The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (46 page)

You too must also know something about this. Whatever. No matter what, we all die. It’s only a question of how, and of how you lived, and one thing is completely clear: STRUGGLING AGAINST THE PIGS AS A PERSON STRUGGLING FOR THE LIBERATION OF THE PEOPLE. As a revolutionary in struggle—with an absolute love for life: with contempt for death. That means for me: serve the people—RAF.

(October 31, 1974)
It’s obviously bullshit, just like Berlin (previously, it sounded a lot better—a leap forward)—because I believed it to be her strategy as well: let her do it, it will soon come to a crisis, a few notable acts of swinishness in that regard: Stuttgart, Berlin starved out, Hamburg fattened up, testing and timely attack, otherwise the calculated fostering of contradictions—“to crack them.”

So far.

Uh huh, it’s up to us. Anyway it is also OUR STRUGGLE. The key is the unwavering struggle of each guerilla individually and within the ranks of the collective. Victory or death—really.

Then

Everything is very easy—to say. Because it’s the TRUTH: whatever one has not experienced/endured/overcome—one cannot know—if it has not been EXPERIENCED/ENDURED/OVERCOME—only thought, said, known. Simply the difference between consciousness and being. That is a FACT. One should not forget it.

First and foremost, we are victorious when we win.

To make it crystal clear: I did not give a report about force-feeding to
Informationsdienst
. Not a word from me in that direction. For the ad. SO WHO? I want to know now.

Regarding the claim about the ban on the tube and this appointment of a certified doctor for force-feeding that I’ve heard about in the same way as you in Hamburg: previously, I had no idea. It suddenly cropped up.

That is exactly the problem with the lawyers: that they have no idea what we want or how to get it, WE and the STRUGGLE, for example, they ABOVE ALL don’t understand the hunger strike, their advocacy has a limited horizon: office/court, etc.

And on the other hand, I mainly think that they block it out. So I really don’t see the point, and that is the problem if one doesn’t really pay attention.

The tube issue is, of course, complete bullshit. It is really unnecessary. So it changes nothing.

Beyond that, the hunger strike: here things are really moving quickly—faster than I can write. Now I’m 46.8. 140-150 g daily (I’ve been weighing myself since the 28th—naturally, only when only I will know the outcome). I ingest 400 calories daily. The doctor-pig claims 1200: three tablespoons per 400—that is the case: three tablespoons = 400 (I have seen a copy of the original with my own eyes).

But otherwise: he feels certain—one must distinguish—SW—will be relocated, he knows he’s not part of it.

Holger Meins
November 1, 1974

This interview with Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe was published in the January 20, 1975, edition of the liberal news magazine Spiegel, under the title “Wir waren in den Durststreik treten” (We are escalating to a thirst strike). The fact that attorney Klaus Croissant worked as an intermediary between Spiegel and the prisoners to facilitate this interview would be cited as a reason to bar him from representing Andreas Baader at the Stammheim trial later that year—see page 346. (M. & S.)

Spiegel
: Has the RAF adopted a new tactic? Have the campaigns that you prepared and led from within the prisons attracted the same interest amongst the people as the bombs and grenades you used in 1972?

RAF: It is not a matter of empty talk about tactics. We are prisoners, and we are currently struggling with the only weapon we have left in prison and in isolation: the collective hunger strike. We are doing this in order to break through the process of extermination in which we find ourselves—long years of social isolation. It is a life and death struggle: if we don’t succeed with this hunger strike we will either die or be psychologically and physically destroyed by brainwashing, isolation, and special treatment.

Spiegel
: Is it really a matter of ”isolation torture” or even “extermination through prison conditions”? You read a lot of newspapers; if you like you can listen to the radio or watch television. For example, at one point Herr Baader had a library of 400 books. You are in contact with other members of the RAF. You exchange secret messages between yourselves. You receive visits and your lawyers come and go.

RAF: One might wonder about these things if all they had to go by was
Spiegel
and the information put out by the state security services.

If one only has access to
Spiegel
or state security information, one might ask that. Two, three, four years of social isolation—certainly no more than that—is enough for you to realize that you are in a process of extermination. You can deal with it for months, but not years. Breaking through the institutional brainwashing-by-isolation is a question of
survival for us; this is the reason why the trials will go on without us.
¹
To claim that we are using the hunger strikes to make ourselves unfit for prison or unfit to appear in court—when everyone knows that the only political prisoners who are considered unfit for prison are those who are dead—is a countertactic, it is counterpropaganda. The BAW has already postponed these trials for three and a half years, so that the prisoners could be broken by isolation, by the dead wings, by brainwashing, and psychiatric reconstruction. The BAW is no longer interested in these trials taking place. Or, if they are to take place, it should only be without the accused and without their defense attorneys, because these are meant to be show trials to discredit revolutionary politics—imperialist state power is to be put on display, and Buback can only achieve this if we are not there.

Spiegel
: Such lies don’t become more convincing, no matter how many times you repeat them; and the public understood long ago that these lies are put out in bad faith in order to sow doubts about the justice system, a goal in which you have achieved some success.

RAF: Because these are facts, you can’t eliminate their political importance simply by denying them.

Spiegel
: You are being held in remand, having been charged with serious crimes such as murder and attempted murder. Aren’t you being held in the same conditions as other prisoners in remand?

RAF: We are demanding an end to special treatment, and not only for those in remand, but for all political prisoners—and by this we mean all proletarian prisoners who understand their situation politically, and who organize in solidarity with the prisoners’ struggle, regardless of why they are in prison.

The justice system also keeps prisoners who have already been sentenced in isolation, some for as many as four years, for example: Werner Hoppe, Helmut Pohl, Rolf Heissler, Ulrich Luther, and Siegfried Knutz. There are thousands of people here who are abused by the prison system, and the moment they begin to resist they are broken by isolation. This is what we are fighting against with this strike; it is a collective
action against institutionalization and isolation. In the older prisons, where previously there were no “isolation facilities”—separate wings for “troublemakers”—meaning for those who disrupt the inhumanity which victimizes them—they will be built; for instance in Tegel, Bruchsal, Straubing, Hannover, Zweibrücken, etc.

In their architectural design, the new prisons incorporate isolation as a form of incarceration. In the FRG, these design principles are not in line with the Swedish model, but rather with the American methods and experiments with fascist rehabilitation programs.

Spiegel
: In concrete terms, tell us what you mean by special treatment. We have looked into the actual prison conditions of the RAF collective. We found no evidence of “special treatment,” other than a series of privileges.

RAF: You have not looked into anything. You got your information from the state security services and the BAW.

When we say special treatment, we are referring to:
¹

• Eight months in the dead wing for Ulrike and Astrid;

• Years of isolation for all the RAF prisoners;

• Forced drugging ordered by the court “as an investigation technique”;

• Years of being chained during yard time;

• Ongoing court-ordered “immediate use of force,” which means cruel treatment in pacification cells, during transportation, during interrogation, as a result of confrontations, and during visits;

• Newspaper censorship;

• Special legislation;

• Special buildings for the trials of RAF prisoners in Kaiserslautern and in Stammheim—the 150 million
DM
,
²
bloated state security budget for the Stammheim trial to take place in a concrete fortress, which will require the relocation of police units from three
Länder
, even though it looks like neither the accused nor their lawyers will even be allowed to be present— assuming, that is, that the justice system will let the accused live that long;

• Interfering with the defense, publishing defense materials, sections of files and state security documents and using them in government campaigns to determine the verdicts and have the defense barred.

The Springer Press has access to defense files and to files that the BAW has withheld from the defense. The defense attorneys are watched day and night. Their mail is opened, their telephones are bugged, and their offices are searched. They receive disciplinary sanctions from the bar for their public work. Relatives and visitors are harassed by the state security services, even at their jobs. They have been terrorized with open surveillance. Anyone who wants to write to us or visit us is spied on and ends up in the state security services’ files.

Because of the pressure from the hunger strike, they have made cosmetic changes, small things, details, which the Ministry presents to film crews. In reality, nothing has changed.

The reality right now is that isolation is organized within the prisons with deadly technical precision—now with prisoners allowed to be together in groups of two for a few hours at a time. This doesn’t interfere with the destructive process; it remains a closed system. This means that the brainwashing is to continue and any social interaction will remain impossible. In regards to the outside, isolation is perfected by excluding the lawyers, or else by limiting their number to three at a time.

Given Posser’s
³
conditions—for example our six years of remand—and the role of the BAW in postponing the trial, it’s clear what we mean by “extermination through prison conditions.” Disprove even one of these “privileges”!

Spiegel
: First you said that force-feeding was a fascist tactic, then after Holger Meins died of starvation, you described his death as a “murder by installment.” Isn’t that a contradiction?

RAF: We’re not the ones who said that, but force-feeding is a tactic used to diminish the effect of the hunger strike—how it appears—on the outside world; in short, to camouflage the murder. This is why intensive care units were set up in the prisons, so that it could be said that “they did everything they could,” although they didn’t do the
simplest thing they could have done: abolish isolation and special treatment.

Holger Meins was intentionally executed by systematic undernourishment. From the beginning, force-feeding in Wittlich prison was a method of assassination. At first, it was carried out by brutal and direct violence to break his will. After that, it was only done for show. With 400 calories a day, it is only a matter of time, certainly only days, before one dies. Buback and the Security Group arranged for Holger Meins to remain in Wittlich prison until he died. On October 21, the Stuttgart Supreme Court ordered that Holger Meins be transferred to Stuttgart by November 2 at the latest. On October 24, Buback informed the Stuttgart court that the state security services would not be able to respect this timetable—a fact that was only made public after Holger’s death. Finally, Hutter, the prison doctor, completely cut off the forcefeeding and went on vacation.

It must also be pointed out that throughout the hunger strike the BKA received “reports” from the prison administration as to the prisoners’ condition. It must be emphasized that in an effort to protect himself, because he could see that Holger was dying, before Hutter left he asked Degenhardt to guarantee that he would not face charges, in the same way that all of the charges against Degenhardt had been dropped. Degenhardt was the doctor who, in the summer of 1973, during the second hunger strike, deprived prisoners at Schwamstadt of water for nine days “for medical reasons,” until a coma was induced. He is the doctor who Buback described, in comparison to Frey, who was dealing with the prisoners in Zweibrücken, as having what it takes.

Holger was assassinated according to a plan by which the scheduling of his transfer was manipulated to create an opening that the BAW and the Security Group could use to target the prisoner directly. The fact that so far no journalist has looked into this and nobody has written about it doesn’t change the facts, but does say everything that needs to be said about the collaboration, complicity, and personal ties between the media conglomerates and state security: the BAW, the BKA, and the intelligence services.

Spiegel
: There is no way we can accept your version of the so-called “murder by installment” of Meins. It seems to us that you have a persecution complex, which would make sense after years spent underground and in prison. We at
Spiegel
criticized Dr. Hutter’s behavior, and the BAW launched an investigation into his actions.

RAF: It’s not about Hutter or any other prison doctor—they decide practically nothing. The medical system in prison is organized hierarchically, and at most Hutter is an expendable figure. He’s a pig, but only a little one, who in the long run might be held accountable, although nobody who knows anything about prison or prison medicine would believe it. When you say you “criticized” him, you are referring to the old trick of talking about “mistakes,” so that the actual mistake will not be understood: class society, its justice system, and its prison camps.