The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  It is to these that we will now turn our attention.

  JUDICIAL COUNTERINSURGENCY

  As we have at times belabored, West Germany had been an intensely conservative society in the 1960s. Even after the APO and Willy Brandt’s “Dare more democracy” ushered in a new, more open age, many institutions retained their authoritarian reflexes. For these, it remained an article of faith that left-wing political violence could only be answered with repression, and the more of it the better.

  Surveillance and arrests were buttressed by psychological warfare, for which the courtroom was always an important theatre. At first, various trials were used to push the idea that the RAF was a hierarchical organization with brutish leaders. The so-called “ringleader thesis” blamed Baader, Meinhof, Raspe, Meins, and Ensslin for all the group’s activities, explaining the guerilla away as a consequence of a few individuals’ charisma, rather than any deeper political conflicts. As a result, the five were charged with attacks even where there was no evidence directly implicating them, in what amounted to a show trial at a special courtroom bunker built within the Stammheim prison compound, with psychologists, psychiatrists, and even neurologists being enlisted to pathologize the “leaders” and their supporters.1

  At the same time as the ringleader thesis was being used for propaganda purposes, implying the RAF was made up of seductive maniacs and idiot followers, a “collective responsibility thesis” was developed, according to which all RAF members were responsible for all RAF attacks. If the ringleader thesis was the cornerstone of the Stammheim trial, the collective responsibility thesis was used to justify the prosecution of the other RAF members for criminal acts even when there was no direct evidence supporting such charges.2 This second approach became all the more important after ‘77, once all five “ringleaders” were dead.

  The collective responsibility thesis was further refined during Angelika Speitel’s 1979 trial, drawing in part on statements Speitel was alleged to have made while hospitalized and under sedation, after having been shot during her arrest. (She was questioned by police officers dressed as doctors.)3 Judge Wagner, who presided over Speitel’s trial, followed this by sentencing Stefan Wisniewski to life in prison on December 4, 1981, finding him responsible for the Schleyer kidnapping and murders, although there was no evidence against him other than his membership in the RAF. Similarly, on June 16, 1982, Sieglinde Hofmann received a fifteen-year sentence in connection with the murder of Jürgen Ponto, despite the fact that the court had to acknowledge that she had not been at the scene of the killing.4 (This was also despite the fact that she had been extradited from France on condition that she not be charged with this crime, as the main evidence against her was the hearsay testimony of Hans-Joachim Dellwo, whose work for the prosecution will be detailed below.)5

  All this was criticized by civil libertarians, and yet it must be stressed that neither the RAF nor the prisoners made a big deal about the collective responsibility thesis, which actually fit well with the guerilla’s own understanding of its internal process and political responsibilities. Although Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Helmut Pohl had each testified in 1976 to the effect that commandos operated on a need-to-know basis, the position that every RAF member was willing to publicly stand by every RAF action was voiced by more than one prisoner. In this way, they could affirm their ongoing solidarity with one another, as well as their political identity as captured combatants (see pages 273–274).

  If trials constituted the stage on which the state presented its narrative, the drama would have been incomplete without the cooperation of turncoats, former guerillas or supporters who had flipped and agreed to collude in the psychological warfare campaign.

  A string of such “repentant guerillas” had been trotted out as witnesses in various trials in the 1970s. First, there was Karl-Heinz Ruhland, a mechanic who had worked with the RAF, and who after being arrested with a stolen car testified against his former friends. Next, an actual member of the guerilla was flipped; Gerhard Müller, who was arrested in 1971, had killed a police officer, but the charges were dropped and he was provided with a new identity and cash payment in exchange for his testimony, which included the smear that the RAF executed its own members rather than allowing them to leave.6

  At the time, the FRG had no crown witness7 law permitting reduced sentences for those who provided state’s evidence, and as such the deals between the attorney general and these witnesses fell into a legal grey zone. Indeed, outrage at Müller’s testimony played an important part in discrediting the Stammheim show trial, with Spiegel arguing that it constituted “an intentional breach of the law.”8

  Müller and Ruhland’s testimony was further compromised by the fact that both men had been peripheral to the RAF. This was to prove typical, as most of those who flipped in the 1970s were simply supporters who found themselves facing heavy charges in circumstances for which they were ill-prepared. The most damaging of these were probably Volker Speitel and Hans-Joachim Dellwo—respectively the husband and brother of RAF members Angelika Speitel and Karl-Heinz Dellwo—who were arrested in the heat of ‘77, and who subsequently testified that the prisoners’ lawyers had smuggled guns into Stammheim. This testimony was not only used to send attorneys Armin Newerla and Arndt Müller to prison, it also provided cover for the shim-sham investigation and discrepancies surrounding the prison deaths of the RAF’s leading figures in October 1977.

  Over the next five years, Volker Speitel’s testimony was repeatedly presented at RAF trials, making him a “star witness” who could not be cross-examined by the defense, and who did not even deliver his testimony in court, all due to alleged “security concerns.”9 This despite the fact that not once in the RAF’s history had a crown witness or defector been targeted by the guerilla.

  The antiterrorist §129a had been crafted as a net to snare and intimidate such supporters. Under this law, over three thousand preliminary proceedings were launched against the left between 1980 and ‘88, only 5 percent of which actually resulted in charges being laid (the average for other laws was 50 percent)10, and less than 2 percent resulted in a conviction.11 The paragraph’s real function was twofold: to elicit information, whether or not there existed any evidence that could stand up in court, and to intimidate the guerilla’s sympathizers.12

  Gerhard Müller (left) and Volker Speitel, two of the most notorious crown witnesses of the 1970s.

  Prison conditions constituted the other half of this equation—years of isolation and abuse creating extreme pressure, with the only option for relief being to flip. This is the real reason why the state felt compelled to crack down on the prisoners’ various attempts to communicate with one another, and why it resisted association: for a long time, the main view was that harsh treatment was the best way to elicit a jailhouse conversion, and that the prisoners had to be kept apart in order for this process to do its work.

  This strategy had some successes, but at the same time it came at a significant cost, as prison conditions themselves became one of the main reasons that supporters joined the guerilla. As Dieter Kunzelmann has observed, “By 1972, practically the whole founding generation of the RAF were behind bars. Yet there was still a second generation and a third generation. Why? Primarily because of the conditions of imprisonment and state-organized terror.”13

  Given that the hard line so often proved counterproductive, the question must be asked: why was it pursued for so long?

  Institutional inertia is one part of the answer. Police and state organs were full of individuals ideologically committed to the iron fist. The revolutionary left was viewed as a social pathology, perhaps the asset of a foreign enemy, and only superficially a political movement. The proposed cure was a combination of quarantine and surgery, isolating the revolutionaries while hitting them hard. Despite the mediocre results, many on the right maintained that waging a “war against vandals and partisans”14 was the only sensible approach when dealing with “terrorists.”

  The hard line w
as also a consequence of jockeying within the state, as the CDU/CSU attempted to win votes by painting the SPD/FDP government as “soft on terrorism”:

  The Christian Democrats, most notably CDU’s party leader Helmut Kohl, deliberately evoked associations of chaos and democratic weakness and blamed the government for its “inability to govern.” He painted the spectre of “political vandalism” and a relapse into “the bad period of the Weimar Republic.” Berlin’s parliamentary CDU party chairman Heinrich Lummer spoke of a “degeneration of democratic morals and principles.” While Federal President Karl Carstens (CDU) warned of a “weak state that, like in 1933, could not defend itself against its enemies.”15

  In a pattern familiar the world over, the alleged “left” political party opted to prove its bonafides by trying to out-right the right. In point of fact, the two parties had a symbiotic relationship; as was noted in 1977, “The repressive politics of the Social Democrats make the Christian Democrats’ wider-ranging efforts seem more tolerable to some, while the latter’s excesses sustain the former’s self-image of moderation to others.”16 SPD Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was indistinguishable from the CDU’s fearmongers, warning of the guerilla’s “intellectual pioneers that live in some of the institutions and the media of our society.”17 Throughout most of the 1970s, his Social-Liberal government defended itself against the right’s accusations by engaging in ever-more-repressive measures, granting the BKA and Verfassungsschutz free reign.

  This dynamic not only occurred between the main political parties, but also within them, as so-called “domestic security” issues provided a useful tool for technocrats to marginalize more progressive or liberal factions within the SPD and FDP. For the SPD, this game reached its tipping point in 1977, when it suddenly found some of its own most prominent members publicly excoriated as RAF sympathizers, just as its lurch to the right was leaving it shorn of much of its own base.18

  Beyond these domestic political realities, there were also international factors behind West Germany’s hard line. Guerilla warfare had come to the First World as an exotic import, radicals in Western Europe inspired by what was clearly a winning strategy in the Third World, while also referring back (at times awkwardly) to their own countries’ antifascist partisan experiences, or lack thereof. Against this development, the FRG and United States pushed to create a consensus within the NATO states that would drive out this new scourge or—if that proved impossible—at least deprive it of any legitimacy. As we have seen, this strategy depended on denying captured combatants any kind of special status, all the while singling them out for special treatment in court and in prison. Given that the FRG had been lobbying other countries to adopt this hard line against their respective political prisoners, it was not completely free to do otherwise in regard to its own.

  THE FREE DEMOCRATS AND SOFT COUNTERINSURGENCY

  Despite the aforementioned obstacles, certain elements within the state recognized that the hard line played into a cycle that fed rather than choked the guerilla’s growth. Paradoxically, one can trace the first ascent of a more flexible and far-sighted “soft counterinsurgency” line to a time when undifferentiated repression seemed to hold sway. In 1977, President Walter Scheel had spoken at Schleyer’s funeral, where he had described “terrorism” as “a barbarism trying to destroy all order.”19 But just months later, Scheel began to complain that anonymous denunciations of alleged sympathizers were polarizing society and undermining the “private sphere of fellow citizens”—a reference to his fellow politicians and members of the intelligentsia who were coming under attack from the right.20

  Significantly, Scheel was from the FDP—the “liberal” part of the Social-Liberal coalition—which had less to lose by questioning such ham-fisted repression than the SPD. With its base in the professional middle class, the FDP fancied itself the standard bearer of classical liberalism, and within its left wing were several individuals sincerely committed to expanding civil liberties. Unlike the SPD and CDU, which had taken turns as the largest force in government throughout the postwar period, the FDP was the perpetual third party. Yet due to this very fact and to its distinct ideological location between the two larger parties, it had become kingmaker in West German politics: with the exception of eight years in the 1950s and ‘60s, the Free Democrats had been a junior partner in every coalition government since World War II, effectively determining who would hold power. While the FDP normally supported the right-wing CDU/CSU, between 1969 and 1982 the party’s leadership was controlled by its more progressive faction, and as such supported the SPD, and on some issues even outflanked its senior coalition partner to the left.

  As a result of this kingmaker role, the FDP remained largely impervious to attacks from the right, as the CDU/CSU strategists knew all too well that their road back to power would depend on reconciling with the liberals.

  Gerhart Baum had become Minister of the Interior in 1978, replacing fellow Free Democrat Werner Maihofer, who had held the position since 1974, and who had been a staunch advocate of giving police and security forces any powers they desired.21

  Gerhart Baum

  Baum would quickly prove to be cut from different cloth. As early as January 1978, in a speech before the Catholic Academy in Freiburg, he expressed dismay that security measures had taken pride of place in the antiterrorist arsenal, suggesting that it might be better to work on refuting the guerilla’s ideas.22 Baum felt that the state should be approaching those who were open to the guerilla’s arguments, identifying sections of the left or even the radical left that could be engaged in dialogue—one of the goals being to deprive the guerilla of its base, leaving it isolated and vulnerable.

  So it was that at the same time as police were gunning down guerillas in the street, the Ministry of the Interior initiated an ambitious social-science research project, which eventually resulted in five books, published between 1981 and 1984, intended to foster a more sophisticated approach to countering political radicalism. As Baum explained:

  Even though I am the minister responsible for the police, I am called upon to combat terrorism with more than just police methods. Preventing and hindering future crimes means addressing the questions posed by people who are not yet clear about which way they’ll go—whether they’ll go the normal democratic way, whether they’ll achieve their goals using democratic instruments and means, or whether they will support the terrorists. As a result, I hold scientific research into the causes of terrorism to be necessary.23

  Baum became known for his brash style and the pleasure he took at upsetting conservative shibboleths. At the height of the hysteria about the West Berlin squats, for instance, he stated that, “The heart of the matter is that there are young people, and older ones as well, who answer the question about the meaning of life in another way than the majority that until now has made policy.”24 Characteristically, Baum suggested that rather than excluding or punishing people who held alternative values, it would be better to reach out to them. Nor did he lack a sense of humor. When asked how he was going to respond to media criticism that he was downplaying the “terrorist” threat, his reply was simple: “I’m going to bomb Südwestfunk [Southwest Radio]. Will that do?”25

  Baum hoped to temper the more odious aspects of the national security state, even if this meant locking horns with the BKA. In the fall of 1979, FDP members of the Bundestag attempted to have three important security laws repealed: §88a (publishing material encouraging violence), §130a (instructions for carrying out crimes), and the Contact Ban.26 That same year, Baum limited the BKA and the Verfassungsschutz’s access to the NADIS computer database (which contained information gathered from a variety of police and nonpolice sources) and made a point of announcing that he had had thirty thousand entries removed from the BKA’s PIOS system (devoted to “terrorists”).27 Publicly clashing with Horst Herold, Baum’s moves against the security establishment pushed the BKA chief to take an early retirement in 1981.28

  All of which not only provoke
d the ire of the right—some grumbled that Baum himself was a “security risk”—but also upset many within the SPD, where Chancellor Schmidt accused him of grandstanding and acting as if he were the only one who cared about the rule of law.

  NEOCOLONIAL “ANTITERRORISM” ABROAD

  While Baum’s domestic reforms were making headlines, a parallel strategy was being pursued on the international stage, but with less fanfare and controversy, as Minister of Foreign Affairs Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski29 worked to seal off the RAF’s rear base areas in the Arab world.

  The Social-Liberal government had been pursuing this goal for years, with full support from the chancellor himself. In 1978, Colonel Muammar Khaddafi traveled to the FRG to receive medical treatment in Wiesbaden: Schmidt personally contacted the Libyan leader and asked him to deny sanctuary to West German guerillas. Khaddafi not only agreed, but also promised to pressure the PLO to do the same.30 In exchange, the Bundeswehr sent a major to begin secretly training Libyan security forces in Tripoli, in a program that would last until at least 1983. (According to some sources, it in fact continued with the help of “private” West German corporate partners until as late as 2006.)31

  Discussions between the PLO and West German officials in Lebanon were followed in 1979 by a meeting in Austria, hosted by the more left-wing Social Democratic government of Bruno Kreisky. Here it was agreed that the PLO would cooperate with Austrian and West German security forces to prevent guerilla attacks in Europe. PLO security chief Ali Hassan Salameh offered to locate RAF members in the Middle East, though he stopped short of agreeing to have them extradited back to the FRG.32 He also encouraged the Europeans to pursue their multilateral international “antiterrorist” strategy, and provided what information he could about the RAF’s plans and capacities.33