The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (17 page)

Many observers eventually concluded that the perceived singling out of Jews represented a political defeat far greater than any military failure. Certainly, Entebbe provides a stark example of the inability some leftists had in recognizing or rejecting antisemitism.

Initially, for most critics, the issue was not that Jews had been segre-gated—a fact which was dismissed by many as state propaganda—but that an airplane had been skyjacked. Karl-Heinz Dellwo, who at the time was a prisoner from the RAF, remembers feeling disbelief at the news, and was relieved to have a letter smuggled to him from Gudrun Ensslin in which she expressed the desire to publicly condemn the action, though she eventually decided to hold back out of respect for the two dead RZ guerillas.
⁶⁹
Helmut Pohl, too, would recall that, “We were critical of that action for a number of reasons: the selection of passengers with Israeli passports, the resolution of the action on the Three Continents instead of in the metropole, and most importantly, the tactic of hijacking a plane.”
⁷⁰

Within the 2JM, Entebbe merely aggravated what were already the beginnings of the tensions between the anti-imperialists and social revolutionaries.
⁷¹
Nevertheless, there too, nobody felt that a public denunciation was appropriate. As Fritz Teufel would later explain:

In the aftermath of the Entebbe hijacking, we considered a public critique. I was opposed…. It is not easy to criticize comrades who risked and lost their lives in an effort to free their comrades. The brutality and military precision of the Israeli military and GSG-9 commando actions in Entebbe and Mogadishu and the deaths of the comrades involved initially set in motion a process that blocked us from considering the sense or lack thereof of these actions, a suspension of thought.
⁷²

Tragically, the lack of public criticism of Entebbe from the ranks of the armed combatants left the door ajar for future skyjackings, and as such for the debacle in Mogadishu.

As for the RZ's international wing, in the years to come it would continue along its troubled trail, eventually becoming a franchise for Carlos and various foreign intelligence agencies. Nevertheless, unlike Mogadishu, where the RAF suffered a serious political defeat and was widely condemned, Entebbe did not result in any backlash against the “domestic” RZ. Partly, this was because none of the hostages were Germans, the airliner was not from a German company, and the action was not carried out on German soil and did not directly involve the
West German state. For many leftists, it could all be viewed as somewhat distant, and despite the leading role played by two members of the RZ, it could be dismissed as having nothing to do with anything in West Germany.

So it was, that as the 1970s came to a close, all three of the FRG's main guerilla groups had been faced with challenges to their identity and their sense of purpose. These challenges were not the same, though, and would be resolved in very different ways. Nonetheless, operating as they did in a world of shared illegality, their choices would not be made in isolation, but would rather build on each other's experiences, accomplishments, and failures.

Nor did any of the guerilla groups exist in a bubble of isolated armed conflict—with the possible exception of the RZ's international wing, all three organizations, anti-imperialists and social revolutionaries alike, remained entrenched in the broader political context, both domestically and internationally. As such, in order to understand the paths they would take, we must now turn our attention to the rise of militant resistance on what was at first a quintessentially aboveground, and certainly unexpected, terrain: the movement against nuclear energy.

_____________

1
. Tobias Wunschik,
Baader-Meinhofs Kinder: Die zweite Generation der RAF
(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997), 273.

2
. Volker Speitel was arrested in 1977 and would end up providing all sorts of information—and tall stories—to the state prosecutors. See
page 252
.

3
. Monika Berberich, “Erfahrungen in der Gruppenarbeit mit Psychotherapeuten,” in Angelika Holderberg (ed.),
Nach dem bewaffneten Kampf
(Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2007), 137.

4
. Wunschik (1997), 199-200.

5
. Ibid., 294.

6
. J.M. Bouguereau, “Recherchés pour l'affaire Schleyer arrêtés en Yougoslavie,”
Libération,
May 30, 1978.

7
. R.K. Pruthi,
An Encyclopaedic Survey of Global Terrorism in 21st Century
(New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 2002), 28-31

8
.
Spiegel,
“Wen suchen wir denn eigentlich?” November 7, 1977. In the cases being discussed, Butz Peters has claimed that both Wisniewski and Wagner were identified because the aliases they used when traveling had already been cracked by the BKA. In the case of Wisniewski, at least, this was done by means of handwriting analysis of the customs cards he had filled out on a previous flight. Butz Peters,
Tödlicher Irrtum: Die Geschichte der RAF
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004), 480-481.

9
. The FRG was at this time an important rear base area for fascist
Ustashe
and other Croatian nationalist organizations, many of which engaged in armed attacks against Yugoslav consulates and diplomatic representatives. In 1976, this included the assassination of the Yugoslav consul in Frankfurt. See: Paul Hockenos,
Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 63. The eight men in question, ranging in age from 29 to 62, were accused of carrying out several such attacks, including a skyjacking and multiple bombings, in their struggle against the Titoist state. A number of them were already in prison in the FRG.
Spiegel,
“Maghrebinische Lösung,” August 31, 1978.

10
. Wunschik (1997), 294. See Appendix II: Boock's Lies,
pages 328–332.

11
. Wunschik (1997), 297-299.

12
. Ibid., 299-300; Dominique Linhardt, “Guerrilla Diffusa: Clandestinité, soupçon et provocation dans le conflit entre organisations révolutionnaires subversives et l'État ouest-allemand (années 1970),”
Politix
2006/2, no. 74, 73-74.

13
. United Press International, “General Police Kill Terrorist,”
European Stars and Stripes,
September 7, 1978.

14
.
Time
, “Closing In On an Elusive Enemy,” October 9, 1978.

15
. United Press International, “General Police Kill Terrorist.”

16
. Wunschik (1997), 299.

17
. United Press International, “Stoll's Death Foiled a Plot, Officials Think,”
European Stars and Stripes,
September 12, 1978.

18
. Grams would eventually be released, as there was not enough evidence for a conviction; he received compensation of 10
DM
per day he had spent locked up. He would later join the RAF. Willi Winkler,
Die Geschichte der RAF
(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2008), 397.

19
. dpa, “‘Kontakte zu Terroristen'—Haftbefehl,”
Hamburger Abendblatt,
September 21, 1978; dpa, “Mutmaßlicher Terrorist festgenommen,”
Hamburger Abendblatt,
November, 17, 1978.

20
. United Press International, “Baader-Meinhof Gang Member Dies of Wounds,”
European Stars and Stripes,
October 8, 1978. Wunschik (1997), 302-303.

21
. During her trial Speitel would fight with the court guards and denounce presiding Judge Klaus Wagner as “a sack of filth, a hangman and an accomplice of U.S. capitalism.” Charged with murder and attempted murder, she insisted her only regret was that she had not made sure both cops were dead. Reuters, “Terrorist Dragged to court,”
Winnipeg Free Press,
October 4, 1979. She was sentenced to life in prison, but would be pardoned in 1989.

22
. Wunschik (1997), 303-304.

23
. A play on words, as the German term for “urban guerilla” is
Stadtguerilla.

24
. Werner Sauber, “Mit dem Rücken zur Wand?” January 1975. This text will be included along with other documents from the 2JM in a forthcoming documentary history to be copublished by Kersplebedeb and PM Press.

25
. Rolf Pohle, Rolf Heißler, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, Verena Becker, and Ina Siepmann were flown out of Germany. The sixth prisoner, former RAF member Horst Mahler, refused the release. See Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 328-332.

26
. Linhardt, 85-86.

27
. Andreas Vogel,
Grussaktion an alle politischen Gefangen,
July 1984.

28
. Associated Press, “Resignation of Berlin Justice Minister Sought,” Lawton (Oklahoma)
Constitution,
July 8, 1976.

29
. Gabriele Rollnik and Daniel Dubbe,
Keine Angst vor niemand
(Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2003), 63-64; Inge Viett,
Nie war ich furchtloser
(Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1996), 160.

30
. Rollnik and Dubbe, 63.

31
. Ibid., 75-76.

32
. Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann, “Deutsche Terroristinnen in Österreich,”
zeitgeschichte
2/37. Jahrgang 2010, 119-120.

33
. Viett, 169-171.

34
. Winkler, 374. Leaving aside Judge von Drenkmann, it appears that if one was going to be kidnapped, one was lucky to be kidnapped by the 2JM: Lorenz had similarly thanked his abductors in 1975, even going so far as to express the desire to meet with them again under better circumstances, perhaps at one of his garden parties. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 329.

35
. Roughly $3.1 million.

36
. Bandhauer-Schöffmann, 119-120; Rollnik and Dubbe, 76-77.

37
. Bandhauer-Schöffmann, 130.

38
. Rollnik and Dubbe, 76-77.

39
. Bandhauer-Schöffmann, 123-124.

40
. While the media trumpeted this as a “major blow” to the RAF, the FRG's minister of the interior, Werner Maihofer, downplayed the arrests, stating that “Christian Möller, 28, the driver, in no way belonged to the hard core of the RAF, and Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann wasn't a major figure, but was at least a ‘symbolic figure.'” In actual fact, she was not a RAF member at all, but had come out of the 2JM milieu. According to some accounts Möller was just a supporter who had been driving her into Switzerland that day. He eventually received an eleven-year sentence. Kröcher-Tiedemann, who had been freed from prison in the 1975 Lorenz hostage exchange, would serve two-thirds of her fifteen-year sentence before being extradited to the FRG in 1987, where she was brought to trial for her part in the 1975 OPEC raid (see below,
pages 71–72
). Due to a lack of evidence, however, she was acquitted in May 1990 and released from prison in 1991. She died of cancer on October 7, 1995, at the age of 44.

41
. J.P. Bruneau, “Le Jura Suisse saisi par le spectre de la RAF,”
Libération,
June 13, 1978.

42
. Viett, 19-50.

43
. Ibid., 78.

44
. Dahlkamp et al., “Operation Zauber.”

45
. The 2JM had planted a bomb at the club on February 2, 1972, to protest the murder of thirteen unarmed demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland, three days earlier, in what became known as the Bogside Massacre, or simply Bloody Sunday. An elderly boat-maker found the 2JM's bomb and attempted to disarm it—the device exploded, killing him.

46
. Rollnik and Dubbe, 75; Klaus Viehmann, “Was nicht geschrieben steht,” 6.

47
. Among the prisoners, Reinders, Teufel, and Fritzsch would be associated with the social revolutionaries, and Vogel, Meyer, and Kröcher-Tiedemann (in Switzerland) with the anti-imperialists. (Klöpper was at this time taking his distance from the guerilla.) On the street, Klaus Viehmann is the only known combatant who remained with the social revolutionaries, Inge Viett, Juliane Plambeck, Gabriele Rollnik, Gudrun Stürmer, and Angelika Goder all rallying to the antiimperialist camp.

48
.
Libération,
“Berlin: un ‘terroriste' délivré par un commando de cinq femmes,” May 26, 1978.

49
. United Press International, “Terrorist Freed,”
Pharos Tribune,
May 28, 1978.

50
.
Libération
“Berlin: un ‘terroriste' délivré par un commando de cinq femmes.”

51
. Associated Press, “Berlin's Law Chief Is Forced to Resign,”
European Stars and Stripes,
July 6, 1978.

52
. Viehmann (1997), 7.

53
. Ralf Reinders and Ronald Fritzch,
Die Bewegung 2. Juni
(Berlin, Amsterdam: Edition ID-Archiv, 1995), 63.

54
. Rollnik and Dubbe, 81.

55
. Viehmann (1997), 7.

56
.
Winnipeg Free Press,
“Combatting Terrorism,” July 18, 1978.

57
. Rollnik and Dubbe, 84. According to Willi Winkler, the four were located due to a tap on the phone they called in Bielefeld (Willi Winkler,
Die Geschichte der RAF,
372).

58
. Rollnik and Dubbe, 83-85. Also: Pruthi, 29.

59
. Rollnik and Dubbe, 87.

60
. Tobias Wunschik, “Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit und der Terrorismus in Deutschland,” 2.

61
. Schmeidel, 155-156.

62
. Viett, 196-207.

63
. Autonome Forum, “A Herstory of the Revolutionary Cells and Rote Zora—Armed Resistance in West Germany.”

64
.
Time,
“Kidnaping in Vienna, Murder in Athens,” January 5, 1976.

65
. To this day the point is debated in the radical left as to whether the guerillas' intention was to single out Jews or Israelis. The editors are unable to fully examine the question of intent in this context, however the fact of the matter is that both Israeli and non-Israeli Jews were held back. Yossi Melmen, “Setting the record straight: Entebbe was not Auschwitz,”
Haaretz
July 8, 2011.