The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (25 page)

34
. Hans Wolfgang Sternsdorff, “Im Schützengraben für die falsche Sache,”
Spiegel,
February 23, 1981. Wunschik (1997), 375.

35
.
Spiegel,
“Mord beginnt beim bösen Wort,” November 7, 1977; Wunschik (1997), 232; Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 337.

36
. Associated Press, “Nab Murder Suspect in Frankfurt,”
Pacific Stars and Stripes,
June 12, 1979.

37
. Rolf Heißler, “Report by Rolf Heissler, Prisoner from the RAF, in Prison for 14 Years,” in Committee ‘Solidarity with the political prisoners in Germany,' 14.

38
. J. Kumagai, “The German Solution,”
IEEE Spectrum
, April 11, 2003.

39
. Heißler, 14.

40
. See
page 116
.

41
. Wunschik (1997), 315.

42
. René Haquin and Pierre Stéphany,
Les grands dossiers criminels en Belgique
(Brussels: Editions Racine, 2005), 266.

43
.
Spiegel,
“Dublin Connection,” August 20, 1979.

44
.
Die Zeit,
“Anschlag in Ramstein,” September 11, 1981. The discrepancies in question regard the quantity of explosives used and the RAF communiqué's reference to a tunnel. In actual fact, investigators believed only ten, not twenty, kilograms had been used, and that there was no tunnel, just a hole dug by the side of the road. In his 1991 obituary, Christian Lochte of the Hamburg
Verfassungsschutz
would be credited with having been one of the first to argue that the attack had indeed been carried out by the RAF.
(Hamburger Abendblatt,
“Ein hartnäckiger Querdenker,” September 4, 1991.)

45
. Tim Naftali,
Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism
(New York: Basic Books, 2006), 117.

46
. Peters, 500-501.

47
. Ben Lewis and Richard Klein,
Baader Meinhof: In Love with Terror
(United Kingdom: A Mentorn Production for BBC Four, 2002).

48
. RAF, “Serve the People: Class Struggle and the Guerilla,” in Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 157.

49
. Reinders and Fritzch, 23-24.

50
. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 112.

51
. Peters, 502-503.

52
. Ibid., 503-504.

53
. Reuters, “Charges Being Prepared against Schleyer Suspect,”
The Lethbridge Herald,
November 20, 1979.

54
. dpa, “Lebenslang—die Mutter war dabei,”
Hamburger Abendblatt,
September 27, 1980.

55
. See for instance, Wunschik (1997), 325.

Today, we began a hunger strike.

Following the execution of Andreas, Gudrun, Jan and Ingrid—following the death of eight prisoners from the RAF in the past three years—following the Stuttgart parliamentary investigative committee's official cover-up of the murder of the hostages, the final scene in the intelligence service operation has unfolded, occurring at the same time as the idea was being floated that now that the leading prisoners from the RAF had been liquidated, those remaining should be dispatched as well—following all of the hunger and thirst strikes of recent years, and the torture that accompanied them: we are beginning this strike both conscious of and enraged by the fact that we have only this wretched means at our disposal, and we are doing so in the face of the boundless desire for destruction that the imperialist strategists are mobilizing against us as prisoners in their war against the armed resistance.

Our isolation from each other and from the outside world violates the promise made by the federal government a year ago.
¹
In spite of the internal promises of “improvements” in recent months, nothing has changed. We continue to find ourselves trapped inside an all-encompassing machine, one that assails us on several levels, cutting us off from the conditions necessary to ensure our ongoing humanity. The murders of Andreas, Gudrun, Jan, and Ingrid constitute a turning point, after which everything we have gained in the way of minimum living conditions is to be wiped away.

Given that the federal government, state security, and their justice and prison systems have made the extermination of the prisoners into an example of their readiness to commit any crime, with the contemptuous hope of smothering the revolutionary process in the metropole, we will act to make it clear that our status as hostages is an example of imperialist politics. They will once again learn that people will not let themselves be liquidated like dogs, and that there exists a type of strength that their machine cannot contain.

We demand:

• That the FRG respect human rights and apply the minimum guarantees for prisoners of war, as established in the Geneva Convention.
  

  That means:
  

• association for the prisoners of the RAF and the other anti-imperialist organizations in groups suitable for healthy interaction. We are only demanding what medical experts have been demanding for years, what Amnesty International has campaigned for, and what this state already agreed to during our April ‘77 hunger strike.
  

Beyond that, we demand:

• that all of Andreas, Gudrun, Jan, Ingrid, and Irmgard's confiscated writings be published—especially Gudrun's letter to which the prison chaplain refers;
  ²
  
• that all facts and all material regarding October 18, 1977, be made available to an independent investigative committee.
  

We will not break off this strike until conditions suitable for life have been established—guaranteed by an appropriate international organization.

Hamburg Remand
for the prisoners from the RAF
March 14, 1978

_____________

¹
On April 30, 1977, RAF prisoners called off their fourth collective hunger strike after receiving assurances that they would be granted limited association. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 471.

²
See
page 41
.

We are on hunger strike against continuous and perfected isolation, part of the extermination strategy directed against the prisoners from the armed anti-imperialist groups. The clearest example of this strategy is the current project of the BAW, the BKA/State Security, and the
Länder
justice authorities to isolate us in special cells, a project drawing on eight years' experience using isolation. Soundproof cement bunkers with bullet-proof windows that cannot be opened; airtight doors and an air conditioner that produce pressure fluctuations; neon lights glaring all day long; a stainless steel sink, toilet, and mirror; furniture bolted to the cement floor. Many such isolation units exist, units that are under total surveillance and are hermetically sealed off from the rest of the institution. The prisoners held in these cells have no contact with one another. “Free movement” takes place in a wire-covered cement cage that is to all intents and purposes just another cell.

In Celle, Straubing, and Stammheim, the prisoners already suffer in this type of isolation bunker; in Berlin, Lübeck, Ossendorf, and many other prisons, similar units have been built or tested.

This machinery of destruction is being used because the state recognizes that the prisoners who were subjected to the previous isolation techniques had not been broken and that the murders of Ulrike, Andreas, Gudrun, Jan, and Ingrid and the attempted murder of Irmgard—made to look like suicides—were and are detrimental to the federal government's objective. This objective, the establishment of social democracy's “Model Germany” throughout Western Europe and beyond, is to be legitimized in the eyes of the people through the direct vote at the European Parliament—as, for example, was indicated during Kohl's recent appearances in Holland. (That doesn't preclude the federal government executing more prisoners should guerilla actions raise the stakes.)

The prisoners who refuse to stop struggling and who reject the “re-socialization” deal, who neither renounce nor collaborate, are to be physically and psychologically destroyed in the new isolation bunkers; when they are released they are to be incapable of further resistance— “their condition should make it nearly impossible” for them “to play any active role for the foreseeable future” in the anti-imperialist struggle, as Senator for Justice Dahrendorf has cynically formulated the counterstrategy's objective.

We demand:

• the abolition of isolation bunkers;
  
• the application of the minimum guarantees of the Geneva Convention and the International Declaration on Human Rights for all prisoners from anti-imperialist groups;
  
• association of these prisoners in groups large enough to allow interaction, as recommended by medical specialists;
  
• freedom for Günter Sonnenberg, whose head injury renders him unfit for prison;
  
• an inquiry into prison conditions by an international humanitarian body/organization.
  

In Ireland, Spain, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Israel prisoners are struggling against prison conditions meant to destroy their political identity and to physically break them—prison conditions that, for the most part, have been implemented in the FRG.

Our hunger strike is part of this struggle and an expression of our solidarity with all prisoners who even in prison are resisting.

The Berlin RAF prisoners
April 20, 1979

On June 25, 1979, the Andreas Baader Commando carried out a bomb attack on NATO Commander-in-Chief General Alexander Haig.

We want to explain how the action failed in its concrete objective, which was to directly hit Haig:

We dug a 1.8 meter trench under the road surface of a bridge on the route from Haig's home to the NATO Headquarters and buried the payload (20 kg of plastic explosives) approximately 40 cm below the surface. The fuse was a 200-meter electrical cable, to be triggered at the moment when the front door of Haig's Mercedes was directly above the payload. We had determined that his car traveled two meters per tenth of a second. Our error was in thinking that we could manually trigger the explosion precisely enough with the target moving that quickly.

We carried out this action, because Haig represents and executes in a particularly precise way the “new course” or “modified style” of the American strategy.

Since the political and military defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam all that has changed is that instead of U.S. aggression decreasing, it is increasing, confronting the people of the world with a new American offensive, which also marks a qualitative leap forward in the development of the relationship of forces between the revolution and the counterrevolution, or, as we have said elsewhere, the worldwide revolutionary process of the cities being encircled by the villages.

With the victories of the liberation struggles in Southeast Asia and Africa, the front line has moved closer to the center. It has fallen back
to the metropole itself and is making the tactical and strategic retreat of U.S. imperialism—the so-called shift of the strategic core to Western Europe—inevitable. What Haig calls the “modified style” requires that the Europroject managed by the FRG finally integrate the West European states into U.S. global strategy: “Europe can no longer afford the luxury of being a spectator on the sidelines.” What Haig means by that is Shaba, is Chad,
¹
is the next expedition into the Gulf, is the direct military intervention by states subjugated to or bought off by North America in the “crisis zones,” all to defend the vital interests of the West.

The concrete steps in this policy of reinforcement—which Haig, as NATO Chief, has carried through with the FRG's help, so as to be prepared for this “half war”
²
(which also means having the European states firmly under control, which was not the case in ‘73)—requires molding the FRG into the most aggressive U.S. base—atomic weapons deployment accompanied by a “steady increase in the number of American troops,” turning the entire country into one big barracks. Thus the FRG will address the “ambivalent and ambiguous situations arising on NATO's flanks or in the peripheral areas, for instance in the Middle East and in Africa,” and act as an iron collar controlling neighboring countries. For Schmidt's Social-Liberal government this means that the social democratic project of covert warfare—which, in its measures against the RAF, has already broken down—is exposed, and the government is recognized internationally as a party of brazen warmongers.

This balancing act between the “Model Germany” sales pitch and the reality of the Federal Republic, which led to Brandt's downfall in ‘73, is now Schmidt's biggest problem. This problem arises from the 1977 Pentagon publication that openly addressed what the “flexible response”
³
strategy means for the FRG: five million of us dead to protect the American homeland. That's the price the SPD pays to stay in power, and it is only a symptom of the total subjugation of the FRG against which we are fighting.