The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (51 page)
Read The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 Online
Authors: J. Smith
On April 25, almost two months after the 2JM’s operation, the RAF’s “Holger Meins Commando”—consisting primarily of former SPK members, most of whom had been active in the Committees Against Torture—seized the top floor of the West German embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, taking twelve hostages. They demanded the release of twenty-six West German political prisoners—not only Ensslin, Meinhof, Raspe, Baader, and the rest of the RAF, but also Annerose Reiche of the 2JM, and various “independent” political prisoners, such
as Wolfgang Quante (a squatter who had been arrested in 1974 after a bomb went off in his house), and Sigurd Debus and Wolfgang Stahl, Hamburg-based independent Maoists who had been robbing banks to fund guerilla operations.
If the 2JM had measured their demands against what the state might be likely to concede, the RAF seemed intent on avoiding any such limits.
Swedish police rushed in, occupying the embassy’s ground floor. They were repeatedly told to leave the building, and the guerilla threatened to execute the FRG’s Military Attaché if they did not do so. When the police failed to heed these warnings, Lieutenant Colonel Baron Andreas von Mirbach was shot through the head.
Thus convinced that the guerillas meant business, the police quickly vacated the premises and set up their perimeter outside. A special intervention team was flown in from Hamburg,
4
telephone lines to the embassy were cut, and the surrounding area was evacuated.
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt summoned a special Crisis Management Team (
Krisenstab
), consisting of his ministerial cabinet and the House Speaker of each parliamentary party, in order to facilitate communication and provide the government with cross-party backing.
5
Thus united, the West German government refused to give in to any of the commando’s demands. For its part, the Swedish government tried to defuse the situation, offering the hostage takers safe passage out of the country, but this was rejected out of hand: “It’s useless, we’re not negotiating,” a guerilla spokesperson is alleged to have replied. “If our demands aren’t met, we shall shoot a hostage every hour. Victory or death!”
6
Slightly more than one hour later, at 10:20 pm, the commando shot dead Economic Attaché Heinz Hillegaart.
Shortly before midnight, as police were preparing to storm the building, the explosives the guerilla had laid detonated.
7
Police rushed in, and
RAF members Siegfried Hausner, Hanna Krabbe, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, and Bernd Rössner were all captured. One RAF member, Ulrich Wessel, had been killed on the spot, not by the explosives themselves, but by his own hand grenade which he dropped as the blast went off. In spite of severe burns to his own body, Siegfried Hausner tried unsuccessfully to revive Wessel and single-handedly dragged Bernd Rössner out of the building.
Siegfried Hausner |
Subsequently, certain RAF prisoners would claim that Hausner’s efforts to save Wessel and Rössner suggested that his initial injuries were not so serious; instead, they would assert that he had been beaten by the Swedish police, and that this is how his skull was fractured, leading to his death. This was part of a conspiracy theory that the police had purposefully set off the guerilla’s explosives, and that Hausner was the only one who had enough knowledge about how the explosives had been laid to prove this. In this regard, they would accuse the state pathologist Rauschke of covering up evidence of a beating. While Hausner’s death would always be attributed to the state, these particular claims faded from RAF statements, which eventually framed the murder as the state having withheld medical care. ( |
It would subsequently be said that the embassy occupation had been organized by Hausner, who had been released from prison in 1974. Trained as a welder, and already suspected of building some of the bombs used in the RAF’s May Offensive, it was Hausner who had rigged the explosives that were used in Stockholm. Despite the fact that he had a fractured skull and burns over most of his body, he was
only hospitalized for a few days, then, over objections from doctors in Sweden and Germany, flown to Stammheim Prison.
He died soon after.
The other captured combatants would be brought to trial in the city of Düsseldorf, and on July 20, 1977, each received double life sentences.
1
Coming right after the Lorenz kidnapping, the embassy takeover prompted Chancellor Schmidt to announce that “anarchist guerillas” posed the worst threat West Germany had faced in its twenty-six-year history.
2
Yet the action was clearly a failure: no one was freed, two RAF members were dead, and four more in prison.
In contrast with the Lorenz kidnapping, the state now emerged victorious, and capitalized on the situation to enlist the people’s support in its campaign against the guerilla. Gas stations received a circular from the BKA, explaining to attendants that, “Your knowledge puts you in a special position to help the police. The enclosed checklist will help you to notice suspicious features when attending to vehicles; please report them.”
3
A similar plan was discussed to enlist hair stylists—who would be asked to report who had their hair cut, dyed or restyled, who bought wigs, etc.—but did not pass.
4
While it may have helped solidify public opinion behind the state, the Stockholm action in no way represented an end to far-left support for the guerilla. Indeed, defeat or no defeat, the fact that people had been willing to lay their lives on the line impressed many, and this itself served as an inspiration to struggle. According to Karl-Heinz Dellwo,
Actually the Stockholm action also encouraged some people to go underground. Before Stockholm, we were only about ten comrades, of whom not all were sure how far they were prepared to go. Afterwards, the RAF was rebuilt with many more people. Stockholm as such also established a new reality on our side. The embassy said: the RAF is still there and has the capacity to carry out such an attack—imagine what would be possible if it was organized on a larger scale.
5
The Holger Meins Commando has been described as a new “generation” of the RAF, a term which some supporters felt was promoted by the state and counterinsurgency forces to suggest that successive waves of combatants were in fact members of different organizations. This was seen by these supporters as part of an ongoing strategy to divide the prisoners from one another in order to break solidarity.
This terminology was resisted, and the RAF line was always that all actions claimed by the various RAF commandos were the work of one single, unified organization for which all members bore collective responsibility.
While we acknowledge the sentiment in this position, we nevertheless note that during the guerilla’s history there were clearly different waves of fighters with different priorities which led to an evolving praxis. The captured combatants always had the moral authority to sanction or repudiate the guerilla’s activities, so one can certainly talk of organizational continuity. Nevertheless, given the clearly distinct waves of fighters, we think it makes more sense to talk about an emerging tradition of armed resistance in which the choice to identify with the RAF’s praxis had real political significance, rather than to regard the RAF as a standing army or corporate body which retained a frozen identity even as its own members changed.
Regarding the guerilla in 1975, it is clear that the Holger Meins Commando consisted of former members of the prisoner support scene who felt the state was intent on exterminating the prisoners, and that it would not think twice before crushing any legal or semi-legal solidarity movement. As Dellwo stated decades later,
Stockholm was also an endorsement and reaffirmation for the prisoners. People they didn’t know at all carried out such an action to get them out. That proved there was a desire on the outside for “the dividing line” and the revolutionary struggle.
1
Yet, the focus for the revolutionary struggle had changed, as can be seen in the communiqué accompanying the Stockholm action, and with subsequent actions in the 1970s. During the 1970-72 period, the RAF had been preoccupied with things like radical subjectivity, workers’ alienation, the exploitation of the Third World, police violence, a left
wing out of touch with rebel youth, and a “new fascism” exemplified by social democratic corporatism and general repression. In statements like
The Urban Guerilla Concept
,
Serve the People
, and
Black September
, the RAF had attempted to grapple with these questions while dialoging with the rest of the left.
This initial openness now gave way to a single-minded focus on a “new fascism” defined as attacks on the prisoners and their legal team, and hardly anything else.
Clearly, the prisoners’ struggle was not only guiding the RAF, drawing in almost all of it new recruits: it was now defining its very politics.
On May 9, 1975, seven months after Holger Meins’ death and within a month of the Stockholm action, Meins’ former lawyer Siegfried Haag, along with Elisabeth von Dyck, herself a former SPK member
2
and assistant to RAF lawyer Klaus Croissant, were caught trying to smuggle guns out of Switzerland.
3
They were released and immediately went underground, Haag issuing a letter in which he accused Attorney General Buback of trying to frame him.
4
It has been claimed that Haag had a direct hand in recruiting members of the Holger Meins Commando. Whatever the truth of the matter, his decision to join the guerilla has been noted as a key point in the development of armed activity to free the prisoners.
5
Despite the heavy losses, the Stockholm action would not be the last attempt to replicate the successful Lorenz kidnapping.
To the RAF prisoners:
We are asking you to call off your hunger strike now even though the demand for an end to isolation has not been met. This demand has not been met because of the powerful reactionary mobilization and the class offensive from above, the subjective conditions of an underdeveloped class struggle, the corruption of the proletariat’s class organizations, and the weakness of the revolutionary left.
Understand that this is an order.
The fact is that the legal left, as a result of their defensiveness and helplessness in the face of the new fascism, has not developed the capacity to organize solidarity as a weapon, and has failed to develop in a way that corresponds to the construction of the guerilla and the politics of the RAF.
The strike has brought them face-to-face with reality: the weakness of political strategies that ignore the need to establish and develop the capacity to act from the underground, the necessity for armed politics as the concrete expression of proletarian internationalism here. Our massive mobilization in 68 was followed by a series of setbacks: the splits, the sects, and the corruption that forced us onto the defensive.
We are saying that the prisoners’ strike has done everything it could to mediate, mobilize, and organize anti-imperialist politics here. Its escalation would not contribute anything qualitative to the struggle.
The state has calculated that it will be able to create propaganda from the execution of guerilla prisoners—who struggle, always struggle, in spite of everything struggle—that would make resistance seem hopeless. Allowing you to continue in this situation would amount to sacrificing you.
We are taking this weapon away from you, because the prisoners’ struggle—given the existing balance of power—is now something that we must settle with our weapons.
VICTORY WILL BE OURS!
RAF
February 2, 1975
To the governments of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Kingdom of Sweden:
On April 24, 1975, at 1:50 pm, we occupied the embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Stockholm and took 12 embassy employees prisoner, including Ambassador Dieter Stoecker, Military Attaché Andreas von Mirbach, Economic Advisor Heinz Hillegaart, and Cultural Advisor Anno Elfgen, in order to free 26 political prisoners in the Federal Republic of Germany, namely:
Gudrun Ensslin, Stuttgart
Andreas Baader, Stuttgart
Ulrike Meinhof, Stuttgart
Jan Raspe, Stuttgart
Carmen Roll, Stuttgart
Werner Hoppe, Hamburg
Helmut Pohl, Hamburg
Wolfgang Beer, Hamburg
Eberhard Becker, Hamburg
Manfred Grashof, Zweibrücken
Klaus Jünschke, Zweibrücken
Wolfgang Quante, Bremen
Ronald Augustin, Bückeburg
Ali Jansen, Berlin
Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Berlin
Bernhard Braun, Berlin