The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (115 page)

1
Hans Filbinger (CDU) was, at this time, the
Land
Chairman of Baden-Württemberg, of which Stuttgart is the capital.

2
Walter Krause (SPD) was, at this time, the Minister of the Interior and acting President of Baden-Württemberg.

3
Arnulf Klett was, at this time, the Mayor of Stuttgart.

1
Frankfurt police chief at the time.

2
The Hauptwache is the central point on a major pedestrian mall in Frankfurt.

1
United Press International, “Baader-Meinhof lawyer praises guerillas,”
European Stars and Stripes
, October 10, 1972. As we shall see, this was not moot criticism.

2
Christopher Dobson,
Black September: Its Short, Violent History
(New York: Macmillan, 1974), 1.

3
Ibid., 12.

4
Ibid., 65-79.

5
Simon Reeve,
One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre
(New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000), 40.

6
Black September would later tell Voice of Palestine radio that they had demanded the release of five “revolutionary German girls belonging to the Baader-Meinhof organization,” which five being left open to conjecture. (United Press International, “Other Arab guerrilla demand told,”
Hayward Daily Review
, September 8, 1972.)

7
Iqrith (also spelled Ikrit) and Bir’im were two Christian villages in the upper Galilee. In 1948, shock troops from the Zionist
Hagana
expelled the towns’ inhabitants at gunpoint. “The pogrom-like expulsion was carried out without the Israeli government approval,” writes Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh. “However, the democratic Israeli state never allowed the Christian inhabitants to return, despite several rulings to the contrary by the Israeli High Court.” (Khaled Amayreh, “Christians, too, suffer the evilness of the occupation,” at
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/12/26/christians_too_suffer_the_evilness_of_th).

1
Aaron J. Klein,
Striking Back: the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s deadly response
(New York: Random House, 2005), 72-73.

2
Reeve, 116.

3
Ibid., 121-122.

4
Dobson, 85.

5
Reeve, 41-42.

6
Ibid, 42.

7
The FRG press reported his name as Ibrahim Badran.

8
Mahmud Abdallah Kallam,
Sabra wa-Shatila, dhakirat ad-Damm
(Beirut: Beisan Publishing), 40-41.

9
Time Magazine
[online], “Return of Black September,” November 13, 1972.

10
Associated Press, “Bay Area service for slain Jews,”
Hayward Daily Review
, September 8, 1972.

11
Sami Hadawi,
Crime and No Punishment: Zionist-Israeli Terrorism 1939-1972
(Beirut: Palestine Research Centre, 1972), 83.

1
Ibid., 84.

2
Henry Cattan,
The Palestine Question
(London: Croom Helm, 1987), 122-123.

3
Reeve, 160-169, 175-195. For more on Israel’s reaction, see Brad E. O’Neill,
Armed Struggle in Palestine: A Political-Military Analysis
(Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1978), 87-88.

4
Black September was demanding the release of Sirhan Sirhan, who had assassinated Bobby Kennedy, a number of Palestinians held in Jordan, all Arab women held in Israel, as well as Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader in the FRG.

5
Patricia McCarty, “The Terrorist War,”
European Stars and Stripes
, August 9, 1973.

6
O’Neill, 151.

7
“Terrorism 101—Counter-Terrorism Organizations: Germany - GSG-9,”
http://www.terrorism101.org/counter/Germany.html.

8
Edgar O’Balance,
Arab Guerilla Power
(London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 215.

9
MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, “Black September Attacked Business Target (Feb. 8, 1972, Federal Republic of Germany),”
http://www.tkb.org/Incident.jsp?incID=790.

10
Dobson, 65.

1
Ibid., 132.

2
Decades later, Abu Daoud remained adamant on this point. “I would be against any operation like Munich ever again,” he told
Sports Illustrated
magazine in 2002. However, “[a]t the time, it was the correct thing to do for our cause. … The operation brought the Palestinian issue into the homes of 500 million people who never previously cared about Palestinian victims at the hands of the Israelis.” (Alexander Wolff, “Thirty years after he helped plan the terror strike, Abu Daoud remains in hiding -- and unrepentant,”
Sports Illustrated
, August 26, 2002.)

3
Indeed, the years 1969-1972 can be considered the golden age of political hostage takings. While kidnappings were a particularly prevalent tactic for the South American guerilla, skyjackings in this period were pioneered by various Palestinian organizations. Whereas there had been only twenty-seven aircraft hijacked between 1961 and 1968, and most of these had been non-political acts, between 1969 and 1972, two hundred seventy-seven aircraft were hijacked, many of them successfully, i.e. the hijackers got away and their demands were met. During this period, seventy-eight political prisoners were released as demanded by various skyjackers. [Alona E. Evans, “Aircraft Hijacking: What is Being Done?”
American Journal of International Law
67 (1973): 641-645].

4
Carlos Marighella, “Kidnapping,” Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marighella-carlos/1969/06/minimanual-urbanguerrilla/ch28.htm.

5
Reeve, 147.

1
Peter Jochen Winters, “Ulrike Meinhof läßt sich nur die Stichwort geben,”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, December 15, 1972. Our translation. Note that those sections not in quotes consist of the summary by Winters. The entire relevant portion of the FAZ article is reproduced in German and English in Appendix I, pages 544-47.

2
In the words of Andrew Roth, a friend of the magazine’s editor Melvin Lasky: “
Encounter
’s function was to combat anti-Americanism by brainwashing the uncertain with pro-American articles. These were paid for at several times the rate paid by the
New Statesman
and offered British academics and intellectuals free U.S. trips and expenses-paid lecture tours. There was no room for the objective-minded in this cold war to capture intellectuals.” (Andrew Roth, “Melvin Lasky, Cold Warrior who Edited Encounter Magazine,”
The Manchester Guardian
[online], Obituaries, May 22, 2004.)

3
George Watson, “Race and the Socialists,”
Encounter
47 (Nov. 1976): 23.

4
Scholar Diane Paule, for instance states: “Watson’s translation and analysis make Meinhof’s point appear to be much clearer than in fact it is, and his charge that she ‘spoke up publicly in the Good Old Cause of revolutionary extermination’ is not obviously supported by the text.” [“‘In the Interests of Civilization’: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
42, no. 1. (January-March, 1981): 128.]

1
Nobel Foundation “Saul Bellow—Nobel Lecture,”
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-lecture.html.

2
Paul Lawrence Rose,
Revolutionary anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

3
For more on this, see Not Wanted in the Model: the KPD, pages 17-18.

4
Horst Mewes, “The German New Left,”
New German Critique
1, (Winter 1973): 39.

5
“The Angela Davis Case,”
Newsweek
[online], October 26, 1970, 20.

1
Mewes, 32-35.

2
Jürgen Schröder,“USA Black Panther Party (BPP) und Angela Davis Materialien zur Analyse von Opposition,”
http://www.mao-projekt.de/INT/NA/USA/USA_Black_Panther_Party_und_Angela_Davis.html.

3
Linksnet “Rede zum Angela-Davis-Kongress 1972,”
http://www.linksnet.de/artikel.php?id=374
.

4
Schröder, ”USA Black Panther Party.”

5
Jutta Ditfurth, interview by Arno Luik, “Sie war die große Schwester der 68er.”

1
A quote from Karl Marx’s
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte
.

1
In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had fled to Jordan, where they lived in ramshackle refugee camps. On September 16, 1970, alarmed at the growing power of Palestinian revolutionaries, King Hussein declared martial law, and the Jordanian armed forces attacked suspected militant strongholds: according to most sources, between four and ten thousand Palestinians, including many non-combatants, were slaughtered. This is the source of the group’s name.

2
On May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating at Kent State University in Ohio against the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Four students were killed and nine others were wounded. Of the wounded, one was permanently paralyzed, and several were seriously maimed.

1
In the correct version of this quote (
Capital
Volume I,
chapter 15
, volume 5), this year is 1830. An error was made either as this document was being written by the RAF or when it was transcribed by supporters, and the year became 1880.

2
Roughly between $364,000 and $728,000.

1
Mohammed Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1951. He quickly began to nationalize Iranian assets including oil. In 1953, he was removed from power by the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in a CIA-backed coup. He died in prison in 1967.

1
Turkey’s East is home to the oppressed Kurdish minority, and also bordered on the Soviet Union.

1
During negotiations with the Palestinian commando, Minister of the Interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher is reported to have offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the Israeli athletes. The commando is said to have refused this offer. Given Horst Mahler’s comments at his October 1972 trial (see page 188), it seems likely that the RAF was attempting an oblique criticism of this decision.

2
Karl Marx,
Capital
Volume I,
chapter 15
, volume 5.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S5
.

1
Gustav Noske, the SPD Minister responsible for the military during bloody suppression of the November Revolution of 1918, during which communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were killed.

2
Eduard Bernstein, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, who helped instigate that party’s rejection of revolutionary Marxism in the late 19th century.

3
The Hauptwache is a popular pedestrian mall in Frankfurt.

4
Bertold Beitz, Krupp manager and a member of the National and International Olympic Committee.

5
Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten in Bethel
is a large Bielefeld-based charity.

1
Heinz Runau, SPD Senator for Internal Affairs in Hamburg at the time.

1
Berliner Gegenunivesitaät
, literally Berlin Counter-University, refers to presentations organized by students independent of formal lectures.

2
This quote is from Rosa Luxemburg’s 1900 text,
Reform or Revolution
,
Chapter X
: Opportunism and Theory in Practice, available from
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch10.htm
.

1
Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was an enormous pogrom against German Jews on the part of the Nazis and their supporters on the night of November 9/10, 1938.

2
Josef Neckermann was a successful Frankfurt-based businessman and horse trainer and founder of the
Stiftung Deutsche Sporthilfe
(German Benevolent Sports Association).

3
All are major corporations that participated in and profited from National Socialism’s reign in Germany. All of them continue to flourish.

1
This is a retort to Negt, who at the Angela Davis Congress in Frankfurt had referred to Kurras as a lone gun-nut, and to the June 2, 1967, shooting as an isolated tragedy that did not represent state policy.

2
Refers to areas in the far North of the former Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) that became important staging points for communist guerillas from the North during the Vietnam War.

3
Wolfgang Harich, an academic from the GDR, who for a time in the late 70s lived in Austria and the FRG, where he worked with the Green Party before returning to the GDR.

4
An early twentieth century anti-Soviet, anarchist guerilla army active in Ukraine.

1
AO is an acronym for
AusBildung Organisation
, roughly translating as “formation organization,” and was used by Marxist-Leninist organizations in Germany that did not yet consider themselves to be parties, but held the goal of eventually forming a party. In North America, such groups were called pre-party formations.

2
Franz Josef Strauß was head of the right-wing CSU in Bavaria, where the Munich events took place. Helmut Schmidt, who would become Chancellor in 1974, was at this point the SPD Minister of Defense.

3
Alfred Dregger was a CDU politician from the conservative and nationalist section of the party. At the time, Genscher was the Minister of the Interior from the small liberal FDP.

4
The
Verfassungsschutzgesetz
was a law passed by the SPD-FDP coalition in 1972; it extended the purview of the
Verfassungsschutz
, the police organization central to the struggle against the guerilla.