The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (80 page)

The undogmatic left had been polarized by the RAF’s struggle, splitting to the left and to the right. This is unremarkable in itself, as is the fact that those who veered rightwards into the Greens were also those who found the RAF’s politics uninspirational, to say the least. What is noteworthy is that those who veered to the left, the autonomists, were often similarly unimpressed with the RAF and its legacy. Certainly, nobody would be inspired by 1977 to set up an armed group, in the way that the RAF’s early actions had inspired the RZ and others.

Indeed, it is striking how much the RAF’s legacy and credibility were damaged by 1977; it took years to recover, even while most of the guerillas remained uncaptured. Most popular and even scholarly works about the group act as if it disbanded afterwards, while in fact it remained active until the 1990s.

Compare this to 1972, when practically the entire guerilla had been wiped out by arrests, and yet the actions of the May Offensive inspired renewed resistance throughout the spectrum of the revolutionary left.

One part of the equation was the distance that had grown between the RAF and the rest of the left, both as a result of its own paradoxes and of the vicious state repression and psychological operations. The other factor, in its own way an expression of the first, was the level of confrontation in which the 1977 commandos had chosen to engage, well beyond the capacity of any other segment of the left to imitate or even support.

While the RAF was in crisis, the Revolutionary Cells and Rote Zora continued to score successes, and carried out approximately eighty actions over the next decade, suffering hardly any arrests. There were also
many low-level attacks carried out by one-off groups, most of which have left no record, yet which nevertheless contributed to an overall armed orientation remarkably different from that which existed in North America at the time.

In a significant way, these developments indicate the degree to which the RAF’s armed strategy had marked revolutionary politics in West Germany, even while its ideology was rarely accepted.

Not that the RAF itself had been removed from the battlefield.

Though it looked broken by defeat and repression, the RAF would once again manage to regroup and draw in new members, establishing the basis for renewed campaigns of revolutionary violence in the 1980s.

In a few years, events revealed that the tradition of armed resistance, and the legacy of the first guerillas to emerge from the APO, had beaten the odds and survived the devastating blows of the seventies.

As detailed in Section 6, Black September: A Statement from Behind Bars, much has been made of an article which appeared in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
on December 15, 1972, entitled “Ulrike Meinhof läßt sich nur die Stichwort geben.”

In order to allow readers to judge the rendition in the CIA funded
Encounter
magazine, we have reprinted the last section of this article in German, alongside our own version and George Watson’s:

“Ohne dass wir das deutsche Volk vom Faschismus freisprechen—denn die Leute haben ja wirklich nicht gewußt, was in den Konzentrationslagern vorging –, können wir es nicht für unseren revolutionären Kampf mobilisieren”, sagt sie. Die Linke sei nach dem Krieg in bezug auf den Faschismus “fahrlässig dumm und dreist vorgegangen. Man habe die Personen in den Vordergrund gerückt, aber nicht tiefer geblickt. “Wie war Auschwitz möglich, was war Antisemitismus?” Das hätte man damals klären müssen, anstatt gemeinsam Auschwitz als Ausdruck des Bösen zu verstehen, meint Ulrike Meinhof.

“Das Schlimmste ist, dass wir uns alle Kommunisten und andre, darin einig waren.” Doch jetzt hat sie erkannt, dass Antisemitismus in seinem Wesen antikapitalistisch sei. Er mache sich den Haß der Menschen auf ihre Abhängigkeit vom Geld als Tauschmittel, ihre Sehnsucht nach dem Kommunismus zu eigen.

“Auschwitz heißt, daß sechs Millionen Juden ermordet und auf die Müllkippen Europas gekarrt wurden als das, als was man sie ausgab—als Geldjuden.” Finanzkapital und Banken, “der harte3 Kern des Systems” des Imperialismus und Kapitalismus, Hätten den Haß der Menschen auf das Geld und die Ausbeutung von sich ab und auf die Juden gelenkt. Diese Zusammenhänge nicht deutlich gemacht zu haben, sei das Versagen der Linken, der Kommunisten gewesen.

Die Deutschen waren antisemitisch, also sind sie heute Anhänger der RAF. Sie wissen es nur nicht, weil man vergessen hat, sie vom Faschismus, vom Judenmord, freizusprechen und ihnen zu sagen, dass Antisemitismus eigentlich Haß auf Kapitalismus ist. In der Tat eine bemerkenswerte Erklärung für das Scheitern der “Baader-Mahler-Meinhof-Gruppe“, die sich Ulrike Meinhof da zurechtgezimmert hat. Dadurch ist es möglich, auch den Münchener Anschlag des “Schwarzen September” zu preisen. Sie fühle eine “historische Identität” mit den Juden im Warschauer Getto, die waffenlos einen Aufstand versuchten und sich hinschlachten ließen, bekennt sie. “Wir haben das ganze Blabla durchbrochen. Wir haben eine gewisse Ermutigung für die Linke dargestellt, die freilich wieder den Bach ‘runtergegangen ist, weil sie uns alle verhaftet haben.“

In December, 1972, for example, Ulrike Meinhof of the West German “Red Army Faction” appeared between a judicial hearing and spoke up publicly for the Good Old Cause of revolutionary extermination. “How was Auschwitz possible, what was anti-Semitism?” she asked from the dock. According to a newspaper account:

People should have explained that, instead of accepting Auschwitz collectively as an expression of evil. The worst of it is that we were all agreed about it, Communists included. But now she [Meinhof] had recognized that anti-Semitism was essentially anti-capitalist. It absorbed the hatred of men for their dependence on money as a means of exchange, and their longing for communism…

How much was socialism, and how much national-socialism in her passionate defense?

Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed, and thrown on the waste-heap of Europe, for what they were: money-Jews (Geldjuden). Finance capital and the banks, the hard core of the system of imperialism and capitalism, had turned the hatred of men against money and exploitation, and against the Jews. The failure of the Left, of the Communists, had lain in not making these connections plain…

And so Marxism and racialism could be proposed once more as philosophical comrades, in our own times, and the link yet again made plain:

Germans were anti-Semitic, and that is why they nowadays support the Red Army Fraction. They have not yet recognised all this, because they have not yet been absolved of fascism and the murder of the Jews. And they have not yet been told that anti- Semitism is really a hatred of capitalism.

“Unless we absolve the German people of fascism—that the people really didn’t know what was going on in the concentration camps—they can’t be mobilized for our struggle,” she said. After the war, the left, in dealing with fascism, were “negligent, stupid, and insolent.” They dealt with the people in the foreground, but didn’t look any deeper. “How was Auschwitz possible; what was antisemitism?” That is something that someone should have clarified at the time. Instead of collectively understanding Auschwitz as an expression of evil, Meinhof stated.

“The worst thing is that all of us, communists as well as others, were united in this.” However, she now recognizes that antisemitism can in it’s own way be anticapitalist. It separates the hatred of people about their dependency on money as a means of exchange from their desire for communism.

“Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were murdered and carted off to Europe’s garbage heap, dispensed with as money Jews.” Finance capital and banks, “the hard core of the system” of imperialism and capitalism deflected the hate of the people for money and oppression from itself and transferred it to the Jews. Not having made this connection clear was the failure of the left and the communists.

Germans were antisemitic, therefore they are today RAF supporters. Only they don’t know it, because they’ve forgotten that they must be absolved of fascism and murdering Jews, and that antisemitism is in reality hatred of capitalism. In this regard Ulrike Meinhof ably constructed a remarkable statement about the failure of the Baader-Meinhof Group. With it, it is also possible to praise the Black September attack in Munich. She claimed to feel an “historical identity” with the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, who attempted an unarmed uprising leading to their defeat. “We have broken through the entire blah blah. We have provided the left with obvious encouragement, which they have voluntarily allowed to dissipate, because we’ve all been arrested.”

In its July 8, 1978 decision, the European Commission of Human Rights noted the following effects on the health of Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader as a result of their prolonged imprisonment under conditions of single or small-group isolation:

(i) State of health

In September 1975:

19. The applicants are in a state of physical and mental exhaustion (Dr. Mende). Their blood pressure is low. Their weight is about 70% of that of a normally healthy person of the same age and build (Dr. Müller). They present the following symptoms in varying degrees: problems of concentration, marked fatigue, difficulties of expression or articulation, reduced physical and mental performance, instability, diminished spontaneity and ability to make contacts, depression (especially noted by Dr. Rasch).

In April 1977:

20. The decline in both physical and mental health is very pronounced in Ensslin (concurring opinion by Dr. Rasch, Dr. Müller, and Dr. Schröder): loss of weight, very low blood pressure, premature aging, severe difficulties of expression and lack of concentration, motor disturbances. The deterioration in the condition of Baader and Raspe is perceptible, though less spectacular: decrease in activity and spontaneity, emotional regression, problems of articulation, hesitancy in speech. They are nevertheless fit for detention.

(ii) The Causes

21. The experts ascribe the applicants’ state of health to a series of factors and circumstances: the particular conditions of their imprisonment, the length of the detention on remand, hunger strikes, tension generated by the trial and the applicants’ wish to defend themselves, etc.. The importance attached to these different factors varies from one report to another.

The particular conditions of imprisonment

22. There is no sensory isolation strictly speaking, such as can be brought about by a substantial reduction in stimulation of the sensory organs. On the other hand, the applicants are subjected to evident social isolation. The international literature on criminology and psychology indicates that isolation can be sufficient in itself to gravely impair physical and mental health. The following conditions may be diagnosed: chronic apathy, fatigue, emotional instability, difficulties of concentration, diminution of mental faculties, disorders of the neuro-vegetative system. Opinions differ on the precise scale of these phenomena. There are no reports in the literature of situations comparable to that of the applicants (Dr. Rasch), affording a better assessment of the psychiatric effects. From the standpoint of internal medicine, certain analogies can be found in case-studies of elderly and isolated persons, persons kept alive artificially in intensive care units, and long-term prisoners (Dr. Müller and Dr. Schröder). However, certain experts state that they have little personal experience of the physical and mental effects of normal imprisonment (Dr. Müller and Dr. Schröder).