The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  Even before the sentence was pronounced, Baum acknowledged that Boock’s treatment cast doubt on the credibility of past appeals to RAF members to defect.63 But with the Ministry of the Interior now in the hands of the right wing, the soft counterinsurgency project Baum had developed seemed consigned to the back burner, if not the dustbin. Dialogue was no longer pursued, nor did the state prioritize cultivating more defectors—once again the demand was for clear repudiation from those wishing to separate from the guerilla, and a willingness to testify in court against their former comrades.

  Nevertheless, the defeat was neither as complete nor as deep as it may have seemed. Just a year later, with the support of several prominent liberals, Boock would successfully appeal his sentence (though not his conviction), which in November 1986 was reduced to a single life term. His appeal, both legally and to his admirers, was certainly not hurt by the fact that he began to divulge more and more “information” about the RAF, much of it questionable, becoming even more outspoken in his criticisms of his former comrades. 64 In point of fact, Boock was soon blurring the line between “defector” and “turncoat,” and as such could be considered to be vindicating Rebmann’s hard line, despite the fact that he continued to be supported and courted by liberals more likely to be have been sympathetic to Baum.

  At the same time, before he was removed from office, Baum’s overtures had caught the attention of some of those prisoners who had been questioning the RAF’s strategy. Klaus Jünschke now took a more public position repudiating armed struggle in a bid to have his isolation conditions relaxed.65 He was joined by Christof Wackernagel and Gert Schneider, both of whom had been arrested in 1978, who now also began speak out against the RAF. By 1982, the three were allowing themselves to figure prominently in a campaign orchestrated by former Sponti Wolfgang Pohrt in favor of amnesty for those who repudiated the armed struggle.66 As Wackernagel would argue:

  Everywhere in the world where there are guerilla prisoners, the demand for amnesty is raised. Why not in the FRG? Our orientation for all other issues comes from the liberation movements, why not in this case? Israel trades 4,000 PLO prisoners for six Israelis, but the FRG wouldn’t exchange anyone for one employers president and ninety civilians. In Ireland IRA prisoners struggle to be released without having to renounce their politics. Here the very idea is treated like betrayal, a split, surrender. In Germany, both sides have an identical commitment: final victory. Both the BAW and the anti-imps have the same pipe-dream. They both serve imperialism’s interests and not the struggle against it.67

  Regardless of where it might have led, with Baum’s departure, Pohrt’s campaign was doomed. Despite a public declaration from a Verfassungsschutz section head that he was sure the three prisoners had truly repudiated armed struggle, and that it was out of the question that they would ever reoffend, the idea of an amnesty, either individual or collective, went nowhere.

  As for Baum, while he was atypical of the security establishment in the FRG at the time, the more nuanced approach that he represented was not without its parallels internationally. During the period between 1979 and 1982, for example, Italy, Spain, and England all experimented with differentiated prison regimes and categories of guilt and defection in their respective struggles against the Red Brigades, ETA, and the Irish Republicans.68

  Furthermore, even in the West German security establishment, certain individuals had noticed how repression without nuance played into a cycle of escalation which had benefited the revolutionary left. Although rare and often isolated, the failures of the right-wing approach would gradually leave the field open to these individuals, and although it may have seemed farfetched in 1983, by the end of the decade it was they who would be directing the state’s “antiterrorism” machine.

  One of these unlikely figures was Christian Lochte, the head of the Hamburg Verfassungsschutz, and the one who had spoken out on behalf of Jünschke, Wackernagel, and Schneider. Despite being a life-long member of the CDU, Lochte would become increasingly prominent in the 1980s as the Verfassungsschutz section chief who had no patience for the stilted repression of the right. He insisted that the guerilla threat had been exaggerated, and that the measures taken in 1977 had been an overreaction. Agreeing to be interviewed by the left-wing taz, he announced that the newspaper was one of the best sources for analysis about the armed struggle and that if it didn’t exist the Verfassungsschutz would have had to set it up themselves, adding that he had taken out subscriptions for each of his caseworkers.69

  Christian Lochte

  Even as Rebmann and company continued to push for more draconian legislation, Lochte was repeating Baum’s earlier observations regarding the use of prison conditions to exacerbate divisions within the guerilla:

  In the case of a decision to defect from a terrorist group, the treatment the defectors receive at the hands of state agencies is decisive. It shouldn’t be special treatment in the sense of better treatment than other convicts (as “mollycoddled” defectors), but it also shouldn’t be worse treatment than other convicts (as a particularly dangerous terrorist). Prevention doesn’t only mean “encouraging defection,” but also “preventing people from joining.” For the hard core of the RAF, the lack of difference in the way defectors are treated only confirms their understanding of “political justice.” It cannot appear that defection is only possible through betrayal. That would only confirm the either-or formula the RAF promotes.

  In the end, terrorism in the Federal Republic will probably only be overcome by the internal decay of the terror groups. This decay should be promoted by all means possible. As a result, the treatment of arrested defectors and their known circle is crucial. It can play a major role in encouraging other people to bolt from the terror scene. In the treatment of arrested defectors suspected of serious crimes, there are few legal options for perks, relief or shorter sentences. Therefore, it is all the more important to use the limited remaining leeway for measures that build trust.70

  Lochte would go even further, and from within the Verfassungsschutz became an early proponent of relaxing prison conditions for all RAF prisoners, even supporting association. As he would put it near the end of his career, “to bring about the end of the RAF, the end of what they call armed struggle, association is a necessary first step.”71

  The reader should make no mistake: while their proposals clearly placed Lochte and Baum at odds with the political establishment in the early 1980s, their approach was less a sign of weakness than of intelligence. Both men understood that their job description meant putting an end to the armed struggle, and they took this job seriously enough to see past the state’s own propaganda, grasping the fact that without a political component the ongoing arrests and killings were unlikely to do much good.

  But the proof of this lay in the future. In 1983, the hardliners once again set the tone, rendering the state incapable of fully exploiting divisions among its opponents when they occurred. When this strategy would be resurrected, it would be partly thanks to a new opposition party, one that first entered the Bundestag at the same time as the SPD lost power.

  As we have seen, disenchantment had been growing throughout Helmut Schmidt’s chancellorship, as the SPD moved further to the right while clashing with an array of grassroots movements. Following the 1983 elections, this process entered a new phase, as the Greens won 5.6 percent of the popular vote and entered the Bundestag for the first time with twenty-seven seats.

  From here on in, the Greens—the “anti-party” party, carrying the hopes of the Citizens Initiatives and the antinuclear and antimissile movements—would represent the most progressive option in the electoral arena. As such, the SPD found itself deprived of much of its base, while the revolutionary movements were confronted by a new political machine eager to integrate them into the system. The Greens were instrumental in pressuring the “peace” movement to adopt a strictly nonviolent code of conduct, and although its relationship with the Autonomen would remain complex for several years, b
y the end of the decade it was lining up behind the police in demanding a clampdown on its erstwhile allies.72

  Shortly thereafter, the soft counterinsurgency strategy would be dusted off and put to work again; not surprisingly, by that time the Greens would be well placed to play their small role in this final assault on the RAF.

  But that was years away, and much would happen before things got to that point, which will be addressed in our next volume.

  On the Question of Collective Responsibility

  Jurists have established the myriad pitfalls that come with assigning collective responsibility to all members of an organization for deeds that they may have approved of, but which they nevertheless had no part in committing. Nonetheless, on a moral and political level, many members of the guerilla have shown little interest in eschewing responsibility for the RAF’s activities.

  Take, for instance, the case of Knut Folkerts, who in 1980 was found guilty of two counts of murder for his purported role in the assassination of Siegfried Buback, receiving a sentence of life in prison. He would be released after eighteen years, in 1995. In 2007, a media frenzy ensued when it became known that the Verfassungsschutz had been aware since 1981 that Folkerts had not in fact been at the scene of the crime.1 Nevertheless, Folkerts expressed no interest in having his trial or sentence reviewed, declaring that the courts were not an appropriate place to evaluate the RAF’s history. Explaining that he is a former RAF member, not a victim, his position remains that he and everyone else who was a member of the RAF at the time share responsibility for the Buback assassination.2

  Discussing his own responsibility, Karl-Heinz Dellwo has been equally forthright:

  I have always defended the collective guilt thesis. I also consider all the adult German citizens of the period responsible for the crimes of Nazism. I likewise have the collective responsibility for everything that occurred in my milieu, that is to say, the “RAF Collective” milieu. With regards to Stockholm, I’m equally responsible for the deaths of both of the embassy staff members. Every member of the commando shares equal guilt.3

  Many former RAF members might reject the concept of “guilt” applied to their actions, as formulated by Dellwo, for all its connotations of “wrongdoing.” Nevertheless, there is broad unanimity as to the fact that all members of the RAF bear responsibility for actions carried out while they were in the guerilla. As Irmgard Möller pointed out in 1992, “We collectively decided upon and carried out the actions.”4

  This continuing solidarity and accountability for the actions carried out when they were active in the guerilla is the norm, not an exception. It constitutes a significant retort to the state’s insistence that former RAF members provide the names and details of those who participated in each attack—framed in terms of being “necessary for the victims to heal,” this is nothing but a transparent ploy to have former comrades served up for prosecution, and to allow the state to finally map out the armed resistance of generations past.

  As explained by some former RAF members in 2010:

  Through all these years, despite “screensearch” technologies, the highly armed state security apparatus hasn’t been able to obtain a reasonably comprehensive picture of our movements. Even those who, under the pressure of isolation, smear campaigns and blackmail, broke down and were used as “crown witnesses”, could not contribute to completing the picture. The bits and pieces put together by state security agencies haven’t been very useful for general counterin-surgency purposes. They have no clue of the approach, the organization, the traces, the dialectics of an urban guerilla in the metropolis. And there is no reason to help them out on this. The RAF’s actions have been discussed and decided collectively when we agreed. All of us, who in a particular period have been part of the group and shared these decisions, obviously have the responsibility for these as well.5

  _____________

  1 See pages 230–231.

  2 Knut Folkerts, interviewed by Michael Sontheimer, “Logik des Krieges,” Spiegel, May 14, 2007.

  3 Karl-Heinz Dellwo, interviewed by Tagesspiegel-Sonntag “Ich bin kein Pazifist,” March 26, 2007.

  4 Irmgard Möller, interviewed by Manfred Ertel and Bruno Schrep.

  5 RAF, some former members.

  _____________

  1. Peter Zinke, “Die Kriminalisierung der RAF,” in Haufen, 61.

  2. Ibid., 66.

  3. Die Zeit, “Mitgefangen, mitgehangen,” March 30, 1984.

  4. Zinke, 62.

  5. Spiegel, “Starke Beklemmung,” October 5, 1981.

  6. Clemens Kaupa, “The Multi-causal and Asynchronous Development of Terrorism Laws in Germany from the 1970’s to the Present,” (MA Thesis, Vienna, December 2009), 16-18. The claim that would-be RAF defectors were executed centered on the disappearance of Ingeborg Barz, but her alleged execution was never corroborated in any way. Numerous examples of RAF members who did leave over the years, often with assistance from the guerilla, make the claim highly dubious. See Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 352.

  7. As German law developed in the context of the Prussian monarchy, various legal terms talk of the “crown” when referring to the state. As such, a “crown witness” is a witness for the state, i.e., for the prosecution.

  8. Kaupa, 17.

  9. Erwin Brunner, Karl-Heinz Janßen, Joachim Riedl, and Michael Sontheimer “Wunderwaffe Kronzeuge,” Die Zeit, November 21, 1986.

  10. Heinz Jürgen Schneider, “Der Terror-Paragraph.”

  11. Spiegel, “Gemalt Weihnachten.”

  12. Josef Gräßle-Münscher, “Der Straftatbestand des §129a StGB,” in Haufen, 42-43. While the state relied heavily on §129a, not all jurists were comfortable with the way in which even spraypainting or postering could be construed as “support for a terrorist organization.” Such misgivings led Judge Helmut Plambeck, the Chairman of the Hamburg OLG State Security Senate, who had himself presided over some minor RAF trials, to call for the law to be abolished. (Spiegel, “Besteht die RAF denn überhaupt noch?” July 13, 1981.)

  13. Lewis and Klein, Baader Meinhof: In Love with Terror.

  14. Beatrice De Graaf, “Counter-Narratives and the Unintentional Messages Counterterrorism Policies Unwittingly Produce: The Case of West-Germany,” in Countering Violent Extremist Narratives (Netherlands: National Coordinator for Counterterrorism [NCTb], July 2010), 13.

  15. Ibid., 15.

  16. Milton Mankoff and Monica Jakobs, “The Return of the Suppressed: McCarthyism in West Germany,” Contemporary Crises, 1 (1977): 353.

  17. Kaupa, 13.

  18. Ibid., 14; see also Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 525.

  19. United Press International, “Crusade Against Terrorism Urged,” Newport Daily News, October 25, 1977.

  20. De Graaf (2010), 16.

  21. Spiegel, “Der umstrittenste Mann der Regierung,” September 8, 1980. Maihofer had in fact been forced to resign in 1978 when Spiegel revealed that he had sanctioned illegal wiretaps, not only of activists, but also the manager of West Germany’s nuclear power industry, Klaus Traube, simply because he had known some people in the radical scene back in his university days.

  22. Jörg Requate and Philipp Zessin, “Comment sortir du ‘terrorisme’? La violence politique et les conditions de sa disparition en France et en République Fédérale d’Allemagne en comparaison 1970-années 1990,” European Review of History/ Revue europeenne d’histoire 14, no. 3 (2007): 432.

  23. Axel Jeschke and Wolfgang Malanowski (eds.), Der Minister und der Terrorist: Gespräche zwischen Gerhart Baum und Horst Mahler (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Spiegel-Buch, 1980), 53.

  24. United Press International, “Squatters in German City Try to Burn 90-Foot Cross,” European Stars and Stripes, April 2, 1981.

  25. Spiegel, “Der umstrittenste Mann der Regierung.”

  26. Joachim Wagner, “Schafft Gesetze auf Zeit: Befristete Normen brauchen nicht immer Ausnahmegesetze zu sein,” Die Zeit, February 1, 1980.

  27. Spiegel, “Der umstrittenste Mann der Regierun
g.”

  28. Kaupa, 40.

  29. Wischnewski was well-suited to this task: in the 1950s he had acted as an interlocutor with the Algerians during the National Liberation Front’s war for independence from France, and had been a public critic of the CDU government’s pro-French policy in that conflict. He later negotiated the release and free transit of Germans arrested during the Pinochet coup in Chile, as well as free transit out of the country for Chileans who had taken refuge in foreign embassies. As such, he had a good reputation with many of the new national governments in the Third World.

  30. Time, “West Germany: Talking Quietly,” May 7, 1979.

  31. Reinhard Müller, “Weshalb Gaddafi die RAF für geisteskrank hielt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 14, 2008.

  32. Matthias Dahlke, “Das Wischnewski-Protokoll: Zur Zusammenarbeit zwischen westeuropäischen Regierungen und transnationalen Terroristen 1977,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 2/2009, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München-Berlin, 211.

  33. Ibid., 210-211.

  34. On this trip, see Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 56-57, 59.

  35. Axel Frohn, “Hilfe vom Roten Prinzen,” Spiegel, October 8, 2001. See also Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 188-193.

  36. Frohn, “Hilfe vom Roten Prinzen.”

  37. Dahlke, 210.

  38. Ibid., 214.

  39. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 12.

  40. Wisniewski, 4. Wisniewski was also critical of the demand for association, explaining that, “Association for us in groups of fifteen based on the Geneva Convention, which is not immediately applicable to us and is impractical for the guerilla struggle in the metropole, is the wrong road to go down. In the long run, it separates us from all other social revolutionary undertakings in the FRG, at a point when they certainly constitute the seeds of a social movement. Association in groups of fifteen—even if it was achievable—is not thinkable without some form of high-security unit. That, however, means accepting the incremental steps of the reform-fascist corrections system.” (Stefan Wisniewski, Untitled document, March 23, 1981.)