The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (5 page)

Following this initial wave of cheap labor, which was regimented by its own political sympathies, came guest workers, many of whom were politically active on the left, and who were thus subjected to greater external regimentation and control. As the source of this labor switched from the East to southern Europe, these workers would be politically screened before entry, and targeted with deportation if identified as “troublemakers.”

So, at the same time as the German working class was highly exploited, it was also deeply divided. An inevitable consequence of this was that its more privileged layers would develop a different political orientation from the more oppressed.

To quote Hülsberg once again:

It is against this background that we must see the tragedy of the integration of the West German working class into the capitalist system and the loss of political strength. Class struggle was replaced by the “American way of life”. Even the king of rock’n’roll, Elvis Presley, paid tribute to it while on his tour of military duty in Germany… For the German petit-bourgeois soul this was the purest balm.
⁵

Greek workers in a West German bottling factory: by the end of the 1960s, women constituted almost a third of all “guest workers” in West Germany.

These hierarchies within the working class resonated within its supposed institutions, the trade union movement and the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

In the first years of the Federal Republic, the trade unions were reorganized by the Allied victors with the express goal of avoiding the “economic chaos” the bourgeoisie feared most. These unions focused on
Mitbestimmung
(co-management, whereby workers would have some token representation in corporate boards of directors), thus further guaranteeing that the official labor movement would remain hostile to revolutionary politics. This degeneracy reached such a point in the 1960s that union members formed the backbone of the “factory militias” whose job it was repress wildcat strikes and unruly workers,
¹
and one foreign journalist began an article on the German labor market with the question, “What is a country to do when its trades unions decline to ask for more money?”
²

As a complement to this sad political trajectory, the SPD “led the less class-conscious workers and the petit bourgeoisie into the arms of the reactionaries,” with a program that “in the immediate postwar period consisted of a crude mixture of nationalism and anti-communism garnished with a meaningless proclamation of the actuality of socialism.”
³
Left-wing trade unionists were expelled from the party, as were the editors of the socialist newspaper
Die Andere Zeitung
,
⁴
while the SPD leadership used its position as the official opposition to repeatedly mislead and sabotage any grassroots revolt.

Needless to say, neither the SPD nor the trade union leadership had any interest in bridging the divide between their (increasingly privileged) base and the growing “pariah layers” of the proletariat:

As a consensus-producing mechanism that united the most powerful interests in the corporate and labour organizations, Social Democratic corporatism consciously excluded the weaker elements: foreigners, women, youth and older workers, thus converting class struggles to group struggles and doing nothing to reduce racism, sexism and anti-welfarism within the subordinate classes.
⁵

AN IMPERIALIST TEAM PLAYER

Of course, the Marshall Plan was not simply a local economic project: from the very beginning it was intended that West Germany also be a European outpost of U.S. imperialism. This is indicated not only in the virtually simultaneous foundation of both NATO and the FRG in 1949, but in the very nature of the Federal Republic as a state: when it was granted formal sovereignty in 1955, it was only on condition that it allow the western powers to station their armed forces within its borders, and within four days of achieving its new condition, it had joined the Atlantic Alliance.
⁶
Perhaps most significantly, in the event of a military conflict, the commanding officer in NATO—always an American—would also become the Commander-in-Chief of the West German armed forces.

As Rudolph Augstein, the editor of the influential liberal magazine
Spiegel
, stated in 1955: “The new German army has not been founded to guarantee the safety of Bonn; rather the new state has been founded to be able to build up an army against the Soviet Union.”
⁷

The result was a West Germany with more than one hundred U.S. bases on its territory and a ruling class eager to support American imperialism around the world. This was achieved by (1) acting as a conduit for financial and military support to anticommunist regimes opposing the national liberation movements, (2) establishing neocolonial penetration of former colonies on behalf of the West, and (3) providing logistical support for American military interventions around the world.

Some important examples of this first role—that of being a conduit to repressive regimes—could include West Germany’s support for the South African apartheid regime, for the fascist Salazar dictatorship in Portugal in its continuing war against freedom fighters in Mozambique and Angola, military and political support for the killers of Patrice Lumumba and for imperialist intervention in the Congo, massive financial aid (disguised as reparations) to the state of Israel, imperialism’s new colonial beachhead in the Middle East, and economic support for the South Vietnamese puppet regime.

Apart from loans, economic investment, military sales, and eventually the sharing of nuclear technology, these reactionary regimes would
also benefit from the occasional intervention of German soldiers
¹
and mercenaries, including veterans of the Nazi SS.
²

The task of entangling the former colonies in the western sphere was accomplished primarily through “development aid,” much of which took the form of weapons shipments to the new so-called “national states.” While such aid was often used to pressure the new national states to join pro-American military alliances, or else to refuse recognition to the GDR, it was equally important simply as a method of maintaining and entrenching the ties between Western capitalism and Third World elites.

By the late 1950s, the FRG had established itself as an important “donor” nation, for a while providing more “aid” than any Western government other than the United States.
³
It was a logical candidate for this role given the fact that it had lost its own colonies decades earlier; as the
Stuttgarter Zeitung
noted in 1963:

It is clear why African states turn to Bonn and not to Paris or London… They turn to a country which is not tainted by colonialism.

Or, as the American
Evening Star
wrote that same year:

West Germany has been specifically authorized by the Atlantic Alliance to grant military aid to Africa and other countries; the simple reason is that no other western country is as well suited for these tasks. West Germany is free from the blemish of colonial rule…
⁴

The prime examples of the FRG’s third role—providing direct support for American military forces—were the many U.S. military bases scattered throughout the country. These served both as a threat to the East Bloc countries, as well as staging areas for special operations. As military
strikes against Third World targets became increasingly important to western imperialism, the Federal Republic’s airbases were all the more appreciated.

All U.S. bases had extra-territorial status and functioned under American law. They were, of course, also sites for CIA interventions in the FRG and in Western Europe in general, not only against Soviet influence, but also against independent left opposition. According to Operation Plan 101-1, the U.S. Commander-in-Chief in Europe was legally entitled to intervene in cases of internal unrest in West Germany. Furthermore, in cooperation with both former Nazis and a new generation of neo-nazis, the CIA established “stay behind” networks which were to carry out terrorist attacks should communists ever come to power in Germany.
⁵

BETTER DEAD THAN RED

While both the economic and military aspects of
Modell Deutschland
were, to a greater or lesser degree, formulated in the public forum, and in some cases faced public opposition, the model had another equally important aspect, one which was never up for debate, and yet it bears directly on the topic under discussion here: anticommunism, described as the third pillar of West German society.
⁶

“All Marxist Roads Lead to Moscow”: election poster for the CDU, 1953.

As we shall see, this anticommunism was far more than a mere ideological construct; rather, the legal structure of West German “constitutional democracy” was from its earliest days intended to prevent and/or eliminate all revolutionary left-wing opposition. This found its legal basis in the way that
personal rights were framed in the Federal Republic’s Constitution, the
Grundgesetz
(Basic Law), which came into effect in 1949. While the Basic Law established the same personal rights and freedoms normally found in bourgeois democracies, it did this with one recurrent caveat: these rights could be withdrawn from those designated as enemies of the state.

This qualification was stated unambiguously in Article 18:

Whoever abuses the freedom of expression, in particular the freedom of the press (paragraph (1) of Article 5), the freedom of teaching (paragraph (3) of Article 5), the freedom of assembly (Article 8), the freedom of association (Article 9), the privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications (Article 10), the rights of property (Article 14), or the right of asylum (Article 16a) in order to combat the free democratic basic order shall forfeit these basic rights. This forfeiture and its extent shall be declared by the Federal Constitutional Court.
¹

The following restriction to Article 21, limiting the right to form political parties, was added to this already ominous provision:

Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional. The Federal Constitutional Court shall rule on the question of unconstitutionality.
²

These passages were marked by the experience of political instability that had traumatized the Weimar Republic. Their design owed very much to the desire to prevent any future such upheaval. Constraints on political freedoms were further rationalized by some observers as necessary to prevent a resurgence of Nazism, a credulous argument which would soon be disproved by the fact that the chief target of these exclusions would be the left.

In 1951, the CDU moved to further tighten the legal framework of repression with a volley of state security legislation, defined in the following five sections: High Treason, Dangers to the State, Offenses against Constitutional Organs, Resistance to the Authority of the State, and
Offenses against Public Order.
³
Minister of Justice Thomas Dehler explained that these laws would be used to combat “ideological high treason,” “ideological subversion,” and “ideological sabotage.”
⁴
In short, thought crime.

The immediate target of all these statutes and constitutional restrictions became clear with due haste. On November 23, 1951, the federal government applied to the Constitutional Court to have the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) proscribed, on the basis of the aforementioned Article 21 of the Basic Law. This was at a time when the party held fifteen seats in the
Bundestag
.

The Communists had opposed integration into NATO and as late as 1952 paid lip service to the revolutionary overthrow of the Adenauer regime. While it clearly didn’t have mass political support—it had garnered only 2.2% of the vote in the 1952 elections
⁵
—the KPD nevertheless constituted a potential nuisance as the only political institution to speak up for a number of popular interests which were poorly represented by the major parties: