, it would be the prisoners’ struggle that would push developments forward, and win a hearing for anti-imperialist politics among the new generation of radical youth.
After their seventh hunger strike, the prisoners had returned to individual or small-group actions to defend themselves.
For instance, in February 1980, Christine Kuby, Christa Eckes, Inga Hornstein, Anne Reiche, and Brigitte Asdonk were all strip-searched and moved to a new high-security unit in Lübeck-Lauerhof. The women responded by going on hunger strike, demanding their transfer out of the dead wing; at one point, they even escalated to refusing liquids. Over a thousand people demonstrated in solidarity in nearby Hamburg, and the America House in that city was occupied, in an action that was framed not only as support for the prisoners, but also for the politics of the RAF.1
After several weeks, the prison administration gave in, promising to relax the women’s isolation conditions—a rare victory.
In May, Knut Folkerts’s trial for murder began in Düsseldorf. It was a rowdy affair, with supporters chanting slogans against isolation torture (four would be fined for disrupting the proceedings). Folkerts denounced the spectacle, explaining that so far as he was concerned, his sentence had been decided before proceedings even began. Referring to the presiding judge as a “state security rat” and a “fascist pig,” he told him bluntly, “We don’t talk to people like you. We shoot people like you.”2 He would be found guilty of two counts of murder in connection with the Buback assassination, receiving a sentence of life in prison.3
In September, also in Düsseldorf, Christof Wackernagel and Gert Schneider were found guilty of membership in a terrorist organization and attempted murder of police officers, stemming from the circumstances of their capture. Removed from the court for heckling during their trial, they each received sentences of fifteen years.4
It was on February 6, 1981, that the prisoners returned to coordinated action, initiating their eighth collective hunger strike, demanding association, the release of Günter Sonnenberg, and that their prison conditions be monitored by the International Commission for the Protection of Prisoners and Against Isolation Torture, which had been set up for this purpose in 1979.
The prisoners had hoped that Stefan Wisniewski would use the occasion of his trial, which began in September 1980, to announce their strike in his opening statement. But this was to be the first trial directly related to the Schleyer kidnapping, and Wisniewski felt it should be used to discuss the events of ‘77. By calling the hunger strike at this time, public attention would be shifted to the prisoners’ struggle. This was a source of some discord and led to Wisniewski quietly distancing himself from his comrades, while publicly maintaining solidarity with them. As he would explain years later, “Having posed the question of the prisoners—our weakest point—as politically central in 1977, there was no way I wanted to repeat this fatal error as a prisoner myself.” Nonetheless, once the strike began he did refuse food for six weeks and encouraged various social prisoners to do the same.5
Hundreds of prisoners joined the strike, most of them not from the RAF. As militants in one city explained, “Only with the hunger strike of about 300 political prisoners a co
nnection among us in Hamburg was established again that made it possible for the different groups to enter into a political discussion…. Solidarity with the political prisoners and the fight against imperialism also became part of the politics of the squatters movement in Berlin and the antinuclear movement in northern Germany.”6 In West Berlin, thousands of people marched in support of the prisoners, the largest demonstration of its kind in years.7 On March 4, members of the FRG Relatives Committee—including the mothers of Rollnik, Stürmer, and Wagner, as well as Becker’s sister—occupied the offices of Spiegel magazine, in an attempt to force the media to begin reporting on the strike.8
“Prisoners in the FRG on hunger strike since February ‘81; Against extermination and isolation! For life and self-determination; Freedom for Günter Sonnenberg; Inside and outside—one struggle!”
On March 8, International Women’s Day, a relatively new group called Women Against Imperialist War marched on Lübeck prison in an attempt to bridge the gap that had always separated the women’s movement from the RAF.9
There was an important victory on March 11, when Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, Christian Möller, and Rolf Clemens Wagner—who were all being held in Switzerland—announced that their demands had been partially met. They had been promised that their conditions would be relaxed immediately, and that they would be integrated into the general population in the near future.10 The three resumed eating, issuing a statement in which they explained that, “We view these developments as further proof that it would also be possible for the authorities in the FRG to take concrete steps to address the demands put forward by the comrades from the guerilla… thereby allowing them to call off their hunger strike.”11
Sympathy for the prisoners was not confined to partisans of armed struggle; once again, sections of the liberal intelligentsia were successfully mobilized, with some progressive doctors and clergy taking a public stand.12 Two days after the victory in Switzerland, Amnesty International weighed in, urging the West German authorities to abolish solitary confinement and small-group isolation as regular forms of imprisonment.13
When a female justice official showed up to speak at a women’s conference in Hamburg she was ejected, denounced by WAIW as “being one of the authorities we wanted to attack but not talk to.”14 This same conference passed a resolution supporting the prisoners’ demands and requesting that the International Federation of Women and the World Council for Peace do the same. Also in Hamburg, a demonstration of three hundred women marched on the offices of the NDR public broadcaster to break through the news blackout surrounding the strike.15
Even minor, nonviolent, actions could have serious consequences. For instance, Sybille Haag and several other supporters would spend weeks in jail for hanging a banner from an overpass on the autobahn between Stuttgart and Heilbrunn.16 In another case, a young woman spent six weeks in remand for helping to organize a demonstration in support of the prisoners. Ten people caught spraypainting slogans on highway signs similarly spent six weeks in remand, while one graffiti artist who had been apprehended writing “War to the Palaces” on a fence received a one-year prison sentence. In all of these cases the relatively minor offenses relating to vandalism were supplemented by prosecution for supporting a “terrorist” organization under §129a, and those thus charged found themselves subject to the same treatment as captured combatants: lawyers’ visits through glass partitions, censored mail, restricted visitors, exclusion from group activities, solitary yard time, etc.17
Such cases were not rare, nor was the state’s reaction considered out of the ordinary. The RAF would later note that fifty people had been charged under §129a during the strike,18 but this was just the tip of the iceberg: the Attorney General had launched 133 preliminary investigations for promoting a terrorist organization, and in the first half of the year, there were 263 proceedings against 600 people: all for nonviolent support activities—leaflets, posters, slogans, and banners—during the hunger strike.19
Once again, Amnesty International was successfully lobbied to protest this repression. As the international human rights organization would explain in its annual report:
[I]n Amnesty International’s opinion the arguments in indictments and judicial decisions against supporters of the hunger-strike constitute a threat to the nonviolent exercise of the freedom of expression. Judge Kuhn,20 a judge at the Bundesgerichtshof (federal court), who is responsible for the pre-trial proceedings in virtually all these cases, has argued in many cases that the “ultimate aim” of the hunger-strike was the continued existence of the Red Army Fraction. Supporters of the hunger-strike who he felt “knew and wanted” this “ultimate aim” therefore supported the terrorist organization, even though the opinions they expressed related only to the direct demands of the hunger-strikers. Many supporters of the hunger-strike were consequently held in investigative detention charged with “making propaganda for a terrorist association” (Article 129a of the criminal code) because of “ultimate aims” which Judge Kuhn held to be apparent from, for example, the use of a red five-pointed star.21
While nonviolent protesters were facing such repression, there were also other forms of support that could be termed “more active behavior”: the SPD Land office in West Berlin was firebombed, as was the American International School in Düsseldorf-Lohausen, a bomb went off outside a U.S. intelligence building in Gießen doing 200,000 DM in damages, and in Frankfurt nine U.S. military police vehicles were torched at the Gibbs Barracks and a U.S. Army employment office was firebombed.22 In that same city, in what might have been an homage of sorts, two department stores were set alight,23 and on April 10, attempts were made to torch two more military installations. Then on April 12, a Bremen to Hannover military transport train was derailed using steel cables, causing approximately 200,000 DM in damages.24
While these attacks were welcomed, the RAF prisoners were not happy with every action supposedly carried out on their behalf: in Cologne, a bomb was set off in the subway, injuring one transit worker and six cops, and a train was derailed by metal chains laid across the tracks. The prisoners condemned these attacks, insisting that they must have been the work of state agents attempting to discredit the hunger strike.25
As in previous strikes, participants faced the ordeal of force-feeding and increased brutality from their jailers. For instance, Angelika Speitel, who had suffered from depression since her 1978 arrest, and had attempted suicide in 1980, was repeatedly taken to the hole, stripped naked by male guards, put in chains, and denied water. All throughout, she remained under constant observation.26
In Celle’s high-security wing, Karl-Heinz Dellwo and resistance prisoner Heinz Herlitz were force-fed by means of a tube inserted through the nose. Die Zeit reported that it was such a bad procedure that in the end even the prison doctor no longer wanted to continue doing it.27 Such force-feeding was little more than torture, as the procedure was excruciatingly painful, and yet the amount of nutrition delivered was negligible.
By early April, seven prisoners were in serious condition;28 once again Amnesty International contacted officials, noting the risks the prisoners were enduring, and urgently called upon authorities to meet the demand to abolish isolation.29 Yet despite the growing support from both liberal and militant quarters, the state held firm.
Demonstrators call for association and support for the hunger strike.
Tragically, on April 15, what everyone feared, occurred: after sixty-four days without food, Sigurd Debus joined Holger Meins as the second prisoner to die during a RAF prisoners’ hunger strike. A tall man, measuring six feet four, he weighed 119 pounds at the time of his death. He had been refusing food since February, and had been subjected to force-feeding beginning on March 20.
Dr. Görlach of the prison office was responsible for Debus at the Hamburg remand center, where he and other hunger strikers had been brought. There he worked under the close supervision of Dr. Friedland, who had been outspoken in his view that hunger strikes must be dealt wit
h forcefully, as an expression of the guerilla’s war against the constitutional state.30
Debus’s health had taken a rapid turn for the worse in the first week of April; his mother was permitted to visit with him, but he didn’t recognize her, and doctors declared that he may have suffered brain damage.31 He lost consciousness on April 7, spending eight days in a coma before he died.
The doctors conducting Debus’s autopsy found that “the immediate cause of death was the death of brain tissue as a result of cerebral bleeding and a significant increase in pressure on the brain.”32 It was unclear whether this was caused by a stroke or as a result of the insufficient nourishment he received during force-feeding. Critics were quick to blame this cerebral hemorrhage on the fact that Görlach had started adding fat emulsion to the fluid Debus was being force-fed.
Funeral procession for Sigurd Debus.
Just hours after Debus’s death, in a public statement ostensibly addressed to Amnesty International, Federal Justice Minister Jürgen Schmude announced that while recognizing prisoner of war status and granting association in one large group were both out of the question, the Länder Justice Ministers would meet to discuss some improvements in prison conditions.33 The RAF prisoners were led to understand that they would no longer be held in individual isolation, and that more groups would be established. According to some supporters, the timing was no coincidence—the state had been waiting for someone to die before making any concessions:
Sigurd’s death was planned. It was carefully planned that he should die because thereby [the] most could be made out of his death in the media. Sigurd was not a member of the RAF, but he joined the hungerstrike, not, as the authorities would have the public believe, out of solidarity, but because the demands of the RAF prisoners were also his own. He wanted to be put together with prisoners of the RAF as those were his comrades and he was determined not to bear any longer the situation in the so-called “reform prison” he was in, where he could not develop and communicate with anyone of his own history and identity. So it was not just an act of solidarity but an act of political consciousness and self-determination that made him join the hungerstrike. The authorities let his murder coincide with the ending of the hungerstrike to show the public that the RAF is willing and able to sacrifice the life of someone who was not even a member of their own group for their unreasonable demands, to show that the RAF is determined to “step over corpses.”34