SEVEN YEARS OF STRUGGLE AGAINST THE STATE

The Red Army Faction (RAF) had first announced itself in 1970, when a small group of radicals broke a young man out of jail.

Andreas Baader was serving a three-year sentence for having set a fire to a department store to protest the war in Vietnam. One of his rescuers, Gudrun Ensslin, had also participated in this political arson, and, as such, was also living underground at the time. Another rescuer, Ulrike Meinhof, was a well known left-wing social critic, a magazine journalist who had been finishing up a docudrama about girls in reform school. She was recognized and forced to go underground with the others.

The RAF made international headlines with this jailbreak, and the operation was hotly debated on the left.

Shortly thereafter, guerilla members travelled to Jordan, in the Middle East, where they received weapons training from the Palestinian group Al Fatah, part of the PLO. The RAF would make extensive use of various Arab countries as rear base areas throughout their existence, places where one could go not only for training, but also to hide when Europe got too "hot". As we shall see, this friendly relationship with Palestinian revolutionary organizations would have other consequences as well.

Upon their return to the FRG, the guerilla once again grabbed the public's attention, carrying out a series of bank robberies and preparing for campaigns to come.

Successfully evading police, the RAF began to take on the aura of folk heroes for many students and leftists who were glad to see someone taking things to the next level. Thousands of people secretly carried photographs of RAF members in their wallets. Time and time again, as the cops stepped up their search, members of the young guerilla group would find doors open to them as they were welcomed into people's homes, including those of not a few middle class sympathisers academics, doctors, even a clergyman. Newspapers at the time carried stories under headlines like "Celebrities Protect Baader Gang" and "Sympathizers Hamper Hunt for Baader Group."

An opinion poll revealed that "40 percent of respondents described the RAF's violence as political, not criminal, in motive; 20 percent indicated that they could understand efforts to protect fugitives from capture; and 6 percent confessed that they were themselves willing to conceal a fugitive."

Then, in May 1972, the group turned things up a notch, carrying out a series of bombings. Targets included police stations and U.S. army headquarters, to protest killer cops and the ongoing war in Vietnam. Four American soldiers were killed, and dozens of other people, including civilians, were injured. West Germany had never seen anything like it, and while many people may have been turned off by this escalation, others saw in these attacks an inspiring example of what could be done.

There followed a wave of repression as one hundred and thirty thousand cops, supported by both West German and U.S. intelligence units, set up checkpoints and carried out raids across the country.

Within a few weeks the leading members of the RAF — Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe and Ulrike Meinhof had all been captured. (It should be stressed: others were arrested too, and the RAF would always insist it had a non-hierarchical structure. Nevertheless, the focus on these five is warranted for the purposes of this pamphlet, for these were the individuals the state considered key to the organization, and all five would die in prison, as will be detailed below.)

The state was not content to simply remove the perceived guerilla leadership from the field. Instead, it hoped to render them ineffective not only as combatants, but also as spokespeople for anti-imperialist resistance. To this end, it set up special "dead wings" in which political prisoners were subjected to severe isolation and sensory deprivation, with the clear hope that if this did not induce them recant, it might at least drive them insane.

Yet, captured and isolated, the guerilla managed not only to survive, but in a sense even turned things around. There were dozens of RAF members in prison, and dozens more political prisoners from other groups. Through the strategic use of hunger strikes these captured combatants called attention not only to their conditions of incarceration, but also to their ideology of anti-imperialist armed struggle.

Prisoner support groups sprang up, and when Holger Meins died during a 1974 hunger strike, there were protests in cities across West Germany. The next day the 2nd of June Movement, a Berlin-based anarchist guerilla group, shot and killed the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court to avenge Meins and support the demands of the prisoners. Another judge had a bomb go off (harmlessly) outside his Hamburg residence, and there were eight firebombings in the university town of Gottingen.

Thousands met in university auditoriums in West Berlin to discuss possible responses, while thousands more braved the ban on demonstrations and took to the streets, battling police with stones and bottles. Protesters in Frankfurt and Mannheim smashed the windows of court buildings; even the Communist Party joined in, handing out fliers stating the obvious: "Holger Meins Murdered."

Three thousand people attended Meins' funeral in Mannheim a week later, including Rudi Dutschke. The former sixties leader, standing over the grave as Meins' casket was lowered, famously gave the clenched fist salute, crying, "Holger, the fight goes on!"

The prisoners' struggle would serve to gain the RAF more than just supporters. It would also win new recruits, as in the eyes of many German leftists the RAF came to symbolize resistance to the imperialist state, to the "new fascism."

Following the death of Meins, the prisoners would continue their hunger strike until the regenerated RAF issued a communiqué addressed to them, in which it ordered them to start eating again. The guerilla promised that they would carry out the necessary actions on behalf of the prisoners, explaining that it would be "our weapons which will decide it.

This would soon come to pass: on April 25, the RAF's "Holger Meins Commando" seized the top floor of the West German embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, taking twelve hostages. They demanded the release of twenty-six West German political prisoners, including Ensslin, Meinhof, Raspe, and Baader.

Swedish police rushed in, occupying the embassy's ground floor. They were repeatedly told to get out of the building, and the guerilla threatened to execute the FRG's Military Attaché if they did not do so. When the police failed to heed these warnings, Lieutenant Colonel Baron Andreas von Mirbach was shot through the head.

Seeing that the guerillas meant business, the police quickly vacated the premises, setting up their perimeter outside. A special intervention team was flown in from Hamburg, telephone lines to the embassy were cut, and the surrounding area was evacuated.

Under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the West German government refused to give in to the Commando's demands. For its part, the Swedish government tried to defuse the situation, offering them safe passage out of the country, but this was not acceptable: "It's useless, we're not negotiating," a guerilla spokesperson is said to have replied. "If our demands aren't met we shall shoot a hostage every hour. Victory or death!"

Slightly more than one hour later, at 10:20 pm, the Commando shot dead Economic Attaché Heinz Hillegaart.

Shortly before midnight, as police were preparing to storm the building, the explosives the guerilla had laid detonated. The state and media would claim that the explosives went off due to some error on the part of the commando; the guerilla would suggest that the police intentionally triggered the explosion. One RAF member, Ulrich Wessel, was killed on the spot. Police rushed in, and RAF members Siegfried Hausner, Hanna Krabbe, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, and Bernhard Rössner were all captured.

Despite the fact that he had a fractured skull and burns over most of his body, Hausner was only hospitalized for a few days. Then, despite objections from doctors in Sweden and Germany, he was flown to Stammheim Prison where he died soon after.

The state had attempted to capitalize on its initial capture of the guerilla, only to find that from within prison they had managed to inspire their successors. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt went so far as to state that "anarchist guerillas" now posed the greatest threat the Federal Republic had encountered during its twenty-six year history. Destroying the prisoners, or at least undercutting their support, became a top priority.

Fear mongering was stepped up; claims were made that the guerilla had nuclear weapons and was intent on kidnapping children to exchange for the prisoners. No claim was too preposterous, as those few who had broken were paraded out as state witnesses, alleging all kinds of horrors. Proof, or even mildly convincing evidence, was no longer deemed necessary.

Then on May 9, 1976, the state announced that Ulrike Meinhof had died in her cell, just as her trial was entering a critical phase. The authorities tried to spin a tale that Meinhof had committed suicide by hanging following a period of extreme depression provoked by tension between herself and her co-defendents, particularly between herself and Andreas Baader.

The prisoners, and most of the left, immediately denounced this as impossible, and did not hesitate to accuse the state of killing the woman who many viewed as the RAF's chief theoretician.

In Meinhof's own words, part of the court record the day before she was found dead, "It is, of course, a police tactic in counter-insurgency conflicts, in guerilla warfare, to take out the leaders."

Meinhof's sister, Inge Wienke Zitzlaff, similarly rejected the state's version of events. "My sister once told me very clearly she never would commit suicide," she remembered. "She said if it ever were reported that she killed herself then I would know she had been murdered."

An open letter signed by various intellectuals — including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir — compared Meinhof's death to the worst crimes of the Nazi era. Social and political prisoners in Berlin-Tegel Prison held a three-day hunger strike, and in Paris the offices of two West German steel companies were bombed, as was the German Cultural Center in Toulouse, and the German Academy and the West German Travel Bureau in Rome. Bombs went off in Munich outside the U.S. Armed Forces radio station and in a shopping center in the middle of the night. Thousands reacted with sorrow and rage, and demonstrations took place across West Germany.

Fighting was particularly fierce in Frankfurt; according to one police spokesperson, "the most brutal in the post-war history of the city." Following a rally, hundreds of people rampaged through the downtown area, breaking the windows at American Express and the America House cultural center, and setting up barricades and defending them against police water cannons with molotov cocktails. Twelve people were arrested and seven cops were injured, two of them seriously when their car was set ablaze as they sat in it.

On May 15, some 7,000 people, many with their faces blackened and heads covered to avoid identification by the police, attended Meinhof's funeral in West Berlin. Wienke Zitzlaff requested that in lieu of flowers donations be made to the prisoners' support campaign, and when they left the cemetery mourners joined with demonstrations in downtown West Berlin and at the Moabit courthouse where Meinhof had been sentenced two years earlier in a previous trial.

That same day there were bomb attacks in Hamm in North Rhine-Westphalia, and also in Rome and Zurich. Three days later there was another demonstration of 8,000 people in West Berlin, during which several police officers were injured. Bombs continued to go off in France, cars with German license plates and the offices of a right-wing newspaper being targeted. On June 2, the Revolutionary Cells bombed the U.S. Army Headquarters and U.S. Officers' Club in Frankfurt, carrying out the attack under the banner of the "Ulrike Meinhof Commando." That same day, just outside of the city, two fully loaded military trucks at a U.S. airbase were blown up.

An International Investigatory Commission into the Death of Ulrike Meinhof was formed; it took three years to release its findings, but in 1978 it claimed to have found evidence Meinhof had been brutally raped and murdered.

This then was the context in which the events of 1977 were to unfold. These were the guerilla and their supporters. This is what they had done. This is what the state had proven itself capable of.

But the story was far from over.

THE SUMMER OF 77: THE PRISONERS' STRUGGLE HEATS UP

By 1977, the Red Army Faction had managed to survive the arrests of its founding members five years earlier. Successfully countering isolation, psychological manipulation and sensory deprivation torture, the prisoners had in fact inspired their own successors, and through the strategic use of hunger strikes had come to symbolize resistance to the West German state and U.S. imperialism.

The prisoners' struggle was to remain central to the RAF throughout the decade, but at no point more so than in 1977.

On March 29 of that year, prisoners from the RAF and the anarchist 2nd of June Movement embarked upon their fourth hunger strike, demanding prisoner of war status, association in groups of no less than fifteen, an end to isolation, and an international investigation into the deaths of RAF prisoners in custody. Initially, thirty-five prisoners participated, but soon the number of prisoners refusing food surpassed one hundred and some prisoners escalated to refusing liquids.

The guerilla outside the prison walls was not going to let the prisoners wage this battle on their own. On April 7, as Attorney General Siegfried Buback was waiting at a traffic light in Karlsruhe, two individuals pulled up on a motorcycle alongside his Mercedes. Suddenly, one of them pulled out a submachine gun and fired, riddling the car with bullets.

As head of the Federal Prosecutor's Office, Buback bore direct responsibility for the prison conditions which had already claimed the lives of Ulrike Meinhof, Siegfried Hausner, and Holger Meins. It was in the name of the "Ulrike Meinhof Commando" that the RAF issued a communiqué claiming responsibility.

As has been noted elsewhere:

This attack marked a shift to a strategy that would be marked by an overwhelming focus on assassinations of key members of the state apparatus and the business elite. Although this might not have been recognized at the time, it was a shift to an entirely new phase in the RAF's practice.

Or, as one guerilla would later testify, the assassination "showed that we knew who they were, that we could attack them, and that there was nothing they could do to stop us."

Within a day police announced that Günter Sonnenberg, Knut Folkerts, and Christian Klar (formerly active in the prisoner support scene) were all sought in connection to the attack, a bounty of 200,000 marks ($88,000) being offered for their capture.

The hunger strike continued, the prisoners consolidating their support. Soon relatives of the prisoners began a solidarity strike, and on April 17, Peter's Church in Frankfurt was occupied and turned into a hunger strike information center. As the number of prisoners refusing food reached one hundred and twenty, more outside supporters began a second solidarity hunger strike in a Bielefeld Church. On April 27, relatives of political prisoners held a demonstration at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva demanding the application of the Geneva Convention. The next day, Amnesty International added its voice to that of eighty clergymen, one hundred and twenty-eight U.S. lawyers, one hundred French and Belgian lawyers and twenty-three English lawyers, all supporting the prisoners' demands.

Finally, on April 30, it was announced that the prisoners would be granted limited association. The seventh floor of Stammheim prison — where Baader, Raspe, and Ensslin were help along with RAF member Irmgard Möller — was soon being renovated to allow up to sixteen prisoners to be housed together. In response to this victory, the prisoners agreed to end their hunger strike.

On May 3, RAF members Günter Sonnenberg and Verena Becker were captured in the German-Swiss border town of Singen.

A woman had tipped off the police after spotting the two as they sat in a café: she recognized Sonnenberg from the wanted posters that had gone up throughout Western Europe after the Buback assassination.

When the police arrived on the scene the guerillas tried to play it cool, innocently pretending to have left their ID papers in their car. While being escorted from the café — presumably to retrieve these phantom ID papers — they drew their weapons and shot the two cops, commandeered a car and took off. Pursued by squad cars alerted to the incident, they took a wrong turn and ended up in a field, at which point they ditched their vehicle and tried to escape on foot.