Jeremy Varon (39 page)

The plight of the RAF fugitives gained even greater notoriety when in January of 1972 the author Heinrich Böll wrote an article in
Der Spiegel
addressing Ulrike Meinhof’s fate. Böll asserted that “Meinhof has declared war on this society, she knows what she is doing and what she has done,” but asked “ who can say what she should do now?”33 Though pleading that she suspend her futile struggle, he nonetheless expressed some understanding of her motives and painted the RAF as victim of the demagoguery of the Springer Press. He then suggested that German society extend to Meinhof the offer of “forgiveness or at least safe return”

(“Gnades oder wenigtens freies Geleit”).
34 Böll was immediately condemned by some as a “sympathizer” of the RAF and himself put on public trial to defend his controversial views

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The radicals’ resolve to shoot only when fired upon progressively crumbled, despite leftists’ claims to the contrary. “Bommi” Baumann, a member of the June 2 Movement who was present when police killed von Rauch, originally alleged that the police had fired without provocation (though von Rauch was armed, Baumann insisted that his gun had not been drawn). The left took this version as the truth and depicted von Rauch as a defenseless victim. Years later, however, Baumann confessed: I no longer know who first pulled the trigger . . . one thing that I find really shitty is that the left simply begins with the assumption that George didn’t pull the trigger at all. The left has made a real Christian martyr [of him]. . . .

The guy wasn’t like that, he was the kind of guy who said, “Of course we’ll shoot.” We had the guns so that we wouldn’t be arrested anymore . . . the climate among the bulls [police] had gotten to such a place that they always

“knew” that we would be armed and that there would be shooting.35

In Baumann’s account, a relationship of hunter and hunted and a shared ethic of “shoot or be shot” prevailed between the police and the guerrillas. Confirming this view, an officer of a Special Commission pursuing the RAF later admitted that the police’s attitude also was, “If you shoot first, you survive.”36 On two occasions, police in fact killed people erroneously suspected of being RAF fugitives. The first victim was Richard Eppel, a seventeen-year-old driving without a license who had sped nervously past a checkpoint. The second was a Scottish businessman, Ian Macleod, gunned down in June 1972 as he stood naked behind a bedroom door in a Stuttgart apartment that the police mistakenly believed harbored RAF members. In both cases, as in the many shoot-outs between fugitives and police, judges and investigators ruled that the police had acted in self-defense and should not be subject to legal penalty.37

For the guerrillas, the imperative of survival and the simple desire to avenge fallen comrades appeared to take precedence over ideological and moral considerations. Much of the early violence of RAF and other guerrillas was therefore oddly depoliticized, driven not by any grand design but by the pressures of illegality and the intense loyalties the underground bred. In the shoot-outs, the guerrillas interacted with the police as their lethal pursuers, reinforcing their image of the state as essentially preda-tory and its agents as their chief enemies. In this way, street confrontations hardened the ideological conflict between the guerrilla movement and the state.

The RAF gave its violence a decidedly political and deadly cast in its 1972 “May Offensive.” In a span of two weeks, the group bombed two 210

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U.S. military bases, police stations in two cities, and offices of the Springer Press. The attacks, carried out by “commandos” bearing the names of slain guerrillas, were audacious in their design and grimly spectacular in their destruction. To begin the campaign, on May 11, the “Kommando Petra Schelm,” consisting of Baader, Ensslin, and Holger Meins, bombed the Headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Army in Frankfurt, killing an officer and injuring thirteen American servicemen. The following day, the RAF

set off a bomb outside the Augsburg police station, injuring one person; later that day, a blast in front of the Bavarian Federal Police Headquarters in Munich demolished twenty-five cars. Four days after that, the RAF

bombed the car of Wolfgang Buddenberg, the Karlsruhe judge who had signed most of the arrest warrants for RAF members. His wife, and not he, was in the car, and suffered serious injuries. Then, on May 19, the RAF bombed the Hamburg offices of the Springer Press, injuring seventeen workers. To conclude the offensive, on May 24, two RAF members drove a car carrying more than 400 pounds of TNT onto the site of the Headquarters of the U.S. Army Supreme European Command in Heidelberg (cars with U.S. license plates were let through, and the RAF had obtained such a car); the car later exploded near an officers’ clubhouse, killing a captain and two GIs and wounding five others.

In its communiqués, the RAF offered a variety of justifications for its bombings and, if only implicitly, for the deaths and injuries they caused.

The attacks on the military bases were responses to the United States’s recent mining of North Vietnamese harbors and stepped-up bombings of North Vietnam—acts that hurt Vietnamese civilians—escalated with harrowing intensity a war the United States insisted was winding down and drew international condemnation. The RAF denounced the U.S.

bombings as “genocide, the murder of the people, annihilation, Auschwitz.”38 Its message to the United States was clear: “West Germany and West Berlin will no longer be safe bases” for the U.S. military.39 The RAF

demanded the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam and threatened continued “attacks against the mass murderers in Vietnam until the Vietcong are victorious.”40

The RAF similarly presented its assaults on the police and the judiciary as forms of counterviolence. With the bombing in Munich, it meant to avenge the death of Weisbecker and to convey the broader lesson that the police “can’t kill any of us without reckoning that we will hit back.”41

The RAF targeted Judge Buddenburg because it held him responsible, by virtue of his legal rulings, for the recent death in prison of the RAF’s Manfred Grashof. The bombing of the offices of the Springer Press raised the Deadly Abstraction

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greatest difficulty. Injuring workers clearly violated the RAF’s insistence that “urban guerrilla actions are directed against the institutions of the class state, imperialism and capitalism [and never] against the working people.”42 (Immediately after the bombings, some radicals in fact speculated that it must have been the work of police agents, intent on discrediting the left.)43 So the RAF blamed the injuries on Springer, arguing that its urgent pleas to have the building cleared—phoned in shortly before the bombs detonated—had been willfully ignored. The initial communiqué explained that “Springer would rather take the risk of his workers and clerical staff being injured by bombs than risk losing a couple of hours working time. . . . For capitalists profit is everything and the people who produce it for them are no better than dirt.”44 For the RAF, the injury to the workers only strengthened the validity of the Springer Press as a target.

The May actions illustrate that the RAF’s violence was not—as common denunciations of the group as fanatic, nihilistic, or sociopathic suggested—entirely without scruple or rationale. It had chosen its targets with precision and defended the bombings in strongly political terms.

American military bases in Germany were important staging points for the shipment of troops and matériel to Vietnam and provided tactical support for operations there. To attack them was to strike at the American war machine. More broadly, the RAF intimated a logic of reciprocal force, in which U.S. soldiers on foreign soil—trained for violence and members of an “imperialist” army—were appropriate objects of lethal attacks, especially as the Vietnam War persisted. By potentially chipping away at the U.S. military’s confidence, the bombings transcended symbolism and had practical value both as a blow to the American empire and an act of solidarity with the Vietnamese. The RAF’s tacit model was that of a just war fought by unconventional methods and within borders the RAF defined. This “war,” as the RAF presented it, drew its legitimacy from the moral ends it served and its restriction of violence to military targets. The RAF’s evocation of Auschwitz suggested that Germans had both a special imperative and right to protest the Vietnam War by drastic means.45 With the bombings directed at the police and the judiciary, the RAF extended the notion of reciprocity to its conflict with the state. Violence against state agents no longer needed to be strictly self-defensive. Retaliation was a sufficient motive.

No matter their stated rationale, the May actions posed serious problems for the group. The RAF’s model of anti-imperialist struggle always presupposed that the West German masses, however defined, would ap-212

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plaud armed actions. Extending this assumption, the RAF confidently announced that “the people in West Germany do not support the security forces in their search for the bombers . . . because they know that the bomb attacks against the mass murderers in Vietnam are just, and because they know from experience that words and demonstrations against the crimes of imperialism are no use.”46 But here the RAF erroneously interpreted the limited and largely fleeting public sympathy for RAF fugitives in prior police hunts as an endorsement of its violence.

Overwhelmingly, the May bombings produced outrage and fear among the public, whose great majority now saw the RAF’s violence as decidedly criminal and not “revolutionary.”

The RAF, in addition, remained evasive on the issue of the human toll of its violence. Its communiqués, which scarcely even acknowledged the victims, failed to specify the political value of injuries and deaths or define precisely whom it considered a legitimate target. Did the group consider
any
American serviceman or official in West Germany fair game by virtue of the war in Vietnam or “U.S. imperialism” in general? Did
anyone
associated with West Germany’s security forces or judicial system bear criminal guilt, punishable by injury or death, for the state’s pursuit of the RAF? And who or what empowered the RAF to make such judgments, especially in the absence of any popular mandate?

To the extent that the ethics of the RAF’s violence was connected to its political consequences, the RAF courted additional hazards. If, as it hoped, its violence were to serve as an example to others and contribute to America’s defeat in Vietnam, then the casualties would have served some political goal (however one may judge either the ends or means).

If, however, this scenario
did not
come to pass, the deaths of people like the American military personnel—who bore no direct responsibility for U.S. aggression in Vietnam—would be rendered politically meaningless.

The ethical calculus, in short, could not be separated from the political future; and this future, though subject to speculation, could not be known in the present, when the RAF made the decision to kill. The RAF also failed in other ways to recognize that violence was a precarious enterprise, not easily controlled by force of the good intentions it insisted it had. Its silence about the “accidental” injury to Judge Buddenberg’s wife, along with its specious blaming of the Springer Press for the injury to workers
its
bombs had caused, signaled the group’s inability to assume true responsibility for its actions.

The May Offensive was a turning point for the RAF in additional senses. The West German left sharpened its objections to a program of Deadly Abstraction

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violence that now included planned political murder and, if unintentionally, injuries to civilians. In separate conferences in late May and early June, leftists debated the current state and future course of liberation struggles in Germany and abroad. The near-unanimous view of the RAF

was one of condemnation.

The first and more radical of the conferences was held by the Frankfurt chapter of Rote Hilfe, an organization that formed in Berlin in 1970

to offer legal aid to leftists, among them RAF members. (Rote Hilfe took its name from the KPD’s legal aid organization in the 1920s and 1930s.) Described as a “Teach-in Against State Repression,” the conference was banned at the last minute from the University of Frankfurt by university and city officials who objected to materials issued in preparation for the meeting. When the conference took place at a new Frankfurt location, student groups, Marxist-Leninist organizations, and independent radicals heatedly discussed the RAF’s recent bombings and the issue of violence more broadly.

Rote Hilfe gave the most charitable assessment of the RAF. In a pre-conference flyer, the group defended the bombings directed at the U.S.

military, asserting, “If imperialism is a worldwide system, and that it is, then the struggle against it must be waged worldwide. It will and must be a violent and armed struggle, or it will not be waged at all.”47 Rote Hilfe also described the IG-Farben Headquarters in Frankfurt, once a center for the financial leaders of the Nazi Reich and now used by the U.S. military in its strategic planning, as a doubly appropriate target of RAF’s May 11 bombing. In a final show of solidarity, Rote Hilfe played at the conference a tape-recorded message from the underground by Meinhof encouraging leftists to continue the struggle. Yet Rote Hilfe balanced its praise for the RAF with sharp, if comradely, criticisms. It insisted that the attacks in Augsburg and Karlsruhe had been driven by emotion, not political sense, and that the May actions as a whole hindered the growth of the West German left.

In defending the RAF, Rote Hilfe was in the distinct minority. Most participants denounced the RAF for alienating “the masses” and prompting greater repression of the legal left. Typical of the criticisms by the

“K-groups” was that of the Kommunistischer Studentenverein, which said that the RAF’s violence was “neither practiced by the masses . . .

nor is it understood by the masses as an expression of their interests. The masses, on the contrary, perceive the actions as a threat, and therefore identify with the reactions of the state apparatus. . . . This violence is not revolutionary. It sabotages the struggle against state repression in that it 214