The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (37 page)

Despite the fact that the general had survived largely unscathed, the technical skill involved raised eyebrows. As one police spokesman put it, the use of a military weapon lent a “new quality” to the guerilla.
⁹⁹
More than that, the RPG-7 is intended to be used against tanks—the general's Mercedes was only a fraction that size, and was partially obscured by brush, yet it had been hit twice from a range of almost five hundred feet.
¹⁰⁰

Years later, Inge Viett would claim that the East Germans had provided the training for this attack. According to the former 2JM guerilla,
Stasi
agents had spent a few days that spring at the Briesen camp, showing RAF members how to use the RPG-7, having them blow up a series of Mercedes limousines, manned first by plastic dummies, and then finally sacrificing a German Shepherd dog. This apparently led to a heated argument, as the guerillas saw no point in killing a defenseless animal, but the
Stasi
insisted, wanting to show what effect the explosion would have on a back-seat passenger.
¹⁰¹

It must be noted that Viett's account has been contradicted by other former RAF members, including Helmut Pohl, who stated in a 1991 interview with the
Frankfurter Rundschau
that the training lesson she refers to occurred after, not before, the Kroesen attack, the purpose
being to ascertain what the guerillas had done wrong.
¹⁰²
Furthermore, Pohl specified that the training in question had been supplied by the National People's Army, not the
Stasi.
In 2011, Christian Klar (who had been released in 2008) accused Viett of having lied about the date in order to lay the basis for prosecuting
Stasi
agents on grounds of “supporting a terrorist organization” thirty years after the fact, as the former GDR had by that point been annexed by the FRG. According to Klar, this was part of a deal Viett made in exchange for a reduced sentence.
¹⁰³
(It is true that the day after Viett made this assertion, charges were laid against a
Stasi
officer in this regard. However, they were subsequently dropped, and while Viett has issued a public apology for her statements, she has also vehemently denied that they were part of any kind of deal.)
¹⁰⁴

At the time, of course, such stories were both unknown and unimagined. For the anti-imps, the attack on Kroesen, like the Ramstein bombing before it, had been a political success, an example of the guerilla's relevance to the aboveground left:

…many people now realized that the targets attacked have great importance for the U.S. war strategy. In May 1981 for example the women's peace groups organized a huge demonstration to the Headquarters in Ramstein. The attacks of the RAF have been discussed within the various peace groups and, unlike 1977, there have been few denunciations.
¹⁰⁵

Momentum continued to build. At the very moment that Kroesen was giving his second press conference about the attack, police identified and defused two bombs that had been placed on the railway tracks used to carry supplies in and out of the Rhine-Main airbase in Frankfurt.
¹⁰⁶
That same week, persons unknown planted a bomb in the offices of Dow Chemical in Düsseldorf, though it too was disarmed before it could go off.
¹⁰⁷

Heavier attacks lent their weight to what would otherwise have passed as relatively innocuous harassment, as when on one evening the tires of cars belonging to American GIs in Frankfurt were slashed—vandalism that made the international newswires as the vehicles were also daubed with the injunction to “Stop the NATO runway” (a reference to Startbahn West), and the words “Kroesen” and “Ramstein.”
¹⁰⁸
Of course, as we have seen, the flipside to this was that even something as harmless as spraypainting graffiti could be interpreted as support for a “terrorist” organization under §129a.
¹⁰⁹

Meanwhile, this rise in resistance was opposed not only by the state, but also by the liberal section of the peace movement. Since the decline of the movement against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, “peace” activism had become the purview of Citizens Initiatives and church groups, often overlapping with the pacifist wing of the antinuclear movement, sometimes even having ties to the SPD. This hegemony had been cracked in Bremen in 1980, but the radicals were still fighting an uphill battle. As one writer has put it, it was an awkward situation, as “there was a booming peace movement on the one hand, and a weak antiwar movement on the other.”
¹¹⁰

A look at the October 1981 Peace Congress held in West Berlin provides a snapshot of the different coexisting forces. The Congress had been called to establish a central Coordinating Committee for the entire movement; a process that included the marginalization of the
Autonomen
as part of its agenda. Worlds collided as Karsten Voigt and former Justice Minister Hans-Jochen Vogel—both of the SPD—took the podium. Anti-imps stormed in screaming and whistling and smashing the light fixtures. Taking the floor, they read out the prisoners' demands from the hunger strike earlier that year, and then sat down chanting, “Vogel murderer! Vogel out! Voigt out!” At first the audience was unsure how to respond—then, after some delay, organizers linked arms and “nonviolently” forced the anti-imps into a corner. Eventually the SPD politicians were able to talk, though by that time half the audience had left.
¹¹¹

Within the antimissile movement, armed struggle remained far more unpopular than simple street militancy. Nevertheless, the RAF's ‘81
offensive had clearly been a setback for the state, which had hoped to be done with the guerilla in ‘77. Instead, it now faced a combination of clandestine and aboveground opponents committed to building a resistance movement—a small current, to be sure, but one which was growing, and making all sorts of interesting connections.

Repression—meaning capture or death—remained one obvious way to counter this development. However, following the arrests of the past few years, by 1981 the police seemed to have run out of luck. Looking for new leads, they announced a 50,000
DM
($22,225) reward for information regarding the Ramstein or Kroesen attacks, or which would lead to the arrest of a guerilla or to the location of a RAF safehouse
¹¹²
—to no avail. Initially, at least, it seemed that for all their resources, the combined might of the BKA, the
Verfassungsschutz
, and sundry local constabularies was coming up empty.

Catch as catch can, it was the aboveground supporters who were now targeted.

Following the attack on Kroesen, police had recovered the rocket launcher, along with camping equipment and cans of cocoa, that had been abandoned on the hillside where the RAF had lain in wait. Fingerprints belonging to Klar, Mohnhaupt, and other individuals were apparently lifted from the scene, and this provided the initial focus for the investigation. Police released photos of various vehicles that the guerillas had allegedly been spotted driving, as well as the motorcycle that Kroesen's bodyguard claimed to have noticed earlier that year.

§129a was used to try and shake something loose from the scene, anyone with radical politics being a potential target. Of the thousands investigated under this law, hardly any were actually charged, so much so that it became known as “the investigator's paragraph.”
¹¹³
(Of 2,131 preliminary proceedings between 1980 and 1987, only 30 led to convictions.) Nevertheless, once proceedings were initiated, the target of the investigation was placed under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance, which often included phone taps. In extreme cases, people were held in remand, with their correspondence censored and all visits through a glass partition, like other political prisoners.
¹¹⁴
Of course, beyond those actually named in proceedings, §129a also provided the means to criminalize and intimidate the militant left in general, and the anti-imps in particular. As observed by
Bunte Hilfe,
a prisoner support group,
“[§129a] seeks to disrupt and prevent discussion between the different sections of the movement, by making it clear that anyone involved might find themselves facing years in prison.”
¹¹⁵

Building on this, the state now refined its propaganda, developing the position that not all RAF combatants had gone underground, but that there was also an “aboveground RAF.” After years of charging comrades for supporting the guerilla, this now established a basis for bringing them to trial as if they were actual RAF members, a qualification that had both political and legal consequences, as “membership” made one liable to prison terms much longer than those for mere “support” or “promotion.”
¹¹⁶

Among the first attempts to implement this thesis were the cases of Karl Grosser and Jürgen Schneider, two anti-imps arrested on April 10, a few days before Debus died.
¹¹⁷
Police would claim that Schneider had helped to write the eighth hunger strike statement, but still only charged him with support. Grosser, on the other hand, would be charged with actual membership in the RAF: even though he had been in prison since April, he was accused of having helped to carry out the attack on Kroesen in September, the police claiming that it was he who had been the person allegedly tailing the general's car on a motorcycle earlier that year. Still, when he was tried in 1982, the Stuttgart court did not find the claim of membership convincing, and instead sentenced him for support—with a three-year sentence—while Schneider received two and a half years.
¹¹⁸

Solidarity poster for Helga Roos, Karl Grosser, and Jürgen Schneider.

Cases like these, and the accusation that the RAF had aboveground members, served to threaten and intimidate anyone who refused to reject armed struggle as beyond the pale. As one movement flier put it, “Faced with our new won strength, which began with the militant 1980 demo in Bremen and the common struggle with the hunger-striking
prisoners, and included the anti-Haig demonstration and the struggle against NATO's Startbahn West, the state has reacted with the police fabrication of an ‘aboveground RAF,' with the goal of destroying this movement with intimidation, criminalization, and imprisonment.”
¹¹⁹

One month after the RAF's summer offensive, the “aboveground RAF” story was trotted out again. On October 16, Helga Roos was arrested in Frankfurt, the police claiming that she had purchased the tent used by the Gudrun Ensslin Commando the night before the Kroesen attack, and that her fingerprints had been found on a can of cocoa at their campsite. Soon after, Gabriele Gebhard was arrested in Mannheim, also accused of having helped the guerilla carry out its recent attacks. Then in December, several anti-imps were picked up in a series of raids in Heidelberg. This was either a fishing trip or straight up harassment; in any case, they were all released a few days later, although they faced subsequent investigations under §129a. The substance of their anti-imperialist activity consisted of supporting the prisoners' hunger strike, demonstrating against U.S. foreign policy, and attending public meetings against Startbahn West and in support of the resistance in El Salvador and Palestine.
¹²⁰

As for Gebhard, police claimed she had lived with Gisela Dutzi, an anti-imp who had gone underground in March and was believed to have joined the RAF. She was also accused of having rented a safehouse in Heidelberg used by the RAF in 1980.
¹²¹
By the end of 1981, these charges had been dropped, there being insufficient evidence to mount a case.

Things were more serious for Roos. She had already served one year in prison for participating in the 1978 dpa occupation, and the police had observed her attending the trial of RAF member Sieglinde Hofmann. Earlier in 1981, her friend Barbara Augustin had been arrested at the Swiss border with a carload of guns and explosives—according to police, Augustin was a member of the RZ.
¹²²
Roos was charged with “membership” under §129a and was held in strict isolation in Stammheim, Bühl, and Zweibrücken prisons. In July 1982, while still awaiting trial, she hunger and thirst struck for a week—this was both in solidarity with Sieglinde Hofmann and Ingrid Barabaß who were hunger striking for association,
¹²³
and also for her own sake, as she herself demanded association with other prisoners from the resistance.
¹²⁴
Eerily echoing the treatment Ulrike Meinhof had been subjected to, the BAW even went so far as to attempt (unsuccessfully) to have her declared insane and committed to a mental institution without trial.
¹²⁵
(Two hundred and fifty women went to Stammheim to support Roos; as they noted in their call-out, “The attack on one of us is meant to destroy our hope for change where we're carrying out resistance, against NATO and in our daily lives.”)
¹²⁶