Read The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 Online
Authors: J. Smith
Such communication, besides constituting a basic human need, was also a form of resistance. Again, according to Mohnhaupt:
The sense of Info, its entire purpose, as we understood it, was as a means to resist isolation. We have said that every sentence that a prisoner writes in Info is like an act, every sentence is an action—that’s how it was for the prisoners.
4
The state would allege that
Info
was used as a form of discipline between prisoners, by which the “ringleaders” coerced the others into participating in hunger strikes. There were also allegations that the prisoners used the system to communicate with active commandos on the outside, a claim which has never been substantiated. As Mohnhaupt explained, what seems far more likely is that
Info
was threatening precisely because it opened a hole in the brutal isolation conditions the government was attempting to perfect. By clamping down on the lawyers and putting an end to this contact, the courts were able to further isolate the prisoners.
5
Finally, the vendetta against the lawyers can be seen as part of
the state’s broader repressive approach intended to intimidate those who might stand with the guerilla. Groenewold was subjected to the
Berufsverbot
on June 12
1
and later that month, RAF lawyers found their offices and homes targeted as police carried out simultaneous raids in Hamburg, Heidelberg, Stuttgart, and West Berlin.
Over the next several years, the lawyers were repeatedly arrested and in some cases sentenced to considerable prison terms. They were openly followed by police; in some cases, agents were stationed outside their offices, taking photos of everyone, political or not, who entered.
On June 18, 1976, in a period of incredible tension in the movement, the office of Klaus Jürgen Langner, Margrit Schiller’s attorney, was firebombed; seven people on the premises were injured.
2
Not long afterwards, Axel Azzola resigned his mandate, explaining that “In this trial, one cannot speak without fear, and without freedom of speech there can be no defense … I am terribly afraid.”
3
These attacks on the lawyers came at the same time as a new volley of legislation, aimed at the entire radical left, was being passed through the legislature.
In the summer of 1976, §129a became law, a more intimidating subsection of §129 specifically related to “support for a terrorist organization”: the maximum penalty for “ringleaders” and “chief instigators” was increased to ten years.
4
At the same time, civil rights protections were loosened so that mere suspicion that an individual was supporting a criminal organization, even where no criminal act had been committed, became sufficient grounds to issue search and arrest warrants.
5
This came after §88a had been passed in January 1976, providing for a maximum three-year jail sentence for those who “produce, distribute, publicly display, and advertise materials that recommend unlawful acts—such as disturbing the peace in special (e.g. armed) cases, murder, manslaughter, robbery, extortion, arson, and the use of explosives.”
6
It was not long before §88a was being used to prosecute not only radical newspapers which reprinted the guerilla’s communiqués, but also the bookstores which carried such publications. On August 18, the
police carried out predawn raids on the homes of booksellers in seven cities, as well as ten bookstores and a book distribution center, confiscating many volumes that they deemed subversive.
7
Beyond the legal chill, a variety of dirty tricks and lies were also used to try to undercut public sympathy for the guerilla.
False flag attacks like the ones threatened in Stuttgart in 1972 were now actually carried out, taking aim at random bystanders. A bomb placed in the Bremen Central Station in December 1974 injured five people. Then, in 1975, there was a spate of such attacks: on September 13, four people were hurt when a bomb went off in the Hamburg train station,
8
claimed by a phantom “RAF Ralf Reinders Commando.”
9
(The next day, a fake bomb threat was called in to the Munich Central Station: an anonymous caller directed police to a locker, where they found a communiqué from the RAF, the 2nd of June Movement, and the Revolutionary Cells denouncing the previous day’s attack.) In October, a bomb was discovered and defused in the Nuremberg train station, claimed by a phantom “Southern Fighting Group of the RAF.” Finally, in November 1975, a similar bomb went off in the Cologne train station.
As with the Hamburg attack, the RAF denounced all these as false flag actions, and released its own communiqués disavowing them, insisting that “the urban guerilla cannot resort to terrorism as a weapon.”
10
Instead, it suggested that they were the work of either a CIA unit or else a neofascist group controlled by state security: this is not as farfetched a theory as it may seem, such scenarios having played themselves out elsewhere in Europe in the 1970s.
11
Nor was the media neglected as a weapon to be wielded against the guerilla.
In May 1975, within a month of the Stockholm action and the start of the Stammheim pretrial hearings, the government announced that
the RAF had “possibly” managed to steal mustard gas from an army depot.
1
One German newspaper warned the public that:
Terrorists are planning a poison attack. The Federal Criminal Investigation Bureau informed the speaker of the German Bundestag on Thursday that members of the Baader-Meinhof gang are planning a poison attack on the German parliament. According to the Bureau’s reports, substantial quantities of poison gas which disappeared a few weeks ago from an army depot have fallen into the hands of members of the Baader-Meinhof gang … Health departments and hospitals have been prepared for the possibility of a terrorist attack with the chemical weapon.”
2
It was later revealed, though less widely reported, that only two litres were missing, and that they might in fact have simply been misplaced. A few months later, it was admitted that this was in fact the case, and that they had since been found.
Nor was the phantom mustard gas scare an isolated case.
3
An almost humorous example occurred in Munich when a judge taking the subway home from a party thought he recognized one of the RAF fugitives riding along with him: Rolf Pohle, who had been freed during the exchange for Lorenz earlier that year.
Spiegel
got wind of this and another ominous fact: a plan of the subway system had been reported missing from a telephone cabinet, clearly a newsworthy item in fastidious Bavaria. The magazine declared that all this pointed towards a possible impending RAF attack, and a full-scale manhunt was launched throughout the
Land
.
Nothing came of this, and government officials were later forced to admit that the judge in question had been “no longer quite sober” on the night in question.
4
On top of such scaremongering news stories, an additional component of the state’s psychological warfare strategy was the trial of Ensslin, Baader, Raspe, and Meinhof—the Stammheim show trial.
The accused had never denied that they bore responsibility for the attacks in May 1972, establishing what would become the standard
practice of all RAF members accepting responsibility for all RAF actions. Yet, this trial was no formality; rather, it was used as a forum for the state to “expose” the captured combatants as monsters and the RAF as something monstrous.
Although the defendants had been apprehended in 1972, the trial was not scheduled to begin until 1974; it was then postponed for an additional year to avoid any unpleasant publicity during the World Cup held in Stuttgart that summer.
5
Next, its very location was turned into a propaganda statement about the danger posed by the accused: having the trial in the regular Stuttgart court house was deemed out of the question, and instead a special “terrorist-proof” facility was ordered built especially for the RAF’s alleged ringleaders.
As a journalist from the
Sunday Times
wrote in 1975:
That remarkable building is now almost complete in a sugar beet field near Stammheim prison. A concrete and steel fortress that will cost about £3 million, it includes among the features not normally found in courthouses, anti-aircraft defense against helicopter attack, listening devices sown in the ground around the building, scores of closed-circuit TV cameras, and an underground tunnel linked to Stammheim so that the defendants can be smuggled in and out of court without showing their noses in the open. The five judges (no jury), the accused and all witnesses will sit behind bullet-proof glass security screens.
Photographing the new court-house is strictly forbidden. The site workmen were, literally, sworn to secrecy. Plain-clothes police patrol it constantly, and local farmers, to their disgust, must carry passes to get to their fields.
6
In this already Orwellian setting, the prisoners were confronted with the testimony of those few of their former comrades who had agreed to cooperate in return for leniency, new identities, or simply as a result of being psychologically broken by isolation.
Karl-Heinz Ruhland, who had proven an embarrassment to the state in the first RAF trials, was now reinforced by a slightly more convincing turncoat: Gerhard Müller, a former SPK member, who had been captured along with Meinhof in 1972. After two and a half years of
hunger strikes and isolation, Müller could take no more and finally broke during the third hunger strike, in the winter of 1974/75. Tempted with offers of leniency and threatened with a murder charge going back to Hamburg police officer Norbert Schmid in 1971, he agreed to work for the prosecution.
The murder case was dropped, and the charges relating to the May Offensive—for which he could have received life—culminated in a tenyear sentence, of which he was only required to serve half.
1
The deal was further sweetened with offers of a new identity and the possibility of selling his story for a considerable sum.
2
He eventually received 500,000 DM and was relocated to the United States.
3
In exchange, Müller painted a nightmare picture of the RAF as brutal killers, accusing Baader in particular of having executed one member, Ingeborg Barz, simply because she wished to opt out of the guerilla struggle.
Barz had joined the RAF in 1971 along with Wolfgang Grundmann; they had both been previously active in the anarchist prisoner support group Black Aid.
4
While she is known to have participated in the Kaiserslautern bank robbery during which police officer Herbert Schoner was killed, she was never apprehended, nor did she ever surface from the underground. Disputing Müller’s claims, witnesses subsequently came forward testifying that they had met with Barz after this supposed execution, and when Müller brought police to the place where she was supposedly buried, they found nothing there.
5
Brigitte Mohnhaupt took the witness stand to refute this story, describing in detail the various ways in which people might leave the guerilla, and insisting that, even in the case of traitors, the RAF had not carried out any executions. Given the growing list of former members who worked with the media and Buback’s prosecutors against the RAF and the glaring fact that none of them had been killed, Mohnhaupt’s statements were far more credible than Müller’s.
Another somewhat less important witness for the prosecution was Dierk Hoff, a metalworker and former SDS member from the Frankfurt
scene. Hoff, who had built bombs and other weapons for the guerilla, testified that he had not realized what he was doing at the time. He claimed that Holger Meins, the conveniently dead former film student, had put him up to it with a story about how they were to be used as realistic props in a movie about terrorism. By the time he realized what was what, it was too late: the guerilla warned him that he was too deeply involved to be able to go to the police.
In exchange for his cooperation, Hoff’s somewhat incredible story was not challenged by the prosecution, and he received only a short prison term.
6
Despite this, his testimony was not felt to be particularly damaging.
Supporters’ claims that all these broken witnesses were being paraded out not to secure a conviction (of which there was never any doubt) but to discredit the guerilla were vindicated at the eleventh hour as the trial was wrapping up. In January 1977, Otto Schily received a tip that Federal Judge Theodor Prinzing, who was in charge of the trial and was thus supposed to pretend to be impartial, had been passing on court documents and evidence to a judge from the appeals court. Copies of these documents had then been making their way to the press, accompanied by suggestions as to how they could be used to discredit the guerilla.
In his eagerness to exploit the testimony of Müller and the others, Prinzing had miscalculated, and in so doing provided the defense with one of its few legal victories: the Federal Judge was forced to recuse himself.
7
He was replaced by associate judge Eberhard Foth, and the circus continued.
Nevertheless, the point had been made: this was a propaganda exercise, coordinated by either the BKA or the BAW, with a purely political goal. In other words, it was a show trial.
The prisoners defended themselves against all this as best they could: they may have accepted collective responsibility for all of the attacks the RAF had carried out, but they were far from indifferent about what was said in court. It was of great importance for them to counter allegations that could easily undermine what support they enjoyed on the left.
In her 1974 statement to the court regarding the liberation of Baader, Ulrike Meinhof had already attempted to refute the state’s slanders, and to place the guerilla’s actions within their proper political context. But the smears continued, and during the years of trials to come, the prisoners repeatedly felt compelled to defend not only their politics, but also their internal structure in the face of accusations of authoritarianism and cold inhumanity.