The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (112 page)

2
Thomas, 111-112.

3
Ibid., 114.

4
Christian Semler in Hockenos, 69.

5
The Springer chain consisted of conservative tabloids, among them
Bild, Berliner Zeitung,
and
Berliner Morgenpost.
They led a campaign to smear progressive students as “muddle heads,” East German spies, and storm troopers—at times even crossing the line and advocating vigilante violence. As Jeremy Varon notes, “Springer publications accounted for more than 70 percent of the West Berlin press and more than 30 percent of the national daily newspaper market. As the press fed a climate of anti-student hysteria, the reaction of the media to the New Left itself became a major object of protest.” [Jeremy Varon,
Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 38-39.]

1
Hockenos, 68.

2
Stefan Aust,
The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon.
Translated by Anthea Bell. (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1987), 44.

3
Thomas, 115.

4
Aust, 44.

5
George Lavy,
Germany and Israel: Moral Debt and National Interest
(London: Frank Cass, 1996), 154.

6
Tariq Ali,
Street fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties
(New York: Verso, 2005), 243.

7
While one cannot mention Dutschke today without referring to the “long march,” the phrase is interpreted wildly differently by different writers. The description offered here is Herbert Marcuse’s, as it appeared in his 1972 essay “The Left Under the Counterrevolution” in which he endorsed the concept while crediting it to his former student Dutschke. [Herbert Marcuse,
Counterrevolution and Revolt
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 55-57]

1
Ali, 246.

2
Thomas, 170.

3
Bommi Baumann,
Terror or Love? The Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla
(London: John Calder Publications, 1979), 41.

4
Thomas, 171.

5
Ibid., 176.

6
Ibid.

7
Baumann, 41.

1
Thomas, 180.

2
Hockenos, 88.

3
Aust, 65-6.

4
Ibid., 64.

1
Associated Press, “Student ‘Army’ Battles With Berlin Police,”
Fresno Bee,
November 4, 1968.

2
Tegeler Weg is a fashionable street in West Berlin where the Bar Association was located.

3
Associated Press, “Student ‘Army’.”

4
George Thomson, “Berlin police, leftists battle,”
Lowell Sun,
November 4, 1968.

5
Ibid.

6
Aust, 145.

7
Associated Press, “Woman gets Jail for Slapping Bonn Chief,”
Fresno Bee,
November 8, 1968.

8
Associated Press, “Hit Kiesinger; Term Suspended,”
European Stars and Stripes,
August 26, 1969.

9
Heinemann had in fact held a cabinet position for the CDU as early as 1949, a post he left, along with the CDU, in the early fifties in protest against Adenauer’s rearmament policies. When Ulrike Meinhof was sued for slander by CSU leader Franz Josef Strauß in 1961 as a result of a
konkret
article, Heinemann agreed to take on her case, successfully defending her—the two had become allies if not friends during the peace movements of the 1950s.

1
Cobler, 154-155.

1
Thomas, 144.

2
Ostpolitik:
the FRG’s official policy towards the GDR and the east bloc.

3
Hülsberg, 42-43.

4
Baumann, 50.

1
Ibid., 59.

2
Tilman Fichter, interview by Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “The anti-Semitism of the 68ers,”
die tageszeitung,
October 25, 2005. The action was intended to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. See Baumann, 60-61 and 67-68.

3
Baumann, 76.

1
Aust, 51, 58.

2
Ibid., 58.

3
Ibid., 58.

4
Ibid., 62.

5
Astrid Proll,
Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67-77
(Zurich: Scalo, 1998), 8.

6
Aust, 60.

7
Andreas Elter “Die RAF und die Medien: Ein Fallbeispiel für terroristische Kommunikation,”
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung
[online], August 20, 2007. Brecht, the famous communist playwright, had stated that “Small timers rob banks, professionals own them.”

8
Aust, 51-2.

9
A law student at the University of Frankfurt, “Danny the Red” had been barred from France in 1968 for his symbolic leadership role in the May events of that year (it was his expulsion which had provoked students to occupy Nanterre University). Today, a respectable politician in the German Green Party, in 1969, he was (in) famous around the world, the very personification of anarchist student revolt. As we shall see in Section 11, (Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Left…), he would play an important role in deradicalizing a section of the movement in the mid-seventies.

10
Associated Press, “Cohn-Bendit Jailed; Court Brawl Follows,”
European Stars and Stripes,
November 1, 1968.

11
European Stars and Stripes,
“New Violence Hits Frankfurt,” November 2, 1968.

1
Proll, 8.

2
Aust, 73.

3
Associated Press, “West Berlin Publisher is Sentenced,”
Danville Bee,
February 16, 1970.

4
Aust, 77.

5
Ibid.

6
Baumann, 77-78.

7
Herzog, 425.

8
Baumann, 75.

9
Eileen MacDonald,
Shoot the Women First
(London: Arrow Books Ltd., 1991), 209-210.

1
Ralf Reinders, Klaus Viehmann, and Ronald Fritzsch, “Zu der angeblichen Auflösung der Bewegung 2. Juni im Juni 1980,”
http://www.bewegung.in/mate_nichtaufloesung.html
. This is an excerpt from a much longer document which, along with the 2JM’s declaration of the merger, will appear (translated) in our second volume,
The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Vol. II: Dancing with Imperialism: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

2
Jutta Ditfurth, interview by Arno Luik, “Sie war die große Schwester der 68er,”
Stern
46 (2007).

3
Aust, 81.

4
Ibid., 47.

1
According to several accounts, Linke was accidentally shot by the man at the scene. Apparently, he had two weapons, an air gun and a real gun, and he intended to scare him with the former, but got confused as to which was which. (MacDonald, 213.)

2
Aust, 6-9.

3
Neil Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed by Violence of Berlin Gunmen,”
Winnipeg Free Press,
July 4, 1970.

4
Ibid., Becker, 125.

5
Aust, 15-16.

6
Ben Lewis and Richard Klein,
Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror
(United Kingdom: a Mentorn production for BBC FOUR, 2002).

7
Ibid.

8
Proll, 10.

9
Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed.”

1
Datenbank des deutschsprachigen Anarchismus: Periodika, “Agit 883,”
http://projekte.free.de/dada/dada-p/P0000921.HTM
.

2
Helen Chapin Metz, Library of Congress Federal Research Division,
Israel, a Country Study
(Whitefish, Montana: Keesinger publishing 2004), 110.

3
Cengiz Candar, “A Turk in the Palestinian Resistance,”
Journal of Palestine Studies
30, no. 1. (Autumn, 2000): 68-82.

4
Baumann, 59: “There was a split when people got back from Palestine. The Palestinian faction said, ‘things don’t make sense the way they’re going now. We have to really start with the armed struggle.’ That meant giving up the Blues, the whole broad open scene.”

5
Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed.”

6
Butch Lee,
Jailbreak Out Of History: The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman
(Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2000), 25.

1
Aust, 99-100. Bäcker would claim that based on their questions, it was clear the East Germans were already well informed about the group’s activities. In November 1972, Bommi Baumann was similarly detained at the East German border while in possession of false identification papers; he was similarly questioned, and provided information on almost one hundred people in the West German underground before being released. Jan-Hendrik Schulz “Zur Geschichte der Roten Armee Fraktion (RAF) und ihrer Kontexte: Eine Chronik,”
Zeitgeschichte Online,
May 2007.

2
Ditfurth, 290. See Appendix V—Strange Stories: Peter Homann and Stefan Aust, pages 557-558.

3
Deutsche Presse-Agentur,
“Stasi soll RAF über Razzien informiert haben,” September 29, 2007.

4
Aust, 99, 101.

5
Kommune 2 was another West Berlin commune, one with a more “serious” and “intellectual” reputation than the yippiesque K.1.

6
Reinders, Viehmann, and Fritzsch.

7
Aust, 108.

8
Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.

1
Aust, 111-112.

2
Ibid., 140.

3
Associated Press, “Paper reports plot to kidnap Willy Brandt,”
European Stars and Stripes,
February 13, 1971.

4
See page 84.

5
Associated Press, “Terrorists Take Child as Hostage,”
Troy Record,
February 25, 1971.

6
Associated Press,“Wrong Boy Kidnaped, Released; Ransom Paid,”
Panama City News Herald,
February 27, 1971.

7
Ibid.

8
Associated Press, “Kidnaped German Boy, 7, Freed After Ransom,”
European Stars and Stripes,
February 29, 1971.

9
Associated Press, “Police Hunting SS Member’s Son in Kidnapings,”
European Stars and Stripes,
March 2, 1971.

1
United Press International, “Professor Endangered by Kidnapper’s Threat,”
Dominion Post,
April 25, 1971.

2
United Press International, “West German Professor Admits Kidnaping Hoax,”
European Stars and Stripes,
April 27, 1971.

3
Jürgen Rieger is a lawyer whose career has been devoted to defending those charged under Germany’s anti-Nazi laws. Ironically, in 2006, both Rieger and Mahler, the latter by this time a Holocaust denier himself, would end up working on the legal defense team of neo-nazi publisher Ernst Zundel, who was charged in connection with the publication of Holocaust denial literature.

4
Aust, 144.

5
Associated Press, “Berlin Cops, Leftists Clash for 2nd Night,”
European Stars and Stripes,
May 17, 1971.

1
Jillian Becker,
Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader Meinhof Gang
(London: Panther Granada Publishing, 1978), 307.

2
When Goergens was finally released in May 1977, she did not return to the guerilla. Schubert, as we shall see, never made it out of prison alive.

3
Becker, 307

4
Baumann, 63.

5
Macdonald, 214-215.

6
Aust, 142.

7
Cobler, 113.

8
tageszeitung
“30 Jahre Deutscher Herbst ‘Die RAF war nicht ganz so schlicht,’”
Deutschlandradio,
October 17, 2007.

1
Earlier that summer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit had received an eight-month suspended sentence for getting through security at a protest against the German Book Trade’s “Peace Prize” being bestowed upon President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal.

2
An oath of fealty to Hitler and the NSDAP that all people working in the public sector were obliged to swear. Millions of people swore this oath for no other reason than to retain their employment.

3
Ernst Niekisch, briefly involved in the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919, went on to become a leader of German chauvinist “National Bolshevism”—it is unclear why Proll singles him out as an example of the Weimar regime persecuting leftists, although under the Nazis he would be sentenced to life imprisonment for “literary high treason” in 1937.

4
Ernst Toller was a Bavarian Jew and an anarchist who was imprisoned for his role on the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. (He subsequently went into exile, eventually committing suicide in his hotel room in New York City in 1939.)

5
On April 1, 1924, Hitler was sentenced to five years for his November 8, 1923, attempted fascist coup, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. He was pardoned and released in December of 1924, having served less than a year of his sentence.

6
Luxemburg and Liebknecht were leading figures in the failed 1918 German communist uprising. They were both captured, tortured, and murdered by rightwing militias, the
Freikorps.

1
Franz von Liszt (not to be confused with his cousin, the composer Franz Liszt) was a Prussian law professor whose work heavily influenced the 1882 Marburger Program, a conservative document that influenced the 1933 Nazi German Prevention of Crime Act.

1
Gerhard Zoebe was the judge in this case.

2
A judge in Frankfurt who often presided over trials against left-wing defendants.

3
In 1964, seven year-old Timo Rinnelt of Wiesbaden was kidnapped and murdered. Some years later, his neighbour, a twenty-seven year-old man, was arrested for the crime. In 1968, he received a life sentence.

4
Jürgen Bartsch, a German serial killer, who as a child suffered both emotional and sexual abuse, was responsible for four brutal child murders in the 60s.