The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (58 page)

There were also significant contradictions regarding a chair allegedly used in the hanging. The report of the legal doctor and that of the criminal police claimed that the chair placed on top of a mattress was supporting Meinhof’s left leg. The chair is not mentioned in the report of Schreitmüller, a prison functionary, who explicitly stated, “I did not see a chair.” When questioned by Croissant, he even went so far as to state that the report of a chair, published in
Spiegel
, was false. Prison doctor Henck stated in his report, “The feet were 20 cm from the floor.” Police reports mentioned neither the chair nor the mattress. The prisoners, in their statement, noted that a chair on such an unstable base would surely have tipped as a result of reflex motions, and that such reflex motions would have caused severe bruising of the legs.
²

Important objects were missing in the inventory of her cell taken following her death. A blanket she always used, on which Andreas Baader’s name was sewn, had gone missing, and was never found. Similarly, Meinhof was found dead wearing black pants and a grey shirt, whereas that day she had been wearing blue jeans and a red shirt. The Commission posed the question as to why a woman intent on committing suicide would change before doing so, and noted that investigators never made any effort to examine the clothing she had been wearing earlier that day.
³

On the evening of her death, the duty guard removed the light bulbs from Meinhof’s cell, as was standard procedure. However, the May 10 inventory turned up a light bulb in Meinhof’s desk lamp. A test for fingerprints produced some partial prints, insufficient for positive identification, but in no way matching those of Ulrike Meinhof. The Commission further noted that the result of these fingerprint tests was only sent to the investigators after the investigation had been closed.
⁴

The way in which the autopsy was conducted also raised serious concerns. Neither the prisoners nor their lawyers were permitted to see the body before the autopsy. Professor Rauschke, the specialist in legal medicine appointed by the state to conduct the autopsy, failed to carry out skin tests that could have established whether or not Meinhof was dead prior to being hanged.
¹
Rauschke had also performed the autopsy on Siegfried Hausner, and some supporters and members of the guerilla would point to this as further evidence of a cover-up, given the theory some held at that time that Hausner’s autopsy had been used to camouflage the fact that he had been beaten to death by the Swedish police.
²

There were also problems regarding the inspection of the cell. Klaus Croissant, Meinhof’s sister Inge Wienke Zitzlaff, and her step-daughter Anja Röhl were all denied the right to attend the inventory, while attorney Michael Oberwinder was only permitted to stay in the hallway outside of the cell as the Criminal Police searched it for five hours.
³
Two days after her death, the entire cell, including the window grating, was painted. This is not standard procedure. It was not until after this that lawyers and relatives were permitted inside the cell.
⁴

Given the mass of evidence, the Commission concluded:

The totality of the medical and legal contradictions, facts, and evidence that we have uncovered and proven, rule out the possibility of suicide as the cause of Meinhof’s death.
5

At a conference in May 1975, Dr. Hans Josef Horchem, at the time head of the
Verfassungsschutz
, had underscored Meinhof’s importance in the eyes of the state. “Through the lack of new ideologues of Ulrike Meinhof’s quality,” the head of the political police had mused, “the continuation of the phenomenon of terror could be curtailed.”
⁶

Noting this, the Commission concluded:

It is not impossible that Ulrike Meinhof’s death was part of a secret service strategy to combat the RAF. In which case, her “suicide” would have been meant to show everyone how her politics and those of the RAF had failed, and how, by her “suicide,” she herself had recognized this failure.
7

The Commission further noted that the murder of Ulrike Meinhof would be far from inconsistent with past treatment of RAF prisoners. Andreas Baader, Ronald Augustin, and Ali Jansen had been deprived of water for extensive periods during hunger strikes.
⁸
They also noted that Holger Meins, Katharina Hammerschmidt, and Siegfried Hausner had all died as a result of medical mistreatment.
⁹

The timing of Meinhof’s death was also taken by some as evidence of a counterinsurgency operation. On May 4, the prisoners had filed demands for the production of evidence. The demands were aimed at unmasking specific political and union figures, and, in particular, at revealing that both the current SPD Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, and his predecessor, Willy Brandt, had ties to the CIA.

According to the Commission, “It is clear that the confrontation would have reached its climax at this point in the trial.”
¹⁰

These demands, as it turns out, were based on Meinhof’s work. Documents pertinent to this subject, as well as those pertinent to other work she was doing, documents that she always kept with her, were never seen again after her death.

As far as the Commission was concerned, the question was not whether Meinhof’s strategy might have damaged well-known politicians. Rather, the Commissioners noted that Meinhof’s plan risked
dealing a serious blow to the Attorney General’s use of the Stammheim trial to depoliticize the defendants and the actions for which they were being held accountable.

The prisoners would subsequently insist that even the concept of institutional murder regarding Meinhof’s death was not precise enough. Rather, it was the execution of a revolutionary in the context of a military conflict.
¹
As Meinhof herself had said in court the day before she was found dead, “It is, of course, a police tactic in counterinsurgency conflicts, in guerilla warfare, to take out the leaders.”
²

Meinhof’s sister, Inge Wienke Zitzlaff, similarly rejected the state’s version of events. “My sister once told me very clearly she never would commit suicide,” she remembered. “She said if it ever were reported that she killed herself then I would know she had been murdered.”
³

Not only members of the RAF support scene, but also many in the undogmatic left and the K-groups, agreed that Meinhof’s death must have been a case of murder.

An open letter signed by various intellectuals—including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir—compared it to the worst crimes of the Nazi era.
⁴
Left-wing poet—and former anti-Nazi resistance fighter—Erich Fried described the fallen guerilla as “the most important woman in German politics since Rosa Luxemburg.”
⁵

There was a wave of low-level attacks against German targets across Europe. In Paris, the offices of two West German steel companies were bombed, as was the German
Cultural Center in Toulouse
⁶
and Daimler-Benz in Nimes. In Italy, the German Academy and the West German Travel Bureau in Rome were firebombed;
⁷
in Milan, targets associated with Bosch and Volkswagen were attacked. The West German consulate in Venice was similarly firebombed. On May 11, the West German consulate in Copenhagen was firebombed.

Meanwhile, back in the FRG, bombs went off in Munich outside the U.S. Armed Forces radio station and in a shopping center in the middle of the night,
⁸
and a molotov cocktail was thrown at the
Land
Courthouse in Wuppertal.

Thousands reacted with sorrow and rage, demonstrations took place across the country, and both social and political prisoners in Berlin-Tegel Prison held a three-day hunger strike, as did thirty-six captives at the Hessen Women’s Prison.

Fighting was particularly fierce in Frankfurt; according to one police spokesperson, it was “the most brutal in the postwar history of the city.”
⁹
Following a rally organized by the
sponti
left,
¹⁰
with the watchword that “Ulrike Meinhof is Dead—Let’s Rescue the Living,” hundreds of people rampaged through the downtown area, breaking the windows at American Express and the America House cultural center, setting up barricades and defending them against police water cannons with molotov cocktails. Twelve people were arrested and seven cops were injured, one of them seriously when his car was set ablaze as he sat in it.
¹¹

As we shall see in Section 11, this demonstration and the reaction to it constituted a turning point for the
sponti
scene.

On May 15, some 7,000 people, many with their faces blackened and heads covered to avoid identification by the police, attended Meinhof’s funeral in West Berlin.
¹²
Wienke Zitzlaff requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the prisoners’ support campaign.
¹
When they left the cemetery, mourners joined with demonstrations in downtown West Berlin and at the Moabit courthouse where Meinhof had been sentenced two years earlier in her trial with Horst Mahler and Hans-Jürgen Bäcker.
²