The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  …political conditions were intense, with the stationing of missiles and the Reagan policies. You saw the relationship to the socialist states differently if you were afraid that a war was coming. For example, we know that radical left groups in the movement that existed at that time went to the FDJ83 summer gatherings—Autonomen, as well as women’s groups and professional associations. This was not a RAF thing, but rather it must be seen as an expression of the overall situation.84

  Indeed, the RAF was not the only armed group to adopt an anti-NATO focus: the Revolutionary Cells had been bombing U.S. military bases for years, and in 1981 they attacked their first targets related to the Startbahn West. Attacks against the military-industrial complex would soon be a priority for the RZ as well.

  The guerilla was taking its lead from the streets, where the Autonomen were joined by unprecedented numbers in opposing the brinksmanship of the Reagan administration and its European allies. For the RZ to embark on this trajectory was only natural, given its movementist orientation. For the RAF, though, this represented a gamble, for there was the real risk that its politics might be obscured without any consequent gain.

  ENTERING THE FRAY

  If the Autonomen had captured the antimilitarist initiative with the Bremen riots, they remained just one part of a broader “peace” movement which was rooted in the Citizens Initiatives, and attracted people of all political persuasions from across the FRG.

  This new movement’s largest protests up to this point were planned for September 13, 1981, the day that Alexander Haig—Reagan’s new secretary of state—was scheduled to visit West Berlin. It was clear to everyone that this had the potential to be the opening chapter in a major wave of anti-American and anti-military activity.

  Just a few months after the prisoners’ hunger strike, and in the middle of the Tuwat gathering, the RAF went into action, carrying out two attacks in rapid succession, each of which targeted the U.S. forces stationed in the FRG.

  On August 31, the Sigurd Debus Commando detonated a car bomb at Ramstein USAREUR, a U.S. military airbase and the headquarters for NATO air forces in central Europe. The explosion took place at 7 am, just outside the Air Force headquarters building,85 shattering windows up to 100 meters away and setting cars aflame across the parking lot. Twenty people were injured—eighteen Americans, including a general, and two Germans—and damage to surrounding homes and automobiles was estimated at 7.2 million DM.86 Police would eventually find that the engine of the RAF’s vehicle had been blown so high it had landed on the roof of a nearby five-story building.87

  The bomb went off just before most people at the base arrived for work—as one witness noted, “It’s a miracle that no one was killed. A half-hour later, and there would have been a massacre.”88 In no time at all, military police in full battle dress and brandishing M-16 rifles ringed the parking lot, as roadblocks went up in the surrounding area—a clear case of closing the stable doors after the horse had bolted, for the guerillas were long gone.

  Ramstein airbase, 1981, after a visit from the Sigurd Debus Commando.

  The BKA had known that Ramstein was a possible RAF target, as plans for the base had been found in a safehouse the year before.89 Nevertheless, it came as a shock—while 1981 had been marked by numerous actions and protests against the American military presence, this was a potentially deadly attack, the likes of which had not been seen since the 1972 May Offensive. Furthermore, this was the first RAF attack inside the FRG since the German Autumn. People took notice.

  The Ramstein bombing set off a familiar dynamic. Just as the prisoners’ hunger strikes elicited solidarity actions on the outside, actual RAF attacks would inspire the movement to act. The way this normally played out was that high-level guerilla actions would be followed by anti-imps carrying out less spectacular low- and medium-level attacks, often against similar targets. For instance, two days after the bombing, persons unknown set fire to the SPD’s Frankfurt offices, leaving behind graffiti referring to Ramstein and calling for “Death to U.S. Imperialism.”90 This was followed by the torching of several cars belonging to U.S. troops in Wiesbaden. Later that week, the same day that tens of thousands gathered to protest against Haig’s visit to West Berlin, firebombs were thrown at the residence of the U.S. consul general in Frankfurt.

  Indeed, Haig’s visit itself proved to be a major embarrassment for the state. One week before, the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (Confederation of German Trade Unions) had held a pro-American “peace” rally in West Berlin to mark the forty-second anniversary of the beginning of World War II, one of several events organized by the DGB to counter the growing antimissile movement. Coming one day after the Ramstein attack, this backfired, as hundreds of masked Autonomen joined the march and began smashing the windows of banks and businesses on the Kürfurstendamm. There were seventeen arrests and forty-two police were injured, with fighting lasting well into the night91—just a taste of what was to come.

  Haig’s arrival the following Tuesday was greeted by fifty thousand demonstrators, including anti-imps who had printed up fliers with the secretary of state’s picture and the caption “2.7 seconds too late”—a reference to the RAF’s failed attempt on his life two years earlier.92 Seven thousand police were deployed; undaunted, as the demo was drawing to a close some three thousand militants broke off and headed toward the Berlin-Schöneberg city hall.93 Initially taken by surprise, the police rallied and then attacked with water cannons, tear gas, and baton charges. People built makeshift barricades by setting cars and dumpsters alight, but eventually the streets were cleared, in part by police driving through the crowds at high speed.94 There were 105 arrests and 151 police were injured.95

  The Haig demonstration was another political victory for the Autonomen, with the next day’s headlines reading “Haig in Berlin—Flames, Blood, and Looting.” (Of course, the vast majority of protesters did not engage in—and likely disapproved of—the violence, but the conservative wing of the peace movement had yet to figure out how to deal with the more radical street scene.)

  The RAF launched its next attack just two days later, on September 15, attempting to assassinate General Frederick Kroesen, supreme commander of the U.S. Army and of NATO’s Central Europe Section.

  The guerillas had camped out overnight on a wooded slope near a bridge crossing the Neckar River, a route the general regularly took from his suburban home to the U.S. Army headquarters in Heidelberg. On the morning in question, he was traveling with his wife in his chauffeured car, followed by a military police escort. The guerillas took aim with an RPG-7 grenade launcher and fired. One grenade blew up the car’s trunk, while another exploded on its fender, as the vehicle was strafed with bullets.

  General Kroesen’s car, slightly the worse for wear…

  Such an attack would normally have been deadly: in an ordinary car the gas tank should have caught fire and exploded. However, one of the general’s bodyguards had apparently noticed they were being tailed by individuals on a motorcycle earlier that year, and upon running its plates had connected it to the anti-imp scene.96 Heightened security measures had been taken, and a new car with armor plating ordered. As such, although the vehicle was hit by two grenades and numerous bullets, its passengers escaped with their lives, though both suffered serious damage to their hearing.97

  Kroesen spoke to reporters from the hospital where he and his wife were treated for minor cuts from broken glass. “I don’t know who was responsible, but I know there was a group that declared war on us,” he said, referring to the RAF, “and I’m beginning to believe them.”98

  Despite the fact that the general had survived largely unscathed, the technical skill involved raised eyebrows. As one police spokesman put it, the use of a military weapon lent a “new quality” to the guerilla.99 More than that, the RPG-7 is intended to be used against tanks—the general’s Mercedes was only a fraction that size, and was partially obscured by brush, yet it had been hit twice from a range of almost five hundred feet.100 />
  Years later, Inge Viett would claim that the East Germans had provided the training for this attack. According to the former 2JM guerilla, Stasi agents had spent a few days that spring at the Briesen camp, showing RAF members how to use the RPG-7, having them blow up a series of Mercedes limousines, manned first by plastic dummies, and then finally sacrificing a German Shepherd dog. This apparently led to a heated argument, as the guerillas saw no point in killing a defenseless animal, but the Stasi insisted, wanting to show what effect the explosion would have on a back-seat passenger.101

  It must be noted that Viett’s account has been contradicted by other former RAF members, including Helmut Pohl, who stated in a 1991 interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau that the training lesson she refers to occurred after, not before, the Kroesen attack, the purpose being to ascertain what the guerillas had done wrong.102 Furthermore, Pohl specified that the training in question had been supplied by the National People’s Army, not the Stasi. In 2011, Christian Klar (who had been released in 2008) accused Viett of having lied about the date in order to lay the basis for prosecuting Stasi agents on grounds of “supporting a terrorist organization” thirty years after the fact, as the former GDR had by that point been annexed by the FRG. According to Klar, this was part of a deal Viett made in exchange for a reduced sentence.103 (It is true that the day after Viett made this assertion, charges were laid against a Stasi officer in this regard. However, they were subsequently dropped, and while Viett has issued a public apology for her statements, she has also vehemently denied that they were part of any kind of deal.)104

  At the time, of course, such stories were both unknown and unimagined. For the anti-imps, the attack on Kroesen, like the Ramstein bombing before it, had been a political success, an example of the guerilla’s relevance to the aboveground left:

  …many people now realized that the targets attacked have great importance for the U.S. war strategy. In May 1981 for example the women’s peace groups organized a huge demonstration to the Headquarters in Ramstein. The attacks of the RAF have been discussed within the various peace groups and, unlike 1977, there have been few denunciations.105

  Momentum continued to build. At the very moment that Kroesen was giving his second press conference about the attack, police identified and defused two bombs that had been placed on the railway tracks used to carry supplies in and out of the Rhine-Main airbase in Frankfurt.106 That same week, persons unknown planted a bomb in the offices of Dow Chemical in Düsseldorf, though it too was disarmed before it could go off.107

  Heavier attacks lent their weight to what would otherwise have passed as relatively innocuous harassment, as when on one evening the tires of cars belonging to American GIs in Frankfurt were slashed—vandalism that made the international newswires as the vehicles were also daubed with the injunction to “Stop the NATO runway” (a reference to Startbahn West), and the words “Kroesen” and “Ramstein.”108 Of course, as we have seen, the flipside to this was that even something as harmless as spraypainting graffiti could be interpreted as support for a “terrorist” organization under §129a.109

  Meanwhile, this rise in resistance was opposed not only by the state, but also by the liberal section of the peace movement. Since the decline of the movement against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, “peace” activism had become the purview of Citizens Initiatives and church groups, often overlapping with the pacifist wing of the antinuclear movement, sometimes even having ties to the SPD. This hegemony had been cracked in Bremen in 1980, but the radicals were still fighting an uphill battle. As one writer has put it, it was an awkward situation, as “there was a booming peace movement on the one hand, and a weak antiwar movement on the other.”110

  A look at the October 1981 Peace Congress held in West Berlin provides a snapshot of the different coexisting forces. The Congress had been called to establish a central Coordinating Committee for the entire movement; a process that included the marginalization of the Autonomen as part of its agenda. Worlds collided as Karsten Voigt and former Justice Minister Hans-Jochen Vogel—both of the SPD—took the podium. Anti-imps stormed in screaming and whistling and smashing the light fixtures. Taking the floor, they read out the prisoners’ demands from the hunger strike earlier that year, and then sat down chanting, “Vogel murderer! Vogel out! Voigt out!” At first the audience was unsure how to respond—then, after some delay, organizers linked arms and “nonviolently” forced the anti-imps into a corner. Eventually the SPD politicians were able to talk, though by that time half the audience had left.111

  Within the antimissile movement, armed struggle remained far more unpopular than simple street militancy. Nevertheless, the RAF’s ‘81 offensive had clearly been a setback for the state, which had hoped to be done with the guerilla in ‘77. Instead, it now faced a combination of clandestine and aboveground opponents committed to building a resistance movement—a small current, to be sure, but one which was growing, and making all sorts of interesting connections.

  Repression—meaning capture or death—remained one obvious way to counter this development. However, following the arrests of the past few years, by 1981 the police seemed to have run out of luck. Looking for new leads, they announced a 50,000 DM ($22,225) reward for information regarding the Ramstein or Kroesen attacks, or which would lead to the arrest of a guerilla or to the location of a RAF safehouse112—to no avail. Initially, at least, it seemed that for all their resources, the combined might of the BKA, the Verfassungsschutz, and sundry local constabularies was coming up empty.

  Catch as catch can, it was the aboveground supporters who were now targeted.

  Following the attack on Kroesen, police had recovered the rocket launcher, along with camping equipment and cans of cocoa, that had been abandoned on the hillside where the RAF had lain in wait. Fingerprints belonging to Klar, Mohnhaupt, and other individuals were apparently lifted from the scene, and this provided the initial focus for the investigation. Police released photos of various vehicles that the guerillas had allegedly been spotted driving, as well as the motorcycle that Kroesen’s bodyguard claimed to have noticed earlier that year.

  §129a was used to try and shake something loose from the scene, anyone with radical politics being a potential target. Of the thousands investigated under this law, hardly any were actually charged, so much so that it became known as “the investigator’s paragraph.”113 (Of 2,131 preliminary proceedings between 1980 and 1987, only 30 led to convictions.) Nevertheless, once proceedings were initiated, the target of the investigation was placed under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance, which often included phone taps. In extreme cases, people were held in remand, with their correspondence censored and all visits through a glass partition, like other political prisoners.114 Of course, beyond those actually named in proceedings, §129a also provided the means to criminalize and intimidate the militant left in general, and the anti-imps in particular. As observed by Bunte Hilfe, a prisoner support group, “[§129a] seeks to disrupt and prevent discussion between the different sections of the movement, by making it clear that anyone involved might find themselves facing years in prison.”115

  Building on this, the state now refined its propaganda, developing the position that not all RAF combatants had gone underground, but that there was also an “aboveground RAF.” After years of charging comrades for supporting the guerilla, this now established a basis for bringing them to trial as if they were actual RAF members, a qualification that had both political and legal consequences, as “membership” made one liable to prison terms much longer than those for mere “support” or “promotion.”116

  Among the first attempts to implement this thesis were the cases of Karl Grosser and Jürgen Schneider, two anti-imps arrested on April 10, a few days before Debus died.117 Police would claim that Schneider had helped to write the eighth hunger strike statement, but still only charged him with support. Grosser, on the other hand, would be charged with actual membership in the RAF: even though he had been in prison since
April, he was accused of having helped to carry out the attack on Kroesen in September, the police claiming that it was he who had been the person allegedly tailing the general’s car on a motorcycle earlier that year. Still, when he was tried in 1982, the Stuttgart court did not find the claim of membership convincing, and instead sentenced him for support—with a three-year sentence—while Schneider received two and a half years.118

  Solidarity poster for Helga Roos, Karl Grosser, and Jürgen Schneider.

  Cases like these, and the accusation that the RAF had aboveground members, served to threaten and intimidate anyone who refused to reject armed struggle as beyond the pale. As one movement flier put it, “Faced with our new won strength, which began with the militant 1980 demo in Bremen and the common struggle with the hunger-striking prisoners, and included the anti-Haig demonstration and the struggle against NATO’s Startbahn West, the state has reacted with the police fabrication of an ‘aboveground RAF,’ with the goal of destroying this movement with intimidation, criminalization, and imprisonment.”119

  One month after the RAF’s summer offensive, the “aboveground RAF” story was trotted out again. On October 16, Helga Roos was arrested in Frankfurt, the police claiming that she had purchased the tent used by the Gudrun Ensslin Commando the night before the Kroesen attack, and that her fingerprints had been found on a can of cocoa at their campsite. Soon after, Gabriele Gebhard was arrested in Mannheim, also accused of having helped the guerilla carry out its recent attacks. Then in December, several anti-imps were picked up in a series of raids in Heidelberg. This was either a fishing trip or straight up harassment; in any case, they were all released a few days later, although they faced subsequent investigations under §129a. The substance of their anti-imperialist activity consisted of supporting the prisoners’ hunger strike, demonstrating against U.S. foreign policy, and attending public meetings against Startbahn West and in support of the resistance in El Salvador and Palestine.120