Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 1: Projectiles for the People

By J. Smith, André Moncourt and Ward Churchill

The long-awaited Volume 2 of the first-ever English-language study of the Red Army Faction—West Germany’s most notorious urban guerillas—covers the period immediately following the organization’s near-total decimation in 1977. This work includes the details of the guerilla’s operations, and its communiqués and texts, from 1978 up until the 1984 offensive.

This was a period of regrouping and reorientation for the RAF, with its previous focus on freeing its prisoners replaced by an anti-NATO orientation. This was in response to the emergence of a new radical youth movement in the Federal Republic, the Autonomen, and an attempt to renew its ties to the radical left. The possibilities and perils of an armed underground organization relating to the broader movement are examined, and the RAF’s approach is contrasted to the more fluid and flexible practice of the Revolutionary Cells. At the same time, the history of the 2nd of June Movement (2JM), an eclectic guerilla group with its roots in West Berlin, is also evaluated, especially in light of the split that led to some 2JM members officially disbanding the organization and rallying to the RAF. Finally, the RAF’s relationship to the East German Stasi is examined, as is the abortive attempt by West Germany’s liberal intelligentsia to defuse the armed struggle during Gerhard Baum’s tenure as Minister of the Interior.

Dancing with Imperialism will be required reading for students of the First World guerilla, those with interest in the history of European protest movements, and all who wish to understand the challenges of revolutionary struggle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PM Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781604868937

Ward Churchill

Ward Churchill was, until moving to Atlanta in 2012, a member of the leadership council of Colorado AIM. He is a life member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and currently a member of the elders council of the original Rainbow Coalition, founded by Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969. Now retired, Churchill was professor of American Indian Studies and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies until 2005, when he became the focus of a major academic freedom case. Among his two dozen books are Wielding Words Like Weapons and Pacifism as Pathology.

Book preview

This book about the Red Army Faction of American-occupied Germany is one that should be read by any serious student of anti-imperialist politics. Volume 1: Projectiles for the People provides a history of the RAF’s development through the words of its letters and communiqués. What makes the book especially important and relevant, however, is the careful research and documentation done by its editors. From this book you will learn the mistakes of a group that was both large and strong, but which (like our own home-grown attempts in this regard) was unable to successfully communicate with the working class of a democratic country on a level that met their needs. While the armed struggle can be the seed of something much larger, it is also another means of reaching out and communicating with the people. Students interested in this historic era would do well to study this book and to internalize both the successes and failures of one of the largest organized armed anti-imperialist organizations operating in Western Europe since World War II.

—Ed Mead, former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade

Clear-headed and meticulously researched, this book deftly avoids many of the problems that plagued earlier attempts to tell the brief but enduring history of the RAF. It offers a remarkable wealth of source material in the form of statements and letters from the combatants, yet the authors manage to present it in a way that is both coherent and engaging. Evidence of brutal—and ultimately ineffective—attempts by the state to silence the voices of political prisoners serve as a timely and powerful reminder of the continued need for anti-imperialist prisoners as leaders in our movements today. At once informative and inspirational, this is a much-needed contribution to the analysis of armed struggle and the cycles of repression and resistance in Europe and around the world.

—Sara Falconer, Toronto Anarchist Black Cross Federation

This first volume about the RAF is about a part of WWII that did not end when the so called allies defeated the nazis. The RAF warriors come from a strong socialist history and knew they were fighting for the very life of their country. Many victories and many errors were scored which provide this important look into REAL her/history lessons. A must read for all serious alternative history students who then in turn can use it as a teaching tool towards a better future.

—b (r.d. brown), former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade

Starting in the Sixties, a new revolutionary strategy began to plague the capitalist metropolis—the urban guerilla. Warfare once waged by peasant armies in the countryside of a Cuba, a China, or a Guinea-Bissau, was suddenly transferred to small cells of ex-students in the imperialist centers of Berlin, Rome, and New York. No urban guerrillas became more famed or more demonized than West Germany’s Red Army Faction (RAF). We knew their signature bold actions in the headlines: from the damaging bombing of the u.s. army V Corps headquarters in Frankfurt in 1972, in response to Washington’s mining of Hanoi’s harbor in an escalation of the Vietnam War, to the kidnapping and later execution of the head of the West German industrialists’ association, in an effort to negotiate for the release of revolutionary prisoners. But we never heard their political voices. Since the RAF’s political statements, debates, and communiqués were untranslated and unavailable in English even within the left.

Now, at last, a significant documentary history of the RAF has come into the spotlight, complete with a readable account of the postwar German New Left from which it emerged. Even better, this work was done by editors/translators who reject the obedient capitalist media’s trivializing of the RAF as pathological death-wishing celebrities. In their hands, the words of the RAF are revealed as serious responses to the failure of parliamentary reformism, trade-unionism, and pacifism, to stop the solidification of Germany’s own form of a neofascist capitalism (lightly cosmeticized with a layer of that numbing consumer democracy). The young RAF fighters hoped for liberation in their dangerous experiment but were willing to accept tragic consequences, and their story is emotionally difficult to read with eyes open. Controversial as the RAF was, their systematic torture in special anti-terrorist facilities stirred worldwide unease and even protest. In fact, those special prisons were the eagerly studied forerunners for the u.s. empire’s own latest human rights abuses, from Guantanamo to the domestic maxi-maxi prisons. We all and the RAF are much closer than the capitalist public wants to believe. It is all here, in this first volume of the Red Army Faction documentary histories, and we should thank all those who worked on this book.

—J. Sakai, author of Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat

THE RED ARMY FACTION:

A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY

VOLUME I

PROJECTILES for the PEOPLE

THE RED ARMY FACTION:

A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY

VOLUME I

PROJECTILES for the PEOPLE

forewords by Bill Dunne and Russell Maroon Shoats

introductory texts and translations by

André Moncourt and J. Smith

the red army faction: a documentary history

volume 1: projectiles for the people

introductory texts and translations by André Moncourt and J. Smith

The opening epigram on page v is from Karl-Heinz Dellwo "Kein Ankommen,

kein Zurück" in Nach dem bewaffneten Kampf, Angelika Holderberg ed. (Gießen:

Psychsozial-Verlag, 2007).

ISBN: 978-1-60486-029-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008929110

Copyright 2009 Kersplebedeb

This edition copyright 2009 PM Press and Kersplebedeb

Many of the translated texts in this book

are available online at www.germanguerilla.com

Kersplebedeb Publishing and Distribution

CP 63560

CCCP Van Horne

Montreal, Quebec

Canada H3W 3H8

www.kersplebedeb.com

PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

Layout and Index by Kersplebedeb

Cover Design: Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org

The photo used on the front cover is of the funeral of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe in 1977.

Printed in the United States on recycled paper

dedicated to the memory of Jim Campbell

We are a projectile, Andreas Baader wrote to the group,

thereby articulating an ethical point of view in which the

subject and his objective became a single thing. It also meant

that if no further separation existed between the subject and

object it was obvious how it would end: in death.

Karl-Heinz Dellwo

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY BILL DUNNE

A WORD FROM RUSSELL MAROON SHOATS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

PREFACE

ACRONYM KEY

GERMAN TERMS

1 DEMOCRACY COMES TO DEUTSCHLAND:

POSTFASCIST GERMANY AND THE

CONTINUING APPEAL OF IMPERIALISM

not wanted in the model: the kpd

2 THE RE-EMERGENCE OF

REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS IN WEST GERMANY

the old left and the new reality

3 TAKING UP THE GUN

Faced With This Justice System, We Can’t Be Bothered Defending Ourselves

(Thorwald Proll, October 1968)

Build the Red Army! (June 5, 1970)

The Urban Guerilla Concept (April 1971)

4 BUILDING A BASE AND SERVING THE PEOPLE

the socialist patients’ collective

Andreas Baader: Letter to the Press (January 24, 1972)

Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle (April 1972)

on the treatment of traitors

This is Edelgard Graefer… (March 27, 1972)

5 THE MAY OFFENSIVE:

BRINGING THE WAR HOME

For the Victory of the People of Vietnam (May 14, 1972)

Attacks in Augsburg and Munich (May 16, 1972)

Attack on Judge Buddenberg (May 20, 1972)

Attack on the Springer Building (May 20, 1972)

Attack on the Heidelberg Headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe (May 25, 1972)

To the News Editors of the West German Press (May 28, 1972)

Regarding the Fascist Bomb Threats Against Stuttgart (May 29, 1972)

Statement to the Red Aid Teach-In (May 31, 1972)

6 BLACK SEPTEMBER:

A STATEMENT FROM BEHIND BARS

the appeal of the fedayeen: to all the free people of the world

The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle (November 1972)

7 STAYING ALIVE: SENSORY DEPRIVATION,

TORTURE, AND THE STRUGGLE BEHIND BARS

the lawyers

horst mahler after the raf

Ulrike Meinhof on the Dead Wing (1972–3, 1973–4)

Second Hunger Strike (May 8, 1973)

Provisional Program of Struggle for the Political Rights of Imprisoned Workers (September 1974)

Third Hunger Strike (September 13, 1974)

The Expulsion of Horst Mahler (Monika Berberich, September 27, 1974)

Holger Meins’ Report on Force-Feeding (October 11, 1974)

Holger Meins’ Last Letter (November 1, 1974)

Interview with Spiegel Magazine (January 1975)

Andreas Baader Regarding Torture (June 18, 1975)

8 A DESPERATE BID TO FREE THE PRISONERS:

THE STOCKHOLM ACTION

Letter from the RAF to the RAF Prisoners (February 2, 1975)

Occupation of the West German Embassy in Stockholm (April 24, 1975)

Defense Attorney Siegfried Haag Goes Underground (May 11, 1975)

9 SHADOW BOXING:

COUNTERING PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

We know why he’s saying it (Brigitte Mohnhaupt, July 22, 1976)

On the Liberation of Andreas Baader (Ulrike Meinhof, September 13, 1974)

The Bombing of the Bremen Train Station (December 9, 1974)

The Nature of the Stammheim Trial: The Prisoners Testify (August 19, 1975)

No Bomb in Munich Central Station (September 14, 1975)

The Bombing of the Hamburg Train Station (September 23, 1975)

The Bombing of the Cologne Train Station (November 1975)

10 THE MURDER OF ULRIKE MEINHOF

ulrike’s brain

meinhof: the suicide-murder debate

Jan-Carl Raspe: On the Murder of Ulrike Meinhof (May 11, 1976)

Fragment Regarding Structure (Ulrike Meinhof, 1976)

Two Letters to Hanna Krabbe (Ulrike Meinhof, March 19 & 23, 1976)

Letter to the Hamburg Prisoners (Ulrike Meinhof, April 13, 1976)

Interview with Le Monde Diplomatique (June 10, 1976)

11 MEANWHILE, ELSEWHERE ON THE LEFT…

(AN INTERMISSION OF SORTS)

12 & BACK TO THE RAF…

RZ Letter to the RAF Comrades (December 1976)

Monika Berberich Responds to the Alleged RZ Letter (January 10, 1977)

Andreas Baader: On the Geneva Convention (June 2, 1977)

13 DARING TO STRUGGLE, FAILING TO WIN

Fourth Hunger Strike (March 29, 1977)

The Assassination of Attorney General Siegfried Buback (April 7, 1977)

Statement Calling Off the Fourth Hunger Strike (April 30, 1977)

The Assassination of Jürgen Ponto (August 14, 1977)

Statement Breaking Off the Fifth Hunger Strike (September 2, 1977)

The Attack on the BAW (September 3, 1977)

The Schleyer Communiqués (September–October, 1977)

Operation Kofr Kaddum (SAWIO, October 13, 1977)

SAWIO Ultimatum (October 13, 1977)

Final Schleyer Communiqué (October 19, 1977)

77: living with the fallout

14 THE STAMMHEIM DEATHS

15 ON THE DEFENSIVE

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I: EXCERPTS FROM THE

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG

APPENDIX II: THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION

OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE RAF PRISONERS

APPENDIX III: THE FRG AND THE STATE OF ISRAEL

APPENDIX IV: THE GENEVA CONVENTION: EXCERPTS

APPENDIX V: STRANGE STORIES:

PETER HOMANN AND STEFAN AUST

APPENDIX VI: THE GERMAN GUERILLA’S

PALESTINIAN ALLIES: WADDI HADDAD’S PFLP (EO)

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

ARMED STRUGGLE IN W. GERMANY: A CHRONOLOGY

NOTE ON SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

FOREWORD BY BILL DUNNE

Projectiles for the People, Volume One of The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History, is an important exposition of what it means to wage armed struggle as an urban guerilla in the post WWII western imperial-capitalist paradigm. Via the fast-turning pages of Projectiles, Smith and Moncourt usher us through the RAF’s emergence in Germany from a moribund and constrained left opposition misdirected and suppressed by U.S. imperialism and a quisling bourgeoisie. The RAF’s projectiles for the people documented their political, practical, intellectual, and emotional trajectory into taking up and using the gun in service of revolutionary communist class war. Projectiles brings us their voices and links their context to ours.

Projectiles shows us how the RAF engaged in people’s warfare without descending into adventurism. It reveals how the guerilla was able to work with apparently unlikely allies and eschew involvement with ostensibly likely ones based on sophisticated analysis of the demands of conditions, time, and place. It illustrates how the comrades were able to internalize the trauma of frequently fatal mistakes and defeats as well as the euphoria of correct practice and victories. It explains how the organization recognized and responded to the enemy’s slanderous campaign of vilification aimed at creating a false opposition to the underground. Projectiles, in this exploration of these and many other elements of RAF praxis, thus illustrates that and how the RAF developed arguably the highest expression of armed struggle in the late capitalist first world.

Projectiles for the People is more than a dry historical treatise, however; it is a highly accessible rendition of a story of struggle that puts us into both the thought and the action. That placement conveys more than a sense or understanding of the RAF’s praxis. It transmits a connection in a visceral way. Not since reading Ten Days that Shook the World have I been so drawn into a political narrative. Reading like a historical thriller notwithstanding, Projectiles lets us see a rare confluence of theory and practice of which anyone who aspires to make revolution should be aware. The RAF may no longer be with us, but it has prepared the ground for and can yet aid the current movement for the most equitable social reality in which all people will have the greatest possible freedom to develop their full human potential. Nowhere else has the RAF’s life, times, and legacy been so clearly laid out.

A WORD FROM RUSSELL MAROON SHOATS

In today’s world ANYONE who dares to raise their voice against ANYTHING being heaped on them by those in power needs to read this book. The repressive methods that the West German state brought to bear against the RAF—detailed by the authors—have been adopted, universalized, and refined, and can be found in use in a prison, jail, detention center or other holding facility not far from you.

In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, world-wide capital—led by U.S. imperialism—is possibly in the endgame struggle, not of Marx’s Socialism or Barbarism, but of what is beginning to be understood by a majority of our planet’s humans: 21st century capitalism/imperialism… equals EXTERMINISM!

The prison isolation and torture methods detailed in this volume are one of the repressive forces’ last ditch efforts to arrest the global material forces that signal their demise.

After being subjected to similar methods of isolation and torture for decades, I can only offer one piece of advice: either stand up and struggle against this monster—and face the horrors detailed in this book—or lay down and accept the idea (and reality) that 21st century capital/imperialism—unchecked—will destroy EVERYTHING it comes into contact with.

Bill Dunne was captured on October 14, 1979. He had been shot three times by police, and according to the state had been involved in an attempt to break a comrade out of the Seattle jail, as part of an unnamed anarchist collective. In 1980, he received a ninety-five-year sentence, and in 1983 had a consecutive fifteen years with five concurrent added due to an attempted escape. As he has stated, The aggregate 105 years is a ‘parole when they feel like it’ sort of sentence.

In 1970, Russell Maroon Shoats was accused of an attack on a Philadelphia police station in which an officer was killed. He went underground, functioning for eighteen months as a soldier in the Black Liberation Army. In 1972, he was captured and sentenced to multiple life sentences. He escaped twice—in 1977 and 1980—but both times was recaptured. Most of his time in prison, including at present, has been spent in isolation conditions, locked down 22 to 24 hours a day.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many, many people were very helpful to us as we worked on this book.

Many, many more had already laid the basis for our study through years of hard work providing a voice for the underground. In the days before the internet, a number of movement publications took responsibility for translating and distributing texts by illegal groups like the Red Army Faction. In this regard, we would like to thank those who worked on Resistance (based in Vancouver, Canada in the 1980s), Arm the Spirit (based in Toronto, Canada in the 1990s), and l’Internationale (based in France, 1983-1984). While it did not specifically focus on the guerilla, the Toronto-based newspaper Prison News Service, which appeared in the 1980s and early 1990s, is worth also mentioning in this regard.

We must certainly thank Maspero, the French publisher, several of whose books were of great use to us, as well as Nadir, Extremismus, Zeitgesichte, and the Marxist Internet Archive, all of which maintain excellent websites.

Anthony Murphy translated the RAF’s The Urban Guerilla Concept in 2003; while we did not end up using his version, we are nevertheless grateful for his work and assistance.

This project would have been impossible in its present form if not for the excellent Rote Armee Fraktion Collection of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, maintained online as an archive by former RAF member Ronald Augustin. We are grateful to both the IISH and to Augustin in particular.

Many of the graphics in this book come from the book and CD Vorwärts bis zum nieder mit, compiled by Sebastian Haunss, Markus Mohr, and Klaus Viehmann from a variety of archives and published by Verlag Assoziation A. The interested reader can view the entire contents of this CD online at http://plakat.nadir.org/. All those involved in producing this artwork, and the book and website in question, have our thanks.

Dan Berger and Matthew Lyons provided very useful feedback to earlier drafts of our text. Henning Böke, Jutta Ditfurth, comrades from the Parti Communiste Marxiste-Léniniste-Maoïste, members of the Leftist Trainspotters and Marxmail email lists, all provided very useful answers to questions regarding the West German radical left and the guerilla. Muhammad Abu Nasr provided helpful insight into the Palestinian resistance, specifically around the Black September action in Munich. Romy Ruukel provided much needed help and advice, proof reading the text and teaching us how to compile a bibliography. Many others provided great assistance to us in this project, yet would rather not be named here. They too have our thanks.

It should go without saying that none of these individuals or groups are likely to agree with everything we have stated in this book, nor do they necessarily approve of the conclusions we have drawn. It goes without saying that they have no responsibility for any errors contained herein.

Finally, and with our tongues planted firmly in our cheeks, we would like to thank the U.S. military for creating the internet, without which this project might not have been possible.

TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

In preparing these texts, we consulted the many existent versions in both French and English. However, in each case these translations were found to have serious shortcomings. Not surprisingly, many of them, the work of committed activists whose grasp of German was limited, were marred by erroneous translation—usually these errors were predictable given the complexity of the German language. In no few cases, segments of the original text were found to be missing from the available translations. It was also not uncommon to encounter what might best be called transliteration—the translator adjusted concepts to suit the milieu for which he or she was translating the document. The end result of this latter phenomenon was often, however unintentional, the ideological distortion of the original document—usually only slight in nature, but occasionally egregious. Perhaps the oddest thing we encountered on more than a few occasions was the existence of accretions in the translated documents we referred to; usually only a phrase or a sentence or two, but occasionally entire paragraphs.

After several months of poring over the existing translations, hoping to tweak them into publishable shape (about two thirds of the documents in this book existed in some form of translation in the two languages accessible to us), we were obliged to accept the inevitable: all of the documents we hoped to use would have to be checked against the originals before going to publication. Then began the task of hunting down the originals, a process greatly facilitated by the existence of several online sources, including an indispensible website maintained by former RAF prisoner Ronald Augustin.¹ Of no less importance was the discovery, in pdf form, of the entire 1997 ID-Verlag book, Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF on the Nadir website.² With these two resources in hand, we had all the documents we needed to complete this book save a small handful that we tracked down elsewhere.

The process of translation we used was to some degree unique. Only one of the two translators was actually conversant in German, and so it fell to him to prepare the translations. Once a document was translated, he would forward it to the other translator who would meticulously examine it and make suggestions for improving (de-Germanizing) the English used. These suggested changes—always numerous—would then be checked against the original to assure that the intent was not being skewed. This process would usually involve two or three rounds of the document going back and forth between the translators, before a finalized version acceptable to both of us was arrived at. On three occasions, each involving a single sentence, neither of us was happy with the other’s proposal and so a compromise had to be arrived at—this would affect in total approximately a half a page of the book you are holding. The end result was that no document in this book was examined fewer than three times and most of the major ones were examined at least five or six times.

Are we saying that these translations are perfect? Undoubtedly not. In a project of this grandeur, involving the translation of between four and five hundred pages, disagreements about decisions we made and interpretations we arrived at are de facto inevitable, as are errors—hopefully none of them significant.

That said, we are confident that the documents in this book accurately represent the history and the ideology of the Red Army Faction and provide the reader with a resource unparalleled elsewhere in English.

Before closing one other issue cries out to be addressed. We refer to this work as the complete texts of the Red Army Faction. The meaning of that statement seems indisputable, but that is not the case, and so we must explain what we mean by complete. To the best of our knowledge, we have included every document issued by the RAF in its close to thirty-year history in either this volume (1968-1977) or the forthcoming second volume (1978-1998). By this, we mean every theoretical manifesto, every communiqué accompanying an action, and every letter sent by the organization to the media.

After some discussion we decided not to include Über den bewaffneten Kampf in Westeuropa (Regarding the Armed Struggle in West Europe) penned by Horst Mahler. This 1971 document, a sprawling theoretical text, was rejected by the other members of the RAF and played no small role in the decision to expel Mahler from the group—making him the only member ever publicly expelled. (The interested reader proficient in German will have no difficulty finding this document online, including in the aforementioned ID-Verlag book.)

We also did not include, with several exceptions, letters written by imprisoned RAF members. There are literally thousands of them, a significant selection of which have been published in German in a book entitled Das Info, edited by former lawyer to RAF prisoners Pieter Bakker Schut. This book can be found in its entirety on the site maintained by Augustin, as can Bakker Schut’s invaluable historical analysis of the Stammheim trial, simply entitled Stammheim. Nor did we publish, with the exception of a handful, any of the hundreds of court statements, often of epic length, made by RAF defendants over the years. In the cases where we did choose to publish a letter or a court statement, it was because the document in question filled out some theoretical or historical aspect of the RAF’s history that we felt was not adequately addressed elsewhere. This is also true of the open letter from the RZ to the RAF that we publish in this volume—a number of similar documents from other German and European guerilla groups will appear in the second volume of this work.

PREFACE

The book you hold in your hands, along with its companion volume, constitute the most complete works and history of the Red Army Faction ever published in the English language.

The Red Army Faction was formed in 1970 when a small group of West German revolutionaries decided to go underground and carry out armed actions against U.S. imperialism. Within a few years, almost all of the original members were either dead or captured, yet the harsh treatment the latter received as prisoners garnered them a degree of sympathy, and their own unflagging resistance earned them the respect of many.

Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that they captured the imagination of a generation of West German youth. Certainly, before they fell, they had already succeeded in inspiring others to pick up their banner.

In fact, the RAF was to remain a factor in German politics for almost thirty years as successive waves of radicals extended the struggle, carrying out increasingly sophisticated and daring campaigns of assassination and bombings against key members of the West German ruling class and American armed forces stationed in the Federal Republic. On more than one occasion, they shook their society to its core, baiting its ruling class into dictatorial reactions that shocked the consciences of even their own supporters. Eventually, the RAF became emblematic of the euro-terrorism of the 1970s and 80s, yet like so many things that are emblematic, it was never typical of that which it represented.

In its halcyon days, many people considered the guerilla a legitimate political force, and one can read reports of soccer fans wearing RAF insignia and of young people secretly keeping photos clipped from wanted posters in their wallets. As this naïve and romantic honeymoon period faded, the group became the object of mass hatred and hysteria, the most egregious example of things going too far, of people losing their moral compass.

As with any powerful symbol, for much of its history what seemed most important about the RAF was what people thought about it. For many, fascination with the group grew out of a fascination with its founding members. In the 1960s, Ulrike Meinhof was already a well known journalist who seemed able to combine radical politics with an increasingly successful career. At the same time, Andreas Baader had a reputation for being the charming rogue of the Berlin hipster scene, his panache enhanced as he and a group of his friends were brought to trial for firebombing a Frankfurt department store.

People may not have agreed with what they did next, or with why they did it, but if nothing else, the misnamed Baader-Meinhof Gang had style, and as the media played up every detail and the old fogies in power got more and more freaked out, they were briefly loved for simply being the most hardcore urban guerillas around.

Much could be written about this bizarre fascination, this production of guerilla cachet, but to do so would be to write a cultural history, and we intend something else altogether.

Except in passing, these books will not deal with the private lives or personalities of the RAF combatants. How the guerillas got along with their parents, friends, or each other is not really our concern. We will not concentrate on the kind of cars they liked or their taste in music or what kind of childhood they had. We will not guess at who was nice and who was a prick, or go over who slept with whom, or catalog the names people called each other when they were arguing.

To have to provide such a disclaimer may seem absurd, for most political histories pass over such details as a matter of course. Yet, a brief survey of the few books available about the RAF will show that these questions have been the major preoccupation of almost anyone who has approached this subject. Nor are we unaware of the point that the RAF prisoners themselves would make on more than one occasion: that efforts to explain their actions in psychological terms were part of a conscious state strategy of pathologizing them and their politics, or at least shifting people’s attention onto trivial and often fabricated personal details. While there are things we consider mistaken in the RAF’s broader analysis, on this question they appear to have been 100% correct.

While the personal may be political, we believe that the RAF’s greatest significance is not to be found in the part it played in the individual lives of its members or supporters. Rather, to appreciate what it was and what it meant, and as a first step towards being able to evaluate its praxis, the RAF must be placed within the context of left-wing revolutionary struggle in the First World at a very particular point in time. As such, we are most interested in the group’s ideas, its line as established in its communiqués and other documents, how it put this line into practice through its actions and campaigns, and the relationship the group enjoyed with its supporters and other leftists.

Some may accuse us of being uncritical, or of even supporting the RAF’s politics and their practice. We would answer that in order to be critical one must first be in possession of the facts. While we consider questions of morality and means and ends to be very important, given that this is the first time most of this material has been made available to English-readers, we prefer not to muddy the waters by condemning or praising the guerilla every step of the way.

Certainly we will offer no blanket denunciation—nor will we indulge in cheap praise. What has been written so far is replete with judgment, and often contains very little factual content or political analysis. We hope with these books to do our small part in correcting this imbalance.

In order for the guerilla’s actions and statements to be at all comprehensible, they need to be placed in the context of their times and of the wider left-wing movement in West Germany. Even as these events were unfolding, this context was not well understood by many of us in North America; now, decades later, it is even harder to grasp. For that reason, we have provided two background chapters providing an overview of postwar West Germany, as well as a series of introductory texts to the different documents from the guerilla. These are overviews and as will be clear, they have been written from a particular perspective. It is here that our analysis most obviously departs from that of the RAF, our sympathy for many of its aims notwithstanding.

We offer these documents to the comrades of today—and to the comrades of tomorrow—both as a testament to those who struggled before and as an explanation as to how they saw the world, why they made the choices they made, and the price they were made to pay for having done so.

ACRONYM KEY

GERMAN TERMS

This is by no means a complete list of German words and terms used in this volume, most of which are explained in the text or by means of footnote. What follows are simply some of the more frequently recurring words the reader will encounter.

Bundestag: The fedaral parliament of West Germany.

Bundeswehr: The armed forced of West Germany, re-established in 1954.

Jusos: Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Jungsozialistinnen und Jungsozialisten in der SPD (Workers Association of Young Socialists in the SPD); the SPD’s youth wing.

Kripo: Short for Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police); the principal German police force.

Land/Länder: The singular and plural for the German equivalent of states or provinces.

Ostpolitik: the FRG’s official policy towards the GDR and the east bloc.

Rote Zora: the independent feminist affiliate of the RZ. Its members were originally active as the Women of the Revolutionary Cells in 1975. The last Rote Zora action occurred in 1995.

Stasi: The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), better know as the Stasi, was the East German secret police force that tracked both internal dissent and foreign threats. It was similar in some ways to the FBI or the BKA, but played a more central role in policy decision-making.

Verfassungsschutz: Literally Protection of the Constitution or Guardians of the Constitution; the German internal intelligence service, primary police force for intelligence actions against the guerilla and the left.

PROJECTILES for the PEOPLE

1

Democracy Comes to Deutschland: Postfascist Germany and the Continuing Appeal of Imperialism

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO REALLY understand the rise of the New Left or the development of armed struggle in West Germany in the late sixties and early seventies without understanding the nature of the country and the role it played within the hegemonic, anticommunist strategy developed by the United States in the period following World War II.

The Federal Republic of Germany was a hybrid state, some elements— its institutions, some legislation, many personnel—seamlessly persisting from the Nazi period, and others grafted on by the Americans. As a nation almost constitutionally defined as a junior partner of U.S. imperialism, West Germany remained subordinate to it in the first postwar decades in a way that even Britain or France were not. Making matters even worse, in return for their allegiance, the West German ruling and professional classes were given free reign to negotiate their own stiflingly conservative and authoritarian post-Nazi culture and identity.

All of this was built on a post-genocidal basis; dead Jews remaining the elephant in the corner, alternately ignored or explained away as a tragic consequence of the lack of morals under Hitler. Many Germans growing up after the war would not know any Jews personally, and would be only vaguely aware of the horrors that had befallen them: bitter testimony to the way in which the dead, precisely because they are dead, have no say over how their murderers explain or ignore their absence.

At first, the defeat of Nazism in May 1945 seemed to spell the end of Germany’s national sovereignty, its territory occupied by France, Britain, and the United States in the West, and the Soviet Union in the East.

In this Soviet Zone, which would eventually become the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Socialist Unity Party (SED) held power. The Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries had borne the brunt of Germany’s war, and so for many years rehabilitation took second place to reparations in the GDR. Throughout its existence, East Germany bore many of the hallmarks of real existing socialism: compared to the capitalist west, there was less abject poverty and less involvement in the pillage of the Third World; at the same time, there was next to no room for political dissent or protest. Even communists suspected of differing from the dominant party line could find themselves arrested and tortured by the Stasi, the secret police. Society and culture were not frozen, yet they were certainly chilled, creating a distinctly socialist kind of conservatism.

Yet more than a few lifelong Communists felt that this was an unfortunate but acceptable price to pay to fetter the German aggression that had defined the first half of the century. As Markus Wolf, head of the dreaded Stasi during the period covered by this book, would explain in his post-wall apologia:

We East German Socialists tried to create a new kind of society that would never repeat the German crimes of the past. Most of all, we were determined that war should never again originate on German soil.¹

In the Western Zone too, initially the United States had toyed with the idea of deindustrializing the country, so as to cripple its development and preclude any future German wars. Very soon, however, this approach was rejected, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive of June 1947 finding that, An orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany.

It didn’t hurt that corporations such as Ford, General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank, IBM, and Standard Oil had had huge prewar investments in Germany and were all lobbying for a rapid resumption of business-as-usual.²

The geopolitical goals of the United States, always foremost amongst the western occupiers, combined with the interests of the German middle and upper classes, effectively sabotaging any real efforts at denazification in the West. In no time at all, important sections of the establishment that had helped maintain the Third Reich were being welcomed into the new pro-American administration. As the late William D. Graf observed:

Almost all the representatives of big business labeled as war criminals by the American Kilgore Commission in 1945 were back in their former positions by 1948; and of roughly 53,000 civil servants dismissed on account of their Nazi pasts in 1945, only about 1,000 remained permanently excluded, while the judiciary was almost 100% restored as early as 1946.³

The result, much as desired, was a political system which remained significantly tilted to the right.

This period marked the beginning of the American Cold War against the Soviet bloc, in which Germany was to become an important chip. In keeping with the Truman Doctrine, the zone occupied by the western Allies was built up as an anticommunist bulwark. The vehicle for this project was the European Relief Program, a blueprint for the economic and military reconstruction of Western Europe, which U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall convinced the U.S. Congress to pass in 1948. Almost one-and-a-half billion dollars were pumped into West Germany through the Marshall Plan, its economy rebuilt in such a way as to guarantee the expansion of U.S. economic influence in Europe, to serve as the foundation for the military and political integration of West Europe into the anticommunist bloc, and to facilitate the cultural and technological Americanization of European societies, especially West Germany itself.⁴

In short, demolished by war and in social and economic chaos, West Germany was offered reconstruction, rapid economic growth, and integration into the Allied Bloc in exchange for offering its support to international capitalism and the use of its territory as a front line position in the Cold War with the U.S.S.R.. This was an appeal aimed not only at the ruling class, but also at ordinary Germans, who may have benefited from the Third Reich’s policies of plunder and genocide, but who now, in defeat, found themselves thrown into economic insecurity¹ An early propaganda document from the western occupation government, issued just weeks after a pro-Soviet coup in neighboring Czechoslovakia, explained what was at stake:

The fate of the Marshall Plan will determine who is to be the victor in the great ideological conflict of democracy versus totalitarianism. Unless the Germans can get enough to eat and decent homes to live in, no amount of fine words about the benefit of democracy and no amount of repression will prevent them from going over to Communism.²

Former Nazis, provided they were not personally too notorious or unwilling to play by the new rules, appeared to the Americans as far preferable to communists or their presumed fellow travelers. Indeed, it has been noted that for much of the West German establishment, anticommunism provided a point of common cause with the Western victors and hence… a means of avoiding being called to account for their complicity with the Hitler regime.³

By the time the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was granted semi-sovereign statehood in 1949, this set of common interests had become embodied in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), under the iron fist of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Ruling for almost twenty years, normally in coalition with the much smaller liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the slightly more rabid Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria, the CDU soon became almost synonymous with the state itself.

SHOWPIECE CAPITALISM

West Germany was to be more than just a shield against the encroaching red menace; it was to be western imperialism’s visible model of economically and socially progressive capitalism. Modell Deutschland (Model Germany), as it became known, was to serve as an example to other West European states and as a taunt to the working class on the other side of the wall.

As an anticommunist showpiece, the FRG soon payed for itself in a time honored capitalist fashion—on the backs of the proletariat, especially the most desperate and oppressed layers.

Heightened levels of exploitation combined with the financial assistance offered by the Marshall Plan made the FRG the envy of other western capitalist states. By every measure of the ruling class, the West German economy shone. Real wages in the period 1948-1958 were at the level already established by the fascist regime,⁴ roughly 25% below that of workers in the United States,⁵ while the working week in 1955 could go as high as fifty hours, longer in key sectors like the steel industry. In that year, West German industrial workers had a work-week two and a half hours longer than their counterparts in Britain and eight hours longer than industrial workers in the United States and Canada.⁶

The profits made possible by this arrangement encouraged an extremely high rate of investment, which grew from 19.1% in 1950 to 26.5% in 1965; even with the recessions of the seventies, it wasn’t until 1976 that it had fallen back to 20%. In 1960, when France was showing a rate of investment of 17.4% and both Britain and the U.S. only registered 16%, West Germany was already showing an investment rate of 24%.⁷

As Werner Hülsberg notes:

The ‘economic miracle’ merely indicated the existence of ideal conditions for the exploitation of wage labor and, as such, is somewhat of a cynical myth. The long-term upswing in the economy, however, did lead to a continuous rise in the living standards of the West German population. While net wages and salaries during the period 1950 to 1962 grew by 143 per cent, the income of independent entrepreneurs during the same period grew by 236 per cent.¹

This boom was also based on real divisions in the working class, with German men in their prime being lifted into higher status and better paying jobs than the pariah layers which included young and older German men, but were fundamentally built around immigrant and female labor.

In the immediate aftermath of German defeat, working class women had borne the brunt of reconstruction unpaid and off the books, but absolutely necessary for survival, to the point that the term Trümmerfrauen (women of the rubble) was coined for those who hauled away the debris of bombed out buildings with their bare hands. At the same time, in October 1945, the Allied Control Council had declared it a duty of all women between the ages of fifteen and fifty to also work in the official economy: the female labor force, which had already earned only 86 cents to the male dollar under the Nazis, now saw its relative wages dropping, until in the 1950s and 60s women’s wages were on average just 60% of those of their menfolk.²

Throughout the 1950s, seven million refugees and displaced persons, many of whom were highly skilled, streamed into the country from the East. The German industries which had been structured around the use of forced labor during the Nazi period soon found they could fill this same niche with immigrant labor.

As New Left historian Karl Heinz Roth has remarked, from the point of view of big business, this exceptionally mobile subproletariat compensated completely for the loss of the slaves condemned to forced labor in the Nazi era.³ Yet, with a crucial difference: unlike the slave labourers, who were literally worked to death under Nazism, these new immigrants were to be highly favored. They were overwhelmingly loyal and politically reliable in the eyes of the ruling class, seeing as they came from the Communist East where more than a few of them had lost real privileges as ethnic Germans when the Nazi occupation came to an end. Indeed, these expellees and refugees from the East, exploited as they were, were naturally drawn towards the most virulent anticommunism, and catalyzed shopfloor and grassroots resistance to the left within the working class.⁴

Following this initial wave of cheap labor, which was regimented by its own political sympathies, came guest workers, many of whom were politically active on the left, and who were thus subjected to greater external regimentation and control. As the source of this labor switched from the East to southern Europe, these workers would be politically screened before entry, and targeted with deportation if identified as troublemakers.

So, at the same time as the German working class was highly exploited, it was also deeply divided. An inevitable consequence of this was that its more privileged layers would develop a different political orientation from the more oppressed.

To quote Hülsberg once again:

It is against this background that we must see the tragedy of the integration of the West German working class into the capitalist system and the loss of political strength. Class struggle was replaced by the American way of life. Even the king of rock’n’roll, Elvis Presley, paid tribute to it while on his tour of military duty in Germany… For the German petit-bourgeois soul this was the purest balm.⁵

Greek workers in a West German bottling factory: by the end of the 1960s, women constituted almost a third of all guest workers in West Germany.

These hierarchies within the working class resonated within its supposed institutions, the trade union movement and the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

In the first years of the Federal Republic, the trade unions were reorganized by the Allied victors with the express goal of avoiding the economic chaos the bourgeoisie feared most. These unions focused on Mitbestimmung (co-management, whereby workers would have some token representation in corporate boards of directors), thus further guaranteeing that the official labor movement would remain hostile to revolutionary politics. This degeneracy reached such a point in the 1960s that union members formed the backbone of the factory militias whose job it was repress wildcat strikes and unruly workers,¹ and one foreign journalist began an article on the German labor market with the question, What is a country to do when its trades unions decline to ask for more money?²

As a complement to this sad political trajectory, the SPD led the less class-conscious workers and the petit bourgeoisie into the arms of the reactionaries, with a program that in the immediate postwar period consisted of a crude mixture of nationalism and anti-communism garnished with a meaningless proclamation of the actuality of socialism.³ Left-wing trade unionists were expelled from the party, as were the editors of the socialist newspaper Die Andere Zeitung,⁴ while the SPD leadership used its position as the official opposition to repeatedly mislead and sabotage any grassroots revolt.

Needless to say, neither the SPD nor the trade union leadership had any interest in bridging the divide between their (increasingly privileged) base and the growing pariah layers of the proletariat:

As a consensus-producing mechanism that united the most powerful interests in the corporate and labour organizations, Social Democratic corporatism consciously excluded the weaker elements: foreigners, women, youth and older workers, thus converting class struggles to group struggles and doing nothing to reduce racism, sexism and anti-welfarism within the subordinate classes.⁵

AN IMPERIALIST TEAM PLAYER

Of course, the Marshall Plan was not simply a local economic project: from the very beginning it was intended that West Germany also be a European outpost of U.S. imperialism. This is indicated not only in the virtually simultaneous foundation of both NATO and the FRG in 1949, but in the very nature of the Federal Republic as a state: when it was granted formal sovereignty in 1955, it was only on condition that it allow the western powers to station their armed forces within its borders, and within four days of achieving its new condition, it had joined the Atlantic Alliance.⁶ Perhaps most significantly, in the event of a military conflict, the commanding officer in NATO—always an American—would also become the Commander-in-Chief of the West German armed forces.

As Rudolph Augstein, the editor of the influential liberal magazine Spiegel, stated in 1955: The new German army has not been founded to guarantee the safety of Bonn; rather the new state has been founded to be able to build up an army against the Soviet Union.⁷

The result was a West Germany with more than one hundred U.S. bases on its territory and a ruling class eager to support American imperialism around the world. This was achieved by (1) acting as a conduit for financial and military support to anticommunist regimes opposing the national liberation movements, (2) establishing neocolonial penetration of former colonies on behalf of the West, and (3) providing logistical support for American military interventions around the world.

Some important examples of this first role—that of being a conduit to repressive regimes—could include West Germany’s support for the South African apartheid regime, for the fascist Salazar dictatorship in Portugal in its continuing war against freedom fighters in Mozambique and Angola, military and political support for the killers of Patrice Lumumba and for imperialist intervention in the Congo, massive financial aid (disguised as reparations) to the state of Israel, imperialism’s new colonial beachhead in the Middle East, and economic support for the South Vietnamese puppet regime.

Apart from loans, economic investment, military sales, and eventually the sharing of nuclear technology, these reactionary regimes would also benefit from the occasional intervention of German soldiers¹ and mercenaries, including veterans of the Nazi SS.²

The task of entangling the former colonies in the western sphere was accomplished primarily through development aid, much of which took the form of weapons shipments to the new so-called national states. While such aid was often used to pressure the new national states to join pro-American military alliances, or else to refuse recognition to the GDR, it was equally important simply as a method of maintaining and entrenching the ties between Western capitalism and Third World elites.

By the late 1950s, the FRG had established itself as an important donor nation, for a while providing more aid than any Western government other than the United States.³ It was a logical candidate for this role given the fact that it had lost its own colonies decades earlier; as the Stuttgarter Zeitung noted in 1963:

It is clear why African states turn to Bonn and not to Paris or London… They turn to a country which is not tainted by colonialism.

Or, as the American Evening Star wrote that same year:

West Germany has been specifically authorized by the Atlantic Alliance to grant military aid to Africa and other countries; the simple reason is that no other western country is as well suited for these tasks. West Germany is free from the blemish of colonial rule…⁴

The prime examples of the FRG’s third role—providing direct support for American military forces—were the many U.S. military bases scattered throughout the country. These served both as a threat to the East Bloc countries, as well as staging areas for special operations. As military strikes against Third World targets became increasingly important to western imperialism, the Federal Republic’s airbases were all the more appreciated.

All U.S. bases had extra-territorial status and functioned under American law. They were, of course, also sites for CIA interventions in the FRG and in Western Europe in general, not only against Soviet influence, but also against independent left opposition. According to Operation Plan 101-1, the U.S. Commander-in-Chief in Europe was legally entitled to intervene in cases of internal unrest in West Germany. Furthermore, in cooperation with both former Nazis and a new generation of neo-nazis, the CIA established stay behind networks which were to carry out terrorist attacks should communists ever come to power in Germany.⁵

BETTER DEAD THAN RED

While both the economic and military aspects of Modell Deutschland were, to a greater or lesser degree, formulated in the public forum, and in some cases faced public opposition, the model had another equally important aspect, one which was never up for debate, and yet it bears directly on the topic under discussion here: anticommunism, described as the third pillar of West German society.⁶

All Marxist Roads Lead to Moscow: election poster for the CDU, 1953.

As we shall see, this anticommunism was far more than a mere ideological construct; rather, the legal structure of West German constitutional democracy was from its earliest days intended to prevent and/or eliminate all revolutionary left-wing opposition. This found its legal basis in the way that personal rights were framed in the Federal Republic’s Constitution, the Grundgesetz (Basic Law), which came into effect in 1949. While the Basic Law established the same personal rights and freedoms normally found in bourgeois democracies, it did this with one recurrent caveat: these rights could be withdrawn from those designated as enemies of the state.

This qualification was stated unambiguously in Article 18:

Whoever abuses the freedom of expression, in particular the freedom of the press (paragraph (1) of Article 5), the freedom of teaching (paragraph (3) of Article 5), the freedom of assembly (Article 8), the freedom of association (Article 9), the privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications (Article 10), the rights of property (Article 14), or the right of asylum (Article 16a) in order to combat the free democratic basic order shall forfeit these basic rights. This forfeiture and its extent shall be declared by the Federal Constitutional Court.¹

The following restriction to Article 21, limiting the right to form political parties, was added to this already ominous provision:

Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional. The Federal Constitutional Court shall rule on the question of unconstitutionality.²

These passages were marked by the experience of political instability that had traumatized the Weimar Republic. Their design owed very much to the desire to prevent any future such upheaval. Constraints on political freedoms were further rationalized by some observers as necessary to prevent a resurgence of Nazism, a credulous argument which would soon be disproved by the fact that the chief target of these exclusions would be the left.

In 1951, the CDU moved to further tighten the legal framework of repression with a volley of state security legislation, defined in the following five sections: High Treason, Dangers to the State, Offenses against Constitutional Organs, Resistance to the Authority of the