The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (56 page)
Read The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History Online
Authors: J Smith
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 waterâshe 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 figures 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 arrestsâoccasioned by a careless mishap and a fateful decision to not flee the safehouseâthe entire RAF had been captured.
Not a single combatant remained at large.
For those of us who joined the guerilla in or after â84, 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 â81, 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 demandsâthere 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 â81 hunger strikeâwith the police and paramilitary units using clubs and gasâclearly showed that the state intended for there to be deaths on our side. Kohl's remark about stationing
medium-range missilesâ”They demonstrate, we govern”âmade 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 struggleâthe 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 â82 with the “Front Paper”âi.e., an organization that would bring together the guerilla, the militants, and the resistance, in order to develop a new form of powerâcorresponded 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 Strauà in Hamburg. He died of his injuries four days later. As detailed on
pages 207â208
, 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 18â19.
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.
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 âStrategy Paper' that they found in an apartment in Frankfurt. We are not responsible for any â84 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.)
Tubthumping
E
VEN 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.
Urban guerilla groupsâin spite of the inevitable romance, mystique, and 007 fantasiesâare fundamentally political organizations. Despite the superficial similarities, they are neither special operations units nor are they commandos in the usual military sense. As has been belabored in almost every single RAF document, the point of the guerilla's attacks was always political, aimed at people's consciousness, not at a target's actual material value. In Gramscian terms, the urban guerilla was involved in a war of position, not a war of maneuver, all the guns and bombs notwithstanding.
Though it is not clear that the state knew it at the time, by the RAF's own account, the Frankfurt arrests in 1984 swept up all the group's remaining members.
1
It is here that the difference between the urban guerilla and a military unit is most clear, for such a blow would have wiped out the latter. As to the RAF, though, before the year was out
new militants had gone underground, the group was reestablished, and indeed was able to quickly launch its most ambitious, and arguably most successful, offensive to date.
