The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (77 page)

The Commission further noted the existence of an uncontrolled entrance to the seventh floor that opened into the cell area, and which was not visible from the guard’s office. This entrance was not acknowledged by authorities until November 4, 1977. The Commission observed:

This indicates that—as citizens have been saying for some time—the functionaries of the BKA, the BND, and the secret services have constant, uncontrolled access to the cells.
⁷

The cover-up was so glaring that the
Frankfurter Rundschau
remarked, in reference to the official investigation:

The Parliamentary Commission is faced with… three sorts of witnesses: those who know nothing, those who don’t want to know anything, and those who aren’t allowed to make a statement.
¹

As a macabre postscript to all this, RAF prisoner Ingrid Schubert was moved into isolation in Munich-Stadeheim prison on November 11, 1977. One hour later, she was found hanged dead.
²
As in the case of Meinhof and Ensslin, the autopsy failed to find the usual signs of death by hanging.
³

On the Thursday before her death, she had assured her lawyer that she had no intention of committing suicide.

N
EWS OF THE STAMMHEIM DEATHS
electrified, astounded, and horrified the European left, provoking an outpouring of rage. Security experts and government officials warned that more “terrorist” attacks would follow, and braced themselves accordingly. City streets were flanked with sandbagged gun emplacements and miles of barbed wire stretched through the capital.
⁴

The wave of protest and violence was not long in coming, though in the end it subsided well short of the “100,000 bombings” that one group promised would avenge the events of October 18.

In the week immediately following the deaths, West German and rightwing targets were attacked in over twenty Italian cities. Simultaneous explosions rocked the Siemens, BMW, and Opel auto buildings in Rome,
⁵
car showrooms were firebombed in Bologna, Milan, Livorno, and Turin, and West German consulates were attacked in Genoa and Venice.
⁶
A police officer in the northern town of Brescia lost his hand while trying to defuse a bomb, and club-wielding demonstrators sent
dozens of cops to the hospital in Sicily. In Milan, city councillor Carlo Arienti, a Christian Democrat, miraculously survived being shot eight times in an action claimed by the Red Brigades to “honor our West German comrades.”
¹

A telephone caller in Milan threatened, “We are also ready to ‘suicide’ the German Ambassador.”
²
As a result, the FRG embassy was ringed with riot police and armored personnel carriers. Left-wing students demonstrating on the Rome University campus engaged police in a three-hour gun battle, leaving five police and three students wounded and twenty-five people in custody on charges of possessing weapons and firebombs.
³
At the same time, windows were smashed on the upper class Via Veneto and molotov cocktails were thrown at cops, the protesters denouncing “German Nazis for the cold blooded murder of our comrades.”

In Paris and Nice, molotov cocktails were thrown at German tourist buses,
⁴
as well as at the Franco-German Bank and a car showroom.
⁵
The offices of the progressive
Libération
newspaper were occupied
⁶
in an effort to force its journalists to launch an investigation into the Stammheim deaths, as bombs went off in Toulouse, Versailles,
⁷
and Le Havre.
⁸

In France, neofascists retaliated against the wave of protest by bombing the offices of the left-wing
Syndicat de la Magistrature,
⁹
leaving behind papers that simply read “Baader Murderer.”
¹⁰
In a public statement,
one self-styled “Anti-Terrorist Brigade” claimed to have captured and killed a member of the guerilla; as no body was ever found, this was likely bluster. Nevertheless, police used the spectre of further escalation and counter-escalation as an excuse to ban all protests outside the West German embassy in Paris.
¹¹

Violent protests also broke out in Athens, and Greek police engaged in a firefight with reported anarchists who were driving a car full of explosives, presumably to attack a nearby factory owned by a West German corporation.
¹²
Around the same time, three people were injured when the West German Cultural Center in Istanbul was firebombed during two days of anti-German demonstrations in Turkey.
¹³

In Holland, several men abducted real estate tycoon Maurits Caransa, pushing him struggling into an automobile after he left a club where he had been playing bridge. The press reported that a Germanspeaking man had called the newspaper
Het Parool
: “We are the Red Army Faction,” he apparently said. “We have Caransa. You will hear from us.” Another newspaper claimed to receive a call demanding that Queen Juliana abdicate and that Knut Folkerts, still awaiting extradition, be freed.
¹⁴
Despite these reports, when Caransa was released three days later after haggling with his captors over a four million dollar ransom, it was revealed to have been a “normal” kidnapping unrelated to the RAF or any other guerilla group.
¹⁵

At the same time, another kidnapping, one which was not reported as being politically motivated, was in fact the work of the guerilla: in a defiant act, on November 9, the anarchist 2nd of June Movement snatched lingerie magnate Walter Palmers in Vienna, dragging him from his car as he arrived home for dinner. He was released unharmed four days later, after his son delivered a ransom of $3.1 million.
¹⁶
Nobody was arrested, and the 2JM took the money and divided it three ways, giving badly needed funds to the RAF and an unspecified Palestinian group.

As far away as Seattle, in the United States, the George Jackson Brigade bombed a Mercedes-Benz dealership in solidarity with the RAF. “We chose Mercedes-Benz as a target,” they explained, “because it is a German luxury car which is a favorite item of conspicuous consumption for ruling class bosses, and because of its association with Hans Martin Schleyer.”
¹

Meanwhile, newspapers reported that they had received threats that three Lufthansa planes would be blown up on November 15, prompting massive cancellations,
²
though in the end there were no attacks on the airline.

The flames of protest spread quickly, but by the end of the year, the violence had clearly been contained. The strongest reaction had been from the Italian left, where a tradition of militancy and a keen awareness of the realities of postfascist state repression provided the basis for the fierce fightback, giving rise to 147 documented anti-German attacks between October 18 and December 31 of 1977.
³
The massive offensive by the revolutionary movement in Italy, including militant strikes and numerous armed actions, certainly contributed to the impressive show of solidarity.

In the Federal Republic itself, courthouses were bombed in Hannover,
⁴
Zweibrucken,
⁵
and Hamburg,
⁶
but these were isolated acts. This meek reaction, especially when compared to what was happening in other countries, was a measure of the extent to which the visible might of the state and vicious anticommunist hysteria had put the left on the defensive. Rage had been muted by despair, as many people now felt that the level of conflict had exceeded their capacities. They recoiled in shock as the country seemed to be transforming itself into a police state.

The cream of the West German establishment gathered at Schleyer’s state funeral on October 24, surrounded by 750 police, with snipers in place on the surrounding rooftops.

In this paramilitary setting, President Walter Scheel declared:

The fight against terrorism is the fight of civilization against a barbarism trying to destroy all order… They are the enemies of every civilization… The nations of the earth are beginning to realize this. They realize with horror that not this or that order is being attacked, but all order.

Specifically referring to anyone who dared protest following the Stammheim deaths, he remarked that, “They too share the guilt.”
⁷

It should be noted that while this lynch mob atmosphere met with broad support from the West German public, for many—including people who had no truck with revolutionary politics—things seemed to be going too far. The new “muscular” social democracy seemed to find appropriate expression on the cover of
Stern
magazine around this time, where Chancellor Schmidt posed wearing the uniform of the BGS. This government reaction to the events of 1977 demonstrated the degree to which the SPD could act as repressively as the CDU, and has been identified as the starting point of yet another split between the party’s leadership and its more left-wing members, a development that accelerated over the next few years, giving rise to the Green Party.
⁸

Police set up special phone numbers in eighteen cities where one could hear taped recordings of the RAF members’ voices; in Bonn, the line was so jammed with calls that a second number had to be set up. Over 100,000 police were mobilized, and alleged terrorist hideouts were raided. In West Berlin, thirty-eight apartments, bookstores, and printing shops were searched and forty people taken into custody, prompting a protest outside of police headquarters, which was met by cops swinging rubber truncheons.
⁹
Info-BUG
and its printers Firma Agit-Druck were amongst those targeted, and the radical newspaper found itself banned.

At the same time, in France, attorney Klaus Croissant was being publicly referred to as “a central figure in international terrorism.” The lawyer was supported by philosophers Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre,
¹
as well a number of professional associations, including the
Syndicat de la Magistrature
, the
Confédération Syndicale des Avocats
, the
Jeunes Avocats
, the
Mouvement d’action judicaire
, and the
Association Francaise des Juristes Democrates
.
²
There was also a Committee for the Immediate Liberation of Klaus Croissant, which made its point by mailing one thousand crescent-shaped pastries to government officials, each one accompanied by a note which read, “If a croissant can circulate freely in the marketplace, why not a lawyer?”
³

Croissant’s persecution by an authoritarian state across the Rhine brought back memories that added weight to the entire affair. As one defense lawyer put it:

When I see this hunted lawyer on the one side, and on the other Prosecutor Shuller, a former stormtrooper and member of the old National Socialist party, I know where I stand.
⁴

But to no avail: on November 2, extradition hearings began in Paris, and two weeks later, the court ruled that Croissant could be handed over to the Germans. By November 19, he was sitting in a cell in Stammheim.
⁵

The RAF was on the defensive, and initial reports indicated that members had fled the country. Reportedly, one million handbills and posters went out across Europe and as far away as Japan,
⁶
identifying the suspects as Susanne Albrecht, Rolf Heissler, Christian Klar, Friederike Krabbe, Silke Maier-Witt, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Adelheid
Schulz, Angelika Speitel, Sigrid Sternebeck, Willi-Peter Stoll, Christof Wackernagel, Rolf Clemens Wagner, Elisabeth von Dyck, Juliane Plambeck, Inge Viett, and Jörg Lang. The equivalent of $19,200 was offered for information leading to the arrest of each of these suspects, for a total of over $300,000. (Plambeck and Viett were not actually members of the RAF, but of the 2nd of June Movement, the bulk of whose members would dissolve their organization and join the RAF in 1980.)