The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (114 page)

1
Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, confessed to the 1933 Reichstag fire under Gestapo torture. It remains unclear if he was, in fact, guilty. Karl-Heinz Ruhland, a fringe member of the RAF, under pressure from the BKA and with coaching from the BAW, provided clearly fabricated testimony against RAF prisoners during a series of trials.

2
This phrase, which will reoccur in a number of different forms in RAF documents over the years, comes from a speech Mao gave at the Meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. in Celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution on November 6, 1957: “‘Lifting a rock only to drop it on one’s own feet’ is a Chinese folk saying to describe the behaviour of certain fools. The reactionaries in all countries are fools of this kind. In the final analysis, their persecution of the revolutionary people only serves to accelerate the people’s revolutions on a broader and more intense scale. Did not the persecution of the revolutionary people by the tsar of Russia and by Chiang Kai-shek perform this function in the great Russian and Chinese revolutions?”

1
Although not referenced as such by the RAF, this is a quote from
30 Questions to a Tupamaro
(see page 128, fn 1).

1
The Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS) was a Maoist student organization based in the refugee communities and active on university campuses throughout the western world.

2
Ludwig Martin, Attorney General from 1963 until 1974, when he was replaced by Siegfried Buback.

3
Roughly $6 million.

4
Almost $69 million.

5
The
G
-3 is an assault rifle and the
MG
-3 is a machinegun.

6
This is a reference to the so-called
Warshauer Kniefall
, the “Warsaw Genuflection,” Brandt’s December 1971 public atonement at the monument commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

7
Amir Abbas Howeida, Prime Minister of Iran during the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi. He was executed in 1979 following the Islamic revolution.

1
The Tupamaros were a guerilla group in Uruguay at the time. This short interview started circulating as an internal document in 1967, and was first made public in a Chilean journal in mid-1968. Within a few years, it had become a text of some importance to the revolutionary edge of the New Left in the metropole.

1
Bayerischen Rundfunk:
Bavarian Broadcasting, the public radio station in Bavaria.

2
The practice of union representatives having a vote on the corporate boards dates from the late 1940s. Also referred to as co-determination.

3
Roughly $1.45 billion.

1
Roughly $43. Regarding the flat rate: wage increases in many German industries were indexed by workers’ “skill category,” which meant that every wage increase in fact served to increase the divide between different layers of the working class. The demand for a flat wage increase was meant to counter this trend, as such an increase would benefit all workers equally. On this, see Roth, 116-117.

1
Roughly $58.

2
Karl Schiller was the SPD’s Federal Minister of Economic Affairs and Minister of Finance at the time. His reference data would presumably have determined the government’s wage guidelines.

3
Roughly $43.

1
Ernst Bloch was an important 20
^th
century German Marxist theorist and art critic who counted the much younger Rudi Dutschke among his friends and intellectual peers.

1
Support During Labor Disputes.

2
The ARD is the
Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
(Consortium of Public-Law Broadcasting Institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany);
Bayerischen Rundfunk
is a member of the ARD. ZDF is the
Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen
(Second German Television), owned by Deutche Telekom; it is commercial TV, partially funded through advertising.

3
This is a reference to a statement by Willy Weyer, Interior Minister of North-Rhine-Westphalia, who stated that “Citizens must get as used precisely to the sight of policemen with machine pistols as they are to paying tax.” (Cobler, 141).

1
Gerhard Löwenthal was a German journalist and a ZDF news anchor from 1969 until 1988.

2
“Spartacus Youth”: the DKP’s student section, by far the largest self-styled communist organization active on campuses during this period.

3
The construction of the Berlin Wall cut off the flow of refugees from the East that had been providing a reservoir of cheap labor up until that time. This signaled the beginning of a guest worker policy of recruiting cheap labor from southern Europe, Turkey, and elsewhere.

1
A prominent German publishing company.

2
Destroy the Islands of Wealth in the Third World.

3
Jürgen Roth is a German investigative journalist.

4
Poverty in the Federal Republic.

5
Roughly $35 to $140.

1
Roughly $220.

2
Roughly $127.

3
Roughly $167.

4
Lukrezia Jochimsen was a sociologist and TV journalist. Today she is a member of parliament for the left-wing
Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus
(PDS).

5
Backyards of the Nation.

1
The Ahlener Program, adopted by the CDU on February 3, 1947, in the town of Ahlen, stated in its opening that the interests of capitalism and those of the German people were identical.

2
Erhard Eppler, a member of the SPD and left-leaning Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation. He resigned in 1974.

3
Signed in August and December 1970, these two treaties were milestones in the SPD’s
Ostpolitik
, normalizing the FRG’s relations with Poland and the Soviet Union for the first time since World War II.

4
Gerhard Schröder was a CDU politician, Minister of the Interior from 1953 until 1961, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1961 until 1966 and Minister of Defense from 1966 until 1969.

1
Herbert Wehner was leader of the SPD’s parliamentary group from 1958 until 1983, and Deputy Chairman of the SPD from 1958 until 1973.

2
Diether Posser, SPD Minister of Justice in the
Land
of North Rhine Westphalia from 1972 until 1978.

3
The project to build a massive dam in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. The right-wing Portuguese government had plans to settle over one million European colonists in the African country. By 1969, five German companies were implicated in the project.

1
In February 1968, a film by Holger Meins showing how to make a molotov cocktail was presented at a meeting held in Berlin to discuss the campaign against the Springer Press.

2
On December 20, 1971, Heinrich Böll famously said that
Bild
’s news coverage “isn’t crypto-fascist anymore, nor fascistoid, but naked fascism, agitation, lies, dirt.”

1
A reference to Rudi Dutschke’s proposed strategy. See p. 35, fn 2.

1
Peter Homann had previously worked as a journalist for the
Spiegel
.

2
Margharita von Brentano was a sociology professor at the Free University, where a prize and a building are now named in her honour.

3
A. Schwan, a West Berlin professor and a member of the
Bund Freiheit de Wissenshaft
(Alliance for Free Scholarship). The BFW was an organization of rightwing university professors who accused the student movement of attempting to establish a left-wing educational system to the exclusion of free thought.

1
Most likely a reference to the
West German
Tupamaros, not to be confused with their South American namesake. These groups had existed in West Berlin and Munich at the beginning of the decade, part of the same amorphous scene as the Roaming Hash Rebels. The 2nd of June Movement grew out of this scene, although several members would instead join the RAF.

1
In his 1957 “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” Mao differentiated between two kinds of conflict or contradiction—“those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people.” While the former should be dealt with by attacking the class enemy, the latter should be dealt with through criticism with the goal of bringing about unity.

1
See page 352.

2
Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle, cf 156-7.

3
Aust, 104; Becker, 255-256.

4
Becker, normally not shy about stating that various combatants actually
did
various things, in this case merely writes, “Astrid Proll (‘Rosi’) was to claim later that she shot at him from a car but missed.” (Becker, 228)

5
Aust, 170-172.

1
The relevant excerpts from Mohnhaupt’s testimony are included in this volume, see page 357.

2
Dan Synovec,“Security Beefed Up at U.S. installations,”
European Stars and Stripes
, May 13, 1972; Dave Lams, “Police Trace Leads in V Corps Blasts,”
European Stars and Stripes
, May 13, 1972.

1
Synovec,“Security Beefed Up.”

2
Thomas Kirn, “Bombendrohungen werden schnell geahndet,”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, June 9, 1972.

3
“General Pearson seeks community help in solving Frankfurt bombings,”
European Stars and Stripes
, May 16, 1972.

4
Kirn, “Bombendrohungen werden schnell geahndet.”

5
European Stars and Stripes
, “German Facilities Struck by Bombs,” May 13, 1972.

6
Aust, 211.

7
See the RAF’s interview with
Le Monde Diplomatique
, on page 422 of this volume. See also Brigitte Mohnhaupt’s testimony at the Stammheim trial, cf. 357-58.

8
Aust, 211.

9
Dan Synovec, “Bombs kill 3 at USAREUR Hq,”
European Stars and Stripes
, May 25, 1972.

10
They were: Clyde Bonner of El Paso, Texas, Ronald Woodward of Otter Lake, Michigan, and Charles Peck of Hawthorne, California. (Associated Press, “W. Germans Sentence 3 Guerrillas to Life for Bomb Deaths,”
Tri-City Herald
, April 28, 1977.)

1
Synovec, “Bombs Kill.”

2
Internazionale Kommission zum Schutz der Gefangenen une Gegen Isolationshaft
, October 1980, 2.

3
“Wir waren in den Durststreik treten,”
Spiegel
4/1975, translated in this volume on pages 300-318.

4
Arm The Spirit, “A Brief History of the Red Army Faction,”
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/61/191.html.

1
RZ Letter to the RAF Comrades, reprinted in this volume on pages 457-463.

2
Not to be confused with the pro-Soviet KPD that was banned in the 50s and later reconstituted as the DKP.

3
Varon, 213.

4
Hockenos, 114.

5
Varon, 213.

6
Statement to the Red Aid Teach-In, reprinted in this volume on pages 183-85.

7
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, “DKP verurteilt anarchistische Demonstrationen in Frankfurt,” May 26, 1972.

8
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, “Keine Solidarisierung mit Abenteurern,” May 29, 1972.

9
Dan Synovec, “Terrorists: odd solidarity prompts aid to the Baader-Meinhof gang,”
European Stars and Stripes
, June 3, 1972.

1
Associated Press, “Bombers Threaten 3 Blasts Friday in Stuttgart Area,”
European Stars and Stripes
, May 29, 1972.

2
Regarding the Fascist Bomb Threats Against Stuttgart, reprinted in this volume on pages 181-82.

3
Cobler, 169.

4
Dan Synovec, “Anarchist gang blamed,”
European Stars and Stripes
, May 27, 1972.

5
“Bescheidene Mitgleiderzahlen radikaler Organisation,”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, June 7, 1972.

6
Aust, 219.

7
Brigitte Mohnhaupt’s Testimony at the Stammheim Trial, July 22, 1976,
http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/76_0708_mohnhaupt_pohl.html.

8
Clare Bielby, “‘Bonnie und Kleid’: Female Terrorists and the Hysterical Feminine,”
Forum
2,
http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue2/bielby.html.

9
They were turned in by Fritz Rodewald, who evidently did not know if he was coming or going: he would donate the reward money to the prisoners’ defense fund (Vague, 49). For more details on Rodewald’s motivations, see page 201.

10
Wolfgang Tersteegen, “Mit der Bombe im Handgepäcke,”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, June 19, 1972;
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, “Erst nach Stunden identifiziert,” June 19, 1972.

1
United Press International, “Ends French Stay: Member of Gang Turns Self In,”
European Stars and Stripes
, July 1, 1972.

2
He was sentenced to life in prison in 1977. Associated Press, “2 German terrorists given life,”
European Stars and Stripes
, June 3, 1977.

3
Four years later, she was sentenced to four and a half years for forging documents, resisting arrest, possession of an unlicensed firearm, and membership in a criminal organization. In 1979, she was found guilty of three counts of murder and sentenced to life for planting the bombs in the Augsburg and Heidelberg attacks. By the time she was released in 1994, she had survived 22 years behind bars, making her Germany’s longest held female prisoner at that time.

4
United Press International, “8 Terrorist gang suspects still sought,”
European Stars and Stripes
, July 10, 1972.