The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (92 page)

July 27–August 3, 1994
RAF prisoners Manuela Happe, Eva Haule, Rolf Heissler, Sieglinde Hofmann, Christian Klar, Hanna Krabbe, Christine Kuby, Irmgard Möller, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Helmut Pohl, Adelheid Schulz, Rolf Clemens Wagner, and Birgit Hogefeld engage in a limited hunger strike demanding the release of Irmgard Möller who has been imprisoned since 1972. Although they refer to it as the RAF’s 11th collective hungerstrike, a number of prisoners do not participate, a further sign of the gravity of the split in the group.

December 1, 1994
RAF prisoner Irmgard Möller is released from prison.

1995
February 21, 1995
RAF prisoner Christine Kuby is released from prison.

April 25, 1995
RAF prisoner Manuela Happe is released from prison.

April 26, 1995
RAF prisoner Lutz Taufer is released from prison.

May 10, 1995
RAF prisoner Karl-Heinz Dellwo is released from prison.

September 5, 1995
On the basis of testimony from former RAF members arrested in the former GDR, the Düsseldorf OLG sentences RAF member Adelheid Schulz to life in prison in connection with the attack on U.S. General Frederick Kroesen.

September 26, 1995
On the basis of testimony from former RAF members arrested in the former East Germany, the Stuttgart OLG sentences RAF member Sieglinde Hofmann to life in prison for her role in the Schleyer kidnapping and execution.

November 13, 1995
RAF prisoner Knut Folkerts is released from prison.

1996
May 10, 1996
RAF prisoner Hanna Krabbe is released from prison.

November 5, 1996
Birgit Hogefeld is sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for fifteen years.

November 19, 1996
The Frankfurt OLG sentences PFLP (EO) member Souhaila Andrawes, the sole survivor of the Mogadishu hijacking, to twelve years in prison. After serving a year in prison in Somalia, Andrawes had moved to Oslo with her husband and daughter. Tracked down by German police in 1994, she was arrested and extradited to Germany in 1995. She serves six years of her sentence before being released due to ill health.

December 9, 1996
The left-wing daily newspaper
junge Welt
prints a letter from the RAF addressing the split in the RAF.

1997
January 1997
RAF prisoner Inge Viett is released from prison.

1998
March 13, 1998
Former RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock is released from prison.

April 20, 1998
The RAF issues a document entitled
Die Stadtguerilla in Form der raf ist nun Geschichte
(The Urban Guerilla in the Form of the RAF is Now History) announcing its dissolution. The document is dated March 1998.

June 1, 1998
RAF prisoner Helmut Pohl, who had suffered as stroke in May, is pardoned by President Roman Herzog and released from prison.

October 19, 1998
RAF prisoner Adelheid Schulz is released from prison due to ill health.

October 27, 1998
The SPD/Green party coalition government is formed with former
Jusos
leader Gerhard Schröder (SPD) as Chancellor,
former
sponti
leader Joschka Fischer (Green Party) as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and former RAF lawyer Otto Schily (SPD) as Minister of the Interior.

1999
March 1, 1999
RAF prisoner Stefan Wisniewski is released from prison. He continues to be subjected to parole conditions.

May 5, 1999
RAF prisoner Sieglinde Hofmann is released from prison. She continues to be subjected to parole conditions.

July 20, 1999
In Duisburg, an armoured car is attacked with a bazooka and robbed of an estimated one million DM. DNA evidence ties Daniela Klette and Ernst Volker Staub, RAF members still living underground, to the robbery. Another RAF member still at large, Burkhard Garweg, is also sought in connection with the robbery. The three remain at large.

September 15, 1999
In a shootout with police in Vienna, RAF member Horst Meyer is shot and killed and alleged RAF member Andrea Klump is arrested.

2001
May 15, 2001
The Stuttgart OLG sentences alleged RAF member Andrea Klump to nine years in prison in connection with an action in Spain and an action in Hungary, neither of which were carried out by the RAF. She remains in prison, but is not generally considered a RAF prisoner.

October 26, 2001
RAF prisoner Rolf Heissler is released from prison. He continues to be subjected to parole conditions.

2002
February 26, 2002
President Johannes Rau pardons RAF member Adelheid Schulz. Schulz, who was released from prison in 1998 for health reasons, remains in poor health.

2003
December 10, 2003
RAF prisoner Rolf Clemens Wagner is released from prison.

2007
January 13, 2007
Clergyman Heinrich Fink reads a message from RAF prisoner Christian Klar to the Rosa Luxemburg Conference in Berlin. In his message, Klar calls for
the continuing struggle against capitalism and for a more humane society.

February 26, 2007
The television news magazine
Report Mainz
(The Mainz Report) reports on RAF prisoner Christian Klar’s application for a presidential pardon, setting off a media debate.

March 25, 2007
RAF prisoner Brigitte Mohnhaupt is released from prison. She remains subject to parole conditions.

April 25, 2007
Attorney General Monika Harms launches an investigation into the allegations of former RAF members Peter-Jürgen Boock and Verena Becker that Stefan Wisniewski was the shooter in the Buback assassination.

May 7, 2007
Following a personal conversation with RAF prisoner Christian Klar, President Horst Köhler turns down Klar’s clemency request. He will also turn down a similar request from Birgit Hogefeld.

August 27, 2007
RAF prisoner Eva Haule is released from prison. She remains subject to parole conditions.

September 9–10, 2007
Special programming on ARD commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Schleyer kidnapping. Former RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock claims in an interview that Stefan Wisniewski and Rolf Heissler executed Schleyer in a wooded area in Alsace. He also claims that there were plans to kidnap then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

October 18, 2007
In an interview with
junge Welt
, Rolf Clemens Wagner expresses the opinion that even in retrospect, many RAF actions still seemed correct.
Bild Zeitung
and former Federal Minister of Defense (CDU) Rupert Scholz call for charges to be laid for “speech encouraging criminality” and “disparaging the memory of the dead,” but nothing comes of it.

2008
January 3, 2008
The Federal Supreme Court orders coercive detention for former RAF members Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Knut Folkerts, and Christian Klar to apply pressure to have them provide information regarding the assassination of Attorney General Siegfried Buback in 1977. The order is subsequently reversed. The case has been reopened on the basis of claims by former RAF members Peter-Jürgen Boock and Verena Becker that Stefan Wisniewski and not Knut Folkerts, who was convicted for the crime, was the shooter.

September 25, 2008
The German release of
Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex
, a film based on Stefan Aust’s book of the same name, and directed by Uli Eidel. Ronald Augustin criticizes the film for portraying Baader as a madman and all of the female guerillas as cold blooded killers.

December 19, 2008
Christian Klar is released from prison after 26 years. Birgit Hogefeld, who will reach her mandatory release date in 2011, remains the only RAF member in prison. A newspaper article reporting on a welcome home party held for Klar in Berlin a week after his release, quoted Inge Viett asserting that the guerrilla was “a reasonable expression of our resistance to capitalism” and that, in retrospect, she wishes they had carried out the guerilla struggle with more know-how, intelligence, patience, and support.

Obviously, many of the challenges in working on this book have stemmed from the nature of the organization we have chosen to study.

The Red Army Faction was not just a clandestine organization, but also a revolutionary communist one. As such, it faced not just state repression, but also actual historical suppression, not merely through “regular” police and paramilitary action, but also more subtly, through ideological attrition. The latter has sometimes taken the form of outright lies with their origin in psychological warfare, but just as insidious has been the unanimous, unexamined rejection of the group’s core beliefs on the part of all those who have studied it. As to those authors writing from an explicitly anti-left perspective, they have often been skeptical about the group’s political beliefs even being germane to its activities or history; for them the political verbiage simply provided cover for deranged crimes.

All works must at times rely on unverifiable assumptions or guesses. This is especially so when studying a clandestine organization, and some authors have clearly felt entitled to make a virtue of necessity, crafting the RAF’s narrative to suit their own political bias, which is more often than not the bias of those who pretend to have no bias at all.

Of course, we too have been forced to make guesses where there is no way of knowing for sure. We have tried, however, to always indicate where we are unsure, and our somewhat excessive use of footnotes is intended to give the reader an opportunity to see on what we are basing our assertions.

A further, at times bewildering, challenge in recovering the RAF’s history has been the fact that many authors seem to feel entitled to play very loose with facts both critical and incidental to this story. This kind of shoddy scholarship is a defining feature of the “real crime” and espionage genres, and in the case of a revolutionary organization, it is often compounded by fabrications planted by the state, which liberal scholars often seem unwilling to subject to the same hermeneutic of suspicion as claims made by the movement. We have found almost all of the state’s psychological warfare stories repeated in some place or another as if they were fact. In some cases, “plans” the state accused the RAF of having actually get promoted to actual events, i.e. we found
one mention of a RAF commando attacking a nuclear power plant in 1977—despite the fact that no such attack ever took place, as should be easy to verify from available public sources.

This basic intellectual corruption seems to come with a free pass to be less than rigorous regarding other facts as well; on several occasions, we found that authors would get people’s names wrong, dates wrong, and the basic facts about various actions wrong. Siegfried Hausner becomes “Wolfgang Hausner”, Andreas Baader dies on a hunger strike, supporters become members, the RZ and 2JM become the RAF … these are just some of the “facts” we have found in various “reputable” works.

In fairness, some authors seem to have sincerely tried to do their best. Others have done very well in general, only to falter when certain subjects are broached. And while almost all works we consulted start from assumptions that we eventually rejected, we nevertheless continued to consult, and to rely on, these works. That is to say, one or many errors, or an open right-wing bias, have not been enough to rule out our consulting a book or article, providing we could not find any other source contradicting it.

The internet is widely considered an unreliable source of information, and yet we have found it to be an excellent tool with which to cross-reference the various “facts” found in most accounts of the RAF story. Even such inherently problematic sources as Wikipedia have served as a crucial warning system to indicate where the extant narrative is missing information, or is in error. In many such cases, we would later find authoritative material indicating that the “unreliable” internet had in fact been correct where some “reputable” work had erred.

Finally, while we have been open about our bias, we should also admit that there are most likely errors and omissions in our work. We have tried our hardest to weed them out, but both as a result of the murky and often contradictory existing record, and as a result of our own inevitable mistakes, chances are, some have snuck in.

We hope, however, to have succeeded in providing a fair and accurate representation of the first part of the RAF saga.

Any note on sources would be remiss without pointing all readers to the incredible Rote Armee Fraktion Collection of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, maintained as an online archive by former RAF member Ronald Augustin. The collection includes tens of thousands of pages related to the RAF, including several books; while most of the documents are in German, some are in other languages, including English:

http://www.labourhistory.net/raf/index.php

A far more modest collection of RAF-related documents in English is available on the German Guerilla website:

http://www.germanguerilla.com

BOOKS

Abendroth, Wolfgang, Helmut Ridder and Otto Schonfeldt, eds.
KPD Verbot oder mit Kommunisten leben
. Hamburg: Rororo Taschenbuch Verlag, 1968.

Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee of the German Democratic Republic.
The Neo-colonialism of the West German Federal Republic
. Berlin: Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee of the German Democratic Republic, 1965.

Alexander, Robert J.
International Maoism in the developed world
. Westport, Conn.: Praeger,1999.

Ali, Tariq.
Street fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties
. New York, NY: Verso, 2005.