The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (76 page)

The editors of this volume cannot be certain of what happened that night in Stammheim. Nevertheless, as in the case of Ulrike Meinhof’s death in that prison, we feel there is compelling evidence pointing to state murder. While we keep an open mind, what follows are some of the reasons why we remain unconvinced by the state’s suicide story. As in the case of Meinhof, we consider the way in which accounts of these latter Stammheim deaths gloss over these inconsistencies to be a sign of the unhealthy political culture we live in today.

Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe died as a result of gunshot wounds, Gudrun Ensslin as a result of hanging, and the sole survivor, Irmgard Möller, suffered repeated stab wounds inflicted with a kitchen knife.

As the two men were alleged to have shot themselves, some explanation as to where the guns had come from was required. On October 27, a spokesperson for the administration at Stammheim offered the necessary story. He stated that it was “not out of the question… that one of the prisoners’ lawyers passed the contraband articles to a prisoner during a visit.”
⁴

This claim was met with widespread incredulity. Before entering the visiting area, lawyers had to empty their pockets and give their jackets to an employee for verification; they were body searched physically and with a metal detector. Prisoners were strip searched and given a new set of clothes both when entering and when leaving visits with lawyers. Further, due to the Contact Ban, the lawyers had been unable to see their clients since September 6.

In the case of Andreas Baader, several other irregularities were apparent. There were three bullet holes in the cell. One bullet lodged in the wall, one in the mattress, and the third, the cause of death, lodged in the floor: this scenario seemed indicative of a struggle, not a suicide.

Baader was supposed to have shot himself in the base of the neck in such a way that the bullet exited his forehead. Repeated tests indicated that it was not easy for an individual to position a gun against his or her own body in such a way. Making the feat well nigh impossible, according to fluorescent x-ray analysis, there were thirty to forty centimeters between the pistol’s barrel and the point of entry at the time the fatal shot was fired.

To top it all off, Baader had powder burns from the recoil on his right hand. Baader, however, was left-handed, and would almost certainly have used his left hand to shoot himself.

The newspaper of the KBW: “One Way—Or Another—These are Concentration Camp Methods! Down with the Contact Ban Law!”

In the case of Raspe, no powder burns were found at all. Powder burns always occur when firing a weapon.

The gun smuggling theory relied on the testimony of Hans-Joachim Dellwo, brother of RAF prisoner Karl-Heinz Dellwo, and Volker Speitel, the husband of RAF member Angelika Speitel. They had both been arrested on October 2, 1977, and charged with supporting a criminal organization under §129.

Speitel had been an important figure in the Committees Against Torture, and both men would later admit to having acted as couriers for the guerilla. They testified that they were aware of lawyers smuggling items to the prisoners during the Stammheim
trial that had ended in April 1977, specifically claiming that guns had been smuggled in. The plot sketched by the state was that these guns were then hidden away in the prisoners’ belongings and in the cell walls when work was done to renovate the seventh floor that summer.
¹

Guerilla supporters were quick to note that Speitel and Dellwo’s testimony was tainted by the fact that they each received reduced sentences and new identities in exchange for these allegations.
²
It has been further claimed that the police threatened Speitel with Youth Court action against his eight-year-old son if he refused to cooperate.
³

Besides conveniently explaining two of the Stammheim deaths, the gun smuggling story served several additional purposes. From that point on, all lawyers’ visits with RAF prisoners were through a screen, a process which facilitated auditory surveillance, as well as depriving the prisoners of one of their last direct human contacts. Furthermore, from that point on, the guards were permitted to look through lawyers’ files “to prevent smuggling.” Finally, as a result of Dellwo and Speitel’s testimony, both Armin Newerla and Arndt Müller were brought to trial, and in 1980 the two attorneys were convicted of smuggling in weapons and explosives, receiving respective sentences of three-years-and-six-months and four-years-and-eight-months.

In the case of Gudrun Ensslin, who was found hanged, contradictions similar to the case of Ulrike Meinhof present themselves. The chair she allegedly stood on to hang herself was too far away from her body to have been used, and the torn sheets supporting her would not likely have tolerated the weight of a falling body. Nor did her cell contain the fibers one would have expected from her tearing up a sheet. As was the case with Meinhof, the skin test that would have established whether Ensslin was dead before she was hanged was never undertaken.

In search of a motive for this mass suicide, the state suggested that the prisoners realized there was no hope for their liberation following the storming of the hijacked airliner in Mogadishu, and consequently chose to kill themselves rather than face life in prison. This theory raises three questions. How would the prisoners, given the Contact Ban, have
known about these developments? How would they have organized a group suicide under such conditions? And further, why would they have made their deaths look like murders?

On October 20, authorities claimed to have “discovered” a radio in Raspe’s cell, a cell that he had only occupied since October 4. The state alleged that, using the wall sockets and tools stolen when the prison was being renovated, the prisoners constructed an elaborate communication system that allowed them to monitor radio broadcasts and to communicate with each other.

This was only the first in a series of very convenient discoveries. On October 22, two hundred and seventy grams of explosives were “discovered” in the prisoners’ wing. On November 12, a razor blade and three detonators were “found” in Baader’s cell. Finally, on December 12, a gun and ammunition were “found” in a cell formerly occupied by RAF prisoner Helmut Pohl. It is worth noting that the government’s Commission of Inquiry was unclear about whether this gun was a Smith & Wesson or a Colt.38, the model used by special police units.

In such an atmosphere, with the state alleging incredible feats of Houdini-like daring do on the part of the prisoners, people understandably began to believe anything could be possible. For instance, Baader’s lawyer, Hans-Heinz Heldmann, in the October 1977 issue of the KB’s
Arbeiterkampf
, pointed to a new mystery. At the time of his death, there was a large quantity of fine, light-colored sand on and in Baader’s shoes: according to Heldmann, the quality and quantity of the sand suggested that Baader had been flown to Mogadishu and then returned to Stammheim.
¹
As has been noted elsewhere, this theory simply cannot be true: there would have been no time to fly to Mogadishu and back, even in the supersonic Concorde airplane. Indeed, Irmgard Möller, the sole survivor of the Stammheim events, has explained that this sand was more likely picked up in the prison, part of the building materials left over from renovations earlier that year.
²

Even taken at face value, the state’s claims do not point to “simple suicide”: in the final analysis, the evidence indicates that
if
prisoners would have had access to guns and radios then someone in a position of authority would have known it. Former
Spiegel
editor Stefan Aust, for instance, has suggested that the prisoners may have been allowed to believe they had established a “secret” communication system so that
what they said to each other could be monitored. What emerges then is a picture of the prisoners being allowed to have weapons and to communicate with each other, while the authorities listened in as a suicide pact was agreed acted on, all the while doing nothing to interfere.
³

As evidenced by the quote at the beginning of this chapter, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, a former member of the Holger Meins Commando that seized the Stockholm embassy in 1975, now holds this view and indeed claims to have held it for years while he publicly backed the murder theory. (It should be noted that Dellwo was held in Hamburg, not Stammheim, at the time, and so could have no direct knowledge of the events in question.)

If this scenario were true, it would be a particularly stark elaboration of an old SPK slogan, namely that “suicide = murder.” Indeed, a section of the radical left has always held that even if the prisoners did commit suicide, they would have done so only as a consequence of the harsh prison conditions in which they were held, and that in such a case, the government would still be culpable.

One of the biggest problems with the suicide story is that not all of the prisoners died.

On October 27, Irmgard Möller, the sole survivor from the alleged group suicide, issued a statement claiming that she had not attempted to kill herself. She stated that the last thing she heard before going to sleep on the night in question was two muffled explosive sounds. She was not aware of anything until she awoke some hours later, feeling intoxicated, disoriented, and having difficulty concentrating.

She had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest, the blade penetrating down to her heart sac. The state later claimed that she had done this to herself, using a prison-issue butter knife she had squirreled away. She has always denied this claim.

Möller has further stated that the prisoners had no contact with one another except by shouting through the air vents in their cells or when
going by each other’s cells on the way to or from the yard. Finally, she insists the prisoners had absolutely no idea of developments in Mogadishu.

To this day, she maintains that Ensslin, Baader, and Raspe were murdered.

Of course, following Meinhof’s death, the prisoners knew that murders might be disguised as suicides. On October 7, Andreas Baader had sent his lawyer the following letter:

As a result of the measures of the last 6 weeks and a few remarks from the guards, one can draw the conclusion that the Administration of State Security, which—as a guard who is now permanently on the 7th floor has said—hopes to provoke one or more suicides here, or, in any case, create the plausible appearance of such. In this regard, I stress: none of us—this is clear from the few words that we have been able to exchange at the doors in the last few weeks and from the years of discussion—have the intention of killing ourselves. Should we—again a guard—“be found dead,” we have been killed, as is the procedure, in keeping with the tradition of legal and political measures here.
¹

Gudrun Ensslin had also written to her lawyers, stating:

I am afraid of being suicided in the same way as Ulrike. If there is no letter from me and I’m found dead; in this case it is an assassination.
²

Her father, the pastor Helmut Ensslin, had been similarly warned. As he would tell the Italian magazine
Lotta Continua
:

I am convinced that she was murdered. She was always afraid that she would be murdered, even in the case of being liberated and going out of the country. After the death of Ulrike, she told me that it might end that way. And, for her, a suicide was absolutely out of the question. Gudrun had never lied, just as the others from the RAF have never lied; they always took responsibility for their deeds.
³

In conversation with two prison chaplains on the afternoon of October 17, Ensslin had explained that there were three sheets of paper kept in a file in her cell, containing important information.

“They should be sent to the head of the Chancellery if they do away with me, or if I’m executed,” she had said. “Please would you see that they get there? I’m afraid that otherwise the Federal Prosecutor will suppress or destroy them.”
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Needless to say, according to the official account, these three sheets of paper were never found.
⁵

Although no independent body was ever formed to investigate the Stammheim deaths, the International Investigatory Commission into the Death of Ulrike Meinhof was still sitting at the time. They had several interesting comments. They noted that on both nights, May 8/9, 1976, and October 17/18, 1977, an auxiliary was in charge of surveillance rather than the usual person. They also noted that, in both incidents, the autopsies posed similar problems.

Regarding the incriminating evidence “turned up” by prison authorities during the cell searches, they approvingly quoted from the press release of Irmgard Möller’s lawyer, Jutta Bahr-Jentges, of October 25, 1977:

Why these inventories of the cells without neutral witnesses, without lawyers, these inventories which have produced receivers, radios, Morse code apparatuses, quantities of plastic explosives—might as well find atomic bombs?
⁶