The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (41 page)
Read The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 Online
Authors: J. Smith
A red stomach pipe (not a tube) is used, about the thickness of a middle finger… The slightest irritation when the pipe is introduced causes gagging and nausea and the cramping of the chest and stomach muscles, setting off a chain reaction of extremely intense convulsions throughout the body, causing one to buck against the pipe…
He concluded that, “The pipe is, regardless of circumstances, torture.”
7
Adelheid Schulz, a RAF member imprisoned in the 1980s, described the effects of force-feeding as hours of nausea, a racing heartbeat, pain, and effects similar to fever—“At times one experiences hot flashes; then one is freezing cold.”
8
In the words of Margrit Schiller: “I was force-fed every day for a month. Each time was like a rape. Each time, I felt totally humiliated and destroyed.”
9
The prisoners insisted that force-feeding was never meant for any purpose other than torture. Events soon convinced many that they were right.
On Saturday, November 9, Holger Meins died of starvation in Wittlich prison. Supporters and lawyers had already argued that this prison lacked the facilities for force-feeding to be of any medical benefit, yet the Bonn Security Group—the section of the BKA charged with protecting political figures (much like the American secret service) and also combating enemies of the state
1
—had blocked Meins from being transferred anywhere else.
For the last two weeks of his life, Meins only received between 400 and 800 calories daily, and in the last four days of his life, never more than 400 calories a day.
2
Meins was never hospitalized, despite a court decision ordering such a transfer, and the prison doctor had gone on vacation without leaving any replacement at his post.
3
Scandalously, before Dr. Hutter left, he sought assurances that he would not be disciplined should Meins die.
Over six feet tall, by the time he died Holger Meins weighed less than one hundred pounds.
Siegfried Haag, one of the RAF’s court appointed attorneys, was with Meins just before he died. The prisoner had to be brought in on a
stretcher as he could no longer walk. The visit lasted two hours, Haag explained, “because I realized this was his last conversation, and he knew it too.”
4
The lawyer, who would himself be moved to join the guerilla, later recalled that, “I shall never be able to forget this experience all my life. I was so intensely involved [with his situation] at the time and I felt that as a lawyer I could not defend him the way he needed to be defended… [nor] do anything to prevent [his] death.”
5
Over six feet tall, Meins weighed less than 100 pounds at the time of his death: for the RAF and their supporters, this was quite simply a murder in the context of a state security war against the prisoners. Indeed, long before the hunger strike, Meins himself had written in his will, “If I should die in prison, it was murder. Whatever the pigs say… Don’t believe the murderers’ lies.”
6
Obituary: After 2 years of isolation, 6 weeks of hunger strike and 2 weeks of forcefeeding, he died at the age of 33—we will not forget him nor will we forget his guards and force-feeders.
As word spread that a prisoner had died, hundreds of people took to the streets of West Berlin, engaging in clashes which sent five cops to the
hospital.
1
Stefan Wisniewski, who would be moved by Meins’ death to eventually join the RAF, remembers the day well:
Everything was about the hunger strike. We had mobilized everyone from Amnesty International to Father Albertz, everyone it seemed possible to mobilize. I was standing on a table in the youth center—there was no podium—and was giving a speech. Suddenly someone came in and said, “Holger is dead.” Tears welled up in my eyes—and I was not the only one. Some people who had been critical of the RAF up to that point immediately began to assemble molotov cocktails and head to the Ku’damm.
2
The next day, November 10, the 2nd of June Movement carried out its own action in solidarity with the prisoners, attempting to kidnap Günter von Drenkmann, the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court. When the judge resisted, he was shot dead.
As the 2JM explained in its communiqué for this action:
When the prisoners’ hunger strike began, we said: if the system’s extermination strategy takes the life of another revolutionary, we will hold the system responsible and they will pay with their lives.
3
In the already tense context of Meins’ death, this action raised the struggle to a whole new level. Electrifying the radical left, it also outraged all those who identified with the state.
Security was immediately stepped up for prosecutors and judges throughout the country.
4
The CDU mayor announced a demonstration against “Terror and Violence,”
5
while the federal government offered a 50,000
DM
reward for the killers.
6
Meanwhile, Beate Sturm was trotted
out to the media, whom she obligingly told about how Meins “had political ideas, but behind them lay the problems he had. He always wanted to be an authority figure. He was fascinated by Baader’s authority, but also intimidated by it—that’s why he always tagged along.” All of this led one major newspaper to opine that the fallen guerilla “perhaps did not only die as a result of his own irrationality, but as a result of manipulation by his associates as well.”
7
After having pointedly ignored the strike in the period prior to November 9, the media now engaged in disinformation like this in an attempt to undercut the widespread sympathy that this death had garnered the prisoners. For instance, it was claimed that Meins was offered contact with other prisoners, but declined, as he “did not feel he was a criminal.”
8
While this claim was ludicrous considering that the demand of both the previous hunger strikes had been precisely such integration, it can also be viewed as a clever attempt to exploit divisions within the left regarding the strategies of association versus equality with social prisoners.
Meanwhile, there was an explosion of actions and demonstrations in support of the prisoners. A bomb went off (harmlessly) outside the Hamburg residence of another judge, Geert Ziegler,
9
and there were eight firebombings in the university town of Göttingen.
10
Within days, protests had spread to cities across the Federal Republic. In Frankfurt and Mannheim, courthouse windows were smashed, while the KPD/ML handed out fliers stating what everyone felt: “Holger Meins Murdered.”
11
In West Berlin, a November 11 Red Aid demonstration was banned by city authorities, which did not deter roughly one thousand people from taking to the streets, demanding that those responsible for Meins’ death be punished and that all political prisoners be freed, while fighting
with stones and bottles against the cops’ clubs and teargas. Thirtytwo people were arrested.
1
As giant pictures of an emaciated Meins were carried through the cities of the FRG, more than one observer was reminded of the victims of the concentration camps.
2
To some on the radical left, this was yet more evidence of the “fascist drift,” of the real and not rhetorical “extermination” that more and more people saw the prisoners facing.
On November 13, there was an historic meeting at Frankfurt University, where several thousand people gathered in solidarity with the hunger strike. A leaflet supporting the RAF was distributed, signed by a number of
sponti
organizations—
Revolutionärer Kampf
(Revolutionary Struggle), the
Häuserrat
(Housing Coucil), and the
Sozialistische Hochschulinitiative
(Socialist Student Initiative)—as well as Red Aid and the Committees Against Torture, expressing unambiguous solidarity not only with the RAF, but also with the killing of Drenkmann:
The Red Army Faction was a political group committed to struggling against oppression and exploitation, guns in hand. At a time when millions of people in Vietnam, South America and South Africa struggle against large landowners, factory owners, and their armies, they decided to call to account the ruling class in the FRG and to integrate themselves into this struggle against imperialism…
A successor organization to the RAF understood the death of Holger Meins as a signal. They took control of their sorrow and their hatred and shot the President of the Berlin Supreme Court, Drenkmann. No threat of torture and imprisonment could deter them.
3
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who had yet to leave his street fighting days behind him and was at the time one of the leading members of the
sponti
organization Revolutionary Struggle, had this to say about the Drenkmann killing:
Whether it was tactically correct is open to discussion. In any event, we’ll discuss it. We’ll make our newspapers and magazines available to the Berlin comrades if they want to use them to explain the reasoning behind their actions. We will not distance ourselves from them.
“Danny the Red” went on to argue that the shooting had not split the left, but that it put the ruling class on notice that even in Germany there were groups prepared to take up arms.
4
(Heinrich Böll, on the other hand, accused Cohn-Bendit of speaking irresponsibly, stating for himself that, “I hold the basic concept of the Red Army Faction to be nonsense.”)
5
While not many took as strong a position as those in Frankfurt, the rapid escalation also pushed liberal organizations to speak out. The PEN Centre held a forum regarding the use of torture by police and prison officials, and Amnesty International demanded an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Meins’ death, torture in the prisons and the conditions in which the RAF prisoners were being held.
6
At the same time, prominent writers, including
Gruppe 47
authors Ernst Bloch, Erich Fried, and Martin Walser, signed a statement protesting prison conditions.
7
Five thousand people attended Meins’ funeral in Mannheim a week later, including Rudi Dutschke. The former APO leader, standing over the grave as Meins’ casket was lowered, famously gave the clenched fist salute, crying, “Holger, the fight goes on!”
The state, meanwhile, was busy trying to keep up with events. Almost immediately following Drenkmann’s killing, the eleven
Länder
Interior Ministers were summoned to Bonn for an emergency meeting to discuss ways to contain the growing rebellion.
8
On November 13, Federal Minister of Justice Hans-Jochen Vogel (SPD) announced that charges
were being brought against seventeen people, and thirty-five were being held in remand while investigations were conducted. Ominously, he also noted that seven lawyers would be investigated for supporting a criminal organization,
1
and in short order, charges were laid against attorneys Croissant, Schily, Groenewold, and Haag for statements they had made describing Meins’ death as a premeditated murder.
2
But the real crackdown had yet to come.
On November 26, the state moved into action, police and border guard units setting up checkpoints and carrying out predawn raids across the country.
3
Dozens of left-wing publishers, bookstores, law firms, and activists’ homes were searched. Many victims were not even seriously suspected of any ties to the guerilla. Frankfurt police, for example, admitted that their targets “included general problem houses, where the occupants were organizing rent strikes or stirring up other sorts of trouble.”
4
All in all, roughly forty people were arrested,
5
several eventually facing charges of supporting a “criminal organization” under §129.
6
Despite their efforts, dubbed
Aktion Winterreise
(“Operation Winter Trip”), the police failed to apprehend a single guerilla fighter. Nevertheless, the raids gave the new Minister of the Interior, Werner Maihofer,
7
the opportunity to shock the public with claims that police had uncovered radio transmitters, explosives, chemicals, narcotics, weapons, and ammunition, not to mention plans for kidnappings and jailbreaks.
8