The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (71 page)

As a result of his injuries, Sonnenberg suffered brain damage, and is prone to epileptic seizures to this day. Years later, he would recall his condition following capture:

I didn’t know anything except my name. I could neither read nor write, nor formulate things in any form. Words and concepts were utterly foreign to me. Even things having to do with daily life—like plate and spoon, bed and sink, book and radio—I no longer knew these words and concepts.
³

Two days later, on May 5, Uwe Folkerts (Knut’s brother) and Johannes Thimme were both arrested in Holland, the police claiming that they
had been involved in the Buback assassination, as well as with alleged plans to seize hostages to exchange for the prisoners.
⁴

Throughout the summer, different RAF prisoners would go back on hunger strike for various periods of time, demanding the association they had been promised.

At the same time, the state was not letting up on its attacks against the lawyers. In one particularly incredible move, attorneys Armin Newerla and Arndt Müller were charged with attempted murder on the grounds that they did not discourage their clients Verena Becker and Sabine Schmitz
⁵
from hunger striking.
⁶
On July 8, Klaus Croissant fled the country: on June 26 he had been subjected to a partial
Berufsverbot
, and there were signs he might be arrested at any time. Pieter Bakker Schut, Ronald Augustin’s Dutch attorney, suggested he go to the Netherlands, but Croissant chose Paris, where he held a press conference four days later, requesting political asylum.
⁷
The lawyer pointed to the years of harassment he had endured, and noted that with the ongoing confrontation things were getting worse: he was facing a third arrest and, as he was now subjected to the
Berufsverbot
, could neither defend himself nor continue to defend his clients except from outside the country. His home, office, and telephone had all been bugged, and surrounding buildings were used for physical surveillance, which included state agents openly photographing everyone who entered his office. On December 15, 1976, one of his secretaries had been offered several thousand
DM
by the
Verfassungsschutz
in exchange for copies of legal notes and a list of his clients. Finally, he pointed to the fact that he was followed to and from his office by uniformed police, which he described as a form of psychological terrorism.
⁸

As we shall see, while Croissant’s plea would raise international awareness about what was happening in the Federal Republic, it would not be sufficient to keep him safe. Nevertheless, for the time being he was allowed to remain in Paris, as the French authorities tried to decide how to handle the affair.

The next attack occurred on July 30 in the wealthy Frankfurt suburb of Oberursel. Three RAF members, including a young woman named Susanne Albrecht, came with red roses to the door of a thirty-room villa belonging to Jürgen Ponto.
¹
One of the most important businessmen in West Germany, Ponto had direct ties to many Third World governments and had served as an advisor to South Africa’s infamous apartheid regime. He was also godfather to Albrecht’s sister and a close friend of her parents.

The guerillas attempted to abduct the businessman, but when he resisted they opened fire, shooting him five times. He died on his kitchen floor.

As Albrecht had been recognized by Ponto’s wife, she signed her name to the guerilla’s communiqué for this action. She was sought for this attack along with Angelika Speitel, Silke Maier-Witt, and Siegrid Sternebeck. With the exception of Speitel, who had been underground for some years now, the women had all been active together since 1974, meeting through the Hamburg squats, Red Aid, and the Committees Against Torture. They had all known members of the Holger Meins Commando who had carried out the ill-fated Stockholm action in 1975. All four went underground immediately.

(A political storm ensued when it was learned that Ponto had never been warned that police knew Albrecht was close to the RAF. This led the FDP Federal Minister of the Interior Werner Maihofer to famously state that, “There is no capitalist who does not have a terrorist in his own intimate circle of friends or relations.”)
²

On August 8, Helmut Pohl, Wolfgang Beer, and Werner Hoppe, who had been moved to be with the others in Stammheim just a month earlier, were transferred back to Hamburg. The precise excuse used was a “fight” with guards—essentially a set up whereby the guards provoked an incident and used it as an excuse to attack and beat all of the prisoners on the floor.
³
It appeared that Buback’s replacement,
Kurt Rebmann, had moved to reverse his previous agreement for association.

In reaction to these shenanigans and to the attack on Ponto, all RAF prisoners went on hunger strike, some escalating to a thirst strike almost immediately.

It was only days before the force-feeding began.

Defense attorneys Newerla and Müller began organizing public support for the striking prisoners, and became subject to even heavier levels of harassment and outright repression. On August 15, the lawyers’ offices were bombed, almost certainly with the collusion of the police who had the premises under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Müller and assistant Volker Speitel were there at the time, but were not injured.
⁴
Newerla was subsequently arrested when multiple copies of the left-wing magazine
MOB
which supported the prisoners were found in his car: he was charged with “supporting a terrorist organization” under §129a.
⁵

The new Attorney General staked out the “hard-line” position for which he would be remembered. “I know that the population is not at all interested if these people go on hunger and thirst strikes,” Rebmann told the press. “The population wants these people to be hit hard, just as hard as they have earned with their brutal deed.”

He was asked about the possibility of prisoners dying. “That is always a bad thing,” he answered, “but it would be the consequence which has been made clear to them and their lawyers and which is clear to them. The conditions of imprisonment don’t justify such a strike; they are doing very well considering the circumstances.”
⁶

On August 25, the RAF responded by targeting Rebmann’s offices. Peter-Jürgen Boock (the husband of Waltraud Boock) set up an improvised rocket launcher aimed at the Attorney General’s headquarters, but the timing device was not set properly, and it failed to fire. Boock later broke with the RAF and claimed that he had purposefully sabotaged this attack, as his conscience would not allow him to risk the lives of the secretaries and office workers in the building.
⁷
(The editors of this
volume assume this statement to be false, along with almost everything else Boock has said.)

Whatever the truth of the matter, the RAF attempted to put this mishap in the best possible light, issuing a communiqué a week later in which they pretended that the entire exercise had merely been intended as a warning. The guerilla went on to promise that it was more than willing to act should it prove necessary to save the prisoners:

Should Andreas, Gudrun, and Jan be killed, the apologists for the hard line will find that they are not the only ones with weapons at their disposal. They will find that we are many, and that we have enough love—as well as enough hate and imagination—to use both our weapons and their weapons against them, and that their pain will equal ours.
¹

Following Meinhof’s murder, and in the context of the recent hunger strikes and Rebmann’s bloodthirsty statements, the guerilla was clearly concerned that the state might move to kill Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe. This fear was shared by the prisoners themselves, who knew that they might suffer reprisals for the guerilla’s actions.

Indeed, anticipating such reprisals, and following the breakdown of negotiations between Amnesty International and the Federal Government, the prisoners called off their hunger and thirst strike on September 2. In a short statement, Jan-Carl Raspe explained that the attacks on Ponto and Rebmann had created an environment in which the prisoners had become hostages and the state was ready and willing to kill them to set an example.
²

The failed Ponto kidnapping had been intended to be the first of a two-pronged action to put pressure on the West German bourgeoisie to force the state to free the prisoners. Despite their failure to take Ponto alive, it was decided to follow through on the second part of this plan.

On September 5, the RAF’s “Siegfried Hausner Commando” kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer. His car and police escort were forced to a stop by a baby stroller that was left out in the middle of the road, at which point they were ambushed by guerillas who killed his chauffeur, Heinz Marcisz, and three police officers—Reinhold Brändle, Helmut Ulmer and Roland Pieler—before making their getaway.

A note received soon after warned that, “The federal government must take steps to assure that all aspects of the manhunt cease—or we will immediately shoot Schleyer without even engaging in negotiations for his freedom.”

Schleyer was the most powerful businessman in West Germany at the time. Like Ponto, he was a frequent figure on television representing the ruling class point of view. He was the president of both the
Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie
(Federal Association of German Industrialists) and the
Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände
(Federal Association of German Employers), and had a reputation as an aggressive opponent of any workers’ demands.
³
As a veteran of Hitler’s SS, he was a perfect symbol of the integration of former Nazis into the postwar power structure.
⁴

Hanns Martin Schleyer in captivity. The RAF had considered having him hold a sign with his SS number and the caption “A Prisoner of His Own History,” but quickly rejected this idea. Not only did the guerillas have no wish to inflict needless humiliation, but they were also aware that their captive was already unpopular in West Germany and feared he would have less exchange value if he was debased further.

As the guerilla would later explain:

We hoped to confront the SPD with the decision of whether to exchange these two individuals who embody the global power of FRG capital in a way that few others do.

Ponto for his international financial policy (revealing how all the German banks, especially his own Dresdner Bank, work to support reactionary regimes in developing countries and also the role of FRG financial policy as a tool to control European integration) and Schleyer for the national economic policy (the big trusts, corporatism, the FRG as an international model of social peace).

They embodied the power within the state which the SPD must respect if it wishes to stay in power.
¹

The attempted Ponto kidnapping may have ended in failure, yet it was felt that the plan could not be called off, that lives were at stake: “the prisoners had reached a point where we could no longer put off an action to liberate them. The prisoners were on a thirst strike and Gudrun was dying.”
²

Within a day of Schleyer’s kidnapping, the commando demanded the release of eleven prisoners—including Ensslin, Raspe, and Baader—and safe passage to a country of their choosing. This demand was reiterated on September 6, as the guerilla suspected state security of not relaying their first communiqué to the proper authorities.

Pastor Martin Niemöller and the Swiss human rights advocate Denis Payot (whom the RAF mistakenly thought held a position in the United Nations) were to accompany the prisoners to their final destination. The commando further demanded that the prisoners be given 100,000
DM
each ($44,000), and that their entire communiqué be read on
Tagesschau
, a nightly current affairs television program.

In discussions with state representatives, the prisoners promised that they would not return to the FRG or participate in future armed actions if exiled. Nevertheless, the government issued a statement indicating that it would not release them under any circumstances.

Government officials declared a “supra-legal state of emergency,” and
Schmidt convened the Crisis Management Team, which had first been established in 1975 during the Lorenz action and then during the RAF’s Stockholm siege. Over the next weeks, this team served to concentrate all decision-making powers in the hands of the executive:

Arguing that each party was represented on the committee, the need to consult parliament in matters of national importance was effectively curtailed. For the length of the “German Autumn” the crisis management team was the ruling body, responsible for all negotiations with the terrorists and the enactment of security measures.
³

One of the first measures taken was a “voluntary” news ban, immediately followed by a total
Kontaktsperre
(Contact Ban) against all political prisoners. As its name implies, the Contact Ban deprived the prisoners of any contact with each other, as well as with the outside world. All visits, including those with lawyers and family members, were forbidden. The prisoners were also denied any access to mail, newspapers, magazines, television, or radio. In short, they were placed in 100% individual isolation,
⁴
in what has been described as a case of “counter-kidnapping” by the state.
⁵