The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (81 page)

In order to appreciate the relationship between the West German radical left and the Palestinian resistance, it may be helpful to take a brief look at the history of West German support for Israel.

Although the two countries did not exchange embassies until the mid-1960s, there had been contact and cooperation well before then. Throughout this period, this contact was understandably marked by the recent genocide that had almost ended Jewish civilization in Europe, and had led to the creation of the Israeli colonial state in 1949. Contrary to expectations, however, the two countries would quickly become close allies, for regardless of the feelings of many citizens, each one had its own reasons to use the Holocaust as a stepping-stone to future goals.

The first official agreement between the two governments came about in 1952, when the FRG signed the Luxembourg Agreement, promising to deliver a total of three billion marks worth of reparations (mainly in the form of goods) to Israel over a period of fourteen years.
¹
The FRG was literally building the Israeli economy, helping to provide the west with its beachhead in the Middle East.

By the end of the decade, the Luxembourg Agreement was supplemented by a plan to give—not sell—arms and materiel to the Israeli military. What started as motor vehicles, training aircraft, and helicopters was soon extended to include anti-tank rockets and other shooting weapons.
²
By the mid-sixties, the FRG was delivering “aircraft including Noratlas transporters, Dornier DO-27 communication planes and French ‘Fouga Magister’ jet trainers, anti-aircraft guns with electronic homing devices, helicopters, howitzers, submarines, and speedboats.”
³
Some claimed that 5,000 Israeli officers and soldiers had been trained by the
Bundeswehr
in West Germany.
⁴

Right from its inception, Israel was engaged in ethnic cleansing: harassing, terrorizing, and murdering Palestinians in order to free up more land for Jewish settlers. Through its financial and military assistance, the FRG was directly complicit with this process, almost right from the start.

Unlike the reparations payments, the military aid and training was kept strictly secret. The Israeli government feared that its own population, which included a large number of Holocaust survivors, would vote them out of office if they learned that they were being armed and trained by the very Germans who so recently had carried out genocide against their people. The West German government was also wary of domestic repercussions, as the idea of getting involved in an international flashpoint like the Middle East was expected to be unpopular so soon after the Second World War. But much more importantly, the West German government was worried that such military support would alienate Arab governments, especially Egypt, perhaps even pushing them closer to the Soviet Bloc.

As it turns out, this is exactly what happened.

On October 26, 1964, the
Frankfurter Rundschau
broke the story. Despite initial denials from both Bonn and Tel Aviv, within days, both governments were forced to admit that military arms and training had been provided since 1959. Reaction across the Arab world was quick in coming, one Egyptian journalist observing that “Germany, who wants to make up for the sins of the Nazi regime, makes the Arabs pay with their security.”
⁵
Within a year, Egypt’s Nasser had arranged for the East German leader Walther Ulbricht to visit Cairo, and the FRG’s contacts throughout the Arab world suffered greatly.

Nevertheless, though the arms shipments were cut off in 1965, the FRG remained Israel’s staunchest European ally. The opportunity to prove this came soon enough.

On June 5, 1967, Israel attacked Egyptian forces in the Sinai and the Gaza Strip with air strikes and tanks, beginning what became known as the Six Day War. (Just two weeks previously, the FRG had delivered a final shipment of 800 troop transports.)
⁶
Soon, both Syria and Jordan entered the conflict in support of Egypt. Nevertheless, thanks
to its far greater military capacity, Israel quickly routed all three Arab armies, seizing the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. As a measure of the military imbalance, barely 1,000 Israeli soldiers lost their lives in this conflict, compared to over 11,000 Egyptians, 700 Jordanians, and 2,500 Syrians.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the newly occupied territories, swelling the numbers in the hellish Jordanian refugee camps, while over 600,000 remained as newly colonized subjects of the racist Israeli state.

Back in the FRG, the Six Day War provided the occasion for a strangely unhealthy—but highly revealing—identification with the Israeli aggressors. The SPD, the CDU, and the Springer Press all went into overdrive, whipping up war frenzy throughout the country, even as Bonn professed that it would not intervene. As Chancellor Kiesinger, the former Nazi, explained it, “our non-intervention, i.e. neutrality in the sense of international law, cannot mean moral indifference or indolence of the heart.”
¹

City governments sent hundreds of thousands of marks in donations, and hundreds of thousands more were contributed by individual citizens to the German-Israeli Society,
²
while the West German Federation of Trade Unions invested three million marks in Israeli bonds, “as a visible expression of solidarity with and confidence in Israel.”
³
Parallel to this, development aid credits to Israel’s Arab neighbors were frozen and German development aid workers were flown home.
⁴

Hundreds of volunteers were recruited and flown from Munich and the NATO Rhine-Main Airport to support Israel in the war zone.
⁵
While the West German government insisted that these volunteers were only engaged in “non-military” activities, East German newspapers claimed that many were in fact serving as soldiers.
⁶

In newspapers and magazines, most especially the Springer Press, the Israeli attack was described in eerily nostalgic terms. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was praised as a new “desert fox,”
⁷
a term that had previously
been reserved for Erwin Rommel, Hitler’s Commander-in-Chief in North Africa. Israel was now the “brother nation,” with the Israelis dubbed the “Prussians of the Middle East,” and Jerusalem being “the Berlin of the Middle East.”
⁸
The Israeli offensive was approvingly referred to as a “Blitzkrieg,” and in
Spiegel
it was announced that “Jews are not as anti-Semites wanted to see them. On the contrary, danger seems not to develop the evil but the noble qualities”—which is the kind of compliment that isn’t one, when you think about it. A
Die Welt
writer was similarly forthright, admitting that Israel had “overcome our anti-Semitism.”
⁹

Other than actual neo-nazis, the only German support for the Palestinian side at this time came from the APO. The SDS was already pro-Palestinian,
¹⁰
but it was this war frenzy that pushed the entire New Left to become anti-Zionist.
¹¹
This fact, along with the odd identification with Israel on the part of the militaristic German right-wing, should be remembered when considering the assertion comrades would soon make that Israel represented the “new Nazism”: while obviously incorrect, such a claim was at least partly a reaction against a reinvigorated German chauvinism projecting itself onto the racist Jewish state.

As such, anti-Zionism became a defining element of the radical left, and, as the 1970s dawned, it was shared by the K-groups, the
spontis
, and most certainly the guerilla.

Art. 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

1. (1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) taking of hostages;

(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for. An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.

The Parties to the conflict should further endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the present Convention.

The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.

Art. 4. Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.

Nationals of a State which is not bound by the Convention are not protected by it. Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are.

The provisions of Part II are, however, wider in application, as defined in Article 13.

Persons protected by the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field of 12 August 1949, or by the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea of 12 August 1949, or by the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of 12 August 1949, shall not be considered as protected persons within the meaning of the present Convention.

Art. 13. The provisions of Part II cover the whole of the populations of the countries in conflict, without any adverse distinction based, in particular, on race, nationality, religion or political opinion, and are intended to alleviate the sufferings caused by war.

Art. 17. The Parties to the conflict shall endeavour to conclude local agreements for the removal from besieged or encircled areas, of wounded, sick, infirm, and aged persons, children and maternity cases, and for the passage of ministers of all religions, medical personnel and medical equipment on their way to such areas.

Art. 130. The detaining authorities shall ensure that internees who die while interned are honourably buried, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged and that their graves are respected, properly maintained, and marked in such a way that they can always be recognized.

Deceased internees shall be buried in individual graves unless unavoidable circumstances require the use of collective graves. Bodies may be cremated only for imperative reasons of hygiene, on account
of the religion of the deceased or in accordance with his expressed wish to this effect. In case of cremation, the fact shall be stated and the reasons given in the death certificate of the deceased. The ashes shall be retained for safe-keeping by the detaining authorities and shall be transferred as soon as possible to the next of kin on their request.

As soon as circumstances permit, and not later than the close of hostilities, the Detaining Power shall forward lists of graves of deceased internees to the Powers on whom deceased internees depended, through the Information Bureaux provided for in Article 136. Such lists shall include all particulars necessary for the identification of the deceased internees, as well as the exact location of their graves.

A former
Spiegel
journalist, Peter Homann was amongst those who traveled to Jordan for training in 1970. According to his friend Stefan Aust, also a friend of Ulrike Meinhof when she worked at
konkret
, Homann had become estranged from the RAF at this time, and the group had even threatened to execute him.

Even more outrageously, upon his return Homann claimed to have learned of a harebrained plan to send Ulrike Meinhof’s seven-year-old twin daughters to be raised as orphans in Al Fatah’s Children’s Home in Amman.

Homann apparently informed Aust of this bizarre plan, and the two men set about tracking down the Meinhof twins, eventually finding them in the care of some Italian hippies. The twins were rescued and sent back to live with their father Klaus Rainer Röhl in the FRG. According to Aust, the RAF subsequently tried to kill Homann as revenge for this intervention.

This story became quite well known following the publication of Aust’s book
Der Baader-Meinhof Komplexe
in 1985, a massive tome that quickly became the standard reference for the RAF’s history up to 1977.
¹
By that time, many of those who could either confirm or deny these allegations were no longer alive.

As such, and with some consternation, even sympathizers were left with no choice but to believe this version of events. Whether one supported the RAF or not, it seemed clear that the group had embarked upon a very bad childcare strategy to say the least. Even those who did not like Aust’s politics could nevertheless be glad that he and Homann had acted when they did.