The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  When evaluating how important this break was, it is worth keeping three things in mind. First, those who stepped away tended to be older supporters, more likely to have been central to previous support efforts, and thus more able to provide a sense of continuity with the previous “generations” of the RAF and its support scene. They also tended to be more well-read, and more at ease discussing what younger comrades might have dismissed as “high theory.”

  Second, despite how rooted these detractors may have been in the guerilla’s previous interpretation of anti-imperialism, no new guerilla group was established by these anti-imperialist critics. While they may have felt they were being true to the original RAF, they certainly weren’t setting out to repeat the latter’s practice. As such, no matter how cogently they may have identified a crisis in anti-imperialism, these detractors seem to have been no more able to address this crisis than their erstwhile comrades in the underground.

  Third, as we shall see, the May Paper would be implemented by future RAF members who had not yet gone under at the time it was released, and this would provide an opening for others to retroactively claim that the paper constituted a definitive break with what had come before. Yet in point of fact, although they were not underground at the time, some of the future RAF members in question had in fact participated in the discussions that led up to and informed the May Paper, as anti-imps. Furthermore, even a cursory reading of RAF statements in the period between 1979 and 1981 shows that these ideological changes had been in the works for years. It has been said that before his death, Wolfgang Beer had worked with Helmut Pohl on the ideas that found their way into the paper, and if this is so, it should be noted that both men had served years in prison, and could trace their involvement in the RAF back to its earliest days. As for those who remained in prison, while Dellwo’s opinion has been noted, the overall view of the May Paper was a positive one. As Irmgard Möller would recall fifteen years later, most of the prisoners agreed with the front strategy and with the idea of a unified European guerilla:

  We were familiar with the paper and discussed it at every opportunity, even if only in snippets. We were sympathetic to the idea within the front concept that the time was right for a front, with its components defined anew and its pivotal point and hub being the struggles in Western Europe. The basic idea was to also act politically, to develop political projects and build political relationships. The first phase, the formation of the guerilla, was over, and it was now a question of consolidation. We too felt the time was ripe for that. Even from the inside looking out, we could see that there was once again a movement in 1980. The state of paralysis, stagnation, and torpor that had defined the radical left between 1977 and 1980 was gone. Demonstrations were occurring once again: for squats, against NATO, against nuclear power. There were new forms of action, and a lot seemed to be happening. We were very pleased about all of this.14

  Regardless of the amount of support, or lack thereof, from the prisoners, nobody denied that the May Paper represented a major shift, even where it was not seen as breaking with the guerilla’s original orientation. For a great many supporters, the RAF remained the RAF, and the proposed changes amounted to a necessary coming to terms with the experiences of the previous twelve years. While disagreements about these new ideas would eventually lead to some acrimonious debates, for the time being these remained muted.

  Indeed, despite this major declaration, nothing more would be heard from the RAF for several months, during which time the movement continued to grapple with its own challenges and build its own momentum.

  RESISTING REAGAN IN 1982

  The Revolutionary Cells seemed unstoppable in 1982, but tabulating their activity poses a methodological problem, as anybody could carry out an attack—from breaking some windows to planting a bomb—and claim it as an RZ action. Limiting the account to major actions is both arbitrary and unavoidable in a study not itself devoted to the Cells; nonetheless, readers should keep in mind that these major attacks were accompanied by a much greater number of low-level actions, even if most of these are now largely forgotten.

  The main left mobilization in 1982 was provoked by Ronald Reagan’s first presidential visit to the FRG, to attend a two-day NATO Summit in downtown Bonn. Initially, with the previous September’s Haig protests still fresh in everybody’s mind, there were questions as to whether the trip would include West Berlin, but the symbolic importance of the divided city made it impossible to avoid.15 Indeed, not visiting would have undone the real purpose of the exercise, which was to create a show of unity behind the Double-Track decision to station new short-range Pershing and Cruise missiles in the FRG.

  To prepare the ground for the June visit, the West Berlin police began to terrorize the city’s squatters. The first raid since Rattay’s death occurred on April 28, in the midst of negotiations to legalize the occupied houses. A peaceful demonstration that night was met with tear gas and a baton charge, with the excuse that the protesters had not sought a police permit. The next day a “legal” demonstration with a permit attracted five thousand people—it too was met with tear gas and billy clubs, as two thousand police engaged in what has been described as an “orgy of violence.”16 Over the next six weeks the raids continued, anti-Reagan leaflets and banners were confiscated, as police took to painting over anti-American graffiti.17

  This preemptive clampdown was accompanied by a public relations charade, meant to paint the Western powers as the true peacemakers. At the Bonn Summit, just before Reagan’s West Berlin appearance, NATO issued a hyperbolic “Program for Peace in Freedom.” As one historian has noted, “The program, which referred to NATO as ‘the essential instrument of peace’ and which vowed that NATO’s nuclear weapons would never be used except in response to attack, pointedly set out to contrast NATO to the Warsaw Pact in an unsubtle effort to offset the growing influence of the peace movement…”18

  NATO’s public relations ploy did not go unchallenged. One week before the Bonn Summit, the Revolutionary Cells carried out its most ambitious offensive to date: on June 1, in the middle of the night, different RZs bombed the U.S. Army Headquarters in Frankfurt, the U.S. Army radio station in West Berlin, ITT in Hannover, IBM and Control Data in Düsseldorf, and the U.S. Army Officers Clubs in Hanau and Gelnhausen. Timed to avoid injuries,19 and involving militants from across the FRG and West Berlin, it was a night of attacks that cemented the RZ’s position at the center of the West German resistance movements. Less obviously, it also did nothing to contradict the RAF’s recent call for a strategy built around common attacks against NATO and the U.S. military. Further bombings—which similarly avoided any casualties—continued throughout the week leading up to the Bonn Summit.20

  On June 10, the second day of the summit, over one hundred thousand people descended on Bonn to demonstrate their opposition to NATO’s war plans. Border police locked down the city, and riot cops easily turned back several thousand who broke away and attempted to march to the city center. The heaviest the action got was just before the rally began, when in nonviolent protest one man doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire—suffering from third-degree burns, he was quickly rushed to hospital by helicopter.21 That same day, tens of thousands gathered in West Berlin for a similarly peaceful demonstration.

  The Bonn demonstration against Ronald Reagan, June 10, 1982: “Atomic Death Threatens Us All.”

  The June 10 protests were carefully orchestrated by various church groups, the Jusos (the SPD’s youth wing), and the Greens—the same forces which had held the initiative at the Peace Congress in West Berlin the previous October—and made a priority out of avoiding any altercations with police. Due to the reformist nature of the Bonn demonstration’s demands (see sidebar on next page) many Autonomen and anti-imp groups in fact chose to stay away, the sentiment being that, “To form our own contingent in order to demonstrate our politics within the demonstration would probably mean that we would go under in the masses of people there.”22

&
nbsp; This left June 11, the day of Reagan’s West Berlin visit, to the radical left.23 In vain, the West Berlin Senate had imposed a total ban on all demonstrations for the day in question, and the day before police had raided a number of houses, confiscating dozens of banners and arresting would-be protesters.24 Nevertheless, Autonomen and anti-imps called for an illegal demonstration in the city center; people were asked to bring helmets, as well as gloves and goggles to protect against tear gas, and were warned to travel in groups and to leave their children at home. Without going so far as to call for violent resistance, the Council of Delegates of the Alternative Liste voted to defy the Senate (to which it had just been elected) and threw its weight behind the June 11 demo.25

  What Kind of Peace?

  It has been said that in the eighties in the FRG, “there was a booming peace movement on the one hand, and a weak antiwar movement on the other.”1

  What this meant was explained in a document produced by Autonomen and anti-imps in the wake of President Reagan’s visit to Bonn and West Berlin:

  The anti-war movement is to be pacified by the offer of a zone without nuclear weapons. That means: the promise that a war is not going to take place here. This “inner stability” would be achieved in the centers of imperialism, the condition necessary to guarantee and to escalate plunder in the Third World, the “grey zones,” and to do this with the countries of Europe taking part in the plunder directly and militarily. […]

  It cannot be our aim to “secure peace,” meaning the status quo here, because we cannot see peace in this country or anywhere else in the world. We cannot pray for peace, we can only fight against the cause of the open and hidden wars and destroy them, in a fight against the system here and against NATO because NATO is the major instrument in the securing of imperialist interests. Our aim is our liberation and that of all people.2

  Or as the Hamburg chapter of Women Against Imperialist War explained, “We are no ‘Women for Peace’ because we see that here and everywhere in the world we cannot conjure up peace and that there will be no peace unless we fight the material causes for war and destroy them.”3

  _____________

  1 Geronimo, 113.

  2 Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, “Summary of a brochure by Autonomist and Anti-imperialist Groups,” in Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, 11-12.

  3 Women Against Imperialist War (Hamburg), “War on Imperialist War,” in Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, 20.

  June 11, 1982: rioting spreads through West Berlin as anti-Reagan protesters break out of the Nollendorfplatz kettle.

  Thousands answered the call, gathering at Nollendorfplatz, when suddenly the area was ringed by barbed wire and water cannons; the police announced that nobody would be allowed to leave without submitting to a search and presenting their ID. Rather than agree to this, people began to attack the barriers of what some would later refer to hyperbolically as a makeshift concentration camp.26 In this they were supported by latecomers who remained outside of the fenced area, and soon the riot spread.27 According to one account,

  Demonstrators built barricades, set fire to cars parked in the area, threw stones at police, and torched and plundered stores in the area. At times, the intensity of the flying stones hurled by protesters prevented firefighters from extinguishing the blazes. Hundreds of anarchists repeatedly charged the police lines, seeking to break through the barriers. Some statistics give an idea of the scope of the riots: police made 271 arrests, 87 police officers were injured in the melee, 40 demonstrators had to be hospitalized, and more than 200 injured people were treated at the scene.28

  As one anti-imp report put it:

  This time we had discussed the objective of the demo at a national level and organized it nationally. In spite of the state’s efforts to demoralize people, thousands came to Nollendorfplatz determined to demonstrate….

  [U]ltimately, it read as if it were always just us—sometimes fewer, sometimes better organized—who were involved in the fighting at these demos. But that’s not true. A great number of young people who are not part of our scene and who weren’t involved in the organizing participated in all of these demos. They participated not because they agreed with our goals, but because of their own living conditions (no work, no homes, no future) and because they knew they had to defend themselves.29

  Of those arrested, twenty-one were charged with serious breach of the peace; they would eventually receive sentences of up to three and a half years.30 As further payback, the day after the riot persons unknown firebombed the Alternative Liste’s main offices and preferred pub, which had become important gathering places for the left. Both were completely destroyed.31

  Violent demonstrations in West Berlin were nothing new, but the fact that some radicals now sat in the city’s Senate complicated the equation. While the AL remained more connected to its militant grassroots than did the Greens, in both cases a dynamic existed whereby violence from the base, while it may have continued to radicalize the movement as a whole, provoked pressure on activists operating in the political arena, forcing them to move in a more conservative direction. As an example of this, following the Reagan visit, the AL apologized for having made a “mistake” in “permitting” the demonstration to erupt into violence, and pledged to promote nonviolent resistance in the future.32 Even the former guerilla Dieter Kunzelmann was quoted as saying that, “The peacemakers must become more courageous, and the militants must become more reasonable.”33 At the same time, this meshed with the internal clampdown within the peace movement, part of the process of strict nonviolence being adopted by all organizations and initiatives endorsed by the national Coordinating Committee.34

  BACK TO THE RAF

  While NATO and the peace movement dominated the headlines in Europe, around the world there was no shortage of imperialist depredations. The Malvinas War between England and Argentina was in full swing; with the help of the United States, El Salvador’s government was carrying out a bloody counterinsurgency war against the FMLN; and, just before the “peace through strength” Bonn Summit, Israel had invaded Lebanon—in September it would arrange for Phalangists to massacre thousands of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Over the coming year, U.S. forces would bomb Beirut, and a few days later invade the Caribbean island of Grenada. There was a lot going on in both Western Europe and the Third World, and yet following the release of the May Paper, the RAF remained silent and unseen.

  While the precise details remain unknown, the fact of the matter is that the RAF was busy working with others to lay the groundwork for its front. Guerilla groups may be unique for their armed quality, but they remain a primarily political phenomenon. Implementing what was essentially a new strategy, the two years following the release of the May Paper would be without further RAF attacks, and yet they were far from being without activity.

  This was also a period in which the relationship with the Stasi seems to have come to an end. According to Helmut Pohl, this happened in early 1984. As he would later explain, there had been sympathy there, but not any kind of ideological unity: “We didn’t care a wit about real existing socialism. The artificiality and the clichés—that aspect created friction at every point. We were probably sometimes as unbearable for them as they were for us.”35 Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the PFLP (EO)’s leader Waddi Haddad had been assassinated by Mossad in 1978, and his comrades-in-arms were embarking on different trajectories. The Palestinian scene which had been providing the RAF with support was in flux, and while the West Germans retained connections in the region, South Yemen suddenly seemed a little further away. Yet while these foreign ties were perhaps reduced, other links were being forged, and clandestine structures extended, as the guerilla repositioned itself for campaigns to come.

  In mid-September 1982, it was reported that three RAF members had successfully robbed a bank in Bochum making off with 100,000 DM.36 What was planned next remains unclear, as the state was about to score a major victory.

&
nbsp; At some point in October, the BKA located a RAF supply cache outside of Frankfurt. Among other things, they found a series of coded documents, which they quickly shipped off to the Wiesbaden headquarters. Within forty-eight hours the code had been cracked, allowing the BKA to locate a series of similar depots in wooded areas throughout the FRG.37 Besides a large quantity of fake driver’s licenses and passports, military IDs, guns, as well as notes about various prisons, police stations, politicians, and Israeli and U.S. institutions, these depots provided the perfect opportunity to trap members of the guerilla, for none of the discoveries were made public.38 Under the rubric Operation Eichhörnchen (“Operation Squirrel”), GSG-9 agents and MEK special police units were deployed around each of these locales, and an indefinite stakeout ensued.

  On November 11, Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Heidi Schulz were captured as they approached a cache outside the town of Heusenstamm, close to Frankfurt. Although they were armed, they were taken by surprise and overpowered before they could defend themselves.

  Left to right: Heidi Schulz, Christian Klar, and Brigitte Mohnhaupt; all captured in November 1982.

  Five days later, Christian Klar was similarly captured as he approached an arms cache outside of Hamburg. He too was armed, but did not put up a fight, leading to media propaganda that he must have been despondent following the capture of his companions the week before. Indeed, Attorney General Rebmann gloated that he was “astonished” that Klar, “a man so sensitive to police hunts and such a practiced criminal could have made this mistake after the events in Frankfurt last week.”39