by J. Smith
The reaction from the Coordinating Committee was to repudiate the Autonomen and anti-imps. In their words,
The peace movement declares clearly and bluntly, that its actions are carried through with solely non-violent means. Whoever uses violence, places himself outside the peace movement and is detrimental to its objectives… The police are not the opposition of the peace movement.28
While certain groups objected that the CC did not have “the right to define who or what the peace movement is in this country,”29 the radical left simply did not have the strength to push the movement against nuclear weapons to make a revolutionary break. At the same time, Friedrich Zimmermann, the new minister of the interior, began turning the screw, drafting legislation to allow police to arrest anyone caught in the vicinity of “violent” protesters. Zimmermann’s goal was twofold: to criminalize the broader opposition to the NATO missiles, and to push the conservative groups to move against the radicals. It was an effective strategy.30 (Unsurprisingly, to ensure the trick worked, the Verfassungsschutz was more than happy to provide some of the “violent demonstrators” in question, and indeed, it was subsequently revealed that Peter Tröber, a “particularly violent” rioter who had traveled to Krefeld from West Berlin, was in fact a Verfassungsschutz agent taking orders from Lummer at the Berlin Ministry of the Interior.)31
As Helmut Kohl’s Conservative-Liberal coalition moved ahead with plans to welcome NATO’s new medium-range missiles that fall, the Autonomen debated how or even whether to intervene. Some groups opted to continue working within the broader peace movement, upping the ante and pushing the envelope in the hopes of radicalizing others. But for many, the results were disappointing:
The peace movement with its strong nonviolent ideology continued to exclude all anti-imperialist and social-revolutionary forces. Their protests—eager to prove their nonviolent commitment—became predictable and empty symbolic gestures of submission to the state. The collaboration with the police also continued. Many peace activists not only wanted to control the Autonomen but were also willing to denounce them.32
Autonomen and anti-imps demonstrating against Bush Sr. in Krefeld.
If the Autonomen had entered the peace movement with the goal of radicalizing it, the anti-imps had done so with the more modest hope of connecting with and winning over specific radical elements—not least among them, the Autonomen. As such, the disappointment many people felt as they were ostracized by the movement leadership provided a new clarity, and while some were demoralized and demobilized, others found themselves drawn in a more militant direction. As usual, state repression was central to this process, as observed in this anti-imp statement from February 1983:
The situation is now clear: given the change of government and the possibility of the unopposed stationing of medium-range missiles, 1983 will be a “decisive year.”
It could be a year marked by the most powerful mobilization against the NATO strategy.
The state is fully prepared for that eventuality, and a reactionary offensive against the entire spectrum of the resistance has been going on for some time; the largest FRG-wide wave of trials since ‘45, with Helga [Roos’] trial at Stammheim being the cutting edge, as it is meant to serve as an example for the entire anti-imperialist political movement. In Spiegel 2/83 you can read about the technical level of BKA and Verfassungsschutz operations—certainly (and by definition) not just against the guerilla. The BAW increased its agitation against the resistance during the manhunt accompanying NATO maneuvers and with the three arrests. At his annual press conference, Rebmann announced that there would be more arrests of people from the anti-imperialist resistance. And now we have the terror against the prisoners. Helga is to be destroyed, because she wants to speak with Adelheid [Schulz].33
This tried and true approach, building on opposition to state repression, was evident immediately following the anti-Bush demonstration, as unknown anti-imps firebombed the Wuppertal Justice Academy, sending “Love and Strength to Our Imprisoned Comrades from June 25 in Krefeld and All Other Imprisoned Militants”:
We decided to attack as quickly as possible in order to prevent the arrests and beatings carried out by SEK units from forcing us onto the defensive, and to avoid spending weeks debating what we could do about it, by instead striking back directly and not letting up. For us, it is important to learn to constantly struggle against the fear that each of us feels and to embrace the reality that this individual fear can only be prevented from developing and can only be overcome through collective confrontation.
Even if every one of our people who is locked up represents a loss for us on the outside, they cannot prevent us from uniting through the walls and bars in common struggle with our imprisoned comrades, each of whom strengthens the struggle within the prisons. We see the struggle for the organization of the revolutionary prisoners, i.e., for the association of the prisoners from the RAF and the resistance in self-determined groups, as a significant part of the struggle against the NATO war policy—in this case, the attempt to use prisons to destroy the resistance and to frighten people collapses in the face of the prospect of collective struggle in the prisons. Those of us on the outside are responsible for bringing pressure to bear in support of association.
The Justice Academy is part of the prison system, as it trains the jailers to control and dominate prisoners. We see our attack against this counterinsurgency institution as part of organizing the revolutionary front that has developed out of the unity of the guerilla, the prisoners, and the militants.34
“Krefeld Anti-NATO Demo Trial; We demand: Association for the prisoners to prepare a common defense; Freedom for the prisoners”
In this way, at the same time as they were being marginalized by the peace movement, militants could remain grounded through the legacy the guerilla and its supporters had built up over the years. As one speaker pointed out at a demonstration at the Krefeld courthouse in November 1983, “The Krefeld prisoners are not alone. They can draw on the experience from the years of prison struggles.”35
THE RAF
As the anti-imps reached out to the Autonomen, the RAF was working to implement the ideas found in the May Paper, deepening its own relationships with supporters. In the midst of the constant arrests, both aboveground and underground, the group prepared for this vision of an intermediate level of resistance, a kind of anti-imp parallel to what the RZs had accomplished: the front.
On March 26, 1984, RAF members robbed a bank in the Bavarian town of Würzburg, netting 171,000 DM.
A few months later, on June 22, police in the town of Deizisau in Baden-Württemberg came upon a woman conducting surveillance of the home of Klaus Knopse, the judge who had been presiding over the trial of Mohnhaupt and Klar, which had started earlier that year. When she was asked for her ID, she pulled a gun and started shooting, but without hitting any of the police officers. Manuela Happe took off running, only to be arrested in a cornfield shortly thereafter.36
Within two weeks of Happe’s arrest, there was an even more devastating setback.
Several RAF members had been staying in a Frankfurt safehouse when on July 2 one of them accidentally shot a hole in the floor while cleaning a gun. Their downstairs neighbor was watching television, and at first thought something had fallen over in his bedroom. A few minutes later a woman knocked at his door, explaining that she was “taking care of the cats” in the apartment above and had spilled some water—she wanted to make sure it wasn’t leaking into his apartment. He told her there was no problem, but after she left he thought it best to make sure: that’s when he noticed the hole in the ceiling and the bullet lying on the floor. He called the police.
Helmut Pohl, Christa Eckes, Stefan Frey, Ingrid Jakobsmeier, Barbara Ernst, and Ernst-Volker Staub were all found hiding in a closet. As well as netting so many guerillas, the police retrieved over eight thousand pages of notes from the safehouse, including surveillance records and personal details about hundreds of government and business fig
ures throughout Europe.37 Within this haul there was a document that the police would refer to as the RAF’s Aktionspapier (Action Paper), alleging that the group had been preparing to release it to supporters. The paper, which it has been said was directed at members of the anti-imperialist resistance working within the context of the RAF’s front concept, was unfinished, and like all such papers, the guerilla would dismiss it as nothing more than discussion notes, not an official RAF document.38
While the police did not know it at the time, with the July 2 arrests—occasioned by a careless mishap and a fateful decision to not flee the safehouse—the entire RAF had been captured.
Not a single combatant remained at large.
A Process Comes to Fruition
For those of us who joined the guerilla in or after ‘84, the early eighties were obviously a time of important experiences, decisions, and changes in our country, and this formed the basis of our decision to take up the armed struggle. It was a time of widespread struggle around various issues: the anti-NATO movement; the political prisoners’ hunger strike of ‘81, during which Sigurd Debus was murdered; the antinuclear struggles; the Startbahn West struggle; the squatter movement; and of course the mass mobilizations against the stationing of medium-range missiles. We ourselves participated in some of these struggles, and we had the same experience as everyone else there: we failed to defeat the powers that be.
At that time, it wasn’t just the hundreds of thousands of people in the streets who supported these struggles and demands. In reality, it was a contradiction involving millions of people, and yet they were unable to force those in power to budge around even one of their demands—there is a reason why struggles became more and more radical and militant. Many people decided to participate in various militant initiatives against key aspects of the extermination policy. The main thing that meant during this period was attacking the U.S./NATO military strategy. This was meant to lend a new intensity and resolve to our struggles. Every day it became increasingly clear that the state would simply ignore demonstrations of hundreds of thousands, while at the same time engaging in ever more brutal and violent attacks against the people who took their demands to the streets. It was only luck that prevented our side from suffering more deaths (Klaus-Jürgen Rattay, Olaf Ritzmann)1 and serious injuries in the struggle during those years. The inhumanity and brutality with which the prisoners were treated during the ‘81 hunger strike—with the police and paramilitary units using clubs and gas—clearly showed that the state intended for there to be deaths on our side. Kohl’s remark about stationing medium-range missiles—”They demonstrate, we govern”—made it clear how those in power viewed anyone who wanted change.
These developments here also had implications for the international situation; for example, in the confrontations between the liberation movements and liberated nations on the one side and imperialism on the other. It was a time of coordinated efforts to effect a rollback: the medium-range missiles were to hold the Soviets in check and trap them in a deadly arms race; the bombing of Libya; the Malvinas War; the destruction of the Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra, Shatila, and Tel Zaatar; opposing the liberation movement in El Salvador; low-intensity warfare to drag wars out and bleed the people dry; the contra wars in the liberated countries of Southern Africa to make independent development impossible, which led to unimaginable numbers of people dying as a result of war and starvation. Here, we can only briefly sketch an outline of what was going on during these years; in every case, imperialism indicated its desire to achieve its centuries-old dream of subjugating all of humanity, using whatever violence proved necessary, including the deployment of nuclear weapons. This is why it sought to impose its plans and projects despite massive resistance, and this is why all forms of resistance had to be crushed and obliterated.
So, like many others, we became increasingly convinced that we had to build an organized force capable of employing both militant and military methods here. Based on everything we experienced in those years, it was perfectly clear that in order to overcome this intractable power we needed to develop something new in our struggle—the alternative would have been to surrender and to capitulate to this power, and for us that wasn’t an option. For increasing numbers of people, the proposal the RAF brought to the discussion in ‘82 with the “Front Paper”—i.e., an organization that would bring together the guerilla, the militants, and the resistance, in order to develop a new form of power—corresponded to their own experiences and the conclusions they had drawn.
Excerpt from We Must Search for Something New
Red Army Faction, August 1992
_____________
1 On August 25, 1980, sixteen-year-old Olaf Ritzmann was hit by a tram while fleeing a police attack on a demonstration against an appearance by CSU leader Franz Josef Strauß in Hamburg. He died of his injuries four days later. As detailed on pages 207–208, on September 22, 1981, Klaus-Jürgen Rattay was struck by a bus and killed while defending a squat from a police raid.
1. Ed Reavis, “Tipster to Receive 50,000 Marks for Spotting Dutzi,” European Stars and Stripes, March 3, 1983.
2. Associated Press, “Woman Accused of Giving Terrorists U.S. Military Data,” European Stars and Stripes, January 24, 1984.
3. Associated Press, “Trial Begins,” The Paris News (Paris, Texas), May 11, 1984.
4. “Aussage von Brigitte im Prozess gegen Helga,” in Marat, 122-123.
5. “Erklärung zu den Sprühaktionen in München und Dachau,” in Marat, 131. The Dachau spraypainting was just one of a number of low-level actions in this period that took symbols of real historic Nazism as opportunities to protest the “fascism” of the contemporary Federal Republic. Earlier in the 1980s, anti-imps had occupied art exhibits devoted to the antifascist resistance to the Third Reich, drawing a parallel between the concentration camps and the treatment the prisoners from the resistance were receiving in West Germany. This was in line with the 1970s RAF’s claim that isolation imprisonment was simply “Auschwitz” reborn in a new form, an extreme example of the “continuity thesis” that held sway in the APO and student movement of the late sixties. Another example of this was the way in which anti-imp groups in the early eighties referred to themselves as “antifascist” groups, the “fascism” they were actively opposing being that of the Social-Liberal coalition, not the NPD or other far right groups. For more on the APO’s continuity thesis, see Utopia or Auschwitz by Hans Kundnani, especially pages 18–19.
6. Bunte Hilfe Nürnberg in Haufen, 232.
7. Both Klöckner and Härlin were elected to the European Parliament on the Green ticket in 1984. Drawing on various European legal traditions, members of parliament benefit from the principle of inviolability (as do members of the Bundestag), rendering them immune from arrest for the duration of their term. The charges were then repealed by the BGH in 1989, and as such they never had to serve their sentences.
8. Haufen, 269.
9. informations-büro: politische gefangene in der brd no. 38, October 5, 1983.
10. Bunte Hilfe Nürnberg in Haufen, 230.
11. “2. Beitrag am 10.11.83,” in Marat, 138.
12. Tolmein, 160.
13. Die Situation der Gefangenen in den ersten Jahren.
14. Andreas Vogel, Grussaktion an alle politischen Gefangen.
15. Tolmein, 160-161.
16. Ibid., 161.
17. Pressekonferenz am 18.8.1982 in Stuttgart.
18. Wienke Zitzlaff, interviewed by Libertad.
19. Tolmein, 161.
20. Steve Breyman, Why Movements Matter: The West German Peace Movement and U.S. Arms Control Policy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), 156-158.
21. The pro-Soviet, non-Maoist, German Communist Party.
22. Geronimo, 113.
23. Breyman, 166.
24. Associated Press, “West German Rioters Pelt Bush Motorcade,” Gazette (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), June 26, 1983.
25. Breyman, 166.
&nb
sp; 26. Sandra Hill for United Press International, “Bush Unhurt in Anti-Nuclear Demonstration,” Hutchinson News (Kansas), June 26, 1983.
27. Ibid.
28. Breyman, 167.
29. The Federal Congress of Autonomous Peace Initiatives, the Federal Congress of Development Action Groups, and the Federation of Nonviolent Action Groups signed a statement to this effect; Ibid., 167.
30. Geronimo, 116; Breyman, 167.
31. Claus Nordbruch, Der Verfassungsschutz: »Geistig-politische Auseinandersetz« ung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 97-98.
32. Geronimo, 116.
33. “Kommunique: Warum wir uns jetzt für die Initiative für die Zusammenlegung der Gefangenen aus Guerilla und Widerstand einsetzen,” in Marat, 126.
34. “Kommunique: Liebe und Kraft unseren gefangenen Genoss-inn-en vom 25.6 in Krefeld und allen anderen kämpfenden Menschen in den Knästen!” in Marat, 135.
35. “2. Beitrag am 10.11.83,” in Marat, 137.
36. Peters, 597; Anke Brenneke-Eggers, interviewed by Grosse Freiheit, “Interview mit Anke Brenneke-Eggers, Rechtsanwältin von Brigitte Mohnhaupt,” Grosse Freiheit, October 1984.
37. Peters, 599-600.
38. Specifically, in 1985, the RAF would state that, “the BAW and the BKA have always referred to a ‘Strategy Paper’ that they found in an apartment in Frankfurt. We are not responsible for any ‘84 Strategy Paper. What they found was a discussion paper by some militants, in which they developed their own idea about how their practice and the prisoners’ struggle could interact.” (RAF, interviewed by Zusammen Kämpfen, “Interview mit Genossen aus der RAF,” Zusammen Kädmpfen April 1985.)
10
Tubthumping
EVEN BEFORE THE 1984 ARRESTS, Spiegel magazine had been crowing that the RAF had been finished off with the capture of Klar and Mohnhaupt almost two years earlier. While this was not the first time that reports of the RAF’s demise had been greatly exaggerated, it is true that the group had not carried out any attacks since the attempted Kroesen assassination. What had seemed like a leap forward in 1981 might by 1984 have appeared to have been more of a last hurrah.