ProleWiki - User contributions [en]

John Fetterman

2024-09-24T04:46:28Z

Connolly1916: started to expand and added infobox (this guy is possibly the worst person alive)

{{Infobox politician|name=John Fetterman|birth_name=John Karl Fetterman|birth_date=15 August 1969|birth_place=West Reading, Pennsylvania, United States|political_orientation=[[Imperialism]] [[Neoliberalism]] [[Progressivism]] (claimed until 2023)|political_party=[[Democratic Party (United States)]]}}

'''John Fetterman''' is a reactionary [[United States of America|US]] politician who formerly claimed to be a [[Progressivism|progressive]]. However, he supports strengthening US-Israel ties, supports inhumane policies against immigrants, and pushes various other reactionary policies. [[Max Blumenthal]] and [[Nick Cruse|Nick]] from [[Revolutionary Blackout|Revolutionary Blackout Network]] criticized Fetterman as being a fake progressive before his outright shift into reactionary imperialism.<ref>https://twitter.com/SocialistMMA/status/1562059597728333824?s=20&t=lKaL9xmDgx9VKH2wVk3wuA</ref><ref>{{Web citation|author=Nathan J. Robinson|newspaper=Current Affairs|title=How to Spot Red Flags|date=2024-01-13|url=https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2024/01/how-to-spot-red-flags}}</ref>

== Reference ==

Jill Stein

2024-09-24T01:24:17Z

Connolly1916: started to add platform and political views

{{Infobox politician|name=Jill Stein|image_size=200|birth_date=May 14, 1950|birth_place=[[Chicago]], [[Illinois]], [[United States of America|United States]]|nationality=Statesian|political_orientation=[[Democratic centralism]] [[Anti-imperialism]] [[Anti-Zionism]]|political_party=[[Green Party (United States)|Green]]|image=Jill Stein.png}}

'''Jill Ellen Stein''' (born May 14, 1950) is a [[United States of America|Statesian]] political activist and presidential candidate. She is running for president as the [[Green Party (United States)|Green Party]] nominee for the [[2024 United States presidential election|2024 presidential election]].

== Political positions ==

=== Domestic policy ===
Stein supports [[Universal healthcare|medicare for all]], including mental health care and dental care, and free higher education.<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|author=Radhika Desai, Michael Hudson|newspaper=[[Geopolitical Economy Report]]|title=Challenging the duopoly: Jill Stein on why she’s running for US president as Green Party candidate|date=2024-04-20|url=https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/04/20/jill-stein-president-green-party-candidate/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240526033209/https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/04/20/jill-stein-president-green-party-candidate/|archive-date=2024-05-26}}</ref>

Stein supports free public education through college and graduate school, the abolishing of student debt, increased and equal funding for public schools and an end to the privatization of public schools.<ref name=":1">{{Web citation|newspaper=Jill Stein 2024|title=Jill Stein 2024 Platform|url=https://www.jillstein2024.com/platform}}</ref>

She is in favor of increased taxes on the wealthy and the closing of loopholes which allow the wealthy to not pay taxes, while also advocating for lower taxes on working people.<ref name=":1" />

She advocates for the creation of public banks and public ownership of the four largest banks in the United States.<ref name=":1" />

She is in favor of a 25 dollar minimum wage and a guaranteed livable income in addition to the closing of loopholes which allow employees to be paid below minimum wage.<ref name=":1" />

She supports worker-owned cooperatives and unionization, including among "gig" workers, as well as worker representation on corporate boards.<ref name=":1" />

She pushes for an end to homelessness and housing insecurity and the funding of social housing. In addition to this she supports the Tenants Bill of Rights, universal rent control and the treatment of housing as a human right. She promises to direct the department of labor to establish a National Tenants Union.<ref name=":1" />

=== Foreign policy ===
Stein is an anti-Zionist and argues that equating [[Judaism]] with [[Zionism]] is [[Antisemitism|antisemitic]].<ref name=":0" />

In September 2024 Stein sold out to [[imperialism]], presumably in hope of gaining more votes, by condemning [[Vladimir Putin]] and [[Bashar al-Assad]], declaring them "war criminals" and putting them at the same level as imperialist war criminals such as [[Barack Obama]], [[Joe Biden]] and [[Donald Trump]].<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Jill Stein 2024|title=Statement on war criminals and diplomacy to prevent WWIII|date=2024-09-19|url=https://www.jillstein2024.com/war_criminals_and_diplomacy|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240921105315/https://www.jillstein2024.com/war_criminals_and_diplomacy|archive-date=2024-09-21}}</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:Political candidates]]
[[Category:Anti-imperialists]]
[[Category:Politicians in the United States]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Stein, Jill}}

Anura Kumara Dissanayake

2024-09-24T00:32:35Z

Connolly1916:

{{Infobox politician|name=Anura Kumara Dissanayake|native_name=අනුර කුමාර දිසානායක|birth_name=Dissanayaka Mudiyanselage Anura Kumara Dissanayake|birth_date=24 November 1968|political_orientation=[[Marxism]] (claimed) [[Reformism]] [[Imperialism]] [[Anti-Tamil Racism]]|political_party=Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna}}

'''Anura Kumara Dissanayake''' is a [[Sri Lankan]] politician who has served as president of the country from 23 September 2024.<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|newspaper=https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/anura-kumara-dissanayake-declared-sri-lankan-president|title=Anura Kumara Dissanayake declared Sri Lankan president|date=2024-11-22|url=https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/anura-kumara-dissanayake-declared-sri-lankan-president}}</ref>

He is the leader of [[Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna]], a de jure Leftist and Marxist party in Sri Lanka, and is the leader of [[National People's Power]], a Left coalition. In reality both parties are Sinhala ethnonationalist parties with little connection to socialism.<ref name=":0" />

He supports Sinhala nationalist policies and rhetoric and has throughout his political life advocated against the Tamil people and their national liberation struggle. He has consistently opposed Tamil self-government, supported genocidal campaigns against the Tamils, and supports placing Buddhism as Sri Lanka's state religion.<ref name=":0" />

== Early life and political involvement ==
Anura Kumara Dissanayake was born 24 November 1968 in central Sri Lanka to working parents.<ref name=":1">{{Web citation|author=BHARATHA MALLAWARACHI|newspaper=ABC News|title=Who is Anura Kumara Dissanayake, Sri Lanka's new Marxist president?|date=2024-11-23|url=https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/anura-kumara-dissanayake-sri-lankas-new-marxist-president-113922204}}</ref>

He first became politically while in school, opposing Tamil liberation in demonstrations against an agreement made with the [[Republic of India]] that would grant a degree of self rule to the ethnic minority.<ref name=":1" />

He joined the [[Socialist Students' Union]], the student wing of the ostensibly leftist [[Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna]] party. In 1987 the JVP staged an armed insurrection against the government of Sri Lanka and Dissanayake went underground while most of the leadership of the JVP was killed or imprisoned.<ref name=":1" />

In 1993 he entered national politics in an effort to rebuild the party under [[Somawansa Amarasinghe]]. In 1994 the party won a seat in parliament, and in 1997 Dissanayake became national organizer of the Socialist Students' Union. He was added to the JVP Central Committee that year and joined the party politburo the next year.<ref name=":1" />

== Mainstream political career ==
In 2000 Dissanayake was elected to parliament after JVP entered into an alliance with [[Chandrika Kumaratunga]], then president of Sri Lanka. The alliance was created to oppose a propsed ceasefire agreement between then-Prime Minister [[Ranil Wickremesinghe]] and the [[Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam]]. He opposed the ceasefire agreement when it was signed in 2002.<ref name=":1" /><ref name=":0" />

In 2004 he and his party campaigned explicitly against a ceasefire and formed an alliance with the [[Sri Lanka Freedom Party]] and that year became Minister of Agriculture, Lands, and Irrigation. The same year he opposed aid distribution efforts in majority Tamil regions after a tsunami devastated the area.<ref name=":0" />

In 2005 he and other JVP members resigned from the government due to the ongoing peace process and backed the anti-ceasefire candidate [[Mahinda Rajapaksa]].<ref name=":0" />

In 2006 he was involved in the founding of the [[Joint Front to Protect the Nation]], which was founded by the JVP in opposition to any ceasefire talks and in favor of military action.<ref name=":0" />

Dissanayake went on to support the genocidal 2009 campaign which destroyed the LTTE and resulted in up to 169,796 deaths of mostly civilians. During this time the JVP protested outside embassies and the United Nations office in Sri Lanka in protest of any efforts to investigate human rights abuses by Sri Lanka.<ref name=":1" /><ref name=":0" />

He became leader of JVP when the left of the party broke away in 2014 and formed the [[National People's Power]] coalition in 2019, which included 21 groups. He subsequently moved to the right, stating that he supported a 'free market economy'.<ref name=":1" />

In 2019 he ran for president for the first time, losing to [[Gotabaya Rajapaksa]], who was forced to flee the country amidst widespread protests two years later.<ref name=":1" />

== 2024 campaign ==
He ran again in 2024. He promised to dissolve parliament 'the very night' of victory, and promised to continue to grant Buddhism special status in Sri Lanka. His party also openly associated with [[Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara]], leader of the Sinhala reactionary nationalist and fascist [[Bodu Bala Sena]] party. He toured the majority Tamil North-East of Sri Lanka during his campaign, and while there emphasized that he would not implement a proposed constitutional amendment which would grant greater powers to Tamils. He positioned the JVP as staunchly anti-federalist. He also promised during his campaign that no one accused of human rights violations and war crimes in the 2009 genocide would be punished.<ref name=":0" />

In addition to racism against Tamil people in Sri Lanka, the JVP has long run on hatred of people of Indian origin in Sri Lanka, with his party describing them as a 'fifth column'.<ref name=":0" />

== Presidency ==
One of his first acts as president was the appointment of [[Sampath Thuyacontha]] as Secretary of Defense. Thuyacontha was responsible for many war crimes during the 2009 genocide, with him leading a helicopter gunship squadron responsible for 400 missions during that genocide. He claimed personal involvement in 60 missions during the later state of the fighting.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Tamil Guardian|title=Another accused Sri Lankan war criminal appointed as Defence Secretary|date=2024-11-23|url=https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/another-accused-sri-lankan-war-criminal-appointed-defence-secretary}}</ref>

== References ==

Anura Kumara Dissanayake

2024-09-24T00:32:19Z

Connolly1916: /* Mainstream political career */

{{Infobox politician|name=Anura Kumara Dissanayake|native_name=අනුර කුමාර දිසානායක|birth_name=Dissanayaka Mudiyanselage Anura Kumara Dissanayake|birth_date=24 November 1968|political_orientation=[[Marxism]] (claimed) [[Reformism]] [[Imperialism]] [[Anti-Tamil Racism]]|political_party=Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna}}

'''Anura Kumara Dissanayake''' is a [[Sri Lankan]] politician who has served as president of the country from 23 September 2024.<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|newspaper=https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/anura-kumara-dissanayake-declared-sri-lankan-president|title=Anura Kumara Dissanayake declared Sri Lankan president|date=2024-11-22|url=https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/anura-kumara-dissanayake-declared-sri-lankan-president}}</ref>

He is the leader of [[Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna]], a de jure Leftist and Marxist party in Sri Lanka, and is the leader of [[National People's Power]], a Left coalition. In reality both parties are Sinhala ethnonationalist parties with little connection to socialism.<ref name=":0" />

He supports Sinhala nationalist policies and rhetoric and has throughout his political life advocated against the Tamil people and their national liberation struggle. He has consistently opposed Tamil self-government, supported genocidal campaigns against the Tamils, and supports placing Buddhism as Sri Lanka's state religion.<ref name=":0" />

== Early life and political involvement ==
Anura Kumara Dissanayake was born 24 November 1968 in central Sri Lanka to working parents.<ref name=":1">{{Web citation|author=BHARATHA MALLAWARACHI|newspaper=ABC News|title=Who is Anura Kumara Dissanayake, Sri Lanka's new Marxist president?|date=2024-11-23|url=https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/anura-kumara-dissanayake-sri-lankas-new-marxist-president-113922204}}</ref>

He first became politically while in school, opposing Tamil liberation in demonstrations against an agreement made with the [[Republic of India]] that would grant a degree of self rule to the ethnic minority.<ref name=":1" />

He joined the [[Socialist Students' Union]], the student wing of the ostensibly leftist [[Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna]] party. In 1987 the JVP staged an armed insurrection against the government of Sri Lanka and Dissanayake went underground while most of the leadership of the JVP was killed or imprisoned.<ref name=":1" />

In 1993 he entered national politics in an effort to rebuild the party under [[Somawansa Amarasinghe]]. In 1994 the party won a seat in parliament, and in 1997 Dissanayake became national organizer of the Socialist Students' Union. He was added to the JVP Central Committee that year and joined the party politburo the next year.<ref name=":1" />

== Mainstream political career ==
In 2000 Dissanayake was elected to parliament after JVP entered into an alliance with [[Chandrika Kumaratunga]], then president of Sri Lanka. The alliance was created to oppose a propsed ceasefire agreement between then-Prime Minister [[Ranil Wickremesinghe]] and the [[Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam]]. He opposed the ceasefire agreement when it was signed in 2002.<ref name=":1" /><ref name=":0" />

In 2004 he and his party campaigned explicitly against a ceasefire and formed an alliance with the [[Sri Lanka Freedom Party]] and that year became Minister of Agriculture, Lands, and Irrigation. The same year he opposed aid distribution efforts in majority Tamil regions after a tsunami devastated the area.<ref name=":0" />

In 2005 he and other JVP members resigned from the government due to the ongoing peace process and backed the anti-ceasefire candidate [[Mahinda Rajapaksa]].<ref name=":0" />

In 2006 he was involved in the founding of the [[Joint Front to Protect the Nation]], which was founded by the JVP in opposition to any ceasefire talks and in favor of military action.<ref name=":0" />

Dissanayake went on to support the genocidal 2009 campaign which destroyed the LTTE and resulted in up to 169,796 deaths of mostly civilians. During this time the JVP protested outside embassies and the United Nations office in Sri Lanka in protest of any efforts to investigate human rights abuses by Sri Lanka.<ref name=":1" /><ref name=":0" />

He became leader of JVP when the left of the party broke away in 2014 and formed the [[National People's Power]] coalition in 2019, which included 21 groups. He subsequently moved to the right, stating that he supported a 'free market economy'.<ref name=":1" />

In 2019 he ran for president for the first time, losing to [[Gotabaya Rajapaksa]], who was forced to flee the country amidst widespread protests two years later.<ref name=":1" />

== 2024 campaign ==
He ran again in 2024. He promised to dissolve parliament 'the very night' of victory, and promised to continue to grant Buddhism special status in Sri Lanka. His party also openly associated with [[Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara]], leader of the Sinhala reactionary nationalist and fascist [[Bodu Bala Sena]] party. He toured the majority Tamil North-East of Sri Lanka during his campaign, and while there emphasized that he would not implement a proposed constitutional amendment which would grant greater powers to Tamils. He positioned the JVP as staunchly anti-federalist. He also promised during his campaign that no one accused of human rights violations and war crimes in the 2009 genocide would be punished.<ref name=":0" />

In addition to racism against Tamil people in Sri Lanka, the JVP has long run on hatred of people of Indian origin in Sri Lanka, with his party describing them as a 'fifth column'.

== Presidency ==
One of his first acts as president was the appointment of [[Sampath Thuyacontha]] as Secretary of Defense. Thuyacontha was responsible for many war crimes during the 2009 genocide, with him leading a helicopter gunship squadron responsible for 400 missions during that genocide. He claimed personal involvement in 60 missions during the later state of the fighting.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Tamil Guardian|title=Another accused Sri Lankan war criminal appointed as Defence Secretary|date=2024-11-23|url=https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/another-accused-sri-lankan-war-criminal-appointed-defence-secretary}}</ref>

== References ==

Anura Kumara Dissanayake

2024-09-24T00:08:10Z

Connolly1916: added more

2024 United States presidential election

2024-09-15T06:31:11Z

Connolly1916: added more

{{Message box/currentevent}}

The '''2024 United States presidential election''' will be the 60th presidential election in the [[United States of America|United States]] and will be held on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. The primary two candidates from the United States' [[corporate duopoly]] are current United States vice president and former prosecutor and attorney general [[Kamala Harris]], and billionaire real estate heir and former president [[Donald Trump]].

Other presidential candidates have run or are currently running, both in favor of the [[Imperialism|imperialist]] duopoly and opposed to it. These include current president [[Joe Biden]], who was replaced on the democratic party ticket by Harris on 21 July due to his unpopularity, old age, and disastrous performance at the first presidential debate,<ref>{{Web citation|author=Ben Burgis|newspaper=Jacobin|title=Joe Biden’s Replacement Must Embrace Economic Populism|date=2024-07-21|url=https://jacobin.com/2024/07/joe-biden-stepping-down-kamala-harris-economic-populism}}</ref> and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ran as an independent before dropping out and endorsing Donald Trump on 23 August.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Democracy Now!|title=Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Suspends Campaign & Endorses Donald Trump|date=2024-08-26|url=https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/26/headlines/robert_f_kennedy_jr_suspends_campaign_endorses_donald_trump}}</ref> Anti-duopoly leftist candidates include the [[Green Party]] candidate [[Jill Stein]], independent [[Cornel West]], and the [[Party for Socialism and Liberation]] and [[Peace and Freedom Party]] candidate [[Claudia De la Cruz]]. [[Chase Oliver]] of the [[Libertarian Party (United States)|Libertarian Party]] is also running.

== Duopoly Candidates ==

=== Democratic Party ===

==== Current ticket ====
The current [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democratic Party]] ticket consists of current vice-president, former prosecutor, district attorney, and attorney general of [[State of California|California]], as well as a former senator [[Kamala Harris]],<ref name=":1">{{Web citation|author=Roqayah Chamseddine|newspaper=Mintpress News|title=The Neoliberal Record Of Kamala Harris, The Democrat’s Rising Star|date=2017-08-16|url=https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-neoliberal-record-of-kamala-harris-the-democrats-rising-star/230986/}}</ref> and her running mate, current [[Minnesota]] governor and former member of the [[United States House of Representatives]] and high school teacher [[Tim Walz]].<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Democracy Now!|title=Tim Walz Touts Record as MN Gov. as He Accepts VP Nomination|date=2024-08-22|url=https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/22/headlines/tim_walz_touts_record_as_mn_gov_as_he_accepts_vp_nomination}}</ref>

The ticket's holds a standard [[Neoliberal]] platform, playing up the idea of the [[Middle class|'middle class']] as a distinct class and supporting the [[petit bourgeoisie]] with rhetoric around 'small businesses' and 'entrepreneurs', while refusing to enact or support popular progressive economic policies including public medical care and free education. The ticket also pushes [[reactionary]] positions on immigration and crime and imperialism. While claiming to support a ceasefire in Gaza, Harris constantly reaffirms her support for the Zionist apartheid state and the United States' imperial project in [[West Asia]] and her plan to keep the United States' military the most 'lethal' in the world. In addition to this, despite promises to raise taxes on the wealthy, Harris has a record of supporting the bourgeoise and opposing labor protections. While the ticket claims to support racial justice, Kamala Harris' record as prosecutor, district attorney, and attorney general included support for truancy laws, marijuana bans, and other practices that disproportionally harmed racial minorities.<ref name=":1" /><ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Harris/Walz Campaign|title=Issues|url=https://kamalaharris.com/issues/}}</ref>

==== Joe Biden campaign ====
Before 21 July 2024 the Democratic Party ticket was headed by current president Joe Biden. Throughout the race he was plagued by negative approval ratings over his ineffectiveness, his age and mental decline, and other issues including his support for the [[2023 Israel-Gaza war and genocide|Gaza Genocide]]. These issues were amplified by his poor performance at the first presidential debate, hosted by CNN on 27 June. During the debate he misspoke constantly and struggled to deliver the already convoluted and milquetoast Democratic Party platform. He responded to a questions about abortion, the issue where the Democratic Party, with an incoherent rant which repeated reactionary and racist [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican Party]] rhetoric around rapes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. He also stated that his administration "beat Medicare", a statement which the [[Green Party]] pointed out was true, even if he didn't mean to say it. His performance led to calls for him to step down from prominent Democratic party members. Biden initially refused to step down due to his own personal ambitions and the urgings of his family, but after several weeks of pressure, most importantly by prominent former Speaker of the House [[Nancy Pelosi]], he stepped aside and endorsed Harris.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Green Party US|title=Biden: "We beat Medicare." Green Party: "Enact Medicare For All now."|url=https://www.gp.org/biden_we_beat_medicare_green_party_enact_medicare_for_all_now}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Democracy Now!|title=“Step Aside Joe”: After First Pres. Debate, Democrats Reeling from Biden Missteps & Trump Lies|date=2024-06-28|url=https://www.democracynow.org/2024/6/28/democrats_reaction_to_disastrous_debate}}</ref><ref>{{Video citation|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr9d79TNPfc|channel=NBC News|title=Watch the first 2024 presidential debate between Biden and Trump|date=2024-06-28}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Current Affairs|title=Cenk Uygur: Biden Will Not Be The Nominee|date=2024-07-11|url=https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/cenk-uygur-biden-will-not-be-the-nominee}}</ref>

==== Shift towards reactionary rhetoric ====
During the 2024 presidential election and throughout the previous years the Democratic Party has moved farther to the right and abandoned many of its calls for minor progressive reform. The 2024 Democratic platform removed mentions of police brutality and reform and affirmed the party's support for funding the United States' Fascist [[police]] force. They also removed opposition to the death penalty, even as horrific executions using nitrogen gas began to be used in 2024.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Rebecca Schneid|newspaper=Time|title=The Changes to the Democrats’ Criminal Justice Platform You May Have Missed|date=2024-08-24|url=https://time.com/7014604/changes-to-democrats-criminal-justice-platform/}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Democracy Now!|title=Ohio Will Consider Execution by Nitrogen Gas After Alabama Used Method Witness Calls “Horrific”|date=2024-30-01|url=https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/30/nitrogen_gas_execution}}</ref> The platform also affirmed the Democratic Party's unwavering and unequivocal support for the Zionist apartheid state and its current genocidal campaign in Gaza, touting current president Biden's opposition to UN efforts to oppose the Zionist Entity and the bipartisan decision to send 14 billion dollars in military aid to the occupation force.<ref>{{Web citation|author=COCO SMYTH|newspaper=Workers' Voice|title=Democrats’ 2024 platform tells us just where they stand on Palestine|date=2024-09-11|url=https://workersvoiceus.org/2024/09/11/democrats-2024-platform-tells-us-just-where-they-stand-on-palestine/}}</ref>

The Democratic ticket has also boasted about the endorsements it has received from reactionary Republican and former Republican figures including former vice-president and reactionary war criminal [[Dick Cheney]], reactionary pro-imperialist former member of the House of Representatives [[Adam Kinzinger]] and others.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Peter Bloom|newspaper=Common Dreams|title=Far-Right Endorsements Unmask Democratic Charade|date=2024-09-14|url=https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/dick-cheney-endorses-harris}}</ref>

==== Democratic Primary ====

=== Republican Party ===

== Other Imperialist and Capitalist Candidates ==

=== Robert F. Kennedy ===

=== Libertarian Party ===

=== No Labels ===

== Opposition candidates ==

=== Green Party ===
[[Green Party (United States)|Green Party]] nominee [[Jill Stein]] failed to achieve ballot access in [[State of New York|New York]] after the [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democratic Party]] restricted third party access by requiring 45,000 signatures of registered voters in six weeks. Stein began a legal struggle, which the [[reactionary]] [[Supreme Court of the United States|Supreme Court]] rejected.<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|newspaper=Claudia & Karina 2024|title=Claudia-Karina Campaign Denounces Nationwide Anti-Democratic Ballot Access Restrictions, Expresses Solidarity with Candidates Standing Against the Genocide|date=2024-05-21|url=https://votesocialist2024.com/statements/claudia-karina-campaign-denounces-nationwide-anti-democratic-ballot-access-restrictions-expresses-solidarity-with-candidates-standing-against-the-genocide|retrieved=2024-06-11}}</ref>

=== Party for Socialism and Liberation ===
The [[Party for Socialism and Liberation]] is running [[Claudia De la Cruz]] for President and [[Karina Garcia]] for Vice President. Like the Green Party, they did not make it onto the New York ballot because of the new restrictions.<ref name=":0" />

=== Cornel West (independent) ===

== References ==
<references />
[[Category:Politics of the United States of America]]

Green Party of the United States

2024-09-14T22:11:02Z

Connolly1916: started article

{{Infobox political party|name=Green Party of the United States|logo=Green Party Logo.png|founded=28-29 July 2001|split=Greens/Green Party USA|political_orientation=[[Environmentalism]] [[Socialism]] [[Anti-Imperialism]] [[Anti-Militarism]] [[Anti-Neoliberalism]] [[Feminism]] [[Anti-Racism]] [[Progressivism]]|seats1_title=Total elected officials|seats1=143|website=https://www.gp.org/}}

The '''Green Party of the United States''' is the largest progressive socialist party in the [[United States of America]]. It has contested elections since its founding in 2001 and advocates for a variety of progressive and leftist causes. [[Jill Stein]] is the current Green candidate in the [[2024 United States presidential election]].<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Green Party US|title=Early History of the United States Green Party, 1984-2001|date=2017-15-05|url=https://www.gp.org/early_history}}</ref>

== References ==

File:Green Party Logo.png

2024-09-14T21:59:48Z

Connolly1916:

2024 United States presidential election

2024-09-14T21:56:24Z

Connolly1916: started expanding

{{Message box/Stub}}

The '''2024 United States presidential election''' will be the 60th presidential election in the United States and will be held on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. The primary two candidates from the United States' [[corporate duopoly]] are current United States vice president and former prosecutor and attorney general [[Kamala Harris]], and billionaire real estate heir and former president [[Donald Trump]].

Other presidential candidates have run or are currently running, both in favor of the imperialist duopoly and opposed to it. These include current president [[Joe Biden]], who was replaced on the democratic party ticket by Harris on 21 July due to his unpopularity, old age, and disastrous performance at the first presidential debate,<ref>{{Web citation|author=Ben Burgis|newspaper=Jacobin|title=Joe Biden’s Replacement Must Embrace Economic Populism|date=2024-07-21|url=https://jacobin.com/2024/07/joe-biden-stepping-down-kamala-harris-economic-populism}}</ref> and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ran as an independent before dropping out and endorsing Donald Trump on 23 August.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Democracy Now!|title=Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Suspends Campaign & Endorses Donald Trump|date=2024-08-26|url=https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/26/headlines/robert_f_kennedy_jr_suspends_campaign_endorses_donald_trump}}</ref> Anti-duopoly leftist candidates include the [[Green Party]] candidate [[Jill Stein]], independent [[Cornel West]], and the [[Party for Socialism and Liberation]] and [[Peace and Freedom Party]] candidate [[Claudia De la Cruz]]. [[Chase Oliver]] of the [[Libertarian Party (United States)|Libertarian Party]] is also running.

== Duopoly Candidates ==

=== Democratic Party ===

==== Current Ticket ====
The current [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democratic Party]] ticket consists of current vice-president, former prosecutor, district attorney, and attorney general of California, as well as a former senator [[Kamala Harris]],<ref name=":1">{{Web citation|author=Roqayah Chamseddine|newspaper=Mintpress News|title=The Neoliberal Record Of Kamala Harris, The Democrat’s Rising Star|date=2017-08-16|url=https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-neoliberal-record-of-kamala-harris-the-democrats-rising-star/230986/}}</ref> and her running mate, current [[Minnesota]] governor and former member of the [[United States House of Representatives]] and high school teacher [[Tim Walz]].<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Democracy Now!|title=Tim Walz Touts Record as MN Gov. as He Accepts VP Nomination|date=2024-08-22|url=https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/22/headlines/tim_walz_touts_record_as_mn_gov_as_he_accepts_vp_nomination}}</ref>

The ticket's holds a standard [[Neoliberal]] platform, playing up the idea of the [[Middle class|'middle class']] as a distinct class and supporting the [[petit bourgeoisie]] with rhetoric around 'small businesses' and 'entrepreneurs', while refusing to enact or support popular progressive economic policies including public medical care and free education. The ticket also pushes reactionary positions on immigration and crime and imperialism. While claiming to support a ceasefire in Gaza, Harris constantly reaffirms her support for the Zionist apartheid state and the United States' imperial project in West Asia and her plan to keep the United States' military the most 'lethal' in the world. In addition to this, despite promises to raise taxes on the wealthy, Harris has a record of supporting the bourgeoise and opposing labor protections. While the ticket claims to support racial justice, Kamala Harris' record as prosecutor, district attorney, and attorney general included support for truancy laws, marijuana bans, and other practices that disproportionally harmed racial minorities.<ref name=":1" /><ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Harris/Walz Campaign|title=Issues|url=https://kamalaharris.com/issues/}}</ref>

==== Joe Biden Campaign ====
Before 21 July 2024 the Democratic Party ticket was headed by current president Joe Biden. Throughout the race he was plagued by negative approval ratings over his ineffectiveness, his age and mental decline, and other issues including his support for the [[2023 Israel-Gaza war and genocide|Gaza Genocide]]. These issues were amplified by his poor performance at the first presidential debate, hosted by CNN on 27 June. During the debate he misspoke constantly and struggled to deliver the already convoluted and milquetoast Democratic Party platform. He responded to a questions about abortion, the issue where the Democratic Party, with an incoherent rant which repeated reactionary and racist Republican Party rhetoric around rapes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. He also stated that his administration "beat Medicare", a statement which the [[Green Party]] pointed out was true, even if he didn't mean to say it. His performance led to calls for him to step down from prominent Democratic party members. Biden initially refused to step down due to his own personal ambitions and the urgings of his family, but after several weeks of pressure, most importantly by prominent former Speaker of the House [[Nancy Pelosi]], he stepped aside and endorsed Harris.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Green Party US|title=Biden: "We beat Medicare." Green Party: "Enact Medicare For All now."|url=https://www.gp.org/biden_we_beat_medicare_green_party_enact_medicare_for_all_now}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Democracy Now!|title=“Step Aside Joe”: After First Pres. Debate, Democrats Reeling from Biden Missteps & Trump Lies|date=2024-06-28|url=https://www.democracynow.org/2024/6/28/democrats_reaction_to_disastrous_debate}}</ref><ref>{{Video citation|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr9d79TNPfc|channel=NBC News|title=Watch the first 2024 presidential debate between Biden and Trump|date=2024-06-28}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Current Affairs|title=Cenk Uygur: Biden Will Not Be The Nominee|date=2024-07-11|url=https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/cenk-uygur-biden-will-not-be-the-nominee}}</ref>

==== Democratic Primary ====

=== Republican Party ===

== Other Imperialist and Capitalist Candidates ==

=== Robert F. Kennedy ===

=== Libertarian Party ===

=== No Labels ===

== Opposition candidates ==

=== Green Party ===
[[Green Party (United States)|Green Party]] nominee [[Jill Stein]] failed to achieve ballot access in [[State of New York|New York]] after the [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democratic Party]] restricted third party access by requiring 45,000 signatures of registered voters in six weeks. Stein began a legal struggle, which the [[reactionary]] [[Supreme Court of the United States|Supreme Court]] rejected.<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|newspaper=Claudia & Karina 2024|title=Claudia-Karina Campaign Denounces Nationwide Anti-Democratic Ballot Access Restrictions, Expresses Solidarity with Candidates Standing Against the Genocide|date=2024-05-21|url=https://votesocialist2024.com/statements/claudia-karina-campaign-denounces-nationwide-anti-democratic-ballot-access-restrictions-expresses-solidarity-with-candidates-standing-against-the-genocide|retrieved=2024-06-11}}</ref>

=== Party for Socialism and Liberation ===
The [[Party for Socialism and Liberation]] is running [[Claudia De la Cruz]] for President and [[Karina Garcia]] for Vice President. Like the Green Party, they did not make it onto the New York ballot because of the new restrictions.<ref name=":0" />

=== Cornel West (independent) ===

== References ==

Seán MacBride

2024-09-09T00:48:39Z

Connolly1916: expanded

{{Infobox politician|name=Seán MacBride|birth_name=Seaghan Macbride|birth_date=26 January 1904|birth_place=Paris, France|death_date=15 January 1988|death_place=Dublin, Ireland|nationality=Irish|political_orientation=[[Irish Republicanism]] [[Socialism]] [[Anti-Imperialism]]}}

'''Seán Macbride''' was an Irish politician, lawyer, Irish republican military leader, and humanitarian and anti-imperialist activist.<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|author=Ronan Keane|newspaper=Dictionary of Irish Biography|title=MacBride, Seán|url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/macbride-sean-a5109}}</ref>

He was involved in the Irish republican movement during the [[Irish War of Independence]], the [[Irish Civil War]], and the subsequent [[Anti-Treaty IRA]] campaigns. He served as Chief of Staff of the Anti-Treaty IRA for a time and as a member of the [[Saor Éire (1931)|Saor Éire]] political party and various pro-Soviet and anti-Fascist groups attempted to move the Irish republican movement to the left. He later defended Irish republican political prisoners in court.<ref name=":0" />

Later in his life he became a prominent humanitarian activist, pushing for social-democratic and some socially progressive reforms in the Republic of Ireland, as well as human rights, anti-imperialism, and anti-militarism abroad. He played a leading role in various international organizations including the [[Amnesty International]] and the [[United Nations]]. He also held positions in the government of the Republic of Ireland.<ref name=":0" />

== Early life ==
Seán Macbride was born on 26 January 1904 in Paris, France. He was the only child of [[Irish Republican|Irish republican]] military leader and future martyr of the [[Easter Rising]] [[John Macbride|John MacBride]], and Irish republican feminist and socialist activist and fellow Easter Rising veteran [[Maude Gonne]], who had married each other in 1903. He had two half siblings on his mothers side, George, who died in infancy, and [[Iseult Lucille]], both of whom were fathered by French right-wing politician [[Lucien Millvoye]].<ref name=":0" />

MacBride and Gonne divorced in 1905 due to John MacBride's alcoholism, violence, and infidelity, and Gonne was awarded custody of Seán.<ref name=":0" />

Seán received his first education at the Jesuit college of St Louis de Gonzague in Paris, France. When he was 12 years old his father was executed for his role in the Easter Rising. Soon after the family moved to London. At 14 Seán was enrolled as a boarder in Mount St. Benedict in County Wexford, Ireland.<ref name=":0" />

He attended University College, Dublin as a student of law and agriculture, but did not graduate due to his involvement in republican action. Around this time his mother bought the Roebuck House in the suburbs of Dublin, where he would live until his death in 1988.<ref name=":0" />

== Early political involvement ==
MacBride was first involved in Sinn Féin at 14 during the 1918 general election while in Dublin, when he joined [[Fianna Éireann]], which would become the youth wing of various iterations of the [[Irish Republican Army]]. At the age of 16 he lied about his age and joined the [[Irish Republican Army (Original)|Irish Republican Army]]. He was involved in the importation of arms into Ireland from the [[Weimar Republic]] with [[Robert Briscoe]] as well as various actions within Dublin. From October to December 1921 MacBride travelled to London with [[Michael Collins]] during the negotiations for the [[Anglo-Irish Treaty]], where he provided security for Collins and to arrange the safe departure of the Irish delegations if the negotiations broke down.<ref name=":0" />

As a result of the Anglo-Irish treaty the Irish republican movement split. The split culminated at the [[Battle of the Four Courts]], where Anti-Treaty republicans occupied the Four Courts in Dublin and were subsequently shelled by the pro-treaty National Army. MacBride was among those with the anti-treaty forces and was arrested after the surrender of his garrison. He was detained in Mountjoy prison for the duration of the [[Irish Civil War]] which erupted after.<ref name=":0" />

== After the civil war ==
In 1923, while he was being transferred from Mountjoy Jail to Kilmainham, MacBride escaped captivity and was never recaptured. He accompanied anti-treaty leader [[Éamon de Valera]] to Rome in 1925.<ref name=":0" />

On 26 January 1926, MacBride married Catalina Bulfin. He began to work for his mother at a jam factory which she had started and also as a journalist in Paris and Dublin. He continued his involvement with anti-treaty forces and was arrested in 1927 after the assassination of [[Kevin O'Higgins]] by anti-treaty republicans, who was minister for justice of the Irish Free State in retaliation for the executions of anti-treaty prisoners of war during the civil war. His mother asked friend and poet [[William Butler Yeats]], then a member of the Free State senate, to work to free MacBride, however due to the emergency laws in place after the assassination these efforts were unsuccessful. He was later released after he established that at the time of the assassination he had been meeting [[Bryan Cooper]], a member of the Free State parliament, in relation to his mother's jam business.<ref name=":0" />

In 1927 Éamon de Valera split from Sinn Féin in order to pursue electoralism. MacBride remained affiliated with the small and fractured [[Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin]]. In September 1931 Macbride was involved in the founding of the short-lived socialist and anti-treaty political party [[Saor Éire (1931)|Saor Éire]], which the anti-treaty movement then began to coalesce around.<ref name=":0" />

MacBride continued his involvement with the Anti-Treaty IRA, where he began to play a leading role as adjutant general. He opposed the [[Peadar O'Donnell|Peadar O'Donnell's]] leadership of Saor Éire primarily due to his perception that it would lead to anti-treaty groups contesting elections, which MacBride believed would be a unproductive venture.<ref name=":0" />

In June 1936 the Irish Republican Army was banned and [[Maurice Twomey]], its Chief of Staff, was arrested. MacBride succeeded him as Chief of Staff. He left the IRA in 1937, when the constitution of the [[Republic of Ireland]] was enacted. He was replaced by [[Tom Barry]].<ref name=":0" />

== Legal career ==
In October 1937, MacBride began his legal career. In June 1939 the Offenses Against the State Act was put into place in the Republic of Ireland, which allowed the internment of suspected IRA members without trial and would lead to the execution and imprisonment of many more IRA members and leaders.<ref name=":0" />

He represented an internee in the case ''Burke v. Lennon'', which led to part of the Offenses Against the State Act being struck down due to it violating the constitution. After the case the constitution of the Republic of Ireland was amended to allow for internment of political prisoners.<ref name=":0" />

== References ==
[[Category:Irish republicans]]
[[Category:Irish socialists]]
[[Category:Politicians]]

Seán MacBride

2024-09-08T23:13:38Z

Connolly1916: started

Library:Interview with Three Correspondents from the Central News Agency, the Sao Tang Pao and the Hsin Min Pao

2024-09-07T00:20:33Z

Connolly1916: added

{{Library work|title=Interview with Three Correspondents from the Central News Agency, the Sao Tang Pao and the Hsin Min Pao|author=Mao Zedong|spoken on=1939-09-16|type=Interview}}

''Correspondent:'' May we ask for your views on a few questions? We have read your statement of September 1 in today's ''New China News;'' it covers some of our questions, but there are others on which we would like you to elaborate. Our written questions are divided into three groups and we would be glad if you would give us your views on each of them.

''Mao Tse-tung:'' I shall deal with them according to your list.

You ask if the War of Resistance has reached the stage of stalemate. I think it has in a sense--in the sense that there is a new international situation and that Japan is facing greater difficulties while China has stood firm against compromise. This does not rule out the possibility that the enemy may still launch fairly big offensive campaigns; for instance, he may attack Pakhoi, Changsha or even Sian. When we say that the enemy's large-scale strategic offensive and our strategic retreat have in a sense largely come to an end, we do not altogether exclude the possibility of further offensives and retreats. As for the specific task in the new stage, it is to prepare for the counter-offensive, and this concept covers everything. That is to say, during the stage of stalemate China must build up all the strength required for the future counter-offensive. To prepare for the counter-offensive does not mean launching it immediately, since it cannot be done unless the conditions are ripe. What we are talking about is the strategic, and not the tactical, counter-offensive. Tactical counter-offensives, such as our repulse of the enemy's "mopping-up" campaigns in southeastern Shansi are not only possible but absolutely necessary. But the time has not yet arrived for an all-out strategic counter-offensive, and we are now at the stage of actively preparing for it. At this stage we shall still have to repulse a certain number of offensive campaigns the enemy may launch at the front.

To itemize the tasks of the new stage, in the enemy's rear we must keep up guerrilla warfare, smash his "mopping-up" campaigns and defeat his economic aggression; at the front we must strengthen our military defences and repulse any offensive campaign the enemy may launch; in the Great Rear Area the main thing is to work hard for political reforms. All these form the specific content of our preparations for the counter-offensive.

Internal political reform is very important because at present the enemy is mainly carrying on a political offensive, and so we must strengthen our political resistance in particular. In other words, the problem of democracy must be solved as soon as possible, for only in this way can we increase our capacity for political resistance and build up our military strength. China has to rely mainly on her own efforts in the War of Resistance. We have stood for regeneration through our own efforts, and this has become even more important in the new international situation. The essence of such regeneration is democracy.

''Question:'' You have just said that democracy is essential to winning victory in the War of Resistance through our own efforts. How can such a system be brought into being in the present circumstances ?

''Answer:'' Dr. Sun Yat-sen originally envisaged the three stages of military rule, political tutelage and constitutional government. But in his "Statement on My Departure for the North" issued shortly before his death, he no longer spoke of three stages, but said instead that a national assembly must be convened immediately. This shows that Dr. Sun himself modified his views many years ago in the light of changing circumstances. In the grave situation prevailing today, with the War of Resistance going on, both the early convening of a national assembly and the introduction of democratic government are imperative for averting the calamity of national subjugation and for driving out the enemy. Opinions differ on this question. Some say that the common people are ignorant and democratic government cannot be introduced. They are wrong. The common people have made very rapid progress in the war and, given leadership and proper policy, democratic government can certainly be introduced. For instance, it has been put into practice in northern China. Most of the heads of districts, townships and the ''pao'' and ''chia'' there are chosen by popular vote. Even some county magistrates have been chosen in this way, and progressive elements and promising young people have been elected. The question should be thrown open to public discussion.

In the second group on your list, you raise the question of "restricting alien parties", that is, the question of the friction in various localities. Your concern over this matter is justified. There has been some improvement recently, but fundamentally the situation remains unchanged.

''Question:'' Has the Communist Party made its position on this question clear to the Central Government?

''Answer:'' We have protested.

''Question:'' In what way?

''Answer:'' Our Party representative, Comrade Chou En-lai, wrote a letter to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek as early as July. Then again on August 1, people from all walks of life in Yenan sent a telegram to the Generalissimo and the National Government, demanding the withdrawal of the "Measures for Restricting the Activities of Alien Parties", which had been secretly circulated and which are at the very root of the "friction" in various places.

''Question:'' Has there been any reply from the Central Government?

''Answer:'' No. But it is said that there are also people in the Kuomintang who disapprove of these measures. As everybody knows, an army that participates in the common fight against Japan is a friendly army, not an "alien army", and similarly, a political party that participates in the common fight against Japan is a friendly party, not an "alien party". There are many parties and groups taking part in the War of Resistance and, while they vary in strength, they are fighting in the same cause; surely they must all unite and must in no circumstances "restrict" one another. Which party is an alien party? The party of the traitors headed by Wang Ching-wei, the running dog of Japan, because it has nothing in common politically with the anti-Japanese parties; that is the kind of party which should be restricted. Between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party there is common political ground, namely, resistance to Japanese aggression. Therefore, the problem is to concentrate all our strength on opposing and checking Japan and Wang Ching-wei, and not on opposing and checking the Communist Party. This is the only basis for formulating correct slogans. Wang Ching-wei has three slogans: "Oppose Chiang Kai-shek," "Oppose the Communist Party", and "Be friends with Japan". Wang Ching-wei is the common enemy of the Kuomintang, the Communist Party and the entire people. But the Communist Party is not the enemy of the Kuomintang, nor is the Kuomintang the enemy of the Communist Party; they should unite and help each other rather than oppose or "restrict" each other. The slogans on our side must be different from Wang Ching-wei's, they must be the opposite of his and never be confused with them. If he says, "Oppose Chiang Kai-shek", everyone should support Chiang Kai-shek; if he says, "Oppose the Communist Party", everyone should unite with the Communist Party; and if he says, "Be friends with Japan", everyone should resist Japan. We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports. In articles nowadays people often quote the saying, "Do not sadden your friends and gladden your enemies." It comes from a letter which Chu Fou, a general under Liu Hsiu of the Eastern Han Dynasty, wrote to Peng Chung, the prefect of Yuyang. In context it reads, "Whatever you do, you must be sure that you do not sadden your friends and gladden your enemies." Chu Pou's words express a clear-cut political principle which we must never forget.

In your list of questions you also ask about the Communist Party's attitude to what has come to be known as "friction". I tell you frankly that we are absolutely opposed to friction between the anti-Japanese parties, which cancels out their strength. But if anyone persists in using violence against us, tries to bully us and resorts to repression, the Communist Party will have to take a firm stand. Our attitude is: We will not attack unless we are attacked; if we are attacked, we will certainly counter-attack. But our stand is strictly one of self-defence; no Communist is permitted to go beyond the principle of self-defence

''Question:'' How about the friction in northern China?

''Answer:'' Chang Yin-wu and Chin Chi-jung are the two expert friction-mongers there. Chang Yin-wu in Hopei and Chin Chi-jung in Shantung are simply violating all laws, human or divine, and are scarcely distinguishable from the traitors. They seldom fight the enemy but often attack the Eighth Route Army. We have already sent Generalissimo Chiang a mass of indisputable evidence, such as Chang Yin-wu's orders to his subordinates to attack the Eighth Route Army

''Question:'' Is there any friction with the New Fourth Army?

''Answer:'' Yes, there is. The incident of the Pingkiang massacre has shocked the whole nation.

''Question:'' Some people say that the united front is important but that the Border Region Government should be abolished for the sake of unification. What do you think of this?

''Answer:'' Nonsense of all sorts is being talked everywhere, the so-called abolition of the Border Region being one example. The Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region is a democratic anti-Japanese base area and is politically the most progressive region in the whole country. What grounds are there for abolishing it? Moreover, Generalissimo Chiang long ago recognized the Border Region and the Executive Yuan of the National Government officially recognized it as long ago as the winter of the 26th year of the Republic (1937). China certainly needs to be unified, but it must be unified on the basis of resistance, unity and progress. If unification is sought on the opposite basis, the country will perish.

''Question:'' Since there are different interpretations of unification, is there any possibility of a split between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party?

''Answer:'' If we are merely talking of possibilities, we can envisage both the possibility of unity and the possibility of a split, depending on the attitudes of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, and especially of the people throughout the country. As far as we Communists are concerned, we have long made it clear that our policy is co-operation, and that we not only hope for long-term co-operation but are working hard for it. It is said that at the Fifth Plenary Session of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek also declared that domestic problems should not be solved by force. Confronted with a formidable enemy and bearing in mind the lessons of the past, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party must each persist in long-term co-operation and avoid a split. But to avoid all possibility of a split, political guarantees for long-term co-operation must be found, namely, perseverance in the War of Resistance and the introduction of democratic government. With these, unity can be maintained and a split avoided; it depends on the common effort of the two parties and the whole nation and the effort must be made. "Persist in resistance and oppose capitulation", "Persist in unity and oppose a split" and "Persist in progress and oppose retrogression" -- these are the three great political slogans our Party put forward in its Manifesto of July 7 this year. In our opinion, this is the only way China can avoid subjugation and drive out the enemy. There is no other way.
[[Category:Library works by Mao Zedong]]
[[Category:Interviews]]

Library:Closing speech at the Second Session of the First National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference

2024-09-07T00:15:00Z

Connolly1916: added

{{Library work|title=Closing speech at the Second Session of the First National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference|author=Mao Zedong|spoken on=1950-06-23|type=Speech}}

The present session has summed up our experience in the past period and laid down various guiding principles.

We have done this work jointly at this gathering of representatives of all the nationalities, democratic classes, democratic parties, people's organizations and democratic personages from every walk of life. Not only have the members of the National Committee of the People's Political Consultative Conference taken part in the discussions, many cadres of the Central People's Government and of the people's governments (or military and administrative commissions) of the greater administrative areas, provinces and municipalities as well as representatives from the consultative committees of the provincial and municipal conferences of people from all circles and many specially invited patriotic personages have also sat in and joined the discussions. Thus we have been able to draw together opinions from all quarters, review our past work and set forth guiding principles for the future. I hope that we will continue to use this method and that the people's governments (or military and administrative commissions) of the greater administrative areas, provinces and municipalities will adopt it too. So far our committee sessions have been advisory in nature. But in practice the Central People's Government will as a matter of course adopt and put into effect the decisions made at our sessions, as it should.

We have unanimously approved the report on the work of the National Committee and the various reports on the work of the Central People's Government. These are the reports on agrarian reform, on political, military, economic and financial work, on taxation, culture and education, and on the work of the judiciary. All of them are good. In these reports the experience of our work in the past has been properly summed up and the guiding principles for our work in the future have been laid down. There were many items on the agenda of our session, because work has started or expanded in every field since the founding of our new state. Throughout the country the people are vigorously unfolding a great and genuine people's revolutionary struggle on all fronts, a struggle that is as great as it is unprecedented on the military, economic, ideological and agrarian reform fronts, and the work in every field awaits summing up and needs guiding principles. That is why we had so many items on the agenda. We shall hold two sessions yearly as required by law, one with a full and the other with a less full agenda. This is what we are called on to do, for China is a large country with a population actually exceeding 475 million and, what is more, it finds itself in a historic period of people's revolution. And this is what we have been doing, and I think we have done right.

Our present session had many subjects for discussion, the central one being the question of transforming the old land system. We have endorsed the Draft Agrarian Reform Law proposed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to which we have made a number of useful amendments and supplements. This is fine. I am glad and wish to congratulate the hundreds of millions of new China's rural population on winning the opportunity for emancipation and the nation on winning the basic condition for industrialization. The peasants form the bulk of China's population. It was with their help that victory was won in the revolution, and it is again their help that will make the industrialization of the country possible. Therefore, the working class should actively help the peasants carry out the agrarian reform; the urban petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie should also give their support, and still more so should all the democratic parties and people's organizations. War and agrarian reform are two tests everyone and every political party in China must go through in the historical period of New Democracy. Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary. Whoever sides with imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism is a counter-revolutionary. Whoever sides with the revolutionary people in word only but not in deed is a revolutionary in word. Whoever sides with the revolutionary people in deed as well as in word is a true revolutionary. The test of war is basically over, and we have all come through well, to the satisfaction of the people of the whole country. Now it is the test of agrarian reform that we have to pass, and I hope we shall acquit ourselves just as well as we did in the test of war. Let us give this matter more thought, have more consultation, straighten out our thinking, march in step and form a great anti-feudal united front, and then we shall be able to lead the people and help them pass this test successfully. When the tests of war and agrarian reform are passed, the remaining test will be easy to pass, that is, the test of socialism, of country-wide socialist transformation. As for those who have made contributions in the revolutionary war and in the revolutionary transformation of the land system and who continue to do so in the coming years of economic and cultural construction, the people will not forget them when the time comes for nationalizing private industry and socializing agriculture (which is still quite far off), and they will have a bright future. This is how our country steadily advances; it has passed through the war and is undergoing new-democratic reforms, and in the future it will enter the new era of socialism unhurriedly and with proper arrangements when our economy and culture are flourishing, when conditions are ripe and when the transition has been fully considered and endorsed by the whole nation. I think it is necessary to make this point clear so that people will have confidence and stop worrying: "Don't know when I'll no longer be wanted and be given the chance to serve the people even if I wish to." No, that won't happen. The people and their government have no reason to reject anyone or deny him the opportunity of making a living and rendering service to the country, provided he is really willing to serve the people and provided he really helped and did a good turn when the people were faced with difficulties and keeps on doing good without giving up halfway.

With this great aim in mind, in the international sphere we must firmly unite with the Soviet Union, the People's Democracies and the forces of peace and democracy everywhere, and there should not be the slightest hesitation or wavering on this question. At home, we must unite all the nationalities, democratic classes, democratic parties, people's organizations and patriotic democrats and consolidate the great, prestigious revolutionary united front already in existence. Whoever contributes to the consolidation of this revolutionary united front is doing right, and we welcome him; whoever harms this consolidation is doing wrong, and we oppose him. To consolidate the revolutionary united front, we must use the method of criticism and self-criticism. The main criterion in the application of this method is our present fundamental law -- the Common Programme. We have carried out criticism and self-criticism at this session, basing ourselves on the Common Programme. This is an excellent method, which impels everyone of us to uphold truth and rectify error, and it is the only correct method for all revolutionary people to educate and remould themselves in a people's state. The people's democratic dictatorship uses two methods. Towards the enemy, it uses the method of dictatorship, that is, for as long a period of time as is necessary it does not permit them to take part in political activity and compels them to obey the law of the People's Government, to engage in labour and, through such labour, be transformed into new men. Towards the people, on the contrary, it uses the method of democracy and not of compulsion, that is, it must necessarily let them take part in political activity and does not compel them to do this or that but uses the method of democracy to educate and persuade. Such education is self-education for the people, and its basic method is criticism and self-criticism. I hope that this method will be used by all the nationalities, democratic classes, democratic parties, people's organizations and patriotic democrats in the country.
[[Category:Library works by Mao Zedong]]
[[Category:Library documents from China]]

Red Army Faction

2024-09-06T20:49:24Z

Connolly1916: citations

{{Infobox guerilla organization|name=Red Army Faction|native_name=Rote Armee Fraktion|logo=Red Army Faction.png|founders=[[Andreas Baader]] [[Hans-Jürgen Bäcker]] [[Ingeborg Barz]] [[Monika Berberich]] [[Gudrun Ensslin]] [[Irene Goergens]] [[Wolfgang Grundmann]] [[Peter Homann]] [[Horst Mahler]] [[Ulrike Meinhof]] [[Astrid Proll]] [[Ingrid Schubert]]|dates=14 May 1970 – 20 April 1998|opponents=[[File:Flag of Germany.svg|20px]][[Federal Republic of Germany|FRG]] [[File:Flag of NATO.png|20px]][[NATO]]|ideology=[[Communism|Revolutionary Socialism]] [[Anti-fascism|Anti-Fascism]] [[Marxism-Leninism]] [[Mao Zedong Thought]]|allies=[[File:GDR flag.png|20px]][[GDR]] [[2 June Movement]] [[Revolutionary Cells]] [[Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine]] [[Black September Organization]]|leaders=Horizontally organized - prominent members at different points included: '''First Generation''' Ulrike Meinhof Andreas Baader Gudrun Ensslin Horst Mahler [[Holger Meins]] [[Jan-Carl Raspe]] '''Second Generation''' [[Brigitte Mohnhaupt]] '''Third Generation''' [[Wolfgang Grams]] [[Birgit Hogefeld]]|war=[[Guerilla Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany]]}}

The '''Red Army Faction''' ([[German language|German]]: ''Rote Armee Fraktion''; '''RAF'''), alternatively translated as Red Army Fraction, was a [[Communism|communist]] [[Urban guerrilla warfare|urban guerrilla]] organization in [[West Germany]].

They participated in many actions against Imperialist and Capitalist forces, including the bombings of US Army bases and police stations, an attack on the West German embassy in Sweden, the killing of Nazi lawyer and federal prosecutor general Siegfried Buback and prominent Nazi Hanns-Martin Schleyer.

After the imprisonment of many of their leaders, many of their allies and supporters around the world took action to try to free them, including the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181, in which the freedom of RAF prisoners was a demand. In order to stop these efforts, the West German government, possibly with the help of allies in Nato, murdered Ulrike Meinhof in 1976 and later on 17 October 1977 murdered Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, with Irmgard Möller surviving. These deaths were all called suicides.<ref>{{Citation|author=Jutta Ditfurth|year=2007|title=Ulrike Meinhof: The Biography|pdf=https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.jutta-ditfurth.de/ulrike-meinhof/Presse/Goeteborgsposten-engl-Ditfurth-Meinhof-20071110.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwikxZvino2FAxWaQzABHYPEA2QQFnoECBYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1QDfxAz_bYpzOh2NQs7yuK|trans-title=Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biographie|trans-lang=German}}</ref>

After the deaths of these members the Red Army Faction continued to carry out attacks until it was dissolved in 1998.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Britannica|title=Rise and Fall of the Red Army Faction|url=https://www.britannica.com/video/180279/Red-Army-Faction-rise-prominence-West-German}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|author=Kate Connolly|newspaper=The Guardian|title=Terrorist chic or debunking of a myth? Baader Meinhof film splits Germany|date=2008-9-10|url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/sep/25/germany#:~:text=Baader%20Meinhof%20film%20splits%20Germany,-This%20article%20is&text=The%20bloody%20legacy%20of%20the,myth%20of%201970s%20terrorist%20chic.}}</ref>

== Background ==

=== West German student sovement ===
''See main article: [[West German Student Movement]]''

The [[Socialist German Students' Federation|Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund]] (Socialist German Students' Federation, SDS) was founded in 1946 as the youth wing of the [[Social Democratic Party of Germany|Social Democratic Party]] (SDP). It moved towards the left, away from the mainstream SDP, beginning in the late 1950s, with the group adopting stances against nuclear weapons, calling for the withdrawal of France from Algeria, and opposing militarism at its 1958 conference. This move to the left was countered in May of 1960 by the forming of the [[Social Democratic Student Federation|Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund]] (Social Democratic Student Federation, SHB) by supporters of the SPD party line. In response to this move the left of the SPD formed another organization, [[Society for the Promotion of Socialism]] (SF), in October 1961. In order to stop the leftward and anti-party-establishment drift of the student groups, the SPD expelled SF and the SDS from the party in late 1961. The SDS continued to be a powerful force in student politics in the years to come, while continuing to pull the SHB and other pro SPD groups left.<ref name=":0">{{Citation|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|year=2009|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People|chapter=The Re-Emergence of Revolutionary Politics in West Germany|chapter-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People#2_-_The_Re-Emergence_of_Revolutionary_Politics_in_West_Germany}}</ref>

Young people in West Germany were drawn to the growing radical left movement for several reasons. Repressive and socially conservative laws and still ever present antisemitism and pro-Fascist sentiments in the older generations, as well as the growing worldwide resistance to United States imperialism and imperialist wars.<ref name=":0" />

In December 1964 [[Moise Tschombe]], Congolese dictator and leader of the coup that resulted in the death of Socialist and anti-imperialist leader [[Patrice Lumumba]], visited West Berlin. This visit was met by large protests, with the SDS playing a major role. The protests faced police repression, and the protesters fought back, setting the scene for the later anti-imperialist movements of the decade.<ref name=":0" />

As the left grew more popular, the SPD further alienated younger and more progressive sections of society by entering into the [[Grand Coalition]] with the [[Christian Democratic Union]] (CDU) and the [[Christian Social Union]] (CSU), two reactionary parties with many former Nazis in their ranks. In response to this, the [[Außerparlamentarische Opposition]] (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, APO) was created.<ref name=":0" />

On 2 June 1967, thousands of demonstrators protested against a visit by the Shah of Iran. They wore masks of the Shah and his wife and pelted the pair with rotten tomatoes. In response the police, as well as the Iranian intelligence agency [[SAVAK]], attacked protesters, leading to a battle which ended with 44 arrests, 44 injuries, and one student dead, [[Benno Ohnesorg]], who was shot in the back of the head by Karl-Heinz Kurras.<ref name=":0" />

The police murder sparked even larger protests, with between 100,000 and 200,000 students taking part. The SDS and other left organizations grew rapidly and began to experiment with new organizational strategies and chapters outside of universities.<ref name=":0" />

Demonstrations were banned in West Berlin on 3 June, with eight protesters being arrested the next day. Then on 5 June, the [[Zionist Entity]] attacked Egypt's air bases and soon destroyed it and its allies militaries in the [[Six-Day War]]. This solidified the Anti-Zionist sentiments in the SDS and further cemented its anti-imperialism.<ref name=":0" />

On 17 and 18 February 1968, 5,000 people attended the International Congress on Vietnam in West Berlin. After the congress a demonstration of more than 12,000 people took place.<ref name=":0" />

The West German press, largely controlled by businessman [[Axel Springer|Axel Springer's]] corporation, increased its attacks on the left. This culminated on 11 April, when right-wing worker named Josef Bachmann attempted to kill [[Rudi Dutschke]], shooting him three times, once in the head, nearly killing him. He later confessed that his information leading to the act was taken from [[Bild Zeitung|''Bild Zeitung'']], a Springer outlet.<ref name=":0" />

The attack, less than a week after the murder of [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] in the United States, radicalized many, leading to increased protests, with 300,000 people participating in marches the next weekend in favor of peace and now against the Springer corporation. Two people were killed by police during the wave of protests, and the Springer corporation began to become the target of direct attacks. By the end of it more than 250,000 dm of Springer property was damaged or destroyed, a serious blow to the propagandists.<ref name=":0" />

On 31 May the [[Notstandgesetze]] (Emergency Powers Act) was passed. It gave the state additional power to suppress protests and allowed increased tapping of phones and stealing of mail. The passing of the act led to even more protests, with tens of thousands demonstrating and tens of thousands more staging a one-day strike in opposition to the law.<ref name=":0" />

Further protests broke out with the attempts to disbar left-wing lawyer [[Horst Mahler]]. These protests culminated in the [[Battle of Tegeler Weg]], where about 1,500 protesters, with cobblestone and wooden two-by-fours, and police with water cannons, tear gas, and clubs, fought throughout the night on 3 November. Ten police and 21 demonstrators were hospitalized and 46 were arrested. Mahler was not disbarred.<ref name=":0" />

In October 1969 the Grand Coalition ended and the SDP, with [[Willy Brandt]] as Chancellor, came into power. Some demands of the student movement were given in to, but the tensions continued.<ref name=":0" />

In March 1970 the SDS dissolved after a congress in Frankfurt.

=== Konkret ===
''See main article: [[Konkret]]''

''[[Konkret]]'' was a Hamburg based magazine published by [[Klaus Rainer Röhl]]. It began publishing in 1957 and was funded in part by the remnants of the KPD based in exile in the GDR. The magazine focused on the left wing issues of the time and became popular within the early student movement. It's chief editor was leftist journalist and later leader of the Red Army Faction [[Ulrike Meinhof]]. She had been active in the SDS from 1957 and had joined the KPD in 1959. In 1961 she married Röhl in 1961.<ref name=":0" />

In 1964, amidst the Sino-Soviet Split, the magazine faced serious challenged and drastic changes. Meinhof and ''konkret'' as a whole took the side of China, despite their funding from the Soviet aligned KPD. This led to them losing its funding from the KPD and the GDR. <ref name=":0" />

In 1969 Meinhof left konkret.<ref name=":0" />

=== West Berlin ===
West Berlin, due to its status as technically part of the Federal Republic of Germany, while being disconnected socially and politically, as well as physically, grew to be a center of the left in Germany. Organizations like [[Kommune 1]], the Republican Clubs, various women's communes and student groups began to further the left movement, though not without flaws.<ref name=":0" />

=== Problems within the student movement ===

==== Male supremacy ====
Chauvinism, male supremacy, and misogyny, though opposed by many, were prevalent within some elements of the student movement. This led a decline in the number of women in the SDS and APO and the growth of smaller feminist groups.<ref name=":0" /> In addition to this, the Kommune 1 movement and other similar Anarchist-oriented groupings within the student movement containing male-oriented and chauvinist distortions of the sexual revolution.<ref name=":1">{{Citation|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|year=2009|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People|chapter=Taking Up The Gun|chapter-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People#Taking_Up_The_Gun}}</ref>

==== Division ====
The student movement was divided along ideological lines, like most of the left in the world at that time. Anarchist groups grew apart from Marxist-oriented groups, forming the ''Sponti'' left. Division over the issue of the German Democratic Republic led to little growth within the newly founded [[German Communist Party]] (DKP), a re-establishment of the [[Communist Party of Germany]] (KPD). Division stemming from the [[Sino-Soviet Split]] also was prevalent, with groups following [[Marxism-Leninism-Maoism]] and [[Mao Zedong Thought]] feuding with pro-Soviet sections of the movement.<ref name=":0" />

==== Lack of working class representation ====
The most serious problem of the student movement was the class makeup of the students in the FRG at the time. University students were overwhelmingly from [[petit bourgeoisie]] or [[Labor aristocracy|labor aristocratic]] backgrounds, with only 7% being from working class families. This led the the FRG being able to buy out many within the movement with ease: two months after the dissolution of the SDS, amnesty was granted to most protesters in prison. This led to the near complete destruction of the student movement. The student movement was not entirely from these backgrounds. In the protests against the Springer corporation after the attempted murder of Rudi Dutschke only a minority of those arrested were university students, with most being working-class youth living in West Berlin.<ref name=":0" />

=== The move to violent action ===
In September 1968 student movement political leaders Rudi Dutschke and [[Hans-Jürgen Krahl]] first proposed the idea of building left-wing urban guerilla, though this would not be further developed for some time.<ref name=":0" />

==== Early Anarchist actions ====
The first organized revolutionary violence was carried out by individuals within Kommune 1. They formed the Anarchist 'Central Committee of the Roaming Hash Rebels'. The group carried out actions under several different names over its existence. Under the name [[Tupamaros-West Berlin]], a firebombing attempt on a Jewish cultural center was carried out and widely criticized from both within and without the movement, and the group essentially dissolved soon after.<ref name=":1" />

The short-lived grouping eventually evolved into the [[2nd of June Movement]] in 1972, which was closely aligned with the RAF.<ref name=":1" />

==== Frankfurt firebombing and trial ====
''See main article: [[1968 Frankfurt department store bombings and trial]]''

On 3 April 1968, the most important development of the revolutionary struggle in relation to the Red Army Faction occurred. Future RAF members [[Gudrun Ensslin]] and [[Andreas Baader]], along with [[Horst Söhnlein]] and [[Thorwald Proll]], who were in Frankfurt at for an SDS conference, firebombed two department stores. They were all arrested 2 days later on 5 April.<ref name=":1" />

The attack was poorly planned; there was no communiqué, little attempt to avoid arrest, and after their capture, little unified strategy in court. Gudrun Ensslin stated that the attack was "in protest against people’s indifference to the murder of the Vietnamese." She also echoed a core belief of the later RAF, that "words are useless without action."<ref name=":1" />

In court they were represented by fellow future RAF leader Horst Mahler, who at that point was well-known as a leftist lawyer.<ref name=":1" />

They were sentenced to three years in prison each in October. They appealed the sentence, but were imprisoned until June 1969. They were then released until the court came to a decision on the appeal. Ensslin, Baader, and Proll began to work within the 'apprentices' collectives', which consisted of runaways from state homes. In November the court denied their appeal. Söhnlein turned himself in, the other three went on the run. Proll soon left the group, but his sister [[Astrid Proll]], who later became a prominent member of the RAF, joined Baader and Ensslin.<ref name=":1" />

They travelled to France and then to Italy before returning to West Berlin, and reconnected with Mahler. He was trying at that point to create a guerilla movement, and joined forces with the three to pursue this. They lived in various safehouses with sympathetic, sometimes prominent, people. One of these people was Ulrike Meinhof.<ref name=":1" />

On 3 April 1970, Andreas Baader was recaptured in West Berlin, set up by longtime informant [[Peter Urbach]]. The subsequent actions by his comrades served as the beginning of the Red Army Faction.<ref name=":1" />

== Early Days of the RAF ==

=== The action to free Andreas Baader ===
''See main article: [[Action to free Andreas Baader]]''

Immedietely after Baader's capture planning to free him began. Eventually it was decided that Ulrike Meinhof would use her reputation to have Baader allowed out to meet with her in a library. This was done with the pretext of research for a book on youth homes, which was a subject Meinhof had covered extensively. Once they were there a group would storm the building, threaten the guards with weapons, and finally make their escape.<ref name=":1" />

On 14 May Baader was allowed out, escorted by armed guards. He met Meinhof at the Institute for Social Issues Library in West Berlin. Once they were there [[Irene Goergens]] and [[Ingrid Schubert]] entered the building, followed by Gudrun Ensslin and an unknown man, both masked and armed. A librarian attempted to intervene and was shot in the liver. After this the guards opened fire, but missed all of them. The four, now joined by Baader and Meinhof, jumped out of the window and into the getaway car waiting for them.<ref name=":1" />

The action gained widespread media attention very quickly, and Meinhof, who before was not fully involved with the underground of the group and had been continuing her public life until then, was forced to go underground.<ref name=":1" />

In response to the action the West Berlin police were supplies hand grenades, semiautomatic revolvers, and submachine guns, in an precedented and shocking move for many on the left.<ref name=":1" />

The group published [[Library:The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People#Build the Red Army!|Build the Red Army]] in the radical magazine ''[[883]]'', explaining the purpose of the action and denouncing those on the left who criticized revolutionary violence.<ref name=":1" />

Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, Ingrid Schubert, Astrid Proll, Irene Goergens,[[Monika Berberich]], [[Hans-Jürgen Bäcker]], [[Ingeborg Barz]], [[Wolfgang Grundmann]], [[Peter Homann]] were known founding members of the Red Army Faction.<ref name=":1" />

=== In Jordan ===
After the action to liberate Baader, more than a dozen RAF members travelled to Jordan to receive training from the [[Palestine Liberation Organization]]. At this time the PLO in Jordan, which had a large Palestinian presence in the aftermath of the [[Nakba]], trained many leftist guerilla organizations throughout the world, including even some West German groups previously. By the end of the summer of 1970 the RAF members travelled back to West Berlin through the GDR.<ref name=":1" />

=== Back in West Berlin and early arrests ===
Soon the RAF began to obtain weapons, cars, and safehouses, as well as new members and supporters. On 29 September 1970, three banks were robbed by the RAF in collaboration with the Roaming Hash Rebels grouping. More than 220,000 dm (about 60,000 US dollars then, more than 480,000 US dollars in May 2024<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=CPI Inflation Calculator|title=CPI Inflation Calculator|url=https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60000&year1=197009&year2=202405}}</ref>) were stolen by the group.<ref name=":1" />

On 8 October, RAF members Monika Berberich, Horst Mahler, Irene Goergens, [[Brigitte Asdonk]], and Ingrid Schubert were arrested in West Berlin after an anonymous tip about two RAF safehouses was received by police. Hans-Jürgen Bäcker was suspected as having been the source of the tip, and was confronted by other members. He denied the claims, but left the RAF.<ref name=":1" />

After the arrests the RAF moved out of West Berlin. Once arriving in West Germany, they burglarized the town halls of two small towns, stealing ID cards, passports, official stamps, and other needed materials.<ref name=":1" />

On 20 December RAF members [[Ali Jensen]] and [[Beate Sturm]] and non-member [[Karl-Heinz Ruhland]] were stopped by police along. Ruhland surrendered, but the others fled. The next day they were arrested along with fellow member [[Uli Scholze]]. Ruhland would later cooperate with the police.<ref name=":1" />

On 10 February 1971 Astrid Proll and [[Manfred Grashof]] were stopped by police. The police opened fire unprovoked, but the two managed to escape.<ref name=":1" />

The trial of Mahler, Goergens, and Schubert began on 1 March in West Berlin. They were charged in relation to the action to free Baader, with Goergens and Schubert charged with attempted murder and Mahler with accessory to the action and illegal possession of a firearm.<ref name=":1" />

=== Early anti-RAF propaganda campaign and further arrests ===
Around this time the first psychological warfare campaign against the RAF began. In February, the police announced that the RAF planned to kidnap FRG Chancellor Willy Brandt. This claim was quickly refuted by the RAF.<ref name=":1" />

On 25 February, a seven-year-old boy was kidnapped, with one of the ransom demands being the release of Mahler. Mahler denounced the kidnapping and called for the boys release. The lawyer who delivered the ransom money to the group reported that the kidnappers were not leftists at all, let alone members of the RAF, and were rather a right-wing group.<ref name=":1" />

On 25 April, it was reported that a university professor and his friend were kidnapped. The alleged kidnappers demanded the release of Mahler, Schubert, and Georgens, and threatened to kill them if they were not released. Two days later, the two alleged victims were found, with no kidnappers nearby. They admitted it was staged in the hopes of turning public opinion against the RAF and the nominally left-wing SPD. The leader of the plan was [[Jürgen Rieger]], a fascist militant who was imprisoned for six months for the plot.<ref name=":1" />

While the trial was occurring various members of the RAF were arrested. On 12 April, [[Ilse Stachowiak]], likely the youngest member of the group, who joined at 16-years-old, was arrested in Frankfurt. One day later [[Rolf Heissler]] was arrested during a bank robbery attempt in Munich. On 6 May Astrid Proll was arrested at a Hamburg gas station.<ref name=":1" />

In late May the trial ended. Goergens were sentenced to four years and Schubert to six. As the trial ended rioting broke out in West Berlin. The defendants would have additional sentences added on in relation to the bank robberies and other RAF actions, with Mahler eventually receiving 14 years in prison by 1974.<ref name=":1" />

Around this time Horst Mahler released a document titled ''Regarding the Armed Struggle in West Europe''. It was portrayed as being an official Red Army Faction statement and published in a radical left magazine under the title ''New Traffic Regulations'' in order to avoid immediate suppression. In response to this document, which the majority of the RAF leadership opposed, ''The Urban Guerilla Concept'' was published widely, both in radical and mainstream publications. The document formed the basis of the RAF's urban guerilla strategy and served as their most important theoretical document, being widely read, translated, and used by revolutionaries around the world.<ref name=":1" />

== Organized state repression and first RAF deaths ==
The first Red Army Faction martyr was [[Petra Schelm]] , who was murdered by police on 15 July 1971. The West German government sent three thousand armed police officers to patrol cities and set up checkpoints on roads across the north of the FRG. These state repression efforts were named Operation Cobra. Schelm and a comrade, [[Werner Hoppe]], were stopped at one such checkpoint in Hamburg. Hoppe surrendered and was captured, Schelm was shot in the head and killed at the age of 19.<ref name=":2">{{Citation|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|year=2009|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People|chapter=Building a Base and Serving the People|chapter-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People#4_-_Building_a_Base_and_%22Serving_the_People%22}}</ref>

The murder led to widespread support among the German working class and especially among proletarian youths for the RAF, with 40 percent of respondents in one survey stating that the RAF's actions were political rather than criminal in nature. This led to an abundance of sympathizers among the general public who were willing to harbor RAF fugitives.<ref name=":2" />

Around this time, many former members of the [[Socialist Patients Collective]] (SPK), a Radical [[New Left]] therapy and medical group, joined the RAF after the arrest of the groups leader and the groups subsequent dissolution in Summer 1971. Many former SPK members would become prominent members of the RAF.<ref name=":2" />

==== First RAF killings ====
The first police death was on 22 October. Former SPK member [[Margrit Schiller]] was being attacked by two police officers, and two RAF members including [[Gerhard Müller]] came to their comrade's defense. Police officer Norbert Schmid was killed in the fighting, and soon after Schiller was captured as well, with her arrest broadcast on live TV.<ref name=":2" />

Two months later, on 22 December, a second police officer, Herbert Schoner, was killed during a bank robbery in Kaiserslautern. He knocked on the window of the getaway vehicle outside of the bank during the robbery and was shot three times. The killing was quickly exploited by bourgeoise media to demonize the RAF.<ref name=":2" />

=== Unprovoked murders by police ===
The first was on 4 December, when police stopped a car carrying two guerillas of the [[2nd of June Movement]] Anarchist group, [[Bommi Baumann]] and [[Georg von Rauch]], in West Berlin. Von Raunch was murdered by police immediately with no provocation.<ref name=":2" />

Then, on 1 March 1972 a seventeen-year-old in West Berlin named Richard Epple was murdered by police machine gun fire after he ran through a police checkpoint. He was not a member of the RAF or of the radical left at all, but instead was driving without a license.<ref name=":2" />

On 25 June, Scottish businessman Ian Macleod was shot by police as he stood behind his bedroom door. He was either a non-member of the RAF or a British spy attempting to infiltrate the group, and either way he was killed without any provocation.<ref name=":2" />

The three police murders led to widespread protest and additional support for the RAF.<ref name=":2" />

=== Further police repression ===
In March 1972 another propaganda effort against the RAF began. Karl-Heinz Ruhland, who was arrested several months before, began to work for police after his trial ended that month, leading to leniency for him in sentencing. He was only loosely connected to the group, but provided evidence, sometimes real, but most of the time fabricated. This included testifying against RAF members in trial and publicly support police narratives, changing his story as the police story changed.<ref name=":2" />

On 2 March 1972 [[Tommy Weissbecker]] was murdered by police in Augsburg at 23-years-old. His comrade [[Carmen Roll]] was captured during the same engagement. The killing occured as the pair left Weissbecker's apartment. Weissbecker was under surveillance at the time. In response the 2nd of June Movement bombed the police headquarters in West Berlin was bombed. Roll was drugged while imprisoned in an effort to force her to provide information. This almost lead to her death on 16 March.<ref name=":2" />

RAF members [[Manfred Grashof]] and [[Wolfgang Grundmann]] feared their cover was blown, as the safehouse they were staying at had been rented out by Weissbecker. They were correct. They returned to the building to collect materials they had left there before planning to flee to another safehouse, and when they returned three police were waiting. One officer shot Grasof three times, and in response Grashof, aiming blindly in the dark building, shot and killed police commissioner [[Hans Eckardt]]. Both were subsequently captured.<ref name=":2" />

=== Crackdown on the legal left and broader police repression ===
The [[Federal Criminal Bureau]] appointed [[Horst Herold]] Chief Commissioner in September 1971. He led the creation of the Baader-Meinhof Special Commission in order to combat the guerilla and created a computerized database of fingerprints, names, organizations, photographs, and other information.<ref name=":2" />

On 28 January 1972 the Anti-Radical Act was passed. Supported by all three major parties in the FRG, the act prohibited known Socialists, Communists, and other leftists from working in the public sector, which included 14% of the workforce. The Verfassungsschutz, the FRG's political police force, also increased its operations, which included wiretapping and informers.<ref name=":2" />

=== ''Serve the People'' and early traitors ===
In April 1972 [[Library:The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People#Building a Base and "Serving The People"#Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and the Class Struggle|''Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and the Class Struggle'']], it's longest theoretical document up to that point, which analyzed the events within West Germany in in 1971 and 1972, particularly the failed chemical worker's strike of 1971.<ref name=":2" />

The document also denounced traitors to the group including Karl-Heinz Ruhland, Beate Sturm, who provided information to the media which portrayed the RAF poorly, and Peter Homann, who kidnapped Ulrike Meinhof's children and brought them to their father Klaus Rainer Röhl.<ref name=":2" />

== May Offensive ==
''See main article: [[May offensive (RAF campaign)]]''

The May offensive of 1972 was the first major Red Army Faction campaign. It was in opposition to global imperialism, and the West German interests supporting it.<ref name=":3">{{Citation|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|year=2009|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History Volume One: Projectiles for the People|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People|chapter=The May Offensive: Bringing the War Home|chapter-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People#5_-_The_May_Offensive:_Bringing_the_War_Home}}</ref>

The first attack occurred on 11, May, when the "Petra Schelm Commando", named after the RAF member martyred the year before, set off three bombs at the U.S. Army V Corps headquarters and the National Security Agency headquarters in Frankfurt. The attack resulted in the deals of one soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Paul A. Bloomquist, as well as thirteen injuries and 300,000 dollars in damage.<ref name=":3" />

The second attack occurred the next day on the 12 May. The "Thomas Weissbecker Commando" bombed the outside of the police headquarters in Augsburg, Bavaria, resulting in one minor injury to an officer. In Munich, Bavaria's capital, a police building was car-bombed. The warning delivered by the Red Army Faction in the second bombing was not received by police in time to evacuate, and due to this twelve people were injured. The second bombing resulted in 150,000 dollars in damages. The bombings were in retaliation to the murder of Thomas Weissbecker that March.<ref name=":3" />

On 16 May, the "Manfred Grashof Commando" planted a bomb in Federal Supreme Court Judge Buddenber's car. The judge had been in charge of RAF cases. The bomb went off when his wife, Greta, went to pick up the judge from work. She was seriously injured, but survived the attack.<ref name=":3" />

On 19 May, the "2nd of June Commando" bombed the Springer Press building in Hamburg. Three bombs went off in total, one in the proofreaders' room and two in bathrooms, resulting in seventeen injuries. The bombings were in response to Springer newspaper's publishing of anti-left and imperialist propaganda. Springer ignored three warnings, which resulted in the injuries of workers. The fact that workers were injured led to infighting within the RAF and criticism of the RAF from the left at large.<ref name=":3" />

On 24 May, the "July 15 Commando", named after the date Petra Schelm was murdered, bombed the headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe in Heidelberg. Two car bombs were set off near the data processing center and the officers' club at the Campbell Barracks, set to go off while most people at the barracks had finished work and were away from the area. The bombing resulted in three deaths and six injuries of soldiers. The attack also destroyed a computer used to calculate carpet bombings of civilian areas in Vietnam.<ref name=":3" />

=== False bomb warning as a support tactic of the RAF ===

=== Reactions to the May offensive ===

== RAF in Prison and Outside Action ==

== German Autumn ==

== Stammheim Murders ==

== References ==
<references />
[[Category:Communist underground movements]]
[[Category:Socialism in Germany]]

Red Army Faction

2024-09-06T01:09:58Z

Connolly1916: started next section

{{Infobox guerilla organization|name=Red Army Faction|native_name=Rote Armee Fraktion|logo=Red Army Faction.png|founders=[[Andreas Baader]] [[Hans-Jürgen Bäcker]] [[Ingeborg Barz]] [[Monika Berberich]] [[Gudrun Ensslin]] [[Irene Goergens]] [[Wolfgang Grundmann]] [[Peter Homann]] [[Horst Mahler]] [[Ulrike Meinhof]] [[Astrid Proll]] [[Ingrid Schubert]]|dates=14 May 1970 – 20 April 1998|opponents=[[File:Flag of Germany.svg|20px]][[Federal Republic of Germany|FRG]] [[File:Flag of NATO.png|20px]][[NATO]]|ideology=[[Communism|Revolutionary Socialism]] [[Anti-fascism|Anti-Fascism]] [[Marxism-Leninism]] [[Mao Zedong Thought]]|allies=[[File:GDR flag.png|20px]][[GDR]] [[2 June Movement]] [[Revolutionary Cells]] [[Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine]] [[Black September Organization]]|leaders=Horizontally organized - prominent members at different points included: '''First Generation''' Ulrike Meinhof Andreas Baader Gudrun Ensslin Horst Mahler [[Holger Meins]] [[Jan-Carl Raspe]] '''Second Generation''' [[Brigitte Mohnhaupt]] '''Third Generation''' [[Wolfgang Grams]] [[Birgit Hogefeld]]|war=[[Guerilla Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany]]}}

The '''Red Army Faction''' ([[German language|German]]: ''Rote Armee Fraktion''; '''RAF'''), alternatively translated as Red Army Fraction, was a [[Communism|communist]] [[Urban guerrilla warfare|urban guerrilla]] organization in [[West Germany]].

They participated in many actions against Imperialist and Capitalist forces, including the bombings of US Army bases and police stations, an attack on the West German embassy in Sweden, the killing of Nazi lawyer and federal prosecutor general Siegfried Buback and prominent Nazi Hanns-Martin Schleyer.

After the imprisonment of many of their leaders, many of their allies and supporters around the world took action to try to free them, including the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181, in which the freedom of RAF prisoners was a demand. In order to stop these efforts, the West German government, possibly with the help of allies in Nato, murdered Ulrike Meinhof in 1976 and later on 17 October 1977 murdered Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, with Irmgard Möller surviving. These deaths were all called suicides.<ref>{{Citation|author=Jutta Ditfurth|year=2007|title=Ulrike Meinhof: The Biography|pdf=https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.jutta-ditfurth.de/ulrike-meinhof/Presse/Goeteborgsposten-engl-Ditfurth-Meinhof-20071110.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwikxZvino2FAxWaQzABHYPEA2QQFnoECBYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1QDfxAz_bYpzOh2NQs7yuK|trans-title=Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biographie|trans-lang=German}}</ref>

After the deaths of these members the Red Army Faction continued to carry out attacks until it was dissolved in 1998.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Britannica|title=Rise and Fall of the Red Army Faction|url=https://www.britannica.com/video/180279/Red-Army-Faction-rise-prominence-West-German}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|author=Kate Connolly|newspaper=The Guardian|title=Terrorist chic or debunking of a myth? Baader Meinhof film splits Germany|date=2008-9-10|url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/sep/25/germany#:~:text=Baader%20Meinhof%20film%20splits%20Germany,-This%20article%20is&text=The%20bloody%20legacy%20of%20the,myth%20of%201970s%20terrorist%20chic.}}</ref>

== Background ==

=== West German student sovement ===
''See main article: [[West German Student Movement]]''

The [[Socialist German Students' Federation|Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund]] (Socialist German Students' Federation, SDS) was founded in 1946 as the youth wing of the [[Social Democratic Party of Germany|Social Democratic Party]] (SDP). It moved towards the left, away from the mainstream SDP, beginning in the late 1950s, with the group adopting stances against nuclear weapons, calling for the withdrawal of France from Algeria, and opposing militarism at its 1958 conference. This move to the left was countered in May of 1960 by the forming of the [[Social Democratic Student Federation|Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund]] (Social Democratic Student Federation, SHB) by supporters of the SPD party line. In response to this move the left of the SPD formed another organization, [[Society for the Promotion of Socialism]] (SF), in October 1961. In order to stop the leftward and anti-party-establishment drift of the student groups, the SPD expelled SF and the SDS from the party in late 1961. The SDS continued to be a powerful force in student politics in the years to come, while continuing to pull the SHB and other pro SPD groups left.<ref name=":0">{{Citation|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|year=2009|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People|chapter=The Re-Emergence of Revolutionary Politics in West Germany|chapter-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People#2_-_The_Re-Emergence_of_Revolutionary_Politics_in_West_Germany}}</ref>

Young people in West Germany were drawn to the growing radical left movement for several reasons. Repressive and socially conservative laws and still ever present antisemitism and pro-Fascist sentiments in the older generations, as well as the growing worldwide resistance to United States imperialism and imperialist wars.<ref name=":0" />

In December 1964 [[Moise Tschombe]], Congolese dictator and leader of the coup that resulted in the death of Socialist and anti-imperialist leader [[Patrice Lumumba]], visited West Berlin. This visit was met by large protests, with the SDS playing a major role. The protests faced police repression, and the protesters fought back, setting the scene for the later anti-imperialist movements of the decade.<ref name=":0" />

As the left grew more popular, the SPD further alienated younger and more progressive sections of society by entering into the [[Grand Coalition]] with the [[Christian Democratic Union]] (CDU) and the [[Christian Social Union]] (CSU), two reactionary parties with many former Nazis in their ranks. In response to this, the [[Außerparlamentarische Opposition]] (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, APO) was created.<ref name=":0" />

On 2 June 1967, thousands of demonstrators protested against a visit by the Shah of Iran. They wore masks of the Shah and his wife and pelted the pair with rotten tomatoes. In response the police, as well as the Iranian intelligence agency [[SAVAK]], attacked protesters, leading to a battle which ended with 44 arrests, 44 injuries, and one student dead, [[Benno Ohnesorg]], who was shot in the back of the head by Karl-Heinz Kurras.<ref name=":0" />

The police murder sparked even larger protests, with between 100,000 and 200,000 students taking part. The SDS and other left organizations grew rapidly and began to experiment with new organizational strategies and chapters outside of universities.<ref name=":0" />

Demonstrations were banned in West Berlin on 3 June, with eight protesters being arrested the next day. Then on 5 June, the [[Zionist Entity]] attacked Egypt's air bases and soon destroyed it and its allies militaries in the [[Six-Day War]]. This solidified the Anti-Zionist sentiments in the SDS and further cemented its anti-imperialism.<ref name=":0" />

On 17 and 18 February 1968, 5,000 people attended the International Congress on Vietnam in West Berlin. After the congress a demonstration of more than 12,000 people took place.<ref name=":0" />

The West German press, largely controlled by businessman [[Axel Springer|Axel Springer's]] corporation, increased its attacks on the left. This culminated on 11 April, when right-wing worker named Josef Bachmann attempted to kill [[Rudi Dutschke]], shooting him three times, once in the head, nearly killing him. He later confessed that his information leading to the act was taken from [[Bild Zeitung|''Bild Zeitung'']], a Springer outlet.<ref name=":0" />

The attack, less than a week after the murder of [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] in the United States, radicalized many, leading to increased protests, with 300,000 people participating in marches the next weekend in favor of peace and now against the Springer corporation. Two people were killed by police during the wave of protests, and the Springer corporation began to become the target of direct attacks. By the end of it more than 250,000 dm of Springer property was damaged or destroyed, a serious blow to the propagandists.<ref name=":0" />

On 31 May the [[Notstandgesetze]] (Emergency Powers Act) was passed. It gave the state additional power to suppress protests and allowed increased tapping of phones and stealing of mail. The passing of the act led to even more protests, with tens of thousands demonstrating and tens of thousands more staging a one-day strike in opposition to the law.<ref name=":0" />

Further protests broke out with the attempts to disbar left-wing lawyer [[Horst Mahler]]. These protests culminated in the [[Battle of Tegeler Weg]], where about 1,500 protesters, with cobblestone and wooden two-by-fours, and police with water cannons, tear gas, and clubs, fought throughout the night on 3 November. Ten police and 21 demonstrators were hospitalized and 46 were arrested. Mahler was not disbarred.<ref name=":0" />

In October 1969 the Grand Coalition ended and the SDP, with [[Willy Brandt]] as Chancellor, came into power. Some demands of the student movement were given in to, but the tensions continued.<ref name=":0" />

In March 1970 the SDS dissolved after a congress in Frankfurt.

=== Konkret ===
''See main article: [[Konkret]]''

''[[Konkret]]'' was a Hamburg based magazine published by [[Klaus Rainer Röhl]]. It began publishing in 1957 and was funded in part by the remnants of the KPD based in exile in the GDR. The magazine focused on the left wing issues of the time and became popular within the early student movement. It's chief editor was leftist journalist and later leader of the Red Army Faction [[Ulrike Meinhof]]. She had been active in the SDS from 1957 and had joined the KPD in 1959. In 1961 she married Röhl in 1961.<ref name=":0" />

In 1964, amidst the Sino-Soviet Split, the magazine faced serious challenged and drastic changes. Meinhof and ''konkret'' as a whole took the side of China, despite their funding from the Soviet aligned KPD. This led to them losing its funding from the KPD and the GDR. <ref name=":0" />

In 1969 Meinhof left konkret.<ref name=":0" />

=== West Berlin ===
West Berlin, due to its status as technically part of the Federal Republic of Germany, while being disconnected socially and politically, as well as physically, grew to be a center of the left in Germany. Organizations like [[Kommune 1]], the Republican Clubs, various women's communes and student groups began to further the left movement, though not without flaws.<ref name=":0" />

=== Problems within the student movement ===

==== Male supremacy ====
Chauvinism, male supremacy, and misogyny, though opposed by many, were prevalent within some elements of the student movement. This led a decline in the number of women in the SDS and APO and the growth of smaller feminist groups.<ref name=":0" /> In addition to this, the Kommune 1 movement and other similar Anarchist-oriented groupings within the student movement containing male-oriented and chauvinist distortions of the sexual revolution.<ref name=":1">{{Citation|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|year=2009|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People|chapter=Taking Up The Gun|chapter-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People#Taking_Up_The_Gun}}</ref>

==== Division ====
The student movement was divided along ideological lines, like most of the left in the world at that time. Anarchist groups grew apart from Marxist-oriented groups, forming the ''Sponti'' left. Division over the issue of the German Democratic Republic led to little growth within the newly founded [[German Communist Party]] (DKP), a re-establishment of the [[Communist Party of Germany]] (KPD). Division stemming from the [[Sino-Soviet Split]] also was prevalent, with groups following [[Marxism-Leninism-Maoism]] and [[Mao Zedong Thought]] feuding with pro-Soviet sections of the movement.<ref name=":0" />

==== Lack of working class representation ====
The most serious problem of the student movement was the class makeup of the students in the FRG at the time. University students were overwhelmingly from [[petit bourgeoisie]] or [[Labor aristocracy|labor aristocratic]] backgrounds, with only 7% being from working class families. This led the the FRG being able to buy out many within the movement with ease: two months after the dissolution of the SDS, amnesty was granted to most protesters in prison. This led to the near complete destruction of the student movement. The student movement was not entirely from these backgrounds. In the protests against the Springer corporation after the attempted murder of Rudi Dutschke only a minority of those arrested were university students, with most being working-class youth living in West Berlin.<ref name=":0" />

=== The move to violent action ===
In September 1968 student movement political leaders Rudi Dutschke and [[Hans-Jürgen Krahl]] first proposed the idea of building left-wing urban guerilla, though this would not be further developed for some time.<ref name=":0" />

==== Early Anarchist actions ====
The first organized revolutionary violence was carried out by individuals within Kommune 1. They formed the Anarchist 'Central Committee of the Roaming Hash Rebels'. The group carried out actions under several different names over its existence. Under the name [[Tupamaros-West Berlin]], a firebombing attempt on a Jewish cultural center was carried out and widely criticized from both within and without the movement, and the group essentially dissolved soon after.<ref name=":1" />

The short-lived grouping eventually evolved into the [[2nd of June Movement]] in 1972, which was closely aligned with the RAF.<ref name=":1" />

==== Frankfurt firebombing and trial ====
''See main article: [[1968 Frankfurt department store bombings and trial]]''

On 3 April 1968, the most important development of the revolutionary struggle in relation to the Red Army Faction occurred. Future RAF members [[Gudrun Ensslin]] and [[Andreas Baader]], along with [[Horst Söhnlein]] and [[Thorwald Proll]], who were in Frankfurt at for an SDS conference, firebombed two department stores. They were all arrested 2 days later on 5 April.<ref name=":1" />

The attack was poorly planned; there was no communiqué, little attempt to avoid arrest, and after their capture, little unified strategy in court. Gudrun Ensslin stated that the attack was "in protest against people’s indifference to the murder of the Vietnamese." She also echoed a core belief of the later RAF, that "words are useless without action."<ref name=":1" />

In court they were represented by fellow future RAF leader Horst Mahler, who at that point was well-known as a leftist lawyer.<ref name=":1" />

They were sentenced to three years in prison each in October. They appealed the sentence, but were imprisoned until June 1969. They were then released until the court came to a decision on the appeal. Ensslin, Baader, and Proll began to work within the 'apprentices' collectives', which consisted of runaways from state homes. In November the court denied their appeal. Söhnlein turned himself in, the other three went on the run. Proll soon left the group, but his sister [[Astrid Proll]], who later became a prominent member of the RAF, joined Baader and Ensslin.<ref name=":1" />

They travelled to France and then to Italy before returning to West Berlin, and reconnected with Mahler. He was trying at that point to create a guerilla movement, and joined forces with the three to pursue this. They lived in various safehouses with sympathetic, sometimes prominent, people. One of these people was Ulrike Meinhof.<ref name=":1" />

On 3 April 1970, Andreas Baader was recaptured in West Berlin, set up by longtime informant [[Peter Urbach]]. The subsequent actions by his comrades served as the beginning of the Red Army Faction.<ref name=":1" />

== Early Days of the RAF ==

=== The action to free Andreas Baader ===
''See main article: [[Action to free Andreas Baader]]''

Immedietely after Baader's capture planning to free him began. Eventually it was decided that Ulrike Meinhof would use her reputation to have Baader allowed out to meet with her in a library. This was done with the pretext of research for a book on youth homes, which was a subject Meinhof had covered extensively. Once they were there a group would storm the building, threaten the guards with weapons, and finally make their escape.<ref name=":1" />

On 14 May Baader was allowed out, escorted by armed guards. He met Meinhof at the Institute for Social Issues Library in West Berlin. Once they were there [[Irene Goergens]] and [[Ingrid Schubert]] entered the building, followed by Gudrun Ensslin and an unknown man, both masked and armed. A librarian attempted to intervene and was shot in the liver. After this the guards opened fire, but missed all of them. The four, now joined by Baader and Meinhof, jumped out of the window and into the getaway car waiting for them.<ref name=":1" />

The action gained widespread media attention very quickly, and Meinhof, who before was not fully involved with the underground of the group and had been continuing her public life until then, was forced to go underground.<ref name=":1" />

In response to the action the West Berlin police were supplies hand grenades, semiautomatic revolvers, and submachine guns, in an precedented and shocking move for many on the left.<ref name=":1" />

The group published [[Library:The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People#Build the Red Army!|Build the Red Army]] in the radical magazine ''[[883]]'', explaining the purpose of the action and denouncing those on the left who criticized revolutionary violence.<ref name=":1" />

Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, Ingrid Schubert, Astrid Proll, Irene Goergens,[[Monika Berberich]], [[Hans-Jürgen Bäcker]], [[Ingeborg Barz]], [[Wolfgang Grundmann]], [[Peter Homann]] were known founding members of the Red Army Faction.<ref name=":1" />

=== In Jordan ===
After the action to liberate Baader, more than a dozen RAF members travelled to Jordan to receive training from the [[Palestine Liberation Organization]]. At this time the PLO in Jordan, which had a large Palestinian presence in the aftermath of the [[Nakba]], trained many leftist guerilla organizations throughout the world, including even some West German groups previously. By the end of the summer of 1970 the RAF members travelled back to West Berlin through the GDR.<ref name=":1" />

=== Back in West Berlin and early arrests ===
Soon the RAF began to obtain weapons, cars, and safehouses, as well as new members and supporters. On 29 September 1970, three banks were robbed by the RAF in collaboration with the Roaming Hash Rebels grouping. More than 220,000 dm (about 60,000 US dollars then, more than 480,000 US dollars in May 2024<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=CPI Inflation Calculator|title=CPI Inflation Calculator|url=https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60000&year1=197009&year2=202405}}</ref>) were stolen by the group.<ref name=":1" />

On 8 October, RAF members Monika Berberich, Horst Mahler, Irene Goergens, [[Brigitte Asdonk]], and Ingrid Schubert were arrested in West Berlin after an anonymous tip about two RAF safehouses was received by police. Hans-Jürgen Bäcker was suspected as having been the source of the tip, and was confronted by other members. He denied the claims, but left the RAF.<ref name=":1" />

After the arrests the RAF moved out of West Berlin. Once arriving in West Germany, they burglarized the town halls of two small towns, stealing ID cards, passports, official stamps, and other needed materials.<ref name=":1" />

On 20 December RAF members [[Ali Jensen]] and [[Beate Sturm]] and non-member [[Karl-Heinz Ruhland]] were stopped by police along. Ruhland surrendered, but the others fled. The next day they were arrested along with fellow member [[Uli Scholze]]. Ruhland would later cooperate with the police.<ref name=":1" />

On 10 February 1971 Astrid Proll and [[Manfred Grashof]] were stopped by police. The police opened fire unprovoked, but the two managed to escape.<ref name=":1" />

The trial of Mahler, Goergens, and Schubert began on 1 March in West Berlin. They were charged in relation to the action to free Baader, with Goergens and Schubert charged with attempted murder and Mahler with accessory to the action and illegal possession of a firearm.<ref name=":1" />

=== Early anti-RAF propaganda campaign and further arrests ===
Around this time the first psychological warfare campaign against the RAF began. In February, the police announced that the RAF planned to kidnap FRG Chancellor Willy Brandt. This claim was quickly refuted by the RAF.<ref name=":1" />

On 25 February, a seven-year-old boy was kidnapped, with one of the ransom demands being the release of Mahler. Mahler denounced the kidnapping and called for the boys release. The lawyer who delivered the ransom money to the group reported that the kidnappers were not leftists at all, let alone members of the RAF, and were rather a right-wing group.<ref name=":1" />

On 25 April, it was reported that a university professor and his friend were kidnapped. The alleged kidnappers demanded the release of Mahler, Schubert, and Georgens, and threatened to kill them if they were not released. Two days later, the two alleged victims were found, with no kidnappers nearby. They admitted it was staged in the hopes of turning public opinion against the RAF and the nominally left-wing SPD. The leader of the plan was [[Jürgen Rieger]], a fascist militant who was imprisoned for six months for the plot.<ref name=":1" />

While the trial was occurring various members of the RAF were arrested. On 12 April, [[Ilse Stachowiak]], likely the youngest member of the group, who joined at 16-years-old, was arrested in Frankfurt. One day later [[Rolf Heissler]] was arrested during a bank robbery attempt in Munich. On 6 May Astrid Proll was arrested at a Hamburg gas station.<ref name=":1" />

In late May the trial ended. Goergens were sentenced to four years and Schubert to six. As the trial ended rioting broke out in West Berlin. The defendants would have additional sentences added on in relation to the bank robberies and other RAF actions, with Mahler eventually receiving 14 years in prison by 1974.<ref name=":1" />

Around this time Horst Mahler released a document titled ''Regarding the Armed Struggle in West Europe''. It was portrayed as being an official Red Army Faction statement and published in a radical left magazine under the title ''New Traffic Regulations'' in order to avoid immediate suppression. In response to this document, which the majority of the RAF leadership opposed, ''The Urban Guerilla Concept'' was published widely, both in radical and mainstream publications. The document formed the basis of the RAF's urban guerilla strategy and served as their most important theoretical document, being widely read, translated, and used by revolutionaries around the world.<ref name=":1" />

== Organized state repression and first RAF deaths ==
The first Red Army Faction martyr was [[Petra Schelm]] , who was murdered by police on 15 July 1971. The West German government sent three thousand armed police officers to patrol cities and set up checkpoints on roads across the north of the FRG. These state repression efforts were named Operation Cobra. Schelm and a comrade, [[Werner Hoppe]], were stopped at one such checkpoint in Hamburg. Hoppe surrendered and was captured, Schelm was shot in the head and killed at the age of 19.<ref name=":2">{{Citation|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|year=2009|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People|chapter=Building a Base and Serving the People|chapter-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People#4_-_Building_a_Base_and_%22Serving_the_People%22}}</ref>

The murder led to widespread support among the German working class and especially among proletarian youths for the RAF, with 40 percent of respondents in one survey stating that the RAF's actions were political rather than criminal in nature. This led to an abundance of sympathizers among the general public who were willing to harbor RAF fugitives.<ref name=":2" />

Around this time, many former members of the [[Socialist Patients Collective]] (SPK), a Radical [[New Left]] therapy and medical group, joined the RAF after the arrest of the groups leader and the groups subsequent dissolution in Summer 1971. Many former SPK members would become prominent members of the RAF.<ref name=":2" />

==== First RAF killings ====
The first police death was on 22 October. Former SPK member [[Margrit Schiller]] was being attacked by two police officers, and two RAF members including [[Gerhard Müller]] came to their comrade's defense. Police officer Norbert Schmid was killed in the fighting, and soon after Schiller was captured as well, with her arrest broadcast on live TV.<ref name=":2" />

Two months later, on 22 December, a second police officer, Herbert Schoner, was killed during a bank robbery in Kaiserslautern. He knocked on the window of the getaway vehicle outside of the bank during the robbery and was shot three times. The killing was quickly exploited by bourgeoise media to demonize the RAF.<ref name=":2" />

=== Unprovoked murders by police ===
The first was on 4 December, when police stopped a car carrying two guerillas of the [[2nd of June Movement]] Anarchist group, [[Bommi Baumann]] and [[Georg von Rauch]], in West Berlin. Von Raunch was murdered by police immediately with no provocation.<ref name=":2" />

Then, on 1 March 1972 a seventeen-year-old in West Berlin named Richard Epple was murdered by police machine gun fire after he ran through a police checkpoint. He was not a member of the RAF or of the radical left at all, but instead was driving without a license.<ref name=":2" />

On 25 June, Scottish businessman Ian Macleod was shot by police as he stood behind his bedroom door. He was either a non-member of the RAF or a British spy attempting to infiltrate the group, and either way he was killed without any provocation.<ref name=":2" />

The three police murders led to widespread protest and additional support for the RAF.<ref name=":2" />

=== Further police repression ===
In March 1972 another propaganda effort against the RAF began. Karl-Heinz Ruhland, who was arrested several months before, began to work for police after his trial ended that month, leading to leniency for him in sentencing. He was only loosely connected to the group, but provided evidence, sometimes real, but most of the time fabricated. This included testifying against RAF members in trial and publicly support police narratives, changing his story as the police story changed.<ref name=":2" />

On 2 March 1972 [[Tommy Weissbecker]] was murdered by police in Augsburg at 23-years-old. His comrade [[Carmen Roll]] was captured during the same engagement. The killing occured as the pair left Weissbecker's apartment. Weissbecker was under surveillance at the time. In response the 2nd of June Movement bombed the police headquarters in West Berlin was bombed. Roll was drugged while imprisoned in an effort to force her to provide information. This almost lead to her death on 16 March.<ref name=":2" />

RAF members [[Manfred Grashof]] and [[Wolfgang Grundmann]] feared their cover was blown, as the safehouse they were staying at had been rented out by Weissbecker. They were correct. They returned to the building to collect materials they had left there before planning to flee to another safehouse, and when they returned three police were waiting. One officer shot Grasof three times, and in response Grashof, aiming blindly in the dark building, shot and killed police commissioner [[Hans Eckardt]]. Both were subsequently captured.<ref name=":2" />

=== Crackdown on the legal left and broader police repression ===
The [[Federal Criminal Bureau]] appointed [[Horst Herold]] Chief Commissioner in September 1971. He led the creation of the Baader-Meinhof Special Commission in order to combat the guerilla and created a computerized database of fingerprints, names, organizations, photographs, and other information.<ref name=":2" />

On 28 January 1972 the Anti-Radical Act was passed. Supported by all three major parties in the FRG, the act prohibited known Socialists, Communists, and other leftists from working in the public sector, which included 14% of the workforce. The Verfassungsschutz, the FRG's political police force, also increased its operations, which included wiretapping and informers.<ref name=":2" />

=== ''Serve the People'' and early traitors ===
In April 1972 [[Library:The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People#Building a Base and "Serving The People"#Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and the Class Struggle|''Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and the Class Struggle'']], it's longest theoretical document up to that point, which analyzed the events within West Germany in in 1971 and 1972, particularly the failed chemical worker's strike of 1971.<ref name=":2" />

The document also denounced traitors to the group including Karl-Heinz Ruhland, Beate Sturm, who provided information to the media which portrayed the RAF poorly, and Peter Homann, who kidnapped Ulrike Meinhof's children and brought them to their father Klaus Rainer Röhl.<ref name=":2" />

== May Offensive ==
''See main article: [[May offensive (RAF campaign)]]''

The May offensive of 1972 was the first major Red Army Faction campaign. It was in opposition to global imperialism, and the West German interests supporting it.

The first attack occurred on 11, May, when the "Petra Schelm Commando", named after the RAF member martyred the year before, set off three bombs at the U.S. Army V Corps headquarters and the National Security Agency headquarters in Frankfurt. The attack resulted in the deals of one soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Paul A. Bloomquist, as well as thirteen injuries and 300,000 dollars in damage.

The second attack occurred the next day on the 12 May. The "Thomas Weissbecker Commando" bombed the outside of the police headquarters in Augsburg, Bavaria, resulting in one minor injury to an officer. In Munich, Bavaria's capital, a police building was car-bombed. The warning delivered by the Red Army Faction in the second bombing was not received by police in time to evacuate, and due to this twelve people were injured. The second bombing resulted in 150,000 dollars in damages. The bombings were in retaliation to the murder of Thomas Weissbecker that March.

On 16 May, the "Manfred Grashof Commando" planted a bomb in Federal Supreme Court Judge Buddenber's car. The judge had been in charge of RAF cases. The bomb went off when his wife, Greta, went to pick up the judge from work. She was seriously injured, but survived the attack.

On 19 May, the "2nd of June Commando" bombed the Springer Press building in Hamburg. Three bombs went off in total, one in the proofreaders' room and two in bathrooms, resulting in seventeen injuries. The bombings were in response to Springer newspaper's publishing of anti-left and imperialist propaganda. Springer ignored three warnings, which resulted in the injuries of workers. The fact that workers were injured led to infighting within the RAF and criticism of the RAF from the left at large.

On 24 May, the "July 15 Commando", named after the date Petra Schelm was murdered, bombed the headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe in Heidelberg. Two car bombs were set off near the data processing center and the officers' club at the Campbell Barracks, set to go off while most people at the barracks had finished work and were away from the area. The bombing resulted in three deaths and six injuries of soldiers. The attack also destroyed a computer used to calculate carpet bombings of civilian areas in Vietnam.

=== False bomb warning as a support tactic of the RAF ===

=== Reactions to the May offensive ===

== RAF in Prison and Outside Action ==

== German Autumn ==

== Stammheim Murders ==

== References ==
<references />
[[Category:Communist underground movements]]
[[Category:Socialism in Germany]]

Library:The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People

2024-07-30T02:00:18Z

Connolly1916: added

{{Library work|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|image=Red Army Faction - A Documentary History Volume One Cover.jpeg|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|written in=1968-1977|published_date=2009|summary=A collection of official Red Army Faction communiques and documents as well as speeches, letters, and other works by individual Red Army Faction members, with historical analysis accompanying the works.}}

“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

== Reviews ==
''This book about the Red Army Faction of American-occupied Germany is one that should be read by any serious student of antiimperialist 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''

== 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.
{| class="wikitable"
|+
|''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.<ref>http://labourhistory.net/raf/</ref> 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.<ref>http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/PolitischeStroemungen/Stadtguerilla+raf/ raf/raf-texte+materialien.pdf</ref> 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 ==
{| class="wikitable"
|+
|2JM
|''Bewegung 2. Juni'' (2nd of June Movement); Berlin-based anarchist guerilla group formed in early 1972, its name comes from the date of the police shooting of protester Benno Ohnesorg in 1967.
|-
|APO
|''Außerparlemtarische Opposition'' (ExtraParliamentary Opposition); the name given to the broad-based militant opposition with its roots in the student movement that encompassed the left-wing anti-imperialist and social revolutionary movements of the late sixties and early seventies.
|-
|ARD
|''Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland'' (Syndicate for Publicly Regulated Radio Stations in the Federal Republic of Germany); state-funded radio.
|-
|BAW
|''Bundesanwaltschaft'' (Federal Prosecutors Office); noted for its aggressive prosecution of cases against the guerilla and the left.
|-
|BGS
|''Bundesgrenzschutz'' (Federal Border Patrol); border security police.
|-
|BKA
|''Bundeskriminalamt'' (Federal Criminal Bureau); the German equivalent of the FBI, particularly active in police activities against the guerilla and the left.
|-
|BND
|''Bundesnachrichtendienst'' (Federal Intelligence Service); the FRG’s foreign intelligence service.
|-
|CDU
|''Christlich Demokratisches Union Deutschlands'' (Christian Democratic Union of Germany); Germany’s mainstream conservative party.
|-
|CSU
|''Christlich-Soziale Union'' in Bayern (Bavarian Christian-Social Union); Bavaria’s mainstream conservative party, the Bavarian partner to the cdu.
|-
|DGB
|''Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund'' (German Union Federation); the largest union federation in the FRG.
|-
|DKP
|''Deutsche Kommunistische Partei'' (German Communist Party); the pro-Soviet communist party founded in 1968, in effect the rebranding of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany), which was banned in 1956.
|-
|FAZ
|''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung''; a high-quality, national, moderate conservative, German daily newspaper.
|-
|FDP
|''Freie Demokratische Partei'' (Free Democratic Party); Germany’s mainstream liberal party.
|-
|GIM
|''Groupe Internationale Marxisten'' (International Marxist Group); West German section of the Trotskyist Fourth International active in the FRG in the seventies and eighties, fused with the KPD/ML to form the VSP in 1986.
|-
|GSG-9
|''Grenzschutzgruppe 9'' (Border Patrol Group 9); officially part of the BGS, in practice Germany’s antiterrorist special operations unit.
|-
|KB
|''Kommunistischer Bund'' (Communist League); a small Maoist group active in the seventies.
|-
|KBW
|''Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschland'' (West German Communist League); founded in Bremen in 1973. A Maoist organization originally associated with China, subsequently shifted their support to Albania and Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime. Dissolved in 1985.
|-
|KPD
|''Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands'' (Communist Party of Germany); pro-Soviet communist party founded in 1919, banned under Hitler in 1933 and under Adenauer in 1956, rebranded as DKP (German Communist Party) in 1968. Also a Maoist party founded by the KPD/AO in 1971 and dissolved in 1980.
|-
|KPD/AO
|''Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands/ Aufbauorganisation'' (Communist Party of Germany/ Pre-Party Formation); a Maoist organization founded in 1970, became the KPD in 1971.
|-
|KPD/ML
|''Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands/Marxisten-Leninisten'' (Communist Party of Germany/Marxist-Leninist); a Maoist party founded on December 31, 1968. It fused with the Trotskyist GIM in 1986 to form the VSP.
|-
|KSV
|''Kommunistische Studentverband'' (Communist Student Association); student wing of the KPD/AO and later the KPD, founded in 1971 and dissolved in 1980.
|-
|ID
|''Informationsdienst''; a left-wing news service published weekly from 1973 until 1981. In 1988, its archives were used to launch the left-wing publisher, Verlag Edition ID-Archiv, specializing in books about the German far left.
|-
|LG
|''Landesgericht'' (Land Court); each of the ''Länder'' had it’s own court system.
|-
|LKA
|''Landeskriminalamt'' (Land Criminal Bureau); the equivalent of the BKA functioning at the level of a state or province.
|-
|LWA
|''Landesanwaltschaft'' (Land Prosecutors Office); the equivalent of a state or provincial prosecutors office.
|-
|NPD
|''Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands'' (National Democratic Party); far-right political party, supported by many neo-nazis.
|-
|OLG
|''Oberlandesgericht'' (Land Court of Appeal); each of the ''Länder'' had it’s own Court of Appeal.
|-
|ÖTV
|''Gewerkschaft öffentliche Dienste, Transport und Verkehr'' (The Public Service, Transport, and Communication Union).
|-
|PFLP
|Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; founded in 1953, secular nationalist and Marxist, the second largest tendency within the PLO after Fatah.
|-
|PFLP (EO)
|Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (External Operations); originally a section of the pflp, expelled in the early seventies for conducting controversial actions outside of Israel, effectively dissolved in 1978 after the death of its leader Waddi Haddad, who had been poisoned by the Mossad.
|-
|RAF
|''Rote Armee Fraktion'' (Red Army Faction).
|-
|RH
|''Rote Hilfe'' (Red Aid); an important prisoner support network which came out of the APO.
|-
|RH e.v.
|''Rote Hilfe e.v.'' (Red Aid registered association); a Red Aid network set up by the KPD/AO in 1970.
|-
|RZ
|''Revolutionäre Zellen'' (Revolutionary Cells); founded in 1973, most groups within its structure ceased activity in 1991, with the final action occurring in 1994.
|-
|SDS
|''Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund'' (Socialist German Students Federation); founded by the SDS in 1946. By the late sixties it was an independent left-wing student federation and the most significant organization in the APO. It dissolved in 1970.
|-
|SHB
|''Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund'' (Social Democratic Student Federation); founded in 1960 by the SPD, dissolved in 1992.
|-
|SPD
|''Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands'' (Social Democratic Party of Germany); Germany’s mainstream social democratic party.
|-
|SPK
|''Socialistiches Patientenkollektiv'' (Socialist Patients’ Collective); founded in 1970, part of the antipsychiatry movement. It dissolved under extreme state pressure in 1971, many of its core members later joining the RAF.
|-
|VSP
|''Vereingte Sozialistische Partei'' (United Socialist Party); formed in 1986 through the fusion of the KPD/ML and the GIM, splintered into various groups in 1993.
|-
|ZDF
|''Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen'' (Second German Television); German publicly regulated television, Europe’s largest broadcasting corporation.
|}

== German Terms ==
<blockquote>''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.''</blockquote>''Bundestag'': The federal 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.

== 1 - “Democracy” Comes to Deutschland: Postfascist Germany and the Continuing Appeal of Imperialism ==
[[File:Germany Map from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb]]
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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>Markus Wolf and Anne McElvoy, ''Man without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster'' (New York: Times Books, 1999), xi.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Charles Higham, ''Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949'' (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983)</ref>

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:<blockquote>''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.<ref>William D. Graf, “Anti-Communism in the Federal Republic of Germany,” ''Socialist Register'' (1984): 167.</ref>''</blockquote>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.<ref>Women Against Imperialist War (Hamburg), “War on Imperialist War,” in Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, ''War on the War Makers: Documents and Communiqués from the West German Left'' (San Francisco: John Brown Book Club n.d.), 21.</ref>

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 insecurity.<ref>There has been much written over the past thirty years about the ways in which the non-Jewish German working class benefited from the Third Reich’s policies, enjoying the position of a labor aristocracy. The most noteworthy book on this subject is Götz Aly’s ''Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial war, and the Nazi Welfare State''; translated by Jefferson Chase, 1st U.S. ed. (New York: Metropolitan, 2007).</ref> 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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>“How to Fight Communism,” March 25, 1948, OMGUS in Patrick Major, ''The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945- 1956'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 247.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Graf, “Anti-Communism,” 169.</ref>

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,<ref>Werner Hülsberg, ''The German Greens: A Social and Political Profile.'' Translated by Gus Fagan. (London: Verso, 1988), 22.</ref> roughly 25% below that of workers in the United States,<ref>5 Karl Heinz Roth, ''L’autre movement ouvrier en Allemagne 1945-78''. Translated by Serge Cosseron. (Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1979), 50.</ref> 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.<ref>Hülsberg, 22-3.</ref>

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%.<ref>Ibid., 23.</ref>

As Werner Hülsberg notes:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>Ibid., 24.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Ibid., 22.</ref>

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.”<ref>Roth, 47.</ref> 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.<ref>Major, 174, 192.</ref>

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:<blockquote>[[File:Greek Workers West German Factory from RAF - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''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.'']]''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.''<ref>Hülsberg, 25.</ref> </blockquote>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,<ref>Roth, 121.</ref> 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?”<ref>David Haworth, “Why German Workers Don’t Ask For Raises,” ''Winnipeg Free Press'', December 11, 1968.</ref>

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.”<ref>Hülsberg, 25.</ref> Left-wing trade unionists were expelled from the party, as were the editors of the socialist newspaper ''Die Andere Zeitung'',<ref>Graf, “Anti-communism,” 183.</ref> 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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>William Graf, “Beyond Social Democracy in West Germany?” ''Socialist Register'' (1985/86): 118.</ref> </blockquote>

=== 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.<ref>“Die Integration der Bundesrepublik ins westliche Bündnissystem,” <nowiki>http://www.kssursee.ch/schuelerweb/kalter-krieg/kk/integration.htm</nowiki>.</ref> 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.”<ref>Women Against Imperialist War, 22.</ref>

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 soldiers<ref>Regarding all these, see ''The Neo-colonialism of the West German Federal Republic'' (German Democratic Republic: Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, 1965), 20-35, 39-45, 62-65, 82-85.</ref> and mercenaries, including veterans of the Nazi SS.<ref>Madeleine G. Kalb, ''The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa from Eisenhower to Kennedy'' (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 193.</ref>

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.<ref>Frieder Sclupp, “Modell Deutschland and the International Division of Labour: The Federal Republic of Germany in the World Political Economy,” in ''The Foreign Policy of West Germany: Formation and Contents'', ed. Ekkert Kruippendorf and Volker Rittberger (London: sage Publications, 1980).</ref> 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:<blockquote>''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.''</blockquote>Or, as the American ''Evening Star'' wrote that same year:<blockquote>''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…''<ref>Quoted in ''The Neo-colonialism of the West German Federal Republic'', 96-7.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Daniel Ganser, ''NATO’s Secret Army: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe'' (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 190-211.</ref>

=== Better Dead Than Red ===
[[File:'All Marxist Roads Lead to Moscow' poster from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''“All Marxist Roads Lead to Moscow”: election poster for the CDU, 1953.'']]
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.<ref>Hülsberg, 15.</ref>

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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>German Bundestag, Administration, Public Relations section, ''Law for the Federal Republic of Germany'' (Berlin, 2001), 22.</ref> </blockquote>The following restriction to Article 21, limiting the right to form political parties, was added to this already ominous provision:<blockquote>''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''.<ref>Ibid., 23.</ref> </blockquote>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 State, and Offenses against Public Order.<ref>Sebastien Cobler, ''Law, Order and Politics in West Germany'' (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1978), 76.</ref> Minister of Justice Thomas Dehler explained that these laws would be used to combat “ideological high treason,” “ideological subversion,” and “ideological sabotage.”<ref>Ibid., 74.</ref> In short, thought crime.

The immediate target of all these statutes and constitutional restrictions became clear with due haste. On November 23, 1951, the federal government applied to the Constitutional Court to have the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) proscribed, on the basis of the aforementioned Article 21 of the Basic Law. This was at a time when the party held fifteen seats in the ''Bundestag''.

The Communists had opposed integration into NATO and as late as 1952 paid lip service to the revolutionary overthrow of the Adenauer regime. While it clearly didn’t have mass political support—it had garnered only 2.2% of the vote in the 1952 elections<ref>Wolfgang Abendroth, Helmut Ridder and Otto Schonfeldt, eds., ''KPD Verbot oder mit Kommunisten leben'' (Hamburg: Rororo Taschenbuch Verlag, 1968), 38.</ref>—the KPD nevertheless constituted a potential nuisance as the only political institution to speak up for a number of popular interests which were poorly represented by the major parties:<blockquote>''Its continued advocacy of an anti-fascist, socialist front, its opposition to rearmament and atomic weapons, its resistance to authoritarian trends such as restrictions on free speech and emergency laws, and its demands for a greater measure of economic democracy were aims shared by members of a great range of groups, including neglected interests within the established parties. It was evident… that to discredit or even criminalize the KPD would also be to reduce the appeal of all groups that shared any of its aims.''<ref>Graf, “Anti-communism,” 179.</ref> </blockquote>The trial of the KPD began on November 11, 1954. Sensing the direction things were going in, the party distanced itself from revolutionary politics in public statements in early 1956. It was already too late: on August 17 of that year, the KPD was declared illegal. Hundreds of arrests followed; not only party members, but also their families, members of alleged front groups, and anyone suspected of communist sympathies, were targeted, and a comprehensive apparatus developed to undertake surveillance of all these individuals and organizations.<ref>Ibid., 180.</ref>

The suppression of the KPD was just the most obvious volley in a broader process of constitutional repression. On August 2, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that the organization and promotion of demonstrations, meetings, and strikes could also constitute treason. A few months later, the Federal Supreme Court ruled that, “No action in a strike which goes beyond the cessation of work and violates interests protected by the law is justified by the so-called strike law.”<ref>Cobler, 183-184.</ref> In 1955, the essential nature of the Basic Law was further confirmed by a general ban on all political strikes.<ref>Ibid., 80.</ref>

At the same time, ample use was made of Dreher’s new security measures. By the 1960s, thousands of cases of treason were being brought before the courts:<blockquote>''…in 1963 10,322 actions were started against people alleged to have committed treasonable offenses of one kind or another. In many cases these actions were against more than one person. In 1961 a total of 442 people were sentenced for various categories of “treason”. Admittedly, of these 36 were only fined and 212 only got between 9 months and 5 years and 5 were sentenced to between 5 and 15 years. Many others had their careers ruined by court actions in which the State failed to prove its case.''<ref>David Childs, ''From Schumacher to Brandt: The Story of German Socialism 1945-1965'' (New York: Pergamon Press, 1966), 49.</ref> </blockquote>With its culture sterilized and its traditions of worker militancy broken, the postfascist, post-genocidal society provided an ideal foundation for a new authoritarian and technocratic capitalist state.
{| class="wikitable"
|+Not Wanted in the Model: The KPD
|Immediately after the war, the KPD benefited from an unambiguous anti-Nazi track record, but this strong position quickly crumbled due to a variety of factors. Patrick Major of Warwick University has provided a valuable overview of this decline in his book ''The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956''.
According to Major, the postwar Party leadership found itself frequently at odds with its more radical rank and file. It was ill placed to connect with its supposed constituency—the proletariat—as many working class grievances took aim at the occupying powers, one of which was the Soviet Union. Indeed, as Major notes, “the earliest proponents of strikes tended to be Social Democrats, whereas, like their French comrades, the German Communists placed national reconstruction before wage increases or even denazification of management.”<ref>Patrick Major, ''The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 170.</ref>

The Party was further handicapped by its ties to East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). The SED encouraged the KPD’s conservative tendencies, insisting that it prioritize forging a progressive nationalist opposition to the Western occupiers, relegating class struggle to the back burner. Not only was it still hoped that the “Western Zone” could be pried out of the hands of imperialism, but it was also recognized that the KPD’s chief competition—the SPD—was winning support with its own “nationalistic rabble rousing.”<ref>Ibid., 115.</ref>

During this patriotic phase, anticapitalist rhetoric was toned down; in some ''Länder'', Party members were instructed to stop singing the ''Internationale'' in public, and the hammer and sickle and Soviet star emblems were removed from their paraphernalia.<ref>Ibid., 116.</ref> To the disgust of many comrades who had barely survived the Third Reich, the KPD even briefly attempted to establish a broad “anticolonialist” National Front, appealing to middle class elements, patriotic capitalists, and even former Nazi supporters.<ref>Ibid., 133.</ref>

Although the KPD was banned in 1956, this dubious “anticolonialism” represented real class forces, and a significant section of progressive opinion. While these gestures failed to win the Communists any significant nationalist support, the politics they represented remained visible in the future campaigns against rearmament and nuclear weapons. Though overwhelmingly left-wing, these campaigns were still able to attract (and accept) support from conservatives and even fascists who opposed integration within the western bloc as “unpatriotic.”
The connection to East Germany’s SED became an ever-greater liability as the Cold War descended: while western communists opposed rearmament in the FRG, they had to make excuses for it in the GDR; while they decried exploitative work conditions in the west, they had to defend piece work policies in the east; while they complained of “colonization” of the FRG by the Americans, they had to remain pointedly silent about “integration” of the GDR into the Soviet Bloc.
Thus, even as the Party played an important role in articulating opposition to the authoritarian Adenauer regime, it faced an uphill battle, not only because of right-wing repression, but also due to the contradictory demands of struggling in the Western Zone while its counterpart ruled in the East.
These political weaknesses, combined with the deep changes to Germany’s class structure that occurred during the Hitler period, prevented the KPD from ever mounting a serious challenge to the new FRG. So much so that according to Major, “In some ways the KPD leadership was ‘saved by the bell’, banned before an internal party discussion could look for scapegoats for the disastrous policies of the past decade.”<ref>Ibid., 226.</ref>
|}

== 2 - The Re-Emergence of Revolutionary Politics in West Germany ==
In the years before the Hitler regime, Germany was home to one of the strongest and most militant left-wing movements in Europe, firmly based in the country’s large and well organized working class. The years after World War I saw insurrections in Bavaria and the Ruhr region, and had it not been for errors and betrayals on the left, many still believe that communist revolution in Germany could have succeeded in giving birth to a radically different twentieth century.

That, of course, is not what happened, and as events unfolded the left that had impressed generations of European socialists was decimated by the rise of German fascism, forced into exile, reduced to inactivity, or sent off to the camps.

When the organized institutions of the left reappeared in the postwar period, they were incapable of overcoming their own historical weaknesses, weaknesses that were actively reinforced by the Allies’ corrupt and repressive policies. Those few independent antifascist groups which had formed in the last days of the war quickly found themselves banned, unwelcome intruders on the victors’ plans, this Allied suppression of any autonomous workers’ or antifascist revolt constituting the flipside to the charade of denazification.

The eclipse of any authentic left-wing opposition continued in the years following the division of Germany. The Christian Democratic Union, the concrete expression of the alliance between the German ruling class and American imperialism, experienced little in the way of opposition as it helped implement the Marshall Plan and establish the legal machinery with which to fight any resurgence of left-wing militancy.

Yet, while the political aspects of the Marshall Plan were carried out with little difficulty, the rearming of West Germany, not surprisingly when one considers the outcome of both World Wars, met with intense opposition.

In the immediate postwar period, West Germans were overwhelmingly opposed to rearmament. By 1952, this sentiment had coalesced into a broad movement, including the not-yet-banned KPD, trade unions, socialist youth groups, Protestant church groups,<ref>Paul Hockenos has noted that for some Protestants, their religion may have made them particularly receptive to the first postwar protest movements, due to feelings of marginalization within the new truncated state: whereas Protestants had outnumbered Catholics by nearly two to one in prewar Germany, there was rough parity between the two religions in the FRG. See Paul Hockenos, ''Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: an Alternative History of Postwar Germany'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22. Despite this fact, the churches remained overwhelmingly anticommunist and hostile to left-wing politics.</ref> pacifists, and, at times, sections of the SPD. This progressive alliance was flanked on its right by small numbers of nationalists and even fascists who objected to the way in which rearmament would anchor the country in the western bloc.<ref>As one deputy from the neo-nazi Socialist Reich Party put it, “First we were told that guns and ammunition were poison and now this poison has turned to sweets which we should eat. But we are not Negroes or idiots to whom they can do whatever they want. It is either they or us who should be admitted to the insane asylum.” [Martin Lee, ''The Beast Reawakens'' (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 65.]</ref> Despite this, the “Without Us Movement” (as it was known) was a predominantly left-wing amalgam. It was the first large protest movement in the new Federal Republic,<ref>For the sake of clarity, it should be remembered that in the years between the Nazi defeat and the establishment of the FRG, there was a large strike movement in favour of nationalization of the country’s largest industries. This movement, which initially seemed to have the wind in its sails, was opposed by the Allied occupiers. Its fate was sealed when the new trade unions obediently redirected it towards token co-management and de-cartelization. As such, it provides a stark example of workers’ political activity sabotaged by their putative left-wing representatives even before the occupation had ended. (Roth, 50-51; Hülsberg, 29-32; Childs, 67-84.)</ref> and while it may appear timid and ineffectual in retrospect, it represented a real break in the postwar consensus at the time.

The response from the Adenauer regime revealed the limits of CDU democracy: in 1951, a KPD referendum initiative on the question was banned, as according to the Basic Law only the federal government was empowered to call a plebiscite. The Communists decided to go ahead anyway, polling people on street corners, through newspaper questionnaires, and at popular meeting places. The “referendum” was more agit prop than a scientific study; at one movie cinema in the town of Celle, for instance, there is a report that just as the feature film ended an eager pollster asked everyone opposed to rearmament to stand up—100% opposition was recorded. Little surprise that the KPD eventually found that almost six million West Germans had “registered” their opposition to the government’s plans.<ref>Major, 145</ref>

Suffice it to say that Adenauer was not amused, and polling people soon became a risky endeavor: there were a total of 7,331 arrests, and the KPD Free German Youth front group was banned simply for engaging in what amounted to a glorified petition campaign.<ref>5 Ibid., Hülsberg, 33.</ref>
[[File:Philipp Müller from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''Philipp Müller, April 5, 1931– May 11, 1952'']]
At the same time, as if to make matters crystal clear, on May 11, 1952, a peace rally in the city of Essen was attacked by police, at first with dogs and clubs, and then with live ammunition. Philipp Müller, a member of Free German Youth, became the first person to be killed in a demonstration in the new Federal Republic. As a sign of things to come, no police officer would ever face charges for Müller’s death, but eleven demonstrators were subsequently jailed for a total of six years and four months for disorderly conduct and “crimes of treason against the Constitution.”<ref>Bernd Langer, ''Art as Resistance''. Translated by Anti-Fascist Forum. (Göttingen: Aktiv-Dr. und Verl., 1998), 8.</ref>

Not that repression was the only tool against incipient revolt: misdirection also remained an important weapon in the ruling class arsenal. Throughout 1953, there were almost one hundred strikes at different factories to protest against the CDU’s rearmament policies. As the politicized sections of the working class were moving aggressively against Adenauer’s plans, the SPD and trade union leadership lined up to rein things in. All energy was now funneled into one big rally in Frankfurt. However, the initiative was removed from the rank and file, and in the end the rally was simply used to drum up support for the SPD.<ref>Hülsberg, 34.</ref> As the CDU moved ahead regardless, the Social Democrats withdrew organizational support, and the movement (now robbed of any autonomous basis) dissipated almost immediately.<ref>Hockenos, 42-3.</ref>

With its most steadfast opponents kept in disarray by their “leaders,” the Adenauer regime easily ratified rearmament through the Treaty of Paris in 1954. The next few years saw the establishment of voluntary military service, universal male conscription, and the production of war materials, further sealing the ties between big business and the state. Demoralized by their failure to prevent any of this, the opposition began to melt, a 1955 poll finding that almost two thirds of the population now considered remilitarization to be a “political necessity.”<ref>Nick Thomas, ''Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy'' (New York: Berg, 2003), 33.</ref>

For the CDU, rearmament, like the Basic Law, was simply part of the Federal Republic acquiring the powers of a “normal” state, part of West Germany’s integration into the imperialist bloc. While there were numerous such state powers bestowed during this period, one which will bear some relevance to our study is the 1951 establishment of the ''Bundesgrenzschutz'', the Federal Border Guard, also known as the BGS. Under the jurisdiction of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the BGS was initially a paramilitary force of 10,000, its activity restricted “to the border area ‘to a depth of thirty kilometres.”<ref>Cobler, 134.</ref>

In 1951, most leftists had feared that the BGS was a roundabout way to establish a standing army. As we have seen, such a ploy did not prove necessary (although many border guards would be integrated into the new armed forces). Rather, the Border Guard would eventually serve as the basis for a national semi-militarized police force.

Despite these discouraging beginnings, antimilitary sentiment remained high, and when, in 1956, the Adenauer government responded favorably to a U.S. “offer” of tactical nuclear weapons, this set off a series of spontaneous mobilizations across the country. In 1957, members of West Germany’s second largest union, the Public Service, Transport, and Communication Union (ÖTV) voted 94.9% in favor of a strike against nuclear armament, a call which was echoed by the president of the powerful IG Metall trade union. In Hannover, 40,000 people demonstrated against nuclear arms, while in Munich there was a turnout of 80,000, and in Hamburg 120,000 people took to the streets.<ref>Thomas, 35.</ref> Opinion polls showed 52% of the population supporting an antinuclear general strike.

The SPD and trade union brass moved to quash this mass movement, which was spinning out of control, by redirecting the campaign away from the streets and factories and into the ballot boxes, proposing a referendum instead of a general strike. Predictably, the government challenged this referendum proposal before the Constitutional Court, where it was ruled unconstitutional in 1958.

The ploy worked, the momentum was broken, and the antinuclear weapons movement entered a period of sharp decline. For years to come, its only visible legacy would be the annual peace demonstrations held every Easter Weekend, the so-called Easter Marches.

Of great relevance to the future history of the West German left, and our story in particular, an important counterpoint to the disreputable machinations of the SPD emerged from its own youth wing: the Socialist German Student Union (SDS).

The SDS had been founded in 1946 as a training ground from which to groom the future party elite (Helmut Schmidt, West Germany’s future Chancellor, was the group’s first president). In the context of the anti-rearmament movement, though, a shift began to occur, and at its 1958 conference, the leadership of the SDS was won by elements significantly to the left of the SPD:<blockquote>''Their main interest was in the development of socialist policies and, in particular, they wanted to build the campaign against nuclear weapons, a campaign which the SPD had already deserted. The resolutions of the SDS conference were a “declaration of war” on the SPD leadership. The SDS first of all developed an anti-imperialist position and demanded the right of national self-determination for the Algerians and the withdrawal of French colonial troops. After this there were congresses against nuclear weapons, for democracy and in opposition to militarism. The SPD strongly condemned this development.''<ref>Hülsberg, 38.</ref> </blockquote>In May of 1960, to counter this leftwards drift, students loyal to the SPD leadership formed the Social Democratic Student Union (SHB).

This move by the right was answered in October 1961 by SPD left wingers forming the Society for the Promotion of Socialism (SF). Unable to neutralize this growing left-wing revolt, the SPD leadership decided to do what it could to isolate it, purging the SF and SDS in a move which completed the alienation of the critical intelligentsia and youth from the party for years to come. (Ironically, the SHB itself continued to be pulled to the left, forced to tail positions staked out by the SDS, until it too would find itself expelled in the 1970s.)<ref>Graf, “Beyond Social Democracy,” 104-5.</ref>

Things were brewing beneath the surface, and a new generation was finding itself increasingly miserable within the suffocating and conservative ''Modell Deutschland''. American expatriate Paul Hockenos describes the fifties cultural climate that surrounded these young people:<blockquote>''Corporal punishment in schools… was still routine, and at universities students could be expelled for interrupting a lecture. The Federal Republic still had “coupling laws” on the books that forbade single men and women under twenty-one to spend the night together—or even to spend time together unchaperoned. Parents who allowed their children to stray could face legal penalties. In contrast to the GDR’s school curricula, in which the churches had no say, in the West German schools there weren’t sexual-education programs until the 1960s.''<ref>Hockenos, 31.</ref></blockquote>
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Old Left and the New Reality
|Under the postwar occupation regime, various intellectuals who had been exiled under Nazism returned home, while others who had remained silent found their voices.
While this was a broader phenomenon, two groups in particular stand out: the Frankfurt School and the ''Gruppe 47''.

The Frankfurt School had emerged from the Institute for Social Research, founded at the University of Frankfurt in 1924 under the tutelage of one of its prominent members, Max Horkheimer. Critical of the narrow intellectual nature of traditional Marxism, members integrated new ideas from the fields of sociology, philosophy, and psychiatry to produce a highly influential and intellectually rigorous theoretical platform, eventually known as “Critical Theory.” Key members, almost all of them men, many of them Jewish, included Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. Going into exile in 1933, the Frankfurt School was based out of Columbia University in New York City until 1943. While Horkheimer and Adorno chose to return to Germany after the war, many others remained in the United States.
The ''Gruppe 47'' was a literary circle founded in 1947 to help give expression to a new generation of German writers who had lived through the war, and who hoped to use their cRAFt as a way to reckon with the with the Nazi experience. Key members included Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Ilse Aichinger, and Erich Fried. There were few Jews or women involved, and amongst the Germans, some were later revealed to have previously been active Nazis. Yet, despite these shortcomings, the ''Gruppe 47'' established itself as an important progressive influence on postwar German culture.

While they may have all initially sympathized with the sixties revolt, many of these intellectuals soon felt alienated by the younger generation’s goals and methods of direct action and violent protest.
Ironically, while the Frankfurt School influenced many of the sixties revolutionaries, it also provided the strongest negative reaction, with Jürgen Habermas going so far as to accuse student radicals of flirting with “left-wing fascism.” Though an inability to agree about the meaning of the student revolt led to the precipitous decline of the ''Gruppe 47'', some of its members remained vocal critics of the political establishment. Heinrich Böll and Erich Fried in particular continued to denounce the state’s penchant for authoritarian solutions, even in regards to its war against the guerilla.
|}
In the words of Detlev Claussen, who would later participate in his generation’s revolt, “They try to make it look better than it was but it really was that bad! It was a terrible, terrible time to grow up.”<ref>Ibid., 29.</ref>

Another indication of what life was like in the post-genocidal society came in the winter of 1959-60, as a wave of antisemitic graffiti and attacks on Jewish cemeteries swept over the country. This prompted some Frankfurt School sociologists to carry out a study which revealed that behind an apathetic 41% who remained indifferent, a hardcore 16% of the population was openly antisemitic, supportive of the death penalty (banned under the Basic Law) and expressing “an excessive inclination for authority.”<ref>Jean-Paul Bier, “The Holocaust and West Germany: Strategies of Oblivion 1947-1979” ''New German Critique'' 19, Special Issue 1: Germans and Jews Winter (1980): 13.</ref>

One of the projects most responsible for challenging this reactionary and stultifying culture was the magazine ''konkret'', published in Hamburg by Klaus Rainer Röhl. An increasingly important forum for progressive youth who rejected the CDU consensus and the country’s conservative cultural mores, the magazine was widely read within the SDS. As Karin Bauer notes, “the magazine thrived from the happy union of intellectual, aesthetic, and popular appeal…”<ref>Karin Bauer, ''Everybody Talks About the Weather… We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof'' (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 27.</ref> Decidedly political, “Recurrent themes were Cuba, anticolonialism, German fascism, the antinuclear struggle, human rights, and social justice.”<ref>Ibid., 30.</ref>

Unbeknownst to its public, ''konkret'' was actually funded and in part controlled by one of the remaining clandestine KPD cells which had gone into exile in East Germany.<ref>“My Mother, The Terrorist”, ''Deutsche Welle'' [online], March 14, 2006.</ref> The magazine’s chief editor was Röhl’s wife, a woman who had been active in the SDS since 1957, and had secretly joined the illegal KPD in 1959. Her name was Ulrike Meinhof.

Another radicalizing event for many young people at the time was the Auschwitz trials, held in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965. Largely a propaganda exercise to cover up the far greater number of Nazis who had found their way into the new West German establishment, twenty-two former SS-men and one ''Kapo'' were tried for murder or complicity in murder. Regardless of the hypocritical aspect of the trial, the fact that for two and a half years almost three hundred witnesses came and testified, and had their testimony reported in the media, gave an inkling of what Auschwitz meant to a generation of German youth, who—quite understandably—now saw their teachers, civic leaders, and even their parents in a horrible new light.

These trials, and the general “discovery” of the Holocaust, were a radicalizing event for many young people at that time;<ref>Hockenos, 34-35. See also Dagmar Herzog, “‘Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together’: Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany,” ''Critical Inquiry'' 24, 2: Intimacy, (Winter 1988): 402-403.</ref> as one veteran of the New Left would later recall:<blockquote>''That the Germans could kill millions of human beings just because they had a different faith was utterly inexplicable to me. My whole moral world view shattered, got entwined with a rigorous rejection of my parents and school. If religion had not prevented this mass destruction of human beings, then it is no good for anything, then the whole talk of love of your neighbor and of meekness. . . was just a lie.''<ref>Eberhard Knodler-Bunte, in Herzog, 416.</ref> </blockquote>Despite what in retrospect may seem to have been a growing potential for revolt, during these early years, the SDS was silent, turned inward, engaging in “seminar Marxism” as it found its bearings outside of the SPD and struggled to elaborate a consistent analysis and strategy. When it did return to the public arena, it was as a small, consciously anti-imperialist organization influenced by the experiences of China, Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam, advancing the analysis that “liberation movements in the Third World, marginal groups in society, and socialist intellectuals now constituted the revolutionary subject in society and the appropriate strategy was direct action.”<ref>Hülsberg, 39.</ref> (It is worth noting that the German Democratic Republic was pointedly not one of the ideological reference points for the new SDS.)

A line was crossed when Moise Tschombe visited Berlin in December 1964. To the applause of the West German ruling class, and with the help of German mercenaries, Tschombe had led a bloody, anticommunist secession in the Congolese province of Katanga. He was considered responsible for the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first president of the Congo and a beloved symbol of the anticolonial struggle in Africa.

Hundreds of protesters turned out against Tschombe, and when the police tried to clear them away, they fought back in what would later be described as the starting point of the antiauthoritarian revolt in West Germany.<ref>Thomas, 94. See also Gretchen Dutschke, ''Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schönes Leben'' (Köln: K&W, 1996), 60-61.</ref>

The SDS played a prominent part in this protest. Based on university campuses, it was becoming the most important organization in the growing and increasingly militant protest movement against imperialist domination of the global South, most especially against the war in Indochina. Demonstrations ceased to be the timid rituals they had been; for the first time in decades, student protests escalated into street fighting.

1964 was also a year of change for ''konkret''. The communist world was at the time deeply divided by the falling out between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Over the years, this split would only become more bitter until each side came to see the other as being objectively as bad as—or even worse than!—the imperialism represented by the United States. Despite its ties to the KPD, ''konkret'' was taking an increasingly pro-Chinese line, going so far as to support China’s acquiring nuclear weapons. At this, its East German patrons lost patience, and after failing to browbeat Meinhof into submission at a secret meeting in East Berlin, they cut off all funding.<ref>Jutta Ditfurth, ''Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biographie'' (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007), 180-181.</ref> In their turn, Meinhof and Röhl resigned from the kpd. As a solution to this new lack of money, Röhl made drastic changes to the magazine’s presentation, turning it into a glossy publication which now featured scantilyclad women in every issue—its circulation almost tripled.<ref>David Kramer, “Ulrike Meinhof: An Emancipated Terrorist?” in ''European Women on the Left: Socialism, Feminism, and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present.'' Jane Slaughter and Robert Kern, eds. Contributions in Women’s Studies. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press 1981), 201.</ref> Far from suffering as a result of their separation from the SPD, the SDS, ''konkret'', and others on the left were now particularly well placed to benefit from a series of economic and political developments, even though these were not of their doing and lay well beyond their control.

In 1966-67, a recession throughout the capitalist world pushed unemployment in the FRG to over a million for the first time in the postwar era, a situation the ruling class attempted to exploit to tip the balance of power even further in its favor. As Karl Heinz Roth explains:<blockquote>''Threats of job losses and elimination of all the groups of workers who would have been able to initiate advanced forms of struggle laid the basis for a general anti-worker offensive.''<ref>Roth, 101.</ref> </blockquote>Furthermore:<blockquote>''The bosses freely admitted that they were using the crisis to intensify work conditions amongst all layers of the global working class. From their point of view, the temporary investment strike was necessary to create the basis for a recovery through a “cleansing of the personnel.” Three hundred thousand immigrant workers and almost as many German workers were thrown out into the street.''<ref>Ibid., 100.</ref></blockquote>In a move to consolidate support amongst more privileged German workers and thus exploit the divisions within the proletariat, the SPD was brought into a so-called “Grand Coalition” government alongside the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union. This created a situation in which former resistance fighter and SPD chief Willy Brandt was now vice-chancellor alongside former Nazi Georg Kiesinger of the CDU, and the CSU’s far-right Franz Josef Strauß was Minister of Finance alongside the SPD’s young luminary, Karl Schiller, who held the Economics portfolio.

The SPD was completely discredited by its open embrace of these reactionaries, and it now appeared that any real change could only come about outside of government channels. Disenchantment struck at West Germany’s youth in the universities, in the factories and on the street, as younger workers were increasingly marginalized by the new corporatist compact. The ''Außerparlamentarische'' ''Opposition'' (APO), or Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, was born.

The revolt was focused in West Berlin, an enclave that was a three-hour drive into East Germany, and which remained officially under western Allied occupation, and so enjoyed the bizarre status of being a de facto part of the Federal Republic even though it remained legally distinct.<ref>There was one autobahn through the GDR connecting the city to the Federal Republic, which the East Germans were obligated by international agreements to keep open. The highway ran through desolate countryside, and was flanked by East German armed forces at all times.</ref> In a sense, West Berlin afforded the personal freedoms of the capitalist west while its odd diplomatic status provided its residents with extra room to maneuver outside of the west’s constraints.<ref>For many examples of just how careful the Federal Republic had to be in imposing itself in West Berlin, see Avril Pittman, ''From Ostpolitik to reunification: West German-Soviet political relations since 1974'' (Cambridge, England & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32-62.</ref> This had many important consequences, not the least of which was that young men who moved to West Berlin could avoid the dRAFt, as they were technically living outside of the FRG.

Not surprisingly, the city became a magnet for the radicals and counterculture rebels of the new generation. In the words of one woman who lived there, it was “a self-contained area where political developments of all kinds… become evident much earlier than elsewhere and much more sharply, as if they were under a magnifying glass.”<ref>Hilke Schlaeger and Nancy Vedder-Shults, “West German Women’s Movement,” ''New German Critique'' 13 (Winter 1978): 61.</ref>
[[File:West Berlin Dancing from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Andreas Baader, Dorothea Ridder and Rainer Langhans, dancing in the streets of West Berlin (August, 1967)'']]
Thus, it was in West Berlin that a group of students, gathered around Hans-Jürgen Krahl and the East German refugees Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl, began questioning not only the economic system, but the very nature of society itself. The structure of the family, the factory, and the school system were all challenged as these young rebels mixed the style of the hippy counterculture with ideas drawn from the Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism.

Communes and housing associations sprung up. Women challenged the male leadership and orientation within the SDS and the APO, setting up daycares, women’s caucuses, women’s centers, and women-only communes. The broader counterculture, rockers, artists, and members of the drug scene rallied to the emerging political insurgency. Protests encompassed traditional demonstrations as well as sit-ins, teach-ins, and happenings. So called “Republican Clubs” spread out to virtually every town and city as centers for discussion and organizing, bridging the divide between the younger radicals and veterans of the earlier peace movements.

As one historian has put it:<blockquote>''Everywhere it could, the 1960s generation countered the German petit bourgeois ethic with its antithesis, as they interpreted it: prudery with free love, nationalism with internationalism, the nuclear family with communes, provincialism with Third World solidarity, obedience to the law with civil disobedience, tradition with wide-open experimentation, servility with in-your-face activism.''<ref>Hockenos, 80.</ref> </blockquote>Or, as one former SDS member would recall, it was a time when “everything”—hash, politics, sex, and Vietnam—“all seemed to hang together with everything else.”<ref>Eckhard Siepmann in Herzog, 427.</ref>

Despite its growing popularity on campus and amongst hipsters, this new radical youth movement was not embraced by the population at large, and demonstrations would often be heckled or even attacked by onlookers. This widespread hostility was a green light for state repression, with results which would soon become clear for all to see.

On June 2, 1967, thousands of people turned out to demonstrate outside the German Opera against a visit by the Shah of Iran, whose brutal regime was a key American ally in the Middle East. Many wore paper masks in the likeness of the Shah and his wife; these had been printed up by Rainer Langhans and Holger Meins of the K.1 commune,<ref>Kommune 1 in German.</ref> “So the police couldn’t recognize us [and so] they only saw the face of the one they were protecting.”<ref>G. Conradt and H. Jahn, ''Starbuck Holger Meins'', directed by G. Conradt. (Germany: Hartmut Jahn Filmproduktion, 2002).</ref> Thus adorned, the protesters greeted the Iranian monarch and his wife with volleys of rotten tomatoes and shouts of “Murderer!”

(As Ulrike Meinhof would later write in ''konkret'': “the students who befouled the Shah did not act on their own behalf, but rather on behalf of the Persian peasants who are in no position to resist under present circumstances, and the tomatoes could only be symbols for better projectiles…”)<ref>“Women in the sds; or, Or Our Own Behalf, (1968)” in German Feminist Writing, eds. Patricia A. Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 160.</ref>

The June 2 rally would be a turning point, as the protesters were brutally set upon by the police and SAVAK, the Iranian secret service. Many fought back, and the demonstration is reported to have “descended into the most violent battle between protesters and police so far in the postwar period… It was only around 12:30 am that the fighting came to an end, by which time 44 demonstrators had been arrested, and the same number of people had been injured, including 20 police officers.”<ref>Thomas, 111-112.</ref>
[[File:Benno Ohensorg murdered by police from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Benno Ohnesorg, shot by police, lies dying in the arms of fellow student Fredericke Dollinger.'']]
Most tragically, a young member of the Evangelical Student Association, Benno Ohnesorg, attending his first demonstration, was shot in the back of the head by Karl-Heinz Kurras, a plainclothes police officer with the Red Squad. Even after Ohnesorg was finally picked up by an ambulance, it was another forty minutes before he was brought to a hospital. He died of his wounds that night.

This police murder was a defining event, electrifying the student movement and pushing it in a far more militant direction. It has been estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 students took part in demonstrations across the country in the days immediately following Ohnesorg’s death. For many, especially those outside of West Berlin, it was their first political protest. As has been noted elsewhere, “Although two-thirds of students in the period before the shooting declared themselves to be apolitical, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting a survey found that 65 per cent of students had been politicized by Ohnesorg’s death.”<ref>Ibid., 114.</ref>

The murder catapulted the SDS into the center of student politics across the Federal Republic. As one student activist later recalled years later:<blockquote>''The SDS didn’t have more than a few hundred members nationwide… and then all at once there was such a huge deluge that we couldn’t cope. Our offices were overrun. So we just opened SDS up and decentralized everything. We let people in different cities and towns organize themselves into autonomous project groups and then we’d all meet at regular congresses to thrash things out. More or less by chance it turned out to be an incredible experiment in participatory democracy.''<ref>Christian Semler in Hockenos, 69.</ref> </blockquote>Initially, the state and the newspapers owned by reactionary press magnate Axel Springer<ref>The Springer chain consisted of conservative tabloids, among them ''Bild, Berliner Zeitung'', and ''Berliner Morgenpost''. They led a campaign to smear progressive students as “muddle heads,” East German spies, and storm troopers—at times even crossing the line and advocating vigilante violence. As Jeremy Varon notes, “Springer publications accounted for more than 70 percent of the West Berlin press and more than 30 percent of the national daily newspaper market. As the press fed a climate of anti-student hysteria, the reaction of the media to the New Left itself became a major object of protest.” [Jeremy Varon, ''Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 38-39.]</ref> tried to justify this murder, repeating lies that the protesters had had plans to kill police and that Kurras had shot in self-defense. Springer’s ''Bild Zeitung'' ominously warned that “A young man died in Berlin, victim of the riots instigated by political hooligans who call themselves demonstrators. Riots aren’t enough anymore. They want to see blood. They wave the red flag and they mean it. This is where democratic tolerance stops.”<ref>Hockenos, 68.</ref>

On June 3, the Berlin Senate banned demonstrations in the city— twenty-five year old Gudrun Ensslin was one of eight protesters arrested for defying this ban the next day<ref>Stefan Aust, ''The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon''. Translated by Anthea Bell. (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1987), 44.</ref>—and the chief of police Duensing proudly explained his tactics as those he would use when confronted with a smelly sausage: “The left end stinks [so] we had to cut into the middle to take off the end.”<ref>Thomas, 115.</ref> As for the Shah, he tried to reassure the Mayor of Berlin Heinrich Albertz, telling him not to think too much of it, “these things happen every day in Iran…”<ref>Aust, 44.</ref>

Nevertheless, given the widespread sense of outrage and the increasing evidence that Ohnesorg had been killed without provocation, Duensing was forced out of his job, and Senator for Internal Affairs Büsch and Mayor Albertz were eventually made to follow suit.

If June 2 has been pointed to as the “coming out” of the West German New Left mass student phenomenon, the international circumstances in which this occurred were not without significance. Just three days after Ohnesorg’s murder, West Germany’s ally Israel attacked Egypt, and quickly destroyed its army—as well as Jordanian and Syrian forces—in what became known as the Six Day War.

In the FRG, the Six Day War provided the odd occasion for a broad-based, mass celebration of militarism. To some observers, it suddenly seemed as if the same emotions and social forces that had supported German fascism were now expressing themselves through support for the Israeli aggressors, described (approvingly) as the “Prussians of the Middle East.”<ref>George Lavy, ''Germany and Israel: Moral Debt and National Interest'' (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 154.</ref> Although the SDS was already pro-Palestinian, most leftists had previously harbored sympathies for the Jewish state. The 1967 war put a definite end to this, establishing the New Left’s anti-Zionist orientation; as an unfortunate side effect of this turn, it also discouraged attempts to grapple with the gravity of Germany’s antisemitic past from a radical, anticapitalist point of view. (For more on Germany’s relationship to Israel, see Appendix III—The FRG and the State of Israel, pages 550-553.)

An uneasy calm reigned in the wake of the June 2 tragedy, and yet the movement continued to grow. More radical ideas were gaining currency, and at an SDS conference in September Rudi Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl went so far as to broach the possibility of the left fielding an urban guerilla. This was the first time such an idea had been mentioned in the SDS or the APO, and for the time being, such talk remained a matter of abstract conjecture.
[[File:Newspaper Clipping Internaitonal Vietnam Conference West Berlin from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb]]
On February 17 and 18, 1968, the movement reached what was perhaps its peak when 5,000 people attended the International Congress on Vietnam in West Berlin, including representatives of anti-imperialist movements from around the world. Addressing those present, Dutschke called for a “long march through the institutions,” a phrase with which his name is today firmly associated.<ref>Tariq Ali, Street fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (New York: Verso, 2005), 243.</ref> (By this, the student leader did not mean joining the system, but rather setting up counterinstitutions while identifying dissatisfied elements within the establishment that might be won over or subverted.)<ref>While one cannot mention Dutschke today without referring to the “long march,” the phrase is interpreted wildly differently by different writers. The description offered here is Herbert Marcuse’s, as it appeared in his 1972 essay “The Left Under the Counterrevolution” in which he endorsed the concept while crediting it to his former student Dutschke. [Herbert Marcuse, ''Counterrevolution and Revolt'' (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 55-57</ref> The congress closed with a demonstration of more than 12,000 people, and would be remembered years later as an important breakthrough for the entire European left.<ref>Ali, 246.</ref>

The establishment mounted its response on February 21, as the West Berlin Senate, the Federation of Trade Unions, and the Springer Press called for a mass demonstration against the student movement and in support of the U.S. war against Vietnam. Eighty thousand people attended, many carrying signs reading “Rudi Dutschke: Public Enemy Number One” and “Berlin Must Not Become Saigon.”

Increasing polarization was leading to a definitive explosion: less than one year after Ohnesorg’s murder, another violent attack on the left served as the spark.

On April 11, 1968, Josef Bachmann, a young right-wing worker, shot Rudi Dutschke three times, once in the head, once in the jaw, and once in the chest. Dutschke, who was recognized as the leading intellectual in the SDS and the APO, had been the target of a massive anticommunist smear campaign in the media, particularly the Springer Press, which would be widely blamed for setting the stage for the attack. Indeed, Bachmann would later testify in this regard, saying, “I have taken my daily information from the ''Bild Zeitung''.”<ref>Thomas, 170.</ref>

The shooting occurred one week after Martin Luther King had been assassinated in the United States, and to many young German leftists, it appeared that their entire international movement was under attack. One young working-class rebel, like Dutschke a refugee from the East, summed up how he felt as follows:<blockquote>''Up to this point they had come with the little police clubs or Mr Kuras(sic) shot; but now it had started, with people being offed specifically. The general baiting had created a climate in which little pranks wouldn’t work anymore. Not when they’re going to liquidate you, regardless of what you do. Before I get transported to Auschwitz again, I’d rather shoot first, that’s clear now. If the gallows is smiling at you at the end anyway, then you can fight back beforehand.''<ref>Bommi Baumann, ''Terror or Love? The Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla'' (London: John Calder Publications, 1979), 41.</ref> </blockquote>Bachmann had carried out his attack on the Thursday before Easter, and the annual peace demonstrations were quickly transformed into protests against the assassination attempt; it has been estimated that 300,000 people participated in the marches over the weekend, the largest figure achieved in West Germany in the 1960s.<ref>Thomas, 171.</ref> Universities were occupied across the country, and running battles with the police lasted for four days. “Springer Shot Too!” became a common slogan amongst radicals, and in many cities, the corporation was targeted with violent attacks. Thousands were arrested, hundreds were hospitalized, and two people (a journalist and a protester) were killed, most likely by police. On May 1, 50,000 people marched through West Berlin.

Unprecedented numbers of working-class youth took part in these battles, with university students constituting only a minority of those arrested by police, a development that worried the ruling class. <ref>Ibid., 176.</ref>

By the time it was over, there had been violent clashes in at least twenty cities. Springer property worth 250,000 dm (roughly $80,000) was damaged or destroyed, including over 100,000dm worth of window panes.<ref>Ibid.</ref>

This rebellion and the police repression pushed many radicals’ thinking to an entirely new level. Bommi Baumann, for instance, credited the riots with opening his eyes to the possibility of armed struggle:<blockquote>''On the spot, I really got it, this concept of mass struggle-terrorism; this problem I had been thinking about for so long became clear to me then. The chance for a revolutionary movement lies in this: when a determined group is there simultaneously with the masses, supporting them through terror.''<ref>Baumann, 41.</ref> </blockquote>Ulrike Meinhof was clearly thinking along similar lines, only she put her thoughts in print, sharing them with the public in a groundbreaking ''konkret'' article entitled “From Protest to Resistance.” Arguing that in the Easter riots “the boundaries between protest and resistance were exceeded,” she promised that “the paramilitary deployment of the police will be answered with paramilitary methods.”<ref>Thomas, 180.</ref>

On May 31, the ''Bundestag'' passed the ''Notstandgesetze'', or Emergency Powers Act, which besides providing the state with tools to deal with crises such as natural disasters or war, was also intended to open the movement up to greater intervention. The CDU had been trying to pass such repressive legislation for years, and short-circuiting opposition to it had been one of the advantages of forming a Grand Coalition along with the SPD. Coming as it did on the heels of the April violence, the legislation passed easily. (The fact that, just across the Rhine, France seemed also on the brink of revolution, enjoying its defining rebellion of the sixties, certainly didn’t hurt matters.)

Under the new Act, the Basic Law was amended to allow the state to tap phones and observe mail unhindered by previous stipulations requiring that the targeted individual be informed. Provisions were introduced in particular for the telephone surveillance of people suspected of preparing or committing “political crimes,” especially those governed by the catch-all §129 of the penal code, criminalizing the “formation or support of a criminal association.” The Emergency Powers Act also officially sanctioned the use of clandestine photography, “trackers” and Verfassungsschutz informants and provocateurs.
[[File:Demonstration against emergency powers poster from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Poster for a demonstration against the Emergency Powers Act, organized by the Munich Board for the Emergency Facing Democracy: “The Emergency Powers Act Plans for War, Not Peace!” Amongst those who gave closing speeches was one Rolf Pohle, at the time a law student prominent in the Munich APO.'']]
Throughout the month of May, as the Act was being passed into law, universities were occupied, students boycotted classes, and tens of thousands of people protested in demonstrations across the country, while a similar number of workers staged a one-day strike. To its critics, the Act represented a dangerous step along the road to re-establishing fascism in the Federal Republic, and this fear was simply reinforced by the way in which the Grand Coalition could pass the legislation regardless of the widespread protests against it.

Anti-''Notstandgesetze'' activities were particularly impressive in Frankfurt, the financial capital of West Germany, which had also become something of an intellectual center for the student movement. On May 27, students occupied the Frankfurt University, and for several days held seminars and workshops addressing a variety of political questions. It took large scale police raids on May 30 to clear the campus.

All this notwithstanding, the Act was passed into law.

The failure of the anti-''Notstandgesetze'' movement was experienced as a bitter defeat by the New Left. Many entertained alarmist fears that the laws would be used to institute a dictatorship, in much the same way as Hindenburg had used similar powers in 1930 and 1933 to create a government independent from parliament, which had facilitated the Nazi dictatorship. In the words of Hans-Jürgen Krahl:<blockquote>''Democracy in Germany is finished. Through concerted political activism we have to form a broad, militant base of resistance against these developments, which could well lead to war and concentration camps. Our struggle against the authoritarian state of today can prevent the fascism of tomorrow.''<ref>Hockenos, 88.</ref> </blockquote>In this heady climate, matters continued to escalate throughout 1968, sections of the movement graduating to more organized and militantly ambitious protests. The most impressive examples of this were probably those that accompanied attempts to disbar Horst Mahler.

Mahler was a superstar of the West Berlin left, known as the “hippy lawyer” who defended radicals in many of the most important cases of this period. He had been involved with the SDS, and was a co-founder of the West Berlin Republican Club and the Socialist Lawyers Collective.<ref>Aust, 65-6.</ref> He had been arrested during the anti-Springer protests that April, and in what would prove to be a foolish move, the state had initiated proceedings to see him disbarred.<ref>Ibid., 64.</ref>

Mahler’s case became a new lightning rod for the West Berlin left, which felt that the state was trying to muzzle their most committed legal defender. The student councils of the Free University and the Technical University called for protests the day of his hearing, one organizer describing the goal as “the destruction of the justice apparatus through massive demonstrations.”<ref>Associated Press, “Student ‘Army’ Battles With Berlin Police,” ''Fresno Bee'', November 4, 1968.</ref>

The street fighting which broke out on November 3 would go down in history as the “Battle of Tegeler Weg.”<ref>Tegeler Weg is a fashionable street in West Berlin where the Bar Association was located.</ref> On the one side, the helmet-wearing protesters (roughly 1,500) attacked with cobblestones and two-by-fours, on the other the police (numbering 1,000) used water cannons, tear gas, and billy clubs:<blockquote>''Several lawyers and bystanders were hit by cobblestones ripped from the sidewalks and hurled by the youths, most of them wearing crash helmets, as they moved forward in waves directed by leaders with megaphones.''

''Injured demonstrators were carried to waiting ambulances marked with blue crosses and staffed by girls wearing improvised nurses’ uniforms.''<ref>Associated Press, “Student ‘Army’.”</ref> </blockquote>Nor were the police spared. As another newspaper reported:<blockquote>''The demonstrators caused a heavy toll of police casualties with their guerrilla style of battle: thrusting at police, withdrawing, consolidating and then thrusting again from another angle.''

''At one stage they managed to beat back a 300-man police force a distance of 150 yards… Police counted 120 injured in their own ranks. Ten of them had to be treated at a hospital. A police spokesman said seven of 21 injured demonstrators were taken to a hospital. The number of arrests was placed at 46.''<ref>George Thomson, “Berlin police, leftists battle,” ''Lowell Sun'', November 4, 1968.</ref> </blockquote>That same night a horse was injured when several molotov cocktails were thrown into the police stable.<ref>Ibid.</ref> It would later be suggested that this attack was the work of an agent provocateur by the name of Peter Urbach.<ref>Aust, 145.</ref>

The court declined to disbar Mahler. Within a few days, the firebrand lawyer was once again making headlines with his latest case: the defense of the young antifascist Beate Klarsfeld, who had smacked CDU Chancellor—and former Nazi—Kurt Georg Kiesinger, hitting him in the face.<ref>Associated Press, “Woman gets Jail for Slapping Bonn Chief,” ''Fresno Bee'', November 8, 1968.</ref> Mahler would eventually win Klarsfeld a suspended sentence, at which point he counter-sued Kiesinger on her behalf, arguing that the very fact that a former Nazi was Chancellor constituted an insult to his client.<ref>Associated Press, “Hit Kiesinger; Term Suspended,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', August 26, 1969.</ref>

The Battle of Tegeler Weg was another milestone, representing a willingness to engage in organized violence the likes of which had not been seen for decades. This period also saw the first experiments with clandestine armed activities, a subject to which we will soon return.

Thus, we can see that even as the spectre of increased repression haunted sections of the militant left, there existed both the desire and the capacity to rise to the next level.

At the same time, however, other developments offered the tempting promise that change might come about in a more comfortable manner by backing down and working within the system.

In October, 1969, the Grand Coalition came to an end, and under the slogan “Let’s Dare More Democracy!” an SPD government (in coalition with the FDP) was elected. SPD leader Willy Brandt was now Chancellor, and FDP leader Walter Scheel became Foreign Minister. The largely symbolic post of president went to political old-timer Gustav Heinemann, widely considered one of the Federal Republic’s most liberal politicians, despite the fact that he had been the Grand Coalition’s SPD Minister of Justice.<ref>Heinemann had in fact held a cabinet position for the CDU as early as 1949, a post he left, along with the CDU, in the early fifties in protest against Adenauer’s rearmament policies. When Ulrike Meinhof was sued for slander by CSU leader Franz Josef Strauß in 1961 as a result of a ''konkret'' article, Heinemann agreed to take on her case, successfully defending her—the two had become allies if not friends during the peace movements of the 1950s.</ref>

For the first time in its history, the Christian Democrats had lost control of the West German parliament.

The new SPD government announced a series of measures which partially fulfilled the students’ more “reasonable” demands: there were new diplomatic overtures to East Germany, it was made easier to be declared a conscientious objector, the age of consent and the legal voting age were lowered from twenty-one to eighteen, no fault divorce legislation was passed, and a series of reforms aimed to modernize and open up the stuffy, hierarchical German school system.

For many, it seemed like a brand new day.

At the same time, Brandt announced an “immediate program to modernize and intensify crime prevention,” which included:<blockquote>''strengthening of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, the modernization of its equipment and the extension of its powers, the re-equipping and reorganization of the Federal Border Guard as a Federal police force, together with the setting up of a “study group on the surveillance of foreigners” within the security services.''<ref>Cobler, 154-155.</ref> </blockquote>Nevertheless, these measures would not affect most activists, and the government shift away from the anachronistic conservatism of the CDU helped confuse and siphon off less committed students, draining potential sources of support for the radical left. At the same time, the movement itself was beginning to fragment.

Problems of male supremacy in the APO had become increasingly difficult to bear for radical women inspired by the feminist movements in the United States, France, and England. In September 1968, things had come to a head at an SDS conference in Frankfurt, where Hans-Jürgen Krahl found himself being pelted by tomatoes after he refused to address the question of chauvinism in the SDS. While many (but not all) of the women from the APO would continue to identify as being on the left, their political trajectory became increasingly separate, both as a result of dynamics internal to the women’s movement and of the continuing sexism outside of it.
[[File:Agit 883 magazine demonstration from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''The different tendencies to emerge from the APO tapped into different aesthetic traditions—above: a call-out from the radical magazine Agit 883 for a demonstration against the Vietnam War.'']]
The decline of the APO also occurred alongside renewed attempts to build various workers’ parties in line with the “correct” Marxist analysis. In 1968, the banned KPD (“Communist Party of Germany”) had been re-established under a new name as the DKP (“German Communist Party”), but boasting the same program and leadership. To most young radicals, though, this “new” Communist Party was of little interest, not only because of its association with the clearly unattractive East German regime, but also because of what was seen as its unimpressive and timid track record in the years before Adenauer had had it banned.
[[File:'Red May First Resist Wage Slavery' poster from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''“Everybody Out to the Red May 1st; Resist Wage Controls; Resist Wage Slavery; A United Working Class Front Against the Betrayal of the SPD Government”'']]
Rather, there followed a veritable alphabet soup of Maoist parties, most of which were as virulently anti-Soviet as they were anti-American. These were joined by a much smaller number of Trotskyist organizations, and together all these would eventually become known as the “K-groups,” in a development roughly analogous to the New Communist Movement which developed at the same time in North America.

Those who remained to the left of the SPD while not joining any of these new party-oriented organizations included the ''sponti'' (“spontaneous”) left which had grown out of the APO’s antiauthoritarian camp, anarchists, and assorted independent socialists. Together, these were referred to as the “undogmatic left,” their bastions being the cities of Frankfurt, Munich, and—of course—West Berlin.

The movement continued to struggle, but with increasing difficulty, fragmenting in all directions, as the APO seemed to be coming apart at the seams.

In March 1970, following a chaotic congress at the Frankfurt Student Association Building, the SDS was dissolved by acclamation. In a brilliant ploy, two months later the government decreed an amnesty for protesters serving short sentences, thereby winning many of these middle class students back to the establishment. The student movement in West Germany was particularly vulnerable to this kind of recuperation, being overwhelmingly comprised of young people for whom there was a place in the more comfortable classes; in 1967, for instance, only 7% of West German students were from working class families (by comparison, in England the figure was almost one in three).<ref>Thomas, 144.</ref>

Despite the APO’s inability to meet the challenges before it, one cannot deny that in just a few years it had thoroughly transformed West German society:<blockquote>''Among the consequences were the reform of education; a new Ostpolitik;''<ref>''Ostpolitik:'' the FRG’s official policy towards the GDR and the east bloc.</ref> ''the deconstruction of the authoritarian patriarchal relations in the family, school, factory and public service; the development of state planning in the economy; a greater integration of women into professional life and a reform in sexual legislation… the APO also provided the impetus to a socio-cultural break with the past. There was a very rapid change in social outlook and behavior patterns. The old ascetic behavior based on the notion of duty came to an end. Along with a different conception of social roles came a new set of sexual mores and a dissolution of the old respectful and subservient attitude towards the state and all forms of authority. There developed, in other words, a new culture which was to pave the way for the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s.''<ref>Hülsberg, 42-43.</ref> </blockquote>

== 3 - Taking up the Gun ==
As the APO foundered, the majority of those to the left of the SPD remained committed to legal, aboveground activism. Nevertheless, a section of the movement had begun testing the waters with another kind of praxis, and for the purposes of our study, it is to this that we will now turn.

The first experiments with armed struggle developed out of the counterculture, as individuals around the K.1 commune in West Berlin began carrying out firebombings and bank robberies. Coming from a milieu where drugs and anarchism mingled freely, these young radicals hung out in a scene known as “the Blues,” and would take on the purposefully ironic name of the “Central Committee of the Roaming Hash Rebels.” As Bommi Baumann later explained, with perhaps a tongue in his cheek:<blockquote>''Mao provided our theoretical basis: “On the Mentality of Roaming Bands of Rebels.” From the so-called robber-bands, he and Chu-Teh had created the first cadre of the Red Army. We took our direction from that. We directed our agitation to make the dopers, who were still partly unpolitical, conscious of their situation. What we did was mass work.''<ref>Baumann, 50.</ref> </blockquote>The Hash Rebels carried out actions under a number of different names, but became best known as the Tupamaros-West Berlin, after the urban guerillas in Uruguay.<ref>Ibid., 59.</ref> Initially, this antiauthoritarian, pre-guerilla tendency suffered from anti-intellectualism, unquestioned male chauvinism, and a lack of any coherent strategy. It has also been criticized for tolerating and engaging in antisemitism under cover of anti-Zionism, one of its first actions being to firebomb a cultural centre housed in a synagogue on the anniversary of a Nazi pogrom.<ref>Tilman Fichter, interview by Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “The anti-Semitism of the 68ers,” ''die tageszeitung'', October 25, 2005. The action was intended to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. See Baumann, 60-61 and 67-68.</ref>

On the other hand, it did seem to enjoy an organic relationship with its base, such as that was.

As the APO fell apart and many of the Hash Rebels’ leading members were arrested or simply had a change of heart, what remained of this tendency would crystallize into a guerilla group known as the 2nd of June Movement (2JM—a reference to the date when Benno Ohnesorg had been killed in 1967). Rooted in West Berlin, this group eventually overcame many of its initial weaknesses while retaining an accessible and often humorous rhetorical style that resonated with many in the anarchist and ''sponti'' scenes throughout the country.

The second guerilla tendency, with which we are more directly concerned, brought together individuals who were peripheral to the countercultural milieu of the Hash Rebels, and of a somewhat more serious bent. As Bommi Baumann would later explain, they “formed at about the same time as we did, because they considered us totally crazy.”<ref>Baumann, 76.</ref> This second tendency was much more theoretically rigorous (or pretentious, to its critics), and heavily influenced not only by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but also by New Left philosophers ranging from Nicos Poulantzas to the Frankfurt School.
[[File:West German Counterculture Cartoon from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''A cartoon from the radical counterculture magazine Agit 883 shows a young man bearing a striking resemblence to Holger Meins (who was a member of the newspaper’s editorial collective) throwing an incendiary device of some sort out of a car. He gets busted because he forgot to change the car’s license plates, but luckily some of his friends are willing to vouch for him and the police are forced to release him, even though they know he did it.'']]
This nascent Marxist-Leninist guerilla scene had its earliest manifestation in the firebombing of two Frankfurt department stores on April 3, 1968, one week before Rudi Dutschke was shot. Petrol bombs with rudimentary timing devices were left in both the Kaufhaus Schneider and Kaufhof buildings, bursting into flames just before midnight. The fires caused almost 700,000 dm ($224,000 U.S.) in damage, though nobody was hurt.

On April 5, Horst Söhnlein, Thorwald Proll, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader, who had all traveled from West Berlin to carry out the action while attending an SDS conference, were arrested and charged with arson.

The four had taken few precautions to protect their identities and avoid arrest. They had issued no communiqué, and in retrospect, the action appears almost flippant in its execution. Indeed, some of those arrested initially denied their participation, and later tried to minimize it all, Baader claiming, “We had no intention of endangering human life or even starting a real fire.”<ref>Aust, 51, 58.</ref>

In court, the four had no united strategy; apparently without bitterness or recrimination, Baader and Ensslin at first tried to present a legal defense, and then switched to accepting full responsibility while insisting that Proll and Söhnlein were both completely innocent.<ref>Ibid., 58.</ref> For their part, these two did not deny their involvement, yet chose not to defend themselves, though Proll did offer an eloquent denunciation of the court and judicial system (see pages 66-78).

In the end, there was no denying that this was a political action, albeit an ill-defined one. In court, Ensslin explained that that the arson was “in protest against people’s indifference to the murder of the Vietnamese,” adding that “We have found that words are useless without action.”<ref>Ibid., 58.</ref>

Then, in a statement that could only be appreciated in retrospect, she told a television reporter, “We have said clearly enough that we did the wrong thing. But there’s no reason for us to discuss it with the law or the state. We must discuss it with people who think as we do.”<ref>Ibid., 62.</ref>

While the four were repudiated by the SDS, they were embraced by others for whom the step into illegality seemed both appropriate and timely. “They were like little media stars for the radical left,” Thorwald’s younger sister Astrid Proll would recall years later.<ref>Astrid Proll, ''Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run'' 67-77 (Zurich: Scalo, 1998), 8.</ref>

One of these admirers was Ulrike Meinhof, who had divorced ''konkret'' publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl and moved to West Berlin with their twin daughters in 1967. Meinhof visited Ensslin in prison, and would approvingly write about the case in her magazine column. “[T]he progressive moment of arson in a department store does not lie in the destruction of goods,” she opined, “but in the criminality of the act, the breaking of the law…”<ref>Aust, 60.</ref>

Publicly, the arsonists’ friends from the K.1 commune declared their solidarity, Fritz Teufel paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht to the effect that “It’s always better to torch a department store than to run one.”<ref>Andreas Elter “Die raf und die Medien: Ein Fallbeispiel für terroristische Kommunikation,” ''Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung'' [online], August 20, 2007. Brecht, the famous communist playwright, had stated that “Small timers rob banks, professionals own them.”</ref> Privately, however, they wondered at how clumsily the whole thing had been carried out, some even supposing that the four might suffer from some “psychic failure,” a subconscious desire to go to jail.<ref>Aust, 51-2.</ref>

In October 1968, the four were each sentenced to three years in prison.

As the judge read out the verdict a familiar figure stood up: “This trial belongs before a student court,” Daniel Cohn-Bendit<ref>A law student at the University of Frankfurt, “Danny the Red” had been barred from France in 1968 for his symbolic leadership role in the May events of that year (it was his expulsion which had provoked students to occupy Nanterre University). Today, a respectable politician in the German Green Party, in 1969, he was (in) famous around the world, the very personification of anarchist student revolt. As we shall see in Section 11, (Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Left…), he would play an important role in deradicalizing a section of the movement in the mid-seventies.</ref> shouted, at which point the gallery erupted into pandemonium, spectators swarming the guards as two of the accused attempted to make a break for it. Three people, including Cohn-Bendit, were arrested as a result of this melee, and all four young arsonists remained in custody.<ref>Associated Press, “Cohn-Bendit Jailed; Court Brawl Follows,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', November 1, 1968.</ref>

The next day, persons unknown lobbed three molotov cocktails into the Frankfurt courthouse.<ref>''European Stars and Stripes'', “New Violence Hits Frankfurt,” November 2, 1968.</ref> Again, no one was hurt.

The arsonists had been represented by Horst Mahler, whom the state failed to have disbarred just days after this defeat, in the hearings which would provoke the aforementioned Battle of Tegeler Weg. The four would not be able to participate in that historic rout of the West Berlin police: despite appealing their sentence, they remained imprisoned until June of 1969. Only then were they finally released on their own recognizance until such a time as the court finally reached its decision.

As the summer of 69 turned to fall and the court continued to deliberate, the newly released Ensslin, Baader, and Proll would busy themselves working in the “apprentices’ collectives” scene. These collectives consisted of young runaways from state homes, and were at the time the object of political campaigning from the disintegrating APO. As Astrid Proll would recall:<blockquote>''When Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin were released from custody they knew exactly what they wanted. Unlike the drugged “communards” they radiated great clarity and resolve… Gudrun and Andreas launched a big campaign in Frankfurt against the authoritarian regimes in young offender institutions. We lived with youths who had escaped from closed institutions, joined them in fighting for their rights, and managed to achieve some successes. Ulrike Meinhof, as a commited (sic), critical journalist, joined us and became friends with Gudrun and Andreas.''<ref>Proll, 8.</ref> </blockquote>In November 1969, the court denied their appeal and ordered the four back to prison: only Söhnlein turned himself in. Ensslin and Baader went underground and set about establishing the contacts that would be necessary for a prolonged campaign of armed struggle. Thorwald Proll was soon abandoned—he was not considered serious enough— but his sister Astrid joined them.

Over the next months, the fugitives would cross into France and Italy and back to West Berlin again, laying the groundwork for the future organization. At this point, they resumed contact with their lawyer Horst Mahler,<ref>Aust, 73.</ref> who was still facing criminal charges stemming from the April 1968 revolt.<ref>Associated Press, “West Berlin Publisher is Sentenced,” ''Danville Bee'', February 16, 1970.</ref> While enduring these legal battles, Mahler had himself been trying to set up a “militant group” in Berlin,<ref>Aust, 77.</ref> and so joining forces with his former clients simply seemed like a wise strategic decision.

At the same time, the serious Marxist-Leninists considered—and rejected—the idea of joining forces with the anarchist guerilla groups that were coalescing within the Roaming Hash Rebels scene. The reasons for this decision to continue following separate paths are not clear-cut, and the consequences were more nuanced than might be expected. It is important to remember that many of the figures involved knew each other from the APO, in some cases were friends, and certainly would have had opinions about each other’s politics and personalities. It has been said that Dieter Kunzelmann, a prominent figure in the Hash Rebels scene, was wary of Baader claiming leadership.<ref>Ibid.</ref> It has also been suggested that the RAF as a whole had a haughty manner, and was made up of middle-class students who didn’t fit in with the supposedly more proletarian 2JM.<ref>Baumann, 77-78.</ref>

While none of the guerillas have ever said as much, one cannot help but wonder what RAF members might have thought of the countercultural scene out of which the Hash Rebels had developed, specifically the sexual arrangements. The K.1 commune was not only famous for its brilliant agit prop, its radical cultural experiments, and its phenomenal drug consumption, but also for its iconic role in the sexual revolution which swept the Federal Republic in the years of the apo. At the same time as K.1’s sexual politics constituted a reaction to the oppressive conservatism of Christian Germany, it was also very much a macho scene built around the desires of key men involved. Polygamy was almost mandatory, and women were passed around between the “revolutionaries”—as one male communard put it, “It’s like training a horse; one guy has to break her in, then she’s available for everyone.”<ref>Herzog, 425.</ref> As Bommi Baumann would later admit regarding the Hash Rebels, “They were just pure oppressors of women; it can’t be put any other way.”<ref>Baumann, 75.</ref>

There were always many women playing central roles in the RAF. It is difficult to imagine Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, or Astrid Proll putting up with the kind of sexist libertinage which has been documented in the West Berlin anarchist scene. Indeed, during her own period in the wild depths of the counterculture, Proll had not gone to K.1 but had chosen to live in a women’s only commune, helping to form a short-lived female version of the Hash Rebels, the Militant Black Panther Aunties.<ref>Eileen MacDonald, ''Shoot the Women First'' (London: Arrow Books Ltd., 1991), 209-210.</ref>

These various explanations, however, are not only difficult to evaluate, they also risk obscuring the fact that cooperation between the anarchist guerilla scene and the Marxist-Leninists would continue throughout the seventies, many members of the former eventually joining the RAF, while a few individuals continued to carry out operations with both organizations. Certainly, from what can be seen, a high level of coordination and solidarity existed between the groups at all times. While their supporters might occasionally engage in unpleasant disputes, the actual fighters seem to have maintained good relations even as they traveled their different roads.

Ultimately, in the early 80s, the 2nd of June Movement would publicly announce that it was joining the RAF en masse. This provided the opportunity for some 2JM political prisoners who opposed the merger to give their own explanation as to why they had always chosen to fight separately. Although these observations were made over ten years later, they help shed light on relations in these early days:<blockquote>''The contradiction between the RAF and the 2nd of June at that time was the result of the different ways the groups had evolved: the 2nd of June Movement out of their members’ social scene and the RAF on the basis of their theoretical revolutionary model. And, equally, as a result of the RAF’s centralized organizational model on the one hand, and our autonomous, decentralized structures on the other. Another point of conflict was to be found in the question of the cadre going underground, which the RAF insisted on as a point of principle.''

''As such, the immediate forerunners to the 2nd of June Movement were always open to a practical—proletarian—alternative; an alternative that had nothing to do with competition, but more to do with different visions of the revolutionary struggle.''

''There was strong mutual support and common actions in the early period of both groups… At the time both groups proceeded with the idea that the future would determine which political vision would prove effective in the long run.''<ref>Ralf Reinders, Klaus Viehmann, and Ronald Fritzsch, “Zu der angeblichen Auflösung der Bewegung 2. Juni im Juni 1980,” <nowiki>http://www.bewegung.in/mate_nichtaufloesung.html</nowiki>. This is an excerpt from a much longer document which, along with the 2JM’s declaration of the merger, will appear (translated) in our second volume, ''The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Vol. II: Dancing with Imperialism: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.''</ref> </blockquote>So, during this germinal period, friendly contacts were maintained even as differences were clarified between the various activists who were choosing to take the next step in the struggle.

For shelter and support, those who were underground became dependent on the goodwill and loyalty of friends and allies who maintained a legal existence. One of those who occasionally sheltered Baader and Ensslin was Ulrike Meinhof, who was already feeling that their commitment and sense of purpose contrasted sharply with what she experienced as her own increasingly hollow existence as a middle class media star, albeit one with “notorious” left-wing politics. At the same time, Meinhof continued to work with young people in closed institutions, specifically girls in reform school, with whom she began producing a television docudrama.

While Meinhof eventually became world famous for what she did next in life, it is worth emphasizing that her time as a journalist was far from insignificant. As her biographer Jutta Ditfurth has argued:<blockquote>''With her columns, and above all with the radio features about things like industrial labor and reform school children, Meinhof had an enormous influence on the thinking of many people. Much more than she realized. She took on themes that only exploded into view years later. For instance, the women’s question. When women in the SDS defended themselves from macho guys, they did it with words and sentences from Meinhof’s articles. She could formulate things succinctly.''<ref>Jutta Ditfurth, interview by Arno Luik, ''“Sie war die große Schwester der 68er,”'' Stern 46 (2007).</ref> </blockquote>Baader was captured in West Berlin on April 3, 1970, set up by a police informant.<ref>Aust, 81.</ref> Peter Urbach had been active around the commune scene for years, all the while secretly acting on behalf of the state. He was particularly “close” to the K.1 commune, and had known Baader since at least 1967. While the bombs and guns Urbach supplied to young rebels never seemed to work, the hard drugs he provided did their job nicely, showing that even as theories of the “liberating” effects of narcotics were being touted in the scene, the state knew on which side its bread was buttered.<ref>Ibid., 47.</ref>

While it has always been stressed that there were neither hierarchies nor favorites amongst the various combatants, Baader seemed to bring with him a sense of daring and possibility which would always make him first amongst equals, for better or for worse. As such, following his capture, all attention was focused on how he could be freed from the state’s clutches.

A plan was hatched, whereby Meinhof would use her press credentials to apply for permission to work with Baader on a book about youth centers, an area in which by now they both had some experience. The prison authorities reluctantly agreed, and on May 14 Baader was escorted under guard to meet her at the Institute for Social Issues Library in the West Berlin suburbs.

This provided the necessary opportunity. Once Baader and Meinhof were in the library, two young women entered the building: Irene Goergens, a teenager who Meinhof had recruited from her work with reform school kids, and Ingrid Schubert, a radical doctor from the West Berlin scene. They were followed by a masked and armed Gudrun Ensslin, and an armed man. Drawing their weapons, these rescuers moved to free Baader. When an elderly librarian, Georg Linke, attempted to intervene, he was shot in his liver.<ref>According to several accounts, Linke was accidentally shot by the man at the scene. Apparently, he had two weapons, an air gun and a real gun, and he intended to scare him with the former, but got confused as to which was which. (MacDonald, 213.)</ref> The guards drew their weapons and opened fire, missing everyone, and all six jumped out of the library window and into the getaway car waiting on the street below.<ref>Aust, 6-9.</ref>

Barely a month after his arrest, Baader was once again free.

The library breakout made headlines around the world, both Meinhof and Ensslin being identified as likely participants. Journalists tried to outdo each other in their sensationalist tripe, describing the one as a middle class poseur and the other as a former porn actress.<ref>Neil Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed by Violence of Berlin Gunmen,” ''Winnipeg Free Press'', July 4, 1970.</ref> Headlines continued to be made when a neofascist arms dealer, Günther Voigt, was arrested and charged with selling the guerilla their guns.<ref>Ibid., Becker, 125.</ref> Then, French journalist Michele Ray declared that she had met with Mahler, Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader in West Berlin—she promptly sold the extensive interviews she had taped to ''Spiegel''.<ref>Aust, 15-16.</ref>

The group had made an impression. Its first action had struck a chord. Yet this was very much a mixed blessing, as Astrid Proll, who had driven the getaway car during the jailbreak,<ref>Ben Lewis and Richard Klein, ''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror'' (United Kingdom: a Mentorn production for bbc four, 2002).</ref> would later explain:<blockquote>''I think we were all very nervous; I remember some people throwing up. Because we weren’t so wonderful criminals, we weren’t so wonderful with the guns, we sort of involved a socalled criminal who could do it so much better than we, and… he was so nervous that he shot somebody. He didn’t kill him, but he shot him very very badly, and that was really really very bad for the whole start of it.''<ref>Ibid.</ref> </blockquote>As she elaborated elsewhere:<blockquote>After a man had been severely hurt… we found ourselves on wanted lists. It was an accident that accelerated the development of the underground life of the group. Ulrike Meinhof, who had so far been at the fringes of the group, was all of a sudden wanted on every single billpost for attempted murder against a reward of dm 10,000… When we were underground there were no more discussions, there was only action.<ref>Proll, 10.</ref> </blockquote>In what would be a recurrent phenomenon, the state made use of the media frenzy around the prison-break to help push through new repressive legislation—in this case the so-called “Hand Grenade Law,” by which West Berlin police were equipped with hand grenades, semiautomatic revolvers, and submachine guns.<ref>Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed."</ref>

This was all hotly debated on the left, prompting the fugitives to send a letter to the radical newspaper ''883'', in which they explained (somewhat defensively) the action and their future plans. At the insistence of the radical former film student Holger Meins who was working at ''883'' at the time and who would later himself become a leading figure in the RAF, the newspaper published the statement, making it the first public document from the guerilla. (Even without Meins’ support, it would have been odd for ''883'' to not publish the text: Baader, Meinhof, Mahler, and Ensslin had all formerly served in the editorial collective, as had several other individuals who would go on to join the guerilla.)<ref>Datenbank des deutschsprachigen Anarchismus: Periodika, “Agit 883,” <nowiki>http://projekte.free.de/dada/dada-p/P0000921.htm</nowiki>.</ref>

The Red Army Faction had been born.

The next year was spent acquiring technical skills, including a trip to Jordan where more than a dozen of the aspiring German guerillas received training from the PLO. While this first trip may not have had great significance for the group, given the subsequent importance of its connection with certain Palestinian organizations, it may be useful to examine the context in which it occurred.

At the time, Jordan contained a very large Palestinian refugee population, one which had swollen since the 1967 Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; by 1970, the Palestinians constituted roughly 1,000,000 of the country’s total population of 2,299,000

Based in the refugee camps, the PLO managed to constitute itself as a virtual parallel state within the country. Indeed, many considered that revolution in Jordan could be one step towards the defeat of Israel, an idea expressed by the slogan, “The road to Tel Aviv lies through Amman”—a sentiment which worried King Hussein, to say the least— as did the increasing use of Jordanian territory as a rear base area for all manner of Palestinian radical organizations.<ref>Helen Chapin Metz, Library of Congress Federal Research Division, ''Israel, a Country Study'' (Whitefish, Montana: Keesinger publishing 2004), 110.</ref>

In September 1970, the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine skyjacked three western aircRAFt, landing them in Dawson’s Field, a remote desert airstrip in Jordan. This provided Hussein with the excuse he needed, and the PLO soon came under attack from the monarch’s armed forces, supported by Israel. By the time a truce was brokered, between 4,000 and 10,000—Yassir ARAFat would claim as many as 20,000—Palestinians had been killed, including many noncombatants. (This would be remembered as “Black September,” and it was in memory of this massacre that the PLO’s unofficial guerilla wing would adopt that name.)

Prior to this, the Palestinians’ Jordanian bases were important sources of inspiration and education for revolutionaries, not only in the Arab world, but also in many European countries. While the largest number of visitors came from Turkey<ref>Cengiz Candar, “A Turk in the Palestinian Resistance,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 30, no. 1. (Autumn, 2000): 68-82.</ref>—many of whom would stay and fight alongside the Palestinians—there were also Maoists, socialists, and aspiring guerillas from France, Denmark, Sweden, and, of course, West Germany. (It would be claimed that members of the Roaming Hash Rebels scene had already received training from the Palestinians, and Baumann has pointed to this as a turning point in its transformation into a guerilla underground.)<ref>Baumann, 59: “There was a split when people got back from Palestine. The Palestinian faction said, ‘things don’t make sense the way they’re going now. We have to really start with the armed struggle.’ That meant giving up the Blues, the whole broad open scene.”</ref>

Even during their Middle Eastern sojourn, the RAF continued to make headlines in Germany, Horst Mahler sending a photo of himself waving a gun and dressed like a fedayeen to a radical newspaper with the message, “Best wishes to your readers from the land of A Thousand and One Nights!”<ref>Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed.”</ref>

Juvenile theatrics aside, this trip signaled the very public beginning of an aspect of the RAF which would bedevil the police, namely, their proficient use of foreign countries as rear base areas. As has been discussed elsewhere:<blockquote>''Rear base areas are little discussed, but essential to guerillas. This is something precise: a large area or territory, bordering on the main battle zone, where the other side cannot freely operate. Either for reasons of remoteness or impenetrable mountain ranges, or because it crosses political boundaries.''<ref>Butch Lee, ''Jailbreak Out Of History: The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman'' (Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2000), 25.</ref> </blockquote>The RAF would make extensive use of various Arab countries as rear base areas throughout their existence, places where one could go not only to train, but also to hide when Europe got too “hot.” During the 1970s at least, it does not seem to have been the governments of these countries which provided the group with aid and succor, but rather various revolutionary Palestinian organizations which were deeply rooted in the refugee populations throughout the region. In this way, in the years following the Palestinians’ defeat at the hands of Jordan’s armed forces in 1970, Lebanon and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen emerged as homes away from home for more than one West German revolutionary.

Another source of foreign support, of course, was the “communist” German Democratic Republic—East Germany—from which the RAF and other guerilla groups would receive various forms of assistance over the years. As far as the RAF is concerned, it is unclear exactly how or when this relationship began. Certainly if it existed in the early seventies, this was very secret, and indeed unimagined on the radical left, for which the “other” German state remained a corrupt and authoritarian regime, alternately “Stalinist” or “revisionist,” but in any case one from which little good could come.

And yet it is known that, as early as 1970, the GDR did choose to knowingly allow the guerilla to pass through its territory, for instance on flights to and from the Middle East. After the first trip to Jordan, it even detained one member—Hans-Jürgen Bäcker—and questioned him about the underground for twenty-four hours, but then released him.<ref>Aust, 99-100. Bäcker would claim that based on their questions, it was clear the East Germans were already well informed about the group’s activities. In November 1972, Bommi Baumann was similarly detained at the East German border while in possession of false identification papers; he was similarly questioned, and provided information on almost one hundred people in the West German underground before being released. Jan-Hendrik Schulz “Zur Geschichte der Roten Armee Fraktion (raf) und ihrer Kontexte: Eine Chronik,” ''Zeitgeschichte Online,'' May 2007</ref> Clearly, by the end of the decade, this policy had been extended to provide other sorts of assistance. It has also been claimed that even at the time of the 1970 training expedition, there were plans to relocate Meinhof’s twin daughters to East Germany if their father won custody away from her sister.<ref>Ditfurth, 290. See Appendix V—Strange Stories: Peter Homann and Stefan Aust, pages 557-558.</ref>

Given the unpopularity of the GDR, why was this aid accepted, and what effects did it have on the RAF?

The answer to the first of these questions is easy enough to guess: at first, East German “aid” seems to have been very limited in scope, really little more than turning a blind eye to what was going on.<ref>''Deutsche Presse-Agentur'', “Stasi soll raf über Razzien informiert haben,” September 29, 2007</ref> Who could complain about that?

Eventually, as we will see, more substantial favors would be forthcoming: shelter, training, even new identities—and yet, for most of its history, there is absolutely no indication that the RAF was choosing its targets or formulating its ideology to please foreign patrons. This would become more debatable near the end, but certainly in the 1970s, the RAF-''Stasi'' connection seems to have been casual if not ephemeral.

At most, one might perhaps argue a case of the GDR egging the guerilla on as a way to get at the Americans, in the context of the ongoing conflagration in Vietnam.

Certainly, throughout the 1970s, the Palestinian connection was of far greater importance, and yet the guerilla’s first visit to the Middle East ended on an unpromising note: according to several reports, the West Germans were far from ideal guests, and the Palestinians eventually sent them on their way.

They returned to West Berlin—via the GDR—as the summer of 1970 came to an end.<ref>Aust, 99, 101.</ref>

The group now set about obtaining cars and locating safehouses. New contacts were made, and new members were recruited, among them Ilse Stachowiak, Ali Jansen, Uli Scholze, Beate Sturm, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe, this last being an old friend of Meinhof’s, and himself a founding member of Kommune 2.<ref>Kommune 2 was another West Berlin commune, one with a more “serious” and “intellectual” reputation than the yippiesque K.1.</ref> Some of these individuals would soon think better of their decision and drop out at the first opportunity, others would determine the very course of the RAF, and in some cases give their lives in the struggle.

But first, the young guerilla needed to acquire funds, and to this end a daring combination of bank raids was planned in cooperation with members of the Roaming Hash Rebels scene.<ref>Reinders, Viehmann, and Fritzsch.</ref> Within ten minutes, on September 29, three different West Berlin banks were hit: the revolutionaries managed to make off with over 220,000dm (just over $60,000) without firing a shot or suffering a single arrest.<ref>Aust, 108.</ref> As Horst Mahler’s former legal assistant Monika Berberich, who had herself joined the RAF, would later explain, “It was not about redistributing wealth, it was about getting money, and we weren’t going to mug grannies in the streets.”<ref>''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.''</ref>

The “triple coup” was a smashing success. Things were looking good.

Then, on October 8, police received an anonymous tip about two safehouses in West Berlin: Mahler and Berberich, as well as Ingrid Schubert, Irene Goergens, and Brigitte Asdonk, were all arrested. (It was suspected that Hans-Jürgen Bäcker had snitched to the police. He was confronted and denied the charge, but quickly parted ways with the guerilla. The fact that he was left unmolested should be taken into account when evaluating later claims that the RAF executed suspected traitors or those who wished to leave its ranks.)<ref>Aust, 111-112.</ref>

Following these arrests, the RAF moved to transfer operations outside of West Berlin, and members of the group began crossing over into West Germany proper. During this period, the fledgling guerilla burglarized the town halls of two small towns, taking blank id cards, passports, and official stamps for use in future operations.

On December 20, Karl-Heinz Ruhland and RAF members Ali Jansen and Beate Sturm were stopped by police in Oberhausen. Ruhland, who was only peripheral to the group, surrendered while Jansen and Sturm made their getaway. The next day Jansen was arrested along with RAF member Uli Scholze while trying to steal a Mercedes-Benz. (Sturm soon left the guerilla, as did Scholze when he was released one day after his capture. Ruhland cooperated with police, helping to reveal the location of safehouses and testifying in court against RAF members. Jansen received a ten year sentence for shooting at police.)

On February 10, 1971, Astrid Proll was spotted by Frankfurt police along with fellow RAF member Manfred Grashof. The police opened fire in a clear attempt to kill the two as they fled; luckily, they missed. Subsequently, the cops involved would claim that they had shot in self-defense, yet unbeknownst to them the entire scene had been observed by the ''Verfassungsschutz'', who filed a report detailing how neither of the guerillas had even drawn their weapons. This fact would remain suppressed by the state for years.<ref>Ibid., 140.</ref>

The alleged “firefight” with Proll and Grashof was added to a growing list of propaganda stories used by the police to justify a massive nationwide search, with Federal Minister of the Interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher publicly declaring the RAF to be “Public Enemy Number One.” Apartments were raided in Gelsenkirchen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Bremen, yet the guerilla managed to elude capture.

Meanwhile, the trial of Horst Mahler, Ingrid Schubert, and Irene Goergens opened in West Berlin on March 1. Schubert and Goergens were charged with attempted murder and using force in the Baader jailbreak, while Mahler (who had arranged to be in court during the action, and so had an alibi) was charged as an accessory, and with illegal possession of a firearm.

This first RAF trial would set the tone for twenty years of collusion between the media, the police, and shadowy elements intent on presenting the guerilla in the most horrific light. The term “psychological warfare” was eventually adopted by the left to describe the phenomenon.

Already in February, police had announced that the RAF had plans to kidnap Chancellor Willy Brandt in order to force the state to release Mahler.<ref>Associated Press, “Paper reports plot to kidnap Willy Brandt,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', February 13, 1971.</ref> The guerilla would subsequently deny this charge, claiming it was intended to make them look like “political idiots.”<ref>See page 84.</ref>

Then, on February 25, a seven-year-old boy was kidnapped. Newspapers announced that his captors were demanding close to $50,000 ransom as well as the release of “the left-wing lawyer in Berlin,” which journalists quickly explained must be a reference to Mahler.<ref>Associated Press, “Terrorists Take Child as Hostage,” ''Troy Record'', February 25, 1971.</ref>

Clearly horrified, Mahler made a public appeal to the kidnappers to release the child.<ref>Associated Press,“Wrong Boy Kidnaped, Released; Ransom Paid,” ''Panama City News Herald'', February 27, 1971.</ref> At the same time the provincial government of North Rhine-Westphalia agreed to pay the ransom—the boy was from a working class family that could not afford such a sum.<ref>Ibid.</ref>

Arrangements were made, a well-known lawyer agreeing to act as the go between. The money was delivered on Saturday February 27 and a young Michael Luhmer was released in the woods outside Munich, suffering from influenza but otherwise unharmed. According to the lawyer who personally delivered the money to the kidnappers, they denied being in the least bit interested in Mahler or anyone else from the RAF. Indeed, he came away with the impression that they were in fact “a rightist group like the Nazi party.”<ref>Associated Press, “Kidnaped German Boy, 7, Freed After Ransom,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', February 29, 1971.</ref> Police later announced that they suspected the son of a former SS officer of being involved in the plot.<ref>Associated Press, “Police Hunting SS Member’s Son in Kidnapings,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', March 2, 1971.</ref>

This first kidnapping occurred just as Mahler, Schubert, and Goergens were about to go on trial. This is what could be called a “false flag” action, a term referring to an attack carried out by certain parties under the banner of another group to which they are hostile in order to discredit them. As we shall see, false flag attacks were to plague the RAF throughout the 1970s, as all manner of antisocial crimes would be carried out or threatened by persons pretending to be from the guerilla.

The RAF repeatedly denied its involvement in these actions, and yet the slander often stuck.

Doubly vexing is the fact that in most of these false flag actions, no firm evidence has ever come to light proving who in fact was responsible. Suspicions have ranged from some secret service working for the state, or for NATO, or else perhaps neofascists, or some combination thereof. Or perhaps these were “normal” criminal acts, and it was the media or police who were fabricating details to tie them to the RAF.

Judging from experiences elsewhere in Europe, it is entirely possible that elements within the state, within NATO, and within the far right collaborated in some of these attacks. Such scenarios are known, for instance, to have played themselves out in France, Italy, and Turkey. The goal for such operations was generally not simply to discredit the left-wing guerilla, but rather to create a general climate of fear in which people would rally to the hard right.

In most cases, we may never know, but amazingly enough, there was a second false flag kidnapping during the first RAF trial, and the authors of this second crime actually ended up admitting the ruse.

On Sunday April 25, newspapers reported that a university professor and his friend had been kidnapped by the guerilla, which was threatening to execute them if Mahler, Schubert, and Goergens were not released. The kidnappers were allegedly demanding that the three be allowed to travel to a country of their choosing, and insisted that this be announced on television.<ref>United Press International, “Professor Endangered by Kidnapper’s Threat,” ''Dominion Post'', April 25, 1971.</ref>

Two days later, the men were found, one of them tied to a tree. The kidnappers, however, were nowhere in sight. After some questioning, the “captives” broke down and admitted that they had staged the entire thing in the hopes of scaring people into voting against the “left-wing” SPD in the provincial elections in Schleswig-Holstein.<ref>United Press International, “West German Professor Admits Kidnaping Hoax,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', April 27, 1971.</ref> The mastermind behind this plan, Jürgen Rieger,<ref>Jürgen Rieger is a lawyer whose career has been devoted to defending those charged under Germany’s anti-Nazi laws. Ironically, in 2006, both Rieger and Mahler, the latter by this time a Holocaust denier himself, would end up working on the legal defense team of neo-nazi publisher Ernst Zundel, who was charged in connection with the publication of Holocaust denial literature.</ref> was active in neofascist circles; he would eventually be sentenced to six months in prison as a result.

As a corollary to these staged actions, the police were happy to oblige by setting the scene at the trial itself:<blockquote>''The criminal court in the Moabit prison had been transformed into a fortress for the trial. There were policemen armed with submachine guns patrolling the corridors, the entrances and exits; outside the building stood vehicles with their engines running and carrying teams of men, there were officers carrying radio equipment, and more units waited in the inner courtyard to go into action if needed.''<ref>Aust, 144.</ref> </blockquote>Far-right hoaxes were helping to justify shocking levels of police militarization and repression. One did not need to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to think that the state was more than willing to play dirty in order to get rid of its new armed opponents and that the talk of a “fascist drift” was more than mere rhetoric.

Not that the radical left was unwilling to fight for the captured combatants, though kidnapping innocent children or academics would never feature amongst its strategies. When kidnappings would eventually be carried out, the targets would always be important members of the establishment, men with personal ties to the system against which the guerilla fought.

In 1971, however, nobody was in a position to carry out such operations, and so the struggle for the prisoners’ freedom took place largely in the streets. As the trial wrapped up, rioting broke out for two days in West Berlin: “youths blocked tRAFfic, and smashed store and car windows,” all the while shouting slogans like “Free Mahler!” and “Hands off Mahler!”<ref>Associated Press, “Berlin Cops, Leftists Clash for 2nd Night,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 17, 1971.</ref>

Clearly, although its capacities were not yet developed, a section of the left was willing to carry out militant actions in support of the guerilla, while itself preferring to remain aboveground.

In late May, after twenty-two days in court, the verdicts came down. Goergens was sentenced to four years youth custody, and Schubert received a six-year sentence.<ref>Jillian Becker, ''Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader Meinhof Gang'' (London: Panther Granada Publishing, 1978), 307.</ref>

It should be noted that both women would soon have additional years tacked on, as they also faced charges relating to various bank robberies.<ref>When Goergens was finally released in May 1977, she did not return to the guerilla. Schubert, as we shall see, never made it out of prison alive.</ref>

Throughout the trial, other combatants had been picked up by the state.

On April 12, 1971, Ilse Stachowiak was recognized by a policeman and arrested in Frankfurt. Known by her nickname “Tinny,” Stachowiak was probably the youngest member of the guerilla, having joined in 1970 at the age of sixteen.

The next day, Rolf Heissler was arrested trying to rob a bank in Munich. Heissler had previously been active in the Munich Tupamaros (a Bavarian group inspired by the West Berlin Tupamaros),<ref>Baumann, 63.</ref> but had followed his ex-wife Brigitte Mohnhaupt into the RAF.

Then, on May 6, not three months after her narrow escape in Frankfurt, Astrid Proll was recognized in Hamburg by a gas station attendant who called the police—she tried to escape by car, but was surrounded by armed cops and arrested.<ref>Macdonald, 214-215.</ref>

Two documents appeared about this time, each allegedly produced by the RAF. The first of these, ''Regarding the Armed Struggle in West Europe'', was published under the innocent title “New TRAFfic Regulations” by the radical West Berlin publishing house of Klaus Wagenbach.<ref>Aust, 142.</ref> Not only did this lead to Wagenbach receiving a suspended nine-month sentence under §129<ref>Cobler, 113.</ref> —the catch-all “supporting a criminal organization” paragraph of the Orwellian 1951 security legislation— but the document was quickly disavowed by the RAF itself: it had been written by Mahler in prison, without consultation with any of the others, and did not sit well with the rest of the group.

While Mahler would remain in the RAF for the time being, this was the first visible sign of an ongoing process of estrangement between the former attorney and the rest of the guerilla.

Almost at the same time as Mahler’s document began to circulate, a second text, one which enjoyed the approval of the entire RAF, was released. On May 1, at the annual May Day demonstrations, supporters distributed what became known as the RAF’s foundational manifesto, emblazoned with a red star and a Kalashnikov submachine gun: The Urban Guerilla Concept. This text was widely reprinted, not only in radical publications like ''883'', but in the mainstream ''Spiegel'', the result of a deal whereby the liberal weekly agreed to “donate” 20,000 dm to youth shelters.<ref>''tageszeitung'' “30 Jahre Deutscher Herbst ‘Die RAF war nicht ganz so schlicht,’” Deutschlandradio, October 17, 2007.</ref>

=== Faced With This Justice System, We Can't Be Bothered Defending Ourselves ===
<blockquote>''This was Thorwald Proll’s closing statement in the Frankfurt Department Store Firebombing Trial. (M. & S.)''</blockquote>The trial for conspiracy to commit arson followed the trial for committing arson. But that’s obviously another question. Justice is the justice of the ruling class. Faced with a justice system that speaks in the name of the ruling class—and speaks dishonestly—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that forced a student couple underground by using laws regarding breach of the public peace and causing a disturbance from the year 1870/71 to sentence them to 12 months without parole, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (breachers of the public peace, torch their ramshackle peace).

Faced with a justice system that uses laws from 1870/71 and then talks about what’s right—and speaks dishonestly—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that gave Daniel Cohn-Bendit<ref>Earlier that summer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit had received an eight-month suspended sentence for getting through security at a protest against the German Book Trade’s “Peace Prize” being bestowed upon President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal.</ref> (lex Benda, lex Bendit) an 8-month suspended sentence for jumping over a security fence, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that, on the other hand, only pursued most Nazi trials in order to ease their own guilty right-wing conscience, trials in which they charge anyone that swore the Führer Oath<ref>An oath of fealty to Hitler and the NSDAP that all people working in the public sector were obliged to swear. Millions of people swore this oath for no other reason than to retain their employment.</ref> as a criminal, an act which the entire justice system quite willingly engaged in itself in 1933; faced with a justice system like that, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that prosecutes the minor murderers of Jews and lets the major murderers of Jews run around free, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that in 1933 shamelessly plunged into fascism and in 1945 just as shamelessly deserted it, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that already in the Weimar Republic always sentenced leftists more heavily (Ernst Niekisch,<ref>Ernst Niekisch, briefly involved in the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919, went on to become a leader of German chauvinist “National Bolshevism”—it is unclear why Proll singles him out as an example of the Weimar regime persecuting leftists, although under the Nazis he would be sentenced to life imprisonment for “literary high treason” in 1937.</ref> Ernst Toller<ref>Ernst Toller was a Bavarian Jew and an anarchist who was imprisoned for his role on the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. (He subsequently went into exile, eventually committing suicide in his hotel room in New York City in 1939.)</ref>) than right wingers (Adolf Hitler<ref>On April 1, 1924, Hitler was sentenced to five years for his November 8, 1923, attempted fascist coup, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. He was pardoned and released in December of 1924, having served less than a year of his sentence.</ref>), that rewarded the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht<ref>Luxemburg and Liebknecht were leading figures in the failed 1918 German communist uprising. They were both captured, tortured, and murdered by rightwing militias, the ''Freikorps''.</ref> (and in so doing became complicit in their deaths), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Comrades, we want to take a moment to remember Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—stand up!—the eye of the law sits in this court.

Faced with a justice system that never dismantled its authoritarian structure, but constantly renews it, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that says might makes right and might comes before right (might is always right), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. All power to freedom! Faced with a justice system that defends property and possessions better than it does human beings, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that is an instrument of social order, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that makes laws against the people rather than for them, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Human rights only for the right humans (the state that leans to the right). Right is what the state does, and it’s always right. The state is the only criminal activity allowed. In a capitalist democracy such as this, in an indirect democracy such as this, it is possible for anyone to end up ruling over anyone, and that’s how it should stay, and don’t ask for how much longer. The ruling morality is bourgeois morality, and bourgeois morality is immoral. Bourgeois morality is and will remain immoral. If it is reformed, it will only result in a new form of immorality (and nothing more). Faced with a justice system that undermines the ethical underpinnings of the people (whatever they may be), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. This state prosecutor is nothing more than a piece of the criminal justice system. He requested 6 years of prison time.

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that says it represents the people, but means that it represents the ruling class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that works to assure the ongoing reproduction of existing relationships, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system for which the (so-called) criminal class is and will remain the criminal class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. What does return to society mean? Back to which society? Back to the capitalist society where you will have the opportunity to re-offend? Back to the bourgeois, capitalist society that is itself a prison, which amounts to going from one hole to another

Every reform to criminal law only reforms the existing criminal injustice; criminal law is criminal injustice; the sentence is the injustice. I wouldn’t again offend against society, if they didn’t give me another reason to do so. How am I supposed to return changed to an unchanged society, and so on, and so forth. It is not the laws that need to be changed; it’s the society that must be changed. We want a socialist society. Faced with a justice system that plays homage to an abstract concept of law (Roman law is Bohemian law) and does not see individuals as the result of their society, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that treats defendants as second-class citizens, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that is a system of the ruling class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. (And furthermore) faced with a justice system that doesn’t reduce delinquency, but creates ever more of it (guilty verdicts and acquittals), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (the outcome can only serve their interests). In an authoritarian democracy like this one, it can never amount to more than an assessment of guilt or innocence. The judge sentences the individual, not the society and not himself. What’s the magic word? The magic word is power, and it means the death of freedom! What do we have here that does not come from Nietzsche, that sociopath? For example, the will to power. You should think about power, but do not think that power thinks about disempowering itself at some point; ergo: destroy power (the question of power, the power of the question). Faced with a justice system that wants power and not freedom, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (what freedom do you mean—bourgeois freedom is servitude, and socialist freedom is a long way off).

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that seeks to criminalize Kommune 1 and has persecuted them with an endless series of trials, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Such a justice system should itself be put on trial. Faced with a justice system that seeks to criminalize a section of the SDS, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. How can the public peace of 1870/71 be broken in 1967/68? Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace!

Furthermore, faced with a justice system with a concept of law—a deceitful concept—that is shaped by the opinions of the ruling class (already the case with Franz von Liszt<ref>Franz von Liszt (not to be confused with his cousin, the composer Franz Liszt) was a Prussian law professor whose work heavily influenced the 1882 Marburger Program, a conservative document that influenced the 1933 Nazi German Prevention of Crime Act.</ref> in 1882) we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that doesn’t see crime as a social phenomenon and which passes sentences that serve no social function (Franz von Liszt), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that speaks of punishment— meaning oppression, meaning repression—helping the offender, while in fact defending bourgeois society, always defending it, defending it to the end; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Quotes from the first draft of the reforms to the criminal code: “The bitter necessity of punishment.” “Responsibility lies with the law breakers” (and not the representatives of the law), “given the flawed nature of people” (and so it will remain in a capitalist society such as this, in which antiauthoritarian structures that promote perfection don’t exist and there are no examples of moral perfection—the principle of guilt, which guarantees the continuation of the principle of punishment, lives on, spelling the death of freedom and assuring the integrity of power). Another quote from the first draft of the criminal law reforms (this will be the last one): “(W)hat the principle of punishment presupposes is a virtually unchallenged standard of criminal law, etc., etc.” When will this stop?

Faced with a justice system that holds that the irrational standards of criminal law and criminology are appropriate, that denies the reality of the capitalist social order, that denies and suppresses psychology and the study of crime in a particularly nauseating way, constantly impeding them, that treats criminology as a science of social relationships; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that represents the law of the ruling class—represents duplicity—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Furthermore, bourgeois morality is and remains immoral, and if reformed, it is only as a new immorality. All attempts at reform are pointless, because they are inherent to the system. We demand the resignation of Minister of Justice Heinemann (also a pointless demand). Where is the judge who will turn his back on this crap and join the general strike, instead of remaining eternally stuck up to his armpits in this shit? Where are the antiauthoritarian judges? I can’t see them. This is your chance, Herr Zoebe,<ref>Gerhard Zoebe was the judge in this case.</ref> to be the first. I wrote that before I knew you. Later, you responded to the word democracy like it was leprosy, which is to say, you shrunk away from the concept. And for you, resocialization sends you into a rage; it’s the final blow. And for you it should be the final blow. Always: the final blow.

Faced with a justice system that has completely authoritarian judges, like the judge Schwalbe,<ref>A judge in Frankfurt who often presided over trials against left-wing defendants.</ref> we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (but one Schwalbe doesn’t make for an authoritarian summer). Faced with a justice system that has judges like the judge in Hamburg, who on August 15 of this year, following a 2½ minute hearing, sentenced a young worker to 4 months with the possibility of parole, beginning at Easter, with the comment that the young worker should be happy —in spite of the brevity of the hearing—that he was given a chance to clarify his political motivations, and then went on to tell this young worker that he should stop worrying about things that don’t concern him; faced with a justice system that is made up of such judges, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace.

Faced with a justice system that has judges like those that presided over the Timo Rinnelt trial,<ref>In 1964, seven year-old Timo Rinnelt of Wiesbaden was kidnapped and murdered. Some years later, his neighbour, a twenty-seven year-old man, was arrested for the crime. In 1968, he received a life sentence.</ref> once more extending the reach of the German billy club, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

And finally, faced with a justice system that has judges like the judge presiding in the case against Jürgen Bartsch,<ref>Jürgen Bartsch, a German serial killer, who as a child suffered both emotional and sexual abuse, was responsible for four brutal child murders in the 60s.</ref> who was sentenced to life imprisonment on the grounds that if he had wanted to he could have struggled to control his abnormal appetites (whatever that means), with the judge saying in conclusion, “And may God help you to learn to control you appetites”—so God and not society—and for such a judge it would be preferable if he had never been born or had died long ago; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

It has been said that the trial of Jürgen Bartsch was the trial of the century. It was actually a trial against this century, and the sentence spoke for this century, which is to say, it spoke for the morality of the preceding century (it will only get worse), which in this trial was celebrated as a barbaric triumph. When the judgment was read, the spectators, a petit bourgeois gathering, clapped and cheered. Nobody forbid that. The teeth of justice were chattering, but nobody heard that. Child murderers are useful. They eliminate all consciousness that criminals were once themselves children (the authoritarian upbringing). A hundred children of West German families are beaten to death every year. Beaten to death. Child murderers work to ease our conscience about this slaughter. And what of the daily murder of children in Vietnam (with its breathtaking body-count)? What do respectable people pray for? Today we get our daily ration of murder (The Springer papers are the centerpiece of every breakfast).

Furthermore, bourgeois morality is the ruling morality, and bourgeois morality is immoral. Faced with a justice system that has state prosecutors like state prosecutor Griebel,<ref>Walter Griebel was the prosecutor in the case at hand.</ref> who told me “under four eyes”<ref>In German “''unter vier Augen''”; this is an obvious reference to the Nazi term for a meetings involving only Hitler and one of his close associates. The content of these discussions was meant to stay between the two men.</ref> that he holds Marx’s teachings in the highest regard (but what does he do about it?), that he is as much a prisoner of a labyrinthine bureaucracy as I (but what does he do against it?). He accuses the left here of only wanting to change superficial things, but nothing beyond that (but he bears the mark of Cain of repression on his forehead), and he had the effrontery to bare his broken bourgeois heart to me, saying that on the one hand he is troubled by the rigidity of the ruling conditions, while on the other—how grotesque—he continued to speak of the legitimacy of the laws of 1870/71—speaking deceptively—faced with such a justice system, I can’t be bothered defending myself, and we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Imprison the state prosecutors. Where is the state prosecutor who will indict the state?

Faced with a justice system that is charging us with life-threatening arson, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system, in the eyes of which, we have every reason to believe, we are politically tainted from the outset, we cannot defend ourselves (all the charged are arsonists and all judges are honest men). Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace.

And furthermore, faced with a justice system that speaks for the ruling class—and speaks deceptively—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system with custodial judges as authoritarian as judge Kappel, who gave every impression of being convinced of the guilt (whatever that is) of all of the accused before the trial even started. Amongst other things, his macho aggressiveness is such that he said to me, “Take your hand out of your pocket.” When I put my other hand in my pocket (obviously not the same one), he didn’t say anything, he just laughed, and my laughter caught in my throat at the thought that he and I could ever laugh at the same thing for the same reason—a question of consciousness. Faced with such a justice system, I can’t be bothered defending myself, and we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with such a decadent justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (a legal right is only what is right legally). Faced with a justice system that grotesquely misuses detention, I can’t be bothered defending myself. If you have a fixed address, the justice system holds on to you until you lose it, which is to say, until you’re tossed out. Then the justice system says, “Ah, you don’t have one. In any event, if you’re released you will no longer have one. That essentially makes you a flight risk.” Faced with a justice system that grotesquely abuses preventive detention, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. In this way they reveal the abyss that is the justice system. If you have a fixed address, the police make sure you lose it, so they can take you into custody. It happened to August Klee, who like me has been held in detention for some months now. While all of this has not been enough to convince me that life is a theatrical drama, I do believe that the remand centre can be. When Klee was detained in this way, the police assured him that it was not the first time they had done this; making the criminal police potential criminals.

Risk of flight always offers the necessary excuse. For instance, August Klee is also classified a flight risk because his closest relatives, first and foremost among them his wife, live outside of Germany. He must divorce her (what’s that about?) if he wants to get out. On the other hand, if you live in Germany, but do not live with your wife (what’s that about?), if you have no family ties (because you’re not chained to that structure), then you’re a flight risk. If you lived outside the country 40 years ago, you’re a flight risk. If you’ve recently come back from a trip (and not from some crappy tourist trip), in that case you’re a flight risk. If you’re a foreigner, then you’re a flight risk. (I can recite all of this by heart). If there is a mix-up of some sort in your arrest, as occurred recently on ''Hammelsgasse'' (bourgeois freedom is a ''Hammelsgasse''<ref>''Hammelsgasse'', a street in an upper class neighbourhood in Frankfurt, could be translated literally as Mutton Alley; a play on words referencing sheeps being led to the slaughter is intended.</ref> ), there’s no need for concern, phony paperwork will be prepared. Here the danger is that one will be silenced.

Following conviction, it may be the case that you will be released for good behavior. He, however, has been refused this, because he has behaved so well that he has become institutionalized, and will surely be unable to find his bearings on the outside. He must remain inside until the end. This is an example of the risk of unadorned reconstruction. If you happen to be an arsonist, there is the danger of evidence being suppressed, etc.; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that supports a prison system that attacks and violates the personal freedom and dignity of 365 people every second—first the attack, then the violation—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

What is permissible and what is not permissible in remand: prisoners in remand are permitted to do what the justice system—acting as administrators—permits them to do. You are not permitted to be afraid. You are not permitted to lie around in bed, but you can lie under the bed. You are not permitted to play ping-pong with multiple balls; you are only permitted one ball. You are not permitted to refuse dinner; you are not permitted to show any kind of defiance. As a revolutionary socialist, you can never show defiance.

A rate of 1.23 dm<ref>Roughly forty cents.</ref> per day is designated for meals (what a fantastic amount). You are not permitted to throw your dinner in the guard’s face, or he’s not responsible for what happens next. The guards are prisoners just like you, and most of them know it. The guards are only the little warlords.

You are not permitted to smoke outside of your cell, only in it. You are permitted to experience the hell of it all inside your cell. You are not permitted to light fires, because you can’t use the fire alarm, because you can’t reach it, because you can’t leave your cell, because the door is locked.

You are not permitted to take the opportunity to engage in discussion with the other prisoners, the so-called criminals, whatever might come out of it. Let’s be perfectly clear, they are staple products of the capitalist social order. You need to be clear about this.

Furthermore, you are not permitted to hang anything on the walls, but you are permitted to hang up the memo that tells you that you are not permitted to hang anything on the walls. You are not permitted to loiter. You are not permitted to lean against the wall. You are not permitted to just hang around. You should spend every day formulating a more thorough understanding of the justice system.

If you go to see the minister, don’t forget it’s just a crutch. Don’t go to church; God is dead, but Che lives. Study the rudiments of socialism, and you will have everything you need.

You are only permitted a half-hour a day to walk. You are not permitted to yell out the window. You are not permitted to have as many comrades as you like. You are permitted to spend 35 dm<ref>Roughly $11.20.</ref> per week. That’s how it goes in Hessen. And don’t forget, Hessen has the most liberal penal system. You are not permitted to drink as much coffee as you wish. You are not permitted to drink any alcohol. You are not permitted to smoke hash. You are not permitted to consume in the way you wish, and you are not permitted to consume what you wish, and all of that in a society based on consumption. Note that in prison consumption becomes a treat.

Correspondence is monitored. Sexual intercourse is not monitored, but then there’s not much of it. Adultery is not permitted (what’s that about?), but it is not permitted to consummate a marriage (what’s that about?). All of those in the hole who still cling onto bourgeois existence (woe be it to those who see no alternative), and that’s most of them, will be driven crazy by the bourgeois social order. That’s how it is. How, for instance, are they to maintain their marriages? They will all fail, and that’s good.

Every citizen should go to prison to gain a real understanding of the situation.

Every socialist should go to prison to gain a real understanding of the situation.

Every citizen should go to prison so that he develops a correct relationship to socialism.

Yet every individual capitalist or socialist has the opportunity to be the first to blow up a prison. Don’t read any of the Springer papers; burn them. Then blow Springer up.

You are not permitted to beat off or masturbate if that’s what you want to do. You can do what you want with your body. The duality of homosexuality exists. If new sexual laws are passed, will you still be permitted to fuck chicks; not to speak of other prisoners. In Butzbach penitentiary there was a flourishing trade in bras. Forced sodomy (what’s that all about?). Rape the guards that torment you.

You aren’t permitted to commit a break-in, but you are permitted to break out. Out of prison I mean. Attempted escape is not an indictable offense. You are not permitted to receive photos 1-3 from the Kommune 1 book, ''Klau Mich'',<ref>Steal Me.</ref> because their obscene content is a threat to the moral order of the remand centre.

The way Glojne, alias Globne, the Regional Court Judge explained it to me in a letter—who asked?—you are not permitted to hang anything in your cell or hang yourself in the cell. You are not permitted to hide in your cell. Try it some time. You are not permitted to take anything from the library. You are not permitted to lose your mind. You are permitted to buy food and specialty items, as well as other items you require in keeping with a reasonable lifestyle. You are not permitted to violate these conditions. The administrators decide what reasonable means (each individual administrator in this mental asylum).

If for reasons of order they want to reduce the number of newspapers and magazines you receive, you must attempt to have them delivered to you by means of disorder—in the sense of antiauthoritarian order. You must pull them out of the guard’s hands, just as he pulled them out of yours. You have to try. You can’t give up without trying. If the warden addresses you with du, you must also address him with du.<ref>German has two forms of the singular you; ''du'', which is used with social inferiors, younger people, and very close friends, and ''Sie'', which is the polite form of address. What the writer is saying is that patronizing behaviour should be answered with patronizing behaviour.</ref> You mustn’t work—for 80 pfennig<ref>Roughly thirty cents.</ref> a day. You can’t let yourself be exploited. The justice system practices the most secretive, most efficient and most disgraceful exploitation possible. It fattens itself by using primitive capitalist techniques in a modern capitalist system. Grievances are pointless, particularly as you are not permitted to file common grievances. Grievances are suppressed at will. Grievances are pointless, because you must submit them to the ruling structure. Common dispositions are common dispositions, and solitary dispositions are solitary dispositions. You can’t give in to loneliness. You can’t lose the dialogue. You can’t lose the socialist dialogue. In prison you have nothing to lose and lose nothing. You have everything to win.

Note that the rights and responsibilities of remand prisoners mentioned here are an introduction to inequality and bondage; you’re a first class citizen, you’re a second class citizen, you’re a fourth class citizen, you’re a fifth class citizen, etc., and that’s what you’ll remain. You’re a criminal and that’s what you will remain. Conduct regarding the attendants: the prisoner must immediately disengage himself from the attendants; he must immediately disengage.

Life in the penal institution is one in which work time, free time, and quiet time are carefully divided, and the prisoner is bound to this division. Life in the penal institution is life in barracks. It consists of sitting around. Life in the penal institution is divided into time for oppression, time for bondage, and time of dead silence. The time of unconsciousness is over. The time for realism has begun. Bourgeois life is its own kind of remand. If you didn’t already know that, now you do. You are not permitted to live and you are not permitted to die; you are not permitted to die and you are not permitted to live. Exactly. You are not permitted to run amok in the house. You are not permitted, of your own free will, to leave your assigned place. You are not permitted to break out. You are not permitted to scream, yell, or speak out the window. You aren’t allowed to speak to your cellmates (what’s that about?). You are not permitted to threaten the security of the institution. You are not permitted to withhold, store, or use anything. You are not permitted to retain anything, etc.

You must do everything that you are not permitted to do, and you must not let your guard down. Always think about it. Send every state prosecutor to prison. You are not permitted to defend yourself. Never. Those who defend themselves incriminate themselves. Do forget that. You are not permitted to have unauthorized telephone contact. Your correspondence is monitored. Letters you send from prison cannot be sealed. You are not permitted to seal them yourself. You are not permitted to… You are not permitted to…

You cannot give in to fatigue. You cannot, at risk of retribution, pass parliamentary representative Güde<ref>Max Güde, a former Nazi, and at the time a member of parliament for the cdu.</ref> in the street without pushing him around. He brings out the best in you. But beforehand you must paint your hand red. The left one, obviously.

Yet again (in the hole), you cannot give in to fatigue. Concentrate. You’re sitting in bourgeois capitalism’s concentration camp. Beyond that, the prisoner has a cell to keep clean. The most oppressive power in prison is the power of cleanliness. Cleaning is the major form of torture. You are not permitted to get dirty while cleaning things. Only clean up when it suits you. Otherwise you aren’t in prison; prison is in you. Keep in mind: the cleaner the cell, the more complete the hell. Furthermore, the prisoner and his seven suitcases<ref>A reference to a poem by Soviet poet Samuel Marschak about a woman bringing her valued possessions with her to the train station, the title of which in German is Die Sieben Sachen (which would translate as “Seven Suitcases” in English).</ref> and his cell can be searched at any time. When you are searched, ask them if they’re looking for new people, etc., etc.

I can’t continue talking about this. Faced with a justice system that has such an indescribable prison system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Such a justice system must itself be indicted. Such a justice system must be exposed by the revolutionary process. It is the responsibility of every antiauthoritarian judge to take legal action against this justice system. We encourage the antiauthoritarian segment of the justice system to use its strength to call a general strike. We particularly encourage antiauthoritarian interns to call a general strike.

I declare my solidarity with Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader, although they have chosen to defend themselves here, which was obviously a decision that no one really understood. This solidarity will continue through the next period while they are in prison and the penitentiary. I have, in any event, every reason to do so. I declare my solidarity with Horst Söhnlein. And if I do so, although he chose not to defend himself, it is as much ''prollidarisch''<ref>A neologism combining the author Thorwald Proll’s last name and ''solidarisch'', the German word for solidarity.</ref> as it is in solidarity. And with that, I stop.

We declare our solidarity with all of the actions that the SDS has undertaken in response to the recent attempts to undermine their public support. We demand the abolition of judicial unaccountability, because they use their power to assure the rule of some people over other people

We demand the abolition of the power of some people over other people.

Workers of the world unite!

Venceremos!

Thorwald Proll

October 1968<ref>The version of this text on Ronald Augustin’s website is dated March 1968, however we believe this is an error, as the arson in question was only committed in April 1968.</ref>

=== Build the Red Army! ===
Comrades of ''883'',

It is pointless to explain the right thing to the wrong people. We’ve done enough of that. We don’t want to explain the action to free Baader to babbling intellectuals, to those who are freaked out, to know-it-alls, but rather to the potentially revolutionary section of the people. That is to say, to those who can immediately understand this action, because they are themselves prisoners. Those who want nothing to do with the blather of the “left,” because it remains without meaning or consequence. Those who are fed up!

The action to free Baader must be explained to youth from the Märkisch neighbourhood, to the girls from Eichenhof, Ollenhauer, and Heiligensee, to young people in group homes, in youth centers, in Grünen Haus, and in Kieferngrund.<ref>Places where disenfranchised youth could be found. RAF members had previously worked with such young marginalized youth in the “apprentices collectives.” Some of these young people became members of the RAF and were involved in the action to free Baader.</ref>

To large families, to young workers and apprentices, to high school students, to families in neighborhoods that are being gentrified, to the workers at Siemens and AEG-Telefunken, at SEL and Osram, to the married women who, as well as doing the housework and raising the children, must do piecework—damn it.

They are the ones who must understand the action; those who receive no compensation for the exploitation they must suffer. Not in their standard of living, not in their consumption, not in the form of mortgages, not in the form of even limited credit, not in the form of midsize cars. Those who cannot even hope for these baubles, who are not seduced by all of that.

Those who have realized that the future promised to them by their teachers and professors and landlords and social workers and supervisors and foremen and union representatives and city councilors is nothing more than an empty lie, but who nonetheless fear the police. It is only necessary that they—and not the petit bourgeois intellectuals—understand that all of that is over now, that this is a start, that the liberation of Baader is only the beginning! That an end to police domination is in sight! It is to them that we want to say that we are building the red army, and it is their army. It is to them that we say, “It has begun.” They don’t pose stupid questions like, “Why right now precisely?” They have already traveled a thousand roads controlled by the authorities and managers—they’ve done the waiting room waltz; they remember the times when it worked and the times when it didn’t. And in conversations with sympathetic teachers, who are assigned to the remedial schools that don’t change anything, and the kindergartens that lack the necessary spaces—they don’t ask why now—damn it!

They certainly won’t listen to you, if you aren’t even able to distribute your newspaper before it is confiscated. Because you don’t need to shake up the left-wing shit eaters, but rather the objective left, you have to construct a distribution network that is out of the reach of the pigs.

Don’t complain that it’s too hard. The action to free Baader was hardly a walk in the park. If you understand what’s going on (and your comments indicate that you do understand, so it’s opportunism to say that the bullet also hit you in the stomach<ref>A reference to Georg Linke, the sixty-four-year-old librarian at the Institute for Social Studies who was shot during the action to free Baader. This shooting led to substantial criticism, even from otherwise sympathetic leftists.</ref>—you assholes), if you understand anything, you need to find a better way to organize your distribution. And we have no more to say to you about our methods than we do about our plans for action—you shitheads! As long as you allow yourselves to brought in by the cops, you aren’t in a position to be giving anyone else advice about how to avoid being brought in by the cops. What do you mean by adventurism? That one only has oneself to blame for informers. Whatever.

What does it mean to bring conflicts to a head? It means not allowing oneself to be taken out of action.

That’s why we’re building the red army. Behind the parents stand the teachers, the youth authorities, and the police. Behind the supervisor stands the boss, the personnel office, the workers compensation board, the welfare office, and the police. Behind the custodian stands the manager, the landlord, the bailiff, the eviction notice, and the police. With this comes the way that the pigs use censorship, layoffs, dismissals, along with bailiff’s seals and billy clubs. Obviously, they reach for their service revolvers, their teargas, their grenades, and their semi-automatic weapons; obviously, they escalate, if nothing else does the trick.<ref>A reference to the Hand Grenade Law passed shortly after Baader’s prison break, whereby police in West Berlin were equipped with hand grenades, semi-automatic revolvers, and submachine guns.</ref> Obviously, the GIs in Vietnam are trained in counterguerilla tactics and the Green Berets receive courses on torture. So what?

It’s clear that prison sentences for political activities have been made heavier. You must be clear that it is social democratic bullshit to act as if imperialism—with all its Neubauers<ref>Kurt Neubauer was a member of the SPD and the Berlin Senator for Youth and Sports.</ref> and Westmorelands,<ref>General William Westmoreland was Commander of the U.S. troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 and army Chief-of-Staff from 1968 to 1972.</ref> with Bonn, the senate, ''Länder'' youth offices, borough councils, the whole pig circus—should be allowed to subvert, investigate, ambush, intimidate, and suppress without a fight. Be absolutely clear that the revolution is no Easter March. The pigs will certainly escalate their means as far as possible, but no further than that. To bring the conflict to a head, we are building the red army.

If the red army is not simultaneously built, then all conflict, all the political work carried out in the factories and in Wedding<ref>A neighborhood in West Berlin.</ref> and in the Märkisch neighborhood<ref>A working-class suburb of West Berlin.</ref> and at Plötze<ref>A working-class suburb of West Berlin.</ref> and in the courtrooms is reduced to reformism; which is to say, you end up with improved discipline, improved intimidation, and improved exploitation. That destroys the people, rather than destroying what destroys the people! If we don’t build the red army, the pigs can do what they want, the pigs can continue to incarcerate, lay off, impound, seize children, intimidate, shoot, and dominate. To bring the conflict to a head means that they are no longer able to do what they want, but rather must do what we want them to do.

You must understand that those who have nothing to gain from the exploitation of the Third World, of Persian oil, of Bolivian bananas, of South African gold, have no reason to identify with the exploiter. They can grasp that what is beginning to happen here has been going on for a long time in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Guatemala, in Oakland and Watts, in Cuba and China, in Angola and in New York.

They will understand, if you explain it to them, that the action to liberate Baader was not an isolated action, that it never was, but that it is just the first of its kind in the FRG. Damn it.

Stop lounging around on the sofa in your recently-raided apartment counting up your love affairs and other petty details. Build an effective distribution system. Forget about the cowardly shits, the bootlickers, the social workers, those who only attempt to curry favor, they are a lumpen mob. Figure out where the asylums are and the large families and the subproletariat and the women workers, those who are only waiting to give a kick in the teeth to those who deserve it. They will take the lead. And don’t let yourselves get caught. Learn from them how one avoids getting caught—they know more about that than you.
[[File:Picture at the End of RAF's 'Build the Red Army' from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|400x400px]]
DEVELOP THE CLASS STRUGGLE

ORGANIZE THE PROLETARIAT

START THE ARMED STRUGGLE

BUILD THE RED ARMY

RAF

June 5, 1970

=== The Urban Guerilla Concept ===
<blockquote>''We must draw a clear line between ourselves and the enemy.''

Mao

''I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear dividing line between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear dividing line between the enemy and ourselves but have achieved spectacular successes in our work.''

Mao tse Tung

May 26, 1939<ref>This version is close to that in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 15. Please note, however, that in keeping with the German translation, the ending here differs slightly from the standard English translation, which reads simply “achieved a great deal in our work.”</ref></blockquote>

# '''Concrete Answers to Concrete Questions'''<blockquote>''I still insist that without investigation there cannot possibly be any right to speak.'' Mao<ref>Ibid., 230.</ref>

Some comrades have already made up their minds about us. For them, it is the “demagoguery of the bourgeois press” that links these “anarchist groups” with the socialist movement. In their incorrect and pejorative use of the term anarchism, they are no different than the Springer Press. We don’t want to engage anyone in dialogue on such a shabby basis.

Many comrades want to know what we think we’re doing. The letter to ''883'', in May 1970, was too vague. The tape Michele Ray had, extracts of which appeared in ''Spiegel'', was not authentic and, in any event, was drawn from a private discussion. Ray wanted to use it as an aide-mémoire for an article she was writing. Either she tricked us or we overestimated her. If our practice was as hasty as she claims, we’d have been caught by now. ''Spiegel'' paid Ray an honorarium of $1,000.00 for the interview.

Almost everything the newspapers have written about us—and the way they write it—has clearly been a lie. Plans to kidnap Willy Brandt are meant to make us look like political idiots, and claims that we intend to kidnap children are meant to make us look like unscrupulous criminals. These lies go as far as the “authentic details” in ''konkret'' #5, which proved to be nothing more than unreliable details that had been slapped together. That we have “officers and soldiers,” that some of us are slaves of others, that comrades who have left us fear reprisals, that we broke into houses or used violence to take passports, that we exercise “group terror”—all of this is bullshit.

The people who imagine an illegal armed organization to be like the ''Freikorps'' or the Feme,<ref>The ''Freikorps'' were right-wing paramilitary groups that sprang up in the period following World War I; many were later integrated into the Nazi rise to power. The Feme was a secret medieval court which meted out the death sentence, the bodies of its victims generally being left hanging in the streets.</ref> are people who hope for a pogrom. The psychological mechanisms that produce such projections, and their relationship to fascism, have been analyzed in Horkheimer and Adorno’s ''Authoritarian Personality'' and ''Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism''. A compulsive revolutionary personality is a contradictio in adjecto— a contradiction in terms. A revolutionary political practice under the present conditions—perhaps under any conditions—presumes the permanent integration of the individual’s personality and political beliefs, that is to say, political identity. Marxist criticism and self-criticism has nothing to do with “self-liberation,” but a lot to do with revolutionary discipline. It is not the members of a “left organization,” writing anonymously or using pen names, who are just interested in “making headlines,” but ''konkret'' itself, whose editor is currently promoting himself as a sort of left-wing Eduard Zimmermann,<ref>Eduard Zimmermann was tv moderator for the German equivalent of Crimewatch. This program was used in the search for RAF members.</ref> producing jack-off material for his market niche.

Many comrades spread untruths about us too. They brag that we lived with them, that they organized our trip to Jordan, that they know about our contacts, that they are doing something for us, when, in fact, they are doing nothing. Some only want to make it look like they are “in the know.” Günther Voigt<ref>Günther Voigt was a West Berlin arms dealer. A pistol that could be linked to him was dropped during the Baader liberation. Voigt fled to Switzerland where he gave an interview that led to his arrest, claiming he was involved in the liberation of Baader.</ref> had to pay for puffing himself up in a conversation with Dürrenmatt,<ref>Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss playwright and essayist.</ref> claiming he was the one who freed Baader, which he regretted when the cops showed up. It’s not easy to clear things up with denials, even when they’re true. Some people want to use these lies to prove that we’re stupid, unreliable, careless, or crazy. By doing so, they encourage people to oppose us. In reality, they are irrelevant to us. They are only consumers. We want nothing to do with these gossipmongers, for whom the anti-imperialist struggle is a coffee klatch. Many are those who don’t gossip, who have some understanding of resistance, who are pissed off enough to wish us luck, who support us because they know that there is no point spending life implicated in and adapted to this crap.

What happened at the Knesebekstr. 89 house (Mahler’s arrest) was not due to carelessness on our part, but to betrayal. The traitor was one of us. There is no guarantee against that for people who do what we do. There is no certainty that comrades will not break under extreme police pressure, or will hold up in the face of the terror that the system uses against us, with which it attacks us. The pigs wouldn’t have the power if they didn’t have these tools.

Our existence makes some people feel pressured to justify themselves. To avoid political discussion with us, to avoid comparing their practice to ours, they distort even the smallest details. For example, the rumor is still circulating that Baader had only three or nine or twelve months to serve, though the correct length of time is easily ascertained: three years for arson, a further six months on probation, and approximately six months for falsifying documents. Of these 48 months, Andreas Baader had served 14 in ten different Hessian prisons—nine times he was transferred because of bad behavior, for example, organizing mutinies and resistance. Reducing the remaining 34 months to three, nine or twelve is intended to reduce the moral justification for the May 14 breakout. In this way, some comrades rationalize their fear of the personal consequences of entering into a political discussion with us.

The question frequently asked, as to whether we would have proceeded with the breakout if we had known that Linke would be shot, can only be answered with a no. The question of what we would have done if… is ambiguous—pacifist, moralistic, platonic, and detached. Anyone who thinks seriously about the breakout would not pose this question, but would think it through for himself. In asking this question, people only want to see if we are as brutal as the Springer Press claims. It’s like an interrogation in catechism class. It is an attempt to trivialize the question of revolutionary violence, by treating revolutionary violence and bourgeois violence as the same thing, which leads nowhere. In anticipating all the possible developments, there was no reason to believe that a civilian would intervene. It is suicidal to think that one can conduct a jailbreak unarmed.

On May 14, the cops fired the first shots. This was the case in Frankfurt as well, where two of us ran for it, because we are not going to just let ourselves be arrested. The cops shot to kill. Sometimes we didn’t shoot at all, and when we did, we didn’t shoot to kill. In Berlin, in Nuremburg, in Frankfurt.<ref>Berlin refers to the Knesebeckstr. arrest mentioned above. On December 21, 1971, RAF member Ali Jansen was arrested following a shootout at a police roadblock in Nuremberg. On February 10, 1971, police in Frankfurt opened fire on Astrid Proll and Manfred Grashof, who escaped unharmed.</ref> It can be proven, because it is true. We do not “use firearms recklessly.” The cop who finds himself in the contradiction of being a “little man” and a capitalist pawn, a low paid employee and monopoly capitalism’s agent, is not obliged to follow orders. We shoot back if someone shoots at us. The cop who lets us go, we let him go as well.

It is clear that the massive hunt for us is really directed against the entire socialist left in the Federal Republic and West Berlin. This circus cannot be justified by the small amount of money or the few cars and documents we are alleged to have stolen, or by the attempted murder they’re trying to pin on us. The ruling class has been scared out of its skin. They thought that they had this state and all of its inhabitants, classes, and contradictions under control, right down to the last detail: the intellectuals reduced to their magazines, the left isolated in its own circles, Marxism-Leninism disarmed, and internationalism demoralized. However fragile it may pretend to be, the power structure is not so easily damaged. One should not be tricked by this hue and cry into contributing to all this noise.

We are not saying that the organization of armed resistance groups can replace the legal proletarian organizations, that isolated actions can replace the class struggle, or that armed struggle can replace political work in the factories or neighborhoods. We are arguing that armed struggle is a necessary precondition for the latter to succeed and progress, that armed struggle is “the highest form of Marxism-Leninism” (Mao), and that it can and must begin now, as without it there can be no anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole. We are not Blanquists nor are we anarchists, though we think Blanqui was a great revolutionary and the personal heroism of many anarchists is certainly above reproach.

We have not even been active for a year yet. It is too soon to draw conclusions. The extensive publicity that Genscher, Zimmermann<ref>Friedrich Zimmermann (CDU) was, at this time, the Chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary faction.</ref> and Co. have given us opens up a propaganda opportunity which we are using to share a few thoughts.

'''2. The Metropole: The Federal Republic'''<blockquote>''The crisis isn’t the result of the stagnation of development, but of development itself. Since the aim is to increase profit, development encourages parasitism and waste, harming whole social sectors, multiplying needs that it cannot satisfy, and accelerating the disintegration of social life. A monstrous apparatus is necessary to control, by means of manipulation and open repression, the tensions and revolts which it itself often provokes. The crisis in American political unity caused by the student rebellion and the Black Movement, the spread of the student struggle in Europe, the vehement renewal and the growth of worker and mass struggles leading to the “May” explosion in France, the tumultuous social crisis in Italy, and the rebirth of dissatisfaction in Germany all indicate the nature of the situation.''

Il Manifesto: The Necessity of Communism, extract from Thesis 33<ref>Expelled from the Italian Communist Party in 1969, Il Manifesto was an influential group in the Italian autonomist movement, having 6,000 members in 1972. They advocated council communism, whereby decisions would be made by workers’ councils, not by a vanguard party or state. Il Manifesto was extremely influential for the entire European New Left. The quote comes from a manifesto of 200 theses issued by the group in 1971.</ref> </blockquote>The comrades from Il Manifesto rightly place the Federal Republic of Germany last in their analysis, vaguely describing the situation here as dissatisfaction. West Germany, which Barzel<ref>Rainer Barzel was, at this time, the party Chairman of the cdu.</ref> described six years ago as an economic giant but a political dwarf, has not lost any of its economic power since, while its external and internal political power has increased. With the formation of the Grand Coalition in 1966, the political danger posed by the coming recession was forestalled. With the Emergency Laws the instrument was created to secure unified ruling class action in the event of future crises—the unity of political reactionaries and all those who cling to legality was established. The Social-Liberal coalition succeeded, neutralizing the “dissatisfaction” that had become evident in the student revolt and the extra-parliamentary movement. Insofar as the SPD’s supporters have not broken with reformism, this section of the intelligentsia has been prevented from embracing a communist alternative; in this way reformism acts as a brake on the anticapitalist struggle. ''Ostpolitik'' is opening new markets for capitalism, while at the same time it represents the German contribution to an accommodation and alliance between U.S. imperialism and the Soviet Union, which the U.S.A. requires in order to have a free hand for its wars of aggression in the Third World. This government seems to have managed to separate the New Left from the old antifascists, cutting off the New Left from its own history, the history of the working class movement. The DKP, which can thank the new collusion between U.S. imperialism and Soviet revisionism for its new legal status, has organized demonstrations in favor of this government’s Ostpolitik. Niemöller—a symbol of antifascism—is shilling for the SPD in the upcoming election.

Using the smokescreen of “the common good,” the government has established state control and curbed the union bureaucracy with its wage guidelines and its notion of concerted action. The strikes of September 69 showed that things have been overwhelmingly skewed to the benefit of profit; and the fact that these strikes only addressed economic issues indicates how firmly the government holds the reins.

The system shows its strength in the way that the Federal Republic, with its 2 million foreign workers and unemployment approaching 10%, can make use of the looming recession to develop the terror and the disciplinary measures that unemployment implies for the proletariat, without having to deal with any political radicalization of the masses.

In exchange for development aid and military support for the U.S.A.’s wars of aggression, the Federal Republic profits from the exploitation of the Third World, without having to take responsibility for these wars, and without having to struggle against internal opposition. While it is no less aggressive than U.S. imperialism, the Federal Republic is less vulnerable.

The political options open to imperialism here have not been exhausted in either their reformist or their fascist forms, and imperialism has not exhausted its ability to either integrate or repress the contradictions that it produces.

The RAF’s urban guerilla concept is not based on an optimistic evaluation of the situation in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

'''3. The Student Revolt'''<blockquote>''The conclusion that it is impossible to separate the revolution in the “heartland” from that in “underdeveloped areas” is based on an analysis of the unique character of the capitalist ruling system. Without a revival of revolution in the West, the imperialists, with their logic of violence, will be able to develop their exit strategy through a catastrophic war, and it will be impossible to prevent the world’s superpowers from imposing crushing oppression.''

Il Manifesto: from Thesis 52</blockquote>To dismiss the student movement as a petit bourgeois revolt is to reduce it to the grandiose claims that accompanied it, to deny its roots in the contradiction between bourgeois society and bourgeois ideology; it means recognizing its obvious shortcomings while ignoring the theoretical level that this anticapitalist protest managed to achieve.

The pathos with which the student movement became aware of its mental immiseration in the knowledge factories was certainly exaggerated, as was the identification of this with the situation of the exploited peoples of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The comparison between the mass circulation of ''Bild Zeitung'' here and the massive bombing of Vietnam was a grotesque oversimplification, just as it was arrogant to compare the ideological critique of the system here and the armed struggle over there. The students’ belief that they were the revolutionary subject, insofar as it was based on the appeal of Marcuse, betrayed their ignorance as to the actual nature of bourgeois society and the mode of production which it has established.

The student revolt in the Federal Republic and West Berlin—with its street fighting, its arsons, its use of counterviolence, its pathos, as well as its exaggerations and ignorance… in short, with its practice—has the merit of having reconstructed Marxism-Leninism, at least in the consciousness of the intelligentsia, as that political theory without which the political, economic, and ideological factors and their outward manifestations cannot be combined into an overall analytical perspective. Without this, internal and external relationships cannot be described.

The student movement was based on the contradiction between the theory of academic freedom and the reality of monopoly capitalism’s control of the universities. Precisely because it was based on this, and not merely on ideology, it didn’t run out of steam before it had established the relationship between the crisis in the universities and the crisis of capitalism, if only in theory. Not before it was clear to the student movement and their public that “liberty, equality, and fraternity” would not be achieved by appeals to human rights or the UN Charter, that what was occurring here was what had always occurred in the colonialist and imperialist exploitation of Latin America, Africa, and Asia: discipline, subordination, and brutality for the oppressed and for those who take up their struggle by protest, those who resist and wage the anti-imperialist struggle.

In its ideological critique, the student movement viewed almost all aspects of state repression as expressions of imperialist exploitation: in the Springer campaign, in the demonstrations against American aggression in Vietnam, in the campaign against class justice, in the ''Bundeswehr'' campaign,<ref>An SDS campaign encouraging soldiers to desert from the ''Bundeswehr'', the West German Army.</ref> in the campaign against the Emergency Laws, and in the high school student movement. Expropriate Springer! Smash NATO! Resist Consumer Terror! Resist Education Terror! Resist Rent Terror!—these were all correct political slogans. They aimed to expose the contradiction between new needs which could be satisfied through the development of productive forces, on the one hand, and the pressure of irrational subordination to class society, on the other. Their identity was not based on class struggle here, but rather on the knowledge that they were part of an international movement, that they were dealing with the same class enemy as the Viet Cong, the same paper tigers, the same pigs.

The second merit of the student movement was that it broke through the old left’s parochialism: the old left’s popular front strategy in the form of the Easter Marches, the German Peace Union, the ''Deutsche Volkszeitung'', an irrational hope for a “massive landslide” in some election or another, a parliamentary fixation on Strauß here or Heinemann there, their pro- and anticommunist vacillation about the GDR, their isolation, their resignation, and their moral conflicts: ready for every sacrifice, incapable of any practice. The socialist section of the student movement developed its consciousness, in spite of theoretical errors, from the correct recognition that “the revolutionary initiative in the West can be based on the crisis in the global balance of power, and on the development of new forces in old countries.” (Il Manifesto, Thesis 55) They based their agitation and propaganda on what can be considered the most important aspect of German reality. They opposed the global strategy of imperialism by internationalizing national struggles, by creating a connection between the national and international aspects of the struggle, between traditional forms of struggle and international revolutionary initiatives. They managed to turn their weakness into strength, because they recognized that continuing resignation, parochialism, reformism, and popular front strategies could only lead to a dead-end for socialist politics in the post- and pre-fascist conditions existing in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

The left knew that it was correct to link the distribution of socialist propaganda in factories with actually preventing the distribution of ''Bild Zeitung''. It was correct to link propaganda against GIs being sent to Vietnam with actual attacks on military planes targeting Vietnam, and the ''Bundswehr'' campaign with attacks on NATO airports. It was correct to link the critique of class justice with the blowing up of prison walls, and the critique of the Springer Corporation with the disarming of its private security services. It was correct to set up radio stations, to demoralize the police, to have safehouses for ''Bundeswehr'' deserters, to combine agitation amongst foreign workers with the production of false documents, to prevent the production of napalm by sabotaging factories.

It was an error, however, to make their own propaganda dependent on supply and demand: to have no newspaper if the workers could not yet finance it, no car if the “movement” could not afford it, no transmitter because they had no license for it, no sabotage because capitalism wouldn’t collapse immediately as a result.

The student movement fell apart when its typically student and petit bourgeois form of organization, “antiauthoritarianism,” proved itself ill-suited to achieving its goals. Its spontaneity proved ineffective in the factories, nor could it create a functioning urban guerilla movement or a socialist mass organization. Unlike in Italy and France, the spark of the student movement here failed to ignite the prairie fire of class struggle, and it was at that point that it collapsed. It could enumerate the aims and contents of the anti-imperialist struggle, but it could not be the revolutionary subject, could not offer the necessary organizational structure.

Unlike the proletarian organizations of the New Left, the Red Army Faction doesn’t deny its roots in the history of the student movement, a movement that reshaped Marxism-Leninism into a weapon of class struggle and established the international basis for revolutionary struggle in the metropole.

'''4. The Primacy of Practice'''<blockquote>''If you want to know a certain thing or a certain class of things directly, you must personally participate in the practical struggle to change reality, to change that thing or class of things, for only thus can you come into contact with them as phenomena; only through personal participation in the practical struggle to change reality can you uncover the essence of that thing or class of things and comprehend them.''

''Marxism emphasizes the importance of theory precisely and only because it can guide action. If we have a correct theory but merely prate about it, pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice, then that theory, however good, is of no significance.''

Mao tse Tung: ''On Practice''<ref>''Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung'' (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967). The first of these two paragraphs comes from pages 299-300, the second from page 304</ref> </blockquote>The decision of leftists and socialists, the student movement’s authority figures, to turn to the study of scientific socialism and transform the critique of political economy into a self criticism of the student movement, was at the same time a decision to retreat into the classroom. Considering their paper output, their organizational models, and their bombastic statements, one might think that these revolutionaries were leading a violent class struggle, as if 1967/68 was the 1905 of socialism in Germany. In 1903, Lenin pointed out, in ''What Is to Be Done'', that the Russian workers needed a specific theory, and postulated, in opposition to the anarchists and the Social Revolutionaries, the necessity of class analysis, organization, and all-encompassing propaganda, because a broad-based class struggle was unfolding:<blockquote>''The fact is that the working masses are roused to a high pitch of excitement by the social evils in Russian life, but we are unable to gather, if one may so put it, and concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular resentment that are brought forth to a far larger extent than we imagine by the conditions of Russian life, and that must be combined into a single gigantic torrent.''

Lenin: What Is to Be Done?<ref>Marxists Internet Archive “Lenin’s What is to be Done? Trade-Unionist Politics and Social Democratic Politics,” [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1901/witbd/iii.htm. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1901/witbd/iii.htm.]</ref> </blockquote>Under the existing conditions in the Federal Republic and West Berlin, we doubt it will be possible to create a strategy to unify the working class or to create an organization that could simultaneously express and initiate the necessary unifying process. We doubt that the unity of the socialist intelligentsia and the proletariat can be “molded out of” the political programs or the declarations coming from the proletarian organizations. The drops and streamlets based on the horrors have long been collected by the Springer Corporation, to which they then add new horrors.

We believe that without a revolutionary initiative, without the practical revolutionary intervention of the vanguard, the socialist workers and intellectuals, and without concrete anti-imperialist struggle, there will be no unifying process. Unity can only be created through the common struggle of the conscious section of the working class and the intellectuals, one which they do not stage-manage, but which they model, or else it will not happen at all.

The paper output of these organizations shows their practice to be mainly a contest between intellectuals for the best Marx review before of an imaginary jury, which couldn’t possibly be the working class, as the language used excludes their participation. They are more embarrassed when they are caught misquoting Marx than when they are caught lying in their practice. Talking is their practice. The page numbers in their footnotes are almost always correct, the membership numbers they give for their organizations seldom are. They fear the accusation of revolutionary impatience more than corruption by bourgeois careers. It’s more important to them to spend years pursuing a degree with Lukacs<ref>George Lukacs was an influential Hungarian Marxist philosopher and art critic. His work greatly influenced the New Left of the 60s and 70s.</ref> than to allow themselves to be spontaneously inspired by Blanqui. They express internationalism in the form of censorship by favoring one Palestinian guerilla organization over another. White masters who claim to be the true guardians of Marxism, they express themselves through patronage, begging their rich friends for alms in the name of the Black Panther Party—not with a view to “victory in the people’s war,” but to soothe their consciences. That’s not a revolutionary method of intervention.

Mao, in his ''Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society'' (1926), contrasted the revolution and the counterrevolution in this way:<blockquote>''Each has hoisted a huge banner: one is the red banner of revolution held aloft by the Third International as the rallying point for all the oppressed classes of the world, the other is the white banner of counterrevolution held aloft by the League of Nations as the rallying point for all the counterrevolutionaries of the world.''<ref>Mao Tse-Tung “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” Marxists Internet Archive, [http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/ mswv1_1.htm. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/ mswv1_1.htm.]</ref></blockquote>Mao differentiated between classes in Chinese society based on the positions they took towards the red and white banners. It wasn’t enough for him to analyze the economic situation of different classes in Chinese society. Part of his class analysis involved the relationship of different classes to the revolution.

There will be no leadership role for Marxist-Leninists in future class struggles if the vanguard doesn’t hold up the red banner of proletarian internationalism, if the vanguard can’t answer the question of how to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, of how to develop the power of the proletariat, of how to break the power of the bourgeoisie, if it isn’t prepared to do anything to answer these questions. The class analysis we require cannot be developed without revolutionary practice or revolutionary initiative.

The “provisional revolutionary demands” put forward by the proletarian organizations throughout the country—such as the struggle against the intensification of exploitation, for a shorter work week, against the squandering of social wealth, for wage parity for men, women, and foreigners, against production quotas, etc.—are nothing but trade union economism as long as they don’t address the question of how to break the political, military, and propaganda power that always stands firmly in the way of these demands when they are put forward in mass class struggles. If these demands stay the same, one can only call them economistic shit, because they are not worth the revolutionary energy wasted in fighting for them, and they won’t lead to victory if “victory means to accept the principle that life is not the most precious thing for a revolutionary” (Debray<ref>Regis Debray was a French Marxist intellectual and a proponent of foco theory, the theory that a small group of guerillas could act as an inspiration to revolutionary activity. He joined Che Guevara on his ill-fated Bolivian adventure</ref>). Trade unions intervene with demands like these—but “the trade union politics of the working class are bourgeois working class politics” (Lenin). That’s not a revolutionary method of intervention.

The proletarian organizations failed to pose the question of armed struggle as a response to the Emergency Laws, the army, the BGS, the police, or the Springer Press. This shows that the proletarian organizations differ in their opportunism from the DKP only in that they are even less rooted in the masses, even if they are more verbally radical and theoretically advanced. In practice, they function at the level of civil rights and are concerned with gaining popularity at any price. They support the lies of the bourgeoisie by supporting the idea that with this state it is still possible to correct social problems by parliamentary means. They encourage the proletariat to engage in struggles that have no chance of success, given the state’s capacity for violence and its barbaric ways. “These Marxist-Leninist factions or parties,” Debray writes of the communists in Latin America, “move within the political environment as if they were controlled by the bourgeoisie. Rather than challenging the political status quo, they reinforce it….”

These organizations don’t offer any alternatives to the thousands of apprentices and young people who, as a result of being politicized by the student movement, became determined to put an end to exploitation in their workplaces. They simply advise them to adapt to capitalist exploitation. Concerning youth crime, when it comes down to it they share the position of prison wardens. Regarding the comrades in prison, they share the point of view of the judges. And regarding the underground, they share the point of view of social workers.

Without political practice, reading ''Capital'' is nothing more than bourgeois study. Without political practice, political programs are just so much twaddle. Without political practice, proletarian internationalism is only hot air. Adopting a proletarian position in theory implies putting it into practice.

The Red Army Faction asserts the primacy of practice. Whether it is right to organize armed resistance now, depends on whether it is possible, and whether it is possible can only be determined in practice.

'''5. The Urban Guerilla'''<blockquote>''Hence, imperialism and all reactionaries, looked at in essence, from a long-term point of view, from a strategic point of view, must be seen for what they are—paper tigers. On this we should build our strategic thinking. On the other hand, they are also living tigers, iron tigers, real tigers which can devour people. On this we should build our tactical thinking.''

Mao tse Tung, January 12, 1958<ref>''Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung'' (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 74.</ref></blockquote>If it is true that American imperialism is a paper tiger, this means it can, in the final analysis, be defeated. And if the thesis of the Chinese communists is correct, then victory over American imperialism is possible, because struggles against it have erupted all over the world, and as a result imperialism’s power is divided. It is this division that renders its defeat possible. If this is true, then there is no reason to exclude or leave out any country or any region from the anti-imperialist struggle simply because the forces of revolution are especially weak, and the forces of reaction are especially strong.

If it is incorrect to demoralize the revolutionary forces by underestimating them, it’s equally incorrect to push them into confrontations that can only lead to defeat. In the conflicts between the honest comrades in the proletarian organizations—let’s leave the big talkers out of it—and the Red Army Faction, we accuse them of demoralizing the revolutionary forces, whereas they feel we are leading the revolutionary forces down a blind alley. There is an attempt to bridge this divide between the comrades in the factories and the neighborhoods and the Red Army Faction, and if we succeed in doing so, we will arrive at the truth. Dogmatism and adventurism are typical deviations in any country during periods in which the revolutionary movement is weak. Since the anarchists have always been the strongest critics of opportunism, everyone who criticizes opportunism is called an anarchist—this is nothing more than fashionable nonsense.

The concept of the urban guerilla comes from Latin America. There, like here, it is the method of revolutionary intervention by generally weak revolutionary forces.

The urban guerilla struggle is based on an understanding that there will be no Prussian-style marching orders, which so many so-called revolutionaries are waiting for to lead the people into revolutionary struggle. It is based on the analysis that by the time the conditions are right for armed struggle, it will be too late to prepare for it. It is based on the recognition that without revolutionary initiatives in a country with as much potential for violence as the Federal Republic, there will be no revolutionary orientation when the conditions for revolutionary struggle are more favorable, as they soon will be given the political and economic developments of late capitalism.

The urban guerilla is the consequence of the long since complete negation of parliamentary democracy by the elected representatives themselves. It is the inevitable response to the Emergency Laws and the Hand Grenade Law. It is the willingness to struggle with the very means that the system appropriates for itself to neutralize its enemies. The urban guerilla is based on facing facts, not making excuses for them.

The student movement already had a partial understanding of what the urban guerilla could achieve. It can give concrete form to the agitation and propaganda work to which the left has been reduced. For instance, in the Springer campaign, in the Carbora Bassa campaign of the Heidelberg students,<ref>A campaign to stop the building of a massive dam in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. The right-wing Portuguese government had plans to settle over one million European colonists in the African country. By 1969, five German companies were implicated in the project. There were protests in the FRG, particularly in Heidelberg, against the project when the U.S. Minister of Defense Robert McNamara visited the country.</ref> in the squatting movement in Frankfurt, in the context of the military aid that the Federal Republic gives the comprador regimes in Africa, and in the security measures and the inhouse justice in the factories. The urban guerilla can make verbal internationalism concrete by providing weapons and money. It can blunt the system’s weapons and the banning of communists by organizing an underground that can elude the police. The urban guerilla is a weapon of class struggle.

The urban guerilla struggle is armed struggle in a situation in which the police use their weapons recklessly and in which class justice finds Kurras not guilty and buries comrades alive. The urban guerilla struggle means not being demoralized by the violence of the system.

The urban guerilla aims to destroy certain aspects of the state structure, and to destroy the myth of state omnipotence and invulnerability.

The urban guerilla requires the organization of an illegal structure, including safehouses, weapons, cars, and documents. What one needs to know about this, Marighella describes in his ''Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla''. What needs to be known beyond that, we are always ready to tell anyone who wants to participate in the guerilla struggle. We don’t know that much yet, but we know a little bit.

Before deciding to take up the armed struggle, it is important that one first experience the legal struggle. When one’s connection to the revolutionary left is based on just wanting to follow the latest fad, then it is better not to start anything you will not be able to get out of later on.

The Red Army Faction and the urban guerilla represent the only faction and practice which draws a clear line between ourselves and the enemy, and is therefore subject to the sharpest attack. This requires that one have a political identity, and it presumes that a learning process has already occurred.

Our original organizational concept implied a connection between the urban guerilla and the work at the base. We wanted everyone to work in the neighborhoods, the factories, and the existing socialist groups, to be influenced by the discussions taking place, to have some experience, to learn. It has become clear that that doesn’t work. The degree to which the political police can monitor these groups, their meetings, their appointments, and the contents of their discussions is already so extensive that one has to stay away if one wants to escape this surveillance.

The urban guerilla struggle requires that one be totally clear about one’s motivations, that one not be put off by the attacks from ''Bild Zeitung'', the antisemitic-criminal-subhuman-murderer-arsonist label that they apply to revolutionaries. All that shit they spit out and are willing to say, and which still influences what many comrades think about us, must have no effect.

Naturally, the system doesn’t give any ground, and there is nothing they will not do and no slander they will not use against us.

There are no publications that have any goals that can be distinguished from those that serve the interests of capital. There is still no socialist publication that reaches beyond itself, its circle, the people handed copies, and its subscribers, and which does not exist primarily in an incidental, private, personal, bourgeois context. All forms of media are controlled by capital, through advertising sales, as a result of the ambitions of the writers, who want to write their way into the establishment, through the radio stations’ boards of directors, and through the market control of the press corporations. The leading publications are the publications of the ruling class. They divide the market opportunities between themselves, developing ideologies for specific milieus, and what they publish serves to assure their market domination. Journalism is about one thing: sales. News is a commodity; information is a consumer product. Whatever isn’t suitable for consumption is vomited back out. The need to retain the readership for advertisement-heavy publications, and point system ratings for television, prevent antagonistic contradictions from developing between these media and the public; no antagonism, nothing of consequence. Whoever wants a place in the market must maintain connections with these extremely powerful opinion shapers. This means that dependence on the Springer Corporation grows in step with the Springer Corporation itself, which has also started to buy up local papers. The urban guerilla can expect nothing but bitter hostility from this public. It has to orient itself around Marxist criticism and self-criticism, and nothing else. As Mao said, “Whoever is not afraid of being drawn and quartered, can dare to pull the emperor from his horse.”

Long-term, meticulous work is crucial for the urban guerilla, insofar as we want to go beyond discussion to action. If the option of retreating to a bourgeois profession is not kept open, if the option of leaving behind the revolution for a townhouse is not maintained, if none of this is even desirable, then, with the full pathos of Blanqui’s statement, “The duty of the revolutionary is to always struggle, in spite of everything to struggle, to struggle until death.” There is no revolutionary struggle, and there has been no revolutionary struggle, in which this hasn’t shown itself to be true: Russia, China, Cuba, Algeria, Palestine, Vietnam.

Some say that the political possibilities of organization, agitation, and propaganda are far from being exhausted, and only when they have been exhausted should one consider armed struggle. We say that the political possibilities will not be fully utilized until armed struggle is recognized as the political goal, as long as the strategic conclusion that all reactionaries are paper tigers is not grasped despite the tactical conclusion that they are criminals, murderers, and exploiters.

We will not talk about “armed propaganda”: we will do it. The prison breakout didn’t take place for reasons of propaganda, but to get the guy out. The bank robberies they try to lay at our doorstep, we’d only do that to grab the money. The “spectacular successes” that Mao tells us we must have scored if “the enemy paints us as utterly black” are not our successes alone. The big clamour that has been made about us is due more to the Latin American comrades—given the clear line they have already drawn between themselves and the enemy—which has led the ruling class here, suspecting us of some bank robberies, to “energetically oppose” us, because of what we have begun to build here: the urban guerilla in the form of the Red Army Faction.

'''6. Legality and Illegality'''<blockquote>''Revolution in the West, the challenge to capitalist power in its strongholds, is the order of the day. It is of decisive importance. The current world situation offers no place and no power that is in a position to guarantee peaceful development and democratic stability. The crisis is intensifying. Parochialism or the decision to postpone the struggle would mean being sucked into the abyss of complete collapse''.

Il Manifesto, extract from Thesis 55</blockquote>The anarchists’ slogan, “Destroy what destroys you,” is aimed at mobilizing the base, young people in prisons and reformatories, in high schools and training centres. It reaches out to all of those in the shittiest situations. It is meant to be spontaneously understood, and is a call for direct resistance. Stokely Carmichael’s<ref>Stokely Carmichael was a prominent militant in the Black Liberation Movement in the United States, playing a leading role in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and then the Black Panther Party.</ref> Black Power slogan, “Trust your own experience!” means just that. And the slogan is based on the insight that in capitalism there is absolutely nothing that oppresses, tortures, constrains, and burdens that does not have its origin in the capitalist mode of production, and that each oppressor, in whatever form he may appear, is a representative of the class interests of capital, which makes him the class enemy.

To this extent the anarchists’ slogan is correct, proletarian, and in line with the class struggle. It is incorrect insofar as it leads to false consciousness. One goes on the offensive simply to give them a kick in the teeth, and organization then takes second place, discipline becomes bourgeois, and class analysis superfluous. If you don’t work out the dialectic of legality and illegality in terms of organization, you will be defenseless against the heavy repression that will follow your actions, and you will be legally arrested.

The statement of some organizations, “Communists are not so stupid as to get themselves banned,” renders them a mouthpiece for class justice, that is to say, for no one. The statement is correct insofar as it means that the legal possibilities for communist agitation, propaganda, and organizing for a political and economic struggle must be fully utilized and cannot be carelessly jeopardized—but that is not what they mean. They mean that there is no way of getting around the limits that the class state and its justice system establish for the socialist project, that one must stop at these limits, that one must retreat from the state’s illegal encroachments as these encroachments are legalized—legality at any price. Illegal imprisonment, terroristic sentences, police harassment, blackmail and coercion on the part of the BAW—eat shit or die— Communists are not that stupid….

This statement is opportunist. It shows a lack of solidarity. It abandons the comrades in prison. It excludes the organization and politicization in a socialist context of anyone who, as a result of their social background and situation, has no choice but to survive through crime: the underground, the subproletariat, innumerable proletarian youth, and guest workers. It facilitates the theoretical criminalization of all those who are not members of these organizations. It expresses complicity with class justice. It is stupid.

Legality is a question of power. The relationship between legality and illegality has to be determined by examining the contradiction between reformist and fascist domination, whose representatives in Bonn are, on the one hand, the Social-Liberal coalition, and on the other, Barzel and Strauß. Their media representatives are, for the former: the ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'', ''Stern'', the WDR<ref>''Westdeutscher Rundfunk'', West German Radio.</ref> Third Program, SFB, and the ''Frankfurter Rundschau''. And, for the latter: the Springer Corporation, the ''Sender Freies Berlin'', the ''Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen'', and the ''Bayernkurier''. The Munich police line here, and the Berlin model there. Here the justice of the Federal Administrative Court and there that of the Federal Supreme Court.

The reformist line attempts to avoid conflicts by using institutional options (co-management) and promises of improvements (in prison conditions, for example), by addressing obsolete sources of conflict (the Chancellor’s genuflection in Poland, for example), by avoiding provocation (the soft line of the Munich police and the Federal Administrative Court in Berlin, for example), and by airing grievances (regarding public education in Hessen and Berlin, for example). As part of this reformist line of avoiding conflict, they move a bit further inside and a bit less outside of legality. They do this to look legitimate. With the Constitution in hand, they intend to neutralize contradictions and leave left-wing criticism dead in the water and empty of content, thereby keeping the ''Jusos'' within the SPD.

There is no doubt that, in the long run, the reformist line is the more effective way of stabilizing capitalist domination, but it relies on certain conditions being met. It requires economic prosperity, because the soft line of the Munich police, for example, is much more expensive than the hard line of Berlin—as the Munich police chief pointed out: “Two officers with machineguns can hold a thousand people in check. 100 officers with truncheons can control a thousand people. Without weapons of this sort, 300 or 400 police officers are necessary.” The reformist line requires a situation in which no organized anticapitalist opposition exists, as one can see by the Munich example.

Camouflaged by political reformism, the concentration of state and economic power accelerates. What Schiller has achieved with his financial policy and Strauß has pushed through with his financial reforms is an increase in exploitation through the intensification of work and heightened division of labor in the productive sector, and through long-term rationalization in the administrative sector and the service industries.

The concentration of violent power in the hands of the few can occur unopposed if it is done quietly, if unnecessary provocation, which can set a process of solidarity in motion, is avoided—that is something that was learned as a result of the student movement and the Paris May. Therefore, the Red Cells<ref>The Red Cells were an independent university-based Marxist organization.</ref> are not yet banned. Therefore the KP can exist as the DKP without the ban on the KP being lifted. Therefore there are still some liberal television programs. And, therefore, some organizations can get away with thinking that they are not as stupid as they really are.

The margin of legality that reformism affords is capital’s response to the attacks of the student movement and the APO—the reformist response is the more effective one, so long as they can manage it. To rely on this legality, to count on it, to perpetuate it metaphysically, to base statistical projections on it, to want to defend it, means repeating the errors of the Latin American self-defense zones. It means you haven’t learned anything and have provided the reactionaries with time to regroup and reorganize, creating a situation in which they won’t ban the left, they’ll smash it.

Willy Weyer<ref>Willy Weyer (SPD) was, at this time, the Minister of the Interior for North Rhine Westphalia and a key proponent of the militarization of the police force.</ref> doesn’t play at tolerance. When the liberal press complains that his highway breathalyzers treat all drivers like potential criminals, he maneuvers and audaciously responds, “We will carry on!”—and in so doing he demonstrates the irrelevance of the liberal public. Eduard Zimmerman creates a whole nation of police agents, and the Springer Corporation has taken on the role of leading the Berlin police—''Bild Zeitung'' columnist Reer recommends arrest warrants to the custodial judges. The mass mobilization in favor of fascism, of crackdowns, of the death penalty, and for more and better-armed police carries on unabated—the New Look of the Brandt-Heinemann-Scheel administration is a facade for Bonn’s policies.

The comrades who only deal with the question of legality and illegality superficially have obviously misunderstood the amnesty with which the student movement was to be tamed. In lifting the criminalization of hundreds of students, they sent them away with just a fright, preventing further radicalization and impressing upon them the value of the privileges that come with being a bourgeois student—that in spite of the nature of the knowledge-factory, the universities are helpful to social climbers. This deepens the class divide between students and the proletariat, between their privileged everyday life and the everyday life of those who do the shit work and who were not offered the same amnesty by the same class enemy. So once again the division between theory and practice is maintained. The equation: amnesty equals pacification.

The social democratic voter initiative involving some respected writers—not only that fuck-up, Grass<ref>At the time a member of ''Gruppe 47'', Günter Grass is one on the most significant German post-World War ii authors and a noted liberal.</ref>—is an attempt at a positive, democratic mobilization, and is a form of resistance against fascism, and therefore should not be dismissed lightly. It is having some effect on the reality presented by certain publishers and some radio and television editorial departments, those that have not yet capitulated to the logic of the monopolies and have not yet been absorbed into the superstructure, with its overarching political reality. The areas of increasing repression are not those with which writers are normally concerned: prison, class justice, intensified work, work-related accidents, installment plans, schools, ''Bild'' and the ''Berliner Zeitung'', barrack-style housing in the suburbs,<ref>Unlike North America, suburbs in Northern Europe are generally occupied by the subproletariat and poorly paid immigrant workers.</ref> and ghettos for foreigners—all of this troubles these writers aesthetically, not politically.

Legality is the ideology of parliamentarianism, of social partnership, and of a pluralistic society. Legality becomes a fetish when those who insist upon it ignore the fact that phones are legally tapped, mail is legally monitored, neighbors are legally interrogated, and informants are legally paid. The organization of political work, if it is not to be under constant observation by the political police, must be simultaneously conducted both legally and illegally.

We don’t count on terror and fascism provoking a spontaneous antifascist mobilization, nor do we think that legality is always corrupt. We understand that our work offers pretexts, just as alcohol does for Willy Weyer, just as the increase in crime does for Strauß, just as ''Ostpolitik'' does for Barzel, just as a Yugoslav running a red light does for a Frankfurt taxi driver, just as a tool in the pocket does for the murderers of car thieves in Berlin. Regarding other pretexts that result from the fact that we are communists, whether communists organize and struggle will depend on whether terror and repression produce only fear and resignation, or whether they produce resistance, class hatred, and solidarity, and whether or not everything goes smoothly for imperialism. It depends on whether communists are so stupid as to tolerate everything that is done to them, or whether they will use legality, as well as other methods, to organize illegality, instead of fetishizing one over the other.

The fate of both the Black Panther Party and ''Gauche Prolétarienne''<ref>''Gauche Prolétarienne'' was a French Maoist organization that, in 1968, began attempts to build a factory-based guerilla group. They were banned in 1970.</ref> resulted from an incorrect understanding of the contradiction between the constitution and legal reality and the increased intensity of this contradiction when organized resistance occurs. And this incorrect understanding prevents people from seeing that the conditions of legality are changed by active resistance, and that it is therefore necessary to use legality simultaneously for political struggle and for the organization of illegality, and that it is an error to wait to be banned, as if it were a stroke of fate coming from the system, because then the banning will constitute a death blow, and the issue will be resolved.

The Red Army Faction organizes illegality as an offensive position for revolutionary intervention.

Building the urban guerilla means conducting the anti-imperialist struggle offensively. The Red Army Faction creates the connection between legal and illegal struggle, between national struggle and international struggle, between political struggle and armed struggle, and between the strategic and tactical aspects of the international communist movement. The urban guerilla means intervening in a revolutionary way here, in spite of the weakness of the revolutionary forces in the Federal Republic and West Berlin!

Cleaver said, “Either you’re part of the problem or your part of the solution. There is nothing in between. This shit has been examined and analyzed for decades and generations from every angle. My opinion is that most of what happens in this country does not need to be analyzed any further.”<ref>Eldridge Cleaver was the Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party. When the party splintered into warring factions, he went into self-imposed exile in Algeria. He is the author of several books, including ''Soul on Ice'', from which this quote is drawn.</ref>
[[File:RAF Petra Schelm Flier.png|thumb|''Flier denouncing the murder of Petra Schelm, who was shot in the head by police. Hamburg Red Aid 1971.'']]
SUPPORT THE ARMED STRUGGLE!

VICTORY TO THE PEOPLE'S WAR

Red Army Faction

April 1971

== 4 - Building a Base and "Serving the People" ==
With safehouses and supporters in several cities, and dozens of guerillas living underground, the RAF patiently built up its organization over two years, a period during which there occurred several clashes with police, leaving two members dead and many more in prison.

The state’s first serious attempt to eradicate the RAF had begun shortly after the publication of ''The Urban Guerilla Concept'' in 1971. Named ''Aktion Kobra'' (“Operation Cobra”), it involved three thousand heavily armed officers patrolling cities and setting up checkpoints throughout northern Germany.

On July 15, 1971, a new line was crossed when RAF members Petra Schelm and Werner Hoppe were identified by police in the port city of Hamburg. A firefight ensued, and while Hoppe managed to surrender,<ref>He would eventually receive a ten year sentence for allegedly shooting at police. (Associated Press, “German Draws 10-year term,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 27, 1972.)</ref> Schelm was shot dead. A working class woman who had entered the guerilla though the commune scene, moving on from the Roaming Hash Rebels to the RAF,<ref>Baumann, 53.</ref> she was nineteen at the time.

There was widespread outrage at this killing, and in an opinion poll conducted shortly thereafter by the respected Allensbach Institute, “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.”<ref>Varon, 199.</ref>

In the wake of the APO, the RAF began to take on the aura of folk heroes for many young people who were glad to see someone taking things to the next level. As one woman who joined the group in this period put it, “For the first time, I found a theoretical foundation for something that, until then, I had only felt.”<ref>Margrit Schiller in ''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror''</ref>

Or in the words of Helmut Pohl, who stole cars for the guerilla at this time:<blockquote>''What was clear was the drive, the resolve, quite simply, the search for something new—something different from the shit here. That was what made it attractive and created the base of support. This existed from the beginning, and there is no way it could have been otherwise.''<ref>Helmut Pohl’s Testimony at the Stammheim Trial, July 29, 1976. This testimony is available on the internet at <nowiki>http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/</nowiki> documents/76_0708_mohnhaupt_pohl.html#22.</ref> </blockquote>Thousands of students secretly carried photographs of RAF members in their wallets, and time and time again, as the police 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 not a few middle class supporters—academics, doctors, even a clergyman.<ref>Philip Jacobson, “Show Trial,” ''Sunday Times Magazine'', February 23, 1975, 17.</ref> Newspapers at the time carried stories under headlines like “Celebrities Protect Baader Gang” and “Sympathizers Hamper Hunt for Baader Group.”<ref>Aust, 141.</ref>

The guerilla continued to attract new members, including several former members of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), a radical therapy group that had carried out some armed actions before its leading members were arrested in July 1971 (see sidebar on next page).
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Socialist Patients' Collective
|While the RAF was forming, other groups in the Federal Republic were also experimenting with armed politics. One of these, the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), started as a radical therapy group based at Heidelberg University in southwest Germany. Under the leadership of psychiatrist Wolfgang Huber, the group adopted the slogan, “The system has made us sick: let us strike the death blow to the sick system!”
In tying together political radicalism and psychotherapy, the SPK were not as odd as they might be considered today. As already mentioned, the student left was deeply indebted to the Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism, and the Frankfurt School in turn was deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, as were philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and revolutionary theorists like Frantz Fanon, all of whom greatly influenced sixties radicals. As such, there was much enthusiasm about psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy within the New Left, and this was nowhere more true than in West Germany.
According to government officials, the SPK held that only the maladjusted can survive in modern society, and the insane are actually too sane to live under present social conditions.<ref>United Press International, “U.S. Hunts German Terrorists,” ''Pacific Stars and Stripes'', July 23, 1978.</ref> The SPK members began carrying out armed attacks after Huber was fired from his post at the university in February 1970, burning down the State Psychiatric Clinic, robbing banks, and even trying (unsuccessfully) to plant a bomb on a train in which the president of the Federal Republic was traveling. In July of 1971, Huber, his wife, and seven SPK members were arrested on charges of having formed a criminal association and illegally procuring arms and explosives.<ref>Becker, ''Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang''. Please note that this book, written by a right-wing South African journalist, is counterinsurgency tripe. Nevertheless, it has been used for specific details like dates and places, when no other source is available.</ref>

Many of the SPK members who remained at large would go on to join the RAF.
|}
On October 22, there was another shooting in Hamburg, but this time a police officer was killed. Margrit Schiller, a former SPK member who had joined the RAF, was being pursued by two policemen when Gerhard Müller (also formerly of the SPL) and a female RAF member came to her defense: in the ensuing melee, officer Norbert Schmid was shot dead.

Schiller was nevertheless captured, and a macabre scene played out as police called a press conference to display their trophy. Millions of television viewers watched, amazed, as the young woman—clearly unwilling to play the part assigned to her—was carried in front of the cameras by a pack of cops, her head pulled back by her hair so that all could see her face as she struggled to break free.<ref>la Times—Washington Post Service, “West Germany’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ Have Country in an Uproar,” ''The Lawton Constitution'', December 3, 1972. Margrit Schiller being dragged into press conference by Hamburg police. could not in fact be tied to any RAF actions, and so was simply charged with illegal possession of a firearm and false identification papers. In February 1973, she received a twenty-seven-month sentence, but was released pending an appeal, at which point she went back underground, only to be captured again in 1974. (United Press International, “Raided Flat is Suspected Anarchist HQ.” ''European Stars and Stripes'', October 28, 1971; ''European Stars and Stripes'' “Released from Custody,” February 11, 1973; Associated Press, “Raids in German Cities Smash New Terror Ring,” ''European Stars and Stripes,'' February 5, 1974.)</ref>
[[File:Georg von Rauch.png|thumb|''Georg von Rauch, murdered by police in West Berlin.'']]
Police searches and checkpoints increased as the hunt for the guerilla continued. On December 4, police in West Berlin stopped a car carrying Bommi Baumann and Georg von Rauch, leading figures in the nascent 2nd of June Movement anarchist guerilla. Von Rauch was immediately shot and killed, which many people took as proof that the cops had adopted a policy to “shoot first, ask questions later.” Thousands participated in demonstrations protesting this killing, and an abandoned nurses’ residence at the Bethanien Hospital was occupied and renamed the Georg von Rauch House.<ref>The Georg von Rauch House still exists today, housing approximately forty itinerant youth at any given time.</ref>

(Subsequent to leaving the guerilla, Baumann told an interviewer from Spiegel that von Rauch had fired his weapon first, though he later backtracked, claiming instead, “I no longer know who first pulled the trigger.”<ref>Baumann, 95.</ref> All of this was viewed with some suspicion, many observers feeling that Baumann’s move to an anti-guerilla position rendered it tantamount to counterinsurgency propaganda.)
[[File:“The Police- Genscher’s Killer Elite or the New Stormtroopers?” - from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|left|thumb|''“The Police- Genscher’s Killer Elite or the New Stormtroopers?” - from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png'']]
The “shoot first” hypothesis would be given further credence on March 1, 1972, when Richard Epple, a seventeen-year-old apprentice, was mowed down by police submachine gun fire after a car chase through Tübingen. Epple had run a police checkpoint because he was driving without a license—he had no connections to the RAF or any other guerilla group.<ref>Vague, 42-43.</ref> Later that year, in Stuttgart, a Scottish businessman, Ian McLeod, was similarly killed by police fire as he stood naked behind a bedroom door. Depending on who one believes, Macleod was either completely unconnected to the RAF, or else was himself a British intelligence agent intent on infiltrating the group—in either case it was clear the police shot without cause or provocation. Hundreds of people took to the streets to protest this police murder.<ref>United Press International, “Paper Says Macleod was a British Spy,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 3, 1972.</ref>

The next bust occurred as 1971 came to a close: on December 17, Rolf Pohle was arrested in a gun shop in Neu-Ulm attempting to buy thirty-two firearms which the police claimed were meant for the RAF.<ref>Associated Press, “Trial starts in Munich for accused Meinhof-gang munitions supplier,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', September 26, 1973. Pohle went to trial in 1973, charged with possession of firearms and support for a criminal organization under §129; during the trial, he spit at reporters and refused to acknowledge his court appointed lawyers. While he denied the charges against him, and repeatedly claimed that he was not a member of the raf, he maintained solidarity with the guerilla. In 1974, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison, a term which he did not serve without some interruptions.</ref> Pohle had been a young law student in Munich in the days of the APO. He had organized legal aid during the 1968 Easter riots,<ref>Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union, “Nachruf auf Rolf Pohle,” <nowiki>https://www.fau.org/artikel/art_040308-182546</nowiki>.</ref> and had been subjected to heavy police harassment ever since, eventually pushing him to join the underground.

On December 22, exactly two months after officer Schmid’s demise, another cop was killed. Several RAF members were robbing a bank in the small military city of Kaiserslautern—the nearest police station had literally been blocked from interfering, guerilla helpers barricading its entrance with cars. By plain bad luck for all concerned, police officer Herbert Schoner spotted the parked getaway van as he passed by the bank, just as it was being relieved of its funds. When Schoner knocked on the van’s window, he was shot twice—he managed to draw his gun before he was finished off by a third bullet.<ref>Aust, 190.</ref>

In the immediate aftermath of December 22, there was no publicly available evidence to tie the robbery or Schoner’s death to any political organization. To all appearances, this was simply a “normal” crime. Nevertheless, the very next morning, the ''Bild Zeitung'' led the charge: “Baader-Meinhof Gang Strikes Again. Bank Raid: Policeman Shot,” screamed the headline.

The Springer Press was merely doing what was by now a tradition, tarring the radical left with any and all crimes and misdemeanors. (Except, of course, that in this case they were right.)

The progressive ''Gruppe 47'' intellectual Heinrich Böll, perhaps the most important author in postwar Germany, was flabbergasted, and publicly accused the anti-RAF smear campaign of bearing all the hallmarks of fascism. While condemning their violence, he tried to put the RAF into perspective, famously describing their struggle as a “war of six against sixty million.”

Böll’s words may have been appreciated by the RAF, but he was certainly no supporter. Of course, this was not the way the right saw things, and he became the target of a hate campaign, branded an apologist for murder and a terrorist sympathizer,<ref>Ibid., 190-191.</ref> to which he replied that those accused of sympathizing were simply “people who have committed the criminal sin of making distinctions.”<ref>Cobler, 41.</ref> He and his family would experience unusual levels of police harassment for years to come. At one point, for instance, as he was entertaining guests from out of town, police with submachine guns raided his home, claiming they suspected Ulrike Meinhof of being on the premises. (To the cop in charge, Böll declared that if Meinhof ever did show up he would shelter her, but only on condition that she not bring any guns into his house. In his words, it would be the Christian thing to do.)<ref>Robert Spaemann, “Kaffee, Kuchen und Terror,” ''Die Zeit'' [online], 19 (1998)</ref>

It wasn’t only the streets that were being policed, but also the cultural and political parameters of debate, and the RAF was being placed clearly beyond the pale.

A second, and at least initially less successful move to solidify public opinion against the RAF was the trial of Karl-Heinz Ruhland, which came to a close in March 1972.

Ruhland had been peripheral to the RAF when he was captured in December 1970. Soon after his arrest, he started providing the police with information, the location of safehouses and the names of those who had sheltered the guerilla.<ref>Aust, 140.</ref> When brought to trial on charges relating to a raf bank robbery, much was made of his class status as a manual worker who was never fully accepted by the other members of the group, all in a fairly transparent ploy to show the guerilla up as hypocritical middle class revolutionaries with no real affinity for the proletariat.

Ruhland provided the police with their first real break, however slight, into the world of the RAF, a service for which he received a relatively lenient sentence of four and a half years. Although even the corporate press had to admit that he did not make a very convincing witness, often changing his testimony to fit the latest police theory, he would remain a fixture in future RAF trials<ref>Ruhland testified against Horst Mahler, Ali Jansen, and Astrid Proll amongst others. Several years later, after the Stammheim deaths, Ruhland was once again trotted out as an “old comrade” of the prisoners in order to explain how they must have felt suicidal. (United Press International, “Suicide Victim Died of Despair— Comrade,” ''Raleigh Register'', November 14, 1977).</ref> until someone more convincing could be turned. In retrospect, his significance appears to be as a template for future state witnesses to come.<ref>Heinrich Hannover, “Terrorsitenprozessen,” <nowiki>http://www.freilassung.de/div/texte/kronzeuge/heinhan1.htm</nowiki>.</ref>

In the meantime, guns continued to blaze as the police and guerilla played an increasingly deadly game of hide and seek. Following a narrow escape, Andreas Baader even sent off a letter to the non-Springer press that he authenticated with his thumbprint, essentially to thumb his nose at the cops, and to prove that he was still alive.<ref>Andreas Eichler, “Die raf und die Medien.” This document is reprinted in this volume: Andreas Baader: Letter to the Press, see pages 120-121.</ref>
[[File:Tommy Weissbecker from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Tommy Weissbecker, murdered by Augsburg police on March 2, 1972.'']]
Then, on March 2, police in the Bavarian city of Augsburg killed Tommy Weissbecker and captured Carmen Roll (a former SPK member). Weissbecker was the son of a Jewish concentration camp survivor,<ref>Tilman Fichter, interview by Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “The anti-Semitism of the 68ers.”</ref> and had cut his teeth in the Hash Rebels scene before gravitating to the RAF. Twenty-three years old, he was never given a chance to surrender.

The killing took place as the two left Weissbecker’s apartment. It was later revealed that the police had had him under surveillance since February, renting an apartment above his, and had been listening in on him just before he went out. This would suggest to many not a chance identity check, but a carefully staged murder. In retaliation, the 2nd of June Movement bombed the police headquarters in West Berlin and, as in the case of Georg von Rauch, an empty building in Berlin was occupied and renamed the Tommy Weissbecker House.

While in custody Roll was drugged, apparently in the hope that she would provide police with information; as part of this chemically assisted interrogation, on March 16 the prison doctor gave her such a large dose of ether that she almost died.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, ''Der Kampf Gegen die Vernichtungshaft'' (n.p.) (n.d.), 131.</ref>

News of Weissbecker’s murder spead quickly. In Hamburg, RAF members Manfred Grashof and Wolfgang Grundmann feared this meant the safehouse they were staying at—which had been rented by Weissbecker—might also be compromised. RAF policy in such situations was to simply leave the house and never return, but Grashof, whose speciality was producing false documents, decide to risk one trip back to gather some items he needed. When he and Grundmann returned, three cops were sitting inside in the dark. As soon as the guerillas opened the door, even before they turned on the lights on, a cop panicked and started shooting.<ref>Gabriele Goettle, “Die Praxis der Galaxie,” ''die tageszeitung'', July 28, 2008.</ref> Grashof was shot three times. He returned fire, aiming blindly in the dark, and hit police commissioner Hans Eckardt, fatally wounding him.<ref>In 1977, Grashof received a life sentence for murder and other offenses; Grundmann received four years on lighter charges (Associated Press, “2 German Terrorists Given life,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', June 3, 1977.)</ref>

Grundmann had come to the RAF from ''Schwarze Hilfe'', or Black Aid, a support group for anarchist political prisoners in West Berlin.<ref>Becker, 273.</ref>

As for Grashof, he had come to West Berlin in 1968 as an army deserter, and had joined with Horst Mahler in the Republican Club arguing that the semi-city be turned into an official refuge for others fleeing military service.<ref>David Binder, “‘Republic of West Berlin’ Suggested by Radical Group,” ''Charleston Gazette'', November 7, 1968. Whereas young men living in West Berlin were already exempt from the draft, those who lived elsewhere and had already been drafted were liable to prosecution if they deserted.</ref> He had been with the guerilla from the beginning, being particularly close to Petra Schelm and especially upset by her death.

Despite his injuries, Grashof was moved from the hospital to a regular prison cell by Federal Supreme Court Judge Wolfgang Buddenberg, who had been put in charge of all RAF arrests. After two months, he was moved into isolation, only allowed to exercise for a half hour each day, and even then only with his wrists handcuffed behind his back. As a result of this treatment, his wounds opened up again, but he did not die.<ref>Aust, 203.</ref>

All of this unfolded within a context of increasing and increasingly visible police control and new repressive legislation. After having offered the carrot of amnesty and limited reforms, Brandt’s SD{-FDP coalition was now showing that it also knew how to wield the stick.

In September 1971, a new Chief Commissioner was appointed to the BKA (Federal Criminal Bureau): Horst Herold, former Chief of the Nuremberg police, and an expert on the new methods of using computerized data processing as a law enforcement tool. Under Herold’s leadership, the BKA was transformed from a relatively unimportant body into the West German equivalent of the FBI. Over the next decade, he would oversee a six-fold increase in the BKA budget, and a tripling of its staff as he personally pushed West Germany to the worldwide forefront of computerized repression.<ref>Ibid., 181.</ref>

By 1979, Herold’s computers contained files on 4.7 million names and 3,100 organizations, including the photos of 1.9 million people and 2.1 million sets of fingerprints.<ref>Ibid.</ref> While today it is routine for such data to be available at the touch of a police keyboard, in the 1970s this represented a simply unheard of level of surveillance and technical sophistication.

One of Herold’s first moves was to set up a “Baader-Meinhof Special Commission,” and hunting for the RAF remained his utmost priority throughout his tenure.

The significance of these changes in the BKA was overshadowed, though, by a new clampdown on the legal left, arguably the greatest since the ban on the KPD, as the Interior Ministers Conference passed the Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Act) on January 28, 1972. The new legislation was supported by all three major political parties, as well as all the major trade unions.<ref>Gerard Braunthal, ''Political Service and Public Loyalty in West Germany: the 1972 decree against radicals and its consequences'' (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 36-37.</ref> Known as the Berufsverbot (Professional Ban) by its opponents, its intention was to bar leftists from working in the public sector. The potential targets of this ban included some 14% of the workforce, not only government bureaucrats, but also anyone employed by the post office, the railways, public hospitals—and most importantly university professors and school teachers.<ref>Monica Jacobs, “Civil Rights and Women’s Rights in the Federal Republic of Germany Today,” ''New German Critique'' 16 Special Feminist Issue (Winter 1978): 166.</ref>

The decree also dramatically increased the visibility of the Verfassungsschutz political police—the so-called “Guardians of the Constitution”—as the names of all applicants for public sector jobs were now sent to this agency, which determined on the basis of its own files whether a special hearing was necessary to gauge the applicant’s loyalty to the state. Not only did the Verfassungsschutz comb open sources—speeches, pamphlets, doctoral theses, etc.—for names, but it also engaged in covert surveillance, telephone taps, and a network of informers which was said to include students hired to note who among their classmates held radical views.<ref>Braunthal, 42.</ref> (Little surprise that the agency’s president until 1972 was Hubert Schrübbers, who had spent the early forties as a Nazi prosecutor notorious for seeking harsh sentences against antifascists, which would certainly have meant confinement in a concentration camp.)<ref>Ibid., 43.</ref>

As Georgy Katsifiacis has noted, “the decree resulted in loyalty checks on 3.5 million persons and the rejection of 2,250 civil service applicants. Although only 256 civil servants were dismissed, the decree had a chilling effect.”<ref>Georgy Katsiaficas, ''Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life'' (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 64.</ref> So much so that according to one survey carried out in the city of Mannheim, “84 percent of university students there refrained from regularly checking leftist materials out of public libraries for fear of being blacklisted.”<ref name=":0">Ibid.</ref><ref name=":0" />

Obviously, those students who had refused the SPD’s amnesty in 1971 found themselves among the first to be targeted. While most of these people would no doubt have rejected the RAF’s politics, fears about the guerilla were exploited to help push through the legislation. As Heinz Kühn, spd President of North Rhine-Westphalia, put it, “We could hardly have Ulrike Meinhof employed as a teacher, or Andreas Baader in the police force.”<ref>Aust, 192</ref>

In the wake of the sixties student movement, the state was establishing the conditions under which erstwhile rebels would be allowed to join the establishment. As its corollary, this rollback included ongoing attacks on the universities themselves. For instance, in early 1972, the Free University hired the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel as professor of economics: the Berlin Senate responded by vetoing this appointment,<ref>''Time Magazine'' [online], “Battle of Berlin,” July 3, 1972.</ref> and despite student strikes, Mandel was barred from entering the FRG. (This ban was only lifted in 1978.)<ref>Rote Armee Fraktion, ''Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF'', (Berlin: id-Verlag, 1997), 82.</ref>

In this context, in April 1972, the RAF released its second theoretical statement, ''Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle''. As with ''The Urban Guerilla Concept'', this text was distributed in magazine form at the May Day demonstrations that year.

In a text almost twice as long as the previous one, the RAF was trying to provide an analysis of the previous year’s events, both within the left and within the Federal Republic as a whole. Considerable energy was spent analyzing the unsuccessful workers’ struggles in the chemical sector in 1971 and the failure of the legal left to respond to class oppression within the FRG. These weaknesses were pointed to as so many factors underscoring the necessity for armed politics.

A real attempt to find a strategic connection between class oppression, working class struggle (outside of the unions, of course) and the guerilla is apparent in all the RAF’s theoretical documents in this period.

This will not always be the case. In contradistinction to its anti-imperialism, this class orientation at times approximated left-communism in its focus on working class self-activity and alienation. Partly, the explanation for this can be found in the political experiences and trajectories of the core members of the RAF at this point: the sixties revolt and the APO, with their grounding in not only Marxism-Leninism and anti-imperialism, but also Frankfurt School Marxism, the “apprentices collectives,” and, via the SPK, radical therapy.

At the same time, the period between 1969 and 1973 was one of heightened class conflict in the FRG, beyond and at times against the trade union leadership, with wildcat strikes often being led by women, youth, and immigrant workers. Combined with the sudden turn of many former APO comrades to the new “proletarian” K-groups, this created a context in which it would have been difficult to elaborate a revolutionary strategy without dealing with the question of the working class.

As we shall see later on, some of the ideas in this document were soon qualified, if not rejected, while others were sharpened, finding their place in the centre of the RAF’s worldview.

Finally, ''Serve the People'' provides the RAF’s response to Karl-Heinz Ruhland, who had been turned into an instrument of police propaganda. Similarly, two drop-outs from the guerilla, Beate Sturm and Peter Homann, were also excoriated as traitors.

Unlike Ruhland, Sturm’s main crime seems to have been that, subsequent to leaving the RAF, she contacted the media, providing ''Spiegel'' with a highly unflattering portrait of the group.

Homann’s story, on the other hand, was more complex; some controversy about his falling out with the group remains even today. While there are radically different versions of the circumstances, it is clear that he was on very bad terms with his erstwhile comrades upon his return from the Jordan training trip in 1970. Immediately after this, he and his friend Stefan Aust traveled to Sicily where Meinhof’s seven-year-old twin daughters were being cared for by comrades. Pretending to be members of the RAF, the two men took Meinhof’s girls with them, delivering them to their father, ''konkret'' editor Klaus Rainer Röhl.

It seems likely that this direct intervention to thwart Meinhof’s plans for her children played some part in provoking his denunciation as a traitor in Serve the People. There are contradictory versions of why Homann did what he did,<ref>See Appendix V—Strange Stories: Peter Homann and Stefan Aust, on pages 557- 58.</ref> but regardless of the facts surrounding this initial “treason,” he would fully earn the sobriquet later that year, going so far as to provide the police with information, and to testify against the guerilla in court.<ref>United Press International, “Meinhof-Al Fatah Ties Described,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', October 19, 1972.</ref>

In retrospect, ''Serve the People'' is significant not so much in its contents, but in its timing, by which it serves as the end of a chapter. With its explanations of the bank robberies and the painstaking preparations undertaken, it allowed the guerilla to deal with some preliminary questions before moving on to grander schemes.

It would be the last theoretical document produced by the RAF outside of prison for almost ten years.

=== Andreas Baader: Letter to the Press ===
<blockquote>''The cops will continue to fumble about in the dark, until circumstances oblige them to see that the political situation has become a military situation.''

Marighella</blockquote>The truth of the matter is that no further information has come out about the group since the first twenty were trained in Jordan. The RAF’s work is clandestine. The “security forces,” the security agencies, the police, the BND, the Verfassungsschutz, the BAW, Spiegel, and the Springer Press know nothing.

They know nothing about the size, the number of members, the organization, the firepower, or the tactics of the group. Everything written about us by the police state for public consumption over the past year and a half is false, is speculation, or is counterpropaganda with the objective of discrediting the theory and practice of the urban guerilla and driving a wedge between us and our base.

I haven’t considered turning myself in. No RAF members have considered turning themselves in. So far no RAF prisoner has provided testimony. Announcements of successes against us have only been about arrests or killings. The guerilla’s strength lies in the determination of each of us. We are not on the run. We are here organizing armed resistance against the regime of the propertied classes and the ongoing exploitation of the people.

The RAF’s current activities are directed towards the formation of politico-military cadre, acquiring better arms and training for revolutionaries, and the anchoring of the group in a sympathetic scene that is ready to support armed resistance. The tactical line that we are currently following is to develop the propaganda of the urban guerilla through the revolutionary organizations that are still legal and to develop broad-based logistical support amongst all layers of the population.

None of us see any subjective or objective basis for betraying the struggle to which we have committed ourselves; not Genscher’s dirty amnesty deal, not Ruhland, the Social Democrats’ van der Lubbe,<ref>Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, confessed to the 1933 Reichstag fire under Gestapo torture. It remains unclear if he was, in fact, guilty. Karl-Heinz Ruhland, a fringe member of the RAF, under pressure from the BKA and with coaching from the BAW, provided clearly fabricated testimony against RAF prisoners during a series of trials.</ref> not the extensive militarization of the police, not prison, not torture, and not the police terror against the population. “The stones they have thrown will fall at their own feet.”<ref>This phrase, which will reoccur in a number of different forms in RAF documents over the years, comes from a speech Mao gave at the Meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. in Celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution on November 6, 1957: “‘Lifting a rock only to drop it on one’s own feet’ is a Chinese folk saying to describe the behaviour of certain fools. The reactionaries in all countries are fools of this kind. In the final analysis, their persecution of the revolutionary people only serves to accelerate the people’s revolutions on a broader and more intense scale. Did not the persecution of the revolutionary people by the tsar of Russia and by Chiang Kai-shek perform this function in the great Russian and Chinese revolutions?”</ref>
[[File:Baader Fingerprint on Letter to the Press.png|left|thumb]]
If the price for our lives or our freedom is to be the betrayal of the anticapitalist struggle, there is only one response: we won’t pay it.

The armed struggle does not develop from one headline to the next. The politico-military strategy of the urban guerilla is based in the resistance to parliamentary democracy’s fascist drift and the organization of the first regular units of the Red Army in the people’s war. The battle has just begun.

Andreas Baader

January 24, 1972

=== Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and the Class Struggle ===
<blockquote>''Everyone dies, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said, “Though death befalls all men alike, it may be heavier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.” To die for the people is heavier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascist and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.''

Mao tse Tung</blockquote><blockquote>''“The armed struggle is a technical issue and therefore requires technical knowledge: training, morale and last of all practice. In this area, improvisation has cost many lives and led to failed attacks. The ‘spontaneity’ that some people romanticize, speaking vaguely about the people’s revolution and ‘the masses,’ is either simply a dodge or it indicates that they have decided to rely upon improvisation during a critical phase of the class struggle. Every vanguard movement must, if they want to remain true to themselves at the decisive moment in the class struggle, analyze and understand the violence of the people, so as to correctly direct it against oppression, thereby achieving the goal with the least sacrifice possible.”''<ref>Although not referenced as such by the RAF, this is a quote from ''30 Questions to a Tupamaro'' (see page 128, fn 1).</ref></blockquote>'''ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!'''

20,000 die every year because the stockholders of the automobile industry only care about profit and, therefore, don’t stop to consider technical safety issues for automobiles or road construction. 5,000 people die every year at their workplace or on their way to or from it, because the owners of the means of production only consider their profits and don’t care about an increase or a decline in the number of accidental deaths. 12,000 commit suicide every year, because they don’t want to die in the service of capital; they’d rather just get it over with themselves. 1,000 children are murdered every year, as a result of living in low quality housing, the only purpose of which is to allow the landlord to pocket a large sum.

People treat death in the service of the exploiter as normal. The refusal to die in the service of the exploiter leads to what people think of as “unnatural deaths.” The desperate actions of people, coping with the working and living conditions that capital has created, are perceived as crimes. People feel there’s nothing to be done about the situation. To ensure that the incorrect perspective of the people is not replaced with a correct perspective, the Federal Minister of the Interior, the Länder Ministers of the Interior and the BAW have set up police death squads. Without this incorrect perspective about crime and death, the ruling class could not maintain its rule.

Petra, Georg, and Thomas died in the struggle against death at the hands of the exploiters. They were murdered so that capital could continue killing undisturbed, and so that people would continue to think that nothing can be done about the situation. But the struggle has begun!
[[File:Murdered - The Struggle Continues from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|center|thumb|''“Murdered—The Struggle Continues”: poster protesting the police killings of Petra Schelm, Thomas Weissbecker, and Georg von Rauch.'']]

# '''PERSIA AND THE CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN THE NEW LEFT'''

Brandt has flown to Tehran to visit the Shah and calm his remaining distress about the greeting he received from West German and West Berlin students during the summer of 67; to inform him that the left in the Federal Republic and in West Berlin is dead, that what remains will soon be liquidated, that the Confederation of Iranian Students<ref>The Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS) was a Maoist student organization based in the refugee communities and active on university campuses throughout the western world.</ref> is effectively isolated, and about the Foreigners Act that is in the works and that will allow for their legal liquidation.

In this way Brandt has revealed the true nature of his foreign and domestic policies; they are the foreign and domestic policies of the corporations meant to control foreign and external markets and to determine who holds political power.

In Tehran Brandt said, “The foreign policy of the Federal Republic must be based on its own interests and must remain free of ideological bias.” The interests of the Federal Republic in Persia are the interests of the German enclave in Tehran, which is to say Siemens, AEG-Telefunken, Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Bank, Mannesmann, Hochtief, Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz, Merck, Schering, Robert Bosch, the Bayerische Vereinsbank, Thyssen, Degussa, and others. They are the ones that had the greetings to the Chancellor published in Tehran’s newspapers.

The Shah also contributed a statement to the daily press celebrating the Chancellor as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, because the Shah also has no ideological biases; concerning cheap labor in Iran, concerning stable political conditions in Iran, not to mention raw materials and certain nearby markets.

Under “ideological biases,” the Chancellor and the Shah subsume the interests of the German and Persian peoples regarding the relationship between their two countries. Three days before Brandt’s arrival, four comrades were murdered in Tehran and Thomas Weissbecker was murdered in Augsburg. A week after Brandt’s return, nine death penalties were carried out against comrades in Tehran. Meanwhile, Attorney General Martin<ref>Ludwig Martin, Attorney General from 1963 until 1974, when he was replaced by Siegfried Buback.</ref> praised the police officers for so impressively proving their worth in the manhunts in Augsburg and Hamburg.

German capital in Persia is taxed at a lower rate than other capital in Persia. German development aid credit finances German projects in Persia; and the imperial arsenal in Persia is to be modernized with the help of the German military. A 22 million dm<ref>Roughly $6 million.</ref> investment in the Persian arms industry in 1969 meant 250 million dm<ref>Almost $69 million.</ref> in follow-up orders for the German arms industry. The Shah’s regime plans to use g-3s and mg-3s<ref>The g-3 is an assault rifle and the mg-3 is a machinegun.</ref> in the struggle against “crime” in Persia, so that in the future wages will remain low, political conditions will remain stable and the conditions of exploitation will remain favorable for German capital. Meaning that pressure for increased wages at home can be handled with threats to move production out of the country. Pressure will also be applied to the public at home, because antifascist protest against the Shah threatens the foreign policy interests of the Federal Republic of Germany.

After prostrating himself in Poland,<ref>This is a reference to the so-called ''Warshauer Kniefall'', the “Warsaw Genuflection,” Brandt’s December 1971 public atonement at the monument commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.</ref> the Chancellor now prostrates himself before the murderous Shah. The repression of the Polish, Russian, Czech, and Hungarian peoples by German fascism is no longer going on. The repression of the Persian people under German imperialism is what is going on now. The Nuremberg Conventions are no longer in effect, but laws against Iranian students, against Greek, Turkish, and Spanish workers, who all come from countries with fascist regimes, are a current reality. German corporations profit from the fascism in these countries, controlling foreign workers here with the threat of what the fascism at home means for them. They are safe from the death penalty, which imprisoned comrades here are spared, but which is enforced in Persia, Turkey, Greece, and Spain.

The West German left met Brandt’s Persian trip with silence. They left him free to babble twaddle. They let Howeida<ref>Amir Abbas Howeida, Prime Minister of Iran during the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi. He was executed in 1979 following the Islamic revolution.</ref> babble twaddle about how the death penalty is only used against common criminals. Given that the Shah is sensitive, given that the 2nd of June disturbed the relationship between Germany and Iran, given that the Shah’s reputation is hardly stellar, as would have to be the case, given that, as everyone knows, enemies of the people dread being called enemies of the people, given that one can presume that even Brandt wasn’t all that comfortable with the hypocrisy, given that German capital is predisposed to fascism, and given that it’s relatively easy to demonstrate the connection between fascism in Iran and German capital in Iran… given all these things, nobody can defend the relationship without presenting themselves in a poor light.

The intellectual left came to the conclusion that only the proletarian masses can change the current situation, that only the West German masses can expropriate the profits that the corporations make from the Shah’s fascism—a situation from which the Shah’s fascism also profits. With this realization, the left stopped criticizing the Shah’s fascism and the domination imposed by West German capitalism in the Third World. With the realization that the resistance of the West German masses against the rule of capital would not be sparked by the problems of the Third World, but only by the problems developing here, they stopped posing the problems of the Third World as a factor in politics here.

This shows both the dogmatism and the parochialism of a section of the left. The fact that the working class in West Germany and West Berlin can only think and act in the national context, while capital thinks and acts in a multinational context, is first and foremost an example of the splitting of the working class, as well as of the weakness of a left that only focuses on capital’s domestic policies in its critique and ignores capital’s foreign policy, thus internalizing the split in the working class. They tell the working class only half of the truth about the system, about what capitalist policy means for the working class on a daily basis and what it means for wage demands in the foreseeable future.

The contradiction facing the New Left is that their basic economic analysis and political assessment is more radical and incisive than anything produced by the West German left prior to the 66/67 recession. This left experienced the end of the postwar reconstruction phase and the strengthening of West German imperialism and understood that they had to base themselves on the extraordinary class struggle, which led to them restricting their propaganda and organizational efforts to the national context. As a result, they have an unimaginative and narrow view of what revolutionary methods of intervention are possible.

In their efforts to give a scientific orientation to the anticapitalist protest—which reaches into the schools, the unions and the SPD— to maintain and develop their position in the high schools, they used Marxism to make the history of the working class more accessible to teachers and students. They hoped in this way to gain a foothold in the factories and schools.

Through these activities they show a willingness to act and to intervene that stands in contradiction to their actual methods of intervention, which remain those that were appropriate for the working class during the phase of competitive capitalism and parliamentarianism. They were appropriate in the period when Rosa Luxemburg, looking at the mass strikes in Russia in 1905, recognized the immense importance of strikes in the political struggle and Lenin recognized the importance of union struggles. It is the contradiction between their use of the German working class as their historical reference point, and the increasing tendency today of West German capitalism to organize itself in the form of West German imperialism.

A section of the left still sees the RAF as Baader and Meinhof’s personal thing and—like Howeida, the ''Bild'' and the ''BZ''—discusses armed struggle as if it were a form of criminal activity. In a similar vein, they also attribute our activity to faulty reasoning and misrepresent our positions. As a result, they will fail to resolve the contradiction between what they know to be the state of the class struggle, and what they perceive to be the revolutionary methods of intervention. They transform the objective problem that we all face into our subjective problem alone. They conduct themselves as if they fear the difficult task ahead of them—they bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about it. The denunciation of the concept of the urban guerilla within a section of the left succeeds far too easily and without much thought, thereby allowing us to see the growing distance between their theory and their practice, a distance that we do not believe can be closed by our efforts alone. Their claim that they are actually involved in this debate proves, we think, that we and they have different self-perceptions.

A year ago, we said that the urban guerilla unites the national and international class struggle. The urban guerilla makes it possible for the people to become aware of the interconnectedness of imperialist rule. The urban guerilla is the revolutionary form of intervention suited to an overall position of weakness. An advance in the class struggle only occurs if legal and illegal work are connected, if political propaganda has a perspective that includes armed struggle and if political organization includes the possibility of the urban guerilla. This was made clear through the concrete example of the chemical workers strike in 1971, which showed the objective reality of the social question, the subjective reality of the question of capitalist ownership and the militarization of the class struggle in West Germany and West Berlin.<blockquote>''In the current phase of history no one can any longer deny that an armed group, however small it may be, has more of a chance of becoming a people’s army than a group that has been reduced to spouting revolutionary rhetoric.''

30 Questions to a Tupamaro<ref>The Tupamaros were a guerilla group in Uruguay at the time. This short interview started circulating as an internal document in 1967, and was first made public in a Chilean journal in mid-1968. Within a few years, it had become a text of some importance to the revolutionary edge of the New Left in the metropole.</ref></blockquote>'''2. THE CHEMICAL WORKERS STRIKE OF 1971'''

The widespread strikes in the chemical and metal industries in 1971— among the most developed industries in West Europe—made it clear what the problems facing the working class will be in the coming years. They exhibited a widespread readiness to struggle on the part of the workforce, while simultaneously showing the economic and political advantages the chemical and metal industries have vis-à-vis the working class; they showed the complicity of the union bureaucracies with the Social-Liberal government and the role of the government as the executive organ of this “corporate state.”

The workers lost the strikes. They struck for 11 and 12 percent, and the unions settled with the employers for 7.8 and 7.5 percent. The situation that socialists in the Federal Republic and West Berlin will face in coming years was certainly clarified by this strike: subjectively, an increase in readiness to struggle on the part of the working class and, objectively, the reduced capacity to struggle; objectively, a decrease in wages and the loss of “vested social rights,” subjectively, increased class antagonism and class hatred.

Economically speaking, the strength of the chemical industry was the result of the trends towards concentration and the export of capital which have been forced upon the entire West European economy by North American competition. Politically, it was the result of the lessons that West German industry drew from May 68 in France and the wildcat strikes of September 69. Their counteroffensive against the September strikes here certainly increased class consciousness.

''Concentration''

Due to their size and technological advantages, the large American industrialists can achieve lower production costs despite paying higher wages. Hugh Stephenson of Time magazine:<blockquote>''the problem of size is not essentially one of the size of factory installations, rather the key is understanding the grandeur of the financial and economic factors that stand behind this. A large volume of business means almost nothing. However, it does have advantageous implications regarding dominant market position. And that is an advantage that can’t be achieved without substantial investment in modern industry, even if it is not in the area of developing technologies. The type of competition between industrialists in developing branches of industry, such as the automobile, chemical and oil industries, has completely changed. The cost of new investments is so high for the enterprises involved that as stable a future market as the intense competition allows for must be guaranteed. Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that European industry must in the future enter a phase of concentration into fewer and larger groups.''

''Die Welt'', February 23, 1972

</blockquote>''Public Funds''

Concentration is the first reality. The influx of public funds to cover the costs of research and development is the second. North American industries have access to greater funds of this variety as a result of their size and the U.S.A.’s permanent war economy. In 1963-64, the U.S.A. used 3.3 percent of its gross national product for research purposes—compared to an average of 1.5 percent in West Europe. Hugh Stephenson:<blockquote>''In the area of developing technologies, Europe will never be able to deal with the immense and ever-growing research and development costs if a constant flow of public funds is not guaranteed.''</blockquote>If not, then it would be better to just sign deals with American firms right away. That is the pressure that today’s economy places on the state. Concentration and state subsidies have become a question of survival for capitalist West Europe.

''The Export of Capital''

The third thing is the export of capital. This entails cooperation with foreign industries and building factories in foreign countries, with the aim of profiting from the cheaper raw materials and lower wages available in these countries, and of reducing transportation costs by buying from foreign markets.

Because the chemical industry stands at the forefront of this development, the chemical workers strike of 1971 had a central significance. It serves as an example of an entire trend, from the chemical companies’ strike preparations in December 1970, through the purge of teachers who are members of the DKP from the public service and the incorporation of the BGS into the federal police force, from the first signs of fascism in the Federal Republic to the CSU seizing control of ''Bayerischen Rundfunk'',<ref>''Bayerischen Rundfunk'': Bavarian Broadcasting, the public radio station in Bavaria.</ref> from the refusal to allow Mandel to teach at the Free University to the application of the death penalty to the Red Army Faction.

As a result of this, in the coming years increasing numbers of people from all levels of society, with the exception of the owners of capital, will find themselves dissatisfied with the structure of ownership. It therefore follows that it is tactically and strategically incorrect not to treat the question of ownership, which is now addressed with trivial and wishy washy arguments about co-management<ref>The practice of union representatives having a vote on the corporate boards dates from the late 1940s. Also referred to as co-determination.</ref> and “protecting what we’ve begun,” as the general and ongoing central issue. The situation has also led to a development whereby anyone who profits from these circumstances can conceal that fact.

''Bayer – BASF– Farbwerke Hoechst''

The chemical industry is among the industries with the highest levels of concentration in West Germany. The market share of just three, IG Farben-Nachfolger Bayer, Farbwerke Hoechst, and BASF, makes up 50 percent of the industrial sector. These three chemical corporations are among the four largest companies incorporated in the Federal Republic.

Of the 597,000 employed in the sector, 200,000 work for the big three. They control over 50 percent of the funds for research and development in the chemical industry. In the years 1965-70 alone, BASF gained control of business and corporate concerns that conducted 4 billion dm<ref>Roughly $1.45 billion.</ref> worth of business, which was more than it had itself been conducting in 1965.

Regarding the cooperation between the state and the chemical corporations, the 1969 Federal Research Report states:<blockquote>''In the chemical industry one can speak of a genuine division of labor between state-funded basic research and industrial research. The chemical industry can only continue their recent rate of growth and retain their international importance if a high level of (state-supported) basic research continues.''</blockquote>What export of capital means in the chemical industry is that while in 1970 West German industry did 19.3 percent of their business outside of Germany, for Farbwerke Hoechst it was 44 percent, for BASF 50 percent, for Bayer 56 percent. South Africa, Portugal, Turkey, Iran, and Brazil are some the places where they have production facilities.

The Federal Republic also provides military aid to Portugal, Turkey and Iran. Obviously, this military aid serves to ensure conditions of exploitation beneficial to West German capital in these countries, which is to say, holding wages down and gunning down workers who resist. It is also clear that since the mid-60s this military aid has also served to build up “security forces,” which is to say the police, who conduct the anti-guerilla war under the guise of fighting crime, saying whatever is necessary to support that position: there is no resistance, the masses are completely satisfied, it’s only a question of criminals and crime.

American military aid to Iran was given to support the campaign against drug dealing and smuggling, and Brandt has no “ideological biases” if the execution of revolutionaries is disguised as sentences carried out against criminals. Scheel spoke recently—in the context of the signing of a contract, in which the Federal Republic secured future Brazilian uranium discoveries—of the common interest of the Federal Republic and the Brazilian military junta in resisting “terrorism and subversive activities,” which is in reaction to the Latin American guerillas who laid bombs at the BASF installation.

Together with American corporations, the West German chemical corporations control almost the entire chemical and pharmaceutical market in Iran. Iran is the site of the greatest rate of expansion of western interests; South Africa offers the highest rate of profit—Volkswagen for example averaged dividends of 30 percent last year, and in 1968 they were as high as 45 percent. Between what they produce and what they sell, the West German chemical and pharmaceutical industry controls 10 to 12 percent of the South American market.

Pressure on wages and the reduction of the wage-cost ratio in production was achieved through the exploitation of lower wage standards in foreign countries, through guest workers, and through investments at home, all of which the chemical industry has used in recent years to achieve a 75 percent increase in capacity, as well as rationalization and redundancy in the labor force.

The figures: between 1950 and 1970, the number of people employed in the chemical industry increased by only 100 percent, compared to an increase in sales of 636 percent. In general, the tendency is for the number of people to decrease. The closing of Phrixwerke made the headlines. Hüls announced this February that in 1972 the number of people it employs will decrease by 3 to 4 percent. The chemical industry speaks of the “the increasing importance of labor costs.” This indicates that they intend lay-offs and wage rollbacks. They entered the 1971 round of negotiations with the aim of asserting their concept of “labor costs,” which is to say, with the hope of putting the working class on the defensive through a massive attack.

''The Strength of the Capitalist Class''

Concentration as the precondition for a strong negotiating position for capital requires nothing more than a unified position on the part of the employers, in a situation where the Employers Association is controlled by the corporations that control the market: Bayer, BASF and Hoechst. Export of capital is a source of strength for the chemical industry, given that it creates a situation in which the working class that confronts it is not the industry’s only source of profit. In the workers’ struggle, the elimination of competition between wage workers always finds its practical limits within national borders, and so a strike only stops a part of capital’s profitable production. While the workers gamble everything, capital only gambles part of what it has.

Just because the chemical industry ruthlessly uses its strengths to gain the upper hand politically is absolutely no reason for whining. It is an error to see the chemical companies as especially evil because they make use of slave labor in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to put pressure on wages, because they use investments to get the labor force off their backs, and because they use concentration to secure economic and political mobility and flexibility. The brutality of their exploitative behavior—in the form of political repression and pressure to reduce the costs of social reproduction—indicates the effect of North American competition on West Europe’s economy, as well as the rationalization of the sector, its products, and the market. It is an integral part of the inhumanity and criminality of the system and will only be eliminated when the system is eliminated, or it will not be eliminated at all.

The chemical industry prepared meticulously for the strike; it was they and not the unions that wanted the strike, and they and not the unions that won the strike. The workers suffered a setback. Everybody played different roles against them: capital, the government and the union bureaucracy.

''Preparing for the Strike''

In February 71, the unions called for a wage increase beginning March 31 in Hessen, North Rhine and Rhineland Palatinate, demanding 11 to 12 percent, and for Hessen a flat 120 marks,<ref>Roughly $43. Regarding the flat rate: wage increases in many German industries were indexed by workers’ “skill category,” which meant that every wage increase in fact served to increase the divide between different layers of the working class. The demand for a flat wage increase was meant to counter this trend, as such an increase would benefit all workers equally. On this, see Roth, 116-117</ref> which for Hessen meant the same wage increase for all wage levels, the freezing of wage cuts and a step forward in the unity of the working class. The chemical industry refused to make any deal.

In December 70, the chemical industry had already created “mutual support systems” between their companies in case of a strike. This took the form of transferring money related to wage payments to the development and conversion of raw materials, to the production of primary and intermediate products, and to the setting aside of capital for production facilities and transportation. They also provided their customers with an 8-week stock of their products, including the smaller clients such as drugstores and universities—the rector of Düsseldorf University, for example, called upon the institutes and seminars to stock up as a precautionary measure.

Operating measures were worked out in detail: instruction manuals for strike breakers, secure plant telephone systems, a list of the names of union representatives, facilities to print leaflets, contacts with the local press and opinion-makers such as teachers, ministers and associations. Lists were drawn up of supposed members of an “underground political force” to be forwarded to the ''Verfassungsschutz'' and the police. Contacts with the police, government departments, and Interior Ministers. A line of argument was also developed about the “danger to the workplace posed by the strike,” etc.

In December 70, the union representatives at Farbwerke Hoechst polled their members regarding the proposed wage demands. The Wage Commission—made up of representatives from the IG Chemie trade union and the larger companies—refused the demands. The vote with which the demands were rejected wasn’t even close: 4 to 1. The union representatives from Merck in Darmstadt demanded 160 marks<ref>Roughly $58.</ref> or 12 percent. They also had little luck with the Wage Commission.

''State Support for the Capitalist Class''

The Employers Association received state support. The basic 9 percent wage increase projected in the government’s wage guidelines was reduced to 7.5 percent at the beginning of the year. Brandt, on May 11 in parliament: “In the current phase, wage costs that are too high risk causing underemployment.” The experts in their opinions supported the chemical industry, stating that “a very slow reduction in the rate of wage increases” is not enough, but that “extreme measures are necessary.” (May 71)

In May, the chemical industry made an offer of 5 percent, and IG Chemie issued a press release stating that they wouldn’t insist upon 11 or 12 percent, but would accept 8 or 9 percent

''The Betrayal of Rhineland Palatinate''

On May 24, however, Rhineland Palatinate—to great public surprise— signed a wage contract for 7.8 percent over ten months, which on the basis of a real duration of twelve months is 6.5 percent, less than that suggested in Schiller’s<ref>2 Karl Schiller was the SPD’s Federal Minister of Economic Affairs and Minister of Finance at the time. His reference data would presumably have determined the government’s wage guidelines.</ref> reference data. Rhineland Palatinate is controlled by BASF. BASF won’t accept strikes.

Bayer and Hoechst also later avoided strikes. The employees of the large companies don’t want the humiliation of a setback during a strike; they have been disciplined by a broad and diverse system of pacification: company housing, purported profit sharing, training grants, a body of company representatives alongside the unions, the organization of the workplace whereby the employees are split into hundreds of separate factory units, a wage system split into different wage levels, separate low wage groups for men and women.

The chemical industry in Hessen circulated to its own employees the leaflet that the IG Chemie trade union had prepared for its members regarding this outcome. The Wage Commission in North Rhine and Hessen bristled at the outcome in Rhineland Palatinate. They talked about options for struggle, but didn’t prepare them. IG Chemie simply demanded that their members get their dues in order and recruit new members.

''The Strike''

In the face of the chemical industry’s resistance, federal government arbitration eventually failed in North Rhine and Hessen, and later in Westphalia and Hamburg. Following the failure of federal government arbitration, the strike began. From the beginning of June until the beginning of July, a total of 50,000 workers in these four areas were on strike and 150,000 were involved in support actions. In North Rhine they struck for 9 percent, in Hessen for a flat increase of at least 120 marks,<ref>Roughly $43.</ref> or 11 percent, and in the other areas for 11 or 12 percent. It was the first strike in the chemical industry in 40 years, since the wage struggles at the beginning and end of the 1920s.

The organizational initiative didn’t come from the unions; it came from the workers. At Glanzstoff in Oberbruch, it started with 120 skilled workers, who spontaneously walked out on June 3. Later, when the union called for a work stoppage in the key sectors, other workers spontaneously joined the strike. At Dynamit Nobel in Troisdorf, the action began with a spontaneous walkout on the part of skilled workers in the explosives factories. At Clouth-Gummiwerken in Cologne, where the strike lasted 4 weeks, it began with the mill workers. At Degussa in Wolfgang, small groups of skilled workers walked out of the various production centres, calling for a demonstration against the factory committee and the union representatives. At Braun in Melsungen, it began with workers in the engineering building. In Glanzstoff in Kelsterbach, the action began with a sit-down strike by some Spanish workers. In Merck, at Farbwerken Hoechst, the action began with different small groups. In some factories the strike lasted for the entire month of June.

On June 8, 10,000 workers took part in a mass IG Chemie trade union demonstration at the Cologne Arena. On June 14, there was a day of action in North Rhine; 19,000 workers from 38 factories joined the strike. On June 16, 10,000 workers again participated in a second mass IG Chemie demonstration in Cologne. Simultaneously, 16,000 took part in actions in Hessen—4,000 workers from Farbwerke Hoechst participated in a union demonstration; it was the first time in 50 years that there was a strike at Hoechst—even if it only lasted a few hours. At the end of June, 38,000 workers were on strike in Hessen, North Rhine, Hamburg and Westphalia. If one considers the dubious behavior of the union bureaucracy, and the fact that the strike initiative came from small groups, these are impressive numbers.

At Merck, the employees were pressured by the chairman of the factory committee to back the union’s demands. The strike motion put forward by strike leaders at Bayer in Leverkusen wasn’t accepted by the regional strike headquarters. Many didn’t want to strike, because they felt not enough was being demanded. Many didn’t want to strike, because they feared it would end in a rotten compromise. That activities were restricted to isolated actions at Farbwerken Hoechst and at Bayer in Leverkusen—the largest factories in Hessen and North Rhine— demoralized many people. The corporations’ system of pacification paid off.

During the strike, the chemical industry took every possible step to remain on the offensive—and to keep the unions on the defensive. Pressure was kept on the workers by claims that the strike was illegal because no strike vote had been held—at IG Chemie, a strike vote is not required, as is also the case at IG Metall. At Hoechst, the argument that there could be “no strike without a strike vote” prevented the strike. The strike leadership at Merck treated the issue of rights as an issue of power in the class struggle: “In the workers’ struggle, and everything is in the wording, we are governed first and foremost by the opinion of the majority, or more specifically the strikers.” IG Chemie can only conceive of things in terms of their own bylaws.

The chemical industry made equal use of legal and illegal methods; Merck spread rumors about injuries; they claimed that stones had been placed on the tracks of the factories’ rail system, that “anticorporate elements” had engaged in sabotage and that strike centres were defended with bicycle chains and brass knuckles. At Glanzstoff in Oberbruch, rumors were spread about shootings. Police units ensured that strike breakers could gain access to the factories at Merck and Glanzstoff. The Kripo photographed and attacked strike centres. Buses carrying strike breakers drove into strike centres (Glanzstoff). Company management at Merck disrupted radio communication between strike centres and increased plant security. Riot police stood at the ready. Outside workers were brought in as strike breakers. An encampment was forced off the factory premises. At Glanzstoff, the police units were so vicious that young police officers were crying and older ones had to be replaced before the police could clear a path for the strike breakers.

''Class Justice''

An injunction issued by the Labor Court ensured strike breakers access to the factories, sanctioned the use of police units, and criminalized strike actions. In Merck, following this injunction, IG Chemie accepted a settlement, the contents of which did not respect the work stoppage— the entry for strike breakers—and held that if anything the injunction sanctioned the unions. As a result, union strike leaders of Merck in Rükken said regarding the injunction, “The eyes of the law look out from the face of the ruling class.” (Ernst Bloch)<ref>Ernst Bloch was an important 20th century German Marxist theorist and art critic who counted the much younger Rudi Dutschke among his friends and intellectual peers.</ref> “We accuse society’s leaders of violence; the violence begins and ends with society’s leaders.” Regarding the injunction, they said, “The injunction makes a mockery of the right to work, using it to permit strike breakers. But the employers refuse to protect the real right to work. Where was the right to work during the crisis of 1966-67?”

The mayor of Darmstadt followed a declaration of state and police neutrality with the threat that surely no one wanted a vacation in the hospital.

The workers at Merck, resisting the police, sometimes with the support of students, continued to block the entry of strike breakers. The fact that they conducted their strike aggressively indicates that the workers had no doubts about the legitimacy of their actions. In response to this, 17 apprentices and young workers from Merck were illegally terminated after the strike ended.

As the unions gradually scaled back their demands, and while the workers were still striking, the chemical industry announced without further ado that, as of June 1, wages would be increased by 6.5 percent. Corruption proceedings launched by the workers were an overall failure. The workers were no match for the machinations of the union leadership. The latter released a Communiqué on Concerted Action in what amounted to a call for the workers to accept defeat and end the strike: “The language of the Common Concerted Action was completely the work of the employers and the unions, to make sure that not everyone will benefit from the anticipated rise in prices and incomes being created by the boom, but rather that everyone will be subjected to the dictates of a phase of macroeconomic consolidation.”

At the beginning of July, the Board of Directors of IG Chemie reached an agreement with the chemical industry: 7.8 percent = wage guidelines = the outcome at Rhineland Palitinate. The Merck strike leadership sent a protest telegram to the board requesting that the decision be rescinded. At Clouth-Gummiwerken, the union traitors were shouted down when the outcome was announced. The strike was over.

The chemical industry had achieved its goal. They wanted the first strike in the chemical industry, the first strike by chemical workers of this generation, to end in defeat, because “given the increasing importance of labor costs, they must consider the possibility that in future wage negotiations in the chemical industry, serious confrontations, possibly even labor disputes, may prove unavoidable” [from: ''Hilfeleistung im Arbeitskampf'' <ref>Support During Labor Disputes.</ref> ]—because for the chemical industry this strike was not an isolated incident, but rather one step in a long term strategy of struggle against the working class. In the words of the Deutsche Bank’s spokesman, Ulrich, “It requires many steps, each of which must be large enough to reach the goal—rates of increase of only two or three percent.” (February 72)

The workers didn’t achieve what they hoped for: more unity—that was the objective of the 120 mark demand in Hessen; wage increases that do not lag behind price increases—that was the objective of the entire strike movement; close relations—unity and not separation between the workers from Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst; success.

This wage agreement is an expression of the actual power relations between the classes. One could say that capital has almost all of it and the workers almost none: capital has closed ranks and “concentrated,” while the working class suffers from numerous divisions; capital has powerful organizations that are firmly in control, while the workers have unions that are out of their control, with a bureaucracy and a leadership that, like the current government, advance anti-worker policies; capital has the state, and the state is against the working class; capital is organized internationally, while the working class is still only able to organize in the national context; capital has a clear, long term strategy and uses propaganda to promote it at every opportunity, with the goal of attacking the working class; the workers can counter this only with their rage—that is all they have.

''The Militarization of the Class Struggle''

In spite of capital’s strength and the weakness of the working class, the state is arming itself and preparing for the militarization of the class struggle. The political means correspond with the economic facts: capital’s aggression. The political facts signal the extent and the strength of the attack.

The less the common good—which is to say general affluence, increasing income, and improved living conditions for all—is addressed by capitalist policy, the more it must be promoted, so as to reduce possibilities for criticizing the methods employed by capital. Therefore, critical journalists have been fired everywhere; therefore the schools have been cleared of leftists; therefore, the CSU has seized control of the ''Bayerischen Rundfunk'', which can only signal the beginning of the acquisition of ARD stations by the ZDF<ref>2 The ARD is the ''Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland'' (Consortium of PublicLaw Broadcasting Institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany); ''Bayerischen Rundfunk'' is a member of the ARD. ZDF is the ''Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen'' (Second German Television), owned by Deutche Telekom; it is commercial TV, partially funded through advertising.</ref>—even if the process can’t proceed as quickly in other ''Länder''.

To the extent that the system can no longer purchase the loyalty of the masses, they must be coerced. As it will no longer be given willingly, it will be gained through threats of violence; the BGS will be transformed into a federal police force and increased from a force of 23,000 to a force of 30,000; the police will be armed with submachine guns, and the citizenry should become as accustomed to seeing submachine gun-armed police on street corners as they are of paying taxes;<ref>This is a reference to a statement by Willy Weyer, Interior Minister of North-Rhine-Westphalia, who stated that “Citizens must get as used precisely to the sight of policemen with machine pistols as they are to paying tax.” (Cobler, 141).</ref> penal law will be stiffened; emergency exercises will be conducted using sharpshooters; comrades will be taken into preventive custody; RAF suspects will be subject to the death penalty.

To the extent that people have no further reason, once capitalism is finally enforced in West Germany, to continue being anticommunist, communists must be forcibly separated from the people. Therefore, the left is being pushed out of the factories. Therefore the price the DKP must pay to remain legal will get higher and higher (and it is apparent that they’ll pay any price). Therefore, the chemical industry threatens the Free University; they will not hire Free University graduates if peace and order are not re-established at the Free University.

To the degree that the ideas of the communist alternative win ground as a result of the system’s own contradictions, the liberated spaces from which such ideas can be propagated must be closed; therefore Mandel should not be permitted to teach at the Free University; therefore the president of the university in Frankfurt calls in the police to make sure that exams supported by industry are written; therefore Löwenthal<ref>Gerhard Löwenthal was a German journalist and a ZDF news anchor from 1969 until 1988.</ref> rants about the Spartacus Youth,<ref>“Spartacus Youth”: the DKP’s student section, by far the largest self-styled communist organization active on campuses during this period.</ref> and Löwenthal’s cameramen attack students to get photos of as many violent scenes that can be used to incite the people as possible.

After ten years of employing foreigners in the Federal Republic— since the wall in 1961<ref>The construction of the Berlin Wall cut off the flow of refugees from the East that had been providing a reservoir of cheap labor up until that time. This signaled the beginning of a guest worker policy of recruiting cheap labor from southern Europe, Turkey, and elsewhere.</ref>—the accident rate of foreigners has reached a level double that of German workers, which is already high enough, and they still live in ghettos and discrimination is still prevalent in the factories and neighborhoods. As foreign workers have now begun to organize to better protect themselves, the Basic Law is to be changed to make it easier to monitor foreigners’ organizations, so as to make it easier to dismantle them, something that is already possible with the fascist laws governing foreigners and the anticommunist law governing association.

Capitalist propagandists use the narrow opportunity that the Red Army Faction affords them to argue that their core problem, the escalation of the class struggle, is caused by us, and that the rise of right wing radicalism is a response to us. This is objectively the argument of the class enemy and subjectively an entirely shallow approach based on nothing more than the superficial assessment of the issues found in the bourgeois press.

''The Legal Left and Public Enemy No. 1''

In the face of capital’s offensive, the legal left is not just on the defensive, it is objectively helpless. They respond with their leaflets and their newspapers and their agitation among the workers, in which they say all the blame lies with capital, which is true, that the workers must organize themselves, that the social democratic line must be overcome in the factories, that the workers must learn to conduct economic struggles so as to regain their class consciousness—all of which is important work. But proposing it as the only form of political work it is shortsighted.

They see semi-automatic pistols and say, “Organize the economic struggle.” They see the emergency exercises and say, “Class consciousness.” They see fascism and say, “Don’t bring the class struggle to a head.” They see war preparations and say, “Develop a policy of unity with the middle class.” They see Labor Court and Federal Labor Court decisions that will ban future strikes and say, “Legality.”

The counterrevolution believes that it is possible to get rid of all of the problems that it itself produces, and no means is too dirty in achieving that goal. But they can’t wait until fascism has really been established and the masses have been mobilized in their service. They need the security offered by a monopoly of weapons and armed violence—so that the rage of the working class, which they did so much to provoke, does not lead the working class to the idea, and with the idea, the means: the idea of the revolutionary guerilla’s armed struggle, striking from the shadows and not easily caught, imposing accountability, demoralizing the police, and resisting their violence with counterviolence.

Genscher would not be the Minister of the Interior of the ruling class if he were not prepared to use unimaginable measures to take us “out of circulation,” if he hadn’t declared us Public Enemy No. 1 even before we did anything, if he hadn’t indicated that he was prepared to do anything, to engage in any action, to isolate us from the left, the labor force and the people, if he wasn’t prepared to murder us. This situation will surely get worse.

But they can no longer continue their war preparations covertly, and they cannot continue to act within their own legal parameters. They are obliged to violate their own system, and in so doing they show their true colors as enemies of the people—and the left creates accurate propaganda at a high dialectical level, as ought to be the case, when they say: this terror is not directed against the RAF, but rather against the working class. Obviously its target isn’t the RAF, but rather the development of the coming class struggle. This is why the idea of armed struggle is met with all the violence the system is currently capable of, in order to prevent the working class from embracing it.

We’re not feeling edgy; the system is feeling nervous.

Capital can’t wait until it has established fascism because American competition won’t wait. The hysteria of the system doesn’t make our strategy or tactics incorrect. And the system is not incorrect in making it incredibly difficult for us to anchor the guerilla in the masses. Knowing this, it is not incorrect to develop resistance, given that the war will be a protracted war.

What could comrades be waiting for in a country that allowed Auschwitz to occur without resistance? Doesn’t the current workers’ movement bring with it the history of the German workers’ movement and this police force the history of the SS?<blockquote>Communists struggle for the satisfaction of the goals and interests of the working class immediately at hand, but they also show the way forward for the movement as well as its future.

''Communist Manifesto''</blockquote>That is what we mean by SERVE THE PEOPLE.

'''3. THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP AND THE MILITARIZATION OF THE CONFLICT'''

The argument that the Federal Republic is not Latin America obscures local conditions more than it clarifies them. This is indicated by (and the debate is liberally seasoned with these): “The same horrifying poverty doesn’t exist here as does there”; “Here the enemy is not a foreign power”; “Here the state is not so hated by the people”; “We are not ruled by a military dictatorship here as is the case in many Latin American countries.”

Meaning: conditions there are so intolerable that violence is the only option—here things are still good enough that the conditions are not ripe for violence.

In the Rowohlt<ref>A prominent German publishing company</ref> volume ''Zerschlagt die Wohlstandsinseln der iii''. Welt,<ref>Destroy the Islands of Wealth in the Third World.</ref> which includes Marighella’s ''Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla,'' it says in the preface that the decision to publish his text is a protest against arrests and torture in Brazil, not a guide for action here, “however weak parliamentary democracy may be and whatever threat is posed by its own economic system.”—“To use counterviolence (the Latin American urban guerilla model) which is meant to be used against a terrorist capitalist ruling class, in a country where one can discuss workers’ participation, is to make a mockery of the wretched of the earth.”

Following this logic, to bomb BASF in Ludwigshafen would be to mock the people who bombed BASF in Brazil. The Latin American comrades feel differently. BASF does as well.

The argument that the Federal Republic is not Latin America is advanced by people who speak about current affairs from a perspective in which their monthly income is secure, and who speak in a way which keeps it secure; it is an example of human coldness and intellectual arrogance in the face of the problems of people here. Reality in the Federal Republic is in this way factually and analytically removed from the table. An analysis of questions here must be based on the objective relevance of social questions, on the subjective relevance of the question of ownership, and on the militarization of the class struggle.

''Poverty in the Federal Republic''

The objective relevance of social questions means the reality of poverty in the Federal Republic. The fact that this poverty is largely hidden doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. The fact that there is no chance that this poverty will lead to social revolution is no reason to act as if it doesn’t exist.

Jürgen Roth,<ref>Jürgen Roth is a German investigative journalist.</ref> in his book ''Armut in der Bundesrepublik''<ref>Poverty in the Federal Republic.</ref> has assembled almost everything that needs to be said on this topic. 14 million people in the Federal Republic and West Berlin are living in poverty today. 1.1 million people living in rural areas must get by on 100 to 400 marks<ref>Roughly $35 to $140.</ref> per month; these are the families of small farmers and people retired from sharecropping. 4.66 million households with an average of three members must get by on a monthly net income of less than 600 marks;<ref>Roughly $220.</ref> that is 21 percent of all households. Over 5 million pensioners have a monthly pension of around 350 marks.<ref>Roughly $127.</ref> To this add 600,000 people in low-income housing projects, 450,000 in homeless shelters, 100,000 institutionalized children, 100,000 in mental asylums, 50,000 adults in prison and 50,000 youth in reform schools. Those are the official figures. Everyone knows that official figures in this area are always underestimates. In Bremen, 11,000 people receive heating subsidies because they can’t afford to buy coal. The Munich Housing Bureau calculates that the number of homeless will increase from 7,300 to 25,000. In Cologne, in 1963, 17,000 lived in low-income housing projects.

In the Nordweststadt neighborhood in Frankfurt one pays 460 marks<ref>Roughly $167</ref> rent for two rooms totaling about 60 square metres. In Nordweststadt the electricity metres are found in the basement. In almost every highrise at least one electricity metre is turned off, regardless of whether there are small children in the apartment and regardless of whether it is winter. The city of Frankfurt turns off the electricity to 50 homes every day; approximately 800 families a month have their electricity cut.

Approximately 5,000 vagrants live in Frankfurt. At night, water is used to drive them from the area where they sleep on the B level of the Hauptwache pedestrian mall. When the police leave, they come back, lie newspapers on the wet ground, and go back to sleep.

7 million homes in the Federal Republic have neither a bath nor a toilet. 800,000 families live in barracks. In Frankfurt, 20,000 people are searching for homes. In Düsseldorf, it’s 30,000.

600,000 people in the Federal Republic suffer from schizophrenia. If schizophrenia is not treated it is debilitating. 3 percent of the population is unable to work or pursue a career. 5 to 6 million people require some form of psychological support. Some psychiatric institutions have only 0.75 square metres of space per patient.

High school teachers estimate that 80 percent of working class children do not attend classes.

Poverty in the Federal Republic is not decreasing; it is increasing. Demand for housing is increasing. The need for schools is increasing. Child abuse is increasing. At the end of 1970, 7,000 cases were reported; it is estimated that in reality there were 100,000. It is also estimated that 1,000 children are beaten to death each year.

“To describe the school system in the Federal Republic is to describe poverty in a rich country,” says Luc Jochimsen<ref>Lukrezia Jochimsen was a sociologist and TV journalist. Today she is a member of parliament for the left-wing Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (PDS).</ref> in her book ''Hinterhöfe der Nation'',<ref>Backyards of the Nation.</ref> which provides the necessary details:<blockquote>''The public education system is a slum with the characteristics of any slum: deprivation, budget shortfalls, shortages, obsolescence, crowding, disrepair, discontent, resignation, indifference, and ruthlessness.''

''What occurs today with six- and seven-year-olds in the primary schools of the Federal Republic reflects a conscious plan to use compulsory education to later deny these children the right to education and training. It is a crime against education. A crime for which no punishment exists. A crime that will never face prosecution.''</blockquote>In 1970, 35,000 people lived in the Märkisch neighborhood in Berlin. It is projected to reach 140,000 by 1980. The people are saying, “It’s brutal here, totally squalid; in any event, it destroys the will to live— but inside the houses are well laid out.” Everything is available in the Märkisch neighborhood: playgrounds, a transportation system, schools, cheap shopping, doctors and lawyers; and they are cesspools for poverty, child abuse, suicide, criminal gangs, bitterness and need. The Märkisch neighborhood shows the future of social conditions.

(Bourgeois authors, faced with the conclusions we are drawing here, make no effort to place their observations within a context which recognizes that poverty is caused by the mobility of capital and the concentration of capital by banks, insurance companies, and home and property owners. They come to terms with the research data through verbal protests.)

The reality of poverty is not the same thing as revolutionary reality. The poor are not spontaneously and of their own accord revolutionary. They generally direct their aggression against themselves rather than against their oppressors. The objects of their aggression are usually other poor people, not those who benefit from their poverty. Not the real estate companies, the banks, the insurance companies, the corporations and the city planners, but rather other victims. Inactive, truly depressed, a discouraging example providing material for the fascism of ''Bild'' and ZDF.

The ZDF showed the following scene: in the slums of Wiesbaden, ZDF had children play in the dirt, beating on each other and screaming. The adults had to scream at them to let each other be. The television voice-over says, “The Federal Republic is not Latin America”; the poor in the Federal Republic have only themselves to blame; they are criminals; there are very few poor people—this is the concrete evidence. The Springer Press prints stuff like this. The material of fascism.

''The Reality of Ownership Conditions''

But the objective reality of poverty has in no small way clarified the subjective fact that capitalist ownership since the early postwar years— the CDU’s Ahlener Program<ref>The Ahlener Program, adopted by the CDU on February 3, 1947, in the town of Ahlen, stated in its opening that the interests of capitalism and those of the German people were identical.</ref>—has provided nothing. No gains came spontaneously, all were won through negotiations. Little was developed for the poor, but in the rest of society Citizens Initiatives with their platitudes became more widespread, albeit very poorly organized and vague, not worth repressing.

The 20,000 sacrificed in car accidents to the automobile industry’s lust for profit has not led to any consideration of the future of the highway system; the insurance aristocracy that represents capital guarantees illness, the downside of which being miserable hospital stays; the contradiction between community debt and the dividends enjoyed by the corporations that engage in production on their territory; between the exploitation of guest workers and the accommodations provided to guest workers; between the misery of children and the profits of toy companies; between profit made by landlords and miserable housing conditions—all of this is common knowledge. It is covered at length in Spiegel every week, and daily in ''Bild'', in most cases as isolated incidents. But this state of affairs has been worsening so quickly that it can no longer be covered up. Deutsche Bank spokesman Ulrich babbles about “the demonization of profit,” “the attack against our economic system,” and the “criticism of profit”: “We are insufficiently committed to broadly clarifying the nature of employers’ profits, without which development and progress are impossible in a free market system”—that a part of this should also be for the common good is rejected by almost all owners of capital.

Eppler<ref>Erhard Eppler, a member of the SPD and left-leaning Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation. He resigned in 1974.</ref> hopes to secure support for the unpopular sales tax increase by using the taxation of higher income brackets for propaganda purposes. The CDU is afraid that the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties<ref>Signed in August and December 1970, these two treaties were milestones in the SPD’s ''Ostpolitik'', normalizing the FRG’s relations with Poland and the Soviet Union for the first time since World War ii.</ref> could lead to an ideological softening within the Federal Republic—Schröder’s<ref>Gerhard Schröder was a CDU politician, Minister of the Interior from 1953 until 1961, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1961 until 1966 and Minister of Defense from 1966 until 1969.</ref> key argument is that the demonization of communism could lose credibility, because communism has come to represent expropriation and collectivization of the means of production. The CDU does not attack the contents of the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties, they struggle against ideological tolerance of the thinking of sworn enemies of capitalism.

The initiatives of the left after 1968, when they had a broad base everywhere, addressed the question of ownership and created a consensus behind their criticism. They did this in a way that constituted an attack against capitalist ownership and acted as a brake on capitalist profiteering. This took place in the squats in cities throughout the Federal Republic, in the Citizens Initiatives opposed to gentrification, in the initiatives for non-profit development in the suburbs—the Märkisch neighborhood, Nordweststadt in Frankfurt—and in the Citizens Initiatives opposed to the development of industrial sites in residential neighborhoods.

The Heidelberg SPK, through collective study and action, developed such a persuasive critique of the connection between illness and capitalism that SPK cadre have been detained in prison under §129 since July 71. The struggle of the students against the standardized testing which capital has imposed, and the campaign of the ''Jusos'' against private property development on public lands in the countryside, both have capitalist ownership as their target.

The most important strikes occurred in September 69, and were sparked by the year’s high profits. The most powerful campaign of the student movement was that against the Springer Corporation: “Expropriate Springer.” The most brutal police action was against the Belgian community’s squats in Kassel, where women and children were beaten with clubs, and against the squats in Hannover, which were destroyed through trials for damages. After Georg’s murder, a sticker appeared in Berlin that read: “Killer cops murdered our brother Georg because they were worried about their loot.”

''Social Democracy and Reformism''

Promise of reform has become the ersatz religion, the opium of the people. Promises of a better future have only one function, to provide a motivation for patience, endurance, and passivity. With all the efforts that are required to push reforms through, one could have a revolution. The people who say otherwise—like the ''Jusos'', and like those who believe that the ''Jusos'' have the power to push through meaningful reforms— misunderstand the system’s ability to resist change. They misunderstand its determination to adapt society to the exploitative conditions of capitalism and not the other way around. They do not understand that the system no longer feels constrained to act “within the bounds of the constitutional state.” Above all, they fail to understand that the ''Jusos'' are the cream of the younger generation of social democrats

There is, however, a difference between the SPD and the CDU. They despise the working class and the people in different ways. The SPD believes in the carrot and the stick. The CDU is only interested in the stick. The SPD is more experienced at leading the working class around by the nose. Wehner<ref>Herbert Wehner was leader of the SPD’s parliamentary group from 1958 until 1983, and Deputy Chairman of the SPD from 1958 until 1973.</ref> is more experienced in deceiving and purging the left. Brandt is more experienced in the way to take over the leadership of a movement so as to neutralize it (e.g., the antinuclear movement in Berlin in 1958). They are more imaginative than the CDU in their tactics against the people.

The SPD pushed the amnesty through to defuse the solidarity that was developing around the trials of students, to disrupt the criticisms of the justice system, to break the solidarity the left was receiving against the justice system and the administration, thereby eliminating the rebellion without involving state security.

With their ''Ostpolitik'', they beat back the criticism that their reform policies were in disarray. The Berlin Senate didn’t send in the police in response to the occupation at the Bethanien Hospital and the establishment of the Georg von Rauch House, instead they chose to shut off the water and take over administration of the building. Because of the protests against his Persian trip, Heinemann is still gun-shy about diplomacy. Under Brandt’s leadership, the ban on foreigners’ organizations was already in the works. It is the SPD that has influence with the unions and the workers, while the CDU distrusts the unions and their method of functioning: accumulation of capital through voluntary membership donations instead of through the extraction of profits. And Posser<ref>Diether Posser, SPD Minister of Justice in the Land of North Rhine Westphalia from 1972 until 1978.</ref> in many ways avoids lying: Mahler is a “fellow human being,” and in his impact report he says Brigitte Asdonk had been mistreated.

The difference between the SPD and the CDU has been defined by some comrades as the difference between the plague and cholera. That’s the choice the West German people face when they vote.

The system is taking the steps necessary to preserve the social status quo. Preserving the status quo requires: the concentration of European businesses to resist American competition; tax funded basic research to maintain high rates of profit; supplying weapons to the Third World through capital export markets so as to keep the liberation movements in check and using foreign production to keep wages down at home; keeping Siemens Annual General Assembly free from criticisms about Carbora Bassa investments;<ref>The project to build a massive dam in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. The right-wing Portuguese government had plans to settle over one million European colonists in the African country. By 1969, five German companies were implicated in the project.</ref> protecting the Shah from criticism about the death penalty in Persia.

Preserving the status quo requires: keeping anyone who is poor away from people who are addressing the issue of ownership; keeping the working class divided; using the accumulation of wealth and promises of reform to rein in the working class; keeping up a steady flow of propaganda: consumer ownership is the same as ownership of the means of production; all attacks against private property are the same; all attacks against private property are criminal; capitalist production is the natural state of affairs; capitalism is the best option available and the best that humans have come up with; criticisms of capitalism serve particular, selfish agendas of individuals and groups; wages are responsible for inflation; employers’ profits serve the common good; whoever has a different perspective is making problems and stands alone and is, in the final analysis, a criminal.

It is a status quo of relations of ownership and ideas that cannot be preserved without the militarization of the class struggle and the criminalization of the left.

''The Springer Press''

The role of the Springer Press in the militarization of the class struggle was well described in 1968 during the “Expropriate Springer” campaign:<blockquote>''One can see the way in which the Springer Press’ public is produced following a simple formula: The Springer Press treats every attempt by people to free themselves from the constraints of late capitalism as a crime. Political revolutionaries are assigned the attributes of violent criminals. Political struggle is presented as individual, abstract terror, and the campaign against imperialism as pointless destruction.''

''The Springer Corporation represents the propaganda vanguard of aggressive anticommunism. The Springer Press is the enemy of the working class. They undermine its ability to act freely and in solidarity. They transform the reader’s desire for equality into a lynching instinct and the longing for a free society into hatred against everybody who wants to build a free society. The Springer Press serves the interests of war preparations. Their construct of the enemy is a way of saying, “If you’re ever disruptive, if you don’t leave your divorce to the divorce lawyers, the question of wage increases for contract negotiations, the issue of housing in the hands of the Housing Office, injustice in the hands of the judges, your security with the police, and your destiny to the vicissitudes of late capitalism, the response will be murder, torture, rape, and criminal attacks.”''

from: ''Destroy Bild''</blockquote>The situation has gotten increasingly critical since the Molotov Cocktail Meeting in February 68.<ref>1 In February 1968, a film by Holger Meins showing how to make a molotov cocktail was presented at a meeting held in Berlin to discuss the campaign against the Springer Press.</ref> ''Bild'' has launched the column “''Bild'' Fights for You!” and reports daily successes in the struggle against exorbitant rents, against the criminalization of foreigners, against denunciations of large families, against forced retirement and the impoverishment of retirees. Before the oppressed masses turn their backs on the institutions of the constitutional state, ''Bild'' turns them against themselves; before their dissatisfaction with the institutions of the class state can become class consciousness, ''Bild'' takes the lead in expressing this dissatisfaction, and just as was the case with the Nazis in 1933, ''Bild'' speaks for capital, not for the proletariat.

Böll called this fascist, by which he meant, so there is no misunderstanding, the “agitation, lies, dirt.”<ref>On December 20, 1971, Heinrich Böll famously said that Bild’s news coverage “isn’t crypto-fascist anymore, nor fascistoid, but naked fascism, agitation, lies, dirt.”</ref> In this he, analytically and politically, hit the nail on the head. The reaction showed how sensitive the system really is, how unstable the status quo, how fascistic Bild, and how agitated the climate at the Springer Corporation.

''The Dialectic of Revolution and Counterrevolution''<blockquote>''It isn’t a question of whether we want the reactionary militarization or not; it is a question of whether we have the conditions necessary to transform the fascist militarization into a revolutionary mobilization, whether we can transform the reactionary militarization into a revolutionary one, whether it is better to lay down and die or to stand up and resist.''

Kim Il Sung</blockquote>Most people say, “It’s unacceptable.” Most people say, “The masses do not want this.” Many people say, “Fighting now will provoke fascism.” Böll says, “Six against 60,000,000—capital has everything, we have nothing.”

They see only the status quo. They see in the system’s violence only the violence, not the fear. They see in the militarization only the weapons, not the crumbling mass base. They see in ''Bild''’s hatred only the hatred, not the dissatisfaction of ''Bild'' readers. They see cops with semiautomatic pistols and see only cops with semi-automatic pistols, not the lack of mass support for fascism. They see the terror against us and see only the terror, not the fear about the social explosiveness of the RAF, which must be “nipped in the bud.” They see in the political apathy of the proletariat only the apathy, not the protest against a system that has nothing to offer them. They see in the high level of suicide amongst the proletariat only the act of desperation, not the protest. They see in the proletariat’s disinterest in economic struggle only a disinterest in struggle, not the refusal to struggle for a paltry percentage and the right to idiotic consumption. They see in the proletariat’s lack of union organization only the lack of organization, not the mistrust of union bureaucrats as accomplices of capital. They see in the population’s hostility towards the left only the hostility towards the left, not the hatred against those who are socially privileged. They see in our isolation from the masses only our isolation from the masses, not the insane lengths to which the system will go to isolate us from the masses. They see in the long periods comrades spend in preventive custody only the long periods in preventive custody, not the system’s fear about the free members of the RAF. They see in the exclusion of DKP teachers only the end of the march through the institutions,<ref>A reference to Rudi Dutschke’s proposed strategy. See p. 35, fn 2</ref> not the beginning of the adoption of revolutionary politics by children and their parents, which must be choked off. They see everything in terms of the existing movement, not the future one, only the bad, not the good: the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution.

We’re not saying it will be easy to build the guerilla, or that the masses are just waiting for the opportunity to join the guerilla. However, we do, above all, believe that the situation will not change by itself. We don’t believe that the guerilla will spontaneously spring forth from the mass struggle. Such illusions are unrealistic. A guerilla that developed spontaneously out of the mass struggle would be a bloodbath, not a guerilla group. We do not believe that the guerilla can be formed as the “illegal wing” of a legal organization. Such an illegal wing would lead to the illegalization of the organization, i.e., its liquidation, and nothing else. We don’t believe that the concept of the guerilla will develop by itself from political work. Therefore, we believe that the options and the specific role of the guerilla in the class struggle can only be collectively perceived and understood, that the guerilla stands in opposition to the consciousness industry.

We have said that any talk of their defeating us can only mean our arrests or deaths. We believe that the guerilla will develop, will gain a foothold, that the development of the class struggle will itself establish the idea of armed struggle only if there is already an organization in existence conducting guerilla warfare, an organization that is not easily demoralized, that does not simply lie down and give up.

We believe that the idea of the guerilla developed by Mao, Fidel, Che, Giáp, and Marighella is a good idea that cannot be removed from the table. If one underestimates the difficulties in establishing the guerilla, if one is scared off by the difficulties against which we must struggle, this also shows that one underestimates the difficulties which the guerilla had to face even in those places where it has made a good deal of progress and is now anchored in the masses. We believe that these reservations are an indication of how far capital is prepared to go when it’s a question of securing exploitative conditions, an area where they have never hesitated: not with the Paris Commune, not in Germany in 1918, not in 1933, not in Algeria, Vietnam, the Congo, Cuba, Latin America, or Mozambique, not at Attica, not in Los Angeles, Kent State, Augsburg or Hamburg.

MAKE THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP THE KEY QUESTION FOR ALL MOVEMENTS!

ADVANCE THE REVOLUTIONARY GUERILLA AGAINST THE REACTIONARY MILITARIZATION!<blockquote>''No party can call itself revolutionary if it fails to prepare for armed struggle, and that is true at all levels of the party. That is the way to most effectively confront the reactionaries at every step of the revolutionary process. Any disregard for this factor can only lead to missed revolutionary opportunities.''</blockquote>That's what we mean by SERVE THE PEOPLE!

'''4. On Current Issues'''

''The Ruhland Trial''

There is still a liberal press in the Federal Republic for whom the trial was a scandal. Ruhland was never as close to the Red Army Faction as he claims. His fawning, his reliance on evidence from the investigation rather than his own memory, the fact that Mahler’s lawyer Schily was prevented from attending his trial, the fact that from the beginning of the trial it was established that there would be a verdict based on negotiations that neither the federal prosecutor nor the defense attorney would challenge (the FAZ reported this). As the Frankfurter Rundschau describes it, “like a nice teacher delivering a worn out speech to a sympathetic student” —proving very clearly that discovering the truth and due process have nothing to do with anything anymore.

The assurance that Ruhland is certainly telling the truth, the fulminations that those he has incriminated are not telling the truth, the assumption that anyone who doesn’t cooperate with the justice system is guilty… that is exactly what class justice means, show trials, making them an—effectively ornamental—component of capital’s general offensive against the left as the vanguard of the working class in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

One cannot offer up ''Verfassungsschutz'' informants, as in earlier communist trials or as with Urbach, to a public increasingly polarized by the growing class contradictions. They expect the left-wing public to be dazzled by state witnesses presented by the Bonn Security Group, and it’ll probably work. The person who’s really screwed in this situation is Ruhland himself, since he no longer knows his friends from his enemies, up from down, the revolution from the counterrevolution. The poor pig doesn’t understand how they’re using him.

Urban guerilla struggle requires that one not be demoralized by the system’s violence. One certainly should not be demoralized by a trial that shows us to be morally and politically in the right. Demoralization is in fact their goal. The Ruhland trial is only a very superficial event in the unfolding of history, the development of class struggle and the question of whether the urban guerilla is legitimate.

''On Traitors''

There are people who believe there might be some truth in the things Homann and the like are spreading around. At least, they say, Homann is no idiot. They take him to be what he presented himself as in ''Spiegel'', a “political scholar”; from a vocabulary that encompasses both hunter and prey.<ref>Peter Homann had previously worked as a journalist for the ''Spiegel''.</ref> These terms have nothing to do with class antagonism. The assertion that you are a scholar doesn’t make you one when you deal in the techniques used by Spiegel journalists. The substance of Marxism, the dialectic of being and consciousness, excludes the possibility that police statements can contribute to the revolutionary strategy. Marxism can only be taught by Marxists, as Margharita von Brentano<ref>Margharita von Brentano was a sociology professor at the Free University, where a prize and a building are now named in her honour.</ref> told Spiegel. What Mandel has to say, Schwan<ref>A. Schwan, a West Berlin professor and a member of the ''Bund Freiheit de Wissenshaft'' (Alliance for Free Scholarship). The BFW was an organization of right-wing university professors who accused the student movement of attempting to establish a left-wing educational system to the exclusion of free thought.</ref> couldn’t spell.

Anybody who shares the interests of the status quo cannot possibly have anything to say about social change. But it is the nature of traitors to share the interests of the status quo, to want to return to their hereditary place in class society, to not feel right in unfamiliar circumstances, to only have a sense of identity in their own milieu, and to remain the object of their own development.

Ruhland only really feels comfortable in his old role as a criminal proletariat, handcuffed and oppressed, and Homann in the role of the lost son of the lumpen proletariat, ever at the beck and call of the bourgeoisie—in ''Spiegel'' and ''konkret''—in his heart of hearts he has no interest in matters of the market. Sturm had an adventure and then fled back home to the bosom of her family.

Ruhland remains a victim and Homann a consumer, the overpaid illiterate and the profiteering academic—the class balance is re-established, legality is obviously the natural state of affairs. Regarding Homann, FAZ wrote: “…a journalist and visual artist, with a politically untrained but sensitive intelligence”; about Ruhland: “…he doesn’t want to be a villain, he is perhaps an honest man with a guileless mind. Facing his guards in the court room, two young security police officers, he exhibits a completely natural and comradely bearing.”

The psychological makeup of traitors is venal and conservative. The conservative FAZ sympathizes with these sons and servants.

We suffered from a false fascination and have underestimated illegality. We’ve overestimated the unity of some groups. That is to say that we have not taken into account all of the implications of the student movement being a relatively privileged movement, that we have failed to observe that for many people much of the politics of 67/68 is no longer relevant, as it offers them no way of increasing their own privilege. It can be pleasant to know a little Marxism, to have some clarity about the conditions of the ruling class’ economic domination and their psychological techniques, to shed the self-imposed pressure to perform of a bourgeois overachiever, to embrace an alienated form of Marxism, acquired by privilege, as an item for one’s intellectual wellbeing and benefit and not directed towards serving the people.

A preference for certain actions because they are illegal is an expression of bourgeois self-indulgence. The student movement, given its suppositions, could not be free of blind followers and people with a mercenary mentality. The tedious, long-term drudgery that must first of all be undertaken to lay the basis for the urban guerilla must seem to these people, who are so falsely programmed, like a scene from a horror show. Anyone who arrives with criminal fantasies, anyone who only wants to improve their personal situation, will certainly and inevitably improve their situation through treason.

We believed if someone said he had worked in this or that organization for such and such a period of time, then he must know what political work entails, what organization means, or else they would already have tossed him. We now know that we should ourselves have established the political organization necessary for the urban guerilla, that we made a mistake when we relied so readily upon others.

Above all, we think that on our own it would have been very difficult for us to have avoided this error and prevented the treason. We think that a false understanding of the police and the justice system, a false understanding of what SERVE THE PEOPLE means, and a false approach to contradictions within the New Left made the treason inevitable.

As long as traitors still find a place with comrades, not even receiving a single punch in the face, but rather finding understanding as to why they must quickly resume their bourgeois existence and do away with their other existence—because they can’t tolerate another day in prison, they send others inside for years or deliver them up to the police death squads—as long as political cooperation with the armed power of capital continues to be tolerated as a political difference of opinion, as long as something that has long been politically condemned is treated as a private matter, treason will continue to exist. Without criticizing liberalism within the left, we cannot eliminate treason.

Traitors must be excluded from the ranks of the revolution. Tolerance in the face of traitors produces more treason. Traitors in the ranks of the revolution cause more harm than the police can without traitors. We believe that is a general rule. It is impossible to know how much they will betray if they are threatened. Given that they are little pigs, one cannot permit them to be in a situation where they can be blackmailed. Capital will continue to turn people into little pigs until we overthrow its rule. We are not responsible for capital’s crimes.

''On Bank Robberies''

Some people say robbing banks is not political. Since when is the question of financing a political organization not a political question? The urban guerilla in Latin America calls bank robberies “expropriation actions.” Nobody is claiming that robbing banks will be all it takes to change the oppressive social order. For revolutionary organizations, it mainly represents the solution to their financial problems. It makes logical sense, because there is no other solution to the financial problem. It makes political sense, because it is an expropriation action. It makes tactical sense, because it is a proletarian action. It makes strategic sense, because it finances the guerilla.

A political concept that bases itself on parliamentary democracy, the political concept of competitive capitalism, a concept that understands class antagonism to be nothing more than a power struggle, that perceives the institutions of the class state to be institutions of a constitutional state, thereby definitely turning its back on progress and humanity… such a political concept cannot condone bank robbery. In the imperialist metropole, where the organization of the anti-imperialist struggle must have both legal and illegal components, the political struggle and the armed struggle, bank robbery cannot be dispensed with. It is, in practice, expropriation. And it points to the necessary method for establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat against the enemy: armed struggle.

''On Logistics and Continuity''

Many comrades are impressed by the Tupamaros’<ref>Most likely a reference to the ''West German Tupamaros'', not to be confused with their South American namesake. These groups had existed in West Berlin and Munich at the beginning of the decade, part of the same amorphous scene as the Roaming Hash Rebels. The 2nd of June Movement grew out of this scene, although several members would instead join the RAF.</ref> actions. They don’t understand why, instead of carrying out popular actions, we’re preoccupied with logistics. They can’t be bothered with going to the trouble to consider what the urban guerilla is and how it functions.

It is most likely maliciously intended when comrades recite the position of the Düsseldorf judge in Ruhland’s trial: Ruhland was a handyman and the gang’s mascot. The concept of the capitalist division of labor has proven to be an abstraction for them. In practice, they still conceive of proletarian comrades as jack-of-all-trades prefiguring some Silesian idyll. That the technical means can only be developed by working and learning collectively, that the urban guerilla must abolish the division of labor so that the arrest of one individual is not a disaster for us all—these comrades’ imagination can’t get that far. Not having the logistical problems at least partially resolved, not having oneself learned how to resolve logistical problems, not engaging in a collective learning and working process, would mean leaving the outcome of actions to chance technically, psychologically, and politically.

Resolving logistical problems assures the ongoing security of a revolutionary organization. We place great importance in the tactical requirements necessary to secure the continuity of the Red Army Faction. It is in the interest of capital to divide, to destroy, to break down solidarity, to isolate people, and to deny the historical context—in the area of production as well as that of housing, of commerce, of opinion making, of education—so as to guarantee ongoing profits. It is in the interest of capital to guarantee that conditions remain the opposite of those necessary for proletarian revolution: unity, continuity, historical consciousness, class consciousness. Without organizational continuity, without guaranteeing the organizational permanence of the revolutionary process, the revolutionary process is left to the anarchy of the system, to chance, to historical spontaneity.

We consider disregard for the question of organizational continuity to be a manifestation of opportunism.

''On Solidarity''

The revolutionary process is revolutionary because it makes objects out of the laws of capitalist commodity production and exchange, rather than being their object. It cannot be measured by market criteria. It can only be measured by criteria that simultaneously destroy the power of market criteria for success.

Solidarity, insofar as it is not based on market criteria, destroys the power of those criteria. Solidarity is political, not so much because solidarity is based on politics, but because it is a refusal to be subservient to the law of value and a refusal to be treated like a mere aspect of exchange value. Solidarity is the essence of free action ungoverned by the ruling class; as such it always means resistance against the influence of the ruling class over relationships between people, and as resistance against the ruling class, it is always correct.

In the view of the system, people whose behavior is not guided by the system’s criteria for success are lunatics, halfwits, or losers. In the view of the revolution, all those who conduct themselves with solidarity, whoever they may be, are comrades.

Solidarity becomes a weapon if it is organized and is acted upon in a consistent way against the courts, the police, the authorities, the bosses, the infiltrators, and the traitors. They must be denied any cooperation, afforded no attention, denied access to evidence, offered no information, and afforded absolutely no time and energy. Solidarity includes struggling against liberalism within the left and addressing contradictions within the left as one addresses contradictions amongst the people, and not as if they were a class contradiction.<ref>In his 1957 “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” Mao differentiated between two kinds of conflict or contradiction—“those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people.” While the former should be dealt with by attacking the class enemy, the latter should be dealt with through criticism with the goal of bringing about unity.</ref>

All political work is based on solidarity. Without solidarity, it will crumble in the face of repression.

“We must prevent the possibility of unnecessary victims. Everybody in the ranks of the revolution must take care of each other, must relate to each other lovingly, must help each other.”

SERVE THE PEOPLE!

MAKE THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP THE KEY QUESTION EVERYWHERE!

SUPPORT THE ARMED STRUGGLE!

BUILD THE REVOLUTIONARY GUERILLA!

VICTORY IN THE PEOPLE'S WAR!

RAF

April 1972
{| class="wikitable"
|+a note from the editors: On the Treatment of Traitors
!There have been insinuations, always vague on details or proof, that the RAF was an intensely authoritarian organization, particularly in regards to people not being allowed to leave. Claims have been made that Baader murdered Ingeborg Barz, a young woman who had joined the RAF from the anarchist Black Aid, simply because she wanted to quit the underground. These claims have been contradicted by other witnesses.<ref>See page 352.</ref>
Some have pointed to ''Serve the People'' as evidence that the RAF endorsed the assassination of drop-outs, one passage in particular being mentioned in this regard:

''Traitors must be excluded from the ranks of the revolution. Tolerance in the face of traitors produces more treason. Traitors in the ranks of the revolution cause more harm than the police can without traitors. We believe that is a general rule. It is impossible to know how much they will betray if they are threatened. Given that they are little pigs, one cannot permit them to be in a situation where they can be blackmailed. Capital will continue to turn people into little pigs until we overthrow its rule. We are not responsible for capital’s crimes.''<ref>Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle, cf 156-7.</ref>

This position should be evaluated in light of the RAF’s documented practice, and the realities of armed struggle.
No clandestine organization can tolerate informants, nor should any revolutionary movement do so, regardless of its legal or illegal status. Yet many observers are wary, and rightly so, of such calls to “exclude” traitors; the reason for this unease is the strong tendency for factions or entire organizations to end up using such a line as cover to attack any and all dissidents, drop-outs, critics or even rivals, accusing them all of “treason.” Examples abound of revolutionary movements gutting themselves and doing inestimable damage to their cause and their political integrity through this error.
Despite allegations to the contrary, there is no substantive evidence of the RAF ever going down that road. The RAF was criticized throughout its existence, yet none of the critics were ever targeted. What is striking about the cases of Sturm, Homann, and Ruhland is not that they were insulted or berated, but that no harm befell them even after they all took public stands against the guerilla. Another guerilla member, Hans-Jürgen Bäcker, suspected of being an informant, was not targeted by any attack even after testifying in court against the RAF.
Stefan Aust and Jillian Becker have both claimed that members of the guerilla made what can only be described as half-hearted attempts to exact vengeance, but their stories are difficult to gauge. Both authors claim that Baader and Mahler were trying to find Homann and Aust to kill them, but if so, they evidently gave up the search quickly.<ref>Aust, 104; Becker, 255-256</ref> This is just one aspect of the story that casts doubt on its veracity. Becker furthermore claims that Astrid Proll shot at Bäcker but missed; the way in which she phrases the allegation, however, indicates the source may be Karl-Heinz Ruhland, himself far from reliable.<ref>Becker, normally not shy about stating that various combatants actually did various things, in this case merely writes, “Astrid Proll (‘Rosi’) was to claim later that she shot at him from a car but missed.” (Becker, 228)</ref> No charges were ever laid against Proll for this.

There is one, and only one, documented case of the RAF doing violence to an informant. In 1971, a friend of Katharina Hammerschmidt’s, Edelgard Graefer, was arrested on bogus charges and threatened with having her five-year-old son permanently taken away from her. Under pressure, Graefer gave information to the police. In early 1972, she was abducted by the RAF and had a bucket of tar poured over her. Following this attack on her person, she stopped working with the police.<ref>Aust, 170-172.</ref>

While unpleasant, such a violent warning is not on the order of a death sentence. Indeed, as Brigitte Mohnhaupt later argued in Stammheim, the fact that a known informant was assaulted and not killed should suffice to discredit claims that other members were executed merely for dropping out.<ref>The relevant excerpts from Mohnhaupt’s testimony are included in this volume, see page 357</ref>

Certainly, given the guerilla’s ability to carry out attacks against even heavily guarded targets, the fact that all of those who testified against them remained unscathed should tell us something.
As for the many others who left over the years, if they did not cooperate with the police or run with tall tales to the media, there is no indication that the guerilla bore them any ill will.[[File:Informer picture from RAF a documentary history.png|center|thumb]]
|}

== 5 - The May Offensive: Bringing the War Home ==
<blockquote>''This decision, this project, was arrived at through collective discussions involving everyone in the RAF; in other words, there was a consensus of all the groups, of the units in each of the cities, and everyone clearly understood what this meant, what the purpose of these attacks was.''

Brigitte Mohnhaupt

Stammheim Trial

July 22, 1976</blockquote>In may 1972, shortly after the release of ''Serve the People'', the RAF left the stage of logistics and preparation, launching a series of attacks that were to go down in history as the “May Offensive.”

On the evening of May 11, the day the United States mined the harbors of North Vietnam, the RAF’s “Petra Schelm Commando” bombed the U.S. Army V Corps headquarters and the site of the National Security Agency in Frankfurt. At least three blasts went off, killing Lieutenant Colonel Paul A. Bloomquist and injuring thirteen others. As one military police officer noted, the toll would have been much worse had the bombs gone off during duty hours. Damage to property was estimated at $300,000.<ref>Dan Synovec,“Security Beefed Up at U.S. installations,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 13, 1972; Dave Lams, “Police Trace Leads in V Corps Blasts,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 13, 1972.</ref>

“We expected things like this in Saigon,” a captain just back from Vietnam was quoted as saying. “Not here in Germany.”<ref>Synovec,“Security Beefed Up.”</ref>

One can imagine that words like that put smiles on many a face, and within twenty-four hours, U.S. military officials reported receiving a number of threats promising all kinds of follow-up attacks. These quickly snowballed, and by early June, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was reporting that thousands of such calls had been made by “high school students, drunks, psychopaths, and criminals.”<ref>Thomas Kirn, “Bombendrohungen werden schnell geahndet,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', June 9, 1972.</ref>

“These calls,” complained the American Lieutenant General Williard Pearson in a similar vein, “were made by mentally unbalanced or irresponsible individuals seeking to create tension or panic within our community.”<ref>3 “General Pearson seeks community help in solving Frankfurt bombings,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 16, 1972.</ref>

Given that the RAF always issued proper communiqués, these threats were most likely the work of people who were simply glad to see the Americans finally being hit. The state was far from amused, and it was noted that the financial consequences of false bomb threats were substantial for warehouses, newspapers, factories, and banks. More importantly, the wave of political prank calls helped create a signal-to-noise situation that can only have helped the guerilla. Nor was the activity without some risk: prison sentences for these false bomb threats ran from a couple of months to as high as three years.<ref>Kirn, “Bombendrohungen werden schnell geahndet.”</ref>

The day after the first bombing, on May 12, attacks were carried out in two Bavarian cities in response to the March 2 shooting of Weissbecker. In Augsburg, bombs were planted inside the police headquarters, and one cop suffered mild injuries. In the state capital Munich, a car bomb was parked just outside the six-storey police building; when it went off, it blew out the windows up to the top floor. A nearby pay station had received a telephone warning, but by the time the police got wind of it, there was not enough time to evacuate—twelve people were injured, and damages were estimated at $150,000.<ref>''European Stars and Stripes,'' “German Facilities Struck by Bombs,” May 13, 1972.</ref> These bombings were claimed by the RAF’s “Thomas Weissbecker Commando.”

On May 16, in Karlsruhe, the RAF’s “Manfred Grashof Commando” placed a bomb in the car of Federal Supreme Court Judge Buddenberg, who had been put in charge of all RAF cases. However, it was not the judge who was behind the wheel, but his wife on her way to pick him up from work. Gerta Buddenberg sustained serious injuries, but survived.

On May 19, the Springer Press building in Hamburg was bombed in retaliation for the constant red baiting and counterinsurgency propaganda published in its newspapers. One bomb went off in the proofreaders’ room, and two in the toilets. Three telephone warnings were ignored and, as a result, seventeen employees were injured, two of them seriously. The attack was claimed by the RAF’s “2nd of June Commando.”

A Springer editor was later quoted saying, “I was only surprised that if they wanted to hit a Springer Building they’d go for the proofreaders, whose views are rather left of centre. I’d have thought there were more rewarding targets if they wanted to strike a real blow. If they’d picked the computer centre, that would have done the building much more damage.”<ref>Aust, 211.</ref>

As many workers had been injured, this attack caused some consternation on the left, and it was subsequently alleged that it caused dissension within the RAF itself.<ref>See the RAF’s interview with Le Monde Diplomatique, on page 422 of this volume. See also Brigitte Mohnhaupt’s testimony at the Stammheim trial, cf. 357-58.</ref> An anonymous tip the next day led to the discovery of three more bombs in the building, which were all safely defused.<ref>Aust, 211.</ref>

On May 24, the RAF bombed the Heidelberg headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe. Two cars loaded with explosives had been parked 140 meters apart near a data processing center and the officers’ club at Campbell Barracks. They were timed to go off after most people had finished work for the day,<ref>Dan Synovec, “Bombs kill 3 at USAREUR Hq,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 25, 1972.</ref> but nevertheless three soldiers were killed<ref>They were: Clyde Bonner of El Paso, Texas, Ronald Woodward of Otter Lake, Michigan, and Charles Peck of Hawthorne, California. (Associated Press, “W. Germans Sentence 3 Guerrillas to Life for Bomb Deaths,” Tri-City Herald, April 28, 1977.)</ref> and six others were injured. This was the work of the “July 15th Commando,” commemorating the date Petra Schelm had died in a firefight with police.

This was a more daring attack than any of the others so far: unlike the V Corps headquarters in Frankfurt, the Campbell Barracks were fenced off and military police were always stationed at the gates. Any person in civilian clothes or in a vehicle without U.S. military plates was supposed to show identification before entering.<ref>Synovec, “Bombs Kill.”</ref>

The computer destroyed in this attack had been used to make calculations for carpet-bombing sorties in South and North Vietnam with the aim of achieving the highest possible number of deaths. This at a time when, though it was clear the war had been lost, the United States had stepped up bombings of Hanoi, Haiphong, and Thanh Hoa province.<ref>''Internazionale Kommission zum Schutz der Gefangenen une Gegen Isolationshaft'', October 1980, 2.</ref> The RAF would later claim that their pictures had gone up on walls in Hanoi as a result of this action,<ref>“Wir waren in den Durststreik treten,” ''Spiegel'' 4/1975, translated in this volume on pages 300-318.</ref> and this clearly remained a point of pride among guerilla veterans even decades later.

Regarding the May Offensive, it has been noted:<blockquote>''Although people were injured or killed in most of these bombings, with the exception of the Buddenberg bombing, they differ from later RAF attacks in not being directed against specific individuals, a point that should be kept in mind when examining the RAF’s history.''<ref>Arm The Spirit, “A Brief History of the Red Army Faction,” <nowiki>http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/61/191.html</nowiki>.</ref></blockquote>Despite the many anonymous bomb threats called in during this period, and the fact that the RAF’s actions coincided with a global wave of protest against ongoing American military aggression in Southeast Asia, some observers have claimed that the May Offensive alienated many of the RAF’s liberal sympathizers. Those who had seen them as modern day Robin Hoods, or as romantic idealists, took a step back once they realized that this was for real.

It would be more true to say that the 1972 bombing campaign polarized the left, and, in a healthy way, provided direction and inspiration to numerous activists who had been considering armed politics, while clarifying the disagreements which existed with opponents of the guerilla struggle. Indeed, the period in question showed a marked rise in newspaper articles describing molotov cocktail attacks and other low level actions against symbols of state power, encouraged by the context the guerilla’s bombs had helped create. Years later, the Revolutionary Cells (another West German guerilla group) would explain the longterm effect of the May Offensive in this way:<blockquote>''At the time, these actions drew the widespread anti-imperialist movement together, causing the further development of an idea that had been rattling around in the heads of thousands of people. We saw that what had long been thought about was in fact possible. Without the RAF, there wouldn’t be an RZ today, there wouldn’t be groups that understand that resistance doesn’t stop where the criminal code starts.''<ref>RZ Letter to the RAF Comrades, reprinted in this volume on pages 457-463.</ref></blockquote>
{| class="wikitable"
|+Alienating Which Masses?
!“When we heard about the RAF bombing the American Headquarters in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, we jumped with joy. At last someone had done something against the imperialist bases in the Federal Republic of Germany.”
These were not the words of a petit bourgeois sect, but rather come from the report of a freedom fighter fighting for national liberation in a land occupied by Portugal. He and his comrades had heard the news while he was in a guerilla base. For years the people there had heard of the FRG being one of the worst enemies of the African people—as a source of arms for Portuguese colonialism—and now for the first time the guerillas could see something happening in the Federal Republic which they considered to be an effective form of resistance to imperialism.
I remarked that their reaction was quite different from that of Marxist groups in the Federal Republic, to which the African comrade responded, “When you are struggling, you see things differently.”
Christian Sigrist
______________
Christian Sigrist, “De Heidelberg au Cap Vert” in ''à propos du procès Baader-Meinhof, Fraction Armée Rouge: de la torture dans les prisons de la RFA'', Klaus Croissant (ed.) (Paris : Christian Bourgeois Éditeur, 1975), 53-54.
|}
One thing is certain: the RAF’s bombing campaign was strongly criticized by the Maoist K-groups who were enjoying their heyday and rejected such attacks as infantile adventurism. The KP (Communist League), whose newspaper ''Arbeiterkampf'' would later distinguish itself by offering some of the most intelligent commentary on the guerilla in Germany, even went so far as to suggest that the Springer attack might have been the work of right-wing extremists.

For its part the KSV (Communist Student Association), the youth section of the Maoist KPD,<ref>Not to be confused with the pro-Soviet KPD that was banned in the 50s and later reconstituted as the DKP.</ref> complained about the RAF’s violence:<blockquote>''[It is] neither practiced by the masses… nor is it understood by the masses as an expression of their interests. The masses, on the contrary, perceive the actions as a threat, and therefore identify with the reactions of the state apparatus… The violence is not revolutionary. It sabotages the struggle against state repression in that it helps to conceal the class character of this repression and encourages the isolation of communists.''<ref>Varon, 213.</ref></blockquote>These comments were delivered at a Teach-In Against State Repression, which was held at Frankfurt University on May 31, just a couple of weeks after the Springer Building in that city was bombed. Organized by Rote Hilfe (Red Aid), a network of autonomous prisoner support collectives which had their roots in the antiauthoritarian wing of the APO, the event attracted hundreds of people, not all of whom were as negative as the Maoists.<ref>Hockenos, 114.</ref> Indeed, one leaflet produced for the event argued that, “If imperialism is a worldwide system, and that it is, then the struggle against it must be waged worldwide. It will and must be a violent and armed struggle, or it will not be waged at all.”<ref>Varon, 213.</ref>

The RAF itself sent a statement to the Red Aid Teach-In in the form of a tape recording by Ulrike Meinhof in which she once again encouraged the radical left to organize armed struggle, arguing that increasing repression and popular resentments were providing the potential which, properly exploited, could lead to a revolutionary situation. As was typical of the RAF at this time, Meinhof was attempting to engage directly with the guerilla’s left-wing critics.<ref>Statement to the Red Aid Teach-In, reprinted in this volume on pages 183-85.</ref>

Remarkably, the Teach-In brought together Maoists and ''spontis'', and as such was representative of the revolutionary left. As for the tamed left, in its eyes the RAF remained well beyond the pale. The pro-Soviet DKP made a point of condemning “anarchist demonstrations” in Frankfurt, pontificating that, “The anarchist groups have clearly made hysteria the order of the day. We are making the struggle to win the solidarity of the people of Frankfurt for the Vietnamese liberation struggle the order of the day.”<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “DKP verurteilt anarchistische Demonstrationen in Frankfurt,” May 26, 1972.</ref> Various labor leaders also took turns condemning the “political adventurists,” “terror,” and “murder.” The chairman of the Public Service, Transport, and Communication Union explained that his union supported the government, for, while it was independent, it shared many common concerns with employers.<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Keine Solidarisierung mit Abenteurern,” May 29, 1972.</ref>

Clearly not reassured by claims that the RAF was driving people away from left, the state recognized that if it did not move quickly, the May bombings could easily inspire renewed resistance. “The longer the Baader-Meinhof gang remains at large,” Attorney General Ludwig Martin worried, “the easier it will be for the public to gain the impression that the powers of the state have broken down.”<ref>Dan Synovec, “Terrorists: odd solidarity prompts aid to the Baader-Meinhof gang,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', June 3, 1972.</ref>

An essential feature of the campaign against the RAF consisted of psychological operations, meant to discourage any solidarity or identification with the guerilla, while legitimizing the state’s own repressive response. As an example of this, in the midst of the May Offensive, communiqués attributed to the RAF, but most likely penned by the secret services or police, were received claiming that on June 2 (the anniversary of Benno Ohnesorg’s murder) three car bombs would be set off in random locations in Stuttgart “as a reminder of the bombing war of the U.S. imperialists in Vietnam.”<ref>Associated Press, “Bombers Threaten 3 Blasts Friday in Stuttgart Area,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 29, 1972.</ref>

The RAF promptly issued its own communiqué repudiating this as a false flag provocation.<ref>Regarding the Fascist Bomb Threats Against Stuttgart, reprinted in this volume on pages 181-82.</ref> Nevertheless, this denial was largely ignored, and on the day in question, “Stuttgart presented the appearance of a beleaguered city. Thousands of police checked all access roads, vehicles and ‘suspicious persons.’”<ref>Cobler, 169.</ref>

One hundred and thirty thousand cops were mobilized, supported by both West German and U.S. intelligence units, in a determined effort to hunt down the guerilla. A $59,000 reward was offered for their capture, and Chancellor Willy Brandt warned the public that any solidarity shown would be treated as criminal complicity.<ref>Dan Synovec, “Anarchist gang blamed,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 27, 1972.</ref> At the same time, Genscher announced that supporters could hope for light sentences if they turned themselves in and helped in the hunt;<ref>“Bescheidene Mitgleiderzahlen radikaler Organisation,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', June 7, 1972.</ref> there do not seem to have been any takers.

Nevertheless, the wave of arrests was not long in coming

On June 1, RAF members Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader were cornered as they arrived at a safehouse in Munich that had been identified by police. Raspe tried to make a run for it, but was quickly apprehended. Meins gave himself up, following police orders to strip down to his underwear before he did so.

Three hundred cops surrounded the warehouse where Baader was holed up, and eventually an armored vehicle tried to enter the building; Baader shot out its wheels. At that point, a sniper took aim and shot the eponymous guerilla fighter in the leg and the police moved in quickly to take him into custody.

Holger Meins was the only one of the three who had surrendered without resistance, a fact that did not stop the police from beating him so severely that he required hospitalization. “I didn’t squeal or scream,” he would later tell his father. “They kicked me black and blue with their big boots. It’s a thing you just can’t describe.”<ref>Aust, 219.</ref>

It later came out that the RAF had intended to kidnap the three U.S. Army City Commanders in Berlin, but called off this action due to security concerns following the June 1 arrests.<ref>Brigitte Mohnhaupt’s Testimony at the Stammheim Trial, July 22, 1976, <nowiki>http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/</nowiki> documents/76_0708_mohnhaupt_pohl.html.</ref>

On June 7, Gudrun Ensslin was arrested in Hamburg when a store clerk noticed a gun in her handbag. (The government’s somewhat farcical Mainz report would later explain this bust in memorably sexist terms: “The arrest of her boyfriend Baader affected this deviant woman to such a degree that she simply had to buy something new, like any normal woman does when something is wrong.”)<ref>Clare Bielby, “‘Bonnie und Kleid’: Female Terrorists and the Hysterical Feminine,” ''Forum 2'', <nowiki>http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue2/bielby.html</nowiki>.</ref>

On June 9, Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Bernhard Braun were arrested in West Berlin; they were both former SPK members. Mohnhaupt had gravitated to the RAF via the Munich Tupamaros. Braun, who was also close to 2JM, had come to the RAF via the West Berlin Tupamaros.

On June 15, Ulrike Meinhof and Gerhard Müller were arrested in Hannover, turned in by a left-wing trade unionist who had agreed to put them up for the night.<ref>They were turned in by Fritz Rodewald, who evidently did not know if he was coming or going: he would donate the reward money to the prisoners’ defense fund (Vague, 49). For more details on Rodewald’s motivations, see page 201.</ref> Police found forged passports, gun oil, a four-and-a-half-kilo homemade bomb, two homemade hand grenades, a semi-automatic pistol, two 9mm handguns, numerous fully loaded magazines, and more than three hundred rounds of ammunition in Meinhof’s luggage, which weighed over twenty-five kilos.<ref>Wolfgang Tersteegen, “Mit der Bombe im Handgepäcke,”''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', June 19, 1972; ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Erst nach Stunden identifiziert,” June 19, 1972.</ref> With her capture, some observers felt that the guerilla’s entire leadership was now in custody, and yet there were more arrests to come.

On June 30, Katharina Hammerschmidt, who had fled to France, was convinced to turn herself in by her lawyer Otto Schily. The police suspected Hammerschmidt of setting up safehouses and perhaps having a role in the recent bombings.<ref>United Press International, “Ends French Stay: Member of Gang Turns Self In,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 1, 1972.</ref>

Finally, on July 7, Klaus Jünschke and Irmgard Möller were arrested in Offenbach, set up by a nineteen-year-old who had been recruited by the guerilla earlier that year, and who had since been identified and turned by the police. Jünschke was a former SPK member sought in relation to the December 22, 1971, bank robbery in which police officer Herbert Schoner had been killed.<ref>He was sentenced to life in prison in 1977. Associated Press, “2 German terrorists given life,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', June 3, 1977.</ref> Irmgard Möller was sought in connection to the 1971 killing of police officer Schmid in Hamburg, and was suspected of participating in the May bombings.<ref>Four years later, she was sentenced to four and a half years for forging documents, resisting arrest, possession of an unlicensed firearm, and membership in a criminal organization. In 1979, she was found guilty of three counts of murder and sentenced to life for planting the bombs in the Augsburg and Heidelberg attacks. By the time she was released in 1994, she had survived 22 years behind bars, making her Germany’s longest held female prisoner at that time.</ref> (With typical hype, Stars and Stripes described her as “the gang’s new chief, replacing jailed Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader.”)<ref>United Press International, “8 Terrorist gang suspects still sought,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 10, 1972.</ref>

The RAF was decimated, and what few members remained at large could do little more than concentrate on their own survival.

Following the successes of this counterinsurgency campaign, the West German government felt confident it had snuffed out its fledgling armed opposition. Even sympathetic observers felt that the RAF might have met its end.

They were all wrong.
{| class="wikitable"
|+"The objective of these actions was clear..."
!The RAF was at the time organized in the following way: there were eight groups established in six cities, and of these there were two strong groups in two cities. There was one group in Munich. The groups, the different units, were integrated into a logistical system. There was contact between the different groups for discussions, but they were autonomous in their decisions regarding how to carry out operations. That was left to the individual groups—and it couldn’t have been otherwise. We didn’t know anything in advance about these actions. However, even if we had known, we wouldn’t have prevented them, because, yeah, it’s not a simple thing to stop a group from doing what it has decided to do. In fact, we couldn’t have prevented it, both because of the underlying perspective and for practical reasons; it would have been impossible given the circumstances. The objective of these actions was clear: they were a response to the fact that fighters were shot in the street, for example, Petra and Tommy. It would never have been our intention to prevent them.
Brigitte Mohnhaupt
Stammheim Trial
July 22, 1976
|}

=== For the Victory of the People of Vietnam ===
On Thursday May 11, 1972—the day the U.S. imperialist mine blockade of North Vietnam began—the Petra Schelm Commando detonated three bombs containing 80kg of TNT at the Frankfurt Headquarters of the V Army Corps of the U.S. Forces in West Germany and West Berlin. West Germany and West Berlin shall no longer be a safe hinterland for the strategy of extermination against Vietnam. They must understand that their crimes against the Vietnamese people have created new and bitter enemies for them, and there is nowhere left in this world where they will be safe from the attacks of revolutionary guerilla units.

We demand an immediate stop to the bomb blockade against North Vietnam.

We demand an immediate end to the bombing of North Vietnam.

We demand the withdrawal of all American troops from Indochina.

VICTORY TO THE VIET CONG!

BUILD THE REVOLUTIONARY GUERILLA.

DARE TO STRUGGLE - DARE TO WIN!

BUILD TWO, THREE, MANY VIETNAMS!

Petra Schelm Commando

May 14, 1972

=== Attacks in Augsburg and Munich ===
On Friday, May 12, 1972, the Thomas Weissbecker Commando detonated three bombs at the police headquarters in Augsburg and in the LKA office in Munich.

On March 2, Thomas Weissbecker was murdered in a well-planned surprise attack by a death squad of the Munich ''Kripo'' and the Augsburg police; he had absolutely no chance to defend himself. The police had no intention of taking Thomas Weissbecker prisoner; they intended to shoot him.

The authorities responsible for the manhunt must understand that they can’t liquidate any of us without having to anticipate that we will strike back. The security services, the special squads, the Kripo, the BGS and their organizational and political employers must be made aware that their attempts to “solve” the problems of this fascist country by arming the police, by militarizing the class struggle, and by the ruthless and vicious use of guns will provoke resistance. This is also true of the police operations in response to the Munich bank robbery, in response to the Cologne bank robbery, against the Tübingen apprentice Epple, and against foreign workers.

The tactics and tools that we use are the tactics and tools of guerilla warfare. The Minister of the Interior and the BAW assess the situation incorrectly if they think that they can rule with their death squads. It is in the nature of the guerilla—because they struggle in the interests of the people—that they cannot be wiped out by military actions, because their freedom of action can be developed anew whenever it suffers temporary setbacks. Faced with the brutal arrogance of the authorities responsible for the manhunt and the “short cuts” of the fascists, our response is the steady development of the revolutionary guerilla and the long, protracted process of the struggle for liberation from fascism, from capitalist exploitation, and from the oppression of the people.

RESIST THE POLICE DEATH SQUADS!

RESIST THE SS PRACTICES OF THE POLICE!

STRUGGLE AGAINST ALL EXPLOITERS AND ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE!

Thomas Weissbecker Commando

May 16, 1972

=== Attack on Judge Buddenberg ===
On Monday, May 16, 1972, the Manfred Grashof Commando carried out a bomb attack against Judge Buddenberg of the Karlsruhe Federal Supreme Court. Buddenberg is the judge at the Federal Supreme Court responsible for the arrests and investigations in the current political proceedings under §129.

Buddenberg, the pig, allowed Grashof to be moved from the hospital to a cell; the transfer and the risk of infection in the prison put his life at risk. He attempted to murder Grashof. The police having failed, he tried again to kill the defenseless Grashof.

Buddenberg, the pig, is responsible for Carmen Roll being drugged in order to get her to talk. The foreseeable effect of the drug indicates that this was attempted murder.

Buddenberg, the pig, doesn’t give a shit about existing laws and conventions. The strict isolation in which prisoners are held to destroy them psychologically: solitary confinement, isolated yard time, the ban on speaking to other prisoners, constant transfers, punitive confinement, observation cells, the censoring of mail and the confiscation of mail, books, and magazines. The means used to destroy them physically—the glaring cell lights at night, frequent interruption of sleep for searches, chaining during yard time, and physical abuse—are not the bullying of insignificant, frustrated prison wardens; these are Buddenberg’s decrees, meant to force the prisoners to make statements. It is institutionalized fascism in the justice system. It is the beginning of torture.

We demand the immediate application of laws governing remand prisoners, the Geneva Human Rights Convention, and the United Nations Charter regarding the use of remand custody for political prisoners. We demand the justice system call off the systematic destructive attacks upon the lives and health of the prisoners.

We will carry out bomb attacks against judges and federal prosecutors until they stop violating the rights of political prisoners. We are, in fact, demanding nothing that is impossible for this justice system. We have no other means to compel them to do so.

FREEDOM FOR THE POLITICAL PRISONERS!

RESIST CLASS JUSTICE! RESIST FASCISM!

Manfred Grashof Commando

May 20, 1972

=== Attack on the Springer Building ===
Yesterday, Friday May 19, at 3:55 pm, two bombs exploded in the Springer Building in Hamburg. Despite prompt and early warnings, the building wasn’t evacuated and 17 people were injured. At 3:29 pm, the first warning was given to number 3471, who was told to evacuate the building within 15 minutes because a bomb would detonate shortly. The answer was, “Stop this nonsense.” The call was cut off. With a second call at 3:31 pm, we said, “If you don’t evacuate immediately, something horrible will happen.” But the telephone operators obviously had instructions not to pay attention to such calls. The third call, at 3:36 pm, was to the cops saying, “Goddamn it, see to it that the building is immediately evacuated.” Because the Springer Corporation can’t cover up the fact that they were warned, they distort it, stating, “There was only one call and it came too late.” Two telephone operators and the police can confirm that the Springer Press is lying once again.

Springer would rather risk his workers and staff being injured by a bomb than risk losing a couple of hours of work time, and therefore profit, as a result of a false alarm. For capitalists, profit is everything, and the people who make it for them are dirt. We regret that workers and staff were injured.

Our demands of Springer: that his newspapers stop the anticommunist hysteria against the New Left, against working class solidarity actions such as strikes, and against communist parties here and in other countries; that the Springer Corporation stop the hysteria against liberation movements in the Third World, especially against the Arab people who struggle for the freedom of Palestine; that he stop his propagandistic support for Zionism—the imperialist politics of the Israeli ruling class; that the Springer Press stop spreading lies about foreign workers here.

We demand that the Springer Press print this communiqué.

We demand nothing impossible. We will stop our attacks on the enemies of the people if our demands are met.

EXPROPRIATE SPRINGER!

EXPROPRIATE THE ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE!

2nd of June Commando May 20, 1972

=== Attack on the Heidelberg Headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe ===
<blockquote>''Every form of monstrosity will be abolished''

Mao</blockquote>Yesterday evening, May 24, 1972, two bombs with an explosive capacity of 200 kg of TNT, were detonated in the Heidelberg Headquarters of the American Armed Forces in Europe. The attack was carried out after General Daniel James, Department Head at the Pentagon, said, on Wednesday in Washington, “For the U.S. Air Force, no target north or south of the 17th parallel in Vietnam will be exempt from bombing attacks.” On Monday, the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Hanoi again accused the United States of bombing densely populated areas of North Vietnam. In the last 7 weeks, the American Air Force has dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II. Many millions of additional bombs is the response the Pentagon intends to use to stop the North Vietnamese offensive. This is genocide, the slaughter of a people; this is “the final solution”; this is Auschwitz.

The people of the Federal Republic don’t support the security service in its search for the bombers, because they want nothing to do with the crimes of American imperialism and the support it receives from the ruling class here, because they haven’t forgotten Auschwitz, Dresden, and Hamburg, because they know that the bomb attacks against those who commit mass murder in Vietnam are just, and because they know from experience that demonstrations and words are of no use against the crimes of imperialism.

WE DEMAND AN END TO BOMB ATTACKS IN VIETNAM!

WE DEMAND A HALT TO THE MINE BLOCKADE AGAINST NORTH VIETNAM!

WE DEMAND THE WITHDRAWL OF AMERICAN TROOPS FROM INDOCHINA!

July 15th Commando

May 25, 1972

=== To the News Editors of the West German Press ===
On May 26, Willy Brandt said in his television broadcast that the bombings of recent weeks have no logical political basis, and that they have endangered innocent lives.

The Federal Chancellor can deceive the people with these assertions because the West German press has almost completely suppressed the communiqués of the urban guerilla commandos.

Instead the ''Frankfurter Rundschau'' published a letter created out of cut out letters—which, when compared to authentic RAF communiqués, can clearly be seen to be a fake—to create the impression that the bombers are brainless twits who act chaotically in an effort to create fear amongst the people.

The Chancellor’s statement does not differ from similar statements by General Franco, General Patakos, von Howeida, the followers of Salazar, or the Turkish military dictator: the reasons for the actions are ignored, and only the condemnation of the Chancellor and the pundits is presented. The reasons for this conduct are obvious:

* The communiqué of the Thomas Weissbecker Commando was intended to bring every individual police officer to the point where he must think about whether or not he wants to be an active part of the hunt for the RAF;
* An investigation would have proven that the 2nd of June Commando warned the Springer Corporation on time and that Springer, as always, has lied;
* The people, who know from their own experience all about genocide and the terrorist bombing of civilian populations, can draw their own conclusions about the bomb attacks against those who commit mass murder in Vietnam and against the fascism of the Springer Corporation;
* And because of this, there can be no doubt that the bomb attacks were directed solely against the enemies of the people, the enemies of the working class, the enemies of the Vietnamese people, the imperialists.

“We’re all in the same boat” has always been the motto of the exploiters and fascists.

Springer has, under threat of further bomb attacks, published the demands made of him, albeit in a mutilated form.

The rest of the press must understand that they themselves will be provoking actions against Springer if they, as a result of economic pressure coming from Springer, submit voluntarily and opportunistically to this practice of censorship. We therefore demand that they no longer deceive the people about the political reasons behind the bomb attacks, that is to say, that they not aggravate the situation unnecessarily. We demand that they print in full the following communiqués: the communiqué of the Thomas Weissbecker Commando, the communiqué of the 2nd of June Commando and the communiqué of the July 15th Commando.

SERVE THE PEOPLE!

EXPROPRIATE SPRINGER!

RAF

May 28, 1972

=== Regarding the Fascist Bomb Threats Against Stuttgart ===
The two bomb threats pasted together out of letters cut from newspapers for next Friday, June 2, in Stuttgart don’t come from the Red Army Faction. Genuine communiqués of the urban guerilla commandos can easily be authenticated by comparing their contents with other RAF communiqués. And they are typewritten, as the cops well know.
[[File:Fake bomb threat by German police and blamed on RAF.png|thumb|''Fake communiqué threatening random bombings in Stuttgart.'']]
The fake communiqués, given their contents, their purpose, their essence, and their style, more likely come from the cops themselves.

The cops know this. The Springer journalists, who have published the false communiqués without reservation, know this. Filbinger,<ref>Hans Filbinger (CDU) was, at this time, the ''Land'' Chairman of Baden-Württemberg, of which Stuttgart is the capital.</ref> Krause,<ref>Walter Krause (SPD) was, at this time, the Minister of the Interior and acting President of Baden-Württemberg.</ref> and Klett<ref>Arnulf Klett was, at this time, the Mayor of Stuttgart.</ref> know this. They are taking precautions only as a pretext to prepare new police actions and to drive the war of nerves to the extreme.

Because the authorities leading the manhunt are receiving no help from the people, they are seizing upon fascist provocation. It is possible that if by Friday they haven’t had any success in their hunt—if they haven’t met their kill quota—they will carry through on the crimes they have threatened. Just as Springer didn’t allow his building to be evacuated, although he himself said he could foresee the attacks coming. Just as the Nazis set the Reichstag on fire and attacked the Gleiwitz transmitter. One must assume that they intend similar communiqués and attacks in the future.

We are not responsible for the crimes of fascists.

The actions of the urban guerilla are directed against the institutions of the class state, imperialism, and capital. They are never directed against working people or against people who have nothing to do with the crimes of imperialism. They are directed against those who plan vicious attacks against the people, such as those announced in the false communiqués, and those carried out daily by U.S. imperialism against the Vietnamese people.

FIGHT FASCISM!

DESTROY AND OBLITERATE THE POWER OF IMPERIALISM!

EXPROPRIATE SPRINGER

RAF

May 29, 1972

=== Statement to the Red Aid Teach-In ===
Comrades, some of you still believe that you don’t have any reason to dialogue with the Red Army Faction.

Some of you still believe that the cops will soon have a handle on the armed struggle in the metropole. Some of you still believe what you read in the newspapers: that the RAF is on the run, that there are splits in the RAF, that the RAF has a hierarchical structure, that the RAF is isolated. You aren’t seeing reality.

The KB in Hamburg believed that the attack against the Springer Corporation was the work of right-wing extremists. Instead of engaging us in debate, they assure the police that they themselves are not guilty. And the Frankfurt KSV Frankfurt asserts, in agreement with the ''Rundshau'', that the recent bomb attacks have nothing to do with the class struggle in West Germany and Berlin. These comrades no longer understand what’s going on.

Although they now understand that Genscher didn’t call out the police for show, that the murders of Petra, Georg, and Thomas were not mistakes on the part of the system, that the ''Kripo'' was responsible for the destruction of strike centrals during the strikes last year, that the Emergency Laws weren’t adopted just for the fun of it, that the banning of foreigners’ organizations isn’t just for show and that over sixty prisoners are being abused in prison—although they know all of this full well, they still believe it is too early to begin to resist.

They protest the death penalty in Persia and in Turkey; they wish the Palestinian resistance success; they protest the terror in Greece and Spain; they protest the complicity of the system with fascist regimes— but they are afraid to intervene or to act. They are clearly afraid to arrive at the obvious conclusion. They hide behind the masses and present their problem as one located outside of themselves.

We see things differently than these comrades. We are of the opinion that the hateful assembly-lines and piecework in the factories have gotten so bad that hardly anyone has any illusions any more about the fact that corporate profits require irreparable damage to the health of the workers. The masses already know that in the Federal Republic they must work themselves to death because that is the source of their employers’ profits, that the factory workers already know who they’re working for—soon it will be for themselves.

We are of the opinion that the problem these comrades see as lying elsewhere is their own subjective problem, that they project onto the masses their own lack of clarity. They want to identify their own inability—an inability to express solidarity with the masses because of their own privileged class position—as lying with the masses, to present it as an objective problem based in the masses’ need to develop a higher level of consciousness.

If, as occurred recently in Frankfurt, some women comrades say, for example, that they want to take to the streets if another one of us is murdered, then that indicates it would be easy to spontaneously intervene. Which is to say: the problem of agency is, as Springer journalists put it in a headline, one of marketing and competition. Political content as the commodity, the masses as the market. So they are ready to moan about imperialist crimes, but not to prevent them with clubs and bombs. For the imperialists, the assembly lines are still not going fast enough and the time required must be further reduced. They will consume as much as they can extract.

There is no reason for further delay in addressing the problem of armed struggle and resistance. Reduced hours, lay-offs, strikes, two million foreign workers, “Bild fights for you!”, “the extortionist of the week” in Stern, Citizens Initiatives, squatted houses—there is hardly any area in which the system can maintain its facade. The people’s desires must be unified and transformed into an organized leap forward.

This greed-driven system is ravaging the cities. Teachers must learn to muzzle themselves or they are fired. The mass media has been purged of decent critical journalists. Riot police are mobilized against strike centrals. Rulings of the Federal Labor Court prepare the way to criminalize future strikes. The BKA hopes to eliminate the remaining press freedoms. They are not waiting for the legal left to take up the armed struggle before proceeding with this. It’s happening now; it has begun. Is this the point when you will start to resist—or are you still waiting for something?

Comrades, stop hiding behind the masses! Stop shifting the question of resistance to the masses! Stop rationalizing your fear of the system’s excessive violence as a problem of agency! Stop presenting your confusion as erudition and your helplessness as a broad perspective!

The system is now producing contradictions at such a rate that they can no longer be integrated, and the masses no longer believe talk of reforms. It is equally true that the guerilla can only be anchored in the people to the degree that we carry out appropriate actions and you make effective propaganda. For this to happen, the revolutionary process and revolutionary consciousness must be developed further; the consciousness that action is justified—and possible!

When we build the revolutionary guerilla, we are creating an instrument that is beyond the reach of the system’s repression, that does not depend on the system’s tolerance for its capacity to act, that does not have its room to maneuver determined by the ''Verfassungsshutz''. If you are domesticated like Müller’s<ref>Frankfurt police chief at the time.</ref> demonstrators in Frankfurt on May 18, you can continue to demonstrate for some time to come, and you can celebrate it along with the KSV as the most powerful and most insular demonstration in a long time. Under the watchful eye of the police and funneled between two water cannons and rows of batons, you can go on celebrating successes long into the future. But the price to be paid is the distance people took from Tuesday’s demonstration, the denunciation of the comrades who broke free from the Hauptwache;<ref>The Hauptwache is the central point on a major pedestrian mall in Frankfurt.</ref> the price in the end was betrayal of the goals in exchange for permission to walk in the streets.

Today, everyone understands our actions against the extermination strategy in Vietnam. Everybody should be able to understand our actions to defend the lives and health of the prisoners and of the RAF comrades still at large. That the media no longer publishes our communiqués about our bomb attacks, but publishes false statements of fascist origin, that they downplay attacks on U.S. imperialism and play up fascist provocations such as that against the citizens of Stuttgart, demonstrates how things really are, demonstrates what they are afraid of and how far they’ll go to hide the truth from the masses, to prop up their facade.

Dare to struggle; dare to win! Attack and smash the power of imperialism! It is the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution! We call on all militants in the Federal Republic to make all American establishments targets of their attacks in their struggle against U.S. imperialism!

Long live the RAF!

Ulrike Meinhof

for the RAF

May 31, 1972

== 6 - Black September: A Statement from Behind Bars ==
In the fall of 1972, operationally devastated, the RAF issued its first document from behind bars: The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle. Written by one or several of the captured combatants, the text was first made public in West Berlin at Mahler’s second RAF trial, during which he faced charges of conspiracy and establishing a terrorist organization. The former lawyer worked it into the court record by using it as the basis for questions to Ulrike Meinhof, whom he had called as a witness. By November, it was being distributed by outside supporters in magazine format as the RAF’s third major publication.

In this paper, the RAF re-examined the geopolitics of anti-imperialism and the class base for revolution in the First World while responding angrily to Frankfurt School intellectual Oskar Negt, who had recently emerged as a vocal critic of armed struggle in the FRG. What caught people’s attention most was the RAF’s expression of warm solidarity with the Palestinian group Black September, which had carried out a daring, and ultimately tragic, hostage-taking during the Munich Olympics just months earlier.

“The guerillas took part in a courageous action,” Mahler explained, “in which they were ready to sacrifice themselves. The only fault the Black September guerillas can be reproached for is that they did not take Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher as a hostage.”<ref>United Press International, “Baader-Meinhof lawyer praises guerillas,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', October 10, 1972. As we shall see, this was not moot criticism.</ref>

At this point, the courtroom full of left-wing supporters erupted into cheers, prompting the judge to order it cleared.

There is no indication that the RAF played any part in the Black September operation; it was effectively out of action at the time, gutted by the arrests it had suffered following the May Offensive. Even so, given the group’s public statement of solidarity, it may be best to revisit the events at the Munich Olympics that year. (For more about the relationship between the West Germany and Israel, and how this affected the New Left, see Appendix III—The FRG and the State of Israel, pages 550-53.)

Black September had its origin in the aftermath of the civil war between Palestinian forces and the Jordanian state in September 1970. Formed by militants within Arafat’s Al Fatah, its first action had been the assassination, on November 28, 1971, of Jordan’s Prime Minister Wasfi Tel.<ref>Christopher Dobson, Black September: Its Short, Violent History (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 1.</ref> Not one month later, the group had attempted its second assassination, wounding Zaid el Rifai, Jordan’s ambassador to England, as he drove through the streets of London.<ref>Ibid., 12.</ref> By September of 1972, Black September had carried out a number of operations in Europe, including skyjacking a Sabena Belgian World Airlines plane en route from Vienna to Tel Aviv. The plane was flown to Lod airport, where Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan sent in a squad of paratroopers disguised as maintenance workers, who carried out a successful assault. Two of the hijackers were killed and two others captured.<ref>Ibid., 65-79.</ref>

Meanwhile, opening on August 26, the 1972 Olympic Games were supposed to be a symbolic graduation ceremony for the FRG. The last time the Olympics were held on German soil had been the 1936 Berlin games, which became a propaganda vehicle for the Hitler regime. Commentators were not shy to admit that the 1972 Munich Olympics were meant to signal a moving on, a testament to how well West Germany had gotten over its fascist past.

As an unrecognized portent of things to come, that June, the International Olympic Committee refused requests to allow a Palestinian team to participate in the games.<ref>Simon Reeve, ''One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre'' (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000), 40.</ref>

Early on September 5, midway through the games, an eight-man Black September commando entered the “Olympic Village” housing athletes from around the world. The commando made directly for the Israeli dorms, which they secured, in the process killing two sportsmen who tried to resist. They seized nine other Israeli athletes as hostages and issued their demands: the release of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs from Israeli prisons, the release of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in the FRG, and safe passage to Egypt for all concerned.<ref>Black September would later tell Voice of Palestine radio that they had demanded the release of five “revolutionary German girls belonging to the Baader-Meinhof organization,” which five being left open to conjecture. (United Press International, “Other Arab guerrilla demand told,” ''Hayward Daily Review'', September 8, 1972.)</ref>

Black September named this its “Operation Iqrith and Kafr Bir’im.”<ref>Iqrith (also spelled Ikrit) and Bir’im were two Christian villages in the upper Galilee. In 1948, shock troops from the Zionist Hagana expelled the towns’ inhabitants at gunpoint. “The pogrom-like expulsion was carried out without the Israeli government approval,” writes Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh. “However, the democratic Israeli state never allowed the Christian inhabitants to return, despite several rulings to the contrary by the Israeli High Court.” (Khaled Amayreh, “Christians, too, suffer the evilness of the occupation,” at [http://www. thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/12/26/christians_too_suffer_ the_evilness_of_th). http://www. thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/12/26/christians_too_suffer_ the_evilness_of_th).]</ref>

Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister, informed the West German authorities that Israel would not release any of the prisoners. At that point, the West Germans developed a plan to pretend to arrange for the safe passage of the commando and the hostages out of the FRG, while in fact preparing an ambush.

At 10:20 pm, the guerillas and their captives were flown to the military airfield at Fürstenfeldbruck, halfway between Munich and Augsburg. A Lufthansa Boeing 727 waited on the tarmac, ostensibly to fly the group to Tunis. But the area was crawling with cops, and five snipers had been positioned with orders to take the “terrorists” out as soon as the signal was given.

Two members of the commando checked out the Boeing to make sure that all was as had been promised. They then started back to the helicopters where the hostages and the other commando members had remained. At this point, the police sharpshooters opened fire: they missed, and there ensued intermittent volleys of bullets lasting over an hour. Finally, unable to subdue the Palestinians with gunfire, just after midnight police in armored vehicles moved in to try and storm the helicopters.

Seeing this, the commando executed the nine hostages.

By the time the cops were in control, five members of the Palestinian commando and a police officer also lay dead. The entire hostage-taking had lasted barely twenty hours.

It was later revealed that the Bavarian police had seriously bungled their ambush. A team that had been designated to overpower the commando inside the Boeing had voted (!) to desert their posts just twenty minutes before the helicopters landed at Fürstenfeldbruck—they considered the proposed ambush “suicidal.”<ref>Aaron J. Klein, ''Striking Back: the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s deadly response'' (New York: Random House, 2005), 72-73.</ref> This put all the pressure on the marksmen, and yet there were only five deployed, they were not equipped with the recommended rifles for such an operation, nor had they received infrared sights, bulletproof vests, or walkie talkies.<ref>Reeve, 116.</ref> They were not even informed of each other’s positions, which led to one police sniper shooting another, whom he mistook for a member of the commando!<ref>Ibid., 121-122.</ref>

The authorities had obviously underestimated the Palestinian guerilla. “At the moment we fired there were not enough terrorists exposed,” explained Bruno Merck, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior. “We had expected, nevertheless, that those who had not been shot would surrender in the shock of the gun battle. That didn’t happen… All we could do was hope for a mistake. But these people are not amateurs.”<ref>Dobson, 85.</ref>

The distinction between “amateurs” and “professionals” is an odd one. Two of the commando members were teenagers, and the others mostly in their early twenties; obviously, none had participated in other actions of this sort. Their determination most likely came from their own personal experiences. They had all grown up in refugee camps, their families forced to endure extreme poverty, hunger, and the constant threat of Israeli violence, while most of the world happily ignored their existence.<ref>Reeve, 41-42.</ref> In the words of Abu Daoud, who claims to have organized the operation, “They were people who had left their homes in ’48, forced to flee, and then languished in the Lebanese camps since then. They were people whose houses were now the homes of Polish, French and American Jews who had replaced them in their own country, living as citizens there without any right to.”<ref>Ibid, 42.</ref>

The three survivors from the commando—Sammar ‘Adnan ‘abd alGhani al-Jishshi,<ref>The frg press reported his name as Ibrahim Badran.</ref> ‘Abd al-Qadir ad-Dinnawi, and Samer Muhammad ‘Abdallah<ref>Mahmud Abdallah Kallam, ''Sabra wa-Shatila, dhakirat ad-Damm'' (Beirut: Beisan Publishing), 40-41.</ref>—were taken into West German custody. Less than two months later, on October 29, a second Black September commando skyjacked a Lufthansa jet en route from Beirut to Ankara, threatening to blow up the plane if the three were not released. Still licking its wounds from the Fürstenfeldbruck fiasco, the West German government agreed: the Munich survivors were granted safe passage to Libya.<ref>''Time Magazine'' [online], “Return of Black September,” November 13, 1972.</ref>

Operation Iqrith and Kafr Bir’im sent shockwaves around the world. To Israel and its supporters, Black September had massacred innocents, and the Germans had been criminally incompetent. In the words of one Israeli diplomat, “The human mind fails to grasp the barbaric depravity of the cruel murderers of the Israeli athletes.”<ref>Associated Press, “Bay Area service for slain Jews,” ''Hayward Daily Review'', September 8, 1972.</ref>

The response was not long in coming and took the form of collective punishment:<blockquote>''[On September 8] Israeli Skyhawk planes attacked villages and refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria… killing a total of 59 people and wounding 40 others, all of whom were civilians. Among the victims were 19 children.''<ref>Sami Hadawi, ''Crime and No Punishment: Zionist-Israeli Terrorism 1939-1972'' (Beirut: Palestine Research Centre, 1972), 83.</ref></blockquote>Eight days later, a second exercise in collective punishment was carried out:<blockquote>''The Israeli army, supported by tanks, armored cars and jet aircraft, crossed into Lebanese territory, and for 36 hours attacked a number of Lebanese villages within an area of some 250 square kilometers, killing people at random and destroying houses and blowing up bridges…''

''The refugee camp at Nabatiya was attacked from the air by napalm bombs, wounding eight of its inmates…''

''By the time the Israelis withdrew, they left behind a trail of death and destruction. About 200 civilians, including women and children, were killed or wounded, and over 200 houses destroyed or damaged. In addition, 18 Lebanese soldiers died in defense of their homeland.''<ref>Ibid., 84.</ref></blockquote>The United States vetoed a United Nations resolution condemning these massacres, and in doing so put Israel’s policy of carrying out reprisals against Palestinian civilians on a firm international footing for decades to come.<ref>Henry Cattan, ''The Palestine Question'' (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 122-123.</ref>

Not only did the Munich operation provoke attacks against Palestinian civilians, it also spelled the beginning of the end of Black September as an organization. On the one hand, Israeli secret services embarked on a bloody campaign of retribution, letter bombs and targeted assassinations, which would eventually claim dozens of lives.<ref>Reeve, 160-169, 175-195. For more on Israel’s reaction, see Brad E. O’Neill, ''Armed Struggle in Palestine: A Political-Military Analysis'' (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1978), 87-88.</ref> At the same time, various Arab regimes which supported the PLO began to worry that the Palestinians’ struggle might endanger their relationship with the imperialist west. The final turning point for these regimes occurred just six months later when a Black September commando took over the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan during a farewell party for the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires<ref>Black September was demanding the release of Sirhan Sirhan, who had assassinated Bobby Kennedy, a number of Palestinians held in Jordan, all Arab women held in Israel, as well as Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader in the FRG.</ref>—one Belgian and two American diplomats were executed before the commando surrendered.<ref>Patricia McCarty, “The Terrorist War,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', August 9, 1973.</ref> The pressure from conservative Arab states increased, and the PLO and Fatah withdrew their support for hijackings and hostage-takings, which caused Black September operations to rapidly taper off.<ref>O’Neill, 151.</ref> Within a few years, the organization was no more.

As for the West German reaction to the events at the Munich Olympics, the whole mess was seen as a great embarrassment. One result was the decision to establish a crack special operations unit, the ''Grenzschutzgruppe'' 9 (literally, “Border Protection Group 9” but shortened to GSG-9), announced within weeks of the Fürstenfeldbruck blunder. Led by Ulrich Wegener, Genscher’s liaison officer with the BGS, who had been present on the scene at the airfield, it would receive its initial training from Britain’s SAS and Israel’s ''Sayeret Mat’kal''. As its name implies, the GSG-9 fell under the umbrella of the Border Police, not the armed forces, legally enabling it to attempt long-term “deep cover” infiltration of the radical scene. The GSG-9 would eventually win international recognition as one of the most fearsome “counterterrorism” units in the world, some of its operatives receiving additional training in NATO’s International Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) School.<ref>“Terrorism 101—Counter-Terrorism Organizations: Germany - GSG-9,” http://www.terrorism101.org/counter/Germany.html.</ref>

Of more immediate consequence was the crackdown against the FRG’s small Arab population.

Earlier that year, Black September had already carried out less dramatic attacks in West Germany. On February 6, the group had assassinated five Jordanians, believed to be intelligence officers who had been active in the civil war, near Cologne.<ref>Edgar O’Balance, ''Arab Guerilla Power'' (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 215.</ref> Then, on February 8, a bomb had gone off in a factory belonging to the Strüver Corporation near Hamburg. The factory produced electrical generators for Israeli aircraft.<ref>MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, “Black September Attacked Business Target (Feb. 8, 1972, Federal Republic of Germany),” http://www.tkb.org/Incident.jsp?incid=790.</ref> On February 22, the Esso Oil pipeline near Hamburg had been similarly damaged.<ref>Dobson, 65.</ref>

Now, with the Munich attack passing under the glare of the Olympic spotlight, the state moved into action; raids were carried out, and the FRG’s 4,000 Arab students and 37,000 Arab “guest workers” came under intense scrutiny. In short order, approximately one hundred Palestinian activists were expelled, and two Fatah front groups—the General Union of Palestinian Students and the General Union of Palestinian Workers—found themselves banned.<ref>Ibid., 132.</ref>

At the same time, within the radical left, some saw the events of September 5 quite differently. To anti-imperialists and others who sympathized with Black September, the operation had been a legitimate one, even if it had ended in tragedy. Some would even argue that the operation had been a success, for although no prisoners had been freed and so many people had died, the world could no longer pretend it did not know about the plight of the Palestinians.<ref>Decades later, Abu Daoud remained adamant on this point. “I would be against any operation like Munich ever again,” he told Sports Illustrated magazine in 2002. However, “[a]t the time, it was the correct thing to do for our cause. … The operation brought the Palestinian issue into the homes of 500 million people who never previously cared about Palestinian victims at the hands of the Israelis.” (Alexander Wolff, “Thirty years after he helped plan the terror strike, Abu Daoud remains in hiding -- and unrepentant,” ''Sports Illustrated'', August 26, 2002.</ref> Furthermore, it was argued that blame for the Israeli athletes’ death lay squarely with the West German police, who had attempted a double-cross which simply blew up in their faces.

Sympathetic observers pointed out that the Palestinians had certainly not wanted to kill their hostages. They hoped rather to free their own comrades. This argument was more difficult to dismiss in 1972 than it would be today, as skyjackings and exchanging hostages for prisoners had not yet exhausted their utility for guerillas at that time, and often did meet with success (as the October 29 skyjacking would demonstrate).<ref>Indeed, the years 1969-1972 can be considered the golden age of political hostage takings. While kidnappings were a particularly prevalent tactic for the South American guerilla, skyjackings in this period were pioneered by various Palestinian organizations. Whereas there had been only twenty-seven aircraft hijacked between 1961 and 1968, and most of these had been non-political acts, between 1969 and 1972, two hundred seventy-seven aircraft were hijacked, many of them successfully, i.e. the hijackers got away and their demands were met. During this period, seventy-eight political prisoners were released as demanded by various skyjackers. [Alona E. Evans, “Aircraft Hijacking: What is Being Done?” ''American Journal of International Law'' ''67'' (1973): 641-645].</ref>

Furthermore, although the athletes were noncombatants, they were nonetheless representatives of a colonial state, one which was for all intents and purposes waging war against the Palestinian people. Certainly, far bloodier actions had been carried out in anticolonial campaigns around the world. No less than Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian guerilla leader, had argued in his famous ''Minimanual'' that “non-political” celebrities could constitute legitimate targets:<blockquote>''The kidnapping of personalities who are well-known artists, sports figures or who are outstanding in some other field, but who have evidenced no political interest, can be a useful form of propaganda for the guerrillas, provided it occurs under special circumstances, and is handled so the public understands and sympathizes with it.''<ref>Carlos Marighella, “Kidnapping,” ''Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla'', [[Library:Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla#KIDNAPPING]]</ref></blockquote>Whether the operation was understood or enjoyed public sympathy depended very much on who one thought of as constituting the “public.” Certainly, in the Arab world, the action was widely understood, and met with a large measure of sympathy. When the bodies of the slain commando members were brought to Libya, for instance, over 30,000 mourners followed their funeral procession from Tripoli’s Martyr’s Square to the Sidi Munaidess Cemetery.<ref>Reeve, 147.</ref>

It is equally true that in the imperialist countries, most people neither understood nor sympathized with the aims of the Palestinians. The commando’s public testament, released shortly afterwards, met with simple incomprehension. Thus the outrage, not only at Black September, but also at anyone who dared to speak up in defense of the Palestinian guerilla action.

If it has been necessary to our study to consider these events in such detail, it is precisely because of this outrage.

Critics of the RAF have zeroed in on the ''Black September'' document, scandalized at this support for the Munich operation. The guerilla’s penchant for purposefully shocking formulations (i.e. “Israel burned their own athletes just as the Nazis had burned the Jews”) did not help matters. Likewise, a strong argument could be made that the RAF, like much of the revolutionary left, did a poor job at acknowledging and analyzing the specifically antisemitic dimensions of German fascism.

What is important to stress in the context of our study is that this is not why the RAF was criticized. Rather, the fact that the captured combatants dared to stand in solidarity with Black September has been construed as “proof” that they were antisemites, not in the sense of having a weak analysis or oppressive blindspots, but in the sense of “hating Jews.” According to the state, various “terrorism experts,” and some right-wing and liberal pundits, it was in this sense that the RAF was accused of being an antisemitic organization.

Yet regardless of whether one finds it to have been correct or ill-conceived, justified or egregious, it is plainly evident that the Munich hostage taking had nothing to do with antisemitism. It was simply part of the struggle of the Palestinian people against colonial oppression. There may be plenty of moral and political arguments with which to object to the targeting of the Olympic athletes, but opposition to antisemitism is not one of them. Indeed, while anti-Jewish racism may well have led some bigots to applaud the action, anti-Arab racism seems to have led far more to automatically condemn it, and with it all those who would not turn their backs on the Palestinian people.

Yet the accusation did not stop there: some liberal and right-wing critics have gone further, accusing Meinhof of making antisemitic comments as the RAF text was being delivered. This story has gained some currency in recent years, especially on the internet, so it is worth extending this already lengthy examination in order to establish the facts of the matter.

As already mentioned, the Black September document was read out in court by Horst Mahler, taking the form of a “cross examination” of Ulrike Meinhof, who had been called to the witness stand. At one point, Meinhof interrupted the reading with an impromptu observation of her own, specifically regarding the nature of German antisemitism and the Holocaust. The only record of what Meinhof said is in an article from the ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', in which many of her words were paraphrased. Here is what the FAZ reported Meinhof as saying:<blockquote>''“Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were murdered and carted off to Europe’s garbage heap, dispensed with as money Jews.” Finance capital and banks, “the hard core of the system” of imperialism and capitalism deflected the hate of the people for money and oppression from itself and transferred it to the Jews.''<ref>Peter Jochen Winters, “Ulrike Meinhof läßt sich nur die Stichwort geben,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', December 15, 1972. Our translation. Note that those sections not in quotes consist of the summary by Winters. The entire relevant portion of the faz article is reproduced in German and English in Appendix I, pages 544-47</ref> </blockquote>The FAZ, like all initial observers, seems to have understood Meinhof as saying that the Nazis took advantage of anticapitalist sentiment, using stereotypes about “rich Jews” to mobilize gentiles behind a program of genocide. That Meinhof saw herself as opposed to this, and therefore opposed to antisemitism, was taken for granted.

Such an analysis of Nazism may be criticized for being facile, economistic, or simply incorrect. Nevertheless, it has an established place on the left, and is not in and of itself in any way anti-Jewish. Rather, it can trace its lineage directly back to the early 20th century social democrat, August Bebel, who famously described antisemitism as “the socialism of fools.”

Even so, Meinhof’s words were to be turned against her, especially in the English-speaking world. One of the first translations of the FAZ quote into English appeared in an article by one George Watson in the British literary magazine ''Encounter'', a CIA-funded publication, which had as its aim the winning over of “progressive” intellectuals to the American side in the Cold War.<ref>In the words of Andrew Roth, a friend of the magazine’s editor Melvin Lasky: “Encounter’s function was to combat anti-Americanism by brainwashing the uncertain with pro-American articles. These were paid for at several times the rate paid by the New Statesman and offered British academics and intellectuals free U.S. trips and expenses-paid lecture tours. There was no room for the objective-minded in this cold war to capture intellectuals.” (Andrew Roth, “Melvin Lasky, Cold Warrior who Edited Encounter Magazine,” The Manchester Guardian [online], Obituaries, May 22, 2004.)</ref> This translation had a curious wording, though, one which seemed to give new meaning to what Meinhof had said. According to Watson, the guerilla leader had stated that “Auschwitz means that 6 million Jews were killed, and thrown onto the waste heap of Europe, ''for what they were'': money-Jews.”<ref>George Watson, “Race and the Socialists,” ''Encounter'' 47 (Nov. 1976): 23.</ref> (emphasis added)

The clear implication here is that Meinhof approved of their murder— that she approved of the Holocaust and Nazism and also Auschwitz. This would flatly contradict everything Meinhof and the RAF had stated both before and after this point, and this fact alone should suffice to cast doubt on Watson’s translation. As should the fact that those who have gone back to the original German FAZ article have disputed Watson’s interpretation with apparent unanimity.<ref>Scholar Diane Paule, for instance states: “Watson’s translation and analysis make Meinhof’s point appear to be much clearer than in fact it is, and his charge that she ‘spoke up publicly in the Good Old Cause of revolutionary extermination’ is not obviously supported by the text.” [“‘In the Interests of Civilization’: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” J''ournal of the History of Ideas''</ref>

However, most people do not return to the original, and this conveniently damning translation has subsequently found its way into all sorts of studies and discussions, not only of the RAF, but of the left in general. Saul Bellow quoted it as he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976,<ref>Nobel Foundation “Saul Bellow—Nobel Lecture,” http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-lecture.html</ref> and it has been featured in books “proving” that revolutionary anticapitalism is antisemitic.<ref>Paul Lawrence Rose, ''Revolutionary anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).</ref> All over the internet it appears as “evidence” that not only the RAF, but indeed the entire German New Left, was anti-Jewish, if not crypto-Nazi.

We are not claiming that there are no legitimate criticisms to be made of how the West German left dealt with—or failed to deal with—the question of antisemitism. It has been noted that many radicals’ fierce antifascism rested on an analysis which saw the persecution of Jews as merely incidental to Nazism. Some radicals, including the RAF, often did seem to view the Third Reich as nothing more than a case of hyper-capitalism, the solution to which could be as simple as hyper-anticapitalism.

Combined with a persisting lack of clarity regarding the status of Germany—imperialist? or colonized?<ref>For more on this, see Not Wanted in the Model: the KPD, pages 17-18.</ref>—and a keen awareness of Israel’s role in world imperialism, these weaknesses pushed sections of the left to occasionally espouse positions which belied a certain antisemitism. This was a serious error at times in the 1970s, and coming to grips with it would eventually acquire some importance for some individuals within both the K-groups and the undogmatic left.

Despite these facts, being a left-wing German anti-Zionist was in no way tantamount to being an antisemite. Far from it. In the precise case of the RAF, those who would accuse the group of antisemitism have yet to make their case.

As to Ulrike Meinhof’s words in question, Watson’s translation is simply wrong. Whether this was an “honest mistake,” or whether it had something to do with the CIA funding the magazine for which he wrote is a question readers had best ponder for themselves. Certainly, the timing is suspect: his article appeared in November 1976. As detailed in Section 10, Meinhof had been found dead—with convincing evidence pointing to murder—in her prison cell earlier that year, and this had elicited much sympathy for the RAF within the left. In this context, discrediting the guerilla leader took on great importance for the state and counterinsurgency forces.

(For more on the original FAZ article, Watson’s loose translation style, and our own translation, see Appendix I—Excerpts from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, pages 544-47.)

As has already been mentioned, the RAF did not limit itself to dealing with the Munich events in its Black September document. For the RAF, these merely provided a starting point from which to launch into a discussion of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the Arab world, including the possible use of petroleum as a weapon. This was a year before the OPEC nations carried out their partial oil embargo as retaliation against western support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

From the question of oil, the RAF went on to consider the problem of opportunism within the imperialist countries, the “metropole.” This discussion focused on Oskar Negt, a former assistant of Jürgen Habermas and a professor of sociology at the Technical University in Hannover, who following the May Offensive had publicly called on socialists to deny the RAF any solidarity or support.

In the early seventies, Negt was considered a leading left-wing intellectual. In 1973, for instance, in the first issue of New German Critique, he would be described as “the most innovative theorist in Germany today.”<ref>Horst Mewes, “The German New Left,” ''New German Critique 1'', (Winter 1973): 39.</ref> He was particularly prominent in the West German campaign to provide solidarity for the Black Liberation Movement militant Angela Davis. Accused of complicity in a failed hostage taking which had been meant to free imprisoned Black revolutionaries (the Soledad Brothers), Davis was incarcerated in the United States for eighteen months between 1970 and 1972. For Negt, the connection was both political and personal, as he had gotten to know Davis when she had spent time studying in Frankfurt in the 1960s.<ref>“The Angela Davis Case,” ''Newsweek'' [online], October 26, 1970, 20.</ref> It was only natural for him to now support her as a political prisoner.

Davis’ trial wound up in San Jose, California, in the late spring of 1972, and the jury began its deliberations on Friday, June 2. That same weekend, as a show of solidarity, an Angela Davis Congress had been organized in Frankfurt by the ''Sozialistisches Büro'', a loose network that had emerged out of the APO in 1969, and had since established itself as an important force within the undogmatic left.<ref>Mewes, 32-35.</ref> Keynote speakers included Frankfurt School personalities Herbert Marcuse and Wolfgang Abendroth, and, of course, Oskar Negt. Close to ten thousand people attended, and one can only imagine what the scene must have been when news arrived on the Sunday that Davis had been found not guilty.<ref>Jürgen Schröder,“USA Black Panther Party (BPP) und Angela Davis Materialien zur Analyse von Opposition,” http://www.mao-projekt.de/int/na/usa/usa_ Black_Panther_Party_und_Angela_Davis.htm</ref>

While the conference was scheduled perfectly to coincide with this victory across the Atlantic, it also occurred at a very particular moment in the FRG. As we have seen, the entire month of May had been filled with bombings carried out by the RAF. Just days before the Congress opened, also in Frankfurt, Red Aid had held a Teach-In Against Repression at which a tape-recorded statement from Ulrike Meinhof had been played. The very next day, the first of the arrests came: Andreas Baader, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe were captured in Munich.

At this critical juncture, at what should have been an ideal occasion to make the connection between revolutionary movements in West Germany and the United States, Negt dropped his own bombshell. His address at the Congress took aim not at imperialism or racism or state repression, but at the RAF, and at those who supported its strategy of armed struggle in the FRG.

According to Negt, the RAF’s politics were disconnected from the experiences of most citizens of the FRG, and for that reason could only be self-defeating. Whereas he believed the Black Liberation Movement was justified in using political violence in the United States, and he fully supported the Black Panther Party and similar groups, he argued that people were not particularly oppressed in the FRG, and, as such, the guerilla could only alienate the working class there. Armed politics in such a context were vanguardist, counterproductive, and doomed to fail, as anyone who robbed banks or planted bombs would only cut themselves off from the very people whose support they should be seeking.

Perhaps worst of all, Negt accused the RAF of being simple “desperadoes” trying to put a political veneer on apolitical crimes. Arguing that “uncritical solidarity” ran contrary to socialist organizing principles, Negt called on leftists to refuse the RAF any support—be it safehouses or IDs or whatnot—smugly adding that if this was done, the guerilla would simply not be able to survive.<ref>Linksnet “Rede zum Angela-Davis-Kongress 1972,” [http://www.linksnet.de/ artikel.php?id=374. http://www.linksnet.de/ artikel.php?id=374.]</ref>

It has been reported that his words did not go over so well with everyone at the Congress, and he was vigorously denounced by many in attendance, notably members of Frankfurt’s ''sponti'' scene.<ref>Schröder, ”USA Black Panther Party.”</ref>

It might have been enough that he speak out against the guerilla in order for the RAF to take him to task, but Negt would be accused of doing far more than that.

Apparently the Hannover sociology professor was friends with Fritz Rodewald—the same Fritz Rodewald who set Ulrike Meinhof and Gerhard Müller up to be captured within a few weeks of the Frankfurt conference. According to Meinhof’s biographer Jutta Ditfurth, Rodewald, uneasy about his prior decision to aid the fugitives, had turned to Negt for advice. Negt repeated his position that nobody owed anyone “mechanical” or “automatic” solidarity, and as a result, the police were contacted.<ref>Jutta Ditfurth, interview by Arno Luik, “Sie war die große Schwester der 68er.”</ref>

In Negt’s hard line, one can discern the first clear rejection of the guerilla by a section of the undogmatic left. While this position can’t have done the guerilla any good, the evidence seems to indicate that in 1972, and for several years thereafter, it failed to achieve hegemony. Which is not to say that the undogmatic left was pro-guerilla, but rather that different people held different opinions, and it would have taken more than the ravings of one left-wing intellectual to cause a definite repudiation. When such a move away from political violence did eventually occur, it would be as a result of former street fighters, guerillas, and semi-legal activists re-examining the question. It would take militants like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer, and former combatants like Bommi Baumann and Hans-Joachim Klein, to do what Negt could not.

If the RAF saw a thread connecting its negative evaluation of Negt to its glowing appraisal of Black September, it was the question of the labor aristocracy. It is surely no accident that the ''Black September'' document provides the guerilla’s most detailed examination of this concept.

Specifically, the “labor aristocracy” refers to those more well-to-do layers of the working class, people who no longer have any material incentive to engage in the dangerous, grueling task of carrying out a revolution against capitalism. Lenin had argued that the labor aristocracy was a product of imperialism, as the profits earned from exploitation in the developing countries were used to pay for the elevated position of certain sections of the working class in the metropole. This concept has been accepted by almost all strains of the Marxist-Leninist tradition, though often accorded little actual importance in practice.

To the first wave of the RAF, however, the question of the labor aristocracy had by this point become central. The labor aristocracy was not seen simply as a section of the West German working class, but as the dominant section, almost to the exclusion of any classical proletariat. As such, the idea of using popular support in the FRG as a barometer of political legitimacy—which is what Negt seemed to propose—was not simply wrong, it reeked of opportunism.

This analysis was hinted at in ''Serve the People'' earlier in 1972, but ''Black September'' spelled it out clearly, while also exploring what this might imply.

In the RAF’s view, in 1972, there was no material basis for revolution in the FRG: the crumbs from the imperialist table were enough to win most people’s loyalty for the system. Yet the RAF did not see this as a reason to give up on revolutionary politics, or to abandon armed struggle; instead, they argued that “the situation is ‘ripe’ to take up the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole—not ‘ripe’ for revolution, but ‘ripe’ for the anti-imperialist offensive.”

The RAF emphasized the alienation which persisted even in an affluent consumer society, zeroing in on people’s individual dissatisfaction and misery in the midst of plenty. Much was made of the way in which consumerism distorted and manipulated people’s desires, “the exploitation of their feelings and thoughts, wishes, and utopian dreams.”

This psychological misery—insufficient, perhaps to carry out a revolution, but enough to establish a revolutionary tradition—was seen as providing a subjective basis for armed resistance to imperialism within the metropole. As the capitalist system would find itself increasingly besieged by the liberation struggles in the Third World—or so the theory went—this base could grow, and then, “the masses here will eventually find their political identity on the side of the liberation struggles, and will eventually free themselves from the grip of the system, with its lies, its glitziness, its election promises, and its lotteries.”

''Black September'' provides the RAF’s most explicit attempt to link the concepts of imperialism, the labor aristocracy, and the subjective basis for revolt in the metropole. In hindsight, it is clear that the optimistic notion that the West German masses might rally to an anti-imperialist position has not been borne out. Nevertheless, this should not detract from the fact that the RAF was at least trying to deal with questions that most leftists in imperialist societies preferred—and still prefer—to ignore.

As we have seen, ''Black September'' was a document firmly embedded in the context of its time. Perhaps for this reason, it did not “age” well, and would be increasingly ignored by those sympathetic to the guerilla in years to come. Yet it was an important document, and the relationship to the national liberation struggles in the Third World and to the working class in Germany as elaborated here would not be revisited by subsequent waves of guerilla fighters for years to come.
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Appeal of the Fedayeen: To All the Free People of the World
!<blockquote>''On Monday, September 11, 1972, the Palestinian Press Agency published a group statement from the Black September members who were killed in Munich. This statement was drafted before the operation in Munich began. (M. & S.)''</blockquote>We do not intend to kill any innocent people with our action. We are struggling above all against injustice. We do not want to disturb the peace, rather we want to draw the world’s attention to the filthy Zionist occupation and the real tragedy our people are suffering.

We ask that the free people of the world understand our action, the goal of which is to thwart imperialism’s international interests, to expose the relationship between imperialism and Zionism, and to clarify for our Arab nation what “Israel” is and who its allies are.

We are a significant element in the armed Palestinian revolutionary movement, which is itself part of the Arab revolution. We ask you, in spite of the enemy’s conspiracy and the difficulties presented by the struggle, not to lay down your weapons. The earth can only be freed with blood.

The world only respects the strong. Our strength does not lie in speeches, but in action.

We apologize to the young athletes of the world if their sensibilities are disturbed by our undertaking. But they should know that there is a people whose homeland has been occupied for 24 years. This people has suffered anguish at the hands of an enemy that moves amongst them in Munich.

It is irrelevant where we are buried; the enemy can defile our corpses. What we hope is that Arab youth are ready to die in the service of the people and the fatherland. We call upon the “Black September” fedayeen and the Palestinian revolutionary movement to carry the struggle forward.

LONG LIVE OUR PEOPLE!

LONG LIVE THE WORLDWIDE REVOLUTION FOR FREEDOM
|}

=== The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle ===
<blockquote>''Proletarian Revolutions… are constantly self-critical, repeatedly come to a standstill, return to past undertakings to begin them anew, pitilessly and thoroughly mocking their own half-measures, and the weakness and shabbiness of their own preliminary efforts. They seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them. They shrink time and again from the unimaginable enormity of their own goals, until they reach a time which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: hic rhodus, hic salta.''<ref>A quote from Karl Marx’s ''The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte''.</ref></blockquote>THE STONE YOU HAVE THROWN AT US WILL FALL AT YOUR OWN FEET.

The Black September action in Munich has simultaneously clarified both the nature of the imperialist ruling class and of the anti-imperialist struggle, in a way that no revolutionary action in West Germany or West Berlin has. It was simultaneously anti-imperialist, antifascist, and internationalist. It indicated an understanding of historical and political connections, that are always the province of the people—that is to say, those from whom profit is sucked, those who are free from complicity with the system, those who have no reason to believe the illusions fostered by their oppressors, no reason to accept the fantasy their oppressors pass off as history, no reason to pay the slightest attention to their version of reality. It revealed the rage and the strength that these revolutionaries get from their close connection to the Palestinian people, a connection resulting in a class consciousness that makes their historical mission to act as a vanguard perfectly clear. Their humanity is firmly based in their knowledge that they must resist this ruling class, a class which as the historical endpoint of this system of class rule is also the most cunning and the most bloodthirsty that has ever existed. It is based in the knowledge that they must resist this system’s character and its tendency towards total imperialist fascism—a form which has many fine representatives: Nixon and Brandt, Moshe Dayan and Genscher, Golda Meir and McGovern.

The West German left can reclaim their political identity—antifascism—antiauthoritarianism—anti-imperialist action—if they cease to embrace the Springer Press and opportunism, if they begin to once again address Auschwitz, Vietnam, and the systemic indifference of the masses here.

BLACK SEPTEMBER'S STRATEGY IS THE REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY FOR ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE, BOTH IN THE THIRD WORLD AND IN THE METROPOLE, GIVEN THE IMPERIALIST CONDITIONS CREATED BY MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS.

# '''IMPERIALISM'''

''Anti Imperialist Struggle''

The action was anti-imperialist.

The comrades from Black September, who had their own Black September in 1970 when the Jordanian army massacred 20,000 Palestinians,<ref>In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had fled to Jordan, where they lived in ramshackle refugee camps. On September 16, 1970, alarmed at the growing power of Palestinian revolutionaries, King Hussein declared martial law, and the Jordanian armed forces attacked suspected militant strongholds: according to most sources, between four and ten thousand Palestinians, including many non-combatants, were slaughtered. This is the source of the group’s name.</ref> went back to the place that is the origin of this massacre: West Germany—formerly Nazi Germany—now at the centre of imperialism. Back to the site of the power that forced the Jews of both West and East Europe to emigrate to Israel. Back to those who had hoped to profit from the theft of Palestinian land. Back to where Israel got its reparation payments and, until 1965, officially, its weapons. Back to where the Springer Corporation celebrated Israel’s 1967 Blitzkrieg in an anticommunist orgy. Back to the supplier who provided Hussein’s army with panzers, assault rifles, machine-pistols, and munitions. Back to where everything possible was done—using development aid, oil deals, investments, weapons, and diplomatic relationships—to pit Arab regimes against each other, and to turn all of them against the Palestinian liberation movement. Back to the place from which imperialism launches its bombers when other means of repressing the Arab liberation movement fail: West Germany—Munich—the NATO airport at Fürstenfeldbruck.

Vietnam

Do people think Vietnam is a joke? Guatemala, Santo Domingo, Indonesia, Angola are all just jokes? Vietnam is an atrocious example for the people of the Third World, an example of how determined imperialism is to commit genocide against them if nothing else achieves the desired results—if they don’t agree to being markets, military bases, sources of raw materials and cheap labor.

And the opportunistic left in the metropole behaves idiotically—being the labor aristocracy of imperialism (Lenin) who benefit from this theft, they sit on their arses. They only take to the streets if something affects them, if the war escalates, if some of them are shot—like during Easter 1968 in Berlin or May 1970 at Kent State.<ref>On May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating at Kent State University in Ohio against the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Four students were killed and nine others were wounded. Of the wounded, one was permanently paralyzed, and several were seriously maimed.</ref> If the system does something against them like what is always being done in the Third World, all of a sudden they get upset, they run to the police, they chase after that rat-catcher McGovern, they run for a post on the labor council and they write a bunch of poems against the war.

The Imperialist Centre

Black September has brought its war from the Arab periphery of imperialism into the centre. The centre means: central to the multinational corporations, the market’s command centre, where they determine the laws of economic, political, military, cultural, and technological development for all countries within their market. The centre is the U.S.A., Japan, and West Europe under the leadership of the FRG. The volume of business, the numbers employed by the corporations, these are only the formal, quantitative data—their weapons production is only one of the sectors of their productive capacity that is directed against the liberation movements, their price controls for raw materials constitute just one of the many ways they ensure their rule over the Third World.

''The Aggressive Character of Imperialist Investment Policy''

Marx analyzed machinery as a weapon that led workers in the 19th century to destroy machines. Marx:<blockquote>''Machinery is the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes, those periodical revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital. It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions made since 1880''<ref>In the correct version of this quote (''Capital'' Volume I, chapter 15, volume 5), this year is 1830. An error was made either as this document was being written by the RAF or when it was transcribed by supporters, and the year became 1880.</ref> ''for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class.''</blockquote>This was the machinery that created unemployment for the working class, that created the wageworker, at the same time offering the proletariat no choice but starvation or overthrowing the dictatorship of capital.

It is now time for someone to write a history of the imperialist investment strategy and in their analysis to demonstrate that it was “made for the sole purpose” of eliminating the liberation movements in the Third World.

''Multinational Corporations''

The multinational corporations control everything in the countries that imperialism has deprived of the opportunity to develop. They use this control against them. At one and the same time, capital creates divisions, skims profits, and then uses these same projects, investments, and profits to play the countries dependent on them off against each other—they use the very raw materials they rely upon the Third World for to oppress the people of the Third World.

''Weapons''

Their weapons consist of the potential of capital, technology, the means of communication and information control, and the means of transportation. Their strategy for conquest is based on investments, transfer of profits, information policy, diversification, marketing, sales planning, and stockpiling. Their occupier or colonial ideology means controlling currency and creating work. Their goal is to assimilate, repress, and rob—the alternative offered is starvation and extermination.

''Oil Investments''

Oil is the primary issue in the states that support the Palestinian liberation movement. 70% of Western Europe’s oil imports come from there. Western Europe’s demand for oil will double by 1985 (1970: 647 million tons). The corporations and their governments are determining their oil policy based on the spectre of revolutionary Arab regimes using this demand for oil to carry through their own industrialization. This would mark the end of oil corporations making profits of more than 100%.

''Algeria's Natural Gas''

American corporations are investing millions of dollars in profit liquefying Algerian natural gas and shipping it by sea, so as to play Algerian natural gas off against that of Libya and against Arab oil: Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia.

''Pipelines''

West European consortiums (Bayerngas—Saarferngas—Gasversorgung Süddeutschland) invest billion-DM sums to build pipelines (1 km costs between 1 and 2 million DM)<ref>Roughly between $364,000 and $728,000.</ref> to transport Algerian natural gas so as to partially reduce their dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

''North Sea Oil''

Oil companies and governments invest billions in oil and natural gas extraction in the North Sea. With regards to development costs, North Sea oil is ten times as expensive as oil from the Persian Gulf—only every sixth drill point is successful, construction and installation expenses for platforms, underwater pipelines. (North Sea oil makes up an estimated 1% of the world reserves; reserves in the Middle East make up 60%.) This is considered preferable to having a flexible approach to the Middle East. According to the European Economic Community (EEC) Europe Committee, “The increasing pressure on Western societies from some oil countries could lead to supply problems in the case of a political crisis”—meaning the problems that corporations will have maintaining their current high rates of profit.

''Australia and Canada''

Regarding raw materials available in Australia and Canada, the economic edition of FAZ wrote with cynical, capitalist bluntness, “The developing countries’ position has deteriorated as a result of the discovery of enormous natural resource reserves in Canada and Australia. The geologically favorable sites in these countries, with their stable governments, lower taxes, and developed industry, have attracted the attention of multinationals from all over the world.”

''The Conference in Santiago de Chile''

In April and May 1972, at the conference in Santiago de Chile, the “developing countries” attempted to establish fixed prices for raw materials. In response to their powerlessness, the FAZ writes, with the condescension and consciousness of a corporate bulletin, “The developing countries overlook the fact that natural resource reserves alone do not constitute wealth. In the final analysis, development, transport, and technical research are more important, and we control an ample share of the world’s reserves of those. It is no accident that the powerful multinational corporations, with their restrictive policies, exercise substantial restraint in their investments in the developing countries.”

''Overexploitation and Stockpiling''

For one thing, the corporations over-exploit the raw materials of the Third World. In Kuwait, for example, the fear is that in 16 years—the oil boom in Kuwait began in 1934—the oil could be exhausted. 95% of Kuwait’s income comes from oil—800 million dollars per year for 740,000 residents. Kuwait, with 12.8% of the world’s annual oil income, has built up the royal treasury—a sort of nest egg. What will they do when the oil and the money is all used up, return to herding sheep? Libya and Venezuela have already reduced their oil production to safeguard their reserves.

At the same time, a policy of stockpiling has been developed in the EEC and the FRG, increasing stocks from 85 to 90 days—Iran’s portion of that is 10 million tons—the FRG needs approximately 133 million tons of oil per year.

The U.S.A. has undertaken a massive conservation program—by 1980, 365 million tons of oil will have been saved—however 770 million tons will still be required. The conservation measures will include shifting commercial transportation from trucks to the railroad, passenger traffic from the air to the ground, and city traffic from automobiles to mass transit.

''Oil and Traffic Related Deaths''

In the FRG, to give one example, the automobile industry has demanded a tribute of 170,000 traffic-related deaths over the past ten years—in the U.S.A., 56,000 deaths are projected for 1972, in the FRG it’s 20,000—all in the service of greater profits for oil and automobile corporations.

This idiotic automobile production will be reduced to create a situation suitable to corporate interests: the wiping out of the liberation movements in the Third World. In this way the obstacle presented by the people of the Third World will be eliminated.

The fear and the circular logic of consumption—the anarchy of capitalist commodity production, which is governed by the market and not the needs of the people—can exceed the limits of the human psyche, especially with the drivel about “quality of life,” for instance. In a situation where everything has been reduced to consumption—“shitty products”—the decline of the masses’ loyalty has already begun. The mass mortality in the streets through the alienation and brutalization of the people is hitting the system in the pocketbook in a way they don’t like.

''Boycott''

The goal is another oil boycott like that of the early 50s against Mossadegh’s<ref>Mohammed Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1951. He quickly began to nationalize Iranian assets including oil. In 1953, he was removed from power by the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in a CIA-backed coup. He died in prison in 1967.</ref> nationalization of Persian oil, which cleared the way for the Shah, that puppet of U.S. imperialism. In response to the nationalization measures in Iraq at that time, Iran quickly stated its willingness to increase annual production from 271 million tons to 400 million tons. This is the kind of government that suits imperialism.

In the 60s, it was hoped that atomic energy would allow for the gradual reduction of dependence on oil as the most important source of energy. By that time—or so it was hoped—high temperature ovens with which coal could be converted to oil would also exist—which was the basis for the talk of the comeback of coal.

The objective of imperialist energy policy is not only to guarantee the continuing theft of oil from the oil-producing nations for all time to come, but also to prevent them from industrializing and establishing their political independence.

''Encirclement Policy''

Regarding the rest of the Middle East, imperialism is hoping its policy of quiet encirclement will succeed.

In the West, they are thoroughly implanted in the Maghreb—Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. West German corporations have invested in mining (raw materials), in the clothing industry (cheap labor), in dam projects (electrical power), and in the automobile industry. Tunisia and Morocco are the main recipients of West German development aid among the Arab states—both countries also receive West German military aid.

In the East and the North, it’s Turkey and Iran. Both countries are also the sites of American military bases. In the context of NATO, the FRG supplies weapons to Turkey. In the context of the free market economy, Siemens has recently been supplying television relay stations, with which the government’s message—“This is the criminal police speaking”—can reach Eastern Turkey.<ref>Turkey’s East is home to the oppressed Kurdish minority, and also bordered on the Soviet Union.</ref> The German enclave in Tehran is well known—the quantity of weapons being provided by West Germany is not.

''Military Bases''

There should be no illusions about the desire to transform the Maghreb in the West and Turkey and Iran in the East from markets into military bases.

And there should certainly be no illusions about what conditions will be like in Algeria in three years if natural gas development by American corporations—that is to say, by big money—has begun and Algeria still attempts to maintain its principled solidarity with the other Arab states. It could only end in disaster.

''Imperialism is the Weapon''

Imperialism is the weapon that the multinational corporations use to address the contradictions between developed countries and the desire for development in the countries they plunder, between states with elected governments and states with CIA-backed governments, between rich and poor countries. Imperialism unifies North and South as the centre and the periphery of a single system.

It is a system that allows the constitutional state to function in much the same way as fascism. It doesn’t eliminate the contradictions, it simply coordinates them, plays them off against one another, integrates them as various interrelated profit-making conditions for their various subsidiaries.

''"Slaves of the System"''

Outwardly, they adjust to the existing conditions—making use of them where possible—creating domestic capital reserves, surrendering middle management to the local population, learning the local language, respecting local laws, all the time using their normative power to establish their control of the market.

The FAZ condescendingly informs “developing countries” that are attempting to protect their mineral resources by reducing mining that they misjudge the marketplace. It informs them that they are actually establishing themselves as slaves of the system if they fail to take note of the “dilemma” created by their own foreign currency needs, on the one hand, and the necessity to protect their natural resources, on the other: “The developing countries, in implementing policies against international natural resource companies, are tying their own hands.”

This imperialism avoids provocation. Where possible, they absorb Third World governments into the facade of their system. They operate within the “confines of their means”—and they have more means at their disposal than any ruling class before them.

''The Means at Their Disposal''

They use illiteracy and hunger to control the people of the Third World; in the metropole, people are made stupid and alienated and are brutalized by television, Springer, and automobile accidents. they saw to the liquidation of the McGovern left. They use torture against the Persian, Turkish, and Palestinian comrades; against the antiimperialist left in West Germany and West Berlin, they use the BAW. In November, following on the heels of the September massacre of Palestinian freedom fighters, they will hold free elections here, having used the spectacle of the Olympic Games to divert attention away from the horror.

This imperialism only reveals its fascist character when it encounters resistance—it has no need for a late capitalist seizure of power. Its historical tendency is towards fascism, towards exploitation and oppression, annihilation, waste, defoliation, the destruction of people, and the plundering of natural resources. It has a greater potential for destruction than any ruling class in history, the potential to leave a wasteland in its wake—wherever there is nothing more to be gained, where everything is devastated, the country and the people—shattered and crippled—Vietnam.

''Black September's Strategy''

The bomb attack on the Strüver Corporation in Hamburg was an attack on one of Israel’s military suppliers.

With their action at the Olympic Village, they brought the conflict between the imperialist metropole of Israel and the Palestinians from the periphery of the system into its centre—they tore off the FRG’s “constitutional” mask and revealed the true objective nature of imperialism’s facade: that they are waging war against the liberation movements of the Third World and that their final objective is strategic extermination and fascism.

Through this action, the Arab people were mobilized for anti-imperialist struggle. They celebrated the revolutionaries as heroes, and their will to struggle received an enormous boost.

That it would have been better to take Genscher hostage is something that Black September itself knows full well.<ref>During negotiations with the Palestinian commando, Minister of the Interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher is reported to have offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the Israeli athletes. The commando is said to have refused this offer. Given Horst Mahler’s comments at his October 1972 trial (see page 188), it seems likely that the raf was attempting an oblique criticism of this decision.</ref> Functioning as it does at a very high level of Marxist theory combined with revolutionary practice, Black September doesn’t need to be told this. The fact is that it would have been better to exchange the Israeli athletes for people who make up the facade of the Social-Liberal Coalition, as this would have destroyed the complicity between Israeli and West German imperialism and isolated Israel. It would have forced the contradiction between the fascism of the developing imperialist system and Israeli Nazi fascism (see the chapter on National Socialism) into the open. It would have made use of the system’s contradictions to split the imperialist forces!

These observations are not meant as a criticism of the action, but rather as an expression of our appreciation of the action. These observations are an excellent example of how practice leads to theoretical development and how theory leads to developments in practice—of the dialectic of theory and practice.

'''2. OPPORTUNISM'''

''Opportunism in the Metropole''

The Marxist bible thumper—equipped with quotes and not thinking any further—will argue that Marx himself said that smashing machines was “stupid.” Marx:<blockquote>''Machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labor, but, when in the service of capital, lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labor, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labor; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of Nature, but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital, makes them paupers…''<ref>Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, chapter 15, volume 5. <nowiki>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S5</nowiki></ref></blockquote>So it is not machinery that should be resisted, but its capitalist application.

On the face of it, it is not clear that everything about imperialist investment policy is intended to eliminate of the Third World liberation movements. “Considered alone” and not as a waste of raw materials and labor power, or as a means of war, one might even speak of military production as being a part of the civilian sector. However, it is meant to reinforce the unequal development between the imperialist centre and the countries of the Third World, which is to say, to reinforce the ongoing rule of the imperialist system.

''Sabotage''

The rejection of sabotage in the metropole, based on the argument that it would be better to take things over instead of destroying them, is based on the dictum: the people of the Third World should wait for their revolution until the masses in the metropole catch up.

This ignores the problem of the labor aristocracy within imperialism, first addressed by Lenin. Furthermore, this demands that the people of the Third World allow all sectors of the world proletariat—most of whom form part of the backbone of the imperialist system—to ride on their coattails. It is the rallying cry of opportunism.

''the Opportunistic Concept of Solidarity''

It’s no surprise that the opportunists no longer know what to do with the concept of solidarity—they betray their claim to leadership with an incorrect analysis of imperialism. They must exclude a section of the disempowered from their concept of solidarity. This is the section that rejects their leadership, and instead turns to the people of the Third World. They must exclude anyone who by “serve the people” doesn’t mean sucking up to the people disempowered by imperialism, but rather means by this that one must struggle against the imperialism which is disempowering people.

''Negt - The Pig''

Negt, who in Frankfurt resurrected Noske’s<ref>Gustav Noske, the SPD Minister responsible for the military during bloody suppression of the November Revolution of 1918, during which communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were killed.</ref> axiom “One must be a bloodhound,” thereby formulated the opportunistic position, with all the jargon, all the contempt for the masses, all the appeals to “the politicians,” and all the pleas for sound, common sense that are fundamental to it. However—like Bernstein<ref name=":1">Eduard Bernstein, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, who helped instigate that party’s rejection of revolutionary Marxism in the late 19th century.</ref><ref name=":1" />—without the slightest hint of an economic analysis.

Given, however, that the problem of opportunism is not objectively a question of the theoretical level he has expressed, it is necessary to engage him in debate. Objectively, it is the result of unequal development within the system, of the inequality in forms of oppression employed by the system and of the inequality of experiences of exploitation under this system.

That Negt has generally been applauded, in spite of the feeble theoretical level of his work, is an objective indication of the pressure that exists here for people to take an opportunistic position. We are dealing with Negt in the hope that his supporters will see what a crock of shit they’re being fed.

''Negt on Solidarity''

Negt: “Mechanical solidarity will destroy socialist politics. It is the worst aspect of the legacy of the protest movement.”

People like to “mechanically” paw for their wallets if they come across someone playing harmonica on the Hauptwache,<ref>The Hauptwache is a popular pedestrian mall in Frankfurt.</ref> and Bertold Beitz<ref>Bertold Beitz, Krupp manager and a member of the National and International Olympic Committee.</ref> feels good about writing a cheque for the ''Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten'' ''in Bethel''.<ref>''Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten'' ''in Bethel'' is a large Bielefeld-based charity</ref> Solidarity is not a reflex action, as anyone who has ever acted in solidarity knows. Or does Negt, with his concept of “mechanics,” also intend to address in a backhanded way the concept of spontaneity?—“spontaneous solidarity”…?

One cannot surpass Negt when it comes to dragging the concept of solidarity through the mud, while at the same time expressing solidarity for all of those who, lacking the necessary courage and psychological stamina, out of fear for themselves, fail to act in solidarity.

''Negt's Fairy Tale''

“Unbidden and often anonymous” they stood at the door—a total lie, nobody ever stood at Negt’s door, at least not without having sent their business card in advance or having used the phone to fill a ''Verfassungsschutz'' tape with babble. There they stood completely unshaven, and then they came in and made a mess of the bathroom. Is that what being revolutionary means? Where do we fit in?

''Opportunistic Arrogance''

Instead of offering an analysis of the connection between wealth here and poverty there—that is to say, an analysis of the system as a unitary whole—Negt renders a judgment based on the alleged power structure, in which he proclaims: “…that political morality is indivisible”— oh, you don’t say—“that those who tolerate or condone the genocide in Vietnam lose the right to speak in the name of democracy”—the Federal Constitutional Court read him the riot act for that one—that should clear that up for him.

''The Principle of Seperation''

Negt makes it his primary task to prevent any awareness of the connection between poverty here and poverty there—to prevent solidarity based on an awareness of this connection. Localizing conflicts is an objective that the system pursues in every way it can.

Negt: “The politicized masses that make up the solidarity movement, the university students, the high school students, and the young workers who have broken with family drudgery and the enforced discipline of the work world and the educational institutions”—(not are emancipated, not are in the process of breaking free, not are going forward, not of wanting more, but “have broken with”)—“gradually lose the ability to have their own experiences”—(the gall of a social worker)—“always putting themselves in a position to be in touch with the most radical positions, thereby establishing a fragile and superficial identity”—(where does he get off attacking those he is talking about with socio-psychological, Youth Authority jargon?)— “based on a shameless identification with the experiences of others.”

So, the people at ''Bild Zeitung'' should only report on what they themselves feel, and only the Viet Cong should celebrate Viet Cong victories. The validity of bombs against the U.S. Headquarters depends on who lays them—or what?

''"The Self-Proclaimed Vanguard"''

Negt: “Self-proclaimed vanguards”—(not appointed by the Minister of Culture, not a legitimate market niche—or what?)—“lay claim to social and historical experiences”—(so the anti-imperialist struggle is not in fact occurring)—“that individual high school students, workers, apprentices, and university students can neither reconcile with their own work environments nor use as the basis for political decisions.”

How then are they supposed to develop an identity? Does Negt believe that ideas develop on their own within the mind? Apparently.

''Dialectical Materialism''

Mao:<blockquote>''Dialectical materialism regards external reality as the condition for change and internal reality as its basis—and in this way external reality conditions internal activity''</blockquote>Meaning: Negt—as external reality—gained applause for his idiotic blather in Frankfurt, because opportunism has deep roots in the metropole. People want “Freedom for Angela Davis”—but they don’t carry out the struggle as relentlessly as the Viet Cong, or as Black September—never that—so great is their despair about the system, so uncertain are they about their cause, that they abandon the cause and embrace hopelessness. Enter Negt, saying that none of that is necessary; we’re already doing what needs to be done—they are relieved, they applaud.

In opposition to this stands the RAF—as sure of our cause as the people of the Third World, because they accept their leadership role, because they know that the struggle must be carried out relentlessly, and that is how they carry it out.

The RAF—as external reality—has found increasing support among high school students, university students, and apprentices. Negt has seen this, even biased “polls” have noted it; the leaflets, slogans, demonstrations, teach-ins, etc.

How could this occur, other than through “internal reality”? If not their own everyday working and living conditions, what else could make them see that only with this perseverance, the same perseverance with which the people of the Third World conduct their struggle, can they achieve the goal—their freedom?

Negt’s scolding proves the opposite of what he asserts; precisely because their experience of living and working conditions—internal reality—leads high school students, apprentices, and university students to begin to understand the situation of the people of the Third World, they identify with the struggle the RAF has conducted in the metropole on their behalf—as external reality.

Were it otherwise, one would not have heard a peep about the RAF, not from Genscher or Ruhnau,<ref>Heinz Runau, SPD Senator for Internal Affairs in Hamburg at the time.</ref> and Negt would have had to be satisfied in Frankfurt with taking a cheap shot out of the side of his mouth at the RAF—or being and consciousness have nothing to do with each other and dialectical materialism is a pipe dream.

We know that it will be an extremely slow, difficult and exhausting process to get things underway in even a few places. That they are, however, in motion indicates that the situation is “ripe” to take up the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole—not “ripe” for revolution, but “ripe” for the anti-imperialist offensive.

Already, at this early stage of “ripeness,” there are comrades who disgrace themselves by losing sight of the realities of their lives and their liberation. Seeing this process at work, we see the system’s continuing appeal in the metropole. That there are comrades who cannot see any purpose to life outside of the liberation struggle attests to how great the appeal of revolution is. Insofar as there is not a single idea, not a thought that does not have its origin in life and in society—positive thoughts, ideas, and people have been thoroughly locked away, cast aside, excluded and treated as insane.

The metropolitan left is beginning to split into a revolutionary, antiimperialist wing and an opportunistic wing. This is not because opportunism has won the struggle on the ground, but because they’ve lost it. They still hope to win this struggle on the ground, even as the left wing gains in strength. Negt’s attacks were a rearguard action. Given that the argument he mounted can only be described as disgraceful, he has helped to unmask opportunism. He has made our work easier.

''Negt as Alexander the Great''

“The knots” of “mechanical solidarity,” “inferiority complexes,” “fear of isolation,” “overblown perceptions of reality,” and “self-delusion” “must be cut” (he’s right about that)—and can no longer be resolved “through polite engagement.”

Which means: allowing the fascists to liquidate the growing left wing of the socialist movement. Which means: Marxist theory and serious discussions constitute “polite engagement”—one is spared socialist discussion with Negt’s fatherly advice and his seminar pedagogy.

Marx and Freud could only say in response to all this: Pardon me?

A complete nut, a truculent, self-confessed petit bourgeois—this Negt. If one did not know that being determines consciousness, one might begin to think that through these thoroughly corrupted rats “corruption has claimed the day.”

''The Objective Role of the Opportunists''

Regarding his own profession, Negt—bluntly—stated: “One should beware of attempts to push left professors and teachers out of the high schools and universities” they being the only ones who, “through routine overtime and small organized groups,” keep this catastrophic institution “running.” The students of the ''Berliner Gegenuniversität''<ref>''Berliner Gegenunivesitaät'', literally Berlin Counter-University, refers to presentations organized by students independent of formal lectures.</ref> fought tooth and nail against exactly this system-stabilizing integration of their work as “overtime”—in this way the opportunistic cat comes out of the seminar Marxist bag.

''The Core: Scholarship for the Bourgeoisie''

Bourgeois scholarship still remains the practical core: “If a fraction of the money spent fighting crime was used to fight the causes of crime, one could count on a long-term impact; a society that cannot guarantee this minimum has lost its authority”—(leave it to Negt and everything will soon be running smoothly).

The investment strategy of multinational corporations is based on this kind of long-term use of money rather than on military adventures.

And to finally accomplish his true goal, Negt tosses the entirety of Marxism-Leninism overboard: “There is no clear and objective criteria for the distinction between right and left.” Why is this stupid pig still called a “socialist”?

Rosa Luxemburg on Bernstein:<blockquote>''What? Is that all you have to say? Not the shadow of an original thought! Not a single idea that was not refuted, crushed, reduced into dust by Marxism several decades ago! It was enough for opportunism to speak out to prove it had nothing to say.''<ref>This quote is from Rosa Luxemburg’s 1900 text, Reform or Revolution, Chapter X: Opportunism and Theory in Practice, available from <nowiki>http://www</nowiki>. marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch10.htm.</ref></blockquote>Negt need only come out into the open for all to see that he is in bed with the fascists—his “qualification,” most probably an “unqualified tool.” (R.L.)

Lenin:<blockquote>''The most dangerous people are those who do not want to understand that the struggle against imperialism is empty and meaningless if it is not unreservedly connected to the struggle against opportunism.''</blockquote>Just as the oppressed themselves could smash this entire “catastrophic institution,” the system could well collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. The consciousness that says we’re all in the same boat, ties opportunism and the system together. They prattle on about socialism, but they mean the system. They ask no questions; they miss the answers. Setbacks for revolutionaries fill them with glee; once again they’ve backed the right horse.

''The Revolutionary Subject''

The problem with opportunism is that by making use of it Negt reveals things about himself, but nothing about the world. Having analyzed the system, the revolutionary subject bases his identity on the knowledge that the people of the Third World are the vanguard, and on an acceptance that Lenin’s concept of the “labor aristocracy” regarding the masses in the metropole cannot be discounted or dismissed. On the contrary: everything starts from that point.

The exploitation of the masses in the metropole has nothing to do with Marx’s concept of wage labourers from whom surplus value is extracted.

It is a fact that with the increasing division of labor, there has been a tremendous intensification and spread of exploitation in the area of production, and work has become a greater burden, both physically and psychologically.

It is also a fact that with the introduction of the 8-hour workday—the precondition for increasing the intensity of work—the system usurped all of the free time people had. To physical exploitation in the factory was added the exploitation of their feelings and thoughts, wishes, and utopian dreams—to capitalist despotism in the factory was added capitalist despotism in all areas of life, through mass consumption and the mass media.

With the introduction of the 8-hour workday, the system’s 24-hour-a-day domination of the working class began its triumphal march— with the establishment of mass purchasing power and “peak income” the system began its triumphal march over the plans, desires, alternatives, fantasies, and spontaneity of the people; in short, over the people themselves!

The system in the metropole has managed to drag the masses so far down into their own dirt that they seem to have largely lost any sense of the oppressive and exploitative nature of their situation, of their situation as objects of the imperialist system. So that for a car, a pair of jeans, life insurance, and a loan, they will easily accept any outrage on the part of the system. In fact, they can no longer imagine or wish for anything beyond a car, a vacation, and a tiled bathroom.

It follows, however, that the revolutionary subject is anyone that breaks free from these compulsions and refuses to take part in this system’s crimes. All those who find their identity in the liberation struggles of the people of the Third World, all those who refuse, all those who no longer participate; these are all revolutionary subjects—comrades.

This is the reason we have analyzed the 24-hour-a-day imperialist system, why we have addressed all of the living and working conditions in this society, the role that the production of surplus value plays in each of them and the connection to factory exploitation, which in any case is really the point. With the supposition: the revolutionary subject in the imperialist metropole is the person who recognizes that a life under the mandatory 24-hour-day is a life under the system’s control— here we have only sketched the outline of the parameters necessary for a class analysis—we are not claiming that this supposition constitutes such an analysis.

The fact is that neither Marx nor Lenin nor Rosa Luxemburg nor Mao had to deal with ''Bild'' readers, television viewers, car drivers, the psychological conditioning of young students, high school reforms, advertising, the radio, mail order sales, loan contracts, “quality of life,” etc. The fact is that the system in the metropole reproduces itself through an ongoing offensive against the people’s psyche, not in an openly fascist way, but rather through the market.

Therefore, to write off entire sections of the population as an impediment to anti-imperialist struggle, simply because they don’t fit into Marx’s analysis of capitalism, is as insane and sectarian as it is un-Marxist.

Only by integrating the 24-hour workday into our understanding of imperialism and anti-imperialism can we get a picture of the actual problems facing the people, so that they will not only understand our actions—and thereby understand the RAF—but also our propaganda, our speech, our words. Serve the people!

If the people of the Third World are the vanguard of the anti-imperialist revolution, then that means that they objectively represent the greatest hope for people in the metropole to achieve their own freedom. If this is the case, then it is our duty to establish a connection between the liberation struggle of the peoples of the Third World and the longing for freedom in the metropole wherever it emerges. This means in grade schools, in high schools, in factories, in families, in prisons, in office cubicles, in hospitals, in head offices, in political parties, in unions—wherever. Against everything that openly negates, suppresses, and destroys this connection: consumerism, the media, co-management, opportunism, dogmatism, authority, paternalism, brutality, and alienation.

“This means us!” We are revolutionary subjects.

Whoever begins to struggle and to resist is one of us.

The answer to the question of how and at what level to struggle against the system, where best to apply pressure when one is at one’s weakest point—we’ve answered this question—is not to be found in a stream of slogans, but rather in the dialectic of theory and practice.

'''3. FASCISM'''

''The Black September action was antifascist''

They established the connection between Nazi fascism and the direction in which imperialism is developing.

''The Olympic Games''

They clearly established this connection by attacking the Olympic Games, from which all reminders of 1936, Auschwitz, and Kristallnacht<ref>Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was an enormous pogrom against German Jews on the part of the Nazis and their supporters on the night of November 9/10, 1938.</ref> were to be excluded. The games were meant to serve as a spectacle distracting attention from what is currently going on in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Israel’s prisons, in Turkey, in Uruguay, in Brazil, in Greece, and in Persia. Insofar as these grueling contests have only winners and losers, they are the opposite of liberation struggles, of acts of solidarity. Instead they are competitions/struggles to reinforce imperialist consciousness in the industrialized nations—games of aggression.

''Bild''

“GOLD-GOLD-GOLD,” ''Bild'' panted, badgered, wheezed, and nagged during the first days of the Olympic Games. “I saw you fade away at 11:00 pm—how will the games continue,” was ''Bild''’s headline on September 7.

Do you want total victory—Yesssss!

''The Athletes''

This is not directed against the athletes. Those who hope to win the competitions have trained for years. They are not the ones who give the Olympic Games the character of an imperialist event. They are connected to the games like a wage laborer to capitalism—without them nothing happens, but they are objects in a spectacle, objects of Neckermann’s ''Sporthilfe''.<ref>Josef Neckermann was a successful Frankfurt-based businessman and horse trainer and founder of the ''Stiftung Deutsche Sporthilfe'' (German Benevolent Sports Association).</ref> That the athletes enjoy what they’re doing changes nothing.

''National Socialism''

National Socialism was nothing other than the political and military precursor to the imperialist system of the multinational corporations.

The ruling class—and especially the German ruling class—is so rapacious that, lead by the Flick, Thyssen, Krupp, and IG Farben corporations,<ref>All are major corporations that participated in and profited from National Socialism’s reign in Germany. All of them continue to flourish.</ref> it hoped to achieve, in conditions that were not yet ripe, that which they managed to achieve later anyway. They formed an uneasy alliance with the old, declining petit bourgeoisie, and they bought into the irrational and deadly antisemitism. Instead of relying on their shareholders, as should have been the case, they developed the imperialist middle class to meet the corporations’ extreme demand for capital—they formed an alliance with the retrograde and ideologically backwards Nazi Party. Instead of waiting to grow strong enough to subjugate peoples and countries without military adventures, they started the Second World War. Antisemitism and war compromised German fascism in the long run, once again completely unmasking the ruling class in the eyes of the masses—and making possible an antifascist alliance between communists and a section of the bourgeoisie.

''Antifascism''

It was this domestic and foreign antifascism that effectively prevented the expansion of West German imperialism. It is antifascist sensitivity to injustice, transgression, state brutality and executive arrogance that has forced this state to maintain a constitutional form.

Just as imperialism has a fascist tendency, antifascism has an anti-imperialist tendency.

For a section of antifascist sympathizers, the RAF has brought the anti-imperialist struggle up to date. The §129 trials at the beginning of the 50s and the ban on the KPD had the effect of separating the KP from their own antifascism and of dismantling their alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie. Liquidating what remained of antifascism in the SPD and amongst the intelligentsia was a significant challenge for the Brandt/Scheel/Heinemann administration. Antifascism was still a part of the 1967-1968 APO, and was supported by the student movement, in the Republican Clubs, at Vietnam demonstrations, and in the movement against the Emergency Powers legislation and police terror.

''The Antiauthoritarian Position''

That the leaders of the student movement are themselves shying away from their anti-imperialist consciousness is a reflection of their revisionism. The positions of the antiauthoritarian movement were clearly anti-imperialist: June 2, Vietnam, Springer, and opposition to the development of West German imperialism, of which the final step in the postwar FRG was the formation of the Grand Coalition.

This movement proved itself to be primarily petit bourgeois when it stripped its political theory of anti-imperialist consciousness, as soon as the first shots were fired. Shots which were not just fired by a single private fascist (Kurras), but rather were the result of systematic imperialist terror—directed at Dutschke, cheered on by Springer<ref>This is a retort to Negt, who at the Angela Davis Congress in Frankfurt had referred to Kurras as a lone gun-nut, and to the June 2, 1967, shooting as an isolated tragedy that did not represent state policy.</ref>

They began to compensate for their obvious powerlessness through organizational fetishism—their decline into a dogmatic and pathologically competitive closed circle that only reproduced the structures of the ruling system, alienation, a know-it-all attitude, and indifference to oppression. They express a hatred of spontaneity equal to that of the system itself, and with their “party chairmen”—Marxism’s guardians of the grail—they turn the proletariat into an object of their leadership aspirations. They see in the masses nothing but what the system has made them: Bild readers, television viewers, car nuts, tourists, SPD voters, Germans—as the squares (already a classic) always ask: “What do the people say?”

The narrow-minded nation-state perspective of the opportunist left is petit bourgeois. It fails to recognize or acknowledge that the people of the Third World are the vanguard and that the struggle in the metropole is the struggle of international brigades of the people’s war in Quang Tri and Hue,<ref>Refers to areas in the far North of the former Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) that became important staging points for communist guerillas from the North during the Vietnam War.</ref> Palestine, Lebanon, Angola, Mozambique, and Turkey, without which no advances will be made. It is also petit bourgeois and un-Marxist to not recognize that the masses here will eventually find their political identity on the side of the liberation struggles, and will eventually free themselves from the grip of the system, with its lies, its glitziness, its election promises, and its lotteries.

Petit bourgeois impatience led to them giving up their anti-imperialist position after one disappointing year in which the student movement failed to win the support of the proletariat and discovered that Springer could not be expropriated quickly and without further ado.

''Anarchism - A Reproach''

Some dismiss the antiauthoritarian movement as anarchist and the international anti-imperialist struggle as anarchist internationalism. In so doing the system’s only objective is denunciation—when people mount this sort of dogmatic argument, they are not drawing their conclusions from an analysis of the system and its process of development, but from a chemical analysis of explosives—from historical analogies based on nothing—a case in point: Harich.<ref>Wolfgang Harich, an academic from the GDR, who for a time in the late 70s lived in Austria and the FRG, where he worked with the Green Party before returning to the GDR.</ref>

Neither the actual socio-economic conditions nor the conception of the state held by earlier anarchists—from Blanqui to Kropotkin—(the Makhno movement<ref>An early twentieth century anti-Soviet, anarchist guerilla army active in Ukraine</ref> and Spanish anarcho-syndicalism are not targeted as such in this critique) have the slightest thing to do with the objective conditions or subjective positions of the antiauthoritarian movement or the RAF. And this is equally true in the case of comrades who refer to themselves as anarchists. They are clearly anti-imperialist—overflowing with distrust for all the “Marxists” who patronize them and hope to subjugate them on the basis of nothing more than bourgeois educational advantages. Their antiauthoritarian characteristics allow them to keep their distance from this paternalism.

The old anarchist concepts are no longer useful—not in the form they had when Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg purged them from the Social Democratic movement—and correctly so. Not in the form that Blanqui, Bakunin, Most, and Kropotkin developed them— immature ideas in an unripe situation.

The legal left completely lacks any critical self-awareness if it compares its tiny mass base to the mass base behind the anti-imperialist struggle. No progress can be made this way. They hope to force us into a discussion by raising the issue of anarchism, but with the problems we have before us, this is just a distraction.

Whether the old anarchists’ understanding of the authority structure anticipated capital’s rule over the people that first developed with imperialism—their understanding of work certainly anticipated the concept of freedom put forward in the anti-imperialist struggle—should be subject to analysis—it could be the case.

''Integration''

To integrate the KP, it was necessary only to ban them, and for the integration of the bourgeois antifascists, the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties sufficed—the student movement required only an amnesty—a cheap bribe.

''The Foolishness of the Left''

The petit bourgeois, spiteful, nit-picking blather that comrades are engaging in about Munich is an example of this foolishness, and Genscher will turn it against them. So it goes. What is expressed here is not the political consciousness of Marxists, but rather the pique of bit players— “It’s all about me!”

''Fürstenfeldbruck and the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties''

The Fürstenfeldbruck massacre would not have been possible without the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties, without the complete demoralization of the old antifascists and extreme opportunism in those sections of the New Left that let themselves be sidetracked by the ML and AO<ref>AO is an acronym for AusBildung Organisation, roughly translating as “formation organization,” and was used by Marxist-Leninist organizations in Germany that did not yet consider themselves to be parties, but held the goal of eventually forming a party. In North America, such groups were called pre-party formations.</ref> deviation—completely blind now, as compared to their terrible clarity in 1967/68.

Not even Strauß, but only Schmidt,<ref>Franz Josef Strauß was head of the right-wing CSU in Bavaria, where the Munich events took place. Helmut Schmidt, who would become Chancellor in 1974, was at this point the SPD Minister of Defense.</ref> could have committed the crimes at Fürstenfeldbruck: sending the fire brigade of West German imperialism onto an American NATO base to offer Israel support—for their torture, their murders, the oppression, the napalm, the land stolen from the Palestinian people.

Not even Dregger, but only Scheel’s party comrade Genscher,<ref>Alfred Dregger was a CDU politician from the conservative and nationalist section of the party. At the time, Genscher was the Minister of the Interior from the small liberal FDP.</ref> could arrange for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the FRG; Palestinians who are here because of the nationalist extermination policy, which has become the Israeli extermination policy. A public policy couldn’t be more clearly morally bankrupt, devoid as it is of historical content, acquiescing without once reflecting upon how extreme the hate will be on the part of those who once again must suffer the retaliation.

''The Social-Liberal Coalition and''

Since the SPD entered the government coalition in 1966, more elements of “democracy” have been eliminated than under all of the CDU governments of the previous 17 years; the Emergency Powers Act, the Hand Grenade Law, the ''Verfassungsschutzgesetz'',<ref>The ''Verfassungsschutzgesetz'' was a law passed by the SPD-FDP coalition in 1972; it extended the purview of the ''Verfassungsschutz'', the police organization central to the struggle against the guerilla.</ref> the Presidential Decree,<ref>The Presidential Decree here referred to here is the statute that established the ''Berufsverbot''.</ref> Federal Labor Court rulings against strikes, and the Federal Border Patrol Law.

Disoriented by their fear of Strauß, a section of the left will only realize that they have already had their vocal cords—which they require for whining—ripped out should Strauß take over these instruments which have in fact been crafted by the Social-Liberal coalition.

But Strauß couldn’t knock off more people than the comrades<ref>A sarcastic reference to the SPD, which was the leading government in parliament when each of the events listed occurred.</ref> have: McLeod’s liquidation, the deportation of Arabs, Prinzregentenstraße,<ref>In 1971, police opened fire on bank robbers holding hostages at a bank on Prinzegerntenstraße in Munich. Two hostages were killed. Strauß was personally present when this occurred.</ref> Löwenthal, Bild, show trials, police operations. The policies of the Social-Liberal Coalition are the policies of the corporations; their opinion is the opinion of the Springer corporation; their foreign policy is the foreign policy of Wolff von Amerongen, Beitz, Messerschmidt, BölkowBlohm, Siemens, Hochtief, Schickedanz, and Gelsenberg AG; their domestic policy is the domestic policy of Daimler-Benz, Glanzstoff, Klöckner, Bayer in Leverkusen; their high school education policy comes from BASF.<ref>All the companies mentioned in this paragraph are major German corporations.</ref>

It’s not a question of parliamentary democracy (Brandt) on one side and fascism (Strauß) on the other, but rather it is a question of the imperialist centre on one side and on the other side the revolutionary liberation struggle of the people of the Third World along with the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole—not to give this or any other government a kick in the ass, but rather to serve the people.

''Acceptable Imperialism''

The Social-Liberal Coalition has made West German imperialism acceptable for the bourgeois left, with its obsession with form—they see the application of imperialist policy as responding to the people’s wishes—they work within “reasonable parameters,” they speak the national language, they make use of parliamentary debate in the same way that they make use of BGS terror troops—they use constitutional means in the same way that they use fascism.

The anti-imperialist left had it easier with Strauß. He at least wore the disconcerting garb of colonial and Nazi imperialism, not the friendly mask of the corporate manager. He had the fucked relationship to power of Thyssen, Flick, and Krupp in 1933,<ref>Major German corporations that supported the Nazi rise to power.</ref> not the evolved self-consciousness of a multinational corporation. He would have been heckled had he entered the factories. He not only sowed hatred, he reaped it.

THE "RIGHT WING TAKEOVER"

The “right-wing takeover” is a bugaboo created out of thin air by the left of the SPD, the chant of brainless opportunists devoid of theory, directed against the anti-imperialist left—their way of covering up the fact that Brandt and Strauß are simply two different masks on the same imperialist system.

The flipside of this is the ideology that considers the masses to be hopeless and stupid—the best example being the filthy journalism of the Springer corporation and the organization of the newsstands, which is to say, the concentration of the media.

'''4. ANTI-IMPERIALIST ACTION'''

''The Massacre''

Brandt, Genscher, Merck, Schreiber, Vogel, Daume, Brundage,<ref>Leading politicians and police representatives who participated in the decisions that led to the massacre at the Fürstenfeldbruck airport.</ref> and all the others who make up imperialism’s cast of characters didn’t pause for a moment to consider agreeing to the revolutionaries’ demand for the release of prisoners. Even before Golda Meir was informed and had taken a position, they had already on their own considered how best to massacre the revolutionaries—with gas or storm troopers or a precision strike or whatever else.<ref>Genscher in consultation with police chief Schreiber had considered sending in tear gas through the Olympic Village air conditioning, and also storming the Israeli dorms with regular police officers. Both plans were rejected as unlikely to succeed.</ref>

All delays to the ultimatum, reached through lies and false promises, served to allow them to reach their sole objective, to win time to plan the massacre. They had only one goal, not to prove in any way inferior to the fascism of Moshe Dayan—Israel’s Himmler.

The September 7 reports from the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior— the first reports were less clear than what followed—consisted of nothing but rhetoric and assertions that it is in fact possible to be a pig just like Moshe Dayan, that everything was planned to resemble his underhanded action against the hijackers in Tel Aviv,<ref>A reference to the fact that the paratroopers Dayan had led in May at Lod airport had been disguised as maintenance workers, whereas the assault team which had been ordered to take out the commando at Fürstenfeldbruck (see page 234, fn 1) were to be disguised as flight attendants.</ref> that everything had been done to spring the same kind of brutal trap on the revolutionaries—truly tragic, tragic…

That Genscher went so far as to guarantee the exchange of hostages on September 6 at 8 in the morning in Cairo is concealed in the West German reports—this was first made public by the leader of the Egyptian Olympic delegation.

Foreign imperialist countries were horrified by the Germans’ incompetence. Once again they had failed to liquidate the communists without also liquidating the Jews.

Israel cried crocodile tears. Isreal burned their own athletes just as the Nazis had burned the Jews—kindling for the imperialist policy of extermination. They won’t even bother to use Munich as a pretext if they now bomb Palestinian villages—they will do what the imperialist system always does: they will bomb the liberation movement. They bomb because the Arab people have embraced the Black September action, because the masses understand the action; their enemy is not only Israel, their enemy is imperialism. It is not only Israel that is bloodthirsty, nor is it only the U.S. in the case of Vietnam, but rather it is all of imperialism against all of the liberation movements. They understand that without an anti-imperialist struggle there can be no victory for the people’s war.

''The Establishment Unmasked''

The West German establishment has unmasked itself—the more they assert themselves, the more the system’s inherent contradictions have proven what this means in the context of developing imperialism: phony campaigns, the social substance of which is a lot of blah blah blah.

The ''Rundschau'' demands the immediate dissolution of all Palestinian organizations in the FRG and the expulsion of all members, again making liberal use of old ''Bild'' arguments from the days of the student movement—“our taxes.” The formulation from the FAZ references to Habash<ref>George Habash, Secretary General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) at the time.</ref>—frothing at the mouth—in the style of the Mainzer ''Baader Meinhof Report''<ref>A farcically hysterical “study” of the RAF produced in 1972 by the BKA, the Bonn Security Group, and the Baader-Meinhof Special Commission. The ''Allgemeinen Zeitung Mainz'', a German regional newspaper based in Mainz, serialized it in its pages.</ref>—he is obviously a cynical man suffering from an inferiority complex. Wischnewski<ref>Hans Jürgen Wischnewski was a long-time SPD politician, known for his good relations with many Arab leaders, one result of his having firmly supported the Algerian National Liberation Front at a time when Adenauer had firmly supported the French.</ref> wants to expel “all Arabs” whose governments support the Palestinians. Augstein<ref>Rudolph Augstein, founder and editor of ''Spiegel'' magazine.</ref> demands painful “sanctions.” Nannen<ref>Henri Nannen, editor of the German newsweekly ''Stern''.</ref> presents ''Stern'' readers with the order of the day: immediate expulsion, a Lufthansa boycott of Arab airports, “not a penny” of development aid or trade credit. Scheel speaks for the “civilized section” of humanity. Heinemann demands that Arab governments act as representatives of the World Court.

In the long run, this overblown outburst in the Springer Press will prove to be as useless as the authorities’ information strategy before and in the first hours following the massacre.<ref>Immediately following the Fürstenfeldbruck showdown, the government announced that all of the Israeli athletes had been rescued unharmed. This news was then broadcast around the world. The rationale for this escapes our comprehension.</ref> When Brandt telephoned Sidki, the Egyptian President, he still believed he could screw around with the revolutionaries in the same way he does with the West German left. He didn’t understand what they wanted. He claimed he didn’t need to know, as everyone must surely agree that they were criminals, anarchists, subhumans, sick, or whatever else. They would be disposed of with no questions asked. Sidki hung up.<ref>Sidki had been contacted to see if the Egyptian government would agree to receive the hostages and the Palestinian commando, the FRG’s goal being to get them out of the country. Sadat’s government later explained that to do so would have done nothing to resolve the crisis, and would have meant simply making it Egypt’s problem.</ref>

Genscher, Merck, Schreiber did not think they would have to admit the embarrassing truth, that they themselves caused the death of the hostages. They thought they would have time to make up a story and people would quickly lose interest, as was ultimately the case with the self-defense version of the assassinations of Petra Schelm, Georg von Rauch, and Thomas Weissbecker.

Right from the start, Genscher thought he could shift the blame to the Bavarians, repeating the approach used to shift the blame for McLeod’s death onto the Stuttgart cops.

The Munich Prosecutors Office thought they would be able to raise a smokescreen to block investigations and deny journalists information. They intended to draw upon the counterpropaganda they’ve been using against the RAF for two years, claiming that there really is no anti-imperialist struggle, that it is only an illusion—to the left of the Social-Liberal Coalition, there is nothing but crackpots, anarchists, criminals, and sick people.

''Eppler''<ref>Erhard Eppler, SPD member and left-leaning Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation from 1968 until 1974.</ref>

The tactically appropriate position, the position required to serve the immediate interests of the FRG, was developed by Eppler: no blanket judgment, no sanctions, continuing development aid, though only in the Maghreb in keeping with the imperialist policy of encirclement, undermining through investments, etc. Those who are prepared to allow the theft of their oil, their mineral resources, and their labor force, will benefit from friendship between nations and partnership.

''Their Unmasking''

Black September stripped the mask off of the Social-Liberal Coalition and their propagandists by forcing the system’s real, rather than the purported, contradiction out into the open. The contradiction between imperialism and the people of the Third World forced them at a certain point to abandon their original goals and intentions, because they could clearly no longer be achieved. The cops wouldn’t play along, refusing to carry out the massacre on the plane.<ref>Twenty minutes before the Palestinian commando arrived at Fürstenfeldbruck, police abandoned their posts inside the Boeing plane, claiming that the mission they had been given was suicidal.</ref> The news media wouldn’t play along. Foreign powers wouldn’t play along. The West German masses weren’t consulted. The Arab people for the most part grasped what West Germany represented: the imperialist policy of extermination.

Unmasking them means forcing them to take the step after next before they have time to take the next one, forcing them to abandon their goals, so that everyone can see what has been going on for a long time now. Pressure must be brought to bear while the revolutionary left is still able to mount a counterstrategy, not after everyone has been banned and fired and is sitting in prison. Unmasking them means forcing the contradictions out into the open, clarifying laws governing trade, seizing the initiative while it’s still possible, not waiting until it becomes impossible.

It is childish to imagine or to assert that the system can once again use ruling class control of the press and the fundamental unity of the establishment to hide behind a smokescreen, and that lacking a smokescreen it might actually collapse, and that therefore whoever contributes to the smokescreen contributes to the system’s preservation. The anti-imperialist struggle doesn’t take place at the level of election campaigns and detergent ads.

''Anti-Imperialist Consciousness''

The propaganda target of anti-imperialist action is the dialectical relationship between being and consciousness, because the masses’ loyalty to the system is based on their accepting its pretty exterior, its promises, and its lies. Their loyalty to the system is based on its capacity to discourage all spontaneity in its quest to completely assimilate the masses into the “the silent bondage of the relationship” (Marx), which it forces the masses to accept as if it were only natural. Anti-imperialist action rips apart the system’s facade and manipulation, along with the loyalty of the masses, and forces it to admit the truth, about which the masses say, as always, “This is not what we wanted.” That they would then act to put an end to the horror of the system, which has long been apparent, is not the madness the opportunists make it out to be.

Who wanted the Fürstenfeldbruck massacre? The athletes who were dragged away from the Olympics didn’t want it. The aggrieved and frightened people who experienced the aftermath and who felt the enormous cold-bloodedness of the IOC and the Springer Press didn’t want it. It would be idiotic to believe that the revolutionaries wanted it. They wanted the release of the prisoners. They wanted what millions in this country still want: not to be tortured—just as political prisoners here don’t want to be tortured—and an end to the theft of land, the murder, the napalming and the bombing terror Israel carries out against the Palestinian refugees. And that is why they were massacred. Because success would have meant an unimaginably higher level of identification with them and their revolution—with their “humanity,” their rage, their solidarity—which would have been a setback.

Anti-imperialist consciousness attempts to prevent the perfection of imperialist rule from being firmly established. The masses are assaulted by ''Bild'' everyday. They are swamped on every side with prefabricated positions and postulations, making it difficult for them to express their actual pain and suffering.

''"Terror"''

The RAF’s actions are directed towards developing anti-imperialist consciousness. The system’s cast of characters understand that. They have understood that this form of struggle gradually builds a mass base, because resistance that grows slowly more powerful and more courageous cannot easily be defeated.

With the tactic of phony bomb threats—used against Stuttgart—they have turned their full attention to addressing this problem. They do this after failing to achieve any breakthroughs, even though they have raided hundreds of houses, scoured thousands of kilometres of streets, and released a million media appeals directed at RAF sympathizers. With the tactic of phony bomb threats and the simultaneous banning of statements from RAF prisoners from the media, the cops themselves are trying to create chaos, which is intended to lead to calls for greater law and order. The socialist left proved incapable of telling the difference between genuine and false bomb threats, although all of the genuine ones were directed against the ruling class and aimed to clear buildings and disrupt the ruling class’s establishments, cultural venues, communication structures, and media outlets—only the Stuttgart threat was directed against the people and was openly fascist and hostile to the masses.

The anti-imperialist war turns the system’s weapons against the system itself—the counterrevolutionary terrorizes the people. The legal left—confused by the police actions—has ceded the issue to the opportunists (Negt).

(What needs to be said in detail about the June and July arrests, the imprisoned comrades must say themselves.)

''Black September''

The Black September action in Munich leaves no room for misunderstanding. They took hostages from a people who are carrying out an extermination policy against them. They put their lives on the line to free their comrades. They didn’t want to die. They put off their ultimatum. In the face of the uncompromising attitude advocated by Israel, they held the Israeli hostages prisoner. The Israeli hostages understood that this was a last resort. They were betrayed by the German authorities just as the revolutionaries were. The German police massacred the hostages and the revolutionaries.

The Black September action in Munich will live on in the memory of the anti-imperialist struggle.

The death of the Arab comrades weighs as heavily as Mount Tai.

THE STONES THAT THESE BEASTS THREW AT FÜRSTENFELDBRUCK WILL FALL AT THEIR OWN FEET!

SOLIDARITY WITH THE LIBERATION STRUGGLE OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!

SOLIDARITY WITH THE VIETNAMESE REVOLUTION!

REVOLUTIONARIES OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!

RAF

November 1972

== 7 - Staying Alive: Sensory Deprivation, Torture, and the Struggle Behind Bars ==
<blockquote>''By 1972, practically the whole founding generation of the RAF were behind bars. Yet there was still a second generation and a third generation. Why? Primarily because of the conditions of imprisonment and state-organized terror''

Dieter Kunzelmann

former K.1 Communard<ref>''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.''</ref> </blockquote>Having captured the ideological leadership of the RAF, the West German state set in motion the second element of their counterinsurgency project: one which would eventually become known as the “Stammheim Model.” The mere incarceration of the guerilla was insufficient. Those captured were to be rendered ineffective not only as combatants, but also as spokespeople for the anti-imperialist resistance. If at all possible, they were to be deconstructed as human beings and reconstructed as representatives of the counterinsurgency project. If this was not possible, at a bare minimum, they were to be destroyed.

The state’s weapon on this terrain was complete and total isolation of the prisoners, both from each other and from the outside world.

As early as June 7, 1972, the importance of isolation was enunciated by Horst Ehmke, the SPD minister responsible for coordinating intelligence operations. “We all… have an interest in completely breaking all solidarity [with the RAF], to isolate them from all others with radical opinions in this country,” Ehmke told the Bundestag. “That is the most important task.”<ref>Statement to Bundestag, June 7, 1972, quoted in ''Texte des prisonniers de la “fraction armée rouge” et dernières lettres d’Ulrike Meinhof'', Draft Version, Cahiers Libres 337 (Paris: François Maspero).</ref>

The prisoners were scattered around the country.<ref>For instance, Andreas Baader was in Schwalmstadt (Düsseldorf), Gudrun Ensslin in Essen, Holger Meins in Wittlich (Cologne), Irmgard Möller in Rastatt (Baden), Gerhard Müller in Hamburg, Jan-Carl Raspe in Cologne, and Horst Mahler in Moabit (West Berlin). (Aust, 231.)</ref> While they would all be targeted by the state, particular pains were taken to attack those who were considered the five ringleaders: Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe.

Andreas Baader was held in total isolation from the day of his arrest on June 1, 1972, until November 11, 1974. In that entire time, he did not see another prisoner.

As of April 11, 1973, Holger Meins was held in Wittlich prison in solitary isolation, with the cells above, below, to the left, and to the right of him kept empty. His cell was searched daily, he was denied all group activities, including church services,<ref>RAF members’ desire to attend church services was not due to any religiosity, although in their youth Meinhof, Ensslin, and Meins had all been quite devout. Rather, these services provided one of the only places where they could meet with and be amongst other prisoners.</ref> and he was shackled whenever he left his cell.

Ulrike Meinhof was put in the so-called “dead wing” at Cologne-Ossendorf prison,<ref>The formulation used in Germany is to put the city name first, and then the name of the prison. So Cologne-Ossendorf refers to Ossendorf prison in the city of Cologne.</ref> where Astrid Proll had previously been held. In order to ensure the women remained separate, Proll was transferred to the men’s wing.

The “dead wing” was intended not only to isolate, but also to induce a breakdown through sensory deprivation torture. It consisted of a specially soundproofed cell painted bright white with a single grated window covered with fine mesh, so that even the sky could not be viewed properly. The cell was lit twenty-four hours a day with a single bald neon light. It was forbidden for the prisoner to hang photographs, posters, or anything else on the walls. All other cells in the wing were kept vacant, and when other prisoners were moved through the prison—for instance, to the exercise yard—they were obliged to take a circuitous route so that even their voices could not be heard. The only minimal contact with another human being was when food was delivered; other than that, the prisoner spent twenty-four hours a day in a world with no variation.

The use of sensory deprivation had been studied by doctors in Canada and the United States since the late 1950s, the line of research being taken up in the FRG by Dr. Jan Gross of Hamburg’s Eppendorf University Hospital. Studies carried out by Gross found that sensory deprivation consistently caused feelings of unease ranging from fear to panic attacks, which could progress to an inability to concentrate, problems of perception (including hallucinations), vegetative disorders including feelings of intense hunger, chest pains, disequilibrium, trouble sleeping, trembling, and even convulsions.<ref>Sjef Teuns, “La Torture par Privation Sensorielle,” ''in à propos du procès BaaderMeinhof, Fraction Armée Rouge : de la torture dans les prisons de la RFA'', Klaus Croissant (ed.) (Paris : Christian Bourgeois Éditeur, 1975), 65-66.</ref>

(It is worth noting that just as research into isolation was not limited to the FRG, many prisoners in the United States today are also subjected to various forms of isolation clearly intended as a form of torture.)<ref>Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, “The People’s Tribunal to Expose the Crimes of the Control Units”; Dr. Mutulu Shakur et al., “Genocide Waged Against the Black Nation Through Behavior Modification/Orchestrated by Counterinsurgency and Low-Intensity Warfare in the U.S. Penal System.” Both reprinted in Matt Meyer, ed. ''Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners'' (Montreal/Oakland: Kersplebedebpm Press, 2008.) Also: Russell Maroon Shoatz, Death by Regulation: Pennsylvania Control Unit Abuses (Montreal: Kersplebedeb 2008).</ref>

Astrid Proll had been held in the dead wing for two periods, from November 1971 to January 1972 and from April 1972 to June 1972. She would later describe this experience:<blockquote>''…I was taken to an empty wing, a dead wing, where I was the only prisoner. Ulrike Meinhof later called it the “Silent Wing”. The shocking experience was that I could not hear any noises apart from the ones that I generated myself. Nothing. Absolute silence. I went through states of excitement, I was haunted by visual and acoustic hallucinations. There were extreme disturbances of concentration and attacks of weakness. I had no idea how long this would go on for. I was terrified that I would go mad.''<ref>Proll, 11.</ref></blockquote>After four and a half months of this torture, Proll’s physical and mental health were so badly damaged that she could hardly walk. When she was brought to trial in September 1973, the court ordered her examined by a heart specialist, a man who happened to be a former POW from Russia: he testified that her condition reminded him of the prisoners interned in Siberia.<ref>Ibid., 12.</ref> The state was obliged to release her to a sanitarium in the Black Forest where she stayed for a year and then escaped, making her way to England.

Even when recaptured years later, she remained scarred by her ordeal, as she wrote in 1978:<blockquote>''During the 2½ years of remand I was 4½ months completely isolated in the Dead Wing of Cologne-Ossendorf. Not even today, six years later, have I completely recovered from that. I can’t stand rooms which are painted white because they remind me of my cell. Silence in a wood can terrify me, it reminds me of the silence in the isolated cell. Darkness makes me so depressive as if my life were taken away. Solitude causes me as much fear as crowds. Even today I have the feeling occasionally as if I can’t move.''<ref>Friends of Astrid Proll, ''Astrid Proll: The Case Against Her Extradition'' (London: 1978), 8. It is worth remembering that she was being charged with attempted murder for shooting at police, an incident that the state already knew had not happened, thanks to the surveillance reports of its own intelligence agents. Cf 60. 3 Aust, 246.</ref> </blockquote>Ulrike Meinhof was held in these conditions for 237 days following her arrest on June 15, 1972, and for shorter periods in December 1973 and February 1975. After eight months of this torture, she wrote:<blockquote>''I finally realized I had to pull myself out of this, I myself had no right to let these frightful things keep affecting me—it was my duty to fight my way out of it. By whatever means there are of doing that in prison: daubing the walls, coming to blows with a cop, wrecking the fitments, hunger strike. I wanted to make them at least put me under arrest, because then you get to hear something—you don’t have a radio babbling away, only the bible to read, maybe no mattress, no window, etc.—but that’s a different kind of torture from not hearing anything. And obviously it would have been a relief to me…''<ref>Aust, 246.</ref></blockquote>Through it all, she would remain unbroken.

Having failed to destroy Meinhof through such severe isolation, the state moved to directly and medically attack her brain. On the basis of an operation she had undergone in 1962 to correct a swollen blood vessel in her brain, Federal Prosecutor Peter Zeis theorized that her political behavior might be the result of some neurological problem.

In a letter dated April 18, 1973, Zeis asked the right-wing<ref>Formerly associated with the Nazi regime, Witter had publicly opposed the payment of reparations to victims of the Holocaust.</ref> director of the University of Homburg-Saar’s Institute for Forensic Medicine and Psychiatry, Dr. Hermann Witter, to ascertain what interventions might prove necessary. In a letter dated May 10, Witter responded that he felt both x-rays and a scintigraphy—a routine and normally harmless diagnostic test which involves the injection of radioisotopes—would be required to establish a diagnosis. On July 13, Federal Supreme Court Judge Knoblich ruled that the state could proceed with these tests, even against Meinhof’s will, and with the use of constraining devices or anesthesia if she resisted.<ref>Commission internationale d’enquête sur la mort d’Ulrike Meinhof. ''La Mort d’Ulrike Meinhof: Rapport de la Commission international d’enquête'' (Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1979), 78-79</ref> Correspondence between Witter and the Attorney General indicates that an appropriate diagnosis would have been used to mandate neurosurgery, regardless of the prisoner or her relatives’ wishes.<ref>In this volume see the interview with ''Le Monde Diplomatique'', pages 410-412.</ref>

All of this was a transparent attempt to discredit the RAF by pathologizing Meinhof: “It would be so embarrassing,” Zeis mused at the time, “if it turned out that all the people began to follow a mad woman.”<ref>“Political Internment in the FRG,” in ''War on the War Makers'', 27.</ref>

It was only through public protests organized by the prisoner support group Red Aid, which mobilized many doctors, that the government was forced to drop its plan.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 131, 133.</ref> Yet as we shall see, this was not the last time that the state would seek to score a propaganda victory by attacking and discrediting the woman who was routinely described as the RAF’s chief theoretician.

On top of imposing internal isolation, the state did all it could to cut the prisoners off from the outside world. They were limited to visits from lawyers and family members. Visits from family members were overseen by two state security employees who recorded all conversations, the contents of which could be introduced at trials, sometimes followed by analysis from a psychologist. Political letters, books, and packages were routinely withheld.

Starting in 1975, everyone arrested under §129 in connection with “political crimes” would be held under the so-called “24-Point Program.” This formalized many of the conditions that had been imposed unevenly up until then, while also adding new restrictions. The program specified, among other things, that the prisoners were banned from all common activities. The prisoners now received one hour of solitary yard time each day, which was immediately interrupted if they failed to heed an order, insulted a staff person, or caused any damage. The prisoners were permitted to keep twenty books in their cells. Visits were limited to people cleared by the authorities, and could only last a maximum of thirty minutes (the standard was two such visits a month). It was prohibited to discuss activities of the so-called “terrorist scene” or its support groups (the latter was a grab bag for all revolutionary organizations), prison revolts, or hunger strikes. All visitors were searched, and this included lawyers.<ref>“24-Punkt-Haftstatut.” <nowiki>http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/</nowiki> PolitischeStroemungen/Stadtguerilla+raf/raf/brd+raf/053.html.</ref>

In a statement regarding such isolation, Till Meyer and Andreas Vogel, both 2nd of June Movement prisoners who were subjected to these conditions for years, wrote:<blockquote>''With the isolation wings, years of isolation have been carried to the extreme and the process of extermination has been perfected: the perfection of spatial limitation and the total isolation, electronic observation with cameras and microphones (openly in each cell)—and we are guarded by special corps (corps who are trained in psychology and conditioned through BKA training).''<ref>Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd of June Movement), D''er Blues: Gesammelte Texte der Bewgung 2. Juni'', ''Vol. 2'', self-published illegally in the FRG, n.d. (1982?), 680.</ref></blockquote>RAF prisoner Helmut Pohl would express himself similarly:<blockquote>''Isolation represents a more intense version of the situation which dominates on the outside, which led us to engage in clandestine armed struggle in the first place. Isolation represents its pure state, its naked reality. Whoever doesn’t find a way to struggle against this situation is destroyed—the situation controls him and not the other way around.''<ref>Helmut Pohl’s Testimony at the Stammheim trial, July 29, 1976.</ref></blockquote>As Andreas Baader described it:<blockquote>Isolation aims at alienating prisoners from every social relationship including their history, their history above all… It makes the prisoner unconscious or kills him or her.<ref>Bakker Schut (ed.), ''Das Info: brief von gefangen aus der RAF aus der discussion 1973-1977'' (Neue Malik Verlag, Plambeck & Neuss, 1987), 218.</ref> </blockquote>Professor Wilfried Rasch of the Institute of Forensic Psychiatry at the Free University of Berlin, who was called upon to examine the RAF prisoners, had this to say about the isolation conditions in which they were held:<blockquote>''The high security wing has simply the quality of torture, that is to say, an attempt to use special measures to achieve something amongst the prisoners through difficult or unbearable conditions, specifically, a change of heart, a defection.''<ref>Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd of June Movement), ''Der Blues: Gesammelte Texte der Bewgung 2. Juni, Vol. 1'', self-published illegally in the FRG, n.d. (1982?), 341.</ref></blockquote>Even those visits that were permitted were designed to add to the prisoners’ stress-level. Eberhard Dreher, held on charges of supporting the 2nd of June Movement, described the closed visiting conditions:<blockquote>''[T]he screen offers a pretense of contact, simultaneously limiting the contact to visual contact and making the contact unfamiliar due to the reflective quality of the glass… Further pain is created by the lack of air and the particular acoustics. The construction of ventilators would rectify this problem… To make oneself understood, one must speak very loudly. One’s own voice within the aquarium-like cabinet is amplified into an acoustic mountain crashing down directly onto one’s own head.''<ref>Ibid., 320.</ref></blockquote>Dreher further described the effect of one such visit with his lawyer as follows:<blockquote>''After… forty minutes, I had a splitting headache and, with the consent of my lawyer, had to break off the visit. I had a headache, needed air, was fed-up, wanted to be in my cell in peace.''<ref>Ibid., 321.</ref></blockquote>In 1978, the European Commission of Human Rights would observe that their prison and trial conditions had contributed to Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader all developing “problems of concentration, marked fatigue, difficulties of expression or articulation, reduced physical and mental performance, instability, diminished spontaneity and ability to make contacts, depression.”<ref>European Commission of Human Rights, ''Decisions and Reports 14'', Strasbourg, June 1979, 96-97.</ref>

If the results of imprisonment in the isolation wing were horrifying, isolation combined with sensory deprivation was even more destructive, as is indicated in Ulrike Meinhof’s harrowing description of her ordeal in Cologne-Ossendorf (see Ulrike Meinhof on the Dead Wing, pages 271-73)

Early on, it became clear to the prisoners that their only hope lay in resistance, and so on January 17, 1973, forty captured combatants from the RAF and other guerilla groups began a hunger strike, demanding access to independent doctors and transfer to the general population.<ref>Rote Armee Fraktion, 181.</ref>

This first hunger strike lasted four and a half weeks, and was only called off when Attorney General Ludwig Martin agreed to move Meinhof out of the dead wing—a promise which was not kept, and was likely never meant as anything but a ploy.<ref>Vague, 50.</ref>

Nevertheless, even though the hunger strike did not achieve any immediate victory, it did manage to break through the wall of silence surrounding prison conditions, galvanizing support from a section of the far left. In a way that was perhaps impossible to foresee, it marked the beginning of a strategy which would give the RAF a new lease on life.

Support had so far come mainly from the Red Aid network, a situation which was less than satisfactory in the eyes of the prisoners, as Red Aid offered solidarity while remaining critical of the RAF’s politics. Furthermore, within Red Aid, the focus on the RAF prisoners had begun causing dissension, especially in Munich, as Bavaria held a large number of prisoners from the antiauthoritarian scene, and it was felt that they were being neglected, too much energy being spent defending the Marxist-Leninist RAF.

Thus, following the first hunger strike in April 1973, several lawyers came together with some of the RAF’s closest political sympathizers to set up the ''Komitees gegen Folter'' (Committees Against Torture) that would take over support work for the prisoners in the future, while promoting the RAF’s particular brand of anti-imperialist politics. This political orientation was no great liability for the legal left, as even many liberals were not yet ready to completely repudiate those who engaged in armed struggle.<ref>Dellwo, 95.</ref>

Several lawyers took leading roles in the Committees, Hans-Christian Ströbele, Klaus Croissant, Otto Schily, Siegfried Haag and Kurt Groenewold being their most prominent members. It was Groenewold who took the lead in establishing the Committees, their Hamburg headquarters being a block away from his office.<ref>Ibid., 93-94.</ref>

As it turned out, the decision to set up the Committees proved fortuitous. Due in part to ongoing tensions between antiauthoritarians and others, the Maoist KPD/ML managed to take control of Red Aid at a national conference in April 1974. This was the second successful attempt by a K-group to move in on the network: the KPD/AO had already formed a rival “Red Aid registered association” to capitalize on its reputation. While the KPD/ML and KPD/AO may have been occasionally sympathetic to the RAF prisoners, they were definitely hostile to their politics, and so the RAF would have been at a disadvantage had they remained dependent on either Red Aid network for support.

Committees Against Torture were established West Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Kassel, Cologne, Munich, Münster, Stuttgart, Tübingen, and Heidelberg<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 97.</ref>—the latter in particular being a magnet for former SPK members.<ref>Dellwo, 94.</ref> Backed by many progressive intellectuals, they worked to focus public attention on the prisoners’ struggle and the destructive conditions in which they were held, setting up information tables, issuing leaflets, and holding teach-ins.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 97-98.</ref> The hope was to win the support of people with their roots in the sixties antiwar movement, people who shared much of the RAF’s analysis and could be expected to express political solidarity, particularly for the idea that the captured combatants were political prisoners who had acted in the context of an international anti-imperialist movement.
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Lawyers
!Hans-Christian Ströbele had helped to found the West Berlin Socialist Lawyers Collective along with Horst Mahler in 1968.<ref>Aust, 66</ref> He was an SPD member in the early seventies, and, in 1978, would be a founding member of the Alternative List, a forerunner to the left wing of the Green Party, in which he would also be active as an elected member of the Bundestag from 1985 to 1987 and again from 1992 on.
Klaus Croissant was a member of the Stuttgart Socialist Lawyers Collective; he had been under surveillance by the state from at least May 1972, suspected of having himself located safehouses for the RAF.<ref>Aust, 207; Becker, 306.</ref> Over the years, he became one of the prisoners’ most ardent and notorious advocates—disgusted at what he saw of West German “justice,” he would eventually begin working with the East German Stasi in the 1980s. He would unsuccessfully run for mayor of Berlin-Kreuzberg on the Alternative List ticket, before joining the ''Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus'' (Party of Democratic Socialism)—the successor to East Germany’s SED—in 1990.[[File:RAF Lawyers from RAF - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Lawyers Klaus Croissant, Otto Schily, and Hans-Christian Ströbele at a press conference in 1974.'']]Otto Schily was a committed civil libertarian, deeply concerned about the rule of law. He had befriended Rudi Dutschke while studying in West Berlin, and had been active in circles around the SDS.<ref>Hockenos, 119.</ref> Probably the only one of the lawyers to take pride in referring to himself as “bourgeois,” Schily would join Ströbele in the Green Party in the 1980s, before crossing over to the Social Democrats in 1989. In 1998, years after he had left our story, Schily was appointed Minister of the Interior, the former civil libertarian now in charge of domestic repression. As such, he was personally responsible for the highly repressive “anti-terrorist” legislation that was passed in the FRG in the wake of September 11, 2001.<ref>Ibid., 290.</ref> The legislation earned him a “Big Brother Award”, a negative prize presented to those who excel in rolling back civil liberties.
Siegfried Haag was a court-appointed attorney. While he had not been prominent in the APO or the political left previously, he was so moved by the prisoners’ plight that he would eventually make their struggle his own.
Kurt Groenewold, the son of a wealthy property owner, had previously represented Ulrike Meinhof in her divorce from Klaus Rainer Röhl in 1968. He was active in the Hamburg Socialist Lawyers Collective, defending cultural radicals like the composers Ernst Schnabel and Hans-Werner Henze for their oratorio to Che Guevara, Floß der Medusa. He also defended the poet Erich Fried, who was accused of slandering the West Berlin police when he described the shooting of Georg von Rauch as a “preventive murder” in a letter to ''Spiegel''.<ref>“Kurt Groenewold,” <nowiki>http://www.literaturhaus.at/autoren/F/fried/</nowiki> gesellschaft/mitglieder/groenewold/.</ref> In recent years, Groenwold has written extensively about the legal and civil rights ramifications of the state’s response to the armed movements in West Germany in the 70s and 80s.
|}
While the Committees welcomed support from many intellectuals and celebrities who still rejected the prisoners’ politics, by and large militants were expected to toe the RAF line. While some involved did have their own quiet reservations in this regard, it is equally clear that many others were sincerely won over to the guerilla’s politics. The state certainly contributed to this process, as activists would find themselves the object of police surveillance, raids, and even in some cases criminal charges, simply for disseminating information about the conditions in West German prisons.<ref>In 1975, for instance, two activists received respective sentences of six and nine months in prison under §129, simply for handing out pamphlets with information about isolation conditions. The Supreme Court’s decision made clear the object of such prosecutions: “The accused did not limit themselves to speaking to individuals in private, but by means of the leaflets sought to make contact with large numbers of people, and principally with young people, who are easily influenced in this way… Nor should the possibility of imitation by potential criminals be ignored. Whether the sentence on the accused will remain largely unknown is not important; what is important is the effect it will inevitably have on people who do know of it.” (Cobler, 114-115)</ref>

In subsequent years, the underground would include several veterans of this prisoners’ support scene, and even some from their legal team, a fact which the state would exploit time and again to attack the RAF’s lawyers. While most of the legal support team never did join the guerilla despite their increasing horror at the Kafkaesque trials and inhumane prison conditions, it is clear in retrospect that work in the Committees did constitute a rite of passage into the RAF for an astonishing number of future guerillas.

It is, of course, equally true that the overwhelming majority of those who were active in this scene never joined the guerilla, and while they remained operational, the Committees Against Torture always limited themselves to nonviolent forms of protest and popular education.

Before long, they got their first opportunity for such public activity: on May 8, 1973—the anniversary of the defeat of the Third Reich— sixty prisoners throughout the Federal Republic began a second hunger strike. The Committees stepped up their activities, organizing for lawyers to engage in a solidarity hunger strike and holding a demonstration outside the Federal Court in Karlsruhe.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 86-87.</ref>

The Committees’ most significant event occurred on May 11, when they held a teach-in where several high-profile supporters spoke out against isolation torture. Heinz Brandt, an official from the IG Metall trade union, described the isolation conditions that the prisoners were subjected to as even worse than what he had suffered during four years in a Nazi concentration camp:<blockquote>''As crass and paradoxical as it may sound, my experiences with strict, radical isolation were worse than my time… in a Nazi concentration camp… [I]n the camp, I still had the bases for human life, namely, communication with my fellow inmates… We were able in the camps to see, not only outrageously fascistic and sadistic mistreatment, but also the possibilities of resistance and collective life among the prisoners, and, with this, for the fulfillment of the fundamental need of a human being: social existence.''<ref>Varon, 218.</ref></blockquote>Dutch psychologist Dr. Sjef Teuns described isolation and sensory deprivation as programmed torture. Dr. Christian Sigrist, who had worked alongside anticolonial freedom fighters in Africa, described the West German torture system as part of the worldwide counterstrategy against anti-imperialist combatants.

This last point was certainly as important to the prisoners as the former two. The RAF viewed human rights campaigns as being worse than useless; indeed, they viewed such humanitarianism as an attack on their fundamental principles. When Red Aid had put out leaflets accusing the state of denying the prisoners’ basic human rights, Baader had angrily objected that, “Because our comrades are half-dead they can’t think we’re anything else ourselves. They’re twisting the thing the same way the pigs twist it worldwide: Violence is taboo…”<ref>Aust, 242.</ref>

Similarly, Baader would later find it necessary to criticize defense attorney Otto Schily in this regard:<blockquote>''We certainly can’t agree with the argument regarding torture as it is developed by Schily in his petition […] In reacting to revolutionary politics, the state does not know what to do except torture, and in doing so it exposes itself as an imperialist state. The indignation of degenerate bourgeois antifascism only masks this. The latter is already so weak, corrupted by social democracy, and locked in revisionism, that it can no longer express itself in a meaningful way.''<ref>Andreas Baader Regarding Torture, reprinted in this volume on pages 319-323.</ref></blockquote>On May 24, 1973, fourteen days into the second hunger strike, the prison authorities began withholding water from Baader, despite a court decision two days earlier forbidding such tactics, as even short term water deprivation under a doctor’s supervision can seriously damage one’s health.<ref>Klaus Croissant, “La justice et la torture par l’isolement,” in Croissant, 120-121.</ref> Indeed, after several days without water and in critical condition—suffering kidney pains, a sore throat, and difficulty seeing— Baader was forced to end his hunger strike. Apparently pleased with their success, the authorities targeted Bernhard Braun next, attempting to have him placed in the so-called “dry cell,” but his lawyer managed to intervene and have this blocked.<ref>Ibid., 120.</ref>

The hunger strike continued until June 29, when the District Court in Karlsruhe ordered the release from isolation of two prisoners.<ref>Rote Armee Fraktion, 181.</ref> (Although accounts are vague on this point, there is some indication that the two were former SPK members Carmen Roll and Siegfried Hausner.)<ref>Hausner had been arrested in 1972 for building bombs and sentenced to three years in a youth facility; he was released from prison in 1974, at which point he made contact with other former SPK members and returned to the underground with the RAF.</ref>

Yet, soon after these two prisoners had their conditions relaxed for health reasons, another RAF prisoner was effectively sentenced to death by medical neglect.

Katharina Hammerschmidt had fled to France in 1971, but when the May Offensive had ended in a wave of arrests, she had turned herself in, returning to face the relatively minor charges relating to her having located safehouses for the guerilla. Despite the fact that she had surrendered voluntarily, she was remanded to the West Berlin Women’s Prison while awaiting her trial.

In August 1973, Hammerschmidt underwent a routine medical exam, which included some x-rays. These revealed an abnormal growth in her chest, but the prison doctors took no steps to evaluate whether this was benign or malignant. In fact, they did not even inform her of the results.<ref>“Des medecins portent plainte,” in Croissant, 104-107.</ref>

In September, Hammerschmidt began to complain of intense pain in her chest and throat. She had difficulty breathing and it hurt to swallow, yet the prison doctors simply told her that if the symptoms continued, more x-rays would be taken in another three months.
{| class="wikitable"
|+Press Release from Andreas Baader's Lawyers
!Even though Baader was doing well, at noon on May 22, 1973, the prison doctor, Dr. Degenhardt from Kassel, came to his cell with a squad of ten guards in order to force him to swallow a solution through a tube as thick as of one’s thumb. Three times Baader requested a spoon so that he could take the solution on his own. Despite this fact, the doctor ordered the guards to hold him down. Pinching his nose, he then forced the tube into his mouth, down his throat and into his digestive tract. Baader vomited and almost suffocated. The tube opened up his throat and his digestive tract and he vomited blood. After this torture Dr. Degenhardt gave him three intravenous injections and he then lost consciousness for eight hours.
On the morning of May 22, Baader had been visited by one of his lawyers, Koch, from the Frankfurt Legal Collective. The lawyer was able to see that Baader’s state of health was relatively good. When he came back that afternoon to continue his visit, a guard told Koch that the doctor had instructed that Baader should remain in bed. It was not possible for him to visit with his lawyer. The lawyer asked to see the warden Metz, but this was refused.
As attorneys of Andreas Baader we note: Andreas Baader is not only subjected to psychological torture in the Ziegenhain prison (Hessen), but he is also being tortured physically by methods which are carbon copies of those practiced in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, and Brazil. Force-feeding, when the prisoner has agreed to feed himself, is a form of torture.
We demand that Dr. Degenhardt and his helpers be punished.
Andreas Baader’s lawyers
Golzem, von Plonitz, Riedel and Koch
May 23 1973
Klaus Croissant, “La justice et la torture par l’isolement,” in Croissant, 119.
|}
In October, the pain was so great that Hammerschmidt could not sleep; she was told by medical staff that her throat hurt from “too much yelling.” As her condition deteriorated to the point that her tumors became visible to the naked eye, the doctors simply prescribed water pills.<ref>Soligruppe Christian S., “Der Spiegel, 1975, baader/meinhof Müdes Auge,” <nowiki>http://www36.websamba.com/Soligruppe/data/spiegel1975.htm</nowiki>; “Les democraties face à la violence” la Lanterne Noire 5 (December 1975).</ref>

In November, her lawyers finally won a court judgment forcing the prison authorities to allow her to be seen by an independent physician. This specialist immediately issued a letter indicating that Hammerschmidt needed follow-up tests as soon as possible. These were not carried out, and she was returned to prison.

Two weeks later, on the night of November 28/29, Hammerschmidt almost suffocated from difficulty breathing. She was brought directly to a hospital, where it was found she had a cancerous tumor as large as a child’s head in her chest. It was determined that the tumor was inoperable, although it was also stated that this might not have been the case just weeks earlier.<ref>Viktor Kleinkrieg, “Les combattantes anti-impérialistes face à la torture,” in Croissant, 47.</ref>
[[File:Katharina Hammerschmidt from RAF a documentary history.jpeg|thumb|''Katharina Hammerschmidt'']]
An independent physician would later remark that the fact that Hammerschmidt had cancer should have been obvious from the x-rays taken in August, and yet six different prison doctors were all seemingly unable to notice that anything was wrong. Or perhaps they simply did not want to: in a public accusation signed by 131 doctors, it was suggested that she was denied necessary medical care because this would have required an end to the isolation conditions that she, like all other RAF prisoners, was being subjected to at the time.

It was January 1974 before the court adjourned her trial, ruling that she was too sick and needed to be released to a clinic for treatment. If anything could have been done, it was now too late: Katharina Hammerschmidt struggled on for the next year and a half, finally succumbing to her illness on June 29, 1975—three years to the day after she had turned herself in.

Many observers considered Hammerschmidt’s death to be a case of “judicial murder.” Independent physicians who examined her upon her release declared that the prison doctors’ findings had been “medically incomprehensible,” evidence of “incredible medical shortcomings.”<ref>Ibid.</ref> A court would eventually award her family the measly sum of 5,000 DM, admitting that the prison administration bore some responsibility for her death.<ref>Peters Butz, RAF Terrorismus in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1991), 454, quoted in “Katharina Hammerschmidt,” <nowiki>http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_Hammerschmidt</nowiki>.</ref>

The RAF and its supporters would lay Katharina Hammerschmidt’s death at the door of the West German prison authorities. Yet, by the time she had died, hers was not the first such case of “judicial murder.”
[[File:RAF Prisoner Support Poster from RAF - a Documentary History.jpeg|thumb]]
On September 13, 1974, forty prisoners led by the RAF had begun their third collective hunger strike against prison conditions.<ref>Apart from the declaration included in this section on pages 274-78, Ulrike Meinhof used the occasion of her testimony in court to announce the strike. See Ulrike Meinhof Regarding the Liberation of Andreas Baader, page 370.</ref> The Committees Against Torture sprang into action, and Amnesty International had its Hamburg offices occupied in an attempt to pressure the liberal organization to take a stand in support of the prisoners. (Notably, several of those involved in this occupation would join the guerilla within a few years.)<ref>For instance: Susanne Albrecht, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, Günter Sonnenberg, Christian Klar, and Knut Folkerts. (Becker, 340-341)</ref>

Not only had the previous hunger strikes failed to achieve integration of all RAF prisoners into the general population, in situations where they had been able to have contact with social prisoners, the latter often found themselves harassed or transferred. The prisoners had come to the conclusion that the demand for integration, while it had undeniable appeal given the high esteem in which the New Left held marginalized groups like social prisoners, was simply not going to work. As a result, integration was dropped, and the struggle was now defined as one against isolation and for the association of political prisoners with each other.

As Karl-Heinz Dellwo, who was active in the Committees Against Torture at the time, explains:<blockquote>''Up until then the hunger strikes were carried out with the goal of achieving “equality” with the other prisoners. I had long been critical of this. I thought it absolutely could not work. Either one would be placed somewhere where the prisoners changed every day, or with prisoners with whom one could not, for various reasons, talk. I was pleased when the RAF prisoners changed their line and chose the demand for association. That created some conflicts on the outside, for instance with the Frankfurt Committee,''<ref>Throughout the 1970s, Frankfurt was the bastion of the ''spontis'', who would have been critical of such a separation from social prisoners.</ref> ''which had a social revolutionary line: they were of the opinion that all prisoners were frustrated social rebels. I seriously doubted that.''<ref>Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Das Projektil sind wir (Hamburg: Nautilus, 2007), 98-99.</ref></blockquote>This new demand for association became a rallying point for the prisoners and their supporters for the next two decades. Years later, 2nd of June Movement prisoner Till Meyer, writing from the dead wing, would express the goal this way:<blockquote>''Our demand—association of all prisoners—is the opposite of what the pigs offer us. Association means, above all, survival, collective political imprisonment, political identity, self-organization—while the dead wing means annihilation.''<ref>Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd of June Movement), ''Der Blues: Gesammelte Texte der Bewgung'' 2. Juni, Vol. 2, 684.</ref></blockquote>In practical terms, association meant bringing together political prisoners in groups large enough to be socially viable, fifteen being the minimum number normally suggested. Political prisoners in some other European countries, such as Italy and Northern Ireland, had already won such conditions for themselves, and so it was hoped that this might prove a realistic goal.

As a brief aside, it should be noted that this reorientation, along with the third hunger strike, provided the occasion for a very public split amongst the prisoners, as Horst Mahler not only refused to participate, but also took the opportunity to publicly repudiate armed struggle and break with the RAF. It has been suggested that one reason for this was his refusal to abandon the demand for integration, though clearly he had had other disagreements with the rest of the guerilla for some time now.<ref>Otto Billig, “The Lawyer Terrorist and his Comrades,” ''Political Psychology'' 6, no. 1 (March 1985): 35.</ref>

In point of fact, Mahler had joined Red Aid e.v., the network that had been set up by the KPD/AO in 1970. He would explain that this was intended as an attempt to “close ranks and organize a criticism of the RAF’s sectarian line in the spirit of solidarity.”<ref>Rote Hilfe e.v. “Zwischen raf-Solidarität und „linker Caritas“ - Teil 1 / 1 / 2007 / Die Rote Hilfe Zeitung / Publikationen / Rote Hilfe e.V. - Rote Hilfe e.V.,” http:// www.rote-hilfe.de/publikationen/die_rote_hilfe_zeitung/2007/1/zwischen_raf_ solidaritaet_und_linker_caritas_teil_1.</ref> Mahler’s move into orthodox Maoism would win him some support: that October, Red Aid e.v. organized a demonstration, during which, according to the Verfassungsschutz, 5,000 people rallied to demand his freedom.<ref>Ibid.</ref> Nevertheless, it failed to do any good in court, where Mahler was now facing his third RAF-related trial, the second time he would face charges relating to Baader’s 1970 jailbreak. Despite his break with the guerilla, he would eventually be sentenced to fourteen years in prison; Ulrike Meinhof, who also stood accused in these proceedings, would receive an eight-year sentence, while Hans-Jürgen Bäcker, who had testified against the guerilla, would be acquitted.<ref>''European Stars and Stripes'', “Meinhof: Female German Guerrilla Leader gets 8-year term for role in murder plot,” November 30, 1974.</ref>

The other prisoners considered Mahler’s public split to be serious enough to warrant a public reply, and on September 27 Monika Berberich delivered a statement at the Mahler-Meinhof-Bäcker trial formally expelling her former comrade, accusing him of being a “filthy, bourgeois chauvinist” who had attempted to “transfer his ruling class arrogance… into the proletarian movement.”<ref>The Expulsion of Horst Mahler, see pages 288-91</ref>
{| class="wikitable"
|+Horst Mahler After the RAF
!Horst Mahler left the RAF for the KPD (previously the KPD/AO) in 1974, but remained a Maoist for only a few years: in 1977 he publicly announced that he was now “internally freed from the dogmatic revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism.”<ref>German Law Journal, “Federal Constitutional Court Issues Temporary Injunction in the NPD Party Ban Case,” ''German Law Journal'' [online] 2, no. 13, (August 1, 2001).</ref> As a repentant guerilla, he was supported on humanitarian grounds by ''Jusos'' chairman Gerhard Schröder, who began acting as his lawyer in 1978.
With time off for good behavior, Mahler was released from prison in 1980, at which point his only real political activity was to cooperate with government propaganda programs and appear before young people to condemn political violence.<ref>United Press International, “Parting shots,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', October 4, 1980.</ref>

In the 1990s, however, a new Horst Mahler emerged as the former guerilla-lawyer publicly repositioned himself on the far right of the German political spectrum. Mahler had crossed the Rubicon, and has since earned international renown as a “third position” fascist, and legal defender of Holocaust Deniers and neo-nazis, racists whose opinions the former communist now shares.
His expulsion in 1974 does not stop journalists from routinely describing Mahler as a founding member of the RAF, implying a connection between his previous views and those he holds today. Indeed, Mahler the neo-nazi has attempted to exploit this smear himself, arguing dishonestly that were Meinhof alive today, she, too, would have crossed over to the neofascist camp.
While several leading lights from the sixties APO generation have indeed moved to the far right, these represent only a small minority. In the case of the RAF itself, despite its degeneration and decline in the late eighties and early nineties,<ref>As will be detailed in our second volume, ''The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume II: Dancing with Imperialism: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.''</ref> Mahler is the only former member to have followed this sad trajectory.
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[[File:RAF Prisoner Solidarity Poster from RAF - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''“Solidarity with the RAF Comrades’ Hunger Strike”: poster for a public meeting organized by the sponti left, with Rudi Dutschke, Johannes Agnoli, and Peter Brückner. September 1974.'']]
This split, and tensions around the new demand for association, may explain the RAF’s “Provisional Program of Struggle for the Political Rights of Imprisoned Workers,” which was also released that September. An attempt to explain how the struggle against isolation could relate to a wider radical prisoners’ movement, the Provisional Program left the door open to the possibility of struggle alongside other prisoners. While this strategy seems to have borne no fruit, it may have assuaged the dissatisfaction felt by some of those who were unhappy at the new orientation away from integration.

Despite this rocky beginning, the RAF’s third hunger strike was a momentous event, rallying support in a way no previous hunger strike had and serving as a major radicalizing experience for various tendencies of the left.

At first, however, little attention was paid to the striking prisoners, especially in the media, which barely mentioned the strike. The main solidarity activity remained public outreach. Students at the West Berlin Technical University staged a solidarity hunger strike,<ref>Peter Jochen Winters, “Unklarheit über die Rolle der verhafteten Pfarrersfrau,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', November 23, 1974.</ref> and supporters in that city occupied a Lutheran Church demanding an end to isolation, extermination imprisonment, and “clean torture”—they were greeted with support by the Church’s superintendent and several clergymen.<ref>Peter Jochen Winters, “Die Verquickung in Machenschaften der Meinhof-Bande began mit einer Kirschenbetzung,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', Nov. 25, 1974.</ref>

Notable among the prisoners’ Lutheran supporters were Undine Zühlke, a clergyman’s wife, and Vicar Cornelius Burghardt. Both Zühlke and Burghardt organized a public assembly at their church on November 4, where they spoke alongside a number of the prisoners’ lawyers, and where resolutions were passed against isolation torture. Burghardt also publicly admitted having sheltered Meinhof in 1971, explaining that he did so in “the Christian tradition.”<ref>Winters “Unklarheit über die Rolle der verhafteten Pfarrersfrau.”</ref> (Zühlke and Burghardt were soon sentenced under §129—he for sheltering Meinhof and she for smuggling a letter out from Meinhof in early November.<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Verdacht der Unterstützung von Terroristen beunruhigt die Berliner evangelische Kirche,” November 12, 1974. The letter in question, likely about prison conditions, was in fact never delivered—losing her nerve, Zühlke destroyed it rather than pass it on to Burghardt. This did nothing to help her following the Drenkmann action, when police accused her of acting as a courier of a letter which allegedly had to do with his killing, and she was unable to produce said letter to prove that it was about nothing of the sort.</ref> Later that month, the Lutheran Church Council attempted to clamp down on radical church members, issuing a “Statement Against Terrorism” and calling on unnamed clergymen to “reorient themselves” accordingly.<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Erklärung der Kirche gegen Terorismus,” November 29, 1974.</ref>)

At the same time, another noteworthy source of support was the KPD/ML, which had successfully taken over the main Red Aid network in April of that year. The KPD/ML remained hostile to the RAF’s politics, especially to what it viewed as their soft line on the East German and Soviet revisionists. Yet, on the basis of opposing state repression, it and the Red Aid network would provide substantial support, issuing leaflets and organizing demonstrations throughout the hunger strike.

During the strike’s first month, two prisoners—Ronald Augustin and Ali Jansen—were both deprived of water for days at a time.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 28, 30.</ref> Jansen had been sentenced in 1973 to ten years in prison on two counts of attempted murder for having shot at cops when they caught him and other RAF members stealing a car in 1970. Augustin was a graphic artist from Amsterdam, who had joined the RAF after meeting members in that city in 1971; he was arrested on July 24, 1973, attempting to enter the FRG, and charged under §129, as well as for resisting arrest and possession of false documents.<ref>He was sentenced to six years, and received another six months “coercive detention” for refusing to testify in the Stammheim trial. He was finally released and extradited back to Holland in 1980.</ref>

While these two applications of the “dry cell” alarmed the prisoners and their supporters, the strike did not falter, and, in the end, this tactic was not repeated.<ref>It is possible that this reticence to use water deprivation was at least partly due to the RAF prisoners’ threat to escalate to a thirst strike if such measures were adopted. See Ulrike Meinhof Regarding the Liberation of Andreas Baader, cf 370.</ref> Rather, the state sought to keep things defused; as part of this strategy, in early October, the president of the Federal Supreme Court, Theodor Prinzing, ruled in favor of force-feeding Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader. The purview of this ruling was soon extended to the other prisoners.

Force-feeding has been used since at least the early twentieth century by governments and penal authorities wishing to break hunger strikes: not only does this countermeasure seem to diminish what is at stake, as it suggests hunger strikers may no longer die from their protests, but the entire ordeal is designed to be excruciatingly painful, in large part to discourage strikers from continuing. Holger Meins described the procedure:<blockquote>''A red stomach pipe (not a tube) is used, about the thickness of a middle finger… The slightest irritation when the pipe is introduced causes gagging and nausea and the cramping of the chest and stomach muscles, setting off a chain reaction of extremely intense convulsions throughout the body, causing one to buck against the pipe…''</blockquote>He concluded that, “The pipe is, regardless of circumstances, torture.”<ref>Holger Meins’ Report on Force-Feeding, see pages 392-95.</ref>

Adelheid Schulz, a RAF member imprisoned in the 1980s, described the effects of force-feeding as hours of nausea, a racing heartbeat, pain, and effects similar to fever—“At times one experiences hot flashes; then one is freezing cold.”<ref>''Von der Zwangernährung zur'' “Koma-Losung,” West Germany, Sept. 1985, 25.</ref>

In the words of Margrit Schiller: “I was force-fed every day for a month. Each time was like a rape. Each time, I felt totally humiliated and destroyed.”<ref>''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.''</ref>

The prisoners insisted that force-feeding was never meant for any purpose other than torture. Events soon convinced many that they were right.

On Saturday, November 9, Holger Meins died of starvation in Wittlich prison. Supporters and lawyers had already argued that this prison lacked the facilities for force-feeding to be of any medical benefit, yet the Bonn Security Group—the section of the BKA charged with protecting political figures (much like the American secret service) and also combating enemies of the state<ref>Cobler, 52. Many aspects of isolation were “suggested” to prison administrators by the Bonn Security Group. See, for instance, Aust, 245-246.</ref>—had blocked Meins from being transferred anywhere else.

For the last two weeks of his life, Meins only received between 400 and 800 calories daily, and in the last four days of his life, never more than 400 calories a day.<ref>Pieter Bakker Schut, Stammheim (Kiel: Neuer Malik Verlag, 1986), 119.</ref>
[[File:Holger Meins from RAF - a documentary history.jpeg|thumb|''Over six feet tall, by the time he died Holger Meins weighed less than one hundred pounds.'']]

Meins was never hospitalized, despite a court decision ordering such a transfer, and the prison doctor had gone on vacation without leaving any replacement at his post.<ref>Aust, 265.</ref> Scandalously, before Dr. Hutter left, he sought assurances that he would not be disciplined should Meins die.

Siegfried Haag, one of the RAF’s court appointed attorneys, was with Meins just before he died. The prisoner had to be brought in on a stretcher as he could no longer walk. The visit lasted two hours, Haag explained, “because I realized this was his last conversation, and he knew it too.”<ref>Ibid., 264.</ref>

The lawyer, who would himself be moved to join the guerilla, later recalled that, “I shall never be able to forget this experience all my life. I was so intensely involved [with his situation] at the time and I felt that as a lawyer I could not defend him the way he needed to be defended… [nor] do anything to prevent [his] death.”<ref>Varon, 231.</ref>
[[File:Holger Meins Obituary Photo from RAF - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''Obituary: After 2 years of isolation, 6 weeks of hunger strike and 2 weeks of force-feeding, he died at the age of 33—we will not forget him nor will we forget his guards and force-feeders.'']]

Over six feet tall, Meins weighed less than 100 pounds at the time of his death: for the RAF and their supporters, this was quite simply a murder in the context of a state security war against the prisoners. Indeed, long before the hunger strike, Meins himself had written in his will, “If I should die in prison, it was murder. Whatever the pigs say… Don’t believe the murderers’ lies.”<ref>Aust, 265.</ref>

As word spread that a prisoner had died, hundreds of people took to the streets of West Berlin, engaging in clashes which sent five cops to the hospital.<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Beshuldigungen nach dem Tod von Holger Meins,” November 10, 1974.</ref> Stefan Wisniewski, who would be moved by Meins’ death to eventually join the RAF, remembers the day well:<blockquote>

''Everything was about the hunger strike. We had mobilized everyone from Amnesty International to Father Albertz, everyone it seemed possible to mobilize. I was standing on a table in the youth center—there was no podium—and was giving a speech. Suddenly someone came in and said, “Holger is dead.” Tears welled up in my eyes—and I was not the only one. Some people who had been critical of the RAF up to that point immediately began to assemble molotov cocktails and head to the Ku’damm.''<ref>Stefan Wisniewski, ''We were so terribly consistent… A Conversation About the History of the Red Army Faction'' (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2008), 7-8.</ref> </blockquote>The next day, November 10, the 2nd of June Movement carried out its own action in solidarity with the prisoners, attempting to kidnap Günter von Drenkmann, the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court. When the judge resisted, he was shot dead.

As the 2JM explained in its communiqué for this action:<blockquote>''When the prisoners’ hunger strike began, we said: if the system’s extermination strategy takes the life of another revolutionary, we will hold the system responsible and they will pay with their lives.''<ref>in bewegung bleiben “Wer Gewalt sät,” <nowiki>http://www.bewegung.in/mate_saehen.html</nowiki>.</ref> </blockquote>In the already tense context of Meins’ death, this action raised the struggle to a whole new level. Electrifying the radical left, it also outraged all those who identified with the state.

Security was immediately stepped up for prosecutors and judges throughout the country.<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Verstärkte Sicherheitsmaßnahmen im gesamtem Bundesgebeit,” November 12, 1974.</ref> The CDU mayor announced a demonstration against “Terror and Violence,”<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Berliner CDU ruft zu einer Demonstration,” November 16, 1974.</ref> while the federal government offered a 50,000dm reward for the killers.<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Empörung nach den tödlichen Schüsssen von Berlin,” November 12, 1974.</ref> Meanwhile, Beate Sturm was trotted out to the media, whom she obligingly told about how Meins “had political ideas, but behind them lay the problems he had. He always wanted to be an authority figure. He was fascinated by Baader’s authority, but also intimidated by it—that’s why he always tagged along.” All of this led one major newspaper to opine that the fallen guerilla “perhaps did not only die as a result of his own irrationality, but as a result of manipulation by his associates as well.”<ref>Jürgen Busch, “Die letzte Waffe des Anarchisten,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', November 11, 1974.</ref>

After having pointedly ignored the strike in the period prior to November 9, the media now engaged in disinformation like this in an attempt to undercut the widespread sympathy that this death had garnered the prisoners. For instance, it was claimed that Meins was offered contact with other prisoners, but declined, as he “did not feel he was a criminal.”<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Die Vollzuganstalt Wittlich,” Nov. 10, 1974.</ref> While this claim was ludicrous considering that the demand of both the previous hunger strikes had been precisely such integration, it can also be viewed as a clever attempt to exploit divisions within the left regarding the strategies of association versus equality with social prisoners.

Meanwhile, there was an explosion of actions and demonstrations in support of the prisoners. A bomb went off (harmlessly) outside the Hamburg residence of another judge, Geert Ziegler,<ref>Deutsche Presse Agentur, “Wieder Anschlag auf einen Richter,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', November 21, 1974.</ref> and there were eight firebombings in the university town of Göttingen.<ref>0 Time Magazine [online], “Guerrillas on Trial,” December 9, 1974.</ref> Within days, protests had spread to cities across the Federal Republic. In Frankfurt and Mannheim, courthouse windows were smashed, while the KPD/ML handed out fliers stating what everyone felt: “Holger Meins Murdered.”<ref>United Press International, “Gunmen kill German judge,” ''Hagerstown Morning Herald'', November 11, 1974. The article in question refers simply to the “Communist Party.” However, it was almost certainly not the conservative DKP, but the KPD/ML, which had earned itself the distinction of being the only K-group to organize support of the hunger strike.</ref> In West Berlin, a November 11 Red Aid demonstration was banned by city authorities, which did not deter roughly one thousand people from taking to the streets, demanding that those responsible for Meins’ death be punished and that all political prisoners be freed, while fighting with stones and bottles against the cops’ clubs and teargas. Thirtytwo people were arrested.<ref>Ibid.; ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Zweihundert Studenten der Freien Universität im Hungerstriek Demonstrationen und Krawalle in Berlin,” November 13, 1974.</ref>

As giant pictures of an emaciated Meins were carried through the cities of the FRG, more than one observer was reminded of the victims of the concentration camps.<ref>Salvator Scalzo, Steffi de Jong, and Joost van den Akker, ''Terror, Myth and Victims: The Historical Interpretation of the Brigate Rosse and the Rote Armee Fraktion'', October 26, 2007, 18.</ref> To some on the radical left, this was yet more evidence of the “fascist drift,” of the real and not rhetorical “extermination” that more and more people saw the prisoners facing.

On November 13, there was an historic meeting at Frankfurt University, where several thousand people gathered in solidarity with the hunger strike. A leaflet supporting the RAF was distributed, signed by a number of ''sponti'' organizations—''Revolutionärer Kampf'' (Revolutionary Struggle), the ''Häuserrat'' (Housing Coucil), and the S''ozialistische Hochschulinitiative'' (Socialist Student Initiative)—as well as Red Aid and the Committees Against Torture, expressing unambiguous solidarity not only with the RAF, but also with the killing of Drenkmann:<blockquote>''The Red Army Faction was a political group committed to struggling against oppression and exploitation, guns in hand. At a time when millions of people in Vietnam, South America and South Africa struggle against large landowners, factory owners, and their armies, they decided to call to account the ruling class in the FRG and to integrate themselves into this struggle against imperialism…''

''A successor organization to the RAF understood the death of Holger Meins as a signal. They took control of their sorrow and their hatred and shot the President of the Berlin Supreme Court, Drenkmann. No threat of torture and imprisonment could deter them.''<ref>Jürgen Busch, “Viele Gruppen—viele führende Leute” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', November 14, 1974. One can see from this declaration how it was assumed by not only journalists, but also by the revolutionary left, that the raf had been finished off by the arrests in 72. Even those “in the know” were unclear about the relationship between the 2nd of June Movement and the raf itself.</ref> </blockquote>Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who had yet to leave his street fighting days behind him and was at the time one of the leading members of the ''sponti'' organization Revolutionary Struggle, had this to say about the Drenkmann killing:<blockquote>''Whether it was tactically correct is open to discussion. In any event, we’ll discuss it. We’ll make our newspapers and magazines available to the Berlin comrades if they want to use them to explain the reasoning behind their actions. We will not distance ourselves from them.''</blockquote>“Danny the Red” went on to argue that the shooting had not split the left, but that it put the ruling class on notice that even in Germany there were groups prepared to take up arms.<ref>Ibid.</ref> (Heinrich Böll, on the other hand, accused Cohn-Bendit of speaking irresponsibly, stating for himself that, “I hold the basic concept of the Red Army Faction to be nonsense.”)<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Todesfälle eingeplant?” November 14, 1974.</ref>

While not many took as strong a position as those in Frankfurt, the rapid escalation also pushed liberal organizations to speak out. The pen Centre held a forum regarding the use of torture by police and prison officials, and Amnesty International demanded an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Meins’ death, torture in the prisons and the conditions in which the RAF prisoners were being held.<ref>Busch, “Die letzte Waffe des Anarchisten.”</ref> At the same time, prominent writers, including Gruppe 47 authors Ernst Bloch, Erich Fried, and Martin Walser, signed a statement protesting prison conditions.<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Beshuldigungen nach dem Tod von Holger Meins.”</ref>

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

The state, meanwhile, was busy trying to keep up with events. Almost immediately following Drenkmann’s killing, the eleven Länder Interior Ministers were summoned to Bonn for an emergency meeting to discuss ways to contain the growing rebellion.<ref>Associated Press, “Bonn fears more violence,” ''Syracuse Post-Standard'', November 12, 1974.</ref> On November 13, Federal Minister of Justice Hans-Jochen Vogel (SPD) announced that charges were being brought against seventeen people, and thirty-five were being held in remand while investigations were conducted. Ominously, he also noted that seven lawyers would be investigated for supporting a criminal organization,<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Maihofer: ‘Brutale Strategie’ der BaaderMeinhof-Bande,” November 14, 1974.</ref> and in short order, charges were laid against attorneys Croissant, Schily, Groenewold, and Haag for statements they had made describing Meins’ death as a premeditated murder.<ref>''European Stars and Stripes'', “German terrorist is hospitalized,” November 14, 1974.</ref>

But the real crackdown had yet to come.

On November 26, the state moved into action, police and border guard units setting up checkpoints and carrying out predawn raids across the country.<ref>Associated Press, “West German police round up anarchist groups,” ''Greeley Tribune'', November 27, 1974.</ref> Dozens of left-wing publishers, bookstores, law firms, and activists’ homes were searched. Many victims were not even seriously suspected of any ties to the guerilla. Frankfurt police, for example, admitted that their targets “included general problem houses, where the occupants were organizing rent strikes or stirring up other sorts of trouble.”<ref>Cobler, 141.</ref> All in all, roughly forty people were arrested,<ref>Associated Press, “West German police round up anarchist groups.”</ref> several eventually facing charges of supporting a “criminal organization” under §129.<ref>The frustrating fact of the matter is that no two sources seem to agree on either the exact number of arrests, the nature of all the charges, or the numbers actually prosecuted.</ref>

Despite their efforts, dubbed ''Aktion Winterreise'' (“Operation Winter Trip”), the police failed to apprehend a single guerilla fighter. Nevertheless, the raids gave the new Minister of the Interior, Werner Maihofer,<ref>In a cabinet shuffle after Helmut Schmidt replaced Willy Brandt as Chancellor earlier that year, Werner Maihofer replaced Hans-Dietrich Genscher as Minister of the Interior. (Genscher became Minister of Foreign Affairs.)</ref> the opportunity to shock the public with claims that police had uncovered radio transmitters, explosives, chemicals, narcotics, weapons, and ammunition, not to mention plans for kidnappings and jailbreaks.<ref>“Meinhof,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', November 30, 1974.</ref>

The real targets of this crackdown were in fact the sympathizers and supporters: the goal of Winter Trip was to break the back of the growing movement while preparing public opinion for a new round of repressive legislation. As defense attorney Klaus Croissant wrote soon after:<blockquote>''In the Attorney General’s own words, the action was aimed at what they call “the sympathizers”: that means the prisoners’ family members, the lawyers, the members of Red Aid, the writers who have publicly taken a stand against isolation torture, brainwashing and detention-extermination. By means of this police action, public opinion was prepared so as to allow special legislation to be passed in fifteen days, just before Christmas.''<ref>Klaus Croissant, “Le procès de Stuttgart,” in Croissant, 16-17.</ref> </blockquote>Most importantly in regards to the RAF’s legal team, the defense attorneys were now accused of organizing an illegal communication network to transmit messages between prisoners, as well as between prisoners and “active commandos” on the outside. The state supplemented evidence from Winter Trip with a series of cell raids, the contents of letters and documents seized being manipulated in the media to present the image of a far-reaching “terrorist conspiracy.”

Croissant was not alone in his belief that the real goal of this crackdown was to deprive the remaining four alleged ringleaders (Holger Meins now being dead) of any effective defense as their trial approached. This was a matter of some importance, for while the accused did not deny responsibility for the RAF’s attacks, their lawyers had marshaled compelling evidence that the isolation conditions in which they were held had rendered them unfit to stand trial. As SPD deputy Fritz-Joachim Gnädinger would later tell the Bundestag:<blockquote>''It is clear to anyone in the know that without the changes in procedure already agreed the trial of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists in Stammheim would have got into even greater difficulties. It might even have had to be abandoned. Only a change in the law made last year… made the continuation of the trial possible. I therefore ask all the critics to consider for a moment what disastrous consequences for our citizens’ sense of law and order would have resulted if the trial in Stammheim had had to be abandoned without a verdict.''<ref>Cobler, 206.</ref> </blockquote>Indeed, these Winter Trip raids prepared the public for a barrage of new laws, “refinements” to existing legislation, and restrictions on defense attorneys. Through these, the state largely achieved a condition in which the upcoming trial in Stammheim prison could proceed with the prisoners ill- or undefended, often even without their personal participation.

There was one final, and controversial, effect that Winter Trip had on the radical left: soon afterwards several key activists left the Committees Against Torture.<ref>The Committees themselves disbanded over the next year and a half.</ref> While this could be interpreted as a retreat, the truth of the matter was more complex: many of those who had banded together to provide legal support now thought better of that strategy.

With some prompting from the prisoners, they had decided to go underground, to take up arms themselves, and to renew the RAF.
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Right from the start, I did not speak to the guards; afterwards, I had even less to desire to. I couldn’t speak to them. I know all of the brilliant analyses— “their situation is also contradictory,” etc.—and those analyses are correct. But they have their limit: these analyses don’t take into account that their contradictions amount to being instruments of terror—at least in some situations. They disarm you. It is obvious: contradictions which are institutionalized, set up to weaken the institution’s victim, to disarm her, to take away her hatred. And hatred of the pigs is the only form that life takes in jail.
You realize how important it is to not speak when you see how they celebrate every one of your words like a victory—in reality something to ease their conscience, their knowledge that they are torturers and assassins. You help them to carry the burden of their responsibility, you make yourself into their accomplice. You are supposed to show them that you consent to the torture you are being subjected to. They want a total victory—and in this way they will have it. And in this way, perhaps for the first time, you know and you understand exactly what the brilliant analyses do not.
a RAF prisoner’s letter to her lawyer
“Témoignages de Prisonniers” in Croissant, 135-6
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<references />
[[Category:Library works by Ulrike Meinhof]]
[[Category:Library works about military theory]]

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File:Holger Meins from RAF - a documentary history.jpeg

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Guerilla Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany

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#REDIRECT [[Guerilla conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany]]

Guerilla conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany

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{{Infobox military conflict
|conflict=Guerilla Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany
|partof=[[Cold War]]
|image=
|image_size=
|alt=
|caption=
|date=1960s-1990s
|place=
|map_type=
|map_relief=
|map_size=
|map_marksize=
|map_caption=
|map_label=
|territory=
|result=
|status=
|combatants_header=Belligerents
|combatant1='''Leftist Guerilla Organizations''' [[Red Army Faction]] (1970-1998) [[2nd of June Movement]] (1971-1980) [[Revolutionary Cells]] (1973-1994 (last attack) [[Rote Zora]] (1974 as wing of Revolutionary Cells/1986 as independant organization-1995 (last attack) [[Central Committee of the Roaming Hash Rebels]] (1960s-early 1970s, a collection of organizations)
|combatant1a='''Support''' [[German Democratic Republic]] [[Palestine Liberation Organization]] [[Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine]] [[Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (External Operations)]] [[Black September Organization]] [[Brigate Rossa]] [[Action Directe]]
|combatant2='''Imperialist''' [[NATO]] [[Federal Republic of Germany]] [[United States of America]]
|combatant2a='''Support''' [[State of "Israel"]] [[Imperial State of Iran]]
|combatant3=
|commander1=
|commander2=
|commander3=
|units1=|units2=|units3=|strength1=|strength2=|strength3=|casualties1=|casualties2=|casualties3=|notes=|campaignbox=}}The '''Guerilla Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany''' was a conflict during the [[Cold War]] between leftist guerilla organizations and imperialist forces in the [[Federal Republic of Germany]] from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s.<ref>{{Citation|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|year=2009|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People}}</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:Conflicts]]
[[Category:Stubs]]
[[Category:Guerilla warfare]]

Red Army Faction

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{{Infobox guerilla organization|name=Red Army Faction|native_name=Rote Armee Fraktion|logo=Red Army Faction.png|founders=[[Andreas Baader]] [[Hans-Jürgen Bäcker]] [[Ingeborg Barz]] [[Monika Berberich]] [[Gudrun Ensslin]] [[Irene Goergens]] [[Wolfgang Grundmann]] [[Peter Homann]] [[Horst Mahler]] [[Ulrike Meinhof]] [[Astrid Proll]] [[Ingrid Schubert]]|dates=14 May 1970 – 20 April 1998|opponents=[[File:Flag of Germany.svg|20px]][[Federal Republic of Germany|FRG]] [[File:Flag of NATO.png|20px]][[NATO]]|ideology=[[Communism|Revolutionary Socialism]] [[Anti-fascism|Anti-Fascism]] [[Marxism-Leninism]] [[Mao Zedong Thought]]|allies=[[File:GDR flag.png|20px]][[GDR]] [[2 June Movement]] [[Revolutionary Cells]] [[Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine]] [[Black September Organization]]|leaders=Horizontally organized - prominent members at different points included: '''First Generation''' Ulrike Meinhof Andreas Baader Gudrun Ensslin Horst Mahler [[Holger Meins]] [[Jan-Carl Raspe]] '''Second Generation''' [[Brigitte Mohnhaupt]] '''Third Generation''' [[Wolfgang Grams]] [[Birgit Hogefeld]]|war=[[Guerilla Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany]]}}

The '''Red Army Faction''' ([[German language|German]]: ''Rote Armee Fraktion''; '''RAF'''), alternatively translated as Red Army Fraction, was a [[Communism|communist]] [[Urban guerrilla warfare|urban guerrilla]] organization in [[West Germany]].

They participated in many actions against Imperialist and Capitalist forces, including the bombings of US Army bases and police stations, an attack on the West German embassy in Sweden, the killing of Nazi lawyer and federal prosecutor general Siegfried Buback and prominent Nazi Hanns-Martin Schleyer.

After the imprisonment of many of their leaders, many of their allies and supporters around the world took action to try to free them, including the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181, in which the freedom of RAF prisoners was a demand. In order to stop these efforts, the West German government, possibly with the help of allies in Nato, murdered Ulrike Meinhof in 1976 and later on 17 October 1977 murdered Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, with Irmgard Möller surviving. These deaths were all called suicides.<ref>{{Citation|author=Jutta Ditfurth|year=2007|title=Ulrike Meinhof: The Biography|pdf=https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.jutta-ditfurth.de/ulrike-meinhof/Presse/Goeteborgsposten-engl-Ditfurth-Meinhof-20071110.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwikxZvino2FAxWaQzABHYPEA2QQFnoECBYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1QDfxAz_bYpzOh2NQs7yuK|trans-title=Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biographie|trans-lang=German}}</ref>

After the deaths of these members the Red Army Faction continued to carry out attacks until it was dissolved in 1998.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Britannica|title=Rise and Fall of the Red Army Faction|url=https://www.britannica.com/video/180279/Red-Army-Faction-rise-prominence-West-German}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|author=Kate Connolly|newspaper=The Guardian|title=Terrorist chic or debunking of a myth? Baader Meinhof film splits Germany|date=2008-9-10|url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/sep/25/germany#:~:text=Baader%20Meinhof%20film%20splits%20Germany,-This%20article%20is&text=The%20bloody%20legacy%20of%20the,myth%20of%201970s%20terrorist%20chic.}}</ref>

== Background ==

=== West German student sovement ===
''See main article: [[West German Student Movement]]''

The [[Socialist German Students' Federation|Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund]] (Socialist German Students' Federation, SDS) was founded in 1946 as the youth wing of the [[Social Democratic Party of Germany|Social Democratic Party]] (SDP). It moved towards the left, away from the mainstream SDP, beginning in the late 1950s, with the group adopting stances against nuclear weapons, calling for the withdrawal of France from Algeria, and opposing militarism at its 1958 conference. This move to the left was countered in May of 1960 by the forming of the [[Social Democratic Student Federation|Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund]] (Social Democratic Student Federation, SHB) by supporters of the SPD party line. In response to this move the left of the SPD formed another organization, [[Society for the Promotion of Socialism]] (SF), in October 1961. In order to stop the leftward and anti-party-establishment drift of the student groups, the SPD expelled SF and the SDS from the party in late 1961. The SDS continued to be a powerful force in student politics in the years to come, while continuing to pull the SHB and other pro SPD groups left.<ref name=":0">{{Citation|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|year=2009|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People|chapter=The Re-Emergence of Revolutionary Politics in West Germany|chapter-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People#2_-_The_Re-Emergence_of_Revolutionary_Politics_in_West_Germany}}</ref>

Young people in West Germany were drawn to the growing radical left movement for several reasons. Repressive and socially conservative laws and still ever present antisemitism and pro-Fascist sentiments in the older generations, as well as the growing worldwide resistance to United States imperialism and imperialist wars.<ref name=":0" />

In December 1964 [[Moise Tschombe]], Congolese dictator and leader of the coup that resulted in the death of Socialist and anti-imperialist leader [[Patrice Lumumba]], visited West Berlin. This visit was met by large protests, with the SDS playing a major role. The protests faced police repression, and the protesters fought back, setting the scene for the later anti-imperialist movements of the decade.<ref name=":0" />

As the left grew more popular, the SPD further alienated younger and more progressive sections of society by entering into the [[Grand Coalition]] with the [[Christian Democratic Union]] (CDU) and the [[Christian Social Union]] (CSU), two reactionary parties with many former Nazis in their ranks. In response to this, the [[Außerparlamentarische Opposition]] (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, APO) was created.<ref name=":0" />

On 2 June 1967, thousands of demonstrators protested against a visit by the Shah of Iran. They wore masks of the Shah and his wife and pelted the pair with rotten tomatoes. In response the police, as well as the Iranian intelligence agency [[SAVAK]], attacked protesters, leading to a battle which ended with 44 arrests, 44 injuries, and one student dead, [[Benno Ohnesorg]], who was shot in the back of the head by Karl-Heinz Kurras.<ref name=":0" />

The police murder sparked even larger protests, with between 100,000 and 200,000 students taking part. The SDS and other left organizations grew rapidly and began to experiment with new organizational strategies and chapters outside of universities.<ref name=":0" />

Demonstrations were banned in West Berlin on 3 June, with eight protesters being arrested the next day. Then on 5 June, the [[Zionist Entity]] attacked Egypt's air bases and soon destroyed it and its allies militaries in the [[Six-Day War]]. This solidified the Anti-Zionist sentiments in the SDS and further cemented its anti-imperialism.<ref name=":0" />

On 17 and 18 February 1968, 5,000 people attended the International Congress on Vietnam in West Berlin. After the congress a demonstration of more than 12,000 people took place.<ref name=":0" />

The West German press, largely controlled by businessman [[Axel Springer|Axel Springer's]] corporation, increased its attacks on the left. This culminated on 11 April, when right-wing worker named Josef Bachmann attempted to kill [[Rudi Dutschke]], shooting him three times, once in the head, nearly killing him. He later confessed that his information leading to the act was taken from [[Bild Zeitung|''Bild Zeitung'']], a Springer outlet.<ref name=":0" />

The attack, less than a week after the murder of [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] in the United States, radicalized many, leading to increased protests, with 300,000 people participating in marches the next weekend in favor of peace and now against the Springer corporation. Two people were killed by police during the wave of protests, and the Springer corporation began to become the target of direct attacks. By the end of it more than 250,000 dm of Springer property was damaged or destroyed, a serious blow to the propagandists.<ref name=":0" />

On 31 May the [[Notstandgesetze]] (Emergency Powers Act) was passed. It gave the state additional power to suppress protests and allowed increased tapping of phones and stealing of mail. The passing of the act led to even more protests, with tens of thousands demonstrating and tens of thousands more staging a one-day strike in opposition to the law.<ref name=":0" />

Further protests broke out with the attempts to disbar left-wing lawyer [[Horst Mahler]]. These protests culminated in the [[Battle of Tegeler Weg]], where about 1,500 protesters, with cobblestone and wooden two-by-fours, and police with water cannons, tear gas, and clubs, fought throughout the night on 3 November. Ten police and 21 demonstrators were hospitalized and 46 were arrested. Mahler was not disbarred.<ref name=":0" />

In October 1969 the Grand Coalition ended and the SDP, with [[Willy Brandt]] as Chancellor, came into power. Some demands of the student movement were given in to, but the tensions continued.<ref name=":0" />

In March 1970 the SDS dissolved after a congress in Frankfurt.

=== Konkret ===
''See main article: [[Konkret]]''

''[[Konkret]]'' was a Hamburg based magazine published by [[Klaus Rainer Röhl]]. It began publishing in 1957 and was funded in part by the remnants of the KPD based in exile in the GDR. The magazine focused on the left wing issues of the time and became popular within the early student movement. It's chief editor was leftist journalist and later leader of the Red Army Faction [[Ulrike Meinhof]]. She had been active in the SDS from 1957 and had joined the KPD in 1959. In 1961 she married Röhl in 1961.<ref name=":0" />

In 1964, amidst the Sino-Soviet Split, the magazine faced serious challenged and drastic changes. Meinhof and ''konkret'' as a whole took the side of China, despite their funding from the Soviet aligned KPD. This led to them losing its funding from the KPD and the GDR. <ref name=":0" />

In 1969 Meinhof left konkret.<ref name=":0" />

=== West Berlin ===
West Berlin, due to its status as technically part of the Federal Republic of Germany, while being disconnected socially and politically, as well as physically, grew to be a center of the left in Germany. Organizations like [[Kommune 1]], the Republican Clubs, various women's communes and student groups began to further the left movement, though not without flaws.<ref name=":0" />

=== Problems within the student movement ===

==== Male supremacy ====
Chauvinism, male supremacy, and misogyny, though opposed by many, were prevalent within some elements of the student movement. This led a decline in the number of women in the SDS and APO and the growth of smaller feminist groups.<ref name=":0" /> In addition to this, the Kommune 1 movement and other similar Anarchist-oriented groupings within the student movement containing male-oriented and chauvinist distortions of the sexual revolution.<ref name=":1">{{Citation|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|year=2009|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People|chapter=Taking Up The Gun|chapter-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People#Taking_Up_The_Gun}}</ref>

==== Division ====
The student movement was divided along ideological lines, like most of the left in the world at that time. Anarchist groups grew apart from Marxist-oriented groups, forming the ''Sponti'' left. Division over the issue of the German Democratic Republic led to little growth within the newly founded [[German Communist Party]] (DKP), a re-establishment of the [[Communist Party of Germany]] (KPD). Division stemming from the [[Sino-Soviet Split]] also was prevalent, with groups following [[Marxism-Leninism-Maoism]] and [[Mao Zedong Thought]] feuding with pro-Soviet sections of the movement.<ref name=":0" />

==== Lack of working class representation ====
The most serious problem of the student movement was the class makeup of the students in the FRG at the time. University students were overwhelmingly from [[petit bourgeoisie]] or [[Labor aristocracy|labor aristocratic]] backgrounds, with only 7% being from working class families. This led the the FRG being able to buy out many within the movement with ease: two months after the dissolution of the SDS, amnesty was granted to most protesters in prison. This led to the near complete destruction of the student movement. The student movement was not entirely from these backgrounds. In the protests against the Springer corporation after the attempted murder of Rudi Dutschke only a minority of those arrested were university students, with most being working-class youth living in West Berlin.<ref name=":0" />

=== The move to violent action ===
In September 1968 student movement political leaders Rudi Dutschke and [[Hans-Jürgen Krahl]] first proposed the idea of building left-wing urban guerilla, though this would not be further developed for some time.<ref name=":0" />

==== Early Anarchist actions ====
The first organized revolutionary violence was carried out by individuals within Kommune 1. They formed the Anarchist 'Central Committee of the Roaming Hash Rebels'. The group carried out actions under several different names over its existence. Under the name [[Tupamaros-West Berlin]], a firebombing attempt on a Jewish cultural center was carried out and widely criticized from both within and without the movement, and the group essentially dissolved soon after.<ref name=":1" />

The short-lived grouping eventually evolved into the [[2nd of June Movement]] in 1972, which was closely aligned with the RAF.<ref name=":1" />

==== Frankfurt firebombing and trial ====
''See main article: [[1968 Frankfurt department store bombings and trial]]''

On 3 April 1968, the most important development of the revolutionary struggle in relation to the Red Army Faction occurred. Future RAF members [[Gudrun Ensslin]] and [[Andreas Baader]], along with [[Horst Söhnlein]] and [[Thorwald Proll]], who were in Frankfurt at for an SDS conference, firebombed two department stores. They were all arrested 2 days later on 5 April.<ref name=":1" />

The attack was poorly planned; there was no communiqué, little attempt to avoid arrest, and after their capture, little unified strategy in court. Gudrun Ensslin stated that the attack was "in protest against people’s indifference to the murder of the Vietnamese." She also echoed a core belief of the later RAF, that "words are useless without action."<ref name=":1" />

In court they were represented by fellow future RAF leader Horst Mahler, who at that point was well-known as a leftist lawyer.<ref name=":1" />

They were sentenced to three years in prison each in October. They appealed the sentence, but were imprisoned until June 1969. They were then released until the court came to a decision on the appeal. Ensslin, Baader, and Proll began to work within the 'apprentices' collectives', which consisted of runaways from state homes. In November the court denied their appeal. Söhnlein turned himself in, the other three went on the run. Proll soon left the group, but his sister [[Astrid Proll]], who later became a prominent member of the RAF, joined Baader and Ensslin.<ref name=":1" />

They travelled to France and then to Italy before returning to West Berlin, and reconnected with Mahler. He was trying at that point to create a guerilla movement, and joined forces with the three to pursue this. They lived in various safehouses with sympathetic, sometimes prominent, people. One of these people was Ulrike Meinhof.<ref name=":1" />

On 3 April 1970, Andreas Baader was recaptured in West Berlin, set up by longtime informant [[Peter Urbach]]. The subsequent actions by his comrades served as the beginning of the Red Army Faction.<ref name=":1" />

== Early Days of the RAF ==

=== The action to free Andreas Baader ===
''See main article: [[Action to free Andreas Baader]]''

Immedietely after Baader's capture planning to free him began. Eventually it was decided that Ulrike Meinhof would use her reputation to have Baader allowed out to meet with her in a library. This was done with the pretext of research for a book on youth homes, which was a subject Meinhof had covered extensively. Once they were there a group would storm the building, threaten the guards with weapons, and finally make their escape.<ref name=":1" />

On 14 May Baader was allowed out, escorted by armed guards. He met Meinhof at the Institute for Social Issues Library in West Berlin. Once they were there [[Irene Goergens]] and [[Ingrid Schubert]] entered the building, followed by Gudrun Ensslin and an unknown man, both masked and armed. A librarian attempted to intervene and was shot in the liver. After this the guards opened fire, but missed all of them. The four, now joined by Baader and Meinhof, jumped out of the window and into the getaway car waiting for them.<ref name=":1" />

The action gained widespread media attention very quickly, and Meinhof, who before was not fully involved with the underground of the group and had been continuing her public life until then, was forced to go underground.<ref name=":1" />

In response to the action the West Berlin police were supplies hand grenades, semiautomatic revolvers, and submachine guns, in an precedented and shocking move for many on the left.<ref name=":1" />

The group published [[Library:The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People#Build the Red Army!|Build the Red Army]] in the radical magazine ''[[883]]'', explaining the purpose of the action and denouncing those on the left who criticized revolutionary violence.<ref name=":1" />

Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, Ingrid Schubert, Astrid Proll, Irene Goergens,[[Monika Berberich]], [[Hans-Jürgen Bäcker]], [[Ingeborg Barz]], [[Wolfgang Grundmann]], [[Peter Homann]] were known founding members of the Red Army Faction.<ref name=":1" />

=== In Jordan ===
After the action to liberate Baader, more than a dozen RAF members travelled to Jordan to receive training from the [[Palestine Liberation Organization]]. At this time the PLO in Jordan, which had a large Palestinian presence in the aftermath of the [[Nakba]], trained many leftist guerilla organizations throughout the world, including even some West German groups previously. By the end of the summer of 1970 the RAF members travelled back to West Berlin through the GDR.<ref name=":1" />

=== Back in West Berlin and early arrests ===
Soon the RAF began to obtain weapons, cars, and safehouses, as well as new members and supporters. On 29 September 1970, three banks were robbed by the RAF in collaboration with the Roaming Hash Rebels grouping. More than 220,000 dm (about 60,000 US dollars then, more than 480,000 US dollars in May 2024<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=CPI Inflation Calculator|title=CPI Inflation Calculator|url=https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60000&year1=197009&year2=202405}}</ref>) were stolen by the group.<ref name=":1" />

On 8 October, RAF members Monika Berberich, Horst Mahler, Irene Goergens, [[Brigitte Asdonk]], and Ingrid Schubert were arrested in West Berlin after an anonymous tip about two RAF safehouses was received by police. Hans-Jürgen Bäcker was suspected as having been the source of the tip, and was confronted by other members. He denied the claims, but left the RAF.<ref name=":1" />

After the arrests the RAF moved out of West Berlin. Once arriving in West Germany, they burglarized the town halls of two small towns, stealing ID cards, passports, official stamps, and other needed materials.<ref name=":1" />

On 20 December RAF members [[Ali Jensen]] and [[Beate Sturm]] and non-member [[Karl-Heinz Ruhland]] were stopped by police along. Ruhland surrendered, but the others fled. The next day they were arrested along with fellow member [[Uli Scholze]]. Ruhland would later cooperate with the police.<ref name=":1" />

On 10 February 1971 Astrid Proll and [[Manfred Grashof]] were stopped by police. The police opened fire unprovoked, but the two managed to escape.<ref name=":1" />

The trial of Mahler, Goergens, and Schubert began on 1 March in West Berlin. They were charged in relation to the action to free Baader, with Goergens and Schubert charged with attempted murder and Mahler with accessory to the action and illegal possession of a firearm.<ref name=":1" />

=== Early anti-RAF propaganda campaign and further arrests ===
Around this time the first psychological warfare campaign against the RAF began. In February, the police announced that the RAF planned to kidnap FRG Chancellor Willy Brandt. This claim was quickly refuted by the RAF.<ref name=":1" />

On 25 February, a seven-year-old boy was kidnapped, with one of the ransom demands being the release of Mahler. Mahler denounced the kidnapping and called for the boys release. The lawyer who delivered the ransom money to the group reported that the kidnappers were not leftists at all, let alone members of the RAF, and were rather a right-wing group.<ref name=":1" />

On 25 April, it was reported that a university professor and his friend were kidnapped. The alleged kidnappers demanded the release of Mahler, Schubert, and Georgens, and threatened to kill them if they were not released. Two days later, the two alleged victims were found, with no kidnappers nearby. They admitted it was staged in the hopes of turning public opinion against the RAF and the nominally left-wing SPD. The leader of the plan was [[Jürgen Rieger]], a fascist militant who was imprisoned for six months for the plot.<ref name=":1" />

While the trial was occurring various members of the RAF were arrested. On 12 April, [[Ilse Stachowiak]], likely the youngest member of the group, who joined at 16-years-old, was arrested in Frankfurt. One day later [[Rolf Heissler]] was arrested during a bank robbery attempt in Munich. On 6 May Astrid Proll was arrested at a Hamburg gas station.<ref name=":1" />

In late May the trial ended. Goergens were sentenced to four years and Schubert to six. As the trial ended rioting broke out in West Berlin. The defendants would have additional sentences added on in relation to the bank robberies and other RAF actions, with Mahler eventually receiving 14 years in prison by 1974.<ref name=":1" />

Around this time Horst Mahler released a document titled ''Regarding the Armed Struggle in West Europe''. It was portrayed as being an official Red Army Faction statement and published in a radical left magazine under the title ''New Traffic Regulations'' in order to avoid immediate suppression. In response to this document, which the majority of the RAF leadership opposed, ''The Urban Guerilla Concept'' was published widely, both in radical and mainstream publications. The document formed the basis of the RAF's urban guerilla strategy and served as their most important theoretical document, being widely read, translated, and used by revolutionaries around the world.<ref name=":1" />

== Organized state repression and first RAF deaths ==
The first Red Army Faction martyr was [[Petra Schelm]] , who was murdered by police on 15 July 1971. The West German government sent three thousand armed police officers to patrol cities and set up checkpoints on roads across the north of the FRG. These state repression efforts were named Operation Cobra. Schelm and a comrade, [[Werner Hoppe]], were stopped at one such checkpoint in Hamburg. Hoppe surrendered and was captured, Schelm was shot in the head and killed at the age of 19.<ref name=":2">{{Citation|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|year=2009|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|title-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People|chapter=Building a Base and Serving the People|chapter-url=https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Red_Army_Faction:_A_Documentary_History_-_Volume_1:_Projectiles_for_the_People#4_-_Building_a_Base_and_%22Serving_the_People%22}}</ref>

The murder led to widespread support among the German working class and especially among proletarian youths for the RAF, with 40 percent of respondents in one survey stating that the RAF's actions were political rather than criminal in nature. This led to an abundance of sympathizers among the general public who were willing to harbor RAF fugitives.<ref name=":2" />

Around this time, many former members of the [[Socialist Patients Collective]] (SPK), a Radical [[New Left]] therapy and medical group, joined the RAF after the arrest of the groups leader and the groups subsequent dissolution in Summer 1971. Many former SPK members would become prominent members of the RAF.<ref name=":2" />

==== First RAF killings ====
The first police death was on 22 October. Former SPK member [[Margrit Schiller]] was being attacked by two police officers, and two RAF members including [[Gerhard Müller]] came to their comrade's defense. Police officer Norbert Schmid was killed in the fighting, and soon after Schiller was captured as well, with her arrest broadcast on live TV.<ref name=":2" />

Two months later, on 22 December, a second police officer, Herbert Schoner, was killed during a bank robbery in Kaiserslautern. He knocked on the window of the getaway vehicle outside of the bank during the robbery and was shot three times. The killing was quickly exploited by bourgeoise media to demonize the RAF.<ref name=":2" />

=== Unprovoked murders by police ===
The first was on 4 December, when police stopped a car carrying two guerillas of the [[2nd of June Movement]] Anarchist group, [[Bommi Baumann]] and [[Georg von Rauch]], in West Berlin. Von Raunch was murdered by police immediately with no provocation.<ref name=":2" />

Then, on 1 March 1972 a seventeen-year-old in West Berlin named Richard Epple was murdered by police machine gun fire after he ran through a police checkpoint. He was not a member of the RAF or of the radical left at all, but instead was driving without a license.<ref name=":2" />

On 25 June, Scottish businessman Ian Macleod was shot by police as he stood behind his bedroom door. He was either a non-member of the RAF or a British spy attempting to infiltrate the group, and either way he was killed without any provocation.<ref name=":2" />

The three police murders led to widespread protest and additional support for the RAF.<ref name=":2" />

=== Further police repression ===
In March 1972 another propaganda effort against the RAF began. Karl-Heinz Ruhland, who was arrested several months before, began to work for police after his trial ended that month, leading to leniency for him in sentencing. He was only loosely connected to the group, but provided evidence, sometimes real, but most of the time fabricated. This included testifying against RAF members in trial and publicly support police narratives, changing his story as the police story changed.<ref name=":2" />

On 2 March 1972 [[Tommy Weissbecker]] was murdered by police in Augsburg at 23-years-old. His comrade [[Carmen Roll]] was captured during the same engagement. The killing occured as the pair left Weissbecker's apartment. Weissbecker was under surveillance at the time. In response the 2nd of June Movement bombed the police headquarters in West Berlin was bombed. Roll was drugged while imprisoned in an effort to force her to provide information. This almost lead to her death on 16 March.<ref name=":2" />

RAF members [[Manfred Grashof]] and [[Wolfgang Grundmann]] feared their cover was blown, as the safehouse they were staying at had been rented out by Weissbecker. They were correct. They returned to the building to collect materials they had left there before planning to flee to another safehouse, and when they returned three police were waiting. One officer shot Grasof three times, and in response Grashof, aiming blindly in the dark building, shot and killed police commissioner [[Hans Eckardt]]. Both were subsequently captured.<ref name=":2" />

=== Crackdown on the legal left and broader police repression ===
The [[Federal Criminal Bureau]] appointed [[Horst Herold]] Chief Commissioner in September 1971. He led the creation of the Baader-Meinhof Special Commission in order to combat the guerilla and created a computerized database of fingerprints, names, organizations, photographs, and other information.<ref name=":2" />

On 28 January 1972 the Anti-Radical Act was passed. Supported by all three major parties in the FRG, the act prohibited known Socialists, Communists, and other leftists from working in the public sector, which included 14% of the workforce. The Verfassungsschutz, the FRG's political police force, also increased its operations, which included wiretapping and informers.<ref name=":2" />

=== ''Serve the People'' and early traitors ===
In April 1972 [[Library:The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People#Building a Base and "Serving The People"#Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and the Class Struggle|''Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and the Class Struggle'']], it's longest theoretical document up to that point, which analyzed the events within West Germany in in 1971 and 1972, particularly the failed chemical worker's strike of 1971.<ref name=":2" />

The document also denounced traitors to the group including Karl-Heinz Ruhland, Beate Sturm, who provided information to the media which portrayed the RAF poorly, and Peter Homann, who kidnapped Ulrike Meinhof's children and brought them to their father Klaus Rainer Röhl.<ref name=":2" />

== May Offensive ==

== RAF in Prison and Outside Action ==

== German Autumn ==

== Stammheim Murders ==

== References ==
<references />
[[Category:Communist underground movements]]
[[Category:Socialism in Germany]]

Template:History calendar/06/22

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Connolly1916: added date

'''1793'''
{{history calendar/calendar event|year=1793|month=06|day=22|event=During the [[Haitian Revolution]], Haitian slave rebels capture the city of Cap-Haïtien from French colonial forces.}}

'''1839'''
{{history calendar/calendar event|year=1839|month=06|day=22|event=[[Major Ridge]], [[John Ridge]], and [[Elias Boudinot]] are assassinated by [[Cherokee]] rebels for signing the treaty which led to the [[Trail of Tears]].}}

'''1897'''
{{history calendar/calendar event|year=1793|month=06|day=22|event=Two British colonial officers are assassinated by Indian revolutionary brothers [[Damodar Hari Chapekar]], [[Balkrishna Hari Chapekar]], and [[Vasudeo Hari Chapekar]].}}

'''1942'''
{{history calendar/calendar event|year=1942|month=06|day=22|event= Polish Catholic priest and Anti-Nazi activist [[August Froehlich]] dies in [[Dachau concentration camp]].}}

Library:The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People

2024-07-22T03:26:22Z

Connolly1916: added more

{{Library work|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|image=Red Army Faction - A Documentary History Volume One Cover.jpeg|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|written in=1968-1977|published_date=2009|summary=A collection of official Red Army Faction communiques and documents as well as speeches, letters, and other works by individual Red Army Faction members, with historical analysis accompanying the works.}}

“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

== Reviews ==
''This book about the Red Army Faction of American-occupied Germany is one that should be read by any serious student of antiimperialist 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''

== 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.
{| class="wikitable"
|+
|''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.<ref>http://labourhistory.net/raf/</ref> 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.<ref>http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/PolitischeStroemungen/Stadtguerilla+raf/ raf/raf-texte+materialien.pdf</ref> 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 ==
{| class="wikitable"
|+
|2JM
|''Bewegung 2. Juni'' (2nd of June Movement); Berlin-based anarchist guerilla group formed in early 1972, its name comes from the date of the police shooting of protester Benno Ohnesorg in 1967.
|-
|APO
|''Außerparlemtarische Opposition'' (ExtraParliamentary Opposition); the name given to the broad-based militant opposition with its roots in the student movement that encompassed the left-wing anti-imperialist and social revolutionary movements of the late sixties and early seventies.
|-
|ARD
|''Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland'' (Syndicate for Publicly Regulated Radio Stations in the Federal Republic of Germany); state-funded radio.
|-
|BAW
|''Bundesanwaltschaft'' (Federal Prosecutors Office); noted for its aggressive prosecution of cases against the guerilla and the left.
|-
|BGS
|''Bundesgrenzschutz'' (Federal Border Patrol); border security police.
|-
|BKA
|''Bundeskriminalamt'' (Federal Criminal Bureau); the German equivalent of the FBI, particularly active in police activities against the guerilla and the left.
|-
|BND
|''Bundesnachrichtendienst'' (Federal Intelligence Service); the FRG’s foreign intelligence service.
|-
|CDU
|''Christlich Demokratisches Union Deutschlands'' (Christian Democratic Union of Germany); Germany’s mainstream conservative party.
|-
|CSU
|''Christlich-Soziale Union'' in Bayern (Bavarian Christian-Social Union); Bavaria’s mainstream conservative party, the Bavarian partner to the cdu.
|-
|DGB
|''Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund'' (German Union Federation); the largest union federation in the FRG.
|-
|DKP
|''Deutsche Kommunistische Partei'' (German Communist Party); the pro-Soviet communist party founded in 1968, in effect the rebranding of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany), which was banned in 1956.
|-
|FAZ
|''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung''; a high-quality, national, moderate conservative, German daily newspaper.
|-
|FDP
|''Freie Demokratische Partei'' (Free Democratic Party); Germany’s mainstream liberal party.
|-
|GIM
|''Groupe Internationale Marxisten'' (International Marxist Group); West German section of the Trotskyist Fourth International active in the FRG in the seventies and eighties, fused with the KPD/ML to form the VSP in 1986.
|-
|GSG-9
|''Grenzschutzgruppe 9'' (Border Patrol Group 9); officially part of the BGS, in practice Germany’s antiterrorist special operations unit.
|-
|KB
|''Kommunistischer Bund'' (Communist League); a small Maoist group active in the seventies.
|-
|KBW
|''Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschland'' (West German Communist League); founded in Bremen in 1973. A Maoist organization originally associated with China, subsequently shifted their support to Albania and Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime. Dissolved in 1985.
|-
|KPD
|''Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands'' (Communist Party of Germany); pro-Soviet communist party founded in 1919, banned under Hitler in 1933 and under Adenauer in 1956, rebranded as DKP (German Communist Party) in 1968. Also a Maoist party founded by the KPD/AO in 1971 and dissolved in 1980.
|-
|KPD/AO
|''Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands/ Aufbauorganisation'' (Communist Party of Germany/ Pre-Party Formation); a Maoist organization founded in 1970, became the KPD in 1971.
|-
|KPD/ML
|''Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands/Marxisten-Leninisten'' (Communist Party of Germany/Marxist-Leninist); a Maoist party founded on December 31, 1968. It fused with the Trotskyist GIM in 1986 to form the VSP.
|-
|KSV
|''Kommunistische Studentverband'' (Communist Student Association); student wing of the KPD/AO and later the KPD, founded in 1971 and dissolved in 1980.
|-
|ID
|''Informationsdienst''; a left-wing news service published weekly from 1973 until 1981. In 1988, its archives were used to launch the left-wing publisher, Verlag Edition ID-Archiv, specializing in books about the German far left.
|-
|LG
|''Landesgericht'' (Land Court); each of the ''Länder'' had it’s own court system.
|-
|LKA
|''Landeskriminalamt'' (Land Criminal Bureau); the equivalent of the BKA functioning at the level of a state or province.
|-
|LWA
|''Landesanwaltschaft'' (Land Prosecutors Office); the equivalent of a state or provincial prosecutors office.
|-
|NPD
|''Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands'' (National Democratic Party); far-right political party, supported by many neo-nazis.
|-
|OLG
|''Oberlandesgericht'' (Land Court of Appeal); each of the ''Länder'' had it’s own Court of Appeal.
|-
|ÖTV
|''Gewerkschaft öffentliche Dienste, Transport und Verkehr'' (The Public Service, Transport, and Communication Union).
|-
|PFLP
|Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; founded in 1953, secular nationalist and Marxist, the second largest tendency within the PLO after Fatah.
|-
|PFLP (EO)
|Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (External Operations); originally a section of the pflp, expelled in the early seventies for conducting controversial actions outside of Israel, effectively dissolved in 1978 after the death of its leader Waddi Haddad, who had been poisoned by the Mossad.
|-
|RAF
|''Rote Armee Fraktion'' (Red Army Faction).
|-
|RH
|''Rote Hilfe'' (Red Aid); an important prisoner support network which came out of the APO.
|-
|RH e.v.
|''Rote Hilfe e.v.'' (Red Aid registered association); a Red Aid network set up by the KPD/AO in 1970.
|-
|RZ
|''Revolutionäre Zellen'' (Revolutionary Cells); founded in 1973, most groups within its structure ceased activity in 1991, with the final action occurring in 1994.
|-
|SDS
|''Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund'' (Socialist German Students Federation); founded by the SDS in 1946. By the late sixties it was an independent left-wing student federation and the most significant organization in the APO. It dissolved in 1970.
|-
|SHB
|''Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund'' (Social Democratic Student Federation); founded in 1960 by the SPD, dissolved in 1992.
|-
|SPD
|''Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands'' (Social Democratic Party of Germany); Germany’s mainstream social democratic party.
|-
|SPK
|''Socialistiches Patientenkollektiv'' (Socialist Patients’ Collective); founded in 1970, part of the antipsychiatry movement. It dissolved under extreme state pressure in 1971, many of its core members later joining the RAF.
|-
|VSP
|''Vereingte Sozialistische Partei'' (United Socialist Party); formed in 1986 through the fusion of the KPD/ML and the GIM, splintered into various groups in 1993.
|-
|ZDF
|''Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen'' (Second German Television); German publicly regulated television, Europe’s largest broadcasting corporation.
|}

== German Terms ==
<blockquote>''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.''</blockquote>''Bundestag'': The federal 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.

== 1 - “Democracy” Comes to Deutschland: Postfascist Germany and the Continuing Appeal of Imperialism ==
[[File:Germany Map from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb]]
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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>Markus Wolf and Anne McElvoy, ''Man without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster'' (New York: Times Books, 1999), xi.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Charles Higham, ''Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949'' (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983)</ref>

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:<blockquote>''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.<ref>William D. Graf, “Anti-Communism in the Federal Republic of Germany,” ''Socialist Register'' (1984): 167.</ref>''</blockquote>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.<ref>Women Against Imperialist War (Hamburg), “War on Imperialist War,” in Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, ''War on the War Makers: Documents and Communiqués from the West German Left'' (San Francisco: John Brown Book Club n.d.), 21.</ref>

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 insecurity.<ref>There has been much written over the past thirty years about the ways in which the non-Jewish German working class benefited from the Third Reich’s policies, enjoying the position of a labor aristocracy. The most noteworthy book on this subject is Götz Aly’s ''Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial war, and the Nazi Welfare State''; translated by Jefferson Chase, 1st U.S. ed. (New York: Metropolitan, 2007).</ref> 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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>“How to Fight Communism,” March 25, 1948, OMGUS in Patrick Major, ''The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945- 1956'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 247.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Graf, “Anti-Communism,” 169.</ref>

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,<ref>Werner Hülsberg, ''The German Greens: A Social and Political Profile.'' Translated by Gus Fagan. (London: Verso, 1988), 22.</ref> roughly 25% below that of workers in the United States,<ref>5 Karl Heinz Roth, ''L’autre movement ouvrier en Allemagne 1945-78''. Translated by Serge Cosseron. (Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1979), 50.</ref> 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.<ref>Hülsberg, 22-3.</ref>

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%.<ref>Ibid., 23.</ref>

As Werner Hülsberg notes:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>Ibid., 24.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Ibid., 22.</ref>

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.”<ref>Roth, 47.</ref> 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.<ref>Major, 174, 192.</ref>

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:<blockquote>[[File:Greek Workers West German Factory from RAF - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''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.'']]''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.''<ref>Hülsberg, 25.</ref> </blockquote>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,<ref>Roth, 121.</ref> 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?”<ref>David Haworth, “Why German Workers Don’t Ask For Raises,” ''Winnipeg Free Press'', December 11, 1968.</ref>

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.”<ref>Hülsberg, 25.</ref> Left-wing trade unionists were expelled from the party, as were the editors of the socialist newspaper ''Die Andere Zeitung'',<ref>Graf, “Anti-communism,” 183.</ref> 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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>William Graf, “Beyond Social Democracy in West Germany?” ''Socialist Register'' (1985/86): 118.</ref> </blockquote>

=== 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.<ref>“Die Integration der Bundesrepublik ins westliche Bündnissystem,” <nowiki>http://www.kssursee.ch/schuelerweb/kalter-krieg/kk/integration.htm</nowiki>.</ref> 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.”<ref>Women Against Imperialist War, 22.</ref>

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 soldiers<ref>Regarding all these, see ''The Neo-colonialism of the West German Federal Republic'' (German Democratic Republic: Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, 1965), 20-35, 39-45, 62-65, 82-85.</ref> and mercenaries, including veterans of the Nazi SS.<ref>Madeleine G. Kalb, ''The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa from Eisenhower to Kennedy'' (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 193.</ref>

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.<ref>Frieder Sclupp, “Modell Deutschland and the International Division of Labour: The Federal Republic of Germany in the World Political Economy,” in ''The Foreign Policy of West Germany: Formation and Contents'', ed. Ekkert Kruippendorf and Volker Rittberger (London: sage Publications, 1980).</ref> 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:<blockquote>''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.''</blockquote>Or, as the American ''Evening Star'' wrote that same year:<blockquote>''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…''<ref>Quoted in ''The Neo-colonialism of the West German Federal Republic'', 96-7.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Daniel Ganser, ''NATO’s Secret Army: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe'' (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 190-211.</ref>

=== Better Dead Than Red ===
[[File:'All Marxist Roads Lead to Moscow' poster from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''“All Marxist Roads Lead to Moscow”: election poster for the CDU, 1953.'']]
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.<ref>Hülsberg, 15.</ref>

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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>German Bundestag, Administration, Public Relations section, ''Law for the Federal Republic of Germany'' (Berlin, 2001), 22.</ref> </blockquote>The following restriction to Article 21, limiting the right to form political parties, was added to this already ominous provision:<blockquote>''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''.<ref>Ibid., 23.</ref> </blockquote>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 State, and Offenses against Public Order.<ref>Sebastien Cobler, ''Law, Order and Politics in West Germany'' (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1978), 76.</ref> Minister of Justice Thomas Dehler explained that these laws would be used to combat “ideological high treason,” “ideological subversion,” and “ideological sabotage.”<ref>Ibid., 74.</ref> In short, thought crime.

The immediate target of all these statutes and constitutional restrictions became clear with due haste. On November 23, 1951, the federal government applied to the Constitutional Court to have the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) proscribed, on the basis of the aforementioned Article 21 of the Basic Law. This was at a time when the party held fifteen seats in the ''Bundestag''.

The Communists had opposed integration into NATO and as late as 1952 paid lip service to the revolutionary overthrow of the Adenauer regime. While it clearly didn’t have mass political support—it had garnered only 2.2% of the vote in the 1952 elections<ref>Wolfgang Abendroth, Helmut Ridder and Otto Schonfeldt, eds., ''KPD Verbot oder mit Kommunisten leben'' (Hamburg: Rororo Taschenbuch Verlag, 1968), 38.</ref>—the KPD nevertheless constituted a potential nuisance as the only political institution to speak up for a number of popular interests which were poorly represented by the major parties:<blockquote>''Its continued advocacy of an anti-fascist, socialist front, its opposition to rearmament and atomic weapons, its resistance to authoritarian trends such as restrictions on free speech and emergency laws, and its demands for a greater measure of economic democracy were aims shared by members of a great range of groups, including neglected interests within the established parties. It was evident… that to discredit or even criminalize the KPD would also be to reduce the appeal of all groups that shared any of its aims.''<ref>Graf, “Anti-communism,” 179.</ref> </blockquote>The trial of the KPD began on November 11, 1954. Sensing the direction things were going in, the party distanced itself from revolutionary politics in public statements in early 1956. It was already too late: on August 17 of that year, the KPD was declared illegal. Hundreds of arrests followed; not only party members, but also their families, members of alleged front groups, and anyone suspected of communist sympathies, were targeted, and a comprehensive apparatus developed to undertake surveillance of all these individuals and organizations.<ref>Ibid., 180.</ref>

The suppression of the KPD was just the most obvious volley in a broader process of constitutional repression. On August 2, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that the organization and promotion of demonstrations, meetings, and strikes could also constitute treason. A few months later, the Federal Supreme Court ruled that, “No action in a strike which goes beyond the cessation of work and violates interests protected by the law is justified by the so-called strike law.”<ref>Cobler, 183-184.</ref> In 1955, the essential nature of the Basic Law was further confirmed by a general ban on all political strikes.<ref>Ibid., 80.</ref>

At the same time, ample use was made of Dreher’s new security measures. By the 1960s, thousands of cases of treason were being brought before the courts:<blockquote>''…in 1963 10,322 actions were started against people alleged to have committed treasonable offenses of one kind or another. In many cases these actions were against more than one person. In 1961 a total of 442 people were sentenced for various categories of “treason”. Admittedly, of these 36 were only fined and 212 only got between 9 months and 5 years and 5 were sentenced to between 5 and 15 years. Many others had their careers ruined by court actions in which the State failed to prove its case.''<ref>David Childs, ''From Schumacher to Brandt: The Story of German Socialism 1945-1965'' (New York: Pergamon Press, 1966), 49.</ref> </blockquote>With its culture sterilized and its traditions of worker militancy broken, the postfascist, post-genocidal society provided an ideal foundation for a new authoritarian and technocratic capitalist state.
{| class="wikitable"
|+Not Wanted in the Model: The KPD
|Immediately after the war, the KPD benefited from an unambiguous anti-Nazi track record, but this strong position quickly crumbled due to a variety of factors. Patrick Major of Warwick University has provided a valuable overview of this decline in his book ''The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956''.
According to Major, the postwar Party leadership found itself frequently at odds with its more radical rank and file. It was ill placed to connect with its supposed constituency—the proletariat—as many working class grievances took aim at the occupying powers, one of which was the Soviet Union. Indeed, as Major notes, “the earliest proponents of strikes tended to be Social Democrats, whereas, like their French comrades, the German Communists placed national reconstruction before wage increases or even denazification of management.”<ref>Patrick Major, ''The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 170.</ref>

The Party was further handicapped by its ties to East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). The SED encouraged the KPD’s conservative tendencies, insisting that it prioritize forging a progressive nationalist opposition to the Western occupiers, relegating class struggle to the back burner. Not only was it still hoped that the “Western Zone” could be pried out of the hands of imperialism, but it was also recognized that the KPD’s chief competition—the SPD—was winning support with its own “nationalistic rabble rousing.”<ref>Ibid., 115.</ref>

During this patriotic phase, anticapitalist rhetoric was toned down; in some ''Länder'', Party members were instructed to stop singing the ''Internationale'' in public, and the hammer and sickle and Soviet star emblems were removed from their paraphernalia.<ref>Ibid., 116.</ref> To the disgust of many comrades who had barely survived the Third Reich, the KPD even briefly attempted to establish a broad “anticolonialist” National Front, appealing to middle class elements, patriotic capitalists, and even former Nazi supporters.<ref>Ibid., 133.</ref>

Although the KPD was banned in 1956, this dubious “anticolonialism” represented real class forces, and a significant section of progressive opinion. While these gestures failed to win the Communists any significant nationalist support, the politics they represented remained visible in the future campaigns against rearmament and nuclear weapons. Though overwhelmingly left-wing, these campaigns were still able to attract (and accept) support from conservatives and even fascists who opposed integration within the western bloc as “unpatriotic.”
The connection to East Germany’s SED became an ever-greater liability as the Cold War descended: while western communists opposed rearmament in the FRG, they had to make excuses for it in the GDR; while they decried exploitative work conditions in the west, they had to defend piece work policies in the east; while they complained of “colonization” of the FRG by the Americans, they had to remain pointedly silent about “integration” of the GDR into the Soviet Bloc.
Thus, even as the Party played an important role in articulating opposition to the authoritarian Adenauer regime, it faced an uphill battle, not only because of right-wing repression, but also due to the contradictory demands of struggling in the Western Zone while its counterpart ruled in the East.
These political weaknesses, combined with the deep changes to Germany’s class structure that occurred during the Hitler period, prevented the KPD from ever mounting a serious challenge to the new FRG. So much so that according to Major, “In some ways the KPD leadership was ‘saved by the bell’, banned before an internal party discussion could look for scapegoats for the disastrous policies of the past decade.”<ref>Ibid., 226.</ref>
|}

== 2 - The Re-Emergence of Revolutionary Politics in West Germany ==
In the years before the Hitler regime, Germany was home to one of the strongest and most militant left-wing movements in Europe, firmly based in the country’s large and well organized working class. The years after World War I saw insurrections in Bavaria and the Ruhr region, and had it not been for errors and betrayals on the left, many still believe that communist revolution in Germany could have succeeded in giving birth to a radically different twentieth century.

That, of course, is not what happened, and as events unfolded the left that had impressed generations of European socialists was decimated by the rise of German fascism, forced into exile, reduced to inactivity, or sent off to the camps.

When the organized institutions of the left reappeared in the postwar period, they were incapable of overcoming their own historical weaknesses, weaknesses that were actively reinforced by the Allies’ corrupt and repressive policies. Those few independent antifascist groups which had formed in the last days of the war quickly found themselves banned, unwelcome intruders on the victors’ plans, this Allied suppression of any autonomous workers’ or antifascist revolt constituting the flipside to the charade of denazification.

The eclipse of any authentic left-wing opposition continued in the years following the division of Germany. The Christian Democratic Union, the concrete expression of the alliance between the German ruling class and American imperialism, experienced little in the way of opposition as it helped implement the Marshall Plan and establish the legal machinery with which to fight any resurgence of left-wing militancy.

Yet, while the political aspects of the Marshall Plan were carried out with little difficulty, the rearming of West Germany, not surprisingly when one considers the outcome of both World Wars, met with intense opposition.

In the immediate postwar period, West Germans were overwhelmingly opposed to rearmament. By 1952, this sentiment had coalesced into a broad movement, including the not-yet-banned KPD, trade unions, socialist youth groups, Protestant church groups,<ref>Paul Hockenos has noted that for some Protestants, their religion may have made them particularly receptive to the first postwar protest movements, due to feelings of marginalization within the new truncated state: whereas Protestants had outnumbered Catholics by nearly two to one in prewar Germany, there was rough parity between the two religions in the FRG. See Paul Hockenos, ''Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: an Alternative History of Postwar Germany'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22. Despite this fact, the churches remained overwhelmingly anticommunist and hostile to left-wing politics.</ref> pacifists, and, at times, sections of the SPD. This progressive alliance was flanked on its right by small numbers of nationalists and even fascists who objected to the way in which rearmament would anchor the country in the western bloc.<ref>As one deputy from the neo-nazi Socialist Reich Party put it, “First we were told that guns and ammunition were poison and now this poison has turned to sweets which we should eat. But we are not Negroes or idiots to whom they can do whatever they want. It is either they or us who should be admitted to the insane asylum.” [Martin Lee, ''The Beast Reawakens'' (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 65.]</ref> Despite this, the “Without Us Movement” (as it was known) was a predominantly left-wing amalgam. It was the first large protest movement in the new Federal Republic,<ref>For the sake of clarity, it should be remembered that in the years between the Nazi defeat and the establishment of the FRG, there was a large strike movement in favour of nationalization of the country’s largest industries. This movement, which initially seemed to have the wind in its sails, was opposed by the Allied occupiers. Its fate was sealed when the new trade unions obediently redirected it towards token co-management and de-cartelization. As such, it provides a stark example of workers’ political activity sabotaged by their putative left-wing representatives even before the occupation had ended. (Roth, 50-51; Hülsberg, 29-32; Childs, 67-84.)</ref> and while it may appear timid and ineffectual in retrospect, it represented a real break in the postwar consensus at the time.

The response from the Adenauer regime revealed the limits of CDU democracy: in 1951, a KPD referendum initiative on the question was banned, as according to the Basic Law only the federal government was empowered to call a plebiscite. The Communists decided to go ahead anyway, polling people on street corners, through newspaper questionnaires, and at popular meeting places. The “referendum” was more agit prop than a scientific study; at one movie cinema in the town of Celle, for instance, there is a report that just as the feature film ended an eager pollster asked everyone opposed to rearmament to stand up—100% opposition was recorded. Little surprise that the KPD eventually found that almost six million West Germans had “registered” their opposition to the government’s plans.<ref>Major, 145</ref>

Suffice it to say that Adenauer was not amused, and polling people soon became a risky endeavor: there were a total of 7,331 arrests, and the KPD Free German Youth front group was banned simply for engaging in what amounted to a glorified petition campaign.<ref>5 Ibid., Hülsberg, 33.</ref>
[[File:Philipp Müller from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''Philipp Müller, April 5, 1931– May 11, 1952'']]
At the same time, as if to make matters crystal clear, on May 11, 1952, a peace rally in the city of Essen was attacked by police, at first with dogs and clubs, and then with live ammunition. Philipp Müller, a member of Free German Youth, became the first person to be killed in a demonstration in the new Federal Republic. As a sign of things to come, no police officer would ever face charges for Müller’s death, but eleven demonstrators were subsequently jailed for a total of six years and four months for disorderly conduct and “crimes of treason against the Constitution.”<ref>Bernd Langer, ''Art as Resistance''. Translated by Anti-Fascist Forum. (Göttingen: Aktiv-Dr. und Verl., 1998), 8.</ref>

Not that repression was the only tool against incipient revolt: misdirection also remained an important weapon in the ruling class arsenal. Throughout 1953, there were almost one hundred strikes at different factories to protest against the CDU’s rearmament policies. As the politicized sections of the working class were moving aggressively against Adenauer’s plans, the SPD and trade union leadership lined up to rein things in. All energy was now funneled into one big rally in Frankfurt. However, the initiative was removed from the rank and file, and in the end the rally was simply used to drum up support for the SPD.<ref>Hülsberg, 34.</ref> As the CDU moved ahead regardless, the Social Democrats withdrew organizational support, and the movement (now robbed of any autonomous basis) dissipated almost immediately.<ref>Hockenos, 42-3.</ref>

With its most steadfast opponents kept in disarray by their “leaders,” the Adenauer regime easily ratified rearmament through the Treaty of Paris in 1954. The next few years saw the establishment of voluntary military service, universal male conscription, and the production of war materials, further sealing the ties between big business and the state. Demoralized by their failure to prevent any of this, the opposition began to melt, a 1955 poll finding that almost two thirds of the population now considered remilitarization to be a “political necessity.”<ref>Nick Thomas, ''Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy'' (New York: Berg, 2003), 33.</ref>

For the CDU, rearmament, like the Basic Law, was simply part of the Federal Republic acquiring the powers of a “normal” state, part of West Germany’s integration into the imperialist bloc. While there were numerous such state powers bestowed during this period, one which will bear some relevance to our study is the 1951 establishment of the ''Bundesgrenzschutz'', the Federal Border Guard, also known as the BGS. Under the jurisdiction of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the BGS was initially a paramilitary force of 10,000, its activity restricted “to the border area ‘to a depth of thirty kilometres.”<ref>Cobler, 134.</ref>

In 1951, most leftists had feared that the BGS was a roundabout way to establish a standing army. As we have seen, such a ploy did not prove necessary (although many border guards would be integrated into the new armed forces). Rather, the Border Guard would eventually serve as the basis for a national semi-militarized police force.

Despite these discouraging beginnings, antimilitary sentiment remained high, and when, in 1956, the Adenauer government responded favorably to a U.S. “offer” of tactical nuclear weapons, this set off a series of spontaneous mobilizations across the country. In 1957, members of West Germany’s second largest union, the Public Service, Transport, and Communication Union (ÖTV) voted 94.9% in favor of a strike against nuclear armament, a call which was echoed by the president of the powerful IG Metall trade union. In Hannover, 40,000 people demonstrated against nuclear arms, while in Munich there was a turnout of 80,000, and in Hamburg 120,000 people took to the streets.<ref>Thomas, 35.</ref> Opinion polls showed 52% of the population supporting an antinuclear general strike.

The SPD and trade union brass moved to quash this mass movement, which was spinning out of control, by redirecting the campaign away from the streets and factories and into the ballot boxes, proposing a referendum instead of a general strike. Predictably, the government challenged this referendum proposal before the Constitutional Court, where it was ruled unconstitutional in 1958.

The ploy worked, the momentum was broken, and the antinuclear weapons movement entered a period of sharp decline. For years to come, its only visible legacy would be the annual peace demonstrations held every Easter Weekend, the so-called Easter Marches.

Of great relevance to the future history of the West German left, and our story in particular, an important counterpoint to the disreputable machinations of the SPD emerged from its own youth wing: the Socialist German Student Union (SDS).

The SDS had been founded in 1946 as a training ground from which to groom the future party elite (Helmut Schmidt, West Germany’s future Chancellor, was the group’s first president). In the context of the anti-rearmament movement, though, a shift began to occur, and at its 1958 conference, the leadership of the SDS was won by elements significantly to the left of the SPD:<blockquote>''Their main interest was in the development of socialist policies and, in particular, they wanted to build the campaign against nuclear weapons, a campaign which the SPD had already deserted. The resolutions of the SDS conference were a “declaration of war” on the SPD leadership. The SDS first of all developed an anti-imperialist position and demanded the right of national self-determination for the Algerians and the withdrawal of French colonial troops. After this there were congresses against nuclear weapons, for democracy and in opposition to militarism. The SPD strongly condemned this development.''<ref>Hülsberg, 38.</ref> </blockquote>In May of 1960, to counter this leftwards drift, students loyal to the SPD leadership formed the Social Democratic Student Union (SHB).

This move by the right was answered in October 1961 by SPD left wingers forming the Society for the Promotion of Socialism (SF). Unable to neutralize this growing left-wing revolt, the SPD leadership decided to do what it could to isolate it, purging the SF and SDS in a move which completed the alienation of the critical intelligentsia and youth from the party for years to come. (Ironically, the SHB itself continued to be pulled to the left, forced to tail positions staked out by the SDS, until it too would find itself expelled in the 1970s.)<ref>Graf, “Beyond Social Democracy,” 104-5.</ref>

Things were brewing beneath the surface, and a new generation was finding itself increasingly miserable within the suffocating and conservative ''Modell Deutschland''. American expatriate Paul Hockenos describes the fifties cultural climate that surrounded these young people:<blockquote>''Corporal punishment in schools… was still routine, and at universities students could be expelled for interrupting a lecture. The Federal Republic still had “coupling laws” on the books that forbade single men and women under twenty-one to spend the night together—or even to spend time together unchaperoned. Parents who allowed their children to stray could face legal penalties. In contrast to the GDR’s school curricula, in which the churches had no say, in the West German schools there weren’t sexual-education programs until the 1960s.''<ref>Hockenos, 31.</ref></blockquote>
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Old Left and the New Reality
|Under the postwar occupation regime, various intellectuals who had been exiled under Nazism returned home, while others who had remained silent found their voices.
While this was a broader phenomenon, two groups in particular stand out: the Frankfurt School and the ''Gruppe 47''.

The Frankfurt School had emerged from the Institute for Social Research, founded at the University of Frankfurt in 1924 under the tutelage of one of its prominent members, Max Horkheimer. Critical of the narrow intellectual nature of traditional Marxism, members integrated new ideas from the fields of sociology, philosophy, and psychiatry to produce a highly influential and intellectually rigorous theoretical platform, eventually known as “Critical Theory.” Key members, almost all of them men, many of them Jewish, included Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. Going into exile in 1933, the Frankfurt School was based out of Columbia University in New York City until 1943. While Horkheimer and Adorno chose to return to Germany after the war, many others remained in the United States.
The ''Gruppe 47'' was a literary circle founded in 1947 to help give expression to a new generation of German writers who had lived through the war, and who hoped to use their cRAFt as a way to reckon with the with the Nazi experience. Key members included Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Ilse Aichinger, and Erich Fried. There were few Jews or women involved, and amongst the Germans, some were later revealed to have previously been active Nazis. Yet, despite these shortcomings, the ''Gruppe 47'' established itself as an important progressive influence on postwar German culture.

While they may have all initially sympathized with the sixties revolt, many of these intellectuals soon felt alienated by the younger generation’s goals and methods of direct action and violent protest.
Ironically, while the Frankfurt School influenced many of the sixties revolutionaries, it also provided the strongest negative reaction, with Jürgen Habermas going so far as to accuse student radicals of flirting with “left-wing fascism.” Though an inability to agree about the meaning of the student revolt led to the precipitous decline of the ''Gruppe 47'', some of its members remained vocal critics of the political establishment. Heinrich Böll and Erich Fried in particular continued to denounce the state’s penchant for authoritarian solutions, even in regards to its war against the guerilla.
|}
In the words of Detlev Claussen, who would later participate in his generation’s revolt, “They try to make it look better than it was but it really was that bad! It was a terrible, terrible time to grow up.”<ref>Ibid., 29.</ref>

Another indication of what life was like in the post-genocidal society came in the winter of 1959-60, as a wave of antisemitic graffiti and attacks on Jewish cemeteries swept over the country. This prompted some Frankfurt School sociologists to carry out a study which revealed that behind an apathetic 41% who remained indifferent, a hardcore 16% of the population was openly antisemitic, supportive of the death penalty (banned under the Basic Law) and expressing “an excessive inclination for authority.”<ref>Jean-Paul Bier, “The Holocaust and West Germany: Strategies of Oblivion 1947-1979” ''New German Critique'' 19, Special Issue 1: Germans and Jews Winter (1980): 13.</ref>

One of the projects most responsible for challenging this reactionary and stultifying culture was the magazine ''konkret'', published in Hamburg by Klaus Rainer Röhl. An increasingly important forum for progressive youth who rejected the CDU consensus and the country’s conservative cultural mores, the magazine was widely read within the SDS. As Karin Bauer notes, “the magazine thrived from the happy union of intellectual, aesthetic, and popular appeal…”<ref>Karin Bauer, ''Everybody Talks About the Weather… We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof'' (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 27.</ref> Decidedly political, “Recurrent themes were Cuba, anticolonialism, German fascism, the antinuclear struggle, human rights, and social justice.”<ref>Ibid., 30.</ref>

Unbeknownst to its public, ''konkret'' was actually funded and in part controlled by one of the remaining clandestine KPD cells which had gone into exile in East Germany.<ref>“My Mother, The Terrorist”, ''Deutsche Welle'' [online], March 14, 2006.</ref> The magazine’s chief editor was Röhl’s wife, a woman who had been active in the SDS since 1957, and had secretly joined the illegal KPD in 1959. Her name was Ulrike Meinhof.

Another radicalizing event for many young people at the time was the Auschwitz trials, held in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965. Largely a propaganda exercise to cover up the far greater number of Nazis who had found their way into the new West German establishment, twenty-two former SS-men and one ''Kapo'' were tried for murder or complicity in murder. Regardless of the hypocritical aspect of the trial, the fact that for two and a half years almost three hundred witnesses came and testified, and had their testimony reported in the media, gave an inkling of what Auschwitz meant to a generation of German youth, who—quite understandably—now saw their teachers, civic leaders, and even their parents in a horrible new light.

These trials, and the general “discovery” of the Holocaust, were a radicalizing event for many young people at that time;<ref>Hockenos, 34-35. See also Dagmar Herzog, “‘Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together’: Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany,” ''Critical Inquiry'' 24, 2: Intimacy, (Winter 1988): 402-403.</ref> as one veteran of the New Left would later recall:<blockquote>''That the Germans could kill millions of human beings just because they had a different faith was utterly inexplicable to me. My whole moral world view shattered, got entwined with a rigorous rejection of my parents and school. If religion had not prevented this mass destruction of human beings, then it is no good for anything, then the whole talk of love of your neighbor and of meekness. . . was just a lie.''<ref>Eberhard Knodler-Bunte, in Herzog, 416.</ref> </blockquote>Despite what in retrospect may seem to have been a growing potential for revolt, during these early years, the SDS was silent, turned inward, engaging in “seminar Marxism” as it found its bearings outside of the SPD and struggled to elaborate a consistent analysis and strategy. When it did return to the public arena, it was as a small, consciously anti-imperialist organization influenced by the experiences of China, Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam, advancing the analysis that “liberation movements in the Third World, marginal groups in society, and socialist intellectuals now constituted the revolutionary subject in society and the appropriate strategy was direct action.”<ref>Hülsberg, 39.</ref> (It is worth noting that the German Democratic Republic was pointedly not one of the ideological reference points for the new SDS.)

A line was crossed when Moise Tschombe visited Berlin in December 1964. To the applause of the West German ruling class, and with the help of German mercenaries, Tschombe had led a bloody, anticommunist secession in the Congolese province of Katanga. He was considered responsible for the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first president of the Congo and a beloved symbol of the anticolonial struggle in Africa.

Hundreds of protesters turned out against Tschombe, and when the police tried to clear them away, they fought back in what would later be described as the starting point of the antiauthoritarian revolt in West Germany.<ref>Thomas, 94. See also Gretchen Dutschke, ''Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schönes Leben'' (Köln: K&W, 1996), 60-61.</ref>

The SDS played a prominent part in this protest. Based on university campuses, it was becoming the most important organization in the growing and increasingly militant protest movement against imperialist domination of the global South, most especially against the war in Indochina. Demonstrations ceased to be the timid rituals they had been; for the first time in decades, student protests escalated into street fighting.

1964 was also a year of change for ''konkret''. The communist world was at the time deeply divided by the falling out between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Over the years, this split would only become more bitter until each side came to see the other as being objectively as bad as—or even worse than!—the imperialism represented by the United States. Despite its ties to the KPD, ''konkret'' was taking an increasingly pro-Chinese line, going so far as to support China’s acquiring nuclear weapons. At this, its East German patrons lost patience, and after failing to browbeat Meinhof into submission at a secret meeting in East Berlin, they cut off all funding.<ref>Jutta Ditfurth, ''Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biographie'' (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007), 180-181.</ref> In their turn, Meinhof and Röhl resigned from the kpd. As a solution to this new lack of money, Röhl made drastic changes to the magazine’s presentation, turning it into a glossy publication which now featured scantilyclad women in every issue—its circulation almost tripled.<ref>David Kramer, “Ulrike Meinhof: An Emancipated Terrorist?” in ''European Women on the Left: Socialism, Feminism, and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present.'' Jane Slaughter and Robert Kern, eds. Contributions in Women’s Studies. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press 1981), 201.</ref> Far from suffering as a result of their separation from the SPD, the SDS, ''konkret'', and others on the left were now particularly well placed to benefit from a series of economic and political developments, even though these were not of their doing and lay well beyond their control.

In 1966-67, a recession throughout the capitalist world pushed unemployment in the FRG to over a million for the first time in the postwar era, a situation the ruling class attempted to exploit to tip the balance of power even further in its favor. As Karl Heinz Roth explains:<blockquote>''Threats of job losses and elimination of all the groups of workers who would have been able to initiate advanced forms of struggle laid the basis for a general anti-worker offensive.''<ref>Roth, 101.</ref> </blockquote>Furthermore:<blockquote>''The bosses freely admitted that they were using the crisis to intensify work conditions amongst all layers of the global working class. From their point of view, the temporary investment strike was necessary to create the basis for a recovery through a “cleansing of the personnel.” Three hundred thousand immigrant workers and almost as many German workers were thrown out into the street.''<ref>Ibid., 100.</ref></blockquote>In a move to consolidate support amongst more privileged German workers and thus exploit the divisions within the proletariat, the SPD was brought into a so-called “Grand Coalition” government alongside the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union. This created a situation in which former resistance fighter and SPD chief Willy Brandt was now vice-chancellor alongside former Nazi Georg Kiesinger of the CDU, and the CSU’s far-right Franz Josef Strauß was Minister of Finance alongside the SPD’s young luminary, Karl Schiller, who held the Economics portfolio.

The SPD was completely discredited by its open embrace of these reactionaries, and it now appeared that any real change could only come about outside of government channels. Disenchantment struck at West Germany’s youth in the universities, in the factories and on the street, as younger workers were increasingly marginalized by the new corporatist compact. The ''Außerparlamentarische'' ''Opposition'' (APO), or Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, was born.

The revolt was focused in West Berlin, an enclave that was a three-hour drive into East Germany, and which remained officially under western Allied occupation, and so enjoyed the bizarre status of being a de facto part of the Federal Republic even though it remained legally distinct.<ref>There was one autobahn through the GDR connecting the city to the Federal Republic, which the East Germans were obligated by international agreements to keep open. The highway ran through desolate countryside, and was flanked by East German armed forces at all times.</ref> In a sense, West Berlin afforded the personal freedoms of the capitalist west while its odd diplomatic status provided its residents with extra room to maneuver outside of the west’s constraints.<ref>For many examples of just how careful the Federal Republic had to be in imposing itself in West Berlin, see Avril Pittman, ''From Ostpolitik to reunification: West German-Soviet political relations since 1974'' (Cambridge, England & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32-62.</ref> This had many important consequences, not the least of which was that young men who moved to West Berlin could avoid the dRAFt, as they were technically living outside of the FRG.

Not surprisingly, the city became a magnet for the radicals and counterculture rebels of the new generation. In the words of one woman who lived there, it was “a self-contained area where political developments of all kinds… become evident much earlier than elsewhere and much more sharply, as if they were under a magnifying glass.”<ref>Hilke Schlaeger and Nancy Vedder-Shults, “West German Women’s Movement,” ''New German Critique'' 13 (Winter 1978): 61.</ref>
[[File:West Berlin Dancing from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Andreas Baader, Dorothea Ridder and Rainer Langhans, dancing in the streets of West Berlin (August, 1967)'']]
Thus, it was in West Berlin that a group of students, gathered around Hans-Jürgen Krahl and the East German refugees Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl, began questioning not only the economic system, but the very nature of society itself. The structure of the family, the factory, and the school system were all challenged as these young rebels mixed the style of the hippy counterculture with ideas drawn from the Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism.

Communes and housing associations sprung up. Women challenged the male leadership and orientation within the SDS and the APO, setting up daycares, women’s caucuses, women’s centers, and women-only communes. The broader counterculture, rockers, artists, and members of the drug scene rallied to the emerging political insurgency. Protests encompassed traditional demonstrations as well as sit-ins, teach-ins, and happenings. So called “Republican Clubs” spread out to virtually every town and city as centers for discussion and organizing, bridging the divide between the younger radicals and veterans of the earlier peace movements.

As one historian has put it:<blockquote>''Everywhere it could, the 1960s generation countered the German petit bourgeois ethic with its antithesis, as they interpreted it: prudery with free love, nationalism with internationalism, the nuclear family with communes, provincialism with Third World solidarity, obedience to the law with civil disobedience, tradition with wide-open experimentation, servility with in-your-face activism.''<ref>Hockenos, 80.</ref> </blockquote>Or, as one former SDS member would recall, it was a time when “everything”—hash, politics, sex, and Vietnam—“all seemed to hang together with everything else.”<ref>Eckhard Siepmann in Herzog, 427.</ref>

Despite its growing popularity on campus and amongst hipsters, this new radical youth movement was not embraced by the population at large, and demonstrations would often be heckled or even attacked by onlookers. This widespread hostility was a green light for state repression, with results which would soon become clear for all to see.

On June 2, 1967, thousands of people turned out to demonstrate outside the German Opera against a visit by the Shah of Iran, whose brutal regime was a key American ally in the Middle East. Many wore paper masks in the likeness of the Shah and his wife; these had been printed up by Rainer Langhans and Holger Meins of the K.1 commune,<ref>Kommune 1 in German.</ref> “So the police couldn’t recognize us [and so] they only saw the face of the one they were protecting.”<ref>G. Conradt and H. Jahn, ''Starbuck Holger Meins'', directed by G. Conradt. (Germany: Hartmut Jahn Filmproduktion, 2002).</ref> Thus adorned, the protesters greeted the Iranian monarch and his wife with volleys of rotten tomatoes and shouts of “Murderer!”

(As Ulrike Meinhof would later write in ''konkret'': “the students who befouled the Shah did not act on their own behalf, but rather on behalf of the Persian peasants who are in no position to resist under present circumstances, and the tomatoes could only be symbols for better projectiles…”)<ref>“Women in the sds; or, Or Our Own Behalf, (1968)” in German Feminist Writing, eds. Patricia A. Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 160.</ref>

The June 2 rally would be a turning point, as the protesters were brutally set upon by the police and SAVAK, the Iranian secret service. Many fought back, and the demonstration is reported to have “descended into the most violent battle between protesters and police so far in the postwar period… It was only around 12:30 am that the fighting came to an end, by which time 44 demonstrators had been arrested, and the same number of people had been injured, including 20 police officers.”<ref>Thomas, 111-112.</ref>
[[File:Benno Ohensorg murdered by police from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Benno Ohnesorg, shot by police, lies dying in the arms of fellow student Fredericke Dollinger.'']]
Most tragically, a young member of the Evangelical Student Association, Benno Ohnesorg, attending his first demonstration, was shot in the back of the head by Karl-Heinz Kurras, a plainclothes police officer with the Red Squad. Even after Ohnesorg was finally picked up by an ambulance, it was another forty minutes before he was brought to a hospital. He died of his wounds that night.

This police murder was a defining event, electrifying the student movement and pushing it in a far more militant direction. It has been estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 students took part in demonstrations across the country in the days immediately following Ohnesorg’s death. For many, especially those outside of West Berlin, it was their first political protest. As has been noted elsewhere, “Although two-thirds of students in the period before the shooting declared themselves to be apolitical, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting a survey found that 65 per cent of students had been politicized by Ohnesorg’s death.”<ref>Ibid., 114.</ref>

The murder catapulted the SDS into the center of student politics across the Federal Republic. As one student activist later recalled years later:<blockquote>''The SDS didn’t have more than a few hundred members nationwide… and then all at once there was such a huge deluge that we couldn’t cope. Our offices were overrun. So we just opened SDS up and decentralized everything. We let people in different cities and towns organize themselves into autonomous project groups and then we’d all meet at regular congresses to thrash things out. More or less by chance it turned out to be an incredible experiment in participatory democracy.''<ref>Christian Semler in Hockenos, 69.</ref> </blockquote>Initially, the state and the newspapers owned by reactionary press magnate Axel Springer<ref>The Springer chain consisted of conservative tabloids, among them ''Bild, Berliner Zeitung'', and ''Berliner Morgenpost''. They led a campaign to smear progressive students as “muddle heads,” East German spies, and storm troopers—at times even crossing the line and advocating vigilante violence. As Jeremy Varon notes, “Springer publications accounted for more than 70 percent of the West Berlin press and more than 30 percent of the national daily newspaper market. As the press fed a climate of anti-student hysteria, the reaction of the media to the New Left itself became a major object of protest.” [Jeremy Varon, ''Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 38-39.]</ref> tried to justify this murder, repeating lies that the protesters had had plans to kill police and that Kurras had shot in self-defense. Springer’s ''Bild Zeitung'' ominously warned that “A young man died in Berlin, victim of the riots instigated by political hooligans who call themselves demonstrators. Riots aren’t enough anymore. They want to see blood. They wave the red flag and they mean it. This is where democratic tolerance stops.”<ref>Hockenos, 68.</ref>

On June 3, the Berlin Senate banned demonstrations in the city— twenty-five year old Gudrun Ensslin was one of eight protesters arrested for defying this ban the next day<ref>Stefan Aust, ''The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon''. Translated by Anthea Bell. (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1987), 44.</ref>—and the chief of police Duensing proudly explained his tactics as those he would use when confronted with a smelly sausage: “The left end stinks [so] we had to cut into the middle to take off the end.”<ref>Thomas, 115.</ref> As for the Shah, he tried to reassure the Mayor of Berlin Heinrich Albertz, telling him not to think too much of it, “these things happen every day in Iran…”<ref>Aust, 44.</ref>

Nevertheless, given the widespread sense of outrage and the increasing evidence that Ohnesorg had been killed without provocation, Duensing was forced out of his job, and Senator for Internal Affairs Büsch and Mayor Albertz were eventually made to follow suit.

If June 2 has been pointed to as the “coming out” of the West German New Left mass student phenomenon, the international circumstances in which this occurred were not without significance. Just three days after Ohnesorg’s murder, West Germany’s ally Israel attacked Egypt, and quickly destroyed its army—as well as Jordanian and Syrian forces—in what became known as the Six Day War.

In the FRG, the Six Day War provided the odd occasion for a broad-based, mass celebration of militarism. To some observers, it suddenly seemed as if the same emotions and social forces that had supported German fascism were now expressing themselves through support for the Israeli aggressors, described (approvingly) as the “Prussians of the Middle East.”<ref>George Lavy, ''Germany and Israel: Moral Debt and National Interest'' (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 154.</ref> Although the SDS was already pro-Palestinian, most leftists had previously harbored sympathies for the Jewish state. The 1967 war put a definite end to this, establishing the New Left’s anti-Zionist orientation; as an unfortunate side effect of this turn, it also discouraged attempts to grapple with the gravity of Germany’s antisemitic past from a radical, anticapitalist point of view. (For more on Germany’s relationship to Israel, see Appendix III—The FRG and the State of Israel, pages 550-553.)

An uneasy calm reigned in the wake of the June 2 tragedy, and yet the movement continued to grow. More radical ideas were gaining currency, and at an SDS conference in September Rudi Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl went so far as to broach the possibility of the left fielding an urban guerilla. This was the first time such an idea had been mentioned in the SDS or the APO, and for the time being, such talk remained a matter of abstract conjecture.
[[File:Newspaper Clipping Internaitonal Vietnam Conference West Berlin from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb]]
On February 17 and 18, 1968, the movement reached what was perhaps its peak when 5,000 people attended the International Congress on Vietnam in West Berlin, including representatives of anti-imperialist movements from around the world. Addressing those present, Dutschke called for a “long march through the institutions,” a phrase with which his name is today firmly associated.<ref>Tariq Ali, Street fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (New York: Verso, 2005), 243.</ref> (By this, the student leader did not mean joining the system, but rather setting up counterinstitutions while identifying dissatisfied elements within the establishment that might be won over or subverted.)<ref>While one cannot mention Dutschke today without referring to the “long march,” the phrase is interpreted wildly differently by different writers. The description offered here is Herbert Marcuse’s, as it appeared in his 1972 essay “The Left Under the Counterrevolution” in which he endorsed the concept while crediting it to his former student Dutschke. [Herbert Marcuse, ''Counterrevolution and Revolt'' (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 55-57</ref> The congress closed with a demonstration of more than 12,000 people, and would be remembered years later as an important breakthrough for the entire European left.<ref>Ali, 246.</ref>

The establishment mounted its response on February 21, as the West Berlin Senate, the Federation of Trade Unions, and the Springer Press called for a mass demonstration against the student movement and in support of the U.S. war against Vietnam. Eighty thousand people attended, many carrying signs reading “Rudi Dutschke: Public Enemy Number One” and “Berlin Must Not Become Saigon.”

Increasing polarization was leading to a definitive explosion: less than one year after Ohnesorg’s murder, another violent attack on the left served as the spark.

On April 11, 1968, Josef Bachmann, a young right-wing worker, shot Rudi Dutschke three times, once in the head, once in the jaw, and once in the chest. Dutschke, who was recognized as the leading intellectual in the SDS and the APO, had been the target of a massive anticommunist smear campaign in the media, particularly the Springer Press, which would be widely blamed for setting the stage for the attack. Indeed, Bachmann would later testify in this regard, saying, “I have taken my daily information from the ''Bild Zeitung''.”<ref>Thomas, 170.</ref>

The shooting occurred one week after Martin Luther King had been assassinated in the United States, and to many young German leftists, it appeared that their entire international movement was under attack. One young working-class rebel, like Dutschke a refugee from the East, summed up how he felt as follows:<blockquote>''Up to this point they had come with the little police clubs or Mr Kuras(sic) shot; but now it had started, with people being offed specifically. The general baiting had created a climate in which little pranks wouldn’t work anymore. Not when they’re going to liquidate you, regardless of what you do. Before I get transported to Auschwitz again, I’d rather shoot first, that’s clear now. If the gallows is smiling at you at the end anyway, then you can fight back beforehand.''<ref>Bommi Baumann, ''Terror or Love? The Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla'' (London: John Calder Publications, 1979), 41.</ref> </blockquote>Bachmann had carried out his attack on the Thursday before Easter, and the annual peace demonstrations were quickly transformed into protests against the assassination attempt; it has been estimated that 300,000 people participated in the marches over the weekend, the largest figure achieved in West Germany in the 1960s.<ref>Thomas, 171.</ref> Universities were occupied across the country, and running battles with the police lasted for four days. “Springer Shot Too!” became a common slogan amongst radicals, and in many cities, the corporation was targeted with violent attacks. Thousands were arrested, hundreds were hospitalized, and two people (a journalist and a protester) were killed, most likely by police. On May 1, 50,000 people marched through West Berlin.

Unprecedented numbers of working-class youth took part in these battles, with university students constituting only a minority of those arrested by police, a development that worried the ruling class. <ref>Ibid., 176.</ref>

By the time it was over, there had been violent clashes in at least twenty cities. Springer property worth 250,000 dm (roughly $80,000) was damaged or destroyed, including over 100,000dm worth of window panes.<ref>Ibid.</ref>

This rebellion and the police repression pushed many radicals’ thinking to an entirely new level. Bommi Baumann, for instance, credited the riots with opening his eyes to the possibility of armed struggle:<blockquote>''On the spot, I really got it, this concept of mass struggle-terrorism; this problem I had been thinking about for so long became clear to me then. The chance for a revolutionary movement lies in this: when a determined group is there simultaneously with the masses, supporting them through terror.''<ref>Baumann, 41.</ref> </blockquote>Ulrike Meinhof was clearly thinking along similar lines, only she put her thoughts in print, sharing them with the public in a groundbreaking ''konkret'' article entitled “From Protest to Resistance.” Arguing that in the Easter riots “the boundaries between protest and resistance were exceeded,” she promised that “the paramilitary deployment of the police will be answered with paramilitary methods.”<ref>Thomas, 180.</ref>

On May 31, the ''Bundestag'' passed the ''Notstandgesetze'', or Emergency Powers Act, which besides providing the state with tools to deal with crises such as natural disasters or war, was also intended to open the movement up to greater intervention. The CDU had been trying to pass such repressive legislation for years, and short-circuiting opposition to it had been one of the advantages of forming a Grand Coalition along with the SPD. Coming as it did on the heels of the April violence, the legislation passed easily. (The fact that, just across the Rhine, France seemed also on the brink of revolution, enjoying its defining rebellion of the sixties, certainly didn’t hurt matters.)

Under the new Act, the Basic Law was amended to allow the state to tap phones and observe mail unhindered by previous stipulations requiring that the targeted individual be informed. Provisions were introduced in particular for the telephone surveillance of people suspected of preparing or committing “political crimes,” especially those governed by the catch-all §129 of the penal code, criminalizing the “formation or support of a criminal association.” The Emergency Powers Act also officially sanctioned the use of clandestine photography, “trackers” and Verfassungsschutz informants and provocateurs.
[[File:Demonstration against emergency powers poster from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Poster for a demonstration against the Emergency Powers Act, organized by the Munich Board for the Emergency Facing Democracy: “The Emergency Powers Act Plans for War, Not Peace!” Amongst those who gave closing speeches was one Rolf Pohle, at the time a law student prominent in the Munich APO.'']]
Throughout the month of May, as the Act was being passed into law, universities were occupied, students boycotted classes, and tens of thousands of people protested in demonstrations across the country, while a similar number of workers staged a one-day strike. To its critics, the Act represented a dangerous step along the road to re-establishing fascism in the Federal Republic, and this fear was simply reinforced by the way in which the Grand Coalition could pass the legislation regardless of the widespread protests against it.

Anti-''Notstandgesetze'' activities were particularly impressive in Frankfurt, the financial capital of West Germany, which had also become something of an intellectual center for the student movement. On May 27, students occupied the Frankfurt University, and for several days held seminars and workshops addressing a variety of political questions. It took large scale police raids on May 30 to clear the campus.

All this notwithstanding, the Act was passed into law.

The failure of the anti-''Notstandgesetze'' movement was experienced as a bitter defeat by the New Left. Many entertained alarmist fears that the laws would be used to institute a dictatorship, in much the same way as Hindenburg had used similar powers in 1930 and 1933 to create a government independent from parliament, which had facilitated the Nazi dictatorship. In the words of Hans-Jürgen Krahl:<blockquote>''Democracy in Germany is finished. Through concerted political activism we have to form a broad, militant base of resistance against these developments, which could well lead to war and concentration camps. Our struggle against the authoritarian state of today can prevent the fascism of tomorrow.''<ref>Hockenos, 88.</ref> </blockquote>In this heady climate, matters continued to escalate throughout 1968, sections of the movement graduating to more organized and militantly ambitious protests. The most impressive examples of this were probably those that accompanied attempts to disbar Horst Mahler.

Mahler was a superstar of the West Berlin left, known as the “hippy lawyer” who defended radicals in many of the most important cases of this period. He had been involved with the SDS, and was a co-founder of the West Berlin Republican Club and the Socialist Lawyers Collective.<ref>Aust, 65-6.</ref> He had been arrested during the anti-Springer protests that April, and in what would prove to be a foolish move, the state had initiated proceedings to see him disbarred.<ref>Ibid., 64.</ref>

Mahler’s case became a new lightning rod for the West Berlin left, which felt that the state was trying to muzzle their most committed legal defender. The student councils of the Free University and the Technical University called for protests the day of his hearing, one organizer describing the goal as “the destruction of the justice apparatus through massive demonstrations.”<ref>Associated Press, “Student ‘Army’ Battles With Berlin Police,” ''Fresno Bee'', November 4, 1968.</ref>

The street fighting which broke out on November 3 would go down in history as the “Battle of Tegeler Weg.”<ref>Tegeler Weg is a fashionable street in West Berlin where the Bar Association was located.</ref> On the one side, the helmet-wearing protesters (roughly 1,500) attacked with cobblestones and two-by-fours, on the other the police (numbering 1,000) used water cannons, tear gas, and billy clubs:<blockquote>''Several lawyers and bystanders were hit by cobblestones ripped from the sidewalks and hurled by the youths, most of them wearing crash helmets, as they moved forward in waves directed by leaders with megaphones.''

''Injured demonstrators were carried to waiting ambulances marked with blue crosses and staffed by girls wearing improvised nurses’ uniforms.''<ref>Associated Press, “Student ‘Army’.”</ref> </blockquote>Nor were the police spared. As another newspaper reported:<blockquote>''The demonstrators caused a heavy toll of police casualties with their guerrilla style of battle: thrusting at police, withdrawing, consolidating and then thrusting again from another angle.''

''At one stage they managed to beat back a 300-man police force a distance of 150 yards… Police counted 120 injured in their own ranks. Ten of them had to be treated at a hospital. A police spokesman said seven of 21 injured demonstrators were taken to a hospital. The number of arrests was placed at 46.''<ref>George Thomson, “Berlin police, leftists battle,” ''Lowell Sun'', November 4, 1968.</ref> </blockquote>That same night a horse was injured when several molotov cocktails were thrown into the police stable.<ref>Ibid.</ref> It would later be suggested that this attack was the work of an agent provocateur by the name of Peter Urbach.<ref>Aust, 145.</ref>

The court declined to disbar Mahler. Within a few days, the firebrand lawyer was once again making headlines with his latest case: the defense of the young antifascist Beate Klarsfeld, who had smacked CDU Chancellor—and former Nazi—Kurt Georg Kiesinger, hitting him in the face.<ref>Associated Press, “Woman gets Jail for Slapping Bonn Chief,” ''Fresno Bee'', November 8, 1968.</ref> Mahler would eventually win Klarsfeld a suspended sentence, at which point he counter-sued Kiesinger on her behalf, arguing that the very fact that a former Nazi was Chancellor constituted an insult to his client.<ref>Associated Press, “Hit Kiesinger; Term Suspended,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', August 26, 1969.</ref>

The Battle of Tegeler Weg was another milestone, representing a willingness to engage in organized violence the likes of which had not been seen for decades. This period also saw the first experiments with clandestine armed activities, a subject to which we will soon return.

Thus, we can see that even as the spectre of increased repression haunted sections of the militant left, there existed both the desire and the capacity to rise to the next level.

At the same time, however, other developments offered the tempting promise that change might come about in a more comfortable manner by backing down and working within the system.

In October, 1969, the Grand Coalition came to an end, and under the slogan “Let’s Dare More Democracy!” an SPD government (in coalition with the FDP) was elected. SPD leader Willy Brandt was now Chancellor, and FDP leader Walter Scheel became Foreign Minister. The largely symbolic post of president went to political old-timer Gustav Heinemann, widely considered one of the Federal Republic’s most liberal politicians, despite the fact that he had been the Grand Coalition’s SPD Minister of Justice.<ref>Heinemann had in fact held a cabinet position for the CDU as early as 1949, a post he left, along with the CDU, in the early fifties in protest against Adenauer’s rearmament policies. When Ulrike Meinhof was sued for slander by CSU leader Franz Josef Strauß in 1961 as a result of a ''konkret'' article, Heinemann agreed to take on her case, successfully defending her—the two had become allies if not friends during the peace movements of the 1950s.</ref>

For the first time in its history, the Christian Democrats had lost control of the West German parliament.

The new SPD government announced a series of measures which partially fulfilled the students’ more “reasonable” demands: there were new diplomatic overtures to East Germany, it was made easier to be declared a conscientious objector, the age of consent and the legal voting age were lowered from twenty-one to eighteen, no fault divorce legislation was passed, and a series of reforms aimed to modernize and open up the stuffy, hierarchical German school system.

For many, it seemed like a brand new day.

At the same time, Brandt announced an “immediate program to modernize and intensify crime prevention,” which included:<blockquote>''strengthening of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, the modernization of its equipment and the extension of its powers, the re-equipping and reorganization of the Federal Border Guard as a Federal police force, together with the setting up of a “study group on the surveillance of foreigners” within the security services.''<ref>Cobler, 154-155.</ref> </blockquote>Nevertheless, these measures would not affect most activists, and the government shift away from the anachronistic conservatism of the CDU helped confuse and siphon off less committed students, draining potential sources of support for the radical left. At the same time, the movement itself was beginning to fragment.

Problems of male supremacy in the APO had become increasingly difficult to bear for radical women inspired by the feminist movements in the United States, France, and England. In September 1968, things had come to a head at an SDS conference in Frankfurt, where Hans-Jürgen Krahl found himself being pelted by tomatoes after he refused to address the question of chauvinism in the SDS. While many (but not all) of the women from the APO would continue to identify as being on the left, their political trajectory became increasingly separate, both as a result of dynamics internal to the women’s movement and of the continuing sexism outside of it.
[[File:Agit 883 magazine demonstration from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''The different tendencies to emerge from the APO tapped into different aesthetic traditions—above: a call-out from the radical magazine Agit 883 for a demonstration against the Vietnam War.'']]
The decline of the APO also occurred alongside renewed attempts to build various workers’ parties in line with the “correct” Marxist analysis. In 1968, the banned KPD (“Communist Party of Germany”) had been re-established under a new name as the DKP (“German Communist Party”), but boasting the same program and leadership. To most young radicals, though, this “new” Communist Party was of little interest, not only because of its association with the clearly unattractive East German regime, but also because of what was seen as its unimpressive and timid track record in the years before Adenauer had had it banned.
[[File:'Red May First Resist Wage Slavery' poster from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''“Everybody Out to the Red May 1st; Resist Wage Controls; Resist Wage Slavery; A United Working Class Front Against the Betrayal of the SPD Government”'']]
Rather, there followed a veritable alphabet soup of Maoist parties, most of which were as virulently anti-Soviet as they were anti-American. These were joined by a much smaller number of Trotskyist organizations, and together all these would eventually become known as the “K-groups,” in a development roughly analogous to the New Communist Movement which developed at the same time in North America.

Those who remained to the left of the SPD while not joining any of these new party-oriented organizations included the ''sponti'' (“spontaneous”) left which had grown out of the APO’s antiauthoritarian camp, anarchists, and assorted independent socialists. Together, these were referred to as the “undogmatic left,” their bastions being the cities of Frankfurt, Munich, and—of course—West Berlin.

The movement continued to struggle, but with increasing difficulty, fragmenting in all directions, as the APO seemed to be coming apart at the seams.

In March 1970, following a chaotic congress at the Frankfurt Student Association Building, the SDS was dissolved by acclamation. In a brilliant ploy, two months later the government decreed an amnesty for protesters serving short sentences, thereby winning many of these middle class students back to the establishment. The student movement in West Germany was particularly vulnerable to this kind of recuperation, being overwhelmingly comprised of young people for whom there was a place in the more comfortable classes; in 1967, for instance, only 7% of West German students were from working class families (by comparison, in England the figure was almost one in three).<ref>Thomas, 144.</ref>

Despite the APO’s inability to meet the challenges before it, one cannot deny that in just a few years it had thoroughly transformed West German society:<blockquote>''Among the consequences were the reform of education; a new Ostpolitik;''<ref>''Ostpolitik:'' the FRG’s official policy towards the GDR and the east bloc.</ref> ''the deconstruction of the authoritarian patriarchal relations in the family, school, factory and public service; the development of state planning in the economy; a greater integration of women into professional life and a reform in sexual legislation… the APO also provided the impetus to a socio-cultural break with the past. There was a very rapid change in social outlook and behavior patterns. The old ascetic behavior based on the notion of duty came to an end. Along with a different conception of social roles came a new set of sexual mores and a dissolution of the old respectful and subservient attitude towards the state and all forms of authority. There developed, in other words, a new culture which was to pave the way for the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s.''<ref>Hülsberg, 42-43.</ref> </blockquote>

== 3 - Taking up the Gun ==
As the APO foundered, the majority of those to the left of the SPD remained committed to legal, aboveground activism. Nevertheless, a section of the movement had begun testing the waters with another kind of praxis, and for the purposes of our study, it is to this that we will now turn.

The first experiments with armed struggle developed out of the counterculture, as individuals around the K.1 commune in West Berlin began carrying out firebombings and bank robberies. Coming from a milieu where drugs and anarchism mingled freely, these young radicals hung out in a scene known as “the Blues,” and would take on the purposefully ironic name of the “Central Committee of the Roaming Hash Rebels.” As Bommi Baumann later explained, with perhaps a tongue in his cheek:<blockquote>''Mao provided our theoretical basis: “On the Mentality of Roaming Bands of Rebels.” From the so-called robber-bands, he and Chu-Teh had created the first cadre of the Red Army. We took our direction from that. We directed our agitation to make the dopers, who were still partly unpolitical, conscious of their situation. What we did was mass work.''<ref>Baumann, 50.</ref> </blockquote>The Hash Rebels carried out actions under a number of different names, but became best known as the Tupamaros-West Berlin, after the urban guerillas in Uruguay.<ref>Ibid., 59.</ref> Initially, this antiauthoritarian, pre-guerilla tendency suffered from anti-intellectualism, unquestioned male chauvinism, and a lack of any coherent strategy. It has also been criticized for tolerating and engaging in antisemitism under cover of anti-Zionism, one of its first actions being to firebomb a cultural centre housed in a synagogue on the anniversary of a Nazi pogrom.<ref>Tilman Fichter, interview by Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “The anti-Semitism of the 68ers,” ''die tageszeitung'', October 25, 2005. The action was intended to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. See Baumann, 60-61 and 67-68.</ref>

On the other hand, it did seem to enjoy an organic relationship with its base, such as that was.

As the APO fell apart and many of the Hash Rebels’ leading members were arrested or simply had a change of heart, what remained of this tendency would crystallize into a guerilla group known as the 2nd of June Movement (2JM—a reference to the date when Benno Ohnesorg had been killed in 1967). Rooted in West Berlin, this group eventually overcame many of its initial weaknesses while retaining an accessible and often humorous rhetorical style that resonated with many in the anarchist and ''sponti'' scenes throughout the country.

The second guerilla tendency, with which we are more directly concerned, brought together individuals who were peripheral to the countercultural milieu of the Hash Rebels, and of a somewhat more serious bent. As Bommi Baumann would later explain, they “formed at about the same time as we did, because they considered us totally crazy.”<ref>Baumann, 76.</ref> This second tendency was much more theoretically rigorous (or pretentious, to its critics), and heavily influenced not only by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but also by New Left philosophers ranging from Nicos Poulantzas to the Frankfurt School.
[[File:West German Counterculture Cartoon from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''A cartoon from the radical counterculture magazine Agit 883 shows a young man bearing a striking resemblence to Holger Meins (who was a member of the newspaper’s editorial collective) throwing an incendiary device of some sort out of a car. He gets busted because he forgot to change the car’s license plates, but luckily some of his friends are willing to vouch for him and the police are forced to release him, even though they know he did it.'']]
This nascent Marxist-Leninist guerilla scene had its earliest manifestation in the firebombing of two Frankfurt department stores on April 3, 1968, one week before Rudi Dutschke was shot. Petrol bombs with rudimentary timing devices were left in both the Kaufhaus Schneider and Kaufhof buildings, bursting into flames just before midnight. The fires caused almost 700,000 dm ($224,000 U.S.) in damage, though nobody was hurt.

On April 5, Horst Söhnlein, Thorwald Proll, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader, who had all traveled from West Berlin to carry out the action while attending an SDS conference, were arrested and charged with arson.

The four had taken few precautions to protect their identities and avoid arrest. They had issued no communiqué, and in retrospect, the action appears almost flippant in its execution. Indeed, some of those arrested initially denied their participation, and later tried to minimize it all, Baader claiming, “We had no intention of endangering human life or even starting a real fire.”<ref>Aust, 51, 58.</ref>

In court, the four had no united strategy; apparently without bitterness or recrimination, Baader and Ensslin at first tried to present a legal defense, and then switched to accepting full responsibility while insisting that Proll and Söhnlein were both completely innocent.<ref>Ibid., 58.</ref> For their part, these two did not deny their involvement, yet chose not to defend themselves, though Proll did offer an eloquent denunciation of the court and judicial system (see pages 66-78).

In the end, there was no denying that this was a political action, albeit an ill-defined one. In court, Ensslin explained that that the arson was “in protest against people’s indifference to the murder of the Vietnamese,” adding that “We have found that words are useless without action.”<ref>Ibid., 58.</ref>

Then, in a statement that could only be appreciated in retrospect, she told a television reporter, “We have said clearly enough that we did the wrong thing. But there’s no reason for us to discuss it with the law or the state. We must discuss it with people who think as we do.”<ref>Ibid., 62.</ref>

While the four were repudiated by the SDS, they were embraced by others for whom the step into illegality seemed both appropriate and timely. “They were like little media stars for the radical left,” Thorwald’s younger sister Astrid Proll would recall years later.<ref>Astrid Proll, ''Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run'' 67-77 (Zurich: Scalo, 1998), 8.</ref>

One of these admirers was Ulrike Meinhof, who had divorced ''konkret'' publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl and moved to West Berlin with their twin daughters in 1967. Meinhof visited Ensslin in prison, and would approvingly write about the case in her magazine column. “[T]he progressive moment of arson in a department store does not lie in the destruction of goods,” she opined, “but in the criminality of the act, the breaking of the law…”<ref>Aust, 60.</ref>

Publicly, the arsonists’ friends from the K.1 commune declared their solidarity, Fritz Teufel paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht to the effect that “It’s always better to torch a department store than to run one.”<ref>Andreas Elter “Die raf und die Medien: Ein Fallbeispiel für terroristische Kommunikation,” ''Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung'' [online], August 20, 2007. Brecht, the famous communist playwright, had stated that “Small timers rob banks, professionals own them.”</ref> Privately, however, they wondered at how clumsily the whole thing had been carried out, some even supposing that the four might suffer from some “psychic failure,” a subconscious desire to go to jail.<ref>Aust, 51-2.</ref>

In October 1968, the four were each sentenced to three years in prison.

As the judge read out the verdict a familiar figure stood up: “This trial belongs before a student court,” Daniel Cohn-Bendit<ref>A law student at the University of Frankfurt, “Danny the Red” had been barred from France in 1968 for his symbolic leadership role in the May events of that year (it was his expulsion which had provoked students to occupy Nanterre University). Today, a respectable politician in the German Green Party, in 1969, he was (in) famous around the world, the very personification of anarchist student revolt. As we shall see in Section 11, (Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Left…), he would play an important role in deradicalizing a section of the movement in the mid-seventies.</ref> shouted, at which point the gallery erupted into pandemonium, spectators swarming the guards as two of the accused attempted to make a break for it. Three people, including Cohn-Bendit, were arrested as a result of this melee, and all four young arsonists remained in custody.<ref>Associated Press, “Cohn-Bendit Jailed; Court Brawl Follows,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', November 1, 1968.</ref>

The next day, persons unknown lobbed three molotov cocktails into the Frankfurt courthouse.<ref>''European Stars and Stripes'', “New Violence Hits Frankfurt,” November 2, 1968.</ref> Again, no one was hurt.

The arsonists had been represented by Horst Mahler, whom the state failed to have disbarred just days after this defeat, in the hearings which would provoke the aforementioned Battle of Tegeler Weg. The four would not be able to participate in that historic rout of the West Berlin police: despite appealing their sentence, they remained imprisoned until June of 1969. Only then were they finally released on their own recognizance until such a time as the court finally reached its decision.

As the summer of 69 turned to fall and the court continued to deliberate, the newly released Ensslin, Baader, and Proll would busy themselves working in the “apprentices’ collectives” scene. These collectives consisted of young runaways from state homes, and were at the time the object of political campaigning from the disintegrating APO. As Astrid Proll would recall:<blockquote>''When Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin were released from custody they knew exactly what they wanted. Unlike the drugged “communards” they radiated great clarity and resolve… Gudrun and Andreas launched a big campaign in Frankfurt against the authoritarian regimes in young offender institutions. We lived with youths who had escaped from closed institutions, joined them in fighting for their rights, and managed to achieve some successes. Ulrike Meinhof, as a commited (sic), critical journalist, joined us and became friends with Gudrun and Andreas.''<ref>Proll, 8.</ref> </blockquote>In November 1969, the court denied their appeal and ordered the four back to prison: only Söhnlein turned himself in. Ensslin and Baader went underground and set about establishing the contacts that would be necessary for a prolonged campaign of armed struggle. Thorwald Proll was soon abandoned—he was not considered serious enough— but his sister Astrid joined them.

Over the next months, the fugitives would cross into France and Italy and back to West Berlin again, laying the groundwork for the future organization. At this point, they resumed contact with their lawyer Horst Mahler,<ref>Aust, 73.</ref> who was still facing criminal charges stemming from the April 1968 revolt.<ref>Associated Press, “West Berlin Publisher is Sentenced,” ''Danville Bee'', February 16, 1970.</ref> While enduring these legal battles, Mahler had himself been trying to set up a “militant group” in Berlin,<ref>Aust, 77.</ref> and so joining forces with his former clients simply seemed like a wise strategic decision.

At the same time, the serious Marxist-Leninists considered—and rejected—the idea of joining forces with the anarchist guerilla groups that were coalescing within the Roaming Hash Rebels scene. The reasons for this decision to continue following separate paths are not clear-cut, and the consequences were more nuanced than might be expected. It is important to remember that many of the figures involved knew each other from the APO, in some cases were friends, and certainly would have had opinions about each other’s politics and personalities. It has been said that Dieter Kunzelmann, a prominent figure in the Hash Rebels scene, was wary of Baader claiming leadership.<ref>Ibid.</ref> It has also been suggested that the RAF as a whole had a haughty manner, and was made up of middle-class students who didn’t fit in with the supposedly more proletarian 2JM.<ref>Baumann, 77-78.</ref>

While none of the guerillas have ever said as much, one cannot help but wonder what RAF members might have thought of the countercultural scene out of which the Hash Rebels had developed, specifically the sexual arrangements. The K.1 commune was not only famous for its brilliant agit prop, its radical cultural experiments, and its phenomenal drug consumption, but also for its iconic role in the sexual revolution which swept the Federal Republic in the years of the apo. At the same time as K.1’s sexual politics constituted a reaction to the oppressive conservatism of Christian Germany, it was also very much a macho scene built around the desires of key men involved. Polygamy was almost mandatory, and women were passed around between the “revolutionaries”—as one male communard put it, “It’s like training a horse; one guy has to break her in, then she’s available for everyone.”<ref>Herzog, 425.</ref> As Bommi Baumann would later admit regarding the Hash Rebels, “They were just pure oppressors of women; it can’t be put any other way.”<ref>Baumann, 75.</ref>

There were always many women playing central roles in the RAF. It is difficult to imagine Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, or Astrid Proll putting up with the kind of sexist libertinage which has been documented in the West Berlin anarchist scene. Indeed, during her own period in the wild depths of the counterculture, Proll had not gone to K.1 but had chosen to live in a women’s only commune, helping to form a short-lived female version of the Hash Rebels, the Militant Black Panther Aunties.<ref>Eileen MacDonald, ''Shoot the Women First'' (London: Arrow Books Ltd., 1991), 209-210.</ref>

These various explanations, however, are not only difficult to evaluate, they also risk obscuring the fact that cooperation between the anarchist guerilla scene and the Marxist-Leninists would continue throughout the seventies, many members of the former eventually joining the RAF, while a few individuals continued to carry out operations with both organizations. Certainly, from what can be seen, a high level of coordination and solidarity existed between the groups at all times. While their supporters might occasionally engage in unpleasant disputes, the actual fighters seem to have maintained good relations even as they traveled their different roads.

Ultimately, in the early 80s, the 2nd of June Movement would publicly announce that it was joining the RAF en masse. This provided the opportunity for some 2JM political prisoners who opposed the merger to give their own explanation as to why they had always chosen to fight separately. Although these observations were made over ten years later, they help shed light on relations in these early days:<blockquote>''The contradiction between the RAF and the 2nd of June at that time was the result of the different ways the groups had evolved: the 2nd of June Movement out of their members’ social scene and the RAF on the basis of their theoretical revolutionary model. And, equally, as a result of the RAF’s centralized organizational model on the one hand, and our autonomous, decentralized structures on the other. Another point of conflict was to be found in the question of the cadre going underground, which the RAF insisted on as a point of principle.''

''As such, the immediate forerunners to the 2nd of June Movement were always open to a practical—proletarian—alternative; an alternative that had nothing to do with competition, but more to do with different visions of the revolutionary struggle.''

''There was strong mutual support and common actions in the early period of both groups… At the time both groups proceeded with the idea that the future would determine which political vision would prove effective in the long run.''<ref>Ralf Reinders, Klaus Viehmann, and Ronald Fritzsch, “Zu der angeblichen Auflösung der Bewegung 2. Juni im Juni 1980,” <nowiki>http://www.bewegung.in/mate_nichtaufloesung.html</nowiki>. This is an excerpt from a much longer document which, along with the 2JM’s declaration of the merger, will appear (translated) in our second volume, ''The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Vol. II: Dancing with Imperialism: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.''</ref> </blockquote>So, during this germinal period, friendly contacts were maintained even as differences were clarified between the various activists who were choosing to take the next step in the struggle.

For shelter and support, those who were underground became dependent on the goodwill and loyalty of friends and allies who maintained a legal existence. One of those who occasionally sheltered Baader and Ensslin was Ulrike Meinhof, who was already feeling that their commitment and sense of purpose contrasted sharply with what she experienced as her own increasingly hollow existence as a middle class media star, albeit one with “notorious” left-wing politics. At the same time, Meinhof continued to work with young people in closed institutions, specifically girls in reform school, with whom she began producing a television docudrama.

While Meinhof eventually became world famous for what she did next in life, it is worth emphasizing that her time as a journalist was far from insignificant. As her biographer Jutta Ditfurth has argued:<blockquote>''With her columns, and above all with the radio features about things like industrial labor and reform school children, Meinhof had an enormous influence on the thinking of many people. Much more than she realized. She took on themes that only exploded into view years later. For instance, the women’s question. When women in the SDS defended themselves from macho guys, they did it with words and sentences from Meinhof’s articles. She could formulate things succinctly.''<ref>Jutta Ditfurth, interview by Arno Luik, ''“Sie war die große Schwester der 68er,”'' Stern 46 (2007).</ref> </blockquote>Baader was captured in West Berlin on April 3, 1970, set up by a police informant.<ref>Aust, 81.</ref> Peter Urbach had been active around the commune scene for years, all the while secretly acting on behalf of the state. He was particularly “close” to the K.1 commune, and had known Baader since at least 1967. While the bombs and guns Urbach supplied to young rebels never seemed to work, the hard drugs he provided did their job nicely, showing that even as theories of the “liberating” effects of narcotics were being touted in the scene, the state knew on which side its bread was buttered.<ref>Ibid., 47.</ref>

While it has always been stressed that there were neither hierarchies nor favorites amongst the various combatants, Baader seemed to bring with him a sense of daring and possibility which would always make him first amongst equals, for better or for worse. As such, following his capture, all attention was focused on how he could be freed from the state’s clutches.

A plan was hatched, whereby Meinhof would use her press credentials to apply for permission to work with Baader on a book about youth centers, an area in which by now they both had some experience. The prison authorities reluctantly agreed, and on May 14 Baader was escorted under guard to meet her at the Institute for Social Issues Library in the West Berlin suburbs.

This provided the necessary opportunity. Once Baader and Meinhof were in the library, two young women entered the building: Irene Goergens, a teenager who Meinhof had recruited from her work with reform school kids, and Ingrid Schubert, a radical doctor from the West Berlin scene. They were followed by a masked and armed Gudrun Ensslin, and an armed man. Drawing their weapons, these rescuers moved to free Baader. When an elderly librarian, Georg Linke, attempted to intervene, he was shot in his liver.<ref>According to several accounts, Linke was accidentally shot by the man at the scene. Apparently, he had two weapons, an air gun and a real gun, and he intended to scare him with the former, but got confused as to which was which. (MacDonald, 213.)</ref> The guards drew their weapons and opened fire, missing everyone, and all six jumped out of the library window and into the getaway car waiting on the street below.<ref>Aust, 6-9.</ref>

Barely a month after his arrest, Baader was once again free.

The library breakout made headlines around the world, both Meinhof and Ensslin being identified as likely participants. Journalists tried to outdo each other in their sensationalist tripe, describing the one as a middle class poseur and the other as a former porn actress.<ref>Neil Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed by Violence of Berlin Gunmen,” ''Winnipeg Free Press'', July 4, 1970.</ref> Headlines continued to be made when a neofascist arms dealer, Günther Voigt, was arrested and charged with selling the guerilla their guns.<ref>Ibid., Becker, 125.</ref> Then, French journalist Michele Ray declared that she had met with Mahler, Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader in West Berlin—she promptly sold the extensive interviews she had taped to ''Spiegel''.<ref>Aust, 15-16.</ref>

The group had made an impression. Its first action had struck a chord. Yet this was very much a mixed blessing, as Astrid Proll, who had driven the getaway car during the jailbreak,<ref>Ben Lewis and Richard Klein, ''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror'' (United Kingdom: a Mentorn production for bbc four, 2002).</ref> would later explain:<blockquote>''I think we were all very nervous; I remember some people throwing up. Because we weren’t so wonderful criminals, we weren’t so wonderful with the guns, we sort of involved a socalled criminal who could do it so much better than we, and… he was so nervous that he shot somebody. He didn’t kill him, but he shot him very very badly, and that was really really very bad for the whole start of it.''<ref>Ibid.</ref> </blockquote>As she elaborated elsewhere:<blockquote>After a man had been severely hurt… we found ourselves on wanted lists. It was an accident that accelerated the development of the underground life of the group. Ulrike Meinhof, who had so far been at the fringes of the group, was all of a sudden wanted on every single billpost for attempted murder against a reward of dm 10,000… When we were underground there were no more discussions, there was only action.<ref>Proll, 10.</ref> </blockquote>In what would be a recurrent phenomenon, the state made use of the media frenzy around the prison-break to help push through new repressive legislation—in this case the so-called “Hand Grenade Law,” by which West Berlin police were equipped with hand grenades, semiautomatic revolvers, and submachine guns.<ref>Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed."</ref>

This was all hotly debated on the left, prompting the fugitives to send a letter to the radical newspaper ''883'', in which they explained (somewhat defensively) the action and their future plans. At the insistence of the radical former film student Holger Meins who was working at ''883'' at the time and who would later himself become a leading figure in the RAF, the newspaper published the statement, making it the first public document from the guerilla. (Even without Meins’ support, it would have been odd for ''883'' to not publish the text: Baader, Meinhof, Mahler, and Ensslin had all formerly served in the editorial collective, as had several other individuals who would go on to join the guerilla.)<ref>Datenbank des deutschsprachigen Anarchismus: Periodika, “Agit 883,” <nowiki>http://projekte.free.de/dada/dada-p/P0000921.htm</nowiki>.</ref>

The Red Army Faction had been born.

The next year was spent acquiring technical skills, including a trip to Jordan where more than a dozen of the aspiring German guerillas received training from the PLO. While this first trip may not have had great significance for the group, given the subsequent importance of its connection with certain Palestinian organizations, it may be useful to examine the context in which it occurred.

At the time, Jordan contained a very large Palestinian refugee population, one which had swollen since the 1967 Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; by 1970, the Palestinians constituted roughly 1,000,000 of the country’s total population of 2,299,000

Based in the refugee camps, the PLO managed to constitute itself as a virtual parallel state within the country. Indeed, many considered that revolution in Jordan could be one step towards the defeat of Israel, an idea expressed by the slogan, “The road to Tel Aviv lies through Amman”—a sentiment which worried King Hussein, to say the least— as did the increasing use of Jordanian territory as a rear base area for all manner of Palestinian radical organizations.<ref>Helen Chapin Metz, Library of Congress Federal Research Division, ''Israel, a Country Study'' (Whitefish, Montana: Keesinger publishing 2004), 110.</ref>

In September 1970, the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine skyjacked three western aircRAFt, landing them in Dawson’s Field, a remote desert airstrip in Jordan. This provided Hussein with the excuse he needed, and the PLO soon came under attack from the monarch’s armed forces, supported by Israel. By the time a truce was brokered, between 4,000 and 10,000—Yassir ARAFat would claim as many as 20,000—Palestinians had been killed, including many noncombatants. (This would be remembered as “Black September,” and it was in memory of this massacre that the PLO’s unofficial guerilla wing would adopt that name.)

Prior to this, the Palestinians’ Jordanian bases were important sources of inspiration and education for revolutionaries, not only in the Arab world, but also in many European countries. While the largest number of visitors came from Turkey<ref>Cengiz Candar, “A Turk in the Palestinian Resistance,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 30, no. 1. (Autumn, 2000): 68-82.</ref>—many of whom would stay and fight alongside the Palestinians—there were also Maoists, socialists, and aspiring guerillas from France, Denmark, Sweden, and, of course, West Germany. (It would be claimed that members of the Roaming Hash Rebels scene had already received training from the Palestinians, and Baumann has pointed to this as a turning point in its transformation into a guerilla underground.)<ref>Baumann, 59: “There was a split when people got back from Palestine. The Palestinian faction said, ‘things don’t make sense the way they’re going now. We have to really start with the armed struggle.’ That meant giving up the Blues, the whole broad open scene.”</ref>

Even during their Middle Eastern sojourn, the RAF continued to make headlines in Germany, Horst Mahler sending a photo of himself waving a gun and dressed like a fedayeen to a radical newspaper with the message, “Best wishes to your readers from the land of A Thousand and One Nights!”<ref>Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed.”</ref>

Juvenile theatrics aside, this trip signaled the very public beginning of an aspect of the RAF which would bedevil the police, namely, their proficient use of foreign countries as rear base areas. As has been discussed elsewhere:<blockquote>''Rear base areas are little discussed, but essential to guerillas. This is something precise: a large area or territory, bordering on the main battle zone, where the other side cannot freely operate. Either for reasons of remoteness or impenetrable mountain ranges, or because it crosses political boundaries.''<ref>Butch Lee, ''Jailbreak Out Of History: The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman'' (Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2000), 25.</ref> </blockquote>The RAF would make extensive use of various Arab countries as rear base areas throughout their existence, places where one could go not only to train, but also to hide when Europe got too “hot.” During the 1970s at least, it does not seem to have been the governments of these countries which provided the group with aid and succor, but rather various revolutionary Palestinian organizations which were deeply rooted in the refugee populations throughout the region. In this way, in the years following the Palestinians’ defeat at the hands of Jordan’s armed forces in 1970, Lebanon and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen emerged as homes away from home for more than one West German revolutionary.

Another source of foreign support, of course, was the “communist” German Democratic Republic—East Germany—from which the RAF and other guerilla groups would receive various forms of assistance over the years. As far as the RAF is concerned, it is unclear exactly how or when this relationship began. Certainly if it existed in the early seventies, this was very secret, and indeed unimagined on the radical left, for which the “other” German state remained a corrupt and authoritarian regime, alternately “Stalinist” or “revisionist,” but in any case one from which little good could come.

And yet it is known that, as early as 1970, the GDR did choose to knowingly allow the guerilla to pass through its territory, for instance on flights to and from the Middle East. After the first trip to Jordan, it even detained one member—Hans-Jürgen Bäcker—and questioned him about the underground for twenty-four hours, but then released him.<ref>Aust, 99-100. Bäcker would claim that based on their questions, it was clear the East Germans were already well informed about the group’s activities. In November 1972, Bommi Baumann was similarly detained at the East German border while in possession of false identification papers; he was similarly questioned, and provided information on almost one hundred people in the West German underground before being released. Jan-Hendrik Schulz “Zur Geschichte der Roten Armee Fraktion (raf) und ihrer Kontexte: Eine Chronik,” ''Zeitgeschichte Online,'' May 2007</ref> Clearly, by the end of the decade, this policy had been extended to provide other sorts of assistance. It has also been claimed that even at the time of the 1970 training expedition, there were plans to relocate Meinhof’s twin daughters to East Germany if their father won custody away from her sister.<ref>Ditfurth, 290. See Appendix V—Strange Stories: Peter Homann and Stefan Aust, pages 557-558.</ref>

Given the unpopularity of the GDR, why was this aid accepted, and what effects did it have on the RAF?

The answer to the first of these questions is easy enough to guess: at first, East German “aid” seems to have been very limited in scope, really little more than turning a blind eye to what was going on.<ref>''Deutsche Presse-Agentur'', “Stasi soll raf über Razzien informiert haben,” September 29, 2007</ref> Who could complain about that?

Eventually, as we will see, more substantial favors would be forthcoming: shelter, training, even new identities—and yet, for most of its history, there is absolutely no indication that the RAF was choosing its targets or formulating its ideology to please foreign patrons. This would become more debatable near the end, but certainly in the 1970s, the RAF-''Stasi'' connection seems to have been casual if not ephemeral.

At most, one might perhaps argue a case of the GDR egging the guerilla on as a way to get at the Americans, in the context of the ongoing conflagration in Vietnam.

Certainly, throughout the 1970s, the Palestinian connection was of far greater importance, and yet the guerilla’s first visit to the Middle East ended on an unpromising note: according to several reports, the West Germans were far from ideal guests, and the Palestinians eventually sent them on their way.

They returned to West Berlin—via the GDR—as the summer of 1970 came to an end.<ref>Aust, 99, 101.</ref>

The group now set about obtaining cars and locating safehouses. New contacts were made, and new members were recruited, among them Ilse Stachowiak, Ali Jansen, Uli Scholze, Beate Sturm, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe, this last being an old friend of Meinhof’s, and himself a founding member of Kommune 2.<ref>Kommune 2 was another West Berlin commune, one with a more “serious” and “intellectual” reputation than the yippiesque K.1.</ref> Some of these individuals would soon think better of their decision and drop out at the first opportunity, others would determine the very course of the RAF, and in some cases give their lives in the struggle.

But first, the young guerilla needed to acquire funds, and to this end a daring combination of bank raids was planned in cooperation with members of the Roaming Hash Rebels scene.<ref>Reinders, Viehmann, and Fritzsch.</ref> Within ten minutes, on September 29, three different West Berlin banks were hit: the revolutionaries managed to make off with over 220,000dm (just over $60,000) without firing a shot or suffering a single arrest.<ref>Aust, 108.</ref> As Horst Mahler’s former legal assistant Monika Berberich, who had herself joined the RAF, would later explain, “It was not about redistributing wealth, it was about getting money, and we weren’t going to mug grannies in the streets.”<ref>''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.''</ref>

The “triple coup” was a smashing success. Things were looking good.

Then, on October 8, police received an anonymous tip about two safehouses in West Berlin: Mahler and Berberich, as well as Ingrid Schubert, Irene Goergens, and Brigitte Asdonk, were all arrested. (It was suspected that Hans-Jürgen Bäcker had snitched to the police. He was confronted and denied the charge, but quickly parted ways with the guerilla. The fact that he was left unmolested should be taken into account when evaluating later claims that the RAF executed suspected traitors or those who wished to leave its ranks.)<ref>Aust, 111-112.</ref>

Following these arrests, the RAF moved to transfer operations outside of West Berlin, and members of the group began crossing over into West Germany proper. During this period, the fledgling guerilla burglarized the town halls of two small towns, taking blank id cards, passports, and official stamps for use in future operations.

On December 20, Karl-Heinz Ruhland and RAF members Ali Jansen and Beate Sturm were stopped by police in Oberhausen. Ruhland, who was only peripheral to the group, surrendered while Jansen and Sturm made their getaway. The next day Jansen was arrested along with RAF member Uli Scholze while trying to steal a Mercedes-Benz. (Sturm soon left the guerilla, as did Scholze when he was released one day after his capture. Ruhland cooperated with police, helping to reveal the location of safehouses and testifying in court against RAF members. Jansen received a ten year sentence for shooting at police.)

On February 10, 1971, Astrid Proll was spotted by Frankfurt police along with fellow RAF member Manfred Grashof. The police opened fire in a clear attempt to kill the two as they fled; luckily, they missed. Subsequently, the cops involved would claim that they had shot in self-defense, yet unbeknownst to them the entire scene had been observed by the ''Verfassungsschutz'', who filed a report detailing how neither of the guerillas had even drawn their weapons. This fact would remain suppressed by the state for years.<ref>Ibid., 140.</ref>

The alleged “firefight” with Proll and Grashof was added to a growing list of propaganda stories used by the police to justify a massive nationwide search, with Federal Minister of the Interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher publicly declaring the RAF to be “Public Enemy Number One.” Apartments were raided in Gelsenkirchen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Bremen, yet the guerilla managed to elude capture.

Meanwhile, the trial of Horst Mahler, Ingrid Schubert, and Irene Goergens opened in West Berlin on March 1. Schubert and Goergens were charged with attempted murder and using force in the Baader jailbreak, while Mahler (who had arranged to be in court during the action, and so had an alibi) was charged as an accessory, and with illegal possession of a firearm.

This first RAF trial would set the tone for twenty years of collusion between the media, the police, and shadowy elements intent on presenting the guerilla in the most horrific light. The term “psychological warfare” was eventually adopted by the left to describe the phenomenon.

Already in February, police had announced that the RAF had plans to kidnap Chancellor Willy Brandt in order to force the state to release Mahler.<ref>Associated Press, “Paper reports plot to kidnap Willy Brandt,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', February 13, 1971.</ref> The guerilla would subsequently deny this charge, claiming it was intended to make them look like “political idiots.”<ref>See page 84.</ref>

Then, on February 25, a seven-year-old boy was kidnapped. Newspapers announced that his captors were demanding close to $50,000 ransom as well as the release of “the left-wing lawyer in Berlin,” which journalists quickly explained must be a reference to Mahler.<ref>Associated Press, “Terrorists Take Child as Hostage,” ''Troy Record'', February 25, 1971.</ref>

Clearly horrified, Mahler made a public appeal to the kidnappers to release the child.<ref>Associated Press,“Wrong Boy Kidnaped, Released; Ransom Paid,” ''Panama City News Herald'', February 27, 1971.</ref> At the same time the provincial government of North Rhine-Westphalia agreed to pay the ransom—the boy was from a working class family that could not afford such a sum.<ref>Ibid.</ref>

Arrangements were made, a well-known lawyer agreeing to act as the go between. The money was delivered on Saturday February 27 and a young Michael Luhmer was released in the woods outside Munich, suffering from influenza but otherwise unharmed. According to the lawyer who personally delivered the money to the kidnappers, they denied being in the least bit interested in Mahler or anyone else from the RAF. Indeed, he came away with the impression that they were in fact “a rightist group like the Nazi party.”<ref>Associated Press, “Kidnaped German Boy, 7, Freed After Ransom,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', February 29, 1971.</ref> Police later announced that they suspected the son of a former SS officer of being involved in the plot.<ref>Associated Press, “Police Hunting SS Member’s Son in Kidnapings,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', March 2, 1971.</ref>

This first kidnapping occurred just as Mahler, Schubert, and Goergens were about to go on trial. This is what could be called a “false flag” action, a term referring to an attack carried out by certain parties under the banner of another group to which they are hostile in order to discredit them. As we shall see, false flag attacks were to plague the RAF throughout the 1970s, as all manner of antisocial crimes would be carried out or threatened by persons pretending to be from the guerilla.

The RAF repeatedly denied its involvement in these actions, and yet the slander often stuck.

Doubly vexing is the fact that in most of these false flag actions, no firm evidence has ever come to light proving who in fact was responsible. Suspicions have ranged from some secret service working for the state, or for NATO, or else perhaps neofascists, or some combination thereof. Or perhaps these were “normal” criminal acts, and it was the media or police who were fabricating details to tie them to the RAF.

Judging from experiences elsewhere in Europe, it is entirely possible that elements within the state, within NATO, and within the far right collaborated in some of these attacks. Such scenarios are known, for instance, to have played themselves out in France, Italy, and Turkey. The goal for such operations was generally not simply to discredit the left-wing guerilla, but rather to create a general climate of fear in which people would rally to the hard right.

In most cases, we may never know, but amazingly enough, there was a second false flag kidnapping during the first RAF trial, and the authors of this second crime actually ended up admitting the ruse.

On Sunday April 25, newspapers reported that a university professor and his friend had been kidnapped by the guerilla, which was threatening to execute them if Mahler, Schubert, and Goergens were not released. The kidnappers were allegedly demanding that the three be allowed to travel to a country of their choosing, and insisted that this be announced on television.<ref>United Press International, “Professor Endangered by Kidnapper’s Threat,” ''Dominion Post'', April 25, 1971.</ref>

Two days later, the men were found, one of them tied to a tree. The kidnappers, however, were nowhere in sight. After some questioning, the “captives” broke down and admitted that they had staged the entire thing in the hopes of scaring people into voting against the “left-wing” SPD in the provincial elections in Schleswig-Holstein.<ref>United Press International, “West German Professor Admits Kidnaping Hoax,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', April 27, 1971.</ref> The mastermind behind this plan, Jürgen Rieger,<ref>Jürgen Rieger is a lawyer whose career has been devoted to defending those charged under Germany’s anti-Nazi laws. Ironically, in 2006, both Rieger and Mahler, the latter by this time a Holocaust denier himself, would end up working on the legal defense team of neo-nazi publisher Ernst Zundel, who was charged in connection with the publication of Holocaust denial literature.</ref> was active in neofascist circles; he would eventually be sentenced to six months in prison as a result.

As a corollary to these staged actions, the police were happy to oblige by setting the scene at the trial itself:<blockquote>''The criminal court in the Moabit prison had been transformed into a fortress for the trial. There were policemen armed with submachine guns patrolling the corridors, the entrances and exits; outside the building stood vehicles with their engines running and carrying teams of men, there were officers carrying radio equipment, and more units waited in the inner courtyard to go into action if needed.''<ref>Aust, 144.</ref> </blockquote>Far-right hoaxes were helping to justify shocking levels of police militarization and repression. One did not need to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to think that the state was more than willing to play dirty in order to get rid of its new armed opponents and that the talk of a “fascist drift” was more than mere rhetoric.

Not that the radical left was unwilling to fight for the captured combatants, though kidnapping innocent children or academics would never feature amongst its strategies. When kidnappings would eventually be carried out, the targets would always be important members of the establishment, men with personal ties to the system against which the guerilla fought.

In 1971, however, nobody was in a position to carry out such operations, and so the struggle for the prisoners’ freedom took place largely in the streets. As the trial wrapped up, rioting broke out for two days in West Berlin: “youths blocked tRAFfic, and smashed store and car windows,” all the while shouting slogans like “Free Mahler!” and “Hands off Mahler!”<ref>Associated Press, “Berlin Cops, Leftists Clash for 2nd Night,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 17, 1971.</ref>

Clearly, although its capacities were not yet developed, a section of the left was willing to carry out militant actions in support of the guerilla, while itself preferring to remain aboveground.

In late May, after twenty-two days in court, the verdicts came down. Goergens was sentenced to four years youth custody, and Schubert received a six-year sentence.<ref>Jillian Becker, ''Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader Meinhof Gang'' (London: Panther Granada Publishing, 1978), 307.</ref>

It should be noted that both women would soon have additional years tacked on, as they also faced charges relating to various bank robberies.<ref>When Goergens was finally released in May 1977, she did not return to the guerilla. Schubert, as we shall see, never made it out of prison alive.</ref>

Throughout the trial, other combatants had been picked up by the state.

On April 12, 1971, Ilse Stachowiak was recognized by a policeman and arrested in Frankfurt. Known by her nickname “Tinny,” Stachowiak was probably the youngest member of the guerilla, having joined in 1970 at the age of sixteen.

The next day, Rolf Heissler was arrested trying to rob a bank in Munich. Heissler had previously been active in the Munich Tupamaros (a Bavarian group inspired by the West Berlin Tupamaros),<ref>Baumann, 63.</ref> but had followed his ex-wife Brigitte Mohnhaupt into the RAF.

Then, on May 6, not three months after her narrow escape in Frankfurt, Astrid Proll was recognized in Hamburg by a gas station attendant who called the police—she tried to escape by car, but was surrounded by armed cops and arrested.<ref>Macdonald, 214-215.</ref>

Two documents appeared about this time, each allegedly produced by the RAF. The first of these, ''Regarding the Armed Struggle in West Europe'', was published under the innocent title “New TRAFfic Regulations” by the radical West Berlin publishing house of Klaus Wagenbach.<ref>Aust, 142.</ref> Not only did this lead to Wagenbach receiving a suspended nine-month sentence under §129<ref>Cobler, 113.</ref> —the catch-all “supporting a criminal organization” paragraph of the Orwellian 1951 security legislation— but the document was quickly disavowed by the RAF itself: it had been written by Mahler in prison, without consultation with any of the others, and did not sit well with the rest of the group.

While Mahler would remain in the RAF for the time being, this was the first visible sign of an ongoing process of estrangement between the former attorney and the rest of the guerilla.

Almost at the same time as Mahler’s document began to circulate, a second text, one which enjoyed the approval of the entire RAF, was released. On May 1, at the annual May Day demonstrations, supporters distributed what became known as the RAF’s foundational manifesto, emblazoned with a red star and a Kalashnikov submachine gun: The Urban Guerilla Concept. This text was widely reprinted, not only in radical publications like ''883'', but in the mainstream ''Spiegel'', the result of a deal whereby the liberal weekly agreed to “donate” 20,000 dm to youth shelters.<ref>''tageszeitung'' “30 Jahre Deutscher Herbst ‘Die RAF war nicht ganz so schlicht,’” Deutschlandradio, October 17, 2007.</ref>

=== Faced With This Justice System, We Can't Be Bothered Defending Ourselves ===
<blockquote>''This was Thorwald Proll’s closing statement in the Frankfurt Department Store Firebombing Trial. (M. & S.)''</blockquote>The trial for conspiracy to commit arson followed the trial for committing arson. But that’s obviously another question. Justice is the justice of the ruling class. Faced with a justice system that speaks in the name of the ruling class—and speaks dishonestly—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that forced a student couple underground by using laws regarding breach of the public peace and causing a disturbance from the year 1870/71 to sentence them to 12 months without parole, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (breachers of the public peace, torch their ramshackle peace).

Faced with a justice system that uses laws from 1870/71 and then talks about what’s right—and speaks dishonestly—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that gave Daniel Cohn-Bendit<ref>Earlier that summer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit had received an eight-month suspended sentence for getting through security at a protest against the German Book Trade’s “Peace Prize” being bestowed upon President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal.</ref> (lex Benda, lex Bendit) an 8-month suspended sentence for jumping over a security fence, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that, on the other hand, only pursued most Nazi trials in order to ease their own guilty right-wing conscience, trials in which they charge anyone that swore the Führer Oath<ref>An oath of fealty to Hitler and the NSDAP that all people working in the public sector were obliged to swear. Millions of people swore this oath for no other reason than to retain their employment.</ref> as a criminal, an act which the entire justice system quite willingly engaged in itself in 1933; faced with a justice system like that, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that prosecutes the minor murderers of Jews and lets the major murderers of Jews run around free, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that in 1933 shamelessly plunged into fascism and in 1945 just as shamelessly deserted it, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that already in the Weimar Republic always sentenced leftists more heavily (Ernst Niekisch,<ref>Ernst Niekisch, briefly involved in the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919, went on to become a leader of German chauvinist “National Bolshevism”—it is unclear why Proll singles him out as an example of the Weimar regime persecuting leftists, although under the Nazis he would be sentenced to life imprisonment for “literary high treason” in 1937.</ref> Ernst Toller<ref>Ernst Toller was a Bavarian Jew and an anarchist who was imprisoned for his role on the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. (He subsequently went into exile, eventually committing suicide in his hotel room in New York City in 1939.)</ref>) than right wingers (Adolf Hitler<ref>On April 1, 1924, Hitler was sentenced to five years for his November 8, 1923, attempted fascist coup, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. He was pardoned and released in December of 1924, having served less than a year of his sentence.</ref>), that rewarded the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht<ref>Luxemburg and Liebknecht were leading figures in the failed 1918 German communist uprising. They were both captured, tortured, and murdered by rightwing militias, the ''Freikorps''.</ref> (and in so doing became complicit in their deaths), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Comrades, we want to take a moment to remember Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—stand up!—the eye of the law sits in this court.

Faced with a justice system that never dismantled its authoritarian structure, but constantly renews it, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that says might makes right and might comes before right (might is always right), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. All power to freedom! Faced with a justice system that defends property and possessions better than it does human beings, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that is an instrument of social order, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that makes laws against the people rather than for them, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Human rights only for the right humans (the state that leans to the right). Right is what the state does, and it’s always right. The state is the only criminal activity allowed. In a capitalist democracy such as this, in an indirect democracy such as this, it is possible for anyone to end up ruling over anyone, and that’s how it should stay, and don’t ask for how much longer. The ruling morality is bourgeois morality, and bourgeois morality is immoral. Bourgeois morality is and will remain immoral. If it is reformed, it will only result in a new form of immorality (and nothing more). Faced with a justice system that undermines the ethical underpinnings of the people (whatever they may be), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. This state prosecutor is nothing more than a piece of the criminal justice system. He requested 6 years of prison time.

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that says it represents the people, but means that it represents the ruling class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that works to assure the ongoing reproduction of existing relationships, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system for which the (so-called) criminal class is and will remain the criminal class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. What does return to society mean? Back to which society? Back to the capitalist society where you will have the opportunity to re-offend? Back to the bourgeois, capitalist society that is itself a prison, which amounts to going from one hole to another

Every reform to criminal law only reforms the existing criminal injustice; criminal law is criminal injustice; the sentence is the injustice. I wouldn’t again offend against society, if they didn’t give me another reason to do so. How am I supposed to return changed to an unchanged society, and so on, and so forth. It is not the laws that need to be changed; it’s the society that must be changed. We want a socialist society. Faced with a justice system that plays homage to an abstract concept of law (Roman law is Bohemian law) and does not see individuals as the result of their society, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that treats defendants as second-class citizens, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that is a system of the ruling class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. (And furthermore) faced with a justice system that doesn’t reduce delinquency, but creates ever more of it (guilty verdicts and acquittals), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (the outcome can only serve their interests). In an authoritarian democracy like this one, it can never amount to more than an assessment of guilt or innocence. The judge sentences the individual, not the society and not himself. What’s the magic word? The magic word is power, and it means the death of freedom! What do we have here that does not come from Nietzsche, that sociopath? For example, the will to power. You should think about power, but do not think that power thinks about disempowering itself at some point; ergo: destroy power (the question of power, the power of the question). Faced with a justice system that wants power and not freedom, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (what freedom do you mean—bourgeois freedom is servitude, and socialist freedom is a long way off).

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that seeks to criminalize Kommune 1 and has persecuted them with an endless series of trials, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Such a justice system should itself be put on trial. Faced with a justice system that seeks to criminalize a section of the SDS, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. How can the public peace of 1870/71 be broken in 1967/68? Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace!

Furthermore, faced with a justice system with a concept of law—a deceitful concept—that is shaped by the opinions of the ruling class (already the case with Franz von Liszt<ref>Franz von Liszt (not to be confused with his cousin, the composer Franz Liszt) was a Prussian law professor whose work heavily influenced the 1882 Marburger Program, a conservative document that influenced the 1933 Nazi German Prevention of Crime Act.</ref> in 1882) we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that doesn’t see crime as a social phenomenon and which passes sentences that serve no social function (Franz von Liszt), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that speaks of punishment— meaning oppression, meaning repression—helping the offender, while in fact defending bourgeois society, always defending it, defending it to the end; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Quotes from the first draft of the reforms to the criminal code: “The bitter necessity of punishment.” “Responsibility lies with the law breakers” (and not the representatives of the law), “given the flawed nature of people” (and so it will remain in a capitalist society such as this, in which antiauthoritarian structures that promote perfection don’t exist and there are no examples of moral perfection—the principle of guilt, which guarantees the continuation of the principle of punishment, lives on, spelling the death of freedom and assuring the integrity of power). Another quote from the first draft of the criminal law reforms (this will be the last one): “(W)hat the principle of punishment presupposes is a virtually unchallenged standard of criminal law, etc., etc.” When will this stop?

Faced with a justice system that holds that the irrational standards of criminal law and criminology are appropriate, that denies the reality of the capitalist social order, that denies and suppresses psychology and the study of crime in a particularly nauseating way, constantly impeding them, that treats criminology as a science of social relationships; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that represents the law of the ruling class—represents duplicity—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Furthermore, bourgeois morality is and remains immoral, and if reformed, it is only as a new immorality. All attempts at reform are pointless, because they are inherent to the system. We demand the resignation of Minister of Justice Heinemann (also a pointless demand). Where is the judge who will turn his back on this crap and join the general strike, instead of remaining eternally stuck up to his armpits in this shit? Where are the antiauthoritarian judges? I can’t see them. This is your chance, Herr Zoebe,<ref>Gerhard Zoebe was the judge in this case.</ref> to be the first. I wrote that before I knew you. Later, you responded to the word democracy like it was leprosy, which is to say, you shrunk away from the concept. And for you, resocialization sends you into a rage; it’s the final blow. And for you it should be the final blow. Always: the final blow.

Faced with a justice system that has completely authoritarian judges, like the judge Schwalbe,<ref>A judge in Frankfurt who often presided over trials against left-wing defendants.</ref> we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (but one Schwalbe doesn’t make for an authoritarian summer). Faced with a justice system that has judges like the judge in Hamburg, who on August 15 of this year, following a 2½ minute hearing, sentenced a young worker to 4 months with the possibility of parole, beginning at Easter, with the comment that the young worker should be happy —in spite of the brevity of the hearing—that he was given a chance to clarify his political motivations, and then went on to tell this young worker that he should stop worrying about things that don’t concern him; faced with a justice system that is made up of such judges, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace.

Faced with a justice system that has judges like those that presided over the Timo Rinnelt trial,<ref>In 1964, seven year-old Timo Rinnelt of Wiesbaden was kidnapped and murdered. Some years later, his neighbour, a twenty-seven year-old man, was arrested for the crime. In 1968, he received a life sentence.</ref> once more extending the reach of the German billy club, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

And finally, faced with a justice system that has judges like the judge presiding in the case against Jürgen Bartsch,<ref>Jürgen Bartsch, a German serial killer, who as a child suffered both emotional and sexual abuse, was responsible for four brutal child murders in the 60s.</ref> who was sentenced to life imprisonment on the grounds that if he had wanted to he could have struggled to control his abnormal appetites (whatever that means), with the judge saying in conclusion, “And may God help you to learn to control you appetites”—so God and not society—and for such a judge it would be preferable if he had never been born or had died long ago; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

It has been said that the trial of Jürgen Bartsch was the trial of the century. It was actually a trial against this century, and the sentence spoke for this century, which is to say, it spoke for the morality of the preceding century (it will only get worse), which in this trial was celebrated as a barbaric triumph. When the judgment was read, the spectators, a petit bourgeois gathering, clapped and cheered. Nobody forbid that. The teeth of justice were chattering, but nobody heard that. Child murderers are useful. They eliminate all consciousness that criminals were once themselves children (the authoritarian upbringing). A hundred children of West German families are beaten to death every year. Beaten to death. Child murderers work to ease our conscience about this slaughter. And what of the daily murder of children in Vietnam (with its breathtaking body-count)? What do respectable people pray for? Today we get our daily ration of murder (The Springer papers are the centerpiece of every breakfast).

Furthermore, bourgeois morality is the ruling morality, and bourgeois morality is immoral. Faced with a justice system that has state prosecutors like state prosecutor Griebel,<ref>Walter Griebel was the prosecutor in the case at hand.</ref> who told me “under four eyes”<ref>In German “''unter vier Augen''”; this is an obvious reference to the Nazi term for a meetings involving only Hitler and one of his close associates. The content of these discussions was meant to stay between the two men.</ref> that he holds Marx’s teachings in the highest regard (but what does he do about it?), that he is as much a prisoner of a labyrinthine bureaucracy as I (but what does he do against it?). He accuses the left here of only wanting to change superficial things, but nothing beyond that (but he bears the mark of Cain of repression on his forehead), and he had the effrontery to bare his broken bourgeois heart to me, saying that on the one hand he is troubled by the rigidity of the ruling conditions, while on the other—how grotesque—he continued to speak of the legitimacy of the laws of 1870/71—speaking deceptively—faced with such a justice system, I can’t be bothered defending myself, and we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Imprison the state prosecutors. Where is the state prosecutor who will indict the state?

Faced with a justice system that is charging us with life-threatening arson, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system, in the eyes of which, we have every reason to believe, we are politically tainted from the outset, we cannot defend ourselves (all the charged are arsonists and all judges are honest men). Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace.

And furthermore, faced with a justice system that speaks for the ruling class—and speaks deceptively—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system with custodial judges as authoritarian as judge Kappel, who gave every impression of being convinced of the guilt (whatever that is) of all of the accused before the trial even started. Amongst other things, his macho aggressiveness is such that he said to me, “Take your hand out of your pocket.” When I put my other hand in my pocket (obviously not the same one), he didn’t say anything, he just laughed, and my laughter caught in my throat at the thought that he and I could ever laugh at the same thing for the same reason—a question of consciousness. Faced with such a justice system, I can’t be bothered defending myself, and we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with such a decadent justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (a legal right is only what is right legally). Faced with a justice system that grotesquely misuses detention, I can’t be bothered defending myself. If you have a fixed address, the justice system holds on to you until you lose it, which is to say, until you’re tossed out. Then the justice system says, “Ah, you don’t have one. In any event, if you’re released you will no longer have one. That essentially makes you a flight risk.” Faced with a justice system that grotesquely abuses preventive detention, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. In this way they reveal the abyss that is the justice system. If you have a fixed address, the police make sure you lose it, so they can take you into custody. It happened to August Klee, who like me has been held in detention for some months now. While all of this has not been enough to convince me that life is a theatrical drama, I do believe that the remand centre can be. When Klee was detained in this way, the police assured him that it was not the first time they had done this; making the criminal police potential criminals.

Risk of flight always offers the necessary excuse. For instance, August Klee is also classified a flight risk because his closest relatives, first and foremost among them his wife, live outside of Germany. He must divorce her (what’s that about?) if he wants to get out. On the other hand, if you live in Germany, but do not live with your wife (what’s that about?), if you have no family ties (because you’re not chained to that structure), then you’re a flight risk. If you lived outside the country 40 years ago, you’re a flight risk. If you’ve recently come back from a trip (and not from some crappy tourist trip), in that case you’re a flight risk. If you’re a foreigner, then you’re a flight risk. (I can recite all of this by heart). If there is a mix-up of some sort in your arrest, as occurred recently on ''Hammelsgasse'' (bourgeois freedom is a ''Hammelsgasse''<ref>''Hammelsgasse'', a street in an upper class neighbourhood in Frankfurt, could be translated literally as Mutton Alley; a play on words referencing sheeps being led to the slaughter is intended.</ref> ), there’s no need for concern, phony paperwork will be prepared. Here the danger is that one will be silenced.

Following conviction, it may be the case that you will be released for good behavior. He, however, has been refused this, because he has behaved so well that he has become institutionalized, and will surely be unable to find his bearings on the outside. He must remain inside until the end. This is an example of the risk of unadorned reconstruction. If you happen to be an arsonist, there is the danger of evidence being suppressed, etc.; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that supports a prison system that attacks and violates the personal freedom and dignity of 365 people every second—first the attack, then the violation—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

What is permissible and what is not permissible in remand: prisoners in remand are permitted to do what the justice system—acting as administrators—permits them to do. You are not permitted to be afraid. You are not permitted to lie around in bed, but you can lie under the bed. You are not permitted to play ping-pong with multiple balls; you are only permitted one ball. You are not permitted to refuse dinner; you are not permitted to show any kind of defiance. As a revolutionary socialist, you can never show defiance.

A rate of 1.23 dm<ref>Roughly forty cents.</ref> per day is designated for meals (what a fantastic amount). You are not permitted to throw your dinner in the guard’s face, or he’s not responsible for what happens next. The guards are prisoners just like you, and most of them know it. The guards are only the little warlords.

You are not permitted to smoke outside of your cell, only in it. You are permitted to experience the hell of it all inside your cell. You are not permitted to light fires, because you can’t use the fire alarm, because you can’t reach it, because you can’t leave your cell, because the door is locked.

You are not permitted to take the opportunity to engage in discussion with the other prisoners, the so-called criminals, whatever might come out of it. Let’s be perfectly clear, they are staple products of the capitalist social order. You need to be clear about this.

Furthermore, you are not permitted to hang anything on the walls, but you are permitted to hang up the memo that tells you that you are not permitted to hang anything on the walls. You are not permitted to loiter. You are not permitted to lean against the wall. You are not permitted to just hang around. You should spend every day formulating a more thorough understanding of the justice system.

If you go to see the minister, don’t forget it’s just a crutch. Don’t go to church; God is dead, but Che lives. Study the rudiments of socialism, and you will have everything you need.

You are only permitted a half-hour a day to walk. You are not permitted to yell out the window. You are not permitted to have as many comrades as you like. You are permitted to spend 35 dm<ref>Roughly $11.20.</ref> per week. That’s how it goes in Hessen. And don’t forget, Hessen has the most liberal penal system. You are not permitted to drink as much coffee as you wish. You are not permitted to drink any alcohol. You are not permitted to smoke hash. You are not permitted to consume in the way you wish, and you are not permitted to consume what you wish, and all of that in a society based on consumption. Note that in prison consumption becomes a treat.

Correspondence is monitored. Sexual intercourse is not monitored, but then there’s not much of it. Adultery is not permitted (what’s that about?), but it is not permitted to consummate a marriage (what’s that about?). All of those in the hole who still cling onto bourgeois existence (woe be it to those who see no alternative), and that’s most of them, will be driven crazy by the bourgeois social order. That’s how it is. How, for instance, are they to maintain their marriages? They will all fail, and that’s good.

Every citizen should go to prison to gain a real understanding of the situation.

Every socialist should go to prison to gain a real understanding of the situation.

Every citizen should go to prison so that he develops a correct relationship to socialism.

Yet every individual capitalist or socialist has the opportunity to be the first to blow up a prison. Don’t read any of the Springer papers; burn them. Then blow Springer up.

You are not permitted to beat off or masturbate if that’s what you want to do. You can do what you want with your body. The duality of homosexuality exists. If new sexual laws are passed, will you still be permitted to fuck chicks; not to speak of other prisoners. In Butzbach penitentiary there was a flourishing trade in bras. Forced sodomy (what’s that all about?). Rape the guards that torment you.

You aren’t permitted to commit a break-in, but you are permitted to break out. Out of prison I mean. Attempted escape is not an indictable offense. You are not permitted to receive photos 1-3 from the Kommune 1 book, ''Klau Mich'',<ref>Steal Me.</ref> because their obscene content is a threat to the moral order of the remand centre.

The way Glojne, alias Globne, the Regional Court Judge explained it to me in a letter—who asked?—you are not permitted to hang anything in your cell or hang yourself in the cell. You are not permitted to hide in your cell. Try it some time. You are not permitted to take anything from the library. You are not permitted to lose your mind. You are permitted to buy food and specialty items, as well as other items you require in keeping with a reasonable lifestyle. You are not permitted to violate these conditions. The administrators decide what reasonable means (each individual administrator in this mental asylum).

If for reasons of order they want to reduce the number of newspapers and magazines you receive, you must attempt to have them delivered to you by means of disorder—in the sense of antiauthoritarian order. You must pull them out of the guard’s hands, just as he pulled them out of yours. You have to try. You can’t give up without trying. If the warden addresses you with du, you must also address him with du.<ref>German has two forms of the singular you; ''du'', which is used with social inferiors, younger people, and very close friends, and ''Sie'', which is the polite form of address. What the writer is saying is that patronizing behaviour should be answered with patronizing behaviour.</ref> You mustn’t work—for 80 pfennig<ref>Roughly thirty cents.</ref> a day. You can’t let yourself be exploited. The justice system practices the most secretive, most efficient and most disgraceful exploitation possible. It fattens itself by using primitive capitalist techniques in a modern capitalist system. Grievances are pointless, particularly as you are not permitted to file common grievances. Grievances are suppressed at will. Grievances are pointless, because you must submit them to the ruling structure. Common dispositions are common dispositions, and solitary dispositions are solitary dispositions. You can’t give in to loneliness. You can’t lose the dialogue. You can’t lose the socialist dialogue. In prison you have nothing to lose and lose nothing. You have everything to win.

Note that the rights and responsibilities of remand prisoners mentioned here are an introduction to inequality and bondage; you’re a first class citizen, you’re a second class citizen, you’re a fourth class citizen, you’re a fifth class citizen, etc., and that’s what you’ll remain. You’re a criminal and that’s what you will remain. Conduct regarding the attendants: the prisoner must immediately disengage himself from the attendants; he must immediately disengage.

Life in the penal institution is one in which work time, free time, and quiet time are carefully divided, and the prisoner is bound to this division. Life in the penal institution is life in barracks. It consists of sitting around. Life in the penal institution is divided into time for oppression, time for bondage, and time of dead silence. The time of unconsciousness is over. The time for realism has begun. Bourgeois life is its own kind of remand. If you didn’t already know that, now you do. You are not permitted to live and you are not permitted to die; you are not permitted to die and you are not permitted to live. Exactly. You are not permitted to run amok in the house. You are not permitted, of your own free will, to leave your assigned place. You are not permitted to break out. You are not permitted to scream, yell, or speak out the window. You aren’t allowed to speak to your cellmates (what’s that about?). You are not permitted to threaten the security of the institution. You are not permitted to withhold, store, or use anything. You are not permitted to retain anything, etc.

You must do everything that you are not permitted to do, and you must not let your guard down. Always think about it. Send every state prosecutor to prison. You are not permitted to defend yourself. Never. Those who defend themselves incriminate themselves. Do forget that. You are not permitted to have unauthorized telephone contact. Your correspondence is monitored. Letters you send from prison cannot be sealed. You are not permitted to seal them yourself. You are not permitted to… You are not permitted to…

You cannot give in to fatigue. You cannot, at risk of retribution, pass parliamentary representative Güde<ref>Max Güde, a former Nazi, and at the time a member of parliament for the cdu.</ref> in the street without pushing him around. He brings out the best in you. But beforehand you must paint your hand red. The left one, obviously.

Yet again (in the hole), you cannot give in to fatigue. Concentrate. You’re sitting in bourgeois capitalism’s concentration camp. Beyond that, the prisoner has a cell to keep clean. The most oppressive power in prison is the power of cleanliness. Cleaning is the major form of torture. You are not permitted to get dirty while cleaning things. Only clean up when it suits you. Otherwise you aren’t in prison; prison is in you. Keep in mind: the cleaner the cell, the more complete the hell. Furthermore, the prisoner and his seven suitcases<ref>A reference to a poem by Soviet poet Samuel Marschak about a woman bringing her valued possessions with her to the train station, the title of which in German is Die Sieben Sachen (which would translate as “Seven Suitcases” in English).</ref> and his cell can be searched at any time. When you are searched, ask them if they’re looking for new people, etc., etc.

I can’t continue talking about this. Faced with a justice system that has such an indescribable prison system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Such a justice system must itself be indicted. Such a justice system must be exposed by the revolutionary process. It is the responsibility of every antiauthoritarian judge to take legal action against this justice system. We encourage the antiauthoritarian segment of the justice system to use its strength to call a general strike. We particularly encourage antiauthoritarian interns to call a general strike.

I declare my solidarity with Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader, although they have chosen to defend themselves here, which was obviously a decision that no one really understood. This solidarity will continue through the next period while they are in prison and the penitentiary. I have, in any event, every reason to do so. I declare my solidarity with Horst Söhnlein. And if I do so, although he chose not to defend himself, it is as much ''prollidarisch''<ref>A neologism combining the author Thorwald Proll’s last name and ''solidarisch'', the German word for solidarity.</ref> as it is in solidarity. And with that, I stop.

We declare our solidarity with all of the actions that the SDS has undertaken in response to the recent attempts to undermine their public support. We demand the abolition of judicial unaccountability, because they use their power to assure the rule of some people over other people

We demand the abolition of the power of some people over other people.

Workers of the world unite!

Venceremos!

Thorwald Proll

October 1968<ref>The version of this text on Ronald Augustin’s website is dated March 1968, however we believe this is an error, as the arson in question was only committed in April 1968.</ref>

=== Build the Red Army! ===
Comrades of ''883'',

It is pointless to explain the right thing to the wrong people. We’ve done enough of that. We don’t want to explain the action to free Baader to babbling intellectuals, to those who are freaked out, to know-it-alls, but rather to the potentially revolutionary section of the people. That is to say, to those who can immediately understand this action, because they are themselves prisoners. Those who want nothing to do with the blather of the “left,” because it remains without meaning or consequence. Those who are fed up!

The action to free Baader must be explained to youth from the Märkisch neighbourhood, to the girls from Eichenhof, Ollenhauer, and Heiligensee, to young people in group homes, in youth centers, in Grünen Haus, and in Kieferngrund.<ref>Places where disenfranchised youth could be found. RAF members had previously worked with such young marginalized youth in the “apprentices collectives.” Some of these young people became members of the RAF and were involved in the action to free Baader.</ref>

To large families, to young workers and apprentices, to high school students, to families in neighborhoods that are being gentrified, to the workers at Siemens and AEG-Telefunken, at SEL and Osram, to the married women who, as well as doing the housework and raising the children, must do piecework—damn it.

They are the ones who must understand the action; those who receive no compensation for the exploitation they must suffer. Not in their standard of living, not in their consumption, not in the form of mortgages, not in the form of even limited credit, not in the form of midsize cars. Those who cannot even hope for these baubles, who are not seduced by all of that.

Those who have realized that the future promised to them by their teachers and professors and landlords and social workers and supervisors and foremen and union representatives and city councilors is nothing more than an empty lie, but who nonetheless fear the police. It is only necessary that they—and not the petit bourgeois intellectuals—understand that all of that is over now, that this is a start, that the liberation of Baader is only the beginning! That an end to police domination is in sight! It is to them that we want to say that we are building the red army, and it is their army. It is to them that we say, “It has begun.” They don’t pose stupid questions like, “Why right now precisely?” They have already traveled a thousand roads controlled by the authorities and managers—they’ve done the waiting room waltz; they remember the times when it worked and the times when it didn’t. And in conversations with sympathetic teachers, who are assigned to the remedial schools that don’t change anything, and the kindergartens that lack the necessary spaces—they don’t ask why now—damn it!

They certainly won’t listen to you, if you aren’t even able to distribute your newspaper before it is confiscated. Because you don’t need to shake up the left-wing shit eaters, but rather the objective left, you have to construct a distribution network that is out of the reach of the pigs.

Don’t complain that it’s too hard. The action to free Baader was hardly a walk in the park. If you understand what’s going on (and your comments indicate that you do understand, so it’s opportunism to say that the bullet also hit you in the stomach<ref>A reference to Georg Linke, the sixty-four-year-old librarian at the Institute for Social Studies who was shot during the action to free Baader. This shooting led to substantial criticism, even from otherwise sympathetic leftists.</ref>—you assholes), if you understand anything, you need to find a better way to organize your distribution. And we have no more to say to you about our methods than we do about our plans for action—you shitheads! As long as you allow yourselves to brought in by the cops, you aren’t in a position to be giving anyone else advice about how to avoid being brought in by the cops. What do you mean by adventurism? That one only has oneself to blame for informers. Whatever.

What does it mean to bring conflicts to a head? It means not allowing oneself to be taken out of action.

That’s why we’re building the red army. Behind the parents stand the teachers, the youth authorities, and the police. Behind the supervisor stands the boss, the personnel office, the workers compensation board, the welfare office, and the police. Behind the custodian stands the manager, the landlord, the bailiff, the eviction notice, and the police. With this comes the way that the pigs use censorship, layoffs, dismissals, along with bailiff’s seals and billy clubs. Obviously, they reach for their service revolvers, their teargas, their grenades, and their semi-automatic weapons; obviously, they escalate, if nothing else does the trick.<ref>A reference to the Hand Grenade Law passed shortly after Baader’s prison break, whereby police in West Berlin were equipped with hand grenades, semi-automatic revolvers, and submachine guns.</ref> Obviously, the GIs in Vietnam are trained in counterguerilla tactics and the Green Berets receive courses on torture. So what?

It’s clear that prison sentences for political activities have been made heavier. You must be clear that it is social democratic bullshit to act as if imperialism—with all its Neubauers<ref>Kurt Neubauer was a member of the SPD and the Berlin Senator for Youth and Sports.</ref> and Westmorelands,<ref>General William Westmoreland was Commander of the U.S. troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 and army Chief-of-Staff from 1968 to 1972.</ref> with Bonn, the senate, ''Länder'' youth offices, borough councils, the whole pig circus—should be allowed to subvert, investigate, ambush, intimidate, and suppress without a fight. Be absolutely clear that the revolution is no Easter March. The pigs will certainly escalate their means as far as possible, but no further than that. To bring the conflict to a head, we are building the red army.

If the red army is not simultaneously built, then all conflict, all the political work carried out in the factories and in Wedding<ref>A neighborhood in West Berlin.</ref> and in the Märkisch neighborhood<ref>A working-class suburb of West Berlin.</ref> and at Plötze<ref>A working-class suburb of West Berlin.</ref> and in the courtrooms is reduced to reformism; which is to say, you end up with improved discipline, improved intimidation, and improved exploitation. That destroys the people, rather than destroying what destroys the people! If we don’t build the red army, the pigs can do what they want, the pigs can continue to incarcerate, lay off, impound, seize children, intimidate, shoot, and dominate. To bring the conflict to a head means that they are no longer able to do what they want, but rather must do what we want them to do.

You must understand that those who have nothing to gain from the exploitation of the Third World, of Persian oil, of Bolivian bananas, of South African gold, have no reason to identify with the exploiter. They can grasp that what is beginning to happen here has been going on for a long time in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Guatemala, in Oakland and Watts, in Cuba and China, in Angola and in New York.

They will understand, if you explain it to them, that the action to liberate Baader was not an isolated action, that it never was, but that it is just the first of its kind in the FRG. Damn it.

Stop lounging around on the sofa in your recently-raided apartment counting up your love affairs and other petty details. Build an effective distribution system. Forget about the cowardly shits, the bootlickers, the social workers, those who only attempt to curry favor, they are a lumpen mob. Figure out where the asylums are and the large families and the subproletariat and the women workers, those who are only waiting to give a kick in the teeth to those who deserve it. They will take the lead. And don’t let yourselves get caught. Learn from them how one avoids getting caught—they know more about that than you.
[[File:Picture at the End of RAF's 'Build the Red Army' from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|400x400px]]
DEVELOP THE CLASS STRUGGLE

ORGANIZE THE PROLETARIAT

START THE ARMED STRUGGLE

BUILD THE RED ARMY

RAF

June 5, 1970

=== The Urban Guerilla Concept ===
<blockquote>''We must draw a clear line between ourselves and the enemy.''

Mao

''I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear dividing line between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear dividing line between the enemy and ourselves but have achieved spectacular successes in our work.''

Mao tse Tung

May 26, 1939<ref>This version is close to that in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 15. Please note, however, that in keeping with the German translation, the ending here differs slightly from the standard English translation, which reads simply “achieved a great deal in our work.”</ref></blockquote>

# '''Concrete Answers to Concrete Questions'''<blockquote>''I still insist that without investigation there cannot possibly be any right to speak.'' Mao<ref>Ibid., 230.</ref>

Some comrades have already made up their minds about us. For them, it is the “demagoguery of the bourgeois press” that links these “anarchist groups” with the socialist movement. In their incorrect and pejorative use of the term anarchism, they are no different than the Springer Press. We don’t want to engage anyone in dialogue on such a shabby basis.

Many comrades want to know what we think we’re doing. The letter to ''883'', in May 1970, was too vague. The tape Michele Ray had, extracts of which appeared in ''Spiegel'', was not authentic and, in any event, was drawn from a private discussion. Ray wanted to use it as an aide-mémoire for an article she was writing. Either she tricked us or we overestimated her. If our practice was as hasty as she claims, we’d have been caught by now. ''Spiegel'' paid Ray an honorarium of $1,000.00 for the interview.

Almost everything the newspapers have written about us—and the way they write it—has clearly been a lie. Plans to kidnap Willy Brandt are meant to make us look like political idiots, and claims that we intend to kidnap children are meant to make us look like unscrupulous criminals. These lies go as far as the “authentic details” in ''konkret'' #5, which proved to be nothing more than unreliable details that had been slapped together. That we have “officers and soldiers,” that some of us are slaves of others, that comrades who have left us fear reprisals, that we broke into houses or used violence to take passports, that we exercise “group terror”—all of this is bullshit.

The people who imagine an illegal armed organization to be like the ''Freikorps'' or the Feme,<ref>The ''Freikorps'' were right-wing paramilitary groups that sprang up in the period following World War I; many were later integrated into the Nazi rise to power. The Feme was a secret medieval court which meted out the death sentence, the bodies of its victims generally being left hanging in the streets.</ref> are people who hope for a pogrom. The psychological mechanisms that produce such projections, and their relationship to fascism, have been analyzed in Horkheimer and Adorno’s ''Authoritarian Personality'' and ''Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism''. A compulsive revolutionary personality is a contradictio in adjecto— a contradiction in terms. A revolutionary political practice under the present conditions—perhaps under any conditions—presumes the permanent integration of the individual’s personality and political beliefs, that is to say, political identity. Marxist criticism and self-criticism has nothing to do with “self-liberation,” but a lot to do with revolutionary discipline. It is not the members of a “left organization,” writing anonymously or using pen names, who are just interested in “making headlines,” but ''konkret'' itself, whose editor is currently promoting himself as a sort of left-wing Eduard Zimmermann,<ref>Eduard Zimmermann was tv moderator for the German equivalent of Crimewatch. This program was used in the search for RAF members.</ref> producing jack-off material for his market niche.

Many comrades spread untruths about us too. They brag that we lived with them, that they organized our trip to Jordan, that they know about our contacts, that they are doing something for us, when, in fact, they are doing nothing. Some only want to make it look like they are “in the know.” Günther Voigt<ref>Günther Voigt was a West Berlin arms dealer. A pistol that could be linked to him was dropped during the Baader liberation. Voigt fled to Switzerland where he gave an interview that led to his arrest, claiming he was involved in the liberation of Baader.</ref> had to pay for puffing himself up in a conversation with Dürrenmatt,<ref>Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss playwright and essayist.</ref> claiming he was the one who freed Baader, which he regretted when the cops showed up. It’s not easy to clear things up with denials, even when they’re true. Some people want to use these lies to prove that we’re stupid, unreliable, careless, or crazy. By doing so, they encourage people to oppose us. In reality, they are irrelevant to us. They are only consumers. We want nothing to do with these gossipmongers, for whom the anti-imperialist struggle is a coffee klatch. Many are those who don’t gossip, who have some understanding of resistance, who are pissed off enough to wish us luck, who support us because they know that there is no point spending life implicated in and adapted to this crap.

What happened at the Knesebekstr. 89 house (Mahler’s arrest) was not due to carelessness on our part, but to betrayal. The traitor was one of us. There is no guarantee against that for people who do what we do. There is no certainty that comrades will not break under extreme police pressure, or will hold up in the face of the terror that the system uses against us, with which it attacks us. The pigs wouldn’t have the power if they didn’t have these tools.

Our existence makes some people feel pressured to justify themselves. To avoid political discussion with us, to avoid comparing their practice to ours, they distort even the smallest details. For example, the rumor is still circulating that Baader had only three or nine or twelve months to serve, though the correct length of time is easily ascertained: three years for arson, a further six months on probation, and approximately six months for falsifying documents. Of these 48 months, Andreas Baader had served 14 in ten different Hessian prisons—nine times he was transferred because of bad behavior, for example, organizing mutinies and resistance. Reducing the remaining 34 months to three, nine or twelve is intended to reduce the moral justification for the May 14 breakout. In this way, some comrades rationalize their fear of the personal consequences of entering into a political discussion with us.

The question frequently asked, as to whether we would have proceeded with the breakout if we had known that Linke would be shot, can only be answered with a no. The question of what we would have done if… is ambiguous—pacifist, moralistic, platonic, and detached. Anyone who thinks seriously about the breakout would not pose this question, but would think it through for himself. In asking this question, people only want to see if we are as brutal as the Springer Press claims. It’s like an interrogation in catechism class. It is an attempt to trivialize the question of revolutionary violence, by treating revolutionary violence and bourgeois violence as the same thing, which leads nowhere. In anticipating all the possible developments, there was no reason to believe that a civilian would intervene. It is suicidal to think that one can conduct a jailbreak unarmed.

On May 14, the cops fired the first shots. This was the case in Frankfurt as well, where two of us ran for it, because we are not going to just let ourselves be arrested. The cops shot to kill. Sometimes we didn’t shoot at all, and when we did, we didn’t shoot to kill. In Berlin, in Nuremburg, in Frankfurt.<ref>Berlin refers to the Knesebeckstr. arrest mentioned above. On December 21, 1971, RAF member Ali Jansen was arrested following a shootout at a police roadblock in Nuremberg. On February 10, 1971, police in Frankfurt opened fire on Astrid Proll and Manfred Grashof, who escaped unharmed.</ref> It can be proven, because it is true. We do not “use firearms recklessly.” The cop who finds himself in the contradiction of being a “little man” and a capitalist pawn, a low paid employee and monopoly capitalism’s agent, is not obliged to follow orders. We shoot back if someone shoots at us. The cop who lets us go, we let him go as well.

It is clear that the massive hunt for us is really directed against the entire socialist left in the Federal Republic and West Berlin. This circus cannot be justified by the small amount of money or the few cars and documents we are alleged to have stolen, or by the attempted murder they’re trying to pin on us. The ruling class has been scared out of its skin. They thought that they had this state and all of its inhabitants, classes, and contradictions under control, right down to the last detail: the intellectuals reduced to their magazines, the left isolated in its own circles, Marxism-Leninism disarmed, and internationalism demoralized. However fragile it may pretend to be, the power structure is not so easily damaged. One should not be tricked by this hue and cry into contributing to all this noise.

We are not saying that the organization of armed resistance groups can replace the legal proletarian organizations, that isolated actions can replace the class struggle, or that armed struggle can replace political work in the factories or neighborhoods. We are arguing that armed struggle is a necessary precondition for the latter to succeed and progress, that armed struggle is “the highest form of Marxism-Leninism” (Mao), and that it can and must begin now, as without it there can be no anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole. We are not Blanquists nor are we anarchists, though we think Blanqui was a great revolutionary and the personal heroism of many anarchists is certainly above reproach.

We have not even been active for a year yet. It is too soon to draw conclusions. The extensive publicity that Genscher, Zimmermann<ref>Friedrich Zimmermann (CDU) was, at this time, the Chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary faction.</ref> and Co. have given us opens up a propaganda opportunity which we are using to share a few thoughts.

'''2. The Metropole: The Federal Republic'''<blockquote>''The crisis isn’t the result of the stagnation of development, but of development itself. Since the aim is to increase profit, development encourages parasitism and waste, harming whole social sectors, multiplying needs that it cannot satisfy, and accelerating the disintegration of social life. A monstrous apparatus is necessary to control, by means of manipulation and open repression, the tensions and revolts which it itself often provokes. The crisis in American political unity caused by the student rebellion and the Black Movement, the spread of the student struggle in Europe, the vehement renewal and the growth of worker and mass struggles leading to the “May” explosion in France, the tumultuous social crisis in Italy, and the rebirth of dissatisfaction in Germany all indicate the nature of the situation.''

Il Manifesto: The Necessity of Communism, extract from Thesis 33<ref>Expelled from the Italian Communist Party in 1969, Il Manifesto was an influential group in the Italian autonomist movement, having 6,000 members in 1972. They advocated council communism, whereby decisions would be made by workers’ councils, not by a vanguard party or state. Il Manifesto was extremely influential for the entire European New Left. The quote comes from a manifesto of 200 theses issued by the group in 1971.</ref> </blockquote>The comrades from Il Manifesto rightly place the Federal Republic of Germany last in their analysis, vaguely describing the situation here as dissatisfaction. West Germany, which Barzel<ref>Rainer Barzel was, at this time, the party Chairman of the cdu.</ref> described six years ago as an economic giant but a political dwarf, has not lost any of its economic power since, while its external and internal political power has increased. With the formation of the Grand Coalition in 1966, the political danger posed by the coming recession was forestalled. With the Emergency Laws the instrument was created to secure unified ruling class action in the event of future crises—the unity of political reactionaries and all those who cling to legality was established. The Social-Liberal coalition succeeded, neutralizing the “dissatisfaction” that had become evident in the student revolt and the extra-parliamentary movement. Insofar as the SPD’s supporters have not broken with reformism, this section of the intelligentsia has been prevented from embracing a communist alternative; in this way reformism acts as a brake on the anticapitalist struggle. ''Ostpolitik'' is opening new markets for capitalism, while at the same time it represents the German contribution to an accommodation and alliance between U.S. imperialism and the Soviet Union, which the U.S.A. requires in order to have a free hand for its wars of aggression in the Third World. This government seems to have managed to separate the New Left from the old antifascists, cutting off the New Left from its own history, the history of the working class movement. The DKP, which can thank the new collusion between U.S. imperialism and Soviet revisionism for its new legal status, has organized demonstrations in favor of this government’s Ostpolitik. Niemöller—a symbol of antifascism—is shilling for the SPD in the upcoming election.

Using the smokescreen of “the common good,” the government has established state control and curbed the union bureaucracy with its wage guidelines and its notion of concerted action. The strikes of September 69 showed that things have been overwhelmingly skewed to the benefit of profit; and the fact that these strikes only addressed economic issues indicates how firmly the government holds the reins.

The system shows its strength in the way that the Federal Republic, with its 2 million foreign workers and unemployment approaching 10%, can make use of the looming recession to develop the terror and the disciplinary measures that unemployment implies for the proletariat, without having to deal with any political radicalization of the masses.

In exchange for development aid and military support for the U.S.A.’s wars of aggression, the Federal Republic profits from the exploitation of the Third World, without having to take responsibility for these wars, and without having to struggle against internal opposition. While it is no less aggressive than U.S. imperialism, the Federal Republic is less vulnerable.

The political options open to imperialism here have not been exhausted in either their reformist or their fascist forms, and imperialism has not exhausted its ability to either integrate or repress the contradictions that it produces.

The RAF’s urban guerilla concept is not based on an optimistic evaluation of the situation in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

'''3. The Student Revolt'''<blockquote>''The conclusion that it is impossible to separate the revolution in the “heartland” from that in “underdeveloped areas” is based on an analysis of the unique character of the capitalist ruling system. Without a revival of revolution in the West, the imperialists, with their logic of violence, will be able to develop their exit strategy through a catastrophic war, and it will be impossible to prevent the world’s superpowers from imposing crushing oppression.''

Il Manifesto: from Thesis 52</blockquote>To dismiss the student movement as a petit bourgeois revolt is to reduce it to the grandiose claims that accompanied it, to deny its roots in the contradiction between bourgeois society and bourgeois ideology; it means recognizing its obvious shortcomings while ignoring the theoretical level that this anticapitalist protest managed to achieve.

The pathos with which the student movement became aware of its mental immiseration in the knowledge factories was certainly exaggerated, as was the identification of this with the situation of the exploited peoples of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The comparison between the mass circulation of ''Bild Zeitung'' here and the massive bombing of Vietnam was a grotesque oversimplification, just as it was arrogant to compare the ideological critique of the system here and the armed struggle over there. The students’ belief that they were the revolutionary subject, insofar as it was based on the appeal of Marcuse, betrayed their ignorance as to the actual nature of bourgeois society and the mode of production which it has established.

The student revolt in the Federal Republic and West Berlin—with its street fighting, its arsons, its use of counterviolence, its pathos, as well as its exaggerations and ignorance… in short, with its practice—has the merit of having reconstructed Marxism-Leninism, at least in the consciousness of the intelligentsia, as that political theory without which the political, economic, and ideological factors and their outward manifestations cannot be combined into an overall analytical perspective. Without this, internal and external relationships cannot be described.

The student movement was based on the contradiction between the theory of academic freedom and the reality of monopoly capitalism’s control of the universities. Precisely because it was based on this, and not merely on ideology, it didn’t run out of steam before it had established the relationship between the crisis in the universities and the crisis of capitalism, if only in theory. Not before it was clear to the student movement and their public that “liberty, equality, and fraternity” would not be achieved by appeals to human rights or the UN Charter, that what was occurring here was what had always occurred in the colonialist and imperialist exploitation of Latin America, Africa, and Asia: discipline, subordination, and brutality for the oppressed and for those who take up their struggle by protest, those who resist and wage the anti-imperialist struggle.

In its ideological critique, the student movement viewed almost all aspects of state repression as expressions of imperialist exploitation: in the Springer campaign, in the demonstrations against American aggression in Vietnam, in the campaign against class justice, in the ''Bundeswehr'' campaign,<ref>An SDS campaign encouraging soldiers to desert from the ''Bundeswehr'', the West German Army.</ref> in the campaign against the Emergency Laws, and in the high school student movement. Expropriate Springer! Smash NATO! Resist Consumer Terror! Resist Education Terror! Resist Rent Terror!—these were all correct political slogans. They aimed to expose the contradiction between new needs which could be satisfied through the development of productive forces, on the one hand, and the pressure of irrational subordination to class society, on the other. Their identity was not based on class struggle here, but rather on the knowledge that they were part of an international movement, that they were dealing with the same class enemy as the Viet Cong, the same paper tigers, the same pigs.

The second merit of the student movement was that it broke through the old left’s parochialism: the old left’s popular front strategy in the form of the Easter Marches, the German Peace Union, the ''Deutsche Volkszeitung'', an irrational hope for a “massive landslide” in some election or another, a parliamentary fixation on Strauß here or Heinemann there, their pro- and anticommunist vacillation about the GDR, their isolation, their resignation, and their moral conflicts: ready for every sacrifice, incapable of any practice. The socialist section of the student movement developed its consciousness, in spite of theoretical errors, from the correct recognition that “the revolutionary initiative in the West can be based on the crisis in the global balance of power, and on the development of new forces in old countries.” (Il Manifesto, Thesis 55) They based their agitation and propaganda on what can be considered the most important aspect of German reality. They opposed the global strategy of imperialism by internationalizing national struggles, by creating a connection between the national and international aspects of the struggle, between traditional forms of struggle and international revolutionary initiatives. They managed to turn their weakness into strength, because they recognized that continuing resignation, parochialism, reformism, and popular front strategies could only lead to a dead-end for socialist politics in the post- and pre-fascist conditions existing in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

The left knew that it was correct to link the distribution of socialist propaganda in factories with actually preventing the distribution of ''Bild Zeitung''. It was correct to link propaganda against GIs being sent to Vietnam with actual attacks on military planes targeting Vietnam, and the ''Bundswehr'' campaign with attacks on NATO airports. It was correct to link the critique of class justice with the blowing up of prison walls, and the critique of the Springer Corporation with the disarming of its private security services. It was correct to set up radio stations, to demoralize the police, to have safehouses for ''Bundeswehr'' deserters, to combine agitation amongst foreign workers with the production of false documents, to prevent the production of napalm by sabotaging factories.

It was an error, however, to make their own propaganda dependent on supply and demand: to have no newspaper if the workers could not yet finance it, no car if the “movement” could not afford it, no transmitter because they had no license for it, no sabotage because capitalism wouldn’t collapse immediately as a result.

The student movement fell apart when its typically student and petit bourgeois form of organization, “antiauthoritarianism,” proved itself ill-suited to achieving its goals. Its spontaneity proved ineffective in the factories, nor could it create a functioning urban guerilla movement or a socialist mass organization. Unlike in Italy and France, the spark of the student movement here failed to ignite the prairie fire of class struggle, and it was at that point that it collapsed. It could enumerate the aims and contents of the anti-imperialist struggle, but it could not be the revolutionary subject, could not offer the necessary organizational structure.

Unlike the proletarian organizations of the New Left, the Red Army Faction doesn’t deny its roots in the history of the student movement, a movement that reshaped Marxism-Leninism into a weapon of class struggle and established the international basis for revolutionary struggle in the metropole.

'''4. The Primacy of Practice'''<blockquote>''If you want to know a certain thing or a certain class of things directly, you must personally participate in the practical struggle to change reality, to change that thing or class of things, for only thus can you come into contact with them as phenomena; only through personal participation in the practical struggle to change reality can you uncover the essence of that thing or class of things and comprehend them.''

''Marxism emphasizes the importance of theory precisely and only because it can guide action. If we have a correct theory but merely prate about it, pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice, then that theory, however good, is of no significance.''

Mao tse Tung: ''On Practice''<ref>''Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung'' (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967). The first of these two paragraphs comes from pages 299-300, the second from page 304</ref> </blockquote>The decision of leftists and socialists, the student movement’s authority figures, to turn to the study of scientific socialism and transform the critique of political economy into a self criticism of the student movement, was at the same time a decision to retreat into the classroom. Considering their paper output, their organizational models, and their bombastic statements, one might think that these revolutionaries were leading a violent class struggle, as if 1967/68 was the 1905 of socialism in Germany. In 1903, Lenin pointed out, in ''What Is to Be Done'', that the Russian workers needed a specific theory, and postulated, in opposition to the anarchists and the Social Revolutionaries, the necessity of class analysis, organization, and all-encompassing propaganda, because a broad-based class struggle was unfolding:<blockquote>''The fact is that the working masses are roused to a high pitch of excitement by the social evils in Russian life, but we are unable to gather, if one may so put it, and concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular resentment that are brought forth to a far larger extent than we imagine by the conditions of Russian life, and that must be combined into a single gigantic torrent.''

Lenin: What Is to Be Done?<ref>Marxists Internet Archive “Lenin’s What is to be Done? Trade-Unionist Politics and Social Democratic Politics,” [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1901/witbd/iii.htm. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1901/witbd/iii.htm.]</ref> </blockquote>Under the existing conditions in the Federal Republic and West Berlin, we doubt it will be possible to create a strategy to unify the working class or to create an organization that could simultaneously express and initiate the necessary unifying process. We doubt that the unity of the socialist intelligentsia and the proletariat can be “molded out of” the political programs or the declarations coming from the proletarian organizations. The drops and streamlets based on the horrors have long been collected by the Springer Corporation, to which they then add new horrors.

We believe that without a revolutionary initiative, without the practical revolutionary intervention of the vanguard, the socialist workers and intellectuals, and without concrete anti-imperialist struggle, there will be no unifying process. Unity can only be created through the common struggle of the conscious section of the working class and the intellectuals, one which they do not stage-manage, but which they model, or else it will not happen at all.

The paper output of these organizations shows their practice to be mainly a contest between intellectuals for the best Marx review before of an imaginary jury, which couldn’t possibly be the working class, as the language used excludes their participation. They are more embarrassed when they are caught misquoting Marx than when they are caught lying in their practice. Talking is their practice. The page numbers in their footnotes are almost always correct, the membership numbers they give for their organizations seldom are. They fear the accusation of revolutionary impatience more than corruption by bourgeois careers. It’s more important to them to spend years pursuing a degree with Lukacs<ref>George Lukacs was an influential Hungarian Marxist philosopher and art critic. His work greatly influenced the New Left of the 60s and 70s.</ref> than to allow themselves to be spontaneously inspired by Blanqui. They express internationalism in the form of censorship by favoring one Palestinian guerilla organization over another. White masters who claim to be the true guardians of Marxism, they express themselves through patronage, begging their rich friends for alms in the name of the Black Panther Party—not with a view to “victory in the people’s war,” but to soothe their consciences. That’s not a revolutionary method of intervention.

Mao, in his ''Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society'' (1926), contrasted the revolution and the counterrevolution in this way:<blockquote>''Each has hoisted a huge banner: one is the red banner of revolution held aloft by the Third International as the rallying point for all the oppressed classes of the world, the other is the white banner of counterrevolution held aloft by the League of Nations as the rallying point for all the counterrevolutionaries of the world.''<ref>Mao Tse-Tung “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” Marxists Internet Archive, [http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/ mswv1_1.htm. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/ mswv1_1.htm.]</ref></blockquote>Mao differentiated between classes in Chinese society based on the positions they took towards the red and white banners. It wasn’t enough for him to analyze the economic situation of different classes in Chinese society. Part of his class analysis involved the relationship of different classes to the revolution.

There will be no leadership role for Marxist-Leninists in future class struggles if the vanguard doesn’t hold up the red banner of proletarian internationalism, if the vanguard can’t answer the question of how to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, of how to develop the power of the proletariat, of how to break the power of the bourgeoisie, if it isn’t prepared to do anything to answer these questions. The class analysis we require cannot be developed without revolutionary practice or revolutionary initiative.

The “provisional revolutionary demands” put forward by the proletarian organizations throughout the country—such as the struggle against the intensification of exploitation, for a shorter work week, against the squandering of social wealth, for wage parity for men, women, and foreigners, against production quotas, etc.—are nothing but trade union economism as long as they don’t address the question of how to break the political, military, and propaganda power that always stands firmly in the way of these demands when they are put forward in mass class struggles. If these demands stay the same, one can only call them economistic shit, because they are not worth the revolutionary energy wasted in fighting for them, and they won’t lead to victory if “victory means to accept the principle that life is not the most precious thing for a revolutionary” (Debray<ref>Regis Debray was a French Marxist intellectual and a proponent of foco theory, the theory that a small group of guerillas could act as an inspiration to revolutionary activity. He joined Che Guevara on his ill-fated Bolivian adventure</ref>). Trade unions intervene with demands like these—but “the trade union politics of the working class are bourgeois working class politics” (Lenin). That’s not a revolutionary method of intervention.

The proletarian organizations failed to pose the question of armed struggle as a response to the Emergency Laws, the army, the BGS, the police, or the Springer Press. This shows that the proletarian organizations differ in their opportunism from the DKP only in that they are even less rooted in the masses, even if they are more verbally radical and theoretically advanced. In practice, they function at the level of civil rights and are concerned with gaining popularity at any price. They support the lies of the bourgeoisie by supporting the idea that with this state it is still possible to correct social problems by parliamentary means. They encourage the proletariat to engage in struggles that have no chance of success, given the state’s capacity for violence and its barbaric ways. “These Marxist-Leninist factions or parties,” Debray writes of the communists in Latin America, “move within the political environment as if they were controlled by the bourgeoisie. Rather than challenging the political status quo, they reinforce it….”

These organizations don’t offer any alternatives to the thousands of apprentices and young people who, as a result of being politicized by the student movement, became determined to put an end to exploitation in their workplaces. They simply advise them to adapt to capitalist exploitation. Concerning youth crime, when it comes down to it they share the position of prison wardens. Regarding the comrades in prison, they share the point of view of the judges. And regarding the underground, they share the point of view of social workers.

Without political practice, reading ''Capital'' is nothing more than bourgeois study. Without political practice, political programs are just so much twaddle. Without political practice, proletarian internationalism is only hot air. Adopting a proletarian position in theory implies putting it into practice.

The Red Army Faction asserts the primacy of practice. Whether it is right to organize armed resistance now, depends on whether it is possible, and whether it is possible can only be determined in practice.

'''5. The Urban Guerilla'''<blockquote>''Hence, imperialism and all reactionaries, looked at in essence, from a long-term point of view, from a strategic point of view, must be seen for what they are—paper tigers. On this we should build our strategic thinking. On the other hand, they are also living tigers, iron tigers, real tigers which can devour people. On this we should build our tactical thinking.''

Mao tse Tung, January 12, 1958<ref>''Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung'' (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 74.</ref></blockquote>If it is true that American imperialism is a paper tiger, this means it can, in the final analysis, be defeated. And if the thesis of the Chinese communists is correct, then victory over American imperialism is possible, because struggles against it have erupted all over the world, and as a result imperialism’s power is divided. It is this division that renders its defeat possible. If this is true, then there is no reason to exclude or leave out any country or any region from the anti-imperialist struggle simply because the forces of revolution are especially weak, and the forces of reaction are especially strong.

If it is incorrect to demoralize the revolutionary forces by underestimating them, it’s equally incorrect to push them into confrontations that can only lead to defeat. In the conflicts between the honest comrades in the proletarian organizations—let’s leave the big talkers out of it—and the Red Army Faction, we accuse them of demoralizing the revolutionary forces, whereas they feel we are leading the revolutionary forces down a blind alley. There is an attempt to bridge this divide between the comrades in the factories and the neighborhoods and the Red Army Faction, and if we succeed in doing so, we will arrive at the truth. Dogmatism and adventurism are typical deviations in any country during periods in which the revolutionary movement is weak. Since the anarchists have always been the strongest critics of opportunism, everyone who criticizes opportunism is called an anarchist—this is nothing more than fashionable nonsense.

The concept of the urban guerilla comes from Latin America. There, like here, it is the method of revolutionary intervention by generally weak revolutionary forces.

The urban guerilla struggle is based on an understanding that there will be no Prussian-style marching orders, which so many so-called revolutionaries are waiting for to lead the people into revolutionary struggle. It is based on the analysis that by the time the conditions are right for armed struggle, it will be too late to prepare for it. It is based on the recognition that without revolutionary initiatives in a country with as much potential for violence as the Federal Republic, there will be no revolutionary orientation when the conditions for revolutionary struggle are more favorable, as they soon will be given the political and economic developments of late capitalism.

The urban guerilla is the consequence of the long since complete negation of parliamentary democracy by the elected representatives themselves. It is the inevitable response to the Emergency Laws and the Hand Grenade Law. It is the willingness to struggle with the very means that the system appropriates for itself to neutralize its enemies. The urban guerilla is based on facing facts, not making excuses for them.

The student movement already had a partial understanding of what the urban guerilla could achieve. It can give concrete form to the agitation and propaganda work to which the left has been reduced. For instance, in the Springer campaign, in the Carbora Bassa campaign of the Heidelberg students,<ref>A campaign to stop the building of a massive dam in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. The right-wing Portuguese government had plans to settle over one million European colonists in the African country. By 1969, five German companies were implicated in the project. There were protests in the FRG, particularly in Heidelberg, against the project when the U.S. Minister of Defense Robert McNamara visited the country.</ref> in the squatting movement in Frankfurt, in the context of the military aid that the Federal Republic gives the comprador regimes in Africa, and in the security measures and the inhouse justice in the factories. The urban guerilla can make verbal internationalism concrete by providing weapons and money. It can blunt the system’s weapons and the banning of communists by organizing an underground that can elude the police. The urban guerilla is a weapon of class struggle.

The urban guerilla struggle is armed struggle in a situation in which the police use their weapons recklessly and in which class justice finds Kurras not guilty and buries comrades alive. The urban guerilla struggle means not being demoralized by the violence of the system.

The urban guerilla aims to destroy certain aspects of the state structure, and to destroy the myth of state omnipotence and invulnerability.

The urban guerilla requires the organization of an illegal structure, including safehouses, weapons, cars, and documents. What one needs to know about this, Marighella describes in his ''Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla''. What needs to be known beyond that, we are always ready to tell anyone who wants to participate in the guerilla struggle. We don’t know that much yet, but we know a little bit.

Before deciding to take up the armed struggle, it is important that one first experience the legal struggle. When one’s connection to the revolutionary left is based on just wanting to follow the latest fad, then it is better not to start anything you will not be able to get out of later on.

The Red Army Faction and the urban guerilla represent the only faction and practice which draws a clear line between ourselves and the enemy, and is therefore subject to the sharpest attack. This requires that one have a political identity, and it presumes that a learning process has already occurred.

Our original organizational concept implied a connection between the urban guerilla and the work at the base. We wanted everyone to work in the neighborhoods, the factories, and the existing socialist groups, to be influenced by the discussions taking place, to have some experience, to learn. It has become clear that that doesn’t work. The degree to which the political police can monitor these groups, their meetings, their appointments, and the contents of their discussions is already so extensive that one has to stay away if one wants to escape this surveillance.

The urban guerilla struggle requires that one be totally clear about one’s motivations, that one not be put off by the attacks from ''Bild Zeitung'', the antisemitic-criminal-subhuman-murderer-arsonist label that they apply to revolutionaries. All that shit they spit out and are willing to say, and which still influences what many comrades think about us, must have no effect.

Naturally, the system doesn’t give any ground, and there is nothing they will not do and no slander they will not use against us.

There are no publications that have any goals that can be distinguished from those that serve the interests of capital. There is still no socialist publication that reaches beyond itself, its circle, the people handed copies, and its subscribers, and which does not exist primarily in an incidental, private, personal, bourgeois context. All forms of media are controlled by capital, through advertising sales, as a result of the ambitions of the writers, who want to write their way into the establishment, through the radio stations’ boards of directors, and through the market control of the press corporations. The leading publications are the publications of the ruling class. They divide the market opportunities between themselves, developing ideologies for specific milieus, and what they publish serves to assure their market domination. Journalism is about one thing: sales. News is a commodity; information is a consumer product. Whatever isn’t suitable for consumption is vomited back out. The need to retain the readership for advertisement-heavy publications, and point system ratings for television, prevent antagonistic contradictions from developing between these media and the public; no antagonism, nothing of consequence. Whoever wants a place in the market must maintain connections with these extremely powerful opinion shapers. This means that dependence on the Springer Corporation grows in step with the Springer Corporation itself, which has also started to buy up local papers. The urban guerilla can expect nothing but bitter hostility from this public. It has to orient itself around Marxist criticism and self-criticism, and nothing else. As Mao said, “Whoever is not afraid of being drawn and quartered, can dare to pull the emperor from his horse.”

Long-term, meticulous work is crucial for the urban guerilla, insofar as we want to go beyond discussion to action. If the option of retreating to a bourgeois profession is not kept open, if the option of leaving behind the revolution for a townhouse is not maintained, if none of this is even desirable, then, with the full pathos of Blanqui’s statement, “The duty of the revolutionary is to always struggle, in spite of everything to struggle, to struggle until death.” There is no revolutionary struggle, and there has been no revolutionary struggle, in which this hasn’t shown itself to be true: Russia, China, Cuba, Algeria, Palestine, Vietnam.

Some say that the political possibilities of organization, agitation, and propaganda are far from being exhausted, and only when they have been exhausted should one consider armed struggle. We say that the political possibilities will not be fully utilized until armed struggle is recognized as the political goal, as long as the strategic conclusion that all reactionaries are paper tigers is not grasped despite the tactical conclusion that they are criminals, murderers, and exploiters.

We will not talk about “armed propaganda”: we will do it. The prison breakout didn’t take place for reasons of propaganda, but to get the guy out. The bank robberies they try to lay at our doorstep, we’d only do that to grab the money. The “spectacular successes” that Mao tells us we must have scored if “the enemy paints us as utterly black” are not our successes alone. The big clamour that has been made about us is due more to the Latin American comrades—given the clear line they have already drawn between themselves and the enemy—which has led the ruling class here, suspecting us of some bank robberies, to “energetically oppose” us, because of what we have begun to build here: the urban guerilla in the form of the Red Army Faction.

'''6. Legality and Illegality'''<blockquote>''Revolution in the West, the challenge to capitalist power in its strongholds, is the order of the day. It is of decisive importance. The current world situation offers no place and no power that is in a position to guarantee peaceful development and democratic stability. The crisis is intensifying. Parochialism or the decision to postpone the struggle would mean being sucked into the abyss of complete collapse''.

Il Manifesto, extract from Thesis 55</blockquote>The anarchists’ slogan, “Destroy what destroys you,” is aimed at mobilizing the base, young people in prisons and reformatories, in high schools and training centres. It reaches out to all of those in the shittiest situations. It is meant to be spontaneously understood, and is a call for direct resistance. Stokely Carmichael’s<ref>Stokely Carmichael was a prominent militant in the Black Liberation Movement in the United States, playing a leading role in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and then the Black Panther Party.</ref> Black Power slogan, “Trust your own experience!” means just that. And the slogan is based on the insight that in capitalism there is absolutely nothing that oppresses, tortures, constrains, and burdens that does not have its origin in the capitalist mode of production, and that each oppressor, in whatever form he may appear, is a representative of the class interests of capital, which makes him the class enemy.

To this extent the anarchists’ slogan is correct, proletarian, and in line with the class struggle. It is incorrect insofar as it leads to false consciousness. One goes on the offensive simply to give them a kick in the teeth, and organization then takes second place, discipline becomes bourgeois, and class analysis superfluous. If you don’t work out the dialectic of legality and illegality in terms of organization, you will be defenseless against the heavy repression that will follow your actions, and you will be legally arrested.

The statement of some organizations, “Communists are not so stupid as to get themselves banned,” renders them a mouthpiece for class justice, that is to say, for no one. The statement is correct insofar as it means that the legal possibilities for communist agitation, propaganda, and organizing for a political and economic struggle must be fully utilized and cannot be carelessly jeopardized—but that is not what they mean. They mean that there is no way of getting around the limits that the class state and its justice system establish for the socialist project, that one must stop at these limits, that one must retreat from the state’s illegal encroachments as these encroachments are legalized—legality at any price. Illegal imprisonment, terroristic sentences, police harassment, blackmail and coercion on the part of the BAW—eat shit or die— Communists are not that stupid….

This statement is opportunist. It shows a lack of solidarity. It abandons the comrades in prison. It excludes the organization and politicization in a socialist context of anyone who, as a result of their social background and situation, has no choice but to survive through crime: the underground, the subproletariat, innumerable proletarian youth, and guest workers. It facilitates the theoretical criminalization of all those who are not members of these organizations. It expresses complicity with class justice. It is stupid.

Legality is a question of power. The relationship between legality and illegality has to be determined by examining the contradiction between reformist and fascist domination, whose representatives in Bonn are, on the one hand, the Social-Liberal coalition, and on the other, Barzel and Strauß. Their media representatives are, for the former: the ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'', ''Stern'', the WDR<ref>''Westdeutscher Rundfunk'', West German Radio.</ref> Third Program, SFB, and the ''Frankfurter Rundschau''. And, for the latter: the Springer Corporation, the ''Sender Freies Berlin'', the ''Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen'', and the ''Bayernkurier''. The Munich police line here, and the Berlin model there. Here the justice of the Federal Administrative Court and there that of the Federal Supreme Court.

The reformist line attempts to avoid conflicts by using institutional options (co-management) and promises of improvements (in prison conditions, for example), by addressing obsolete sources of conflict (the Chancellor’s genuflection in Poland, for example), by avoiding provocation (the soft line of the Munich police and the Federal Administrative Court in Berlin, for example), and by airing grievances (regarding public education in Hessen and Berlin, for example). As part of this reformist line of avoiding conflict, they move a bit further inside and a bit less outside of legality. They do this to look legitimate. With the Constitution in hand, they intend to neutralize contradictions and leave left-wing criticism dead in the water and empty of content, thereby keeping the ''Jusos'' within the SPD.

There is no doubt that, in the long run, the reformist line is the more effective way of stabilizing capitalist domination, but it relies on certain conditions being met. It requires economic prosperity, because the soft line of the Munich police, for example, is much more expensive than the hard line of Berlin—as the Munich police chief pointed out: “Two officers with machineguns can hold a thousand people in check. 100 officers with truncheons can control a thousand people. Without weapons of this sort, 300 or 400 police officers are necessary.” The reformist line requires a situation in which no organized anticapitalist opposition exists, as one can see by the Munich example.

Camouflaged by political reformism, the concentration of state and economic power accelerates. What Schiller has achieved with his financial policy and Strauß has pushed through with his financial reforms is an increase in exploitation through the intensification of work and heightened division of labor in the productive sector, and through long-term rationalization in the administrative sector and the service industries.

The concentration of violent power in the hands of the few can occur unopposed if it is done quietly, if unnecessary provocation, which can set a process of solidarity in motion, is avoided—that is something that was learned as a result of the student movement and the Paris May. Therefore, the Red Cells<ref>The Red Cells were an independent university-based Marxist organization.</ref> are not yet banned. Therefore the KP can exist as the DKP without the ban on the KP being lifted. Therefore there are still some liberal television programs. And, therefore, some organizations can get away with thinking that they are not as stupid as they really are.

The margin of legality that reformism affords is capital’s response to the attacks of the student movement and the APO—the reformist response is the more effective one, so long as they can manage it. To rely on this legality, to count on it, to perpetuate it metaphysically, to base statistical projections on it, to want to defend it, means repeating the errors of the Latin American self-defense zones. It means you haven’t learned anything and have provided the reactionaries with time to regroup and reorganize, creating a situation in which they won’t ban the left, they’ll smash it.

Willy Weyer<ref>Willy Weyer (SPD) was, at this time, the Minister of the Interior for North Rhine Westphalia and a key proponent of the militarization of the police force.</ref> doesn’t play at tolerance. When the liberal press complains that his highway breathalyzers treat all drivers like potential criminals, he maneuvers and audaciously responds, “We will carry on!”—and in so doing he demonstrates the irrelevance of the liberal public. Eduard Zimmerman creates a whole nation of police agents, and the Springer Corporation has taken on the role of leading the Berlin police—''Bild Zeitung'' columnist Reer recommends arrest warrants to the custodial judges. The mass mobilization in favor of fascism, of crackdowns, of the death penalty, and for more and better-armed police carries on unabated—the New Look of the Brandt-Heinemann-Scheel administration is a facade for Bonn’s policies.

The comrades who only deal with the question of legality and illegality superficially have obviously misunderstood the amnesty with which the student movement was to be tamed. In lifting the criminalization of hundreds of students, they sent them away with just a fright, preventing further radicalization and impressing upon them the value of the privileges that come with being a bourgeois student—that in spite of the nature of the knowledge-factory, the universities are helpful to social climbers. This deepens the class divide between students and the proletariat, between their privileged everyday life and the everyday life of those who do the shit work and who were not offered the same amnesty by the same class enemy. So once again the division between theory and practice is maintained. The equation: amnesty equals pacification.

The social democratic voter initiative involving some respected writers—not only that fuck-up, Grass<ref>At the time a member of ''Gruppe 47'', Günter Grass is one on the most significant German post-World War ii authors and a noted liberal.</ref>—is an attempt at a positive, democratic mobilization, and is a form of resistance against fascism, and therefore should not be dismissed lightly. It is having some effect on the reality presented by certain publishers and some radio and television editorial departments, those that have not yet capitulated to the logic of the monopolies and have not yet been absorbed into the superstructure, with its overarching political reality. The areas of increasing repression are not those with which writers are normally concerned: prison, class justice, intensified work, work-related accidents, installment plans, schools, ''Bild'' and the ''Berliner Zeitung'', barrack-style housing in the suburbs,<ref>Unlike North America, suburbs in Northern Europe are generally occupied by the subproletariat and poorly paid immigrant workers.</ref> and ghettos for foreigners—all of this troubles these writers aesthetically, not politically.

Legality is the ideology of parliamentarianism, of social partnership, and of a pluralistic society. Legality becomes a fetish when those who insist upon it ignore the fact that phones are legally tapped, mail is legally monitored, neighbors are legally interrogated, and informants are legally paid. The organization of political work, if it is not to be under constant observation by the political police, must be simultaneously conducted both legally and illegally.

We don’t count on terror and fascism provoking a spontaneous antifascist mobilization, nor do we think that legality is always corrupt. We understand that our work offers pretexts, just as alcohol does for Willy Weyer, just as the increase in crime does for Strauß, just as ''Ostpolitik'' does for Barzel, just as a Yugoslav running a red light does for a Frankfurt taxi driver, just as a tool in the pocket does for the murderers of car thieves in Berlin. Regarding other pretexts that result from the fact that we are communists, whether communists organize and struggle will depend on whether terror and repression produce only fear and resignation, or whether they produce resistance, class hatred, and solidarity, and whether or not everything goes smoothly for imperialism. It depends on whether communists are so stupid as to tolerate everything that is done to them, or whether they will use legality, as well as other methods, to organize illegality, instead of fetishizing one over the other.

The fate of both the Black Panther Party and ''Gauche Prolétarienne''<ref>''Gauche Prolétarienne'' was a French Maoist organization that, in 1968, began attempts to build a factory-based guerilla group. They were banned in 1970.</ref> resulted from an incorrect understanding of the contradiction between the constitution and legal reality and the increased intensity of this contradiction when organized resistance occurs. And this incorrect understanding prevents people from seeing that the conditions of legality are changed by active resistance, and that it is therefore necessary to use legality simultaneously for political struggle and for the organization of illegality, and that it is an error to wait to be banned, as if it were a stroke of fate coming from the system, because then the banning will constitute a death blow, and the issue will be resolved.

The Red Army Faction organizes illegality as an offensive position for revolutionary intervention.

Building the urban guerilla means conducting the anti-imperialist struggle offensively. The Red Army Faction creates the connection between legal and illegal struggle, between national struggle and international struggle, between political struggle and armed struggle, and between the strategic and tactical aspects of the international communist movement. The urban guerilla means intervening in a revolutionary way here, in spite of the weakness of the revolutionary forces in the Federal Republic and West Berlin!

Cleaver said, “Either you’re part of the problem or your part of the solution. There is nothing in between. This shit has been examined and analyzed for decades and generations from every angle. My opinion is that most of what happens in this country does not need to be analyzed any further.”<ref>Eldridge Cleaver was the Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party. When the party splintered into warring factions, he went into self-imposed exile in Algeria. He is the author of several books, including ''Soul on Ice'', from which this quote is drawn.</ref>
[[File:RAF Petra Schelm Flier.png|thumb|''Flier denouncing the murder of Petra Schelm, who was shot in the head by police. Hamburg Red Aid 1971.'']]
SUPPORT THE ARMED STRUGGLE!

VICTORY TO THE PEOPLE'S WAR

Red Army Faction

April 1971

== 4 - Building a Base and "Serving the People" ==
With safehouses and supporters in several cities, and dozens of guerillas living underground, the RAF patiently built up its organization over two years, a period during which there occurred several clashes with police, leaving two members dead and many more in prison.

The state’s first serious attempt to eradicate the RAF had begun shortly after the publication of ''The Urban Guerilla Concept'' in 1971. Named ''Aktion Kobra'' (“Operation Cobra”), it involved three thousand heavily armed officers patrolling cities and setting up checkpoints throughout northern Germany.

On July 15, 1971, a new line was crossed when RAF members Petra Schelm and Werner Hoppe were identified by police in the port city of Hamburg. A firefight ensued, and while Hoppe managed to surrender,<ref>He would eventually receive a ten year sentence for allegedly shooting at police. (Associated Press, “German Draws 10-year term,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 27, 1972.)</ref> Schelm was shot dead. A working class woman who had entered the guerilla though the commune scene, moving on from the Roaming Hash Rebels to the RAF,<ref>Baumann, 53.</ref> she was nineteen at the time.

There was widespread outrage at this killing, and in an opinion poll conducted shortly thereafter by the respected Allensbach Institute, “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.”<ref>Varon, 199.</ref>

In the wake of the APO, the RAF began to take on the aura of folk heroes for many young people who were glad to see someone taking things to the next level. As one woman who joined the group in this period put it, “For the first time, I found a theoretical foundation for something that, until then, I had only felt.”<ref>Margrit Schiller in ''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror''</ref>

Or in the words of Helmut Pohl, who stole cars for the guerilla at this time:<blockquote>''What was clear was the drive, the resolve, quite simply, the search for something new—something different from the shit here. That was what made it attractive and created the base of support. This existed from the beginning, and there is no way it could have been otherwise.''<ref>Helmut Pohl’s Testimony at the Stammheim Trial, July 29, 1976. This testimony is available on the internet at <nowiki>http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/</nowiki> documents/76_0708_mohnhaupt_pohl.html#22.</ref> </blockquote>Thousands of students secretly carried photographs of RAF members in their wallets, and time and time again, as the police 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 not a few middle class supporters—academics, doctors, even a clergyman.<ref>Philip Jacobson, “Show Trial,” ''Sunday Times Magazine'', February 23, 1975, 17.</ref> Newspapers at the time carried stories under headlines like “Celebrities Protect Baader Gang” and “Sympathizers Hamper Hunt for Baader Group.”<ref>Aust, 141.</ref>

The guerilla continued to attract new members, including several former members of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), a radical therapy group that had carried out some armed actions before its leading members were arrested in July 1971 (see sidebar on next page).
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Socialist Patients' Collective
|While the RAF was forming, other groups in the Federal Republic were also experimenting with armed politics. One of these, the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), started as a radical therapy group based at Heidelberg University in southwest Germany. Under the leadership of psychiatrist Wolfgang Huber, the group adopted the slogan, “The system has made us sick: let us strike the death blow to the sick system!”
In tying together political radicalism and psychotherapy, the SPK were not as odd as they might be considered today. As already mentioned, the student left was deeply indebted to the Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism, and the Frankfurt School in turn was deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, as were philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and revolutionary theorists like Frantz Fanon, all of whom greatly influenced sixties radicals. As such, there was much enthusiasm about psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy within the New Left, and this was nowhere more true than in West Germany.
According to government officials, the SPK held that only the maladjusted can survive in modern society, and the insane are actually too sane to live under present social conditions.<ref>United Press International, “U.S. Hunts German Terrorists,” ''Pacific Stars and Stripes'', July 23, 1978.</ref> The SPK members began carrying out armed attacks after Huber was fired from his post at the university in February 1970, burning down the State Psychiatric Clinic, robbing banks, and even trying (unsuccessfully) to plant a bomb on a train in which the president of the Federal Republic was traveling. In July of 1971, Huber, his wife, and seven SPK members were arrested on charges of having formed a criminal association and illegally procuring arms and explosives.<ref>Becker, ''Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang''. Please note that this book, written by a right-wing South African journalist, is counterinsurgency tripe. Nevertheless, it has been used for specific details like dates and places, when no other source is available.</ref>

Many of the SPK members who remained at large would go on to join the RAF.
|}
On October 22, there was another shooting in Hamburg, but this time a police officer was killed. Margrit Schiller, a former SPK member who had joined the RAF, was being pursued by two policemen when Gerhard Müller (also formerly of the SPL) and a female RAF member came to her defense: in the ensuing melee, officer Norbert Schmid was shot dead.

Schiller was nevertheless captured, and a macabre scene played out as police called a press conference to display their trophy. Millions of television viewers watched, amazed, as the young woman—clearly unwilling to play the part assigned to her—was carried in front of the cameras by a pack of cops, her head pulled back by her hair so that all could see her face as she struggled to break free.<ref>la Times—Washington Post Service, “West Germany’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ Have Country in an Uproar,” ''The Lawton Constitution'', December 3, 1972. Margrit Schiller being dragged into press conference by Hamburg police. could not in fact be tied to any RAF actions, and so was simply charged with illegal possession of a firearm and false identification papers. In February 1973, she received a twenty-seven-month sentence, but was released pending an appeal, at which point she went back underground, only to be captured again in 1974. (United Press International, “Raided Flat is Suspected Anarchist HQ.” ''European Stars and Stripes'', October 28, 1971; ''European Stars and Stripes'' “Released from Custody,” February 11, 1973; Associated Press, “Raids in German Cities Smash New Terror Ring,” ''European Stars and Stripes,'' February 5, 1974.)</ref>
[[File:Georg von Rauch.png|thumb|''Georg von Rauch, murdered by police in West Berlin.'']]
Police searches and checkpoints increased as the hunt for the guerilla continued. On December 4, police in West Berlin stopped a car carrying Bommi Baumann and Georg von Rauch, leading figures in the nascent 2nd of June Movement anarchist guerilla. Von Rauch was immediately shot and killed, which many people took as proof that the cops had adopted a policy to “shoot first, ask questions later.” Thousands participated in demonstrations protesting this killing, and an abandoned nurses’ residence at the Bethanien Hospital was occupied and renamed the Georg von Rauch House.<ref>The Georg von Rauch House still exists today, housing approximately forty itinerant youth at any given time.</ref>

(Subsequent to leaving the guerilla, Baumann told an interviewer from Spiegel that von Rauch had fired his weapon first, though he later backtracked, claiming instead, “I no longer know who first pulled the trigger.”<ref>Baumann, 95.</ref> All of this was viewed with some suspicion, many observers feeling that Baumann’s move to an anti-guerilla position rendered it tantamount to counterinsurgency propaganda.)
[[File:“The Police- Genscher’s Killer Elite or the New Stormtroopers?” - from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|left|thumb|''“The Police- Genscher’s Killer Elite or the New Stormtroopers?” - from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png'']]
The “shoot first” hypothesis would be given further credence on March 1, 1972, when Richard Epple, a seventeen-year-old apprentice, was mowed down by police submachine gun fire after a car chase through Tübingen. Epple had run a police checkpoint because he was driving without a license—he had no connections to the RAF or any other guerilla group.<ref>Vague, 42-43.</ref> Later that year, in Stuttgart, a Scottish businessman, Ian McLeod, was similarly killed by police fire as he stood naked behind a bedroom door. Depending on who one believes, Macleod was either completely unconnected to the RAF, or else was himself a British intelligence agent intent on infiltrating the group—in either case it was clear the police shot without cause or provocation. Hundreds of people took to the streets to protest this police murder.<ref>United Press International, “Paper Says Macleod was a British Spy,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 3, 1972.</ref>

The next bust occurred as 1971 came to a close: on December 17, Rolf Pohle was arrested in a gun shop in Neu-Ulm attempting to buy thirty-two firearms which the police claimed were meant for the RAF.<ref>Associated Press, “Trial starts in Munich for accused Meinhof-gang munitions supplier,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', September 26, 1973. Pohle went to trial in 1973, charged with possession of firearms and support for a criminal organization under §129; during the trial, he spit at reporters and refused to acknowledge his court appointed lawyers. While he denied the charges against him, and repeatedly claimed that he was not a member of the raf, he maintained solidarity with the guerilla. In 1974, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison, a term which he did not serve without some interruptions.</ref> Pohle had been a young law student in Munich in the days of the APO. He had organized legal aid during the 1968 Easter riots,<ref>Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union, “Nachruf auf Rolf Pohle,” <nowiki>https://www.fau.org/artikel/art_040308-182546</nowiki>.</ref> and had been subjected to heavy police harassment ever since, eventually pushing him to join the underground.

On December 22, exactly two months after officer Schmid’s demise, another cop was killed. Several RAF members were robbing a bank in the small military city of Kaiserslautern—the nearest police station had literally been blocked from interfering, guerilla helpers barricading its entrance with cars. By plain bad luck for all concerned, police officer Herbert Schoner spotted the parked getaway van as he passed by the bank, just as it was being relieved of its funds. When Schoner knocked on the van’s window, he was shot twice—he managed to draw his gun before he was finished off by a third bullet.<ref>Aust, 190.</ref>

In the immediate aftermath of December 22, there was no publicly available evidence to tie the robbery or Schoner’s death to any political organization. To all appearances, this was simply a “normal” crime. Nevertheless, the very next morning, the ''Bild Zeitung'' led the charge: “Baader-Meinhof Gang Strikes Again. Bank Raid: Policeman Shot,” screamed the headline.

The Springer Press was merely doing what was by now a tradition, tarring the radical left with any and all crimes and misdemeanors. (Except, of course, that in this case they were right.)

The progressive ''Gruppe 47'' intellectual Heinrich Böll, perhaps the most important author in postwar Germany, was flabbergasted, and publicly accused the anti-RAF smear campaign of bearing all the hallmarks of fascism. While condemning their violence, he tried to put the RAF into perspective, famously describing their struggle as a “war of six against sixty million.”

Böll’s words may have been appreciated by the RAF, but he was certainly no supporter. Of course, this was not the way the right saw things, and he became the target of a hate campaign, branded an apologist for murder and a terrorist sympathizer,<ref>Ibid., 190-191.</ref> to which he replied that those accused of sympathizing were simply “people who have committed the criminal sin of making distinctions.”<ref>Cobler, 41.</ref> He and his family would experience unusual levels of police harassment for years to come. At one point, for instance, as he was entertaining guests from out of town, police with submachine guns raided his home, claiming they suspected Ulrike Meinhof of being on the premises. (To the cop in charge, Böll declared that if Meinhof ever did show up he would shelter her, but only on condition that she not bring any guns into his house. In his words, it would be the Christian thing to do.)<ref>Robert Spaemann, “Kaffee, Kuchen und Terror,” ''Die Zeit'' [online], 19 (1998)</ref>

It wasn’t only the streets that were being policed, but also the cultural and political parameters of debate, and the RAF was being placed clearly beyond the pale.

A second, and at least initially less successful move to solidify public opinion against the RAF was the trial of Karl-Heinz Ruhland, which came to a close in March 1972.

Ruhland had been peripheral to the RAF when he was captured in December 1970. Soon after his arrest, he started providing the police with information, the location of safehouses and the names of those who had sheltered the guerilla.<ref>Aust, 140.</ref> When brought to trial on charges relating to a raf bank robbery, much was made of his class status as a manual worker who was never fully accepted by the other members of the group, all in a fairly transparent ploy to show the guerilla up as hypocritical middle class revolutionaries with no real affinity for the proletariat.

Ruhland provided the police with their first real break, however slight, into the world of the RAF, a service for which he received a relatively lenient sentence of four and a half years. Although even the corporate press had to admit that he did not make a very convincing witness, often changing his testimony to fit the latest police theory, he would remain a fixture in future RAF trials<ref>Ruhland testified against Horst Mahler, Ali Jansen, and Astrid Proll amongst others. Several years later, after the Stammheim deaths, Ruhland was once again trotted out as an “old comrade” of the prisoners in order to explain how they must have felt suicidal. (United Press International, “Suicide Victim Died of Despair— Comrade,” ''Raleigh Register'', November 14, 1977).</ref> until someone more convincing could be turned. In retrospect, his significance appears to be as a template for future state witnesses to come.<ref>Heinrich Hannover, “Terrorsitenprozessen,” <nowiki>http://www.freilassung.de/div/texte/kronzeuge/heinhan1.htm</nowiki>.</ref>

In the meantime, guns continued to blaze as the police and guerilla played an increasingly deadly game of hide and seek. Following a narrow escape, Andreas Baader even sent off a letter to the non-Springer press that he authenticated with his thumbprint, essentially to thumb his nose at the cops, and to prove that he was still alive.<ref>Andreas Eichler, “Die raf und die Medien.” This document is reprinted in this volume: Andreas Baader: Letter to the Press, see pages 120-121.</ref>
[[File:Tommy Weissbecker from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Tommy Weissbecker, murdered by Augsburg police on March 2, 1972.'']]
Then, on March 2, police in the Bavarian city of Augsburg killed Tommy Weissbecker and captured Carmen Roll (a former SPK member). Weissbecker was the son of a Jewish concentration camp survivor,<ref>Tilman Fichter, interview by Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “The anti-Semitism of the 68ers.”</ref> and had cut his teeth in the Hash Rebels scene before gravitating to the RAF. Twenty-three years old, he was never given a chance to surrender.

The killing took place as the two left Weissbecker’s apartment. It was later revealed that the police had had him under surveillance since February, renting an apartment above his, and had been listening in on him just before he went out. This would suggest to many not a chance identity check, but a carefully staged murder. In retaliation, the 2nd of June Movement bombed the police headquarters in West Berlin and, as in the case of Georg von Rauch, an empty building in Berlin was occupied and renamed the Tommy Weissbecker House.

While in custody Roll was drugged, apparently in the hope that she would provide police with information; as part of this chemically assisted interrogation, on March 16 the prison doctor gave her such a large dose of ether that she almost died.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, ''Der Kampf Gegen die Vernichtungshaft'' (n.p.) (n.d.), 131.</ref>

News of Weissbecker’s murder spead quickly. In Hamburg, RAF members Manfred Grashof and Wolfgang Grundmann feared this meant the safehouse they were staying at—which had been rented by Weissbecker—might also be compromised. RAF policy in such situations was to simply leave the house and never return, but Grashof, whose speciality was producing false documents, decide to risk one trip back to gather some items he needed. When he and Grundmann returned, three cops were sitting inside in the dark. As soon as the guerillas opened the door, even before they turned on the lights on, a cop panicked and started shooting.<ref>Gabriele Goettle, “Die Praxis der Galaxie,” ''die tageszeitung'', July 28, 2008.</ref> Grashof was shot three times. He returned fire, aiming blindly in the dark, and hit police commissioner Hans Eckardt, fatally wounding him.<ref>In 1977, Grashof received a life sentence for murder and other offenses; Grundmann received four years on lighter charges (Associated Press, “2 German Terrorists Given life,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', June 3, 1977.)</ref>

Grundmann had come to the RAF from ''Schwarze Hilfe'', or Black Aid, a support group for anarchist political prisoners in West Berlin.<ref>Becker, 273.</ref>

As for Grashof, he had come to West Berlin in 1968 as an army deserter, and had joined with Horst Mahler in the Republican Club arguing that the semi-city be turned into an official refuge for others fleeing military service.<ref>David Binder, “‘Republic of West Berlin’ Suggested by Radical Group,” ''Charleston Gazette'', November 7, 1968. Whereas young men living in West Berlin were already exempt from the draft, those who lived elsewhere and had already been drafted were liable to prosecution if they deserted.</ref> He had been with the guerilla from the beginning, being particularly close to Petra Schelm and especially upset by her death.

Despite his injuries, Grashof was moved from the hospital to a regular prison cell by Federal Supreme Court Judge Wolfgang Buddenberg, who had been put in charge of all RAF arrests. After two months, he was moved into isolation, only allowed to exercise for a half hour each day, and even then only with his wrists handcuffed behind his back. As a result of this treatment, his wounds opened up again, but he did not die.<ref>Aust, 203.</ref>

All of this unfolded within a context of increasing and increasingly visible police control and new repressive legislation. After having offered the carrot of amnesty and limited reforms, Brandt’s SD{-FDP coalition was now showing that it also knew how to wield the stick.

In September 1971, a new Chief Commissioner was appointed to the BKA (Federal Criminal Bureau): Horst Herold, former Chief of the Nuremberg police, and an expert on the new methods of using computerized data processing as a law enforcement tool. Under Herold’s leadership, the BKA was transformed from a relatively unimportant body into the West German equivalent of the FBI. Over the next decade, he would oversee a six-fold increase in the BKA budget, and a tripling of its staff as he personally pushed West Germany to the worldwide forefront of computerized repression.<ref>Ibid., 181.</ref>

By 1979, Herold’s computers contained files on 4.7 million names and 3,100 organizations, including the photos of 1.9 million people and 2.1 million sets of fingerprints.<ref>Ibid.</ref> While today it is routine for such data to be available at the touch of a police keyboard, in the 1970s this represented a simply unheard of level of surveillance and technical sophistication.

One of Herold’s first moves was to set up a “Baader-Meinhof Special Commission,” and hunting for the RAF remained his utmost priority throughout his tenure.

The significance of these changes in the BKA was overshadowed, though, by a new clampdown on the legal left, arguably the greatest since the ban on the KPD, as the Interior Ministers Conference passed the Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Act) on January 28, 1972. The new legislation was supported by all three major political parties, as well as all the major trade unions.<ref>Gerard Braunthal, ''Political Service and Public Loyalty in West Germany: the 1972 decree against radicals and its consequences'' (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 36-37.</ref> Known as the Berufsverbot (Professional Ban) by its opponents, its intention was to bar leftists from working in the public sector. The potential targets of this ban included some 14% of the workforce, not only government bureaucrats, but also anyone employed by the post office, the railways, public hospitals—and most importantly university professors and school teachers.<ref>Monica Jacobs, “Civil Rights and Women’s Rights in the Federal Republic of Germany Today,” ''New German Critique'' 16 Special Feminist Issue (Winter 1978): 166.</ref>

The decree also dramatically increased the visibility of the Verfassungsschutz political police—the so-called “Guardians of the Constitution”—as the names of all applicants for public sector jobs were now sent to this agency, which determined on the basis of its own files whether a special hearing was necessary to gauge the applicant’s loyalty to the state. Not only did the Verfassungsschutz comb open sources—speeches, pamphlets, doctoral theses, etc.—for names, but it also engaged in covert surveillance, telephone taps, and a network of informers which was said to include students hired to note who among their classmates held radical views.<ref>Braunthal, 42.</ref> (Little surprise that the agency’s president until 1972 was Hubert Schrübbers, who had spent the early forties as a Nazi prosecutor notorious for seeking harsh sentences against antifascists, which would certainly have meant confinement in a concentration camp.)<ref>Ibid., 43.</ref>

As Georgy Katsifiacis has noted, “the decree resulted in loyalty checks on 3.5 million persons and the rejection of 2,250 civil service applicants. Although only 256 civil servants were dismissed, the decree had a chilling effect.”<ref>Georgy Katsiaficas, ''Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life'' (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 64.</ref> So much so that according to one survey carried out in the city of Mannheim, “84 percent of university students there refrained from regularly checking leftist materials out of public libraries for fear of being blacklisted.”<ref name=":0">Ibid.</ref><ref name=":0" />

Obviously, those students who had refused the SPD’s amnesty in 1971 found themselves among the first to be targeted. While most of these people would no doubt have rejected the RAF’s politics, fears about the guerilla were exploited to help push through the legislation. As Heinz Kühn, spd President of North Rhine-Westphalia, put it, “We could hardly have Ulrike Meinhof employed as a teacher, or Andreas Baader in the police force.”<ref>Aust, 192</ref>

In the wake of the sixties student movement, the state was establishing the conditions under which erstwhile rebels would be allowed to join the establishment. As its corollary, this rollback included ongoing attacks on the universities themselves. For instance, in early 1972, the Free University hired the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel as professor of economics: the Berlin Senate responded by vetoing this appointment,<ref>''Time Magazine'' [online], “Battle of Berlin,” July 3, 1972.</ref> and despite student strikes, Mandel was barred from entering the FRG. (This ban was only lifted in 1978.)<ref>Rote Armee Fraktion, ''Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF'', (Berlin: id-Verlag, 1997), 82.</ref>

In this context, in April 1972, the RAF released its second theoretical statement, ''Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle''. As with ''The Urban Guerilla Concept'', this text was distributed in magazine form at the May Day demonstrations that year.

In a text almost twice as long as the previous one, the RAF was trying to provide an analysis of the previous year’s events, both within the left and within the Federal Republic as a whole. Considerable energy was spent analyzing the unsuccessful workers’ struggles in the chemical sector in 1971 and the failure of the legal left to respond to class oppression within the FRG. These weaknesses were pointed to as so many factors underscoring the necessity for armed politics.

A real attempt to find a strategic connection between class oppression, working class struggle (outside of the unions, of course) and the guerilla is apparent in all the RAF’s theoretical documents in this period.

This will not always be the case. In contradistinction to its anti-imperialism, this class orientation at times approximated left-communism in its focus on working class self-activity and alienation. Partly, the explanation for this can be found in the political experiences and trajectories of the core members of the RAF at this point: the sixties revolt and the APO, with their grounding in not only Marxism-Leninism and anti-imperialism, but also Frankfurt School Marxism, the “apprentices collectives,” and, via the SPK, radical therapy.

At the same time, the period between 1969 and 1973 was one of heightened class conflict in the FRG, beyond and at times against the trade union leadership, with wildcat strikes often being led by women, youth, and immigrant workers. Combined with the sudden turn of many former APO comrades to the new “proletarian” K-groups, this created a context in which it would have been difficult to elaborate a revolutionary strategy without dealing with the question of the working class.

As we shall see later on, some of the ideas in this document were soon qualified, if not rejected, while others were sharpened, finding their place in the centre of the RAF’s worldview.

Finally, ''Serve the People'' provides the RAF’s response to Karl-Heinz Ruhland, who had been turned into an instrument of police propaganda. Similarly, two drop-outs from the guerilla, Beate Sturm and Peter Homann, were also excoriated as traitors.

Unlike Ruhland, Sturm’s main crime seems to have been that, subsequent to leaving the RAF, she contacted the media, providing ''Spiegel'' with a highly unflattering portrait of the group.

Homann’s story, on the other hand, was more complex; some controversy about his falling out with the group remains even today. While there are radically different versions of the circumstances, it is clear that he was on very bad terms with his erstwhile comrades upon his return from the Jordan training trip in 1970. Immediately after this, he and his friend Stefan Aust traveled to Sicily where Meinhof’s seven-year-old twin daughters were being cared for by comrades. Pretending to be members of the RAF, the two men took Meinhof’s girls with them, delivering them to their father, ''konkret'' editor Klaus Rainer Röhl.

It seems likely that this direct intervention to thwart Meinhof’s plans for her children played some part in provoking his denunciation as a traitor in Serve the People. There are contradictory versions of why Homann did what he did,<ref>See Appendix V—Strange Stories: Peter Homann and Stefan Aust, on pages 557- 58.</ref> but regardless of the facts surrounding this initial “treason,” he would fully earn the sobriquet later that year, going so far as to provide the police with information, and to testify against the guerilla in court.<ref>United Press International, “Meinhof-Al Fatah Ties Described,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', October 19, 1972.</ref>

In retrospect, ''Serve the People'' is significant not so much in its contents, but in its timing, by which it serves as the end of a chapter. With its explanations of the bank robberies and the painstaking preparations undertaken, it allowed the guerilla to deal with some preliminary questions before moving on to grander schemes.

It would be the last theoretical document produced by the RAF outside of prison for almost ten years.

=== Andreas Baader: Letter to the Press ===
<blockquote>''The cops will continue to fumble about in the dark, until circumstances oblige them to see that the political situation has become a military situation.''

Marighella</blockquote>The truth of the matter is that no further information has come out about the group since the first twenty were trained in Jordan. The RAF’s work is clandestine. The “security forces,” the security agencies, the police, the BND, the Verfassungsschutz, the BAW, Spiegel, and the Springer Press know nothing.

They know nothing about the size, the number of members, the organization, the firepower, or the tactics of the group. Everything written about us by the police state for public consumption over the past year and a half is false, is speculation, or is counterpropaganda with the objective of discrediting the theory and practice of the urban guerilla and driving a wedge between us and our base.

I haven’t considered turning myself in. No RAF members have considered turning themselves in. So far no RAF prisoner has provided testimony. Announcements of successes against us have only been about arrests or killings. The guerilla’s strength lies in the determination of each of us. We are not on the run. We are here organizing armed resistance against the regime of the propertied classes and the ongoing exploitation of the people.

The RAF’s current activities are directed towards the formation of politico-military cadre, acquiring better arms and training for revolutionaries, and the anchoring of the group in a sympathetic scene that is ready to support armed resistance. The tactical line that we are currently following is to develop the propaganda of the urban guerilla through the revolutionary organizations that are still legal and to develop broad-based logistical support amongst all layers of the population.

None of us see any subjective or objective basis for betraying the struggle to which we have committed ourselves; not Genscher’s dirty amnesty deal, not Ruhland, the Social Democrats’ van der Lubbe,<ref>Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, confessed to the 1933 Reichstag fire under Gestapo torture. It remains unclear if he was, in fact, guilty. Karl-Heinz Ruhland, a fringe member of the RAF, under pressure from the BKA and with coaching from the BAW, provided clearly fabricated testimony against RAF prisoners during a series of trials.</ref> not the extensive militarization of the police, not prison, not torture, and not the police terror against the population. “The stones they have thrown will fall at their own feet.”<ref>This phrase, which will reoccur in a number of different forms in RAF documents over the years, comes from a speech Mao gave at the Meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. in Celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution on November 6, 1957: “‘Lifting a rock only to drop it on one’s own feet’ is a Chinese folk saying to describe the behaviour of certain fools. The reactionaries in all countries are fools of this kind. In the final analysis, their persecution of the revolutionary people only serves to accelerate the people’s revolutions on a broader and more intense scale. Did not the persecution of the revolutionary people by the tsar of Russia and by Chiang Kai-shek perform this function in the great Russian and Chinese revolutions?”</ref>
[[File:Baader Fingerprint on Letter to the Press.png|left|thumb]]
If the price for our lives or our freedom is to be the betrayal of the anticapitalist struggle, there is only one response: we won’t pay it.

The armed struggle does not develop from one headline to the next. The politico-military strategy of the urban guerilla is based in the resistance to parliamentary democracy’s fascist drift and the organization of the first regular units of the Red Army in the people’s war. The battle has just begun.

Andreas Baader

January 24, 1972

=== Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and the Class Struggle ===
<blockquote>''Everyone dies, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said, “Though death befalls all men alike, it may be heavier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.” To die for the people is heavier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascist and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.''

Mao tse Tung</blockquote><blockquote>''“The armed struggle is a technical issue and therefore requires technical knowledge: training, morale and last of all practice. In this area, improvisation has cost many lives and led to failed attacks. The ‘spontaneity’ that some people romanticize, speaking vaguely about the people’s revolution and ‘the masses,’ is either simply a dodge or it indicates that they have decided to rely upon improvisation during a critical phase of the class struggle. Every vanguard movement must, if they want to remain true to themselves at the decisive moment in the class struggle, analyze and understand the violence of the people, so as to correctly direct it against oppression, thereby achieving the goal with the least sacrifice possible.”''<ref>Although not referenced as such by the RAF, this is a quote from ''30 Questions to a Tupamaro'' (see page 128, fn 1).</ref></blockquote>'''ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!'''

20,000 die every year because the stockholders of the automobile industry only care about profit and, therefore, don’t stop to consider technical safety issues for automobiles or road construction. 5,000 people die every year at their workplace or on their way to or from it, because the owners of the means of production only consider their profits and don’t care about an increase or a decline in the number of accidental deaths. 12,000 commit suicide every year, because they don’t want to die in the service of capital; they’d rather just get it over with themselves. 1,000 children are murdered every year, as a result of living in low quality housing, the only purpose of which is to allow the landlord to pocket a large sum.

People treat death in the service of the exploiter as normal. The refusal to die in the service of the exploiter leads to what people think of as “unnatural deaths.” The desperate actions of people, coping with the working and living conditions that capital has created, are perceived as crimes. People feel there’s nothing to be done about the situation. To ensure that the incorrect perspective of the people is not replaced with a correct perspective, the Federal Minister of the Interior, the Länder Ministers of the Interior and the BAW have set up police death squads. Without this incorrect perspective about crime and death, the ruling class could not maintain its rule.

Petra, Georg, and Thomas died in the struggle against death at the hands of the exploiters. They were murdered so that capital could continue killing undisturbed, and so that people would continue to think that nothing can be done about the situation. But the struggle has begun!
[[File:Murdered - The Struggle Continues from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|center|thumb|''“Murdered—The Struggle Continues”: poster protesting the police killings of Petra Schelm, Thomas Weissbecker, and Georg von Rauch.'']]

# '''PERSIA AND THE CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN THE NEW LEFT'''

Brandt has flown to Tehran to visit the Shah and calm his remaining distress about the greeting he received from West German and West Berlin students during the summer of 67; to inform him that the left in the Federal Republic and in West Berlin is dead, that what remains will soon be liquidated, that the Confederation of Iranian Students<ref>The Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS) was a Maoist student organization based in the refugee communities and active on university campuses throughout the western world.</ref> is effectively isolated, and about the Foreigners Act that is in the works and that will allow for their legal liquidation.

In this way Brandt has revealed the true nature of his foreign and domestic policies; they are the foreign and domestic policies of the corporations meant to control foreign and external markets and to determine who holds political power.

In Tehran Brandt said, “The foreign policy of the Federal Republic must be based on its own interests and must remain free of ideological bias.” The interests of the Federal Republic in Persia are the interests of the German enclave in Tehran, which is to say Siemens, AEG-Telefunken, Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Bank, Mannesmann, Hochtief, Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz, Merck, Schering, Robert Bosch, the Bayerische Vereinsbank, Thyssen, Degussa, and others. They are the ones that had the greetings to the Chancellor published in Tehran’s newspapers.

The Shah also contributed a statement to the daily press celebrating the Chancellor as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, because the Shah also has no ideological biases; concerning cheap labor in Iran, concerning stable political conditions in Iran, not to mention raw materials and certain nearby markets.

Under “ideological biases,” the Chancellor and the Shah subsume the interests of the German and Persian peoples regarding the relationship between their two countries. Three days before Brandt’s arrival, four comrades were murdered in Tehran and Thomas Weissbecker was murdered in Augsburg. A week after Brandt’s return, nine death penalties were carried out against comrades in Tehran. Meanwhile, Attorney General Martin<ref>Ludwig Martin, Attorney General from 1963 until 1974, when he was replaced by Siegfried Buback.</ref> praised the police officers for so impressively proving their worth in the manhunts in Augsburg and Hamburg.

German capital in Persia is taxed at a lower rate than other capital in Persia. German development aid credit finances German projects in Persia; and the imperial arsenal in Persia is to be modernized with the help of the German military. A 22 million dm<ref>Roughly $6 million.</ref> investment in the Persian arms industry in 1969 meant 250 million dm<ref>Almost $69 million.</ref> in follow-up orders for the German arms industry. The Shah’s regime plans to use g-3s and mg-3s<ref>The g-3 is an assault rifle and the mg-3 is a machinegun.</ref> in the struggle against “crime” in Persia, so that in the future wages will remain low, political conditions will remain stable and the conditions of exploitation will remain favorable for German capital. Meaning that pressure for increased wages at home can be handled with threats to move production out of the country. Pressure will also be applied to the public at home, because antifascist protest against the Shah threatens the foreign policy interests of the Federal Republic of Germany.

After prostrating himself in Poland,<ref>This is a reference to the so-called ''Warshauer Kniefall'', the “Warsaw Genuflection,” Brandt’s December 1971 public atonement at the monument commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.</ref> the Chancellor now prostrates himself before the murderous Shah. The repression of the Polish, Russian, Czech, and Hungarian peoples by German fascism is no longer going on. The repression of the Persian people under German imperialism is what is going on now. The Nuremberg Conventions are no longer in effect, but laws against Iranian students, against Greek, Turkish, and Spanish workers, who all come from countries with fascist regimes, are a current reality. German corporations profit from the fascism in these countries, controlling foreign workers here with the threat of what the fascism at home means for them. They are safe from the death penalty, which imprisoned comrades here are spared, but which is enforced in Persia, Turkey, Greece, and Spain.

The West German left met Brandt’s Persian trip with silence. They left him free to babble twaddle. They let Howeida<ref>Amir Abbas Howeida, Prime Minister of Iran during the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi. He was executed in 1979 following the Islamic revolution.</ref> babble twaddle about how the death penalty is only used against common criminals. Given that the Shah is sensitive, given that the 2nd of June disturbed the relationship between Germany and Iran, given that the Shah’s reputation is hardly stellar, as would have to be the case, given that, as everyone knows, enemies of the people dread being called enemies of the people, given that one can presume that even Brandt wasn’t all that comfortable with the hypocrisy, given that German capital is predisposed to fascism, and given that it’s relatively easy to demonstrate the connection between fascism in Iran and German capital in Iran… given all these things, nobody can defend the relationship without presenting themselves in a poor light.

The intellectual left came to the conclusion that only the proletarian masses can change the current situation, that only the West German masses can expropriate the profits that the corporations make from the Shah’s fascism—a situation from which the Shah’s fascism also profits. With this realization, the left stopped criticizing the Shah’s fascism and the domination imposed by West German capitalism in the Third World. With the realization that the resistance of the West German masses against the rule of capital would not be sparked by the problems of the Third World, but only by the problems developing here, they stopped posing the problems of the Third World as a factor in politics here.

This shows both the dogmatism and the parochialism of a section of the left. The fact that the working class in West Germany and West Berlin can only think and act in the national context, while capital thinks and acts in a multinational context, is first and foremost an example of the splitting of the working class, as well as of the weakness of a left that only focuses on capital’s domestic policies in its critique and ignores capital’s foreign policy, thus internalizing the split in the working class. They tell the working class only half of the truth about the system, about what capitalist policy means for the working class on a daily basis and what it means for wage demands in the foreseeable future.

The contradiction facing the New Left is that their basic economic analysis and political assessment is more radical and incisive than anything produced by the West German left prior to the 66/67 recession. This left experienced the end of the postwar reconstruction phase and the strengthening of West German imperialism and understood that they had to base themselves on the extraordinary class struggle, which led to them restricting their propaganda and organizational efforts to the national context. As a result, they have an unimaginative and narrow view of what revolutionary methods of intervention are possible.

In their efforts to give a scientific orientation to the anticapitalist protest—which reaches into the schools, the unions and the SPD— to maintain and develop their position in the high schools, they used Marxism to make the history of the working class more accessible to teachers and students. They hoped in this way to gain a foothold in the factories and schools.

Through these activities they show a willingness to act and to intervene that stands in contradiction to their actual methods of intervention, which remain those that were appropriate for the working class during the phase of competitive capitalism and parliamentarianism. They were appropriate in the period when Rosa Luxemburg, looking at the mass strikes in Russia in 1905, recognized the immense importance of strikes in the political struggle and Lenin recognized the importance of union struggles. It is the contradiction between their use of the German working class as their historical reference point, and the increasing tendency today of West German capitalism to organize itself in the form of West German imperialism.

A section of the left still sees the RAF as Baader and Meinhof’s personal thing and—like Howeida, the ''Bild'' and the ''BZ''—discusses armed struggle as if it were a form of criminal activity. In a similar vein, they also attribute our activity to faulty reasoning and misrepresent our positions. As a result, they will fail to resolve the contradiction between what they know to be the state of the class struggle, and what they perceive to be the revolutionary methods of intervention. They transform the objective problem that we all face into our subjective problem alone. They conduct themselves as if they fear the difficult task ahead of them—they bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about it. The denunciation of the concept of the urban guerilla within a section of the left succeeds far too easily and without much thought, thereby allowing us to see the growing distance between their theory and their practice, a distance that we do not believe can be closed by our efforts alone. Their claim that they are actually involved in this debate proves, we think, that we and they have different self-perceptions.

A year ago, we said that the urban guerilla unites the national and international class struggle. The urban guerilla makes it possible for the people to become aware of the interconnectedness of imperialist rule. The urban guerilla is the revolutionary form of intervention suited to an overall position of weakness. An advance in the class struggle only occurs if legal and illegal work are connected, if political propaganda has a perspective that includes armed struggle and if political organization includes the possibility of the urban guerilla. This was made clear through the concrete example of the chemical workers strike in 1971, which showed the objective reality of the social question, the subjective reality of the question of capitalist ownership and the militarization of the class struggle in West Germany and West Berlin.<blockquote>''In the current phase of history no one can any longer deny that an armed group, however small it may be, has more of a chance of becoming a people’s army than a group that has been reduced to spouting revolutionary rhetoric.''

30 Questions to a Tupamaro<ref>The Tupamaros were a guerilla group in Uruguay at the time. This short interview started circulating as an internal document in 1967, and was first made public in a Chilean journal in mid-1968. Within a few years, it had become a text of some importance to the revolutionary edge of the New Left in the metropole.</ref></blockquote>'''2. THE CHEMICAL WORKERS STRIKE OF 1971'''

The widespread strikes in the chemical and metal industries in 1971— among the most developed industries in West Europe—made it clear what the problems facing the working class will be in the coming years. They exhibited a widespread readiness to struggle on the part of the workforce, while simultaneously showing the economic and political advantages the chemical and metal industries have vis-à-vis the working class; they showed the complicity of the union bureaucracies with the Social-Liberal government and the role of the government as the executive organ of this “corporate state.”

The workers lost the strikes. They struck for 11 and 12 percent, and the unions settled with the employers for 7.8 and 7.5 percent. The situation that socialists in the Federal Republic and West Berlin will face in coming years was certainly clarified by this strike: subjectively, an increase in readiness to struggle on the part of the working class and, objectively, the reduced capacity to struggle; objectively, a decrease in wages and the loss of “vested social rights,” subjectively, increased class antagonism and class hatred.

Economically speaking, the strength of the chemical industry was the result of the trends towards concentration and the export of capital which have been forced upon the entire West European economy by North American competition. Politically, it was the result of the lessons that West German industry drew from May 68 in France and the wildcat strikes of September 69. Their counteroffensive against the September strikes here certainly increased class consciousness.

''Concentration''

Due to their size and technological advantages, the large American industrialists can achieve lower production costs despite paying higher wages. Hugh Stephenson of Time magazine:<blockquote>''the problem of size is not essentially one of the size of factory installations, rather the key is understanding the grandeur of the financial and economic factors that stand behind this. A large volume of business means almost nothing. However, it does have advantageous implications regarding dominant market position. And that is an advantage that can’t be achieved without substantial investment in modern industry, even if it is not in the area of developing technologies. The type of competition between industrialists in developing branches of industry, such as the automobile, chemical and oil industries, has completely changed. The cost of new investments is so high for the enterprises involved that as stable a future market as the intense competition allows for must be guaranteed. Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that European industry must in the future enter a phase of concentration into fewer and larger groups.''

''Die Welt'', February 23, 1972

</blockquote>''Public Funds''

Concentration is the first reality. The influx of public funds to cover the costs of research and development is the second. North American industries have access to greater funds of this variety as a result of their size and the U.S.A.’s permanent war economy. In 1963-64, the U.S.A. used 3.3 percent of its gross national product for research purposes—compared to an average of 1.5 percent in West Europe. Hugh Stephenson:<blockquote>''In the area of developing technologies, Europe will never be able to deal with the immense and ever-growing research and development costs if a constant flow of public funds is not guaranteed.''</blockquote>If not, then it would be better to just sign deals with American firms right away. That is the pressure that today’s economy places on the state. Concentration and state subsidies have become a question of survival for capitalist West Europe.

''The Export of Capital''

The third thing is the export of capital. This entails cooperation with foreign industries and building factories in foreign countries, with the aim of profiting from the cheaper raw materials and lower wages available in these countries, and of reducing transportation costs by buying from foreign markets.

Because the chemical industry stands at the forefront of this development, the chemical workers strike of 1971 had a central significance. It serves as an example of an entire trend, from the chemical companies’ strike preparations in December 1970, through the purge of teachers who are members of the DKP from the public service and the incorporation of the BGS into the federal police force, from the first signs of fascism in the Federal Republic to the CSU seizing control of ''Bayerischen Rundfunk'',<ref>''Bayerischen Rundfunk'': Bavarian Broadcasting, the public radio station in Bavaria.</ref> from the refusal to allow Mandel to teach at the Free University to the application of the death penalty to the Red Army Faction.

As a result of this, in the coming years increasing numbers of people from all levels of society, with the exception of the owners of capital, will find themselves dissatisfied with the structure of ownership. It therefore follows that it is tactically and strategically incorrect not to treat the question of ownership, which is now addressed with trivial and wishy washy arguments about co-management<ref>The practice of union representatives having a vote on the corporate boards dates from the late 1940s. Also referred to as co-determination.</ref> and “protecting what we’ve begun,” as the general and ongoing central issue. The situation has also led to a development whereby anyone who profits from these circumstances can conceal that fact.

''Bayer – BASF– Farbwerke Hoechst''

The chemical industry is among the industries with the highest levels of concentration in West Germany. The market share of just three, IG Farben-Nachfolger Bayer, Farbwerke Hoechst, and BASF, makes up 50 percent of the industrial sector. These three chemical corporations are among the four largest companies incorporated in the Federal Republic.

Of the 597,000 employed in the sector, 200,000 work for the big three. They control over 50 percent of the funds for research and development in the chemical industry. In the years 1965-70 alone, BASF gained control of business and corporate concerns that conducted 4 billion dm<ref>Roughly $1.45 billion.</ref> worth of business, which was more than it had itself been conducting in 1965.

Regarding the cooperation between the state and the chemical corporations, the 1969 Federal Research Report states:<blockquote>''In the chemical industry one can speak of a genuine division of labor between state-funded basic research and industrial research. The chemical industry can only continue their recent rate of growth and retain their international importance if a high level of (state-supported) basic research continues.''</blockquote>What export of capital means in the chemical industry is that while in 1970 West German industry did 19.3 percent of their business outside of Germany, for Farbwerke Hoechst it was 44 percent, for BASF 50 percent, for Bayer 56 percent. South Africa, Portugal, Turkey, Iran, and Brazil are some the places where they have production facilities.

The Federal Republic also provides military aid to Portugal, Turkey and Iran. Obviously, this military aid serves to ensure conditions of exploitation beneficial to West German capital in these countries, which is to say, holding wages down and gunning down workers who resist. It is also clear that since the mid-60s this military aid has also served to build up “security forces,” which is to say the police, who conduct the anti-guerilla war under the guise of fighting crime, saying whatever is necessary to support that position: there is no resistance, the masses are completely satisfied, it’s only a question of criminals and crime.

American military aid to Iran was given to support the campaign against drug dealing and smuggling, and Brandt has no “ideological biases” if the execution of revolutionaries is disguised as sentences carried out against criminals. Scheel spoke recently—in the context of the signing of a contract, in which the Federal Republic secured future Brazilian uranium discoveries—of the common interest of the Federal Republic and the Brazilian military junta in resisting “terrorism and subversive activities,” which is in reaction to the Latin American guerillas who laid bombs at the BASF installation.

Together with American corporations, the West German chemical corporations control almost the entire chemical and pharmaceutical market in Iran. Iran is the site of the greatest rate of expansion of western interests; South Africa offers the highest rate of profit—Volkswagen for example averaged dividends of 30 percent last year, and in 1968 they were as high as 45 percent. Between what they produce and what they sell, the West German chemical and pharmaceutical industry controls 10 to 12 percent of the South American market.

Pressure on wages and the reduction of the wage-cost ratio in production was achieved through the exploitation of lower wage standards in foreign countries, through guest workers, and through investments at home, all of which the chemical industry has used in recent years to achieve a 75 percent increase in capacity, as well as rationalization and redundancy in the labor force.

The figures: between 1950 and 1970, the number of people employed in the chemical industry increased by only 100 percent, compared to an increase in sales of 636 percent. In general, the tendency is for the number of people to decrease. The closing of Phrixwerke made the headlines. Hüls announced this February that in 1972 the number of people it employs will decrease by 3 to 4 percent. The chemical industry speaks of the “the increasing importance of labor costs.” This indicates that they intend lay-offs and wage rollbacks. They entered the 1971 round of negotiations with the aim of asserting their concept of “labor costs,” which is to say, with the hope of putting the working class on the defensive through a massive attack.

''The Strength of the Capitalist Class''

Concentration as the precondition for a strong negotiating position for capital requires nothing more than a unified position on the part of the employers, in a situation where the Employers Association is controlled by the corporations that control the market: Bayer, BASF and Hoechst. Export of capital is a source of strength for the chemical industry, given that it creates a situation in which the working class that confronts it is not the industry’s only source of profit. In the workers’ struggle, the elimination of competition between wage workers always finds its practical limits within national borders, and so a strike only stops a part of capital’s profitable production. While the workers gamble everything, capital only gambles part of what it has.

Just because the chemical industry ruthlessly uses its strengths to gain the upper hand politically is absolutely no reason for whining. It is an error to see the chemical companies as especially evil because they make use of slave labor in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to put pressure on wages, because they use investments to get the labor force off their backs, and because they use concentration to secure economic and political mobility and flexibility. The brutality of their exploitative behavior—in the form of political repression and pressure to reduce the costs of social reproduction—indicates the effect of North American competition on West Europe’s economy, as well as the rationalization of the sector, its products, and the market. It is an integral part of the inhumanity and criminality of the system and will only be eliminated when the system is eliminated, or it will not be eliminated at all.

The chemical industry prepared meticulously for the strike; it was they and not the unions that wanted the strike, and they and not the unions that won the strike. The workers suffered a setback. Everybody played different roles against them: capital, the government and the union bureaucracy.

''Preparing for the Strike''

In February 71, the unions called for a wage increase beginning March 31 in Hessen, North Rhine and Rhineland Palatinate, demanding 11 to 12 percent, and for Hessen a flat 120 marks,<ref>Roughly $43. Regarding the flat rate: wage increases in many German industries were indexed by workers’ “skill category,” which meant that every wage increase in fact served to increase the divide between different layers of the working class. The demand for a flat wage increase was meant to counter this trend, as such an increase would benefit all workers equally. On this, see Roth, 116-117</ref> which for Hessen meant the same wage increase for all wage levels, the freezing of wage cuts and a step forward in the unity of the working class. The chemical industry refused to make any deal.

In December 70, the chemical industry had already created “mutual support systems” between their companies in case of a strike. This took the form of transferring money related to wage payments to the development and conversion of raw materials, to the production of primary and intermediate products, and to the setting aside of capital for production facilities and transportation. They also provided their customers with an 8-week stock of their products, including the smaller clients such as drugstores and universities—the rector of Düsseldorf University, for example, called upon the institutes and seminars to stock up as a precautionary measure.

Operating measures were worked out in detail: instruction manuals for strike breakers, secure plant telephone systems, a list of the names of union representatives, facilities to print leaflets, contacts with the local press and opinion-makers such as teachers, ministers and associations. Lists were drawn up of supposed members of an “underground political force” to be forwarded to the ''Verfassungsschutz'' and the police. Contacts with the police, government departments, and Interior Ministers. A line of argument was also developed about the “danger to the workplace posed by the strike,” etc.

In December 70, the union representatives at Farbwerke Hoechst polled their members regarding the proposed wage demands. The Wage Commission—made up of representatives from the IG Chemie trade union and the larger companies—refused the demands. The vote with which the demands were rejected wasn’t even close: 4 to 1. The union representatives from Merck in Darmstadt demanded 160 marks<ref>Roughly $58.</ref> or 12 percent. They also had little luck with the Wage Commission.

''State Support for the Capitalist Class''

The Employers Association received state support. The basic 9 percent wage increase projected in the government’s wage guidelines was reduced to 7.5 percent at the beginning of the year. Brandt, on May 11 in parliament: “In the current phase, wage costs that are too high risk causing underemployment.” The experts in their opinions supported the chemical industry, stating that “a very slow reduction in the rate of wage increases” is not enough, but that “extreme measures are necessary.” (May 71)

In May, the chemical industry made an offer of 5 percent, and IG Chemie issued a press release stating that they wouldn’t insist upon 11 or 12 percent, but would accept 8 or 9 percent

''The Betrayal of Rhineland Palatinate''

On May 24, however, Rhineland Palatinate—to great public surprise— signed a wage contract for 7.8 percent over ten months, which on the basis of a real duration of twelve months is 6.5 percent, less than that suggested in Schiller’s<ref>2 Karl Schiller was the SPD’s Federal Minister of Economic Affairs and Minister of Finance at the time. His reference data would presumably have determined the government’s wage guidelines.</ref> reference data. Rhineland Palatinate is controlled by BASF. BASF won’t accept strikes.

Bayer and Hoechst also later avoided strikes. The employees of the large companies don’t want the humiliation of a setback during a strike; they have been disciplined by a broad and diverse system of pacification: company housing, purported profit sharing, training grants, a body of company representatives alongside the unions, the organization of the workplace whereby the employees are split into hundreds of separate factory units, a wage system split into different wage levels, separate low wage groups for men and women.

The chemical industry in Hessen circulated to its own employees the leaflet that the IG Chemie trade union had prepared for its members regarding this outcome. The Wage Commission in North Rhine and Hessen bristled at the outcome in Rhineland Palatinate. They talked about options for struggle, but didn’t prepare them. IG Chemie simply demanded that their members get their dues in order and recruit new members.

''The Strike''

In the face of the chemical industry’s resistance, federal government arbitration eventually failed in North Rhine and Hessen, and later in Westphalia and Hamburg. Following the failure of federal government arbitration, the strike began. From the beginning of June until the beginning of July, a total of 50,000 workers in these four areas were on strike and 150,000 were involved in support actions. In North Rhine they struck for 9 percent, in Hessen for a flat increase of at least 120 marks,<ref>Roughly $43.</ref> or 11 percent, and in the other areas for 11 or 12 percent. It was the first strike in the chemical industry in 40 years, since the wage struggles at the beginning and end of the 1920s.

The organizational initiative didn’t come from the unions; it came from the workers. At Glanzstoff in Oberbruch, it started with 120 skilled workers, who spontaneously walked out on June 3. Later, when the union called for a work stoppage in the key sectors, other workers spontaneously joined the strike. At Dynamit Nobel in Troisdorf, the action began with a spontaneous walkout on the part of skilled workers in the explosives factories. At Clouth-Gummiwerken in Cologne, where the strike lasted 4 weeks, it began with the mill workers. At Degussa in Wolfgang, small groups of skilled workers walked out of the various production centres, calling for a demonstration against the factory committee and the union representatives. At Braun in Melsungen, it began with workers in the engineering building. In Glanzstoff in Kelsterbach, the action began with a sit-down strike by some Spanish workers. In Merck, at Farbwerken Hoechst, the action began with different small groups. In some factories the strike lasted for the entire month of June.

On June 8, 10,000 workers took part in a mass IG Chemie trade union demonstration at the Cologne Arena. On June 14, there was a day of action in North Rhine; 19,000 workers from 38 factories joined the strike. On June 16, 10,000 workers again participated in a second mass IG Chemie demonstration in Cologne. Simultaneously, 16,000 took part in actions in Hessen—4,000 workers from Farbwerke Hoechst participated in a union demonstration; it was the first time in 50 years that there was a strike at Hoechst—even if it only lasted a few hours. At the end of June, 38,000 workers were on strike in Hessen, North Rhine, Hamburg and Westphalia. If one considers the dubious behavior of the union bureaucracy, and the fact that the strike initiative came from small groups, these are impressive numbers.

At Merck, the employees were pressured by the chairman of the factory committee to back the union’s demands. The strike motion put forward by strike leaders at Bayer in Leverkusen wasn’t accepted by the regional strike headquarters. Many didn’t want to strike, because they felt not enough was being demanded. Many didn’t want to strike, because they feared it would end in a rotten compromise. That activities were restricted to isolated actions at Farbwerken Hoechst and at Bayer in Leverkusen—the largest factories in Hessen and North Rhine— demoralized many people. The corporations’ system of pacification paid off.

During the strike, the chemical industry took every possible step to remain on the offensive—and to keep the unions on the defensive. Pressure was kept on the workers by claims that the strike was illegal because no strike vote had been held—at IG Chemie, a strike vote is not required, as is also the case at IG Metall. At Hoechst, the argument that there could be “no strike without a strike vote” prevented the strike. The strike leadership at Merck treated the issue of rights as an issue of power in the class struggle: “In the workers’ struggle, and everything is in the wording, we are governed first and foremost by the opinion of the majority, or more specifically the strikers.” IG Chemie can only conceive of things in terms of their own bylaws.

The chemical industry made equal use of legal and illegal methods; Merck spread rumors about injuries; they claimed that stones had been placed on the tracks of the factories’ rail system, that “anticorporate elements” had engaged in sabotage and that strike centres were defended with bicycle chains and brass knuckles. At Glanzstoff in Oberbruch, rumors were spread about shootings. Police units ensured that strike breakers could gain access to the factories at Merck and Glanzstoff. The Kripo photographed and attacked strike centres. Buses carrying strike breakers drove into strike centres (Glanzstoff). Company management at Merck disrupted radio communication between strike centres and increased plant security. Riot police stood at the ready. Outside workers were brought in as strike breakers. An encampment was forced off the factory premises. At Glanzstoff, the police units were so vicious that young police officers were crying and older ones had to be replaced before the police could clear a path for the strike breakers.

''Class Justice''

An injunction issued by the Labor Court ensured strike breakers access to the factories, sanctioned the use of police units, and criminalized strike actions. In Merck, following this injunction, IG Chemie accepted a settlement, the contents of which did not respect the work stoppage— the entry for strike breakers—and held that if anything the injunction sanctioned the unions. As a result, union strike leaders of Merck in Rükken said regarding the injunction, “The eyes of the law look out from the face of the ruling class.” (Ernst Bloch)<ref>Ernst Bloch was an important 20th century German Marxist theorist and art critic who counted the much younger Rudi Dutschke among his friends and intellectual peers.</ref> “We accuse society’s leaders of violence; the violence begins and ends with society’s leaders.” Regarding the injunction, they said, “The injunction makes a mockery of the right to work, using it to permit strike breakers. But the employers refuse to protect the real right to work. Where was the right to work during the crisis of 1966-67?”

The mayor of Darmstadt followed a declaration of state and police neutrality with the threat that surely no one wanted a vacation in the hospital.

The workers at Merck, resisting the police, sometimes with the support of students, continued to block the entry of strike breakers. The fact that they conducted their strike aggressively indicates that the workers had no doubts about the legitimacy of their actions. In response to this, 17 apprentices and young workers from Merck were illegally terminated after the strike ended.

As the unions gradually scaled back their demands, and while the workers were still striking, the chemical industry announced without further ado that, as of June 1, wages would be increased by 6.5 percent. Corruption proceedings launched by the workers were an overall failure. The workers were no match for the machinations of the union leadership. The latter released a Communiqué on Concerted Action in what amounted to a call for the workers to accept defeat and end the strike: “The language of the Common Concerted Action was completely the work of the employers and the unions, to make sure that not everyone will benefit from the anticipated rise in prices and incomes being created by the boom, but rather that everyone will be subjected to the dictates of a phase of macroeconomic consolidation.”

At the beginning of July, the Board of Directors of IG Chemie reached an agreement with the chemical industry: 7.8 percent = wage guidelines = the outcome at Rhineland Palitinate. The Merck strike leadership sent a protest telegram to the board requesting that the decision be rescinded. At Clouth-Gummiwerken, the union traitors were shouted down when the outcome was announced. The strike was over.

The chemical industry had achieved its goal. They wanted the first strike in the chemical industry, the first strike by chemical workers of this generation, to end in defeat, because “given the increasing importance of labor costs, they must consider the possibility that in future wage negotiations in the chemical industry, serious confrontations, possibly even labor disputes, may prove unavoidable” [from: ''Hilfeleistung im Arbeitskampf'' <ref>Support During Labor Disputes.</ref> ]—because for the chemical industry this strike was not an isolated incident, but rather one step in a long term strategy of struggle against the working class. In the words of the Deutsche Bank’s spokesman, Ulrich, “It requires many steps, each of which must be large enough to reach the goal—rates of increase of only two or three percent.” (February 72)

The workers didn’t achieve what they hoped for: more unity—that was the objective of the 120 mark demand in Hessen; wage increases that do not lag behind price increases—that was the objective of the entire strike movement; close relations—unity and not separation between the workers from Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst; success.

This wage agreement is an expression of the actual power relations between the classes. One could say that capital has almost all of it and the workers almost none: capital has closed ranks and “concentrated,” while the working class suffers from numerous divisions; capital has powerful organizations that are firmly in control, while the workers have unions that are out of their control, with a bureaucracy and a leadership that, like the current government, advance anti-worker policies; capital has the state, and the state is against the working class; capital is organized internationally, while the working class is still only able to organize in the national context; capital has a clear, long term strategy and uses propaganda to promote it at every opportunity, with the goal of attacking the working class; the workers can counter this only with their rage—that is all they have.

''The Militarization of the Class Struggle''

In spite of capital’s strength and the weakness of the working class, the state is arming itself and preparing for the militarization of the class struggle. The political means correspond with the economic facts: capital’s aggression. The political facts signal the extent and the strength of the attack.

The less the common good—which is to say general affluence, increasing income, and improved living conditions for all—is addressed by capitalist policy, the more it must be promoted, so as to reduce possibilities for criticizing the methods employed by capital. Therefore, critical journalists have been fired everywhere; therefore the schools have been cleared of leftists; therefore, the CSU has seized control of the ''Bayerischen Rundfunk'', which can only signal the beginning of the acquisition of ARD stations by the ZDF<ref>2 The ARD is the ''Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland'' (Consortium of PublicLaw Broadcasting Institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany); ''Bayerischen Rundfunk'' is a member of the ARD. ZDF is the ''Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen'' (Second German Television), owned by Deutche Telekom; it is commercial TV, partially funded through advertising.</ref>—even if the process can’t proceed as quickly in other ''Länder''.

To the extent that the system can no longer purchase the loyalty of the masses, they must be coerced. As it will no longer be given willingly, it will be gained through threats of violence; the BGS will be transformed into a federal police force and increased from a force of 23,000 to a force of 30,000; the police will be armed with submachine guns, and the citizenry should become as accustomed to seeing submachine gun-armed police on street corners as they are of paying taxes;<ref>This is a reference to a statement by Willy Weyer, Interior Minister of North-Rhine-Westphalia, who stated that “Citizens must get as used precisely to the sight of policemen with machine pistols as they are to paying tax.” (Cobler, 141).</ref> penal law will be stiffened; emergency exercises will be conducted using sharpshooters; comrades will be taken into preventive custody; RAF suspects will be subject to the death penalty.

To the extent that people have no further reason, once capitalism is finally enforced in West Germany, to continue being anticommunist, communists must be forcibly separated from the people. Therefore, the left is being pushed out of the factories. Therefore the price the DKP must pay to remain legal will get higher and higher (and it is apparent that they’ll pay any price). Therefore, the chemical industry threatens the Free University; they will not hire Free University graduates if peace and order are not re-established at the Free University.

To the degree that the ideas of the communist alternative win ground as a result of the system’s own contradictions, the liberated spaces from which such ideas can be propagated must be closed; therefore Mandel should not be permitted to teach at the Free University; therefore the president of the university in Frankfurt calls in the police to make sure that exams supported by industry are written; therefore Löwenthal<ref>Gerhard Löwenthal was a German journalist and a ZDF news anchor from 1969 until 1988.</ref> rants about the Spartacus Youth,<ref>“Spartacus Youth”: the DKP’s student section, by far the largest self-styled communist organization active on campuses during this period.</ref> and Löwenthal’s cameramen attack students to get photos of as many violent scenes that can be used to incite the people as possible.

After ten years of employing foreigners in the Federal Republic— since the wall in 1961<ref>The construction of the Berlin Wall cut off the flow of refugees from the East that had been providing a reservoir of cheap labor up until that time. This signaled the beginning of a guest worker policy of recruiting cheap labor from southern Europe, Turkey, and elsewhere.</ref>—the accident rate of foreigners has reached a level double that of German workers, which is already high enough, and they still live in ghettos and discrimination is still prevalent in the factories and neighborhoods. As foreign workers have now begun to organize to better protect themselves, the Basic Law is to be changed to make it easier to monitor foreigners’ organizations, so as to make it easier to dismantle them, something that is already possible with the fascist laws governing foreigners and the anticommunist law governing association.

Capitalist propagandists use the narrow opportunity that the Red Army Faction affords them to argue that their core problem, the escalation of the class struggle, is caused by us, and that the rise of right wing radicalism is a response to us. This is objectively the argument of the class enemy and subjectively an entirely shallow approach based on nothing more than the superficial assessment of the issues found in the bourgeois press.

''The Legal Left and Public Enemy No. 1''

In the face of capital’s offensive, the legal left is not just on the defensive, it is objectively helpless. They respond with their leaflets and their newspapers and their agitation among the workers, in which they say all the blame lies with capital, which is true, that the workers must organize themselves, that the social democratic line must be overcome in the factories, that the workers must learn to conduct economic struggles so as to regain their class consciousness—all of which is important work. But proposing it as the only form of political work it is shortsighted.

They see semi-automatic pistols and say, “Organize the economic struggle.” They see the emergency exercises and say, “Class consciousness.” They see fascism and say, “Don’t bring the class struggle to a head.” They see war preparations and say, “Develop a policy of unity with the middle class.” They see Labor Court and Federal Labor Court decisions that will ban future strikes and say, “Legality.”

The counterrevolution believes that it is possible to get rid of all of the problems that it itself produces, and no means is too dirty in achieving that goal. But they can’t wait until fascism has really been established and the masses have been mobilized in their service. They need the security offered by a monopoly of weapons and armed violence—so that the rage of the working class, which they did so much to provoke, does not lead the working class to the idea, and with the idea, the means: the idea of the revolutionary guerilla’s armed struggle, striking from the shadows and not easily caught, imposing accountability, demoralizing the police, and resisting their violence with counterviolence.

Genscher would not be the Minister of the Interior of the ruling class if he were not prepared to use unimaginable measures to take us “out of circulation,” if he hadn’t declared us Public Enemy No. 1 even before we did anything, if he hadn’t indicated that he was prepared to do anything, to engage in any action, to isolate us from the left, the labor force and the people, if he wasn’t prepared to murder us. This situation will surely get worse.

But they can no longer continue their war preparations covertly, and they cannot continue to act within their own legal parameters. They are obliged to violate their own system, and in so doing they show their true colors as enemies of the people—and the left creates accurate propaganda at a high dialectical level, as ought to be the case, when they say: this terror is not directed against the RAF, but rather against the working class. Obviously its target isn’t the RAF, but rather the development of the coming class struggle. This is why the idea of armed struggle is met with all the violence the system is currently capable of, in order to prevent the working class from embracing it.

We’re not feeling edgy; the system is feeling nervous.

Capital can’t wait until it has established fascism because American competition won’t wait. The hysteria of the system doesn’t make our strategy or tactics incorrect. And the system is not incorrect in making it incredibly difficult for us to anchor the guerilla in the masses. Knowing this, it is not incorrect to develop resistance, given that the war will be a protracted war.

What could comrades be waiting for in a country that allowed Auschwitz to occur without resistance? Doesn’t the current workers’ movement bring with it the history of the German workers’ movement and this police force the history of the SS?<blockquote>Communists struggle for the satisfaction of the goals and interests of the working class immediately at hand, but they also show the way forward for the movement as well as its future.

''Communist Manifesto''</blockquote>That is what we mean by SERVE THE PEOPLE.

'''3. THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP AND THE MILITARIZATION OF THE CONFLICT'''

The argument that the Federal Republic is not Latin America obscures local conditions more than it clarifies them. This is indicated by (and the debate is liberally seasoned with these): “The same horrifying poverty doesn’t exist here as does there”; “Here the enemy is not a foreign power”; “Here the state is not so hated by the people”; “We are not ruled by a military dictatorship here as is the case in many Latin American countries.”

Meaning: conditions there are so intolerable that violence is the only option—here things are still good enough that the conditions are not ripe for violence.

In the Rowohlt<ref>A prominent German publishing company</ref> volume ''Zerschlagt die Wohlstandsinseln der iii''. Welt,<ref>Destroy the Islands of Wealth in the Third World.</ref> which includes Marighella’s ''Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla,'' it says in the preface that the decision to publish his text is a protest against arrests and torture in Brazil, not a guide for action here, “however weak parliamentary democracy may be and whatever threat is posed by its own economic system.”—“To use counterviolence (the Latin American urban guerilla model) which is meant to be used against a terrorist capitalist ruling class, in a country where one can discuss workers’ participation, is to make a mockery of the wretched of the earth.”

Following this logic, to bomb BASF in Ludwigshafen would be to mock the people who bombed BASF in Brazil. The Latin American comrades feel differently. BASF does as well.

The argument that the Federal Republic is not Latin America is advanced by people who speak about current affairs from a perspective in which their monthly income is secure, and who speak in a way which keeps it secure; it is an example of human coldness and intellectual arrogance in the face of the problems of people here. Reality in the Federal Republic is in this way factually and analytically removed from the table. An analysis of questions here must be based on the objective relevance of social questions, on the subjective relevance of the question of ownership, and on the militarization of the class struggle.

''Poverty in the Federal Republic''

The objective relevance of social questions means the reality of poverty in the Federal Republic. The fact that this poverty is largely hidden doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. The fact that there is no chance that this poverty will lead to social revolution is no reason to act as if it doesn’t exist.

Jürgen Roth,<ref>Jürgen Roth is a German investigative journalist.</ref> in his book ''Armut in der Bundesrepublik''<ref>Poverty in the Federal Republic.</ref> has assembled almost everything that needs to be said on this topic. 14 million people in the Federal Republic and West Berlin are living in poverty today. 1.1 million people living in rural areas must get by on 100 to 400 marks<ref>Roughly $35 to $140.</ref> per month; these are the families of small farmers and people retired from sharecropping. 4.66 million households with an average of three members must get by on a monthly net income of less than 600 marks;<ref>Roughly $220.</ref> that is 21 percent of all households. Over 5 million pensioners have a monthly pension of around 350 marks.<ref>Roughly $127.</ref> To this add 600,000 people in low-income housing projects, 450,000 in homeless shelters, 100,000 institutionalized children, 100,000 in mental asylums, 50,000 adults in prison and 50,000 youth in reform schools. Those are the official figures. Everyone knows that official figures in this area are always underestimates. In Bremen, 11,000 people receive heating subsidies because they can’t afford to buy coal. The Munich Housing Bureau calculates that the number of homeless will increase from 7,300 to 25,000. In Cologne, in 1963, 17,000 lived in low-income housing projects.

In the Nordweststadt neighborhood in Frankfurt one pays 460 marks<ref>Roughly $167</ref> rent for two rooms totaling about 60 square metres. In Nordweststadt the electricity metres are found in the basement. In almost every highrise at least one electricity metre is turned off, regardless of whether there are small children in the apartment and regardless of whether it is winter. The city of Frankfurt turns off the electricity to 50 homes every day; approximately 800 families a month have their electricity cut.

Approximately 5,000 vagrants live in Frankfurt. At night, water is used to drive them from the area where they sleep on the B level of the Hauptwache pedestrian mall. When the police leave, they come back, lie newspapers on the wet ground, and go back to sleep.

7 million homes in the Federal Republic have neither a bath nor a toilet. 800,000 families live in barracks. In Frankfurt, 20,000 people are searching for homes. In Düsseldorf, it’s 30,000.

600,000 people in the Federal Republic suffer from schizophrenia. If schizophrenia is not treated it is debilitating. 3 percent of the population is unable to work or pursue a career. 5 to 6 million people require some form of psychological support. Some psychiatric institutions have only 0.75 square metres of space per patient.

High school teachers estimate that 80 percent of working class children do not attend classes.

Poverty in the Federal Republic is not decreasing; it is increasing. Demand for housing is increasing. The need for schools is increasing. Child abuse is increasing. At the end of 1970, 7,000 cases were reported; it is estimated that in reality there were 100,000. It is also estimated that 1,000 children are beaten to death each year.

“To describe the school system in the Federal Republic is to describe poverty in a rich country,” says Luc Jochimsen<ref>Lukrezia Jochimsen was a sociologist and TV journalist. Today she is a member of parliament for the left-wing Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (PDS).</ref> in her book ''Hinterhöfe der Nation'',<ref>Backyards of the Nation.</ref> which provides the necessary details:<blockquote>''The public education system is a slum with the characteristics of any slum: deprivation, budget shortfalls, shortages, obsolescence, crowding, disrepair, discontent, resignation, indifference, and ruthlessness.''

''What occurs today with six- and seven-year-olds in the primary schools of the Federal Republic reflects a conscious plan to use compulsory education to later deny these children the right to education and training. It is a crime against education. A crime for which no punishment exists. A crime that will never face prosecution.''</blockquote>In 1970, 35,000 people lived in the Märkisch neighborhood in Berlin. It is projected to reach 140,000 by 1980. The people are saying, “It’s brutal here, totally squalid; in any event, it destroys the will to live— but inside the houses are well laid out.” Everything is available in the Märkisch neighborhood: playgrounds, a transportation system, schools, cheap shopping, doctors and lawyers; and they are cesspools for poverty, child abuse, suicide, criminal gangs, bitterness and need. The Märkisch neighborhood shows the future of social conditions.

(Bourgeois authors, faced with the conclusions we are drawing here, make no effort to place their observations within a context which recognizes that poverty is caused by the mobility of capital and the concentration of capital by banks, insurance companies, and home and property owners. They come to terms with the research data through verbal protests.)

The reality of poverty is not the same thing as revolutionary reality. The poor are not spontaneously and of their own accord revolutionary. They generally direct their aggression against themselves rather than against their oppressors. The objects of their aggression are usually other poor people, not those who benefit from their poverty. Not the real estate companies, the banks, the insurance companies, the corporations and the city planners, but rather other victims. Inactive, truly depressed, a discouraging example providing material for the fascism of ''Bild'' and ZDF.

The ZDF showed the following scene: in the slums of Wiesbaden, ZDF had children play in the dirt, beating on each other and screaming. The adults had to scream at them to let each other be. The television voice-over says, “The Federal Republic is not Latin America”; the poor in the Federal Republic have only themselves to blame; they are criminals; there are very few poor people—this is the concrete evidence. The Springer Press prints stuff like this. The material of fascism.

''The Reality of Ownership Conditions''

But the objective reality of poverty has in no small way clarified the subjective fact that capitalist ownership since the early postwar years— the CDU’s Ahlener Program<ref>The Ahlener Program, adopted by the CDU on February 3, 1947, in the town of Ahlen, stated in its opening that the interests of capitalism and those of the German people were identical.</ref>—has provided nothing. No gains came spontaneously, all were won through negotiations. Little was developed for the poor, but in the rest of society Citizens Initiatives with their platitudes became more widespread, albeit very poorly organized and vague, not worth repressing.

The 20,000 sacrificed in car accidents to the automobile industry’s lust for profit has not led to any consideration of the future of the highway system; the insurance aristocracy that represents capital guarantees illness, the downside of which being miserable hospital stays; the contradiction between community debt and the dividends enjoyed by the corporations that engage in production on their territory; between the exploitation of guest workers and the accommodations provided to guest workers; between the misery of children and the profits of toy companies; between profit made by landlords and miserable housing conditions—all of this is common knowledge. It is covered at length in Spiegel every week, and daily in ''Bild'', in most cases as isolated incidents. But this state of affairs has been worsening so quickly that it can no longer be covered up. Deutsche Bank spokesman Ulrich babbles about “the demonization of profit,” “the attack against our economic system,” and the “criticism of profit”: “We are insufficiently committed to broadly clarifying the nature of employers’ profits, without which development and progress are impossible in a free market system”—that a part of this should also be for the common good is rejected by almost all owners of capital.

Eppler<ref>Erhard Eppler, a member of the SPD and left-leaning Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation. He resigned in 1974.</ref> hopes to secure support for the unpopular sales tax increase by using the taxation of higher income brackets for propaganda purposes. The CDU is afraid that the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties<ref>Signed in August and December 1970, these two treaties were milestones in the SPD’s ''Ostpolitik'', normalizing the FRG’s relations with Poland and the Soviet Union for the first time since World War ii.</ref> could lead to an ideological softening within the Federal Republic—Schröder’s<ref>Gerhard Schröder was a CDU politician, Minister of the Interior from 1953 until 1961, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1961 until 1966 and Minister of Defense from 1966 until 1969.</ref> key argument is that the demonization of communism could lose credibility, because communism has come to represent expropriation and collectivization of the means of production. The CDU does not attack the contents of the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties, they struggle against ideological tolerance of the thinking of sworn enemies of capitalism.

The initiatives of the left after 1968, when they had a broad base everywhere, addressed the question of ownership and created a consensus behind their criticism. They did this in a way that constituted an attack against capitalist ownership and acted as a brake on capitalist profiteering. This took place in the squats in cities throughout the Federal Republic, in the Citizens Initiatives opposed to gentrification, in the initiatives for non-profit development in the suburbs—the Märkisch neighborhood, Nordweststadt in Frankfurt—and in the Citizens Initiatives opposed to the development of industrial sites in residential neighborhoods.

The Heidelberg SPK, through collective study and action, developed such a persuasive critique of the connection between illness and capitalism that SPK cadre have been detained in prison under §129 since July 71. The struggle of the students against the standardized testing which capital has imposed, and the campaign of the ''Jusos'' against private property development on public lands in the countryside, both have capitalist ownership as their target.

The most important strikes occurred in September 69, and were sparked by the year’s high profits. The most powerful campaign of the student movement was that against the Springer Corporation: “Expropriate Springer.” The most brutal police action was against the Belgian community’s squats in Kassel, where women and children were beaten with clubs, and against the squats in Hannover, which were destroyed through trials for damages. After Georg’s murder, a sticker appeared in Berlin that read: “Killer cops murdered our brother Georg because they were worried about their loot.”

''Social Democracy and Reformism''

Promise of reform has become the ersatz religion, the opium of the people. Promises of a better future have only one function, to provide a motivation for patience, endurance, and passivity. With all the efforts that are required to push reforms through, one could have a revolution. The people who say otherwise—like the ''Jusos'', and like those who believe that the ''Jusos'' have the power to push through meaningful reforms— misunderstand the system’s ability to resist change. They misunderstand its determination to adapt society to the exploitative conditions of capitalism and not the other way around. They do not understand that the system no longer feels constrained to act “within the bounds of the constitutional state.” Above all, they fail to understand that the ''Jusos'' are the cream of the younger generation of social democrats

There is, however, a difference between the SPD and the CDU. They despise the working class and the people in different ways. The SPD believes in the carrot and the stick. The CDU is only interested in the stick. The SPD is more experienced at leading the working class around by the nose. Wehner<ref>Herbert Wehner was leader of the SPD’s parliamentary group from 1958 until 1983, and Deputy Chairman of the SPD from 1958 until 1973.</ref> is more experienced in deceiving and purging the left. Brandt is more experienced in the way to take over the leadership of a movement so as to neutralize it (e.g., the antinuclear movement in Berlin in 1958). They are more imaginative than the CDU in their tactics against the people.

The SPD pushed the amnesty through to defuse the solidarity that was developing around the trials of students, to disrupt the criticisms of the justice system, to break the solidarity the left was receiving against the justice system and the administration, thereby eliminating the rebellion without involving state security.

With their ''Ostpolitik'', they beat back the criticism that their reform policies were in disarray. The Berlin Senate didn’t send in the police in response to the occupation at the Bethanien Hospital and the establishment of the Georg von Rauch House, instead they chose to shut off the water and take over administration of the building. Because of the protests against his Persian trip, Heinemann is still gun-shy about diplomacy. Under Brandt’s leadership, the ban on foreigners’ organizations was already in the works. It is the SPD that has influence with the unions and the workers, while the CDU distrusts the unions and their method of functioning: accumulation of capital through voluntary membership donations instead of through the extraction of profits. And Posser<ref>Diether Posser, SPD Minister of Justice in the Land of North Rhine Westphalia from 1972 until 1978.</ref> in many ways avoids lying: Mahler is a “fellow human being,” and in his impact report he says Brigitte Asdonk had been mistreated.

The difference between the SPD and the CDU has been defined by some comrades as the difference between the plague and cholera. That’s the choice the West German people face when they vote.

The system is taking the steps necessary to preserve the social status quo. Preserving the status quo requires: the concentration of European businesses to resist American competition; tax funded basic research to maintain high rates of profit; supplying weapons to the Third World through capital export markets so as to keep the liberation movements in check and using foreign production to keep wages down at home; keeping Siemens Annual General Assembly free from criticisms about Carbora Bassa investments;<ref>The project to build a massive dam in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. The right-wing Portuguese government had plans to settle over one million European colonists in the African country. By 1969, five German companies were implicated in the project.</ref> protecting the Shah from criticism about the death penalty in Persia.

Preserving the status quo requires: keeping anyone who is poor away from people who are addressing the issue of ownership; keeping the working class divided; using the accumulation of wealth and promises of reform to rein in the working class; keeping up a steady flow of propaganda: consumer ownership is the same as ownership of the means of production; all attacks against private property are the same; all attacks against private property are criminal; capitalist production is the natural state of affairs; capitalism is the best option available and the best that humans have come up with; criticisms of capitalism serve particular, selfish agendas of individuals and groups; wages are responsible for inflation; employers’ profits serve the common good; whoever has a different perspective is making problems and stands alone and is, in the final analysis, a criminal.

It is a status quo of relations of ownership and ideas that cannot be preserved without the militarization of the class struggle and the criminalization of the left.

''The Springer Press''

The role of the Springer Press in the militarization of the class struggle was well described in 1968 during the “Expropriate Springer” campaign:<blockquote>''One can see the way in which the Springer Press’ public is produced following a simple formula: The Springer Press treats every attempt by people to free themselves from the constraints of late capitalism as a crime. Political revolutionaries are assigned the attributes of violent criminals. Political struggle is presented as individual, abstract terror, and the campaign against imperialism as pointless destruction.''

''The Springer Corporation represents the propaganda vanguard of aggressive anticommunism. The Springer Press is the enemy of the working class. They undermine its ability to act freely and in solidarity. They transform the reader’s desire for equality into a lynching instinct and the longing for a free society into hatred against everybody who wants to build a free society. The Springer Press serves the interests of war preparations. Their construct of the enemy is a way of saying, “If you’re ever disruptive, if you don’t leave your divorce to the divorce lawyers, the question of wage increases for contract negotiations, the issue of housing in the hands of the Housing Office, injustice in the hands of the judges, your security with the police, and your destiny to the vicissitudes of late capitalism, the response will be murder, torture, rape, and criminal attacks.”''

from: ''Destroy Bild''</blockquote>The situation has gotten increasingly critical since the Molotov Cocktail Meeting in February 68.<ref>1 In February 1968, a film by Holger Meins showing how to make a molotov cocktail was presented at a meeting held in Berlin to discuss the campaign against the Springer Press.</ref> ''Bild'' has launched the column “''Bild'' Fights for You!” and reports daily successes in the struggle against exorbitant rents, against the criminalization of foreigners, against denunciations of large families, against forced retirement and the impoverishment of retirees. Before the oppressed masses turn their backs on the institutions of the constitutional state, ''Bild'' turns them against themselves; before their dissatisfaction with the institutions of the class state can become class consciousness, ''Bild'' takes the lead in expressing this dissatisfaction, and just as was the case with the Nazis in 1933, ''Bild'' speaks for capital, not for the proletariat.

Böll called this fascist, by which he meant, so there is no misunderstanding, the “agitation, lies, dirt.”<ref>On December 20, 1971, Heinrich Böll famously said that Bild’s news coverage “isn’t crypto-fascist anymore, nor fascistoid, but naked fascism, agitation, lies, dirt.”</ref> In this he, analytically and politically, hit the nail on the head. The reaction showed how sensitive the system really is, how unstable the status quo, how fascistic Bild, and how agitated the climate at the Springer Corporation.

''The Dialectic of Revolution and Counterrevolution''<blockquote>''It isn’t a question of whether we want the reactionary militarization or not; it is a question of whether we have the conditions necessary to transform the fascist militarization into a revolutionary mobilization, whether we can transform the reactionary militarization into a revolutionary one, whether it is better to lay down and die or to stand up and resist.''

Kim Il Sung</blockquote>Most people say, “It’s unacceptable.” Most people say, “The masses do not want this.” Many people say, “Fighting now will provoke fascism.” Böll says, “Six against 60,000,000—capital has everything, we have nothing.”

They see only the status quo. They see in the system’s violence only the violence, not the fear. They see in the militarization only the weapons, not the crumbling mass base. They see in ''Bild''’s hatred only the hatred, not the dissatisfaction of ''Bild'' readers. They see cops with semiautomatic pistols and see only cops with semi-automatic pistols, not the lack of mass support for fascism. They see the terror against us and see only the terror, not the fear about the social explosiveness of the RAF, which must be “nipped in the bud.” They see in the political apathy of the proletariat only the apathy, not the protest against a system that has nothing to offer them. They see in the high level of suicide amongst the proletariat only the act of desperation, not the protest. They see in the proletariat’s disinterest in economic struggle only a disinterest in struggle, not the refusal to struggle for a paltry percentage and the right to idiotic consumption. They see in the proletariat’s lack of union organization only the lack of organization, not the mistrust of union bureaucrats as accomplices of capital. They see in the population’s hostility towards the left only the hostility towards the left, not the hatred against those who are socially privileged. They see in our isolation from the masses only our isolation from the masses, not the insane lengths to which the system will go to isolate us from the masses. They see in the long periods comrades spend in preventive custody only the long periods in preventive custody, not the system’s fear about the free members of the RAF. They see in the exclusion of DKP teachers only the end of the march through the institutions,<ref>A reference to Rudi Dutschke’s proposed strategy. See p. 35, fn 2</ref> not the beginning of the adoption of revolutionary politics by children and their parents, which must be choked off. They see everything in terms of the existing movement, not the future one, only the bad, not the good: the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution.

We’re not saying it will be easy to build the guerilla, or that the masses are just waiting for the opportunity to join the guerilla. However, we do, above all, believe that the situation will not change by itself. We don’t believe that the guerilla will spontaneously spring forth from the mass struggle. Such illusions are unrealistic. A guerilla that developed spontaneously out of the mass struggle would be a bloodbath, not a guerilla group. We do not believe that the guerilla can be formed as the “illegal wing” of a legal organization. Such an illegal wing would lead to the illegalization of the organization, i.e., its liquidation, and nothing else. We don’t believe that the concept of the guerilla will develop by itself from political work. Therefore, we believe that the options and the specific role of the guerilla in the class struggle can only be collectively perceived and understood, that the guerilla stands in opposition to the consciousness industry.

We have said that any talk of their defeating us can only mean our arrests or deaths. We believe that the guerilla will develop, will gain a foothold, that the development of the class struggle will itself establish the idea of armed struggle only if there is already an organization in existence conducting guerilla warfare, an organization that is not easily demoralized, that does not simply lie down and give up.

We believe that the idea of the guerilla developed by Mao, Fidel, Che, Giáp, and Marighella is a good idea that cannot be removed from the table. If one underestimates the difficulties in establishing the guerilla, if one is scared off by the difficulties against which we must struggle, this also shows that one underestimates the difficulties which the guerilla had to face even in those places where it has made a good deal of progress and is now anchored in the masses. We believe that these reservations are an indication of how far capital is prepared to go when it’s a question of securing exploitative conditions, an area where they have never hesitated: not with the Paris Commune, not in Germany in 1918, not in 1933, not in Algeria, Vietnam, the Congo, Cuba, Latin America, or Mozambique, not at Attica, not in Los Angeles, Kent State, Augsburg or Hamburg.

MAKE THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP THE KEY QUESTION FOR ALL MOVEMENTS!

ADVANCE THE REVOLUTIONARY GUERILLA AGAINST THE REACTIONARY MILITARIZATION!<blockquote>''No party can call itself revolutionary if it fails to prepare for armed struggle, and that is true at all levels of the party. That is the way to most effectively confront the reactionaries at every step of the revolutionary process. Any disregard for this factor can only lead to missed revolutionary opportunities.''</blockquote>That's what we mean by SERVE THE PEOPLE!

'''4. On Current Issues'''

''The Ruhland Trial''

There is still a liberal press in the Federal Republic for whom the trial was a scandal. Ruhland was never as close to the Red Army Faction as he claims. His fawning, his reliance on evidence from the investigation rather than his own memory, the fact that Mahler’s lawyer Schily was prevented from attending his trial, the fact that from the beginning of the trial it was established that there would be a verdict based on negotiations that neither the federal prosecutor nor the defense attorney would challenge (the FAZ reported this). As the Frankfurter Rundschau describes it, “like a nice teacher delivering a worn out speech to a sympathetic student” —proving very clearly that discovering the truth and due process have nothing to do with anything anymore.

The assurance that Ruhland is certainly telling the truth, the fulminations that those he has incriminated are not telling the truth, the assumption that anyone who doesn’t cooperate with the justice system is guilty… that is exactly what class justice means, show trials, making them an—effectively ornamental—component of capital’s general offensive against the left as the vanguard of the working class in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

One cannot offer up ''Verfassungsschutz'' informants, as in earlier communist trials or as with Urbach, to a public increasingly polarized by the growing class contradictions. They expect the left-wing public to be dazzled by state witnesses presented by the Bonn Security Group, and it’ll probably work. The person who’s really screwed in this situation is Ruhland himself, since he no longer knows his friends from his enemies, up from down, the revolution from the counterrevolution. The poor pig doesn’t understand how they’re using him.

Urban guerilla struggle requires that one not be demoralized by the system’s violence. One certainly should not be demoralized by a trial that shows us to be morally and politically in the right. Demoralization is in fact their goal. The Ruhland trial is only a very superficial event in the unfolding of history, the development of class struggle and the question of whether the urban guerilla is legitimate.

''On Traitors''

There are people who believe there might be some truth in the things Homann and the like are spreading around. At least, they say, Homann is no idiot. They take him to be what he presented himself as in ''Spiegel'', a “political scholar”; from a vocabulary that encompasses both hunter and prey.<ref>Peter Homann had previously worked as a journalist for the ''Spiegel''.</ref> These terms have nothing to do with class antagonism. The assertion that you are a scholar doesn’t make you one when you deal in the techniques used by Spiegel journalists. The substance of Marxism, the dialectic of being and consciousness, excludes the possibility that police statements can contribute to the revolutionary strategy. Marxism can only be taught by Marxists, as Margharita von Brentano<ref>Margharita von Brentano was a sociology professor at the Free University, where a prize and a building are now named in her honour.</ref> told Spiegel. What Mandel has to say, Schwan<ref>A. Schwan, a West Berlin professor and a member of the ''Bund Freiheit de Wissenshaft'' (Alliance for Free Scholarship). The BFW was an organization of right-wing university professors who accused the student movement of attempting to establish a left-wing educational system to the exclusion of free thought.</ref> couldn’t spell.

Anybody who shares the interests of the status quo cannot possibly have anything to say about social change. But it is the nature of traitors to share the interests of the status quo, to want to return to their hereditary place in class society, to not feel right in unfamiliar circumstances, to only have a sense of identity in their own milieu, and to remain the object of their own development.

Ruhland only really feels comfortable in his old role as a criminal proletariat, handcuffed and oppressed, and Homann in the role of the lost son of the lumpen proletariat, ever at the beck and call of the bourgeoisie—in ''Spiegel'' and ''konkret''—in his heart of hearts he has no interest in matters of the market. Sturm had an adventure and then fled back home to the bosom of her family.

Ruhland remains a victim and Homann a consumer, the overpaid illiterate and the profiteering academic—the class balance is re-established, legality is obviously the natural state of affairs. Regarding Homann, FAZ wrote: “…a journalist and visual artist, with a politically untrained but sensitive intelligence”; about Ruhland: “…he doesn’t want to be a villain, he is perhaps an honest man with a guileless mind. Facing his guards in the court room, two young security police officers, he exhibits a completely natural and comradely bearing.”

The psychological makeup of traitors is venal and conservative. The conservative FAZ sympathizes with these sons and servants.

We suffered from a false fascination and have underestimated illegality. We’ve overestimated the unity of some groups. That is to say that we have not taken into account all of the implications of the student movement being a relatively privileged movement, that we have failed to observe that for many people much of the politics of 67/68 is no longer relevant, as it offers them no way of increasing their own privilege. It can be pleasant to know a little Marxism, to have some clarity about the conditions of the ruling class’ economic domination and their psychological techniques, to shed the self-imposed pressure to perform of a bourgeois overachiever, to embrace an alienated form of Marxism, acquired by privilege, as an item for one’s intellectual wellbeing and benefit and not directed towards serving the people.

A preference for certain actions because they are illegal is an expression of bourgeois self-indulgence. The student movement, given its suppositions, could not be free of blind followers and people with a mercenary mentality. The tedious, long-term drudgery that must first of all be undertaken to lay the basis for the urban guerilla must seem to these people, who are so falsely programmed, like a scene from a horror show. Anyone who arrives with criminal fantasies, anyone who only wants to improve their personal situation, will certainly and inevitably improve their situation through treason.

We believed if someone said he had worked in this or that organization for such and such a period of time, then he must know what political work entails, what organization means, or else they would already have tossed him. We now know that we should ourselves have established the political organization necessary for the urban guerilla, that we made a mistake when we relied so readily upon others.

Above all, we think that on our own it would have been very difficult for us to have avoided this error and prevented the treason. We think that a false understanding of the police and the justice system, a false understanding of what SERVE THE PEOPLE means, and a false approach to contradictions within the New Left made the treason inevitable.

As long as traitors still find a place with comrades, not even receiving a single punch in the face, but rather finding understanding as to why they must quickly resume their bourgeois existence and do away with their other existence—because they can’t tolerate another day in prison, they send others inside for years or deliver them up to the police death squads—as long as political cooperation with the armed power of capital continues to be tolerated as a political difference of opinion, as long as something that has long been politically condemned is treated as a private matter, treason will continue to exist. Without criticizing liberalism within the left, we cannot eliminate treason.

Traitors must be excluded from the ranks of the revolution. Tolerance in the face of traitors produces more treason. Traitors in the ranks of the revolution cause more harm than the police can without traitors. We believe that is a general rule. It is impossible to know how much they will betray if they are threatened. Given that they are little pigs, one cannot permit them to be in a situation where they can be blackmailed. Capital will continue to turn people into little pigs until we overthrow its rule. We are not responsible for capital’s crimes.

''On Bank Robberies''

Some people say robbing banks is not political. Since when is the question of financing a political organization not a political question? The urban guerilla in Latin America calls bank robberies “expropriation actions.” Nobody is claiming that robbing banks will be all it takes to change the oppressive social order. For revolutionary organizations, it mainly represents the solution to their financial problems. It makes logical sense, because there is no other solution to the financial problem. It makes political sense, because it is an expropriation action. It makes tactical sense, because it is a proletarian action. It makes strategic sense, because it finances the guerilla.

A political concept that bases itself on parliamentary democracy, the political concept of competitive capitalism, a concept that understands class antagonism to be nothing more than a power struggle, that perceives the institutions of the class state to be institutions of a constitutional state, thereby definitely turning its back on progress and humanity… such a political concept cannot condone bank robbery. In the imperialist metropole, where the organization of the anti-imperialist struggle must have both legal and illegal components, the political struggle and the armed struggle, bank robbery cannot be dispensed with. It is, in practice, expropriation. And it points to the necessary method for establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat against the enemy: armed struggle.

''On Logistics and Continuity''

Many comrades are impressed by the Tupamaros’<ref>Most likely a reference to the ''West German Tupamaros'', not to be confused with their South American namesake. These groups had existed in West Berlin and Munich at the beginning of the decade, part of the same amorphous scene as the Roaming Hash Rebels. The 2nd of June Movement grew out of this scene, although several members would instead join the RAF.</ref> actions. They don’t understand why, instead of carrying out popular actions, we’re preoccupied with logistics. They can’t be bothered with going to the trouble to consider what the urban guerilla is and how it functions.

It is most likely maliciously intended when comrades recite the position of the Düsseldorf judge in Ruhland’s trial: Ruhland was a handyman and the gang’s mascot. The concept of the capitalist division of labor has proven to be an abstraction for them. In practice, they still conceive of proletarian comrades as jack-of-all-trades prefiguring some Silesian idyll. That the technical means can only be developed by working and learning collectively, that the urban guerilla must abolish the division of labor so that the arrest of one individual is not a disaster for us all—these comrades’ imagination can’t get that far. Not having the logistical problems at least partially resolved, not having oneself learned how to resolve logistical problems, not engaging in a collective learning and working process, would mean leaving the outcome of actions to chance technically, psychologically, and politically.

Resolving logistical problems assures the ongoing security of a revolutionary organization. We place great importance in the tactical requirements necessary to secure the continuity of the Red Army Faction. It is in the interest of capital to divide, to destroy, to break down solidarity, to isolate people, and to deny the historical context—in the area of production as well as that of housing, of commerce, of opinion making, of education—so as to guarantee ongoing profits. It is in the interest of capital to guarantee that conditions remain the opposite of those necessary for proletarian revolution: unity, continuity, historical consciousness, class consciousness. Without organizational continuity, without guaranteeing the organizational permanence of the revolutionary process, the revolutionary process is left to the anarchy of the system, to chance, to historical spontaneity.

We consider disregard for the question of organizational continuity to be a manifestation of opportunism.

''On Solidarity''

The revolutionary process is revolutionary because it makes objects out of the laws of capitalist commodity production and exchange, rather than being their object. It cannot be measured by market criteria. It can only be measured by criteria that simultaneously destroy the power of market criteria for success.

Solidarity, insofar as it is not based on market criteria, destroys the power of those criteria. Solidarity is political, not so much because solidarity is based on politics, but because it is a refusal to be subservient to the law of value and a refusal to be treated like a mere aspect of exchange value. Solidarity is the essence of free action ungoverned by the ruling class; as such it always means resistance against the influence of the ruling class over relationships between people, and as resistance against the ruling class, it is always correct.

In the view of the system, people whose behavior is not guided by the system’s criteria for success are lunatics, halfwits, or losers. In the view of the revolution, all those who conduct themselves with solidarity, whoever they may be, are comrades.

Solidarity becomes a weapon if it is organized and is acted upon in a consistent way against the courts, the police, the authorities, the bosses, the infiltrators, and the traitors. They must be denied any cooperation, afforded no attention, denied access to evidence, offered no information, and afforded absolutely no time and energy. Solidarity includes struggling against liberalism within the left and addressing contradictions within the left as one addresses contradictions amongst the people, and not as if they were a class contradiction.<ref>In his 1957 “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” Mao differentiated between two kinds of conflict or contradiction—“those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people.” While the former should be dealt with by attacking the class enemy, the latter should be dealt with through criticism with the goal of bringing about unity.</ref>

All political work is based on solidarity. Without solidarity, it will crumble in the face of repression.

“We must prevent the possibility of unnecessary victims. Everybody in the ranks of the revolution must take care of each other, must relate to each other lovingly, must help each other.”

SERVE THE PEOPLE!

MAKE THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP THE KEY QUESTION EVERYWHERE!

SUPPORT THE ARMED STRUGGLE!

BUILD THE REVOLUTIONARY GUERILLA!

VICTORY IN THE PEOPLE'S WAR!

RAF

April 1972
{| class="wikitable"
|+a note from the editors: On the Treatment of Traitors
!There have been insinuations, always vague on details or proof, that the RAF was an intensely authoritarian organization, particularly in regards to people not being allowed to leave. Claims have been made that Baader murdered Ingeborg Barz, a young woman who had joined the RAF from the anarchist Black Aid, simply because she wanted to quit the underground. These claims have been contradicted by other witnesses.<ref>See page 352.</ref>
Some have pointed to ''Serve the People'' as evidence that the RAF endorsed the assassination of drop-outs, one passage in particular being mentioned in this regard:

''Traitors must be excluded from the ranks of the revolution. Tolerance in the face of traitors produces more treason. Traitors in the ranks of the revolution cause more harm than the police can without traitors. We believe that is a general rule. It is impossible to know how much they will betray if they are threatened. Given that they are little pigs, one cannot permit them to be in a situation where they can be blackmailed. Capital will continue to turn people into little pigs until we overthrow its rule. We are not responsible for capital’s crimes.''<ref>Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle, cf 156-7.</ref>

This position should be evaluated in light of the RAF’s documented practice, and the realities of armed struggle.
No clandestine organization can tolerate informants, nor should any revolutionary movement do so, regardless of its legal or illegal status. Yet many observers are wary, and rightly so, of such calls to “exclude” traitors; the reason for this unease is the strong tendency for factions or entire organizations to end up using such a line as cover to attack any and all dissidents, drop-outs, critics or even rivals, accusing them all of “treason.” Examples abound of revolutionary movements gutting themselves and doing inestimable damage to their cause and their political integrity through this error.
Despite allegations to the contrary, there is no substantive evidence of the RAF ever going down that road. The RAF was criticized throughout its existence, yet none of the critics were ever targeted. What is striking about the cases of Sturm, Homann, and Ruhland is not that they were insulted or berated, but that no harm befell them even after they all took public stands against the guerilla. Another guerilla member, Hans-Jürgen Bäcker, suspected of being an informant, was not targeted by any attack even after testifying in court against the RAF.
Stefan Aust and Jillian Becker have both claimed that members of the guerilla made what can only be described as half-hearted attempts to exact vengeance, but their stories are difficult to gauge. Both authors claim that Baader and Mahler were trying to find Homann and Aust to kill them, but if so, they evidently gave up the search quickly.<ref>Aust, 104; Becker, 255-256</ref> This is just one aspect of the story that casts doubt on its veracity. Becker furthermore claims that Astrid Proll shot at Bäcker but missed; the way in which she phrases the allegation, however, indicates the source may be Karl-Heinz Ruhland, himself far from reliable.<ref>Becker, normally not shy about stating that various combatants actually did various things, in this case merely writes, “Astrid Proll (‘Rosi’) was to claim later that she shot at him from a car but missed.” (Becker, 228)</ref> No charges were ever laid against Proll for this.

There is one, and only one, documented case of the RAF doing violence to an informant. In 1971, a friend of Katharina Hammerschmidt’s, Edelgard Graefer, was arrested on bogus charges and threatened with having her five-year-old son permanently taken away from her. Under pressure, Graefer gave information to the police. In early 1972, she was abducted by the RAF and had a bucket of tar poured over her. Following this attack on her person, she stopped working with the police.<ref>Aust, 170-172.</ref>

While unpleasant, such a violent warning is not on the order of a death sentence. Indeed, as Brigitte Mohnhaupt later argued in Stammheim, the fact that a known informant was assaulted and not killed should suffice to discredit claims that other members were executed merely for dropping out.<ref>The relevant excerpts from Mohnhaupt’s testimony are included in this volume, see page 357</ref>

Certainly, given the guerilla’s ability to carry out attacks against even heavily guarded targets, the fact that all of those who testified against them remained unscathed should tell us something.
As for the many others who left over the years, if they did not cooperate with the police or run with tall tales to the media, there is no indication that the guerilla bore them any ill will.[[File:Informer picture from RAF a documentary history.png|center|thumb]]
|}

== 5 - The May Offensive: Bringing the War Home ==
<blockquote>''This decision, this project, was arrived at through collective discussions involving everyone in the RAF; in other words, there was a consensus of all the groups, of the units in each of the cities, and everyone clearly understood what this meant, what the purpose of these attacks was.''

Brigitte Mohnhaupt

Stammheim Trial

July 22, 1976</blockquote>In may 1972, shortly after the release of ''Serve the People'', the RAF left the stage of logistics and preparation, launching a series of attacks that were to go down in history as the “May Offensive.”

On the evening of May 11, the day the United States mined the harbors of North Vietnam, the RAF’s “Petra Schelm Commando” bombed the U.S. Army V Corps headquarters and the site of the National Security Agency in Frankfurt. At least three blasts went off, killing Lieutenant Colonel Paul A. Bloomquist and injuring thirteen others. As one military police officer noted, the toll would have been much worse had the bombs gone off during duty hours. Damage to property was estimated at $300,000.<ref>Dan Synovec,“Security Beefed Up at U.S. installations,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 13, 1972; Dave Lams, “Police Trace Leads in V Corps Blasts,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 13, 1972.</ref>

“We expected things like this in Saigon,” a captain just back from Vietnam was quoted as saying. “Not here in Germany.”<ref>Synovec,“Security Beefed Up.”</ref>

One can imagine that words like that put smiles on many a face, and within twenty-four hours, U.S. military officials reported receiving a number of threats promising all kinds of follow-up attacks. These quickly snowballed, and by early June, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was reporting that thousands of such calls had been made by “high school students, drunks, psychopaths, and criminals.”<ref>Thomas Kirn, “Bombendrohungen werden schnell geahndet,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', June 9, 1972.</ref>

“These calls,” complained the American Lieutenant General Williard Pearson in a similar vein, “were made by mentally unbalanced or irresponsible individuals seeking to create tension or panic within our community.”<ref>3 “General Pearson seeks community help in solving Frankfurt bombings,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 16, 1972.</ref>

Given that the RAF always issued proper communiqués, these threats were most likely the work of people who were simply glad to see the Americans finally being hit. The state was far from amused, and it was noted that the financial consequences of false bomb threats were substantial for warehouses, newspapers, factories, and banks. More importantly, the wave of political prank calls helped create a signal-to-noise situation that can only have helped the guerilla. Nor was the activity without some risk: prison sentences for these false bomb threats ran from a couple of months to as high as three years.<ref>Kirn, “Bombendrohungen werden schnell geahndet.”</ref>

The day after the first bombing, on May 12, attacks were carried out in two Bavarian cities in response to the March 2 shooting of Weissbecker. In Augsburg, bombs were planted inside the police headquarters, and one cop suffered mild injuries. In the state capital Munich, a car bomb was parked just outside the six-storey police building; when it went off, it blew out the windows up to the top floor. A nearby pay station had received a telephone warning, but by the time the police got wind of it, there was not enough time to evacuate—twelve people were injured, and damages were estimated at $150,000.<ref>''European Stars and Stripes,'' “German Facilities Struck by Bombs,” May 13, 1972.</ref> These bombings were claimed by the RAF’s “Thomas Weissbecker Commando.”

On May 16, in Karlsruhe, the RAF’s “Manfred Grashof Commando” placed a bomb in the car of Federal Supreme Court Judge Buddenberg, who had been put in charge of all RAF cases. However, it was not the judge who was behind the wheel, but his wife on her way to pick him up from work. Gerta Buddenberg sustained serious injuries, but survived.

On May 19, the Springer Press building in Hamburg was bombed in retaliation for the constant red baiting and counterinsurgency propaganda published in its newspapers. One bomb went off in the proofreaders’ room, and two in the toilets. Three telephone warnings were ignored and, as a result, seventeen employees were injured, two of them seriously. The attack was claimed by the RAF’s “2nd of June Commando.”

A Springer editor was later quoted saying, “I was only surprised that if they wanted to hit a Springer Building they’d go for the proofreaders, whose views are rather left of centre. I’d have thought there were more rewarding targets if they wanted to strike a real blow. If they’d picked the computer centre, that would have done the building much more damage.”<ref>Aust, 211.</ref>

As many workers had been injured, this attack caused some consternation on the left, and it was subsequently alleged that it caused dissension within the RAF itself.<ref>See the RAF’s interview with Le Monde Diplomatique, on page 422 of this volume. See also Brigitte Mohnhaupt’s testimony at the Stammheim trial, cf. 357-58.</ref> An anonymous tip the next day led to the discovery of three more bombs in the building, which were all safely defused.<ref>Aust, 211.</ref>

On May 24, the RAF bombed the Heidelberg headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe. Two cars loaded with explosives had been parked 140 meters apart near a data processing center and the officers’ club at Campbell Barracks. They were timed to go off after most people had finished work for the day,<ref>Dan Synovec, “Bombs kill 3 at USAREUR Hq,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 25, 1972.</ref> but nevertheless three soldiers were killed<ref>They were: Clyde Bonner of El Paso, Texas, Ronald Woodward of Otter Lake, Michigan, and Charles Peck of Hawthorne, California. (Associated Press, “W. Germans Sentence 3 Guerrillas to Life for Bomb Deaths,” Tri-City Herald, April 28, 1977.)</ref> and six others were injured. This was the work of the “July 15th Commando,” commemorating the date Petra Schelm had died in a firefight with police.

This was a more daring attack than any of the others so far: unlike the V Corps headquarters in Frankfurt, the Campbell Barracks were fenced off and military police were always stationed at the gates. Any person in civilian clothes or in a vehicle without U.S. military plates was supposed to show identification before entering.<ref>Synovec, “Bombs Kill.”</ref>

The computer destroyed in this attack had been used to make calculations for carpet-bombing sorties in South and North Vietnam with the aim of achieving the highest possible number of deaths. This at a time when, though it was clear the war had been lost, the United States had stepped up bombings of Hanoi, Haiphong, and Thanh Hoa province.<ref>''Internazionale Kommission zum Schutz der Gefangenen une Gegen Isolationshaft'', October 1980, 2.</ref> The RAF would later claim that their pictures had gone up on walls in Hanoi as a result of this action,<ref>“Wir waren in den Durststreik treten,” ''Spiegel'' 4/1975, translated in this volume on pages 300-318.</ref> and this clearly remained a point of pride among guerilla veterans even decades later.

Regarding the May Offensive, it has been noted:<blockquote>''Although people were injured or killed in most of these bombings, with the exception of the Buddenberg bombing, they differ from later RAF attacks in not being directed against specific individuals, a point that should be kept in mind when examining the RAF’s history.''<ref>Arm The Spirit, “A Brief History of the Red Army Faction,” <nowiki>http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/61/191.html</nowiki>.</ref></blockquote>Despite the many anonymous bomb threats called in during this period, and the fact that the RAF’s actions coincided with a global wave of protest against ongoing American military aggression in Southeast Asia, some observers have claimed that the May Offensive alienated many of the RAF’s liberal sympathizers. Those who had seen them as modern day Robin Hoods, or as romantic idealists, took a step back once they realized that this was for real.

It would be more true to say that the 1972 bombing campaign polarized the left, and, in a healthy way, provided direction and inspiration to numerous activists who had been considering armed politics, while clarifying the disagreements which existed with opponents of the guerilla struggle. Indeed, the period in question showed a marked rise in newspaper articles describing molotov cocktail attacks and other low level actions against symbols of state power, encouraged by the context the guerilla’s bombs had helped create. Years later, the Revolutionary Cells (another West German guerilla group) would explain the longterm effect of the May Offensive in this way:<blockquote>''At the time, these actions drew the widespread anti-imperialist movement together, causing the further development of an idea that had been rattling around in the heads of thousands of people. We saw that what had long been thought about was in fact possible. Without the RAF, there wouldn’t be an RZ today, there wouldn’t be groups that understand that resistance doesn’t stop where the criminal code starts.''<ref>RZ Letter to the RAF Comrades, reprinted in this volume on pages 457-463.</ref></blockquote>
{| class="wikitable"
|+Alienating Which Masses?
!“When we heard about the RAF bombing the American Headquarters in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, we jumped with joy. At last someone had done something against the imperialist bases in the Federal Republic of Germany.”
These were not the words of a petit bourgeois sect, but rather come from the report of a freedom fighter fighting for national liberation in a land occupied by Portugal. He and his comrades had heard the news while he was in a guerilla base. For years the people there had heard of the FRG being one of the worst enemies of the African people—as a source of arms for Portuguese colonialism—and now for the first time the guerillas could see something happening in the Federal Republic which they considered to be an effective form of resistance to imperialism.
I remarked that their reaction was quite different from that of Marxist groups in the Federal Republic, to which the African comrade responded, “When you are struggling, you see things differently.”
Christian Sigrist
______________
Christian Sigrist, “De Heidelberg au Cap Vert” in ''à propos du procès Baader-Meinhof, Fraction Armée Rouge: de la torture dans les prisons de la RFA'', Klaus Croissant (ed.) (Paris : Christian Bourgeois Éditeur, 1975), 53-54.
|}
One thing is certain: the RAF’s bombing campaign was strongly criticized by the Maoist K-groups who were enjoying their heyday and rejected such attacks as infantile adventurism. The KP (Communist League), whose newspaper ''Arbeiterkampf'' would later distinguish itself by offering some of the most intelligent commentary on the guerilla in Germany, even went so far as to suggest that the Springer attack might have been the work of right-wing extremists.

For its part the KSV (Communist Student Association), the youth section of the Maoist KPD,<ref>Not to be confused with the pro-Soviet KPD that was banned in the 50s and later reconstituted as the DKP.</ref> complained about the RAF’s violence:<blockquote>''[It is] neither practiced by the masses… nor is it understood by the masses as an expression of their interests. The masses, on the contrary, perceive the actions as a threat, and therefore identify with the reactions of the state apparatus… The violence is not revolutionary. It sabotages the struggle against state repression in that it helps to conceal the class character of this repression and encourages the isolation of communists.''<ref>Varon, 213.</ref></blockquote>These comments were delivered at a Teach-In Against State Repression, which was held at Frankfurt University on May 31, just a couple of weeks after the Springer Building in that city was bombed. Organized by Rote Hilfe (Red Aid), a network of autonomous prisoner support collectives which had their roots in the antiauthoritarian wing of the APO, the event attracted hundreds of people, not all of whom were as negative as the Maoists.<ref>Hockenos, 114.</ref> Indeed, one leaflet produced for the event argued that, “If imperialism is a worldwide system, and that it is, then the struggle against it must be waged worldwide. It will and must be a violent and armed struggle, or it will not be waged at all.”<ref>Varon, 213.</ref>

The RAF itself sent a statement to the Red Aid Teach-In in the form of a tape recording by Ulrike Meinhof in which she once again encouraged the radical left to organize armed struggle, arguing that increasing repression and popular resentments were providing the potential which, properly exploited, could lead to a revolutionary situation. As was typical of the RAF at this time, Meinhof was attempting to engage directly with the guerilla’s left-wing critics.<ref>Statement to the Red Aid Teach-In, reprinted in this volume on pages 183-85.</ref>

Remarkably, the Teach-In brought together Maoists and ''spontis'', and as such was representative of the revolutionary left. As for the tamed left, in its eyes the RAF remained well beyond the pale. The pro-Soviet DKP made a point of condemning “anarchist demonstrations” in Frankfurt, pontificating that, “The anarchist groups have clearly made hysteria the order of the day. We are making the struggle to win the solidarity of the people of Frankfurt for the Vietnamese liberation struggle the order of the day.”<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “DKP verurteilt anarchistische Demonstrationen in Frankfurt,” May 26, 1972.</ref> Various labor leaders also took turns condemning the “political adventurists,” “terror,” and “murder.” The chairman of the Public Service, Transport, and Communication Union explained that his union supported the government, for, while it was independent, it shared many common concerns with employers.<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Keine Solidarisierung mit Abenteurern,” May 29, 1972.</ref>

Clearly not reassured by claims that the RAF was driving people away from left, the state recognized that if it did not move quickly, the May bombings could easily inspire renewed resistance. “The longer the Baader-Meinhof gang remains at large,” Attorney General Ludwig Martin worried, “the easier it will be for the public to gain the impression that the powers of the state have broken down.”<ref>Dan Synovec, “Terrorists: odd solidarity prompts aid to the Baader-Meinhof gang,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', June 3, 1972.</ref>

An essential feature of the campaign against the RAF consisted of psychological operations, meant to discourage any solidarity or identification with the guerilla, while legitimizing the state’s own repressive response. As an example of this, in the midst of the May Offensive, communiqués attributed to the RAF, but most likely penned by the secret services or police, were received claiming that on June 2 (the anniversary of Benno Ohnesorg’s murder) three car bombs would be set off in random locations in Stuttgart “as a reminder of the bombing war of the U.S. imperialists in Vietnam.”<ref>Associated Press, “Bombers Threaten 3 Blasts Friday in Stuttgart Area,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 29, 1972.</ref>

The RAF promptly issued its own communiqué repudiating this as a false flag provocation.<ref>Regarding the Fascist Bomb Threats Against Stuttgart, reprinted in this volume on pages 181-82.</ref> Nevertheless, this denial was largely ignored, and on the day in question, “Stuttgart presented the appearance of a beleaguered city. Thousands of police checked all access roads, vehicles and ‘suspicious persons.’”<ref>Cobler, 169.</ref>

One hundred and thirty thousand cops were mobilized, supported by both West German and U.S. intelligence units, in a determined effort to hunt down the guerilla. A $59,000 reward was offered for their capture, and Chancellor Willy Brandt warned the public that any solidarity shown would be treated as criminal complicity.<ref>Dan Synovec, “Anarchist gang blamed,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 27, 1972.</ref> At the same time, Genscher announced that supporters could hope for light sentences if they turned themselves in and helped in the hunt;<ref>“Bescheidene Mitgleiderzahlen radikaler Organisation,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', June 7, 1972.</ref> there do not seem to have been any takers.

Nevertheless, the wave of arrests was not long in coming

On June 1, RAF members Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader were cornered as they arrived at a safehouse in Munich that had been identified by police. Raspe tried to make a run for it, but was quickly apprehended. Meins gave himself up, following police orders to strip down to his underwear before he did so.

Three hundred cops surrounded the warehouse where Baader was holed up, and eventually an armored vehicle tried to enter the building; Baader shot out its wheels. At that point, a sniper took aim and shot the eponymous guerilla fighter in the leg and the police moved in quickly to take him into custody.

Holger Meins was the only one of the three who had surrendered without resistance, a fact that did not stop the police from beating him so severely that he required hospitalization. “I didn’t squeal or scream,” he would later tell his father. “They kicked me black and blue with their big boots. It’s a thing you just can’t describe.”<ref>Aust, 219.</ref>

It later came out that the RAF had intended to kidnap the three U.S. Army City Commanders in Berlin, but called off this action due to security concerns following the June 1 arrests.<ref>Brigitte Mohnhaupt’s Testimony at the Stammheim Trial, July 22, 1976, <nowiki>http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/</nowiki> documents/76_0708_mohnhaupt_pohl.html.</ref>

On June 7, Gudrun Ensslin was arrested in Hamburg when a store clerk noticed a gun in her handbag. (The government’s somewhat farcical Mainz report would later explain this bust in memorably sexist terms: “The arrest of her boyfriend Baader affected this deviant woman to such a degree that she simply had to buy something new, like any normal woman does when something is wrong.”)<ref>Clare Bielby, “‘Bonnie und Kleid’: Female Terrorists and the Hysterical Feminine,” ''Forum 2'', <nowiki>http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue2/bielby.html</nowiki>.</ref>

On June 9, Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Bernhard Braun were arrested in West Berlin; they were both former SPK members. Mohnhaupt had gravitated to the RAF via the Munich Tupamaros. Braun, who was also close to 2JM, had come to the RAF via the West Berlin Tupamaros.

On June 15, Ulrike Meinhof and Gerhard Müller were arrested in Hannover, turned in by a left-wing trade unionist who had agreed to put them up for the night.<ref>They were turned in by Fritz Rodewald, who evidently did not know if he was coming or going: he would donate the reward money to the prisoners’ defense fund (Vague, 49). For more details on Rodewald’s motivations, see page 201.</ref> Police found forged passports, gun oil, a four-and-a-half-kilo homemade bomb, two homemade hand grenades, a semi-automatic pistol, two 9mm handguns, numerous fully loaded magazines, and more than three hundred rounds of ammunition in Meinhof’s luggage, which weighed over twenty-five kilos.<ref>Wolfgang Tersteegen, “Mit der Bombe im Handgepäcke,”''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', June 19, 1972; ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Erst nach Stunden identifiziert,” June 19, 1972.</ref> With her capture, some observers felt that the guerilla’s entire leadership was now in custody, and yet there were more arrests to come.

On June 30, Katharina Hammerschmidt, who had fled to France, was convinced to turn herself in by her lawyer Otto Schily. The police suspected Hammerschmidt of setting up safehouses and perhaps having a role in the recent bombings.<ref>United Press International, “Ends French Stay: Member of Gang Turns Self In,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 1, 1972.</ref>

Finally, on July 7, Klaus Jünschke and Irmgard Möller were arrested in Offenbach, set up by a nineteen-year-old who had been recruited by the guerilla earlier that year, and who had since been identified and turned by the police. Jünschke was a former SPK member sought in relation to the December 22, 1971, bank robbery in which police officer Herbert Schoner had been killed.<ref>He was sentenced to life in prison in 1977. Associated Press, “2 German terrorists given life,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', June 3, 1977.</ref> Irmgard Möller was sought in connection to the 1971 killing of police officer Schmid in Hamburg, and was suspected of participating in the May bombings.<ref>Four years later, she was sentenced to four and a half years for forging documents, resisting arrest, possession of an unlicensed firearm, and membership in a criminal organization. In 1979, she was found guilty of three counts of murder and sentenced to life for planting the bombs in the Augsburg and Heidelberg attacks. By the time she was released in 1994, she had survived 22 years behind bars, making her Germany’s longest held female prisoner at that time.</ref> (With typical hype, Stars and Stripes described her as “the gang’s new chief, replacing jailed Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader.”)<ref>United Press International, “8 Terrorist gang suspects still sought,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 10, 1972.</ref>

The RAF was decimated, and what few members remained at large could do little more than concentrate on their own survival.

Following the successes of this counterinsurgency campaign, the West German government felt confident it had snuffed out its fledgling armed opposition. Even sympathetic observers felt that the RAF might have met its end.

They were all wrong.
{| class="wikitable"
|+"The objective of these actions was clear..."
!The RAF was at the time organized in the following way: there were eight groups established in six cities, and of these there were two strong groups in two cities. There was one group in Munich. The groups, the different units, were integrated into a logistical system. There was contact between the different groups for discussions, but they were autonomous in their decisions regarding how to carry out operations. That was left to the individual groups—and it couldn’t have been otherwise. We didn’t know anything in advance about these actions. However, even if we had known, we wouldn’t have prevented them, because, yeah, it’s not a simple thing to stop a group from doing what it has decided to do. In fact, we couldn’t have prevented it, both because of the underlying perspective and for practical reasons; it would have been impossible given the circumstances. The objective of these actions was clear: they were a response to the fact that fighters were shot in the street, for example, Petra and Tommy. It would never have been our intention to prevent them.
Brigitte Mohnhaupt
Stammheim Trial
July 22, 1976
|}

=== For the Victory of the People of Vietnam ===
On Thursday May 11, 1972—the day the U.S. imperialist mine blockade of North Vietnam began—the Petra Schelm Commando detonated three bombs containing 80kg of TNT at the Frankfurt Headquarters of the V Army Corps of the U.S. Forces in West Germany and West Berlin. West Germany and West Berlin shall no longer be a safe hinterland for the strategy of extermination against Vietnam. They must understand that their crimes against the Vietnamese people have created new and bitter enemies for them, and there is nowhere left in this world where they will be safe from the attacks of revolutionary guerilla units.

We demand an immediate stop to the bomb blockade against North Vietnam.

We demand an immediate end to the bombing of North Vietnam.

We demand the withdrawal of all American troops from Indochina.

VICTORY TO THE VIET CONG!

BUILD THE REVOLUTIONARY GUERILLA.

DARE TO STRUGGLE - DARE TO WIN!

BUILD TWO, THREE, MANY VIETNAMS!

Petra Schelm Commando

May 14, 1972

=== Attacks in Augsburg and Munich ===
On Friday, May 12, 1972, the Thomas Weissbecker Commando detonated three bombs at the police headquarters in Augsburg and in the LKA office in Munich.

On March 2, Thomas Weissbecker was murdered in a well-planned surprise attack by a death squad of the Munich ''Kripo'' and the Augsburg police; he had absolutely no chance to defend himself. The police had no intention of taking Thomas Weissbecker prisoner; they intended to shoot him.

The authorities responsible for the manhunt must understand that they can’t liquidate any of us without having to anticipate that we will strike back. The security services, the special squads, the Kripo, the BGS and their organizational and political employers must be made aware that their attempts to “solve” the problems of this fascist country by arming the police, by militarizing the class struggle, and by the ruthless and vicious use of guns will provoke resistance. This is also true of the police operations in response to the Munich bank robbery, in response to the Cologne bank robbery, against the Tübingen apprentice Epple, and against foreign workers.

The tactics and tools that we use are the tactics and tools of guerilla warfare. The Minister of the Interior and the BAW assess the situation incorrectly if they think that they can rule with their death squads. It is in the nature of the guerilla—because they struggle in the interests of the people—that they cannot be wiped out by military actions, because their freedom of action can be developed anew whenever it suffers temporary setbacks. Faced with the brutal arrogance of the authorities responsible for the manhunt and the “short cuts” of the fascists, our response is the steady development of the revolutionary guerilla and the long, protracted process of the struggle for liberation from fascism, from capitalist exploitation, and from the oppression of the people.

RESIST THE POLICE DEATH SQUADS!

RESIST THE SS PRACTICES OF THE POLICE!

STRUGGLE AGAINST ALL EXPLOITERS AND ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE!

Thomas Weissbecker Commando

May 16, 1972

=== Attack on Judge Buddenberg ===
On Monday, May 16, 1972, the Manfred Grashof Commando carried out a bomb attack against Judge Buddenberg of the Karlsruhe Federal Supreme Court. Buddenberg is the judge at the Federal Supreme Court responsible for the arrests and investigations in the current political proceedings under §129.

Buddenberg, the pig, allowed Grashof to be moved from the hospital to a cell; the transfer and the risk of infection in the prison put his life at risk. He attempted to murder Grashof. The police having failed, he tried again to kill the defenseless Grashof.

Buddenberg, the pig, is responsible for Carmen Roll being drugged in order to get her to talk. The foreseeable effect of the drug indicates that this was attempted murder.

Buddenberg, the pig, doesn’t give a shit about existing laws and conventions. The strict isolation in which prisoners are held to destroy them psychologically: solitary confinement, isolated yard time, the ban on speaking to other prisoners, constant transfers, punitive confinement, observation cells, the censoring of mail and the confiscation of mail, books, and magazines. The means used to destroy them physically—the glaring cell lights at night, frequent interruption of sleep for searches, chaining during yard time, and physical abuse—are not the bullying of insignificant, frustrated prison wardens; these are Buddenberg’s decrees, meant to force the prisoners to make statements. It is institutionalized fascism in the justice system. It is the beginning of torture.

We demand the immediate application of laws governing remand prisoners, the Geneva Human Rights Convention, and the United Nations Charter regarding the use of remand custody for political prisoners. We demand the justice system call off the systematic destructive attacks upon the lives and health of the prisoners.

We will carry out bomb attacks against judges and federal prosecutors until they stop violating the rights of political prisoners. We are, in fact, demanding nothing that is impossible for this justice system. We have no other means to compel them to do so.

FREEDOM FOR THE POLITICAL PRISONERS!

RESIST CLASS JUSTICE! RESIST FASCISM!

Manfred Grashof Commando

May 20, 1972

=== Attack on the Springer Building ===
Yesterday, Friday May 19, at 3:55 pm, two bombs exploded in the Springer Building in Hamburg. Despite prompt and early warnings, the building wasn’t evacuated and 17 people were injured. At 3:29 pm, the first warning was given to number 3471, who was told to evacuate the building within 15 minutes because a bomb would detonate shortly. The answer was, “Stop this nonsense.” The call was cut off. With a second call at 3:31 pm, we said, “If you don’t evacuate immediately, something horrible will happen.” But the telephone operators obviously had instructions not to pay attention to such calls. The third call, at 3:36 pm, was to the cops saying, “Goddamn it, see to it that the building is immediately evacuated.” Because the Springer Corporation can’t cover up the fact that they were warned, they distort it, stating, “There was only one call and it came too late.” Two telephone operators and the police can confirm that the Springer Press is lying once again.

Springer would rather risk his workers and staff being injured by a bomb than risk losing a couple of hours of work time, and therefore profit, as a result of a false alarm. For capitalists, profit is everything, and the people who make it for them are dirt. We regret that workers and staff were injured.

Our demands of Springer: that his newspapers stop the anticommunist hysteria against the New Left, against working class solidarity actions such as strikes, and against communist parties here and in other countries; that the Springer Corporation stop the hysteria against liberation movements in the Third World, especially against the Arab people who struggle for the freedom of Palestine; that he stop his propagandistic support for Zionism—the imperialist politics of the Israeli ruling class; that the Springer Press stop spreading lies about foreign workers here.

We demand that the Springer Press print this communiqué.

We demand nothing impossible. We will stop our attacks on the enemies of the people if our demands are met.

EXPROPRIATE SPRINGER!

EXPROPRIATE THE ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE!

2nd of June Commando May 20, 1972

=== Attack on the Heidelberg Headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe ===
<blockquote>''Every form of monstrosity will be abolished''

Mao</blockquote>Yesterday evening, May 24, 1972, two bombs with an explosive capacity of 200 kg of TNT, were detonated in the Heidelberg Headquarters of the American Armed Forces in Europe. The attack was carried out after General Daniel James, Department Head at the Pentagon, said, on Wednesday in Washington, “For the U.S. Air Force, no target north or south of the 17th parallel in Vietnam will be exempt from bombing attacks.” On Monday, the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Hanoi again accused the United States of bombing densely populated areas of North Vietnam. In the last 7 weeks, the American Air Force has dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II. Many millions of additional bombs is the response the Pentagon intends to use to stop the North Vietnamese offensive. This is genocide, the slaughter of a people; this is “the final solution”; this is Auschwitz.

The people of the Federal Republic don’t support the security service in its search for the bombers, because they want nothing to do with the crimes of American imperialism and the support it receives from the ruling class here, because they haven’t forgotten Auschwitz, Dresden, and Hamburg, because they know that the bomb attacks against those who commit mass murder in Vietnam are just, and because they know from experience that demonstrations and words are of no use against the crimes of imperialism.

WE DEMAND AN END TO BOMB ATTACKS IN VIETNAM!

WE DEMAND A HALT TO THE MINE BLOCKADE AGAINST NORTH VIETNAM!

WE DEMAND THE WITHDRAWL OF AMERICAN TROOPS FROM INDOCHINA!

July 15th Commando

May 25, 1972

=== To the News Editors of the West German Press ===
On May 26, Willy Brandt said in his television broadcast that the bombings of recent weeks have no logical political basis, and that they have endangered innocent lives.

The Federal Chancellor can deceive the people with these assertions because the West German press has almost completely suppressed the communiqués of the urban guerilla commandos.

Instead the ''Frankfurter Rundschau'' published a letter created out of cut out letters—which, when compared to authentic RAF communiqués, can clearly be seen to be a fake—to create the impression that the bombers are brainless twits who act chaotically in an effort to create fear amongst the people.

The Chancellor’s statement does not differ from similar statements by General Franco, General Patakos, von Howeida, the followers of Salazar, or the Turkish military dictator: the reasons for the actions are ignored, and only the condemnation of the Chancellor and the pundits is presented. The reasons for this conduct are obvious:

* The communiqué of the Thomas Weissbecker Commando was intended to bring every individual police officer to the point where he must think about whether or not he wants to be an active part of the hunt for the RAF;
* An investigation would have proven that the 2nd of June Commando warned the Springer Corporation on time and that Springer, as always, has lied;
* The people, who know from their own experience all about genocide and the terrorist bombing of civilian populations, can draw their own conclusions about the bomb attacks against those who commit mass murder in Vietnam and against the fascism of the Springer Corporation;
* And because of this, there can be no doubt that the bomb attacks were directed solely against the enemies of the people, the enemies of the working class, the enemies of the Vietnamese people, the imperialists.

“We’re all in the same boat” has always been the motto of the exploiters and fascists.

Springer has, under threat of further bomb attacks, published the demands made of him, albeit in a mutilated form.

The rest of the press must understand that they themselves will be provoking actions against Springer if they, as a result of economic pressure coming from Springer, submit voluntarily and opportunistically to this practice of censorship. We therefore demand that they no longer deceive the people about the political reasons behind the bomb attacks, that is to say, that they not aggravate the situation unnecessarily. We demand that they print in full the following communiqués: the communiqué of the Thomas Weissbecker Commando, the communiqué of the 2nd of June Commando and the communiqué of the July 15th Commando.

SERVE THE PEOPLE!

EXPROPRIATE SPRINGER!

RAF

May 28, 1972

=== Regarding the Fascist Bomb Threats Against Stuttgart ===
The two bomb threats pasted together out of letters cut from newspapers for next Friday, June 2, in Stuttgart don’t come from the Red Army Faction. Genuine communiqués of the urban guerilla commandos can easily be authenticated by comparing their contents with other RAF communiqués. And they are typewritten, as the cops well know.
[[File:Fake bomb threat by German police and blamed on RAF.png|thumb|''Fake communiqué threatening random bombings in Stuttgart.'']]
The fake communiqués, given their contents, their purpose, their essence, and their style, more likely come from the cops themselves.

The cops know this. The Springer journalists, who have published the false communiqués without reservation, know this. Filbinger,<ref>Hans Filbinger (CDU) was, at this time, the ''Land'' Chairman of Baden-Württemberg, of which Stuttgart is the capital.</ref> Krause,<ref>Walter Krause (SPD) was, at this time, the Minister of the Interior and acting President of Baden-Württemberg.</ref> and Klett<ref>Arnulf Klett was, at this time, the Mayor of Stuttgart.</ref> know this. They are taking precautions only as a pretext to prepare new police actions and to drive the war of nerves to the extreme.

Because the authorities leading the manhunt are receiving no help from the people, they are seizing upon fascist provocation. It is possible that if by Friday they haven’t had any success in their hunt—if they haven’t met their kill quota—they will carry through on the crimes they have threatened. Just as Springer didn’t allow his building to be evacuated, although he himself said he could foresee the attacks coming. Just as the Nazis set the Reichstag on fire and attacked the Gleiwitz transmitter. One must assume that they intend similar communiqués and attacks in the future.

We are not responsible for the crimes of fascists.

The actions of the urban guerilla are directed against the institutions of the class state, imperialism, and capital. They are never directed against working people or against people who have nothing to do with the crimes of imperialism. They are directed against those who plan vicious attacks against the people, such as those announced in the false communiqués, and those carried out daily by U.S. imperialism against the Vietnamese people.

FIGHT FASCISM!

DESTROY AND OBLITERATE THE POWER OF IMPERIALISM!

EXPROPRIATE SPRINGER

RAF

May 29, 1972

=== Statement to the Red Aid Teach-In ===
Comrades, some of you still believe that you don’t have any reason to dialogue with the Red Army Faction.

Some of you still believe that the cops will soon have a handle on the armed struggle in the metropole. Some of you still believe what you read in the newspapers: that the RAF is on the run, that there are splits in the RAF, that the RAF has a hierarchical structure, that the RAF is isolated. You aren’t seeing reality.

The KB in Hamburg believed that the attack against the Springer Corporation was the work of right-wing extremists. Instead of engaging us in debate, they assure the police that they themselves are not guilty. And the Frankfurt KSV Frankfurt asserts, in agreement with the ''Rundshau'', that the recent bomb attacks have nothing to do with the class struggle in West Germany and Berlin. These comrades no longer understand what’s going on.

Although they now understand that Genscher didn’t call out the police for show, that the murders of Petra, Georg, and Thomas were not mistakes on the part of the system, that the ''Kripo'' was responsible for the destruction of strike centrals during the strikes last year, that the Emergency Laws weren’t adopted just for the fun of it, that the banning of foreigners’ organizations isn’t just for show and that over sixty prisoners are being abused in prison—although they know all of this full well, they still believe it is too early to begin to resist.

They protest the death penalty in Persia and in Turkey; they wish the Palestinian resistance success; they protest the terror in Greece and Spain; they protest the complicity of the system with fascist regimes— but they are afraid to intervene or to act. They are clearly afraid to arrive at the obvious conclusion. They hide behind the masses and present their problem as one located outside of themselves.

We see things differently than these comrades. We are of the opinion that the hateful assembly-lines and piecework in the factories have gotten so bad that hardly anyone has any illusions any more about the fact that corporate profits require irreparable damage to the health of the workers. The masses already know that in the Federal Republic they must work themselves to death because that is the source of their employers’ profits, that the factory workers already know who they’re working for—soon it will be for themselves.

We are of the opinion that the problem these comrades see as lying elsewhere is their own subjective problem, that they project onto the masses their own lack of clarity. They want to identify their own inability—an inability to express solidarity with the masses because of their own privileged class position—as lying with the masses, to present it as an objective problem based in the masses’ need to develop a higher level of consciousness.

If, as occurred recently in Frankfurt, some women comrades say, for example, that they want to take to the streets if another one of us is murdered, then that indicates it would be easy to spontaneously intervene. Which is to say: the problem of agency is, as Springer journalists put it in a headline, one of marketing and competition. Political content as the commodity, the masses as the market. So they are ready to moan about imperialist crimes, but not to prevent them with clubs and bombs. For the imperialists, the assembly lines are still not going fast enough and the time required must be further reduced. They will consume as much as they can extract.

There is no reason for further delay in addressing the problem of armed struggle and resistance. Reduced hours, lay-offs, strikes, two million foreign workers, “Bild fights for you!”, “the extortionist of the week” in Stern, Citizens Initiatives, squatted houses—there is hardly any area in which the system can maintain its facade. The people’s desires must be unified and transformed into an organized leap forward.

This greed-driven system is ravaging the cities. Teachers must learn to muzzle themselves or they are fired. The mass media has been purged of decent critical journalists. Riot police are mobilized against strike centrals. Rulings of the Federal Labor Court prepare the way to criminalize future strikes. The BKA hopes to eliminate the remaining press freedoms. They are not waiting for the legal left to take up the armed struggle before proceeding with this. It’s happening now; it has begun. Is this the point when you will start to resist—or are you still waiting for something?

Comrades, stop hiding behind the masses! Stop shifting the question of resistance to the masses! Stop rationalizing your fear of the system’s excessive violence as a problem of agency! Stop presenting your confusion as erudition and your helplessness as a broad perspective!

The system is now producing contradictions at such a rate that they can no longer be integrated, and the masses no longer believe talk of reforms. It is equally true that the guerilla can only be anchored in the people to the degree that we carry out appropriate actions and you make effective propaganda. For this to happen, the revolutionary process and revolutionary consciousness must be developed further; the consciousness that action is justified—and possible!

When we build the revolutionary guerilla, we are creating an instrument that is beyond the reach of the system’s repression, that does not depend on the system’s tolerance for its capacity to act, that does not have its room to maneuver determined by the ''Verfassungsshutz''. If you are domesticated like Müller’s<ref>Frankfurt police chief at the time.</ref> demonstrators in Frankfurt on May 18, you can continue to demonstrate for some time to come, and you can celebrate it along with the KSV as the most powerful and most insular demonstration in a long time. Under the watchful eye of the police and funneled between two water cannons and rows of batons, you can go on celebrating successes long into the future. But the price to be paid is the distance people took from Tuesday’s demonstration, the denunciation of the comrades who broke free from the Hauptwache;<ref>The Hauptwache is the central point on a major pedestrian mall in Frankfurt.</ref> the price in the end was betrayal of the goals in exchange for permission to walk in the streets.

Today, everyone understands our actions against the extermination strategy in Vietnam. Everybody should be able to understand our actions to defend the lives and health of the prisoners and of the RAF comrades still at large. That the media no longer publishes our communiqués about our bomb attacks, but publishes false statements of fascist origin, that they downplay attacks on U.S. imperialism and play up fascist provocations such as that against the citizens of Stuttgart, demonstrates how things really are, demonstrates what they are afraid of and how far they’ll go to hide the truth from the masses, to prop up their facade.

Dare to struggle; dare to win! Attack and smash the power of imperialism! It is the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution! We call on all militants in the Federal Republic to make all American establishments targets of their attacks in their struggle against U.S. imperialism!

Long live the RAF!

Ulrike Meinhof

for the RAF

May 31, 1972

== 6 - Black September: A Statement from Behind Bars ==
In the fall of 1972, operationally devastated, the RAF issued its first document from behind bars: The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle. Written by one or several of the captured combatants, the text was first made public in West Berlin at Mahler’s second RAF trial, during which he faced charges of conspiracy and establishing a terrorist organization. The former lawyer worked it into the court record by using it as the basis for questions to Ulrike Meinhof, whom he had called as a witness. By November, it was being distributed by outside supporters in magazine format as the RAF’s third major publication.

In this paper, the RAF re-examined the geopolitics of anti-imperialism and the class base for revolution in the First World while responding angrily to Frankfurt School intellectual Oskar Negt, who had recently emerged as a vocal critic of armed struggle in the FRG. What caught people’s attention most was the RAF’s expression of warm solidarity with the Palestinian group Black September, which had carried out a daring, and ultimately tragic, hostage-taking during the Munich Olympics just months earlier.

“The guerillas took part in a courageous action,” Mahler explained, “in which they were ready to sacrifice themselves. The only fault the Black September guerillas can be reproached for is that they did not take Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher as a hostage.”<ref>United Press International, “Baader-Meinhof lawyer praises guerillas,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', October 10, 1972. As we shall see, this was not moot criticism.</ref>

At this point, the courtroom full of left-wing supporters erupted into cheers, prompting the judge to order it cleared.

There is no indication that the RAF played any part in the Black September operation; it was effectively out of action at the time, gutted by the arrests it had suffered following the May Offensive. Even so, given the group’s public statement of solidarity, it may be best to revisit the events at the Munich Olympics that year. (For more about the relationship between the West Germany and Israel, and how this affected the New Left, see Appendix III—The FRG and the State of Israel, pages 550-53.)

Black September had its origin in the aftermath of the civil war between Palestinian forces and the Jordanian state in September 1970. Formed by militants within Arafat’s Al Fatah, its first action had been the assassination, on November 28, 1971, of Jordan’s Prime Minister Wasfi Tel.<ref>Christopher Dobson, Black September: Its Short, Violent History (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 1.</ref> Not one month later, the group had attempted its second assassination, wounding Zaid el Rifai, Jordan’s ambassador to England, as he drove through the streets of London.<ref>Ibid., 12.</ref> By September of 1972, Black September had carried out a number of operations in Europe, including skyjacking a Sabena Belgian World Airlines plane en route from Vienna to Tel Aviv. The plane was flown to Lod airport, where Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan sent in a squad of paratroopers disguised as maintenance workers, who carried out a successful assault. Two of the hijackers were killed and two others captured.<ref>Ibid., 65-79.</ref>

Meanwhile, opening on August 26, the 1972 Olympic Games were supposed to be a symbolic graduation ceremony for the FRG. The last time the Olympics were held on German soil had been the 1936 Berlin games, which became a propaganda vehicle for the Hitler regime. Commentators were not shy to admit that the 1972 Munich Olympics were meant to signal a moving on, a testament to how well West Germany had gotten over its fascist past.

As an unrecognized portent of things to come, that June, the International Olympic Committee refused requests to allow a Palestinian team to participate in the games.<ref>Simon Reeve, ''One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre'' (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000), 40.</ref>

Early on September 5, midway through the games, an eight-man Black September commando entered the “Olympic Village” housing athletes from around the world. The commando made directly for the Israeli dorms, which they secured, in the process killing two sportsmen who tried to resist. They seized nine other Israeli athletes as hostages and issued their demands: the release of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs from Israeli prisons, the release of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in the FRG, and safe passage to Egypt for all concerned.<ref>Black September would later tell Voice of Palestine radio that they had demanded the release of five “revolutionary German girls belonging to the Baader-Meinhof organization,” which five being left open to conjecture. (United Press International, “Other Arab guerrilla demand told,” ''Hayward Daily Review'', September 8, 1972.)</ref>

Black September named this its “Operation Iqrith and Kafr Bir’im.”<ref>Iqrith (also spelled Ikrit) and Bir’im were two Christian villages in the upper Galilee. In 1948, shock troops from the Zionist Hagana expelled the towns’ inhabitants at gunpoint. “The pogrom-like expulsion was carried out without the Israeli government approval,” writes Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh. “However, the democratic Israeli state never allowed the Christian inhabitants to return, despite several rulings to the contrary by the Israeli High Court.” (Khaled Amayreh, “Christians, too, suffer the evilness of the occupation,” at [http://www. thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/12/26/christians_too_suffer_ the_evilness_of_th). http://www. thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/12/26/christians_too_suffer_ the_evilness_of_th).]</ref>

Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister, informed the West German authorities that Israel would not release any of the prisoners. At that point, the West Germans developed a plan to pretend to arrange for the safe passage of the commando and the hostages out of the FRG, while in fact preparing an ambush.

At 10:20 pm, the guerillas and their captives were flown to the military airfield at Fürstenfeldbruck, halfway between Munich and Augsburg. A Lufthansa Boeing 727 waited on the tarmac, ostensibly to fly the group to Tunis. But the area was crawling with cops, and five snipers had been positioned with orders to take the “terrorists” out as soon as the signal was given.

Two members of the commando checked out the Boeing to make sure that all was as had been promised. They then started back to the helicopters where the hostages and the other commando members had remained. At this point, the police sharpshooters opened fire: they missed, and there ensued intermittent volleys of bullets lasting over an hour. Finally, unable to subdue the Palestinians with gunfire, just after midnight police in armored vehicles moved in to try and storm the helicopters.

Seeing this, the commando executed the nine hostages.

By the time the cops were in control, five members of the Palestinian commando and a police officer also lay dead. The entire hostage-taking had lasted barely twenty hours.

It was later revealed that the Bavarian police had seriously bungled their ambush. A team that had been designated to overpower the commando inside the Boeing had voted (!) to desert their posts just twenty minutes before the helicopters landed at Fürstenfeldbruck—they considered the proposed ambush “suicidal.”<ref>Aaron J. Klein, ''Striking Back: the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s deadly response'' (New York: Random House, 2005), 72-73.</ref> This put all the pressure on the marksmen, and yet there were only five deployed, they were not equipped with the recommended rifles for such an operation, nor had they received infrared sights, bulletproof vests, or walkie talkies.<ref>Reeve, 116.</ref> They were not even informed of each other’s positions, which led to one police sniper shooting another, whom he mistook for a member of the commando!<ref>Ibid., 121-122.</ref>

The authorities had obviously underestimated the Palestinian guerilla. “At the moment we fired there were not enough terrorists exposed,” explained Bruno Merck, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior. “We had expected, nevertheless, that those who had not been shot would surrender in the shock of the gun battle. That didn’t happen… All we could do was hope for a mistake. But these people are not amateurs.”<ref>Dobson, 85.</ref>

The distinction between “amateurs” and “professionals” is an odd one. Two of the commando members were teenagers, and the others mostly in their early twenties; obviously, none had participated in other actions of this sort. Their determination most likely came from their own personal experiences. They had all grown up in refugee camps, their families forced to endure extreme poverty, hunger, and the constant threat of Israeli violence, while most of the world happily ignored their existence.<ref>Reeve, 41-42.</ref> In the words of Abu Daoud, who claims to have organized the operation, “They were people who had left their homes in ’48, forced to flee, and then languished in the Lebanese camps since then. They were people whose houses were now the homes of Polish, French and American Jews who had replaced them in their own country, living as citizens there without any right to.”<ref>Ibid, 42.</ref>

The three survivors from the commando—Sammar ‘Adnan ‘abd alGhani al-Jishshi,<ref>The frg press reported his name as Ibrahim Badran.</ref> ‘Abd al-Qadir ad-Dinnawi, and Samer Muhammad ‘Abdallah<ref>Mahmud Abdallah Kallam, ''Sabra wa-Shatila, dhakirat ad-Damm'' (Beirut: Beisan Publishing), 40-41.</ref>—were taken into West German custody. Less than two months later, on October 29, a second Black September commando skyjacked a Lufthansa jet en route from Beirut to Ankara, threatening to blow up the plane if the three were not released. Still licking its wounds from the Fürstenfeldbruck fiasco, the West German government agreed: the Munich survivors were granted safe passage to Libya.<ref>''Time Magazine'' [online], “Return of Black September,” November 13, 1972.</ref>

Operation Iqrith and Kafr Bir’im sent shockwaves around the world. To Israel and its supporters, Black September had massacred innocents, and the Germans had been criminally incompetent. In the words of one Israeli diplomat, “The human mind fails to grasp the barbaric depravity of the cruel murderers of the Israeli athletes.”<ref>Associated Press, “Bay Area service for slain Jews,” ''Hayward Daily Review'', September 8, 1972.</ref>

The response was not long in coming and took the form of collective punishment:<blockquote>''[On September 8] Israeli Skyhawk planes attacked villages and refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria… killing a total of 59 people and wounding 40 others, all of whom were civilians. Among the victims were 19 children.''<ref>Sami Hadawi, ''Crime and No Punishment: Zionist-Israeli Terrorism 1939-1972'' (Beirut: Palestine Research Centre, 1972), 83.</ref></blockquote>Eight days later, a second exercise in collective punishment was carried out:<blockquote>''The Israeli army, supported by tanks, armored cars and jet aircraft, crossed into Lebanese territory, and for 36 hours attacked a number of Lebanese villages within an area of some 250 square kilometers, killing people at random and destroying houses and blowing up bridges…''

''The refugee camp at Nabatiya was attacked from the air by napalm bombs, wounding eight of its inmates…''

''By the time the Israelis withdrew, they left behind a trail of death and destruction. About 200 civilians, including women and children, were killed or wounded, and over 200 houses destroyed or damaged. In addition, 18 Lebanese soldiers died in defense of their homeland.''<ref>Ibid., 84.</ref></blockquote>The United States vetoed a United Nations resolution condemning these massacres, and in doing so put Israel’s policy of carrying out reprisals against Palestinian civilians on a firm international footing for decades to come.<ref>Henry Cattan, ''The Palestine Question'' (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 122-123.</ref>

Not only did the Munich operation provoke attacks against Palestinian civilians, it also spelled the beginning of the end of Black September as an organization. On the one hand, Israeli secret services embarked on a bloody campaign of retribution, letter bombs and targeted assassinations, which would eventually claim dozens of lives.<ref>Reeve, 160-169, 175-195. For more on Israel’s reaction, see Brad E. O’Neill, ''Armed Struggle in Palestine: A Political-Military Analysis'' (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1978), 87-88.</ref> At the same time, various Arab regimes which supported the PLO began to worry that the Palestinians’ struggle might endanger their relationship with the imperialist west. The final turning point for these regimes occurred just six months later when a Black September commando took over the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan during a farewell party for the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires<ref>Black September was demanding the release of Sirhan Sirhan, who had assassinated Bobby Kennedy, a number of Palestinians held in Jordan, all Arab women held in Israel, as well as Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader in the FRG.</ref>—one Belgian and two American diplomats were executed before the commando surrendered.<ref>Patricia McCarty, “The Terrorist War,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', August 9, 1973.</ref> The pressure from conservative Arab states increased, and the PLO and Fatah withdrew their support for hijackings and hostage-takings, which caused Black September operations to rapidly taper off.<ref>O’Neill, 151.</ref> Within a few years, the organization was no more.

As for the West German reaction to the events at the Munich Olympics, the whole mess was seen as a great embarrassment. One result was the decision to establish a crack special operations unit, the ''Grenzschutzgruppe'' 9 (literally, “Border Protection Group 9” but shortened to GSG-9), announced within weeks of the Fürstenfeldbruck blunder. Led by Ulrich Wegener, Genscher’s liaison officer with the BGS, who had been present on the scene at the airfield, it would receive its initial training from Britain’s SAS and Israel’s ''Sayeret Mat’kal''. As its name implies, the GSG-9 fell under the umbrella of the Border Police, not the armed forces, legally enabling it to attempt long-term “deep cover” infiltration of the radical scene. The GSG-9 would eventually win international recognition as one of the most fearsome “counterterrorism” units in the world, some of its operatives receiving additional training in NATO’s International Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) School.<ref>“Terrorism 101—Counter-Terrorism Organizations: Germany - GSG-9,” http://www.terrorism101.org/counter/Germany.html.</ref>

Of more immediate consequence was the crackdown against the FRG’s small Arab population.

Earlier that year, Black September had already carried out less dramatic attacks in West Germany. On February 6, the group had assassinated five Jordanians, believed to be intelligence officers who had been active in the civil war, near Cologne.<ref>Edgar O’Balance, ''Arab Guerilla Power'' (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 215.</ref> Then, on February 8, a bomb had gone off in a factory belonging to the Strüver Corporation near Hamburg. The factory produced electrical generators for Israeli aircraft.<ref>MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, “Black September Attacked Business Target (Feb. 8, 1972, Federal Republic of Germany),” http://www.tkb.org/Incident.jsp?incid=790.</ref> On February 22, the Esso Oil pipeline near Hamburg had been similarly damaged.<ref>Dobson, 65.</ref>

Now, with the Munich attack passing under the glare of the Olympic spotlight, the state moved into action; raids were carried out, and the FRG’s 4,000 Arab students and 37,000 Arab “guest workers” came under intense scrutiny. In short order, approximately one hundred Palestinian activists were expelled, and two Fatah front groups—the General Union of Palestinian Students and the General Union of Palestinian Workers—found themselves banned.<ref>Ibid., 132.</ref>

At the same time, within the radical left, some saw the events of September 5 quite differently. To anti-imperialists and others who sympathized with Black September, the operation had been a legitimate one, even if it had ended in tragedy. Some would even argue that the operation had been a success, for although no prisoners had been freed and so many people had died, the world could no longer pretend it did not know about the plight of the Palestinians.<ref>Decades later, Abu Daoud remained adamant on this point. “I would be against any operation like Munich ever again,” he told Sports Illustrated magazine in 2002. However, “[a]t the time, it was the correct thing to do for our cause. … The operation brought the Palestinian issue into the homes of 500 million people who never previously cared about Palestinian victims at the hands of the Israelis.” (Alexander Wolff, “Thirty years after he helped plan the terror strike, Abu Daoud remains in hiding -- and unrepentant,” ''Sports Illustrated'', August 26, 2002.</ref> Furthermore, it was argued that blame for the Israeli athletes’ death lay squarely with the West German police, who had attempted a double-cross which simply blew up in their faces.

Sympathetic observers pointed out that the Palestinians had certainly not wanted to kill their hostages. They hoped rather to free their own comrades. This argument was more difficult to dismiss in 1972 than it would be today, as skyjackings and exchanging hostages for prisoners had not yet exhausted their utility for guerillas at that time, and often did meet with success (as the October 29 skyjacking would demonstrate).<ref>Indeed, the years 1969-1972 can be considered the golden age of political hostage takings. While kidnappings were a particularly prevalent tactic for the South American guerilla, skyjackings in this period were pioneered by various Palestinian organizations. Whereas there had been only twenty-seven aircraft hijacked between 1961 and 1968, and most of these had been non-political acts, between 1969 and 1972, two hundred seventy-seven aircraft were hijacked, many of them successfully, i.e. the hijackers got away and their demands were met. During this period, seventy-eight political prisoners were released as demanded by various skyjackers. [Alona E. Evans, “Aircraft Hijacking: What is Being Done?” ''American Journal of International Law'' ''67'' (1973): 641-645].</ref>

Furthermore, although the athletes were noncombatants, they were nonetheless representatives of a colonial state, one which was for all intents and purposes waging war against the Palestinian people. Certainly, far bloodier actions had been carried out in anticolonial campaigns around the world. No less than Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian guerilla leader, had argued in his famous ''Minimanual'' that “non-political” celebrities could constitute legitimate targets:<blockquote>''The kidnapping of personalities who are well-known artists, sports figures or who are outstanding in some other field, but who have evidenced no political interest, can be a useful form of propaganda for the guerrillas, provided it occurs under special circumstances, and is handled so the public understands and sympathizes with it.''<ref>Carlos Marighella, “Kidnapping,” ''Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla'', [[Library:Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla#KIDNAPPING]]</ref></blockquote>Whether the operation was understood or enjoyed public sympathy depended very much on who one thought of as constituting the “public.” Certainly, in the Arab world, the action was widely understood, and met with a large measure of sympathy. When the bodies of the slain commando members were brought to Libya, for instance, over 30,000 mourners followed their funeral procession from Tripoli’s Martyr’s Square to the Sidi Munaidess Cemetery.<ref>Reeve, 147.</ref>

It is equally true that in the imperialist countries, most people neither understood nor sympathized with the aims of the Palestinians. The commando’s public testament, released shortly afterwards, met with simple incomprehension. Thus the outrage, not only at Black September, but also at anyone who dared to speak up in defense of the Palestinian guerilla action.

If it has been necessary to our study to consider these events in such detail, it is precisely because of this outrage.

Critics of the RAF have zeroed in on the ''Black September'' document, scandalized at this support for the Munich operation. The guerilla’s penchant for purposefully shocking formulations (i.e. “Israel burned their own athletes just as the Nazis had burned the Jews”) did not help matters. Likewise, a strong argument could be made that the RAF, like much of the revolutionary left, did a poor job at acknowledging and analyzing the specifically antisemitic dimensions of German fascism.

What is important to stress in the context of our study is that this is not why the RAF was criticized. Rather, the fact that the captured combatants dared to stand in solidarity with Black September has been construed as “proof” that they were antisemites, not in the sense of having a weak analysis or oppressive blindspots, but in the sense of “hating Jews.” According to the state, various “terrorism experts,” and some right-wing and liberal pundits, it was in this sense that the RAF was accused of being an antisemitic organization.

Yet regardless of whether one finds it to have been correct or ill-conceived, justified or egregious, it is plainly evident that the Munich hostage taking had nothing to do with antisemitism. It was simply part of the struggle of the Palestinian people against colonial oppression. There may be plenty of moral and political arguments with which to object to the targeting of the Olympic athletes, but opposition to antisemitism is not one of them. Indeed, while anti-Jewish racism may well have led some bigots to applaud the action, anti-Arab racism seems to have led far more to automatically condemn it, and with it all those who would not turn their backs on the Palestinian people.

Yet the accusation did not stop there: some liberal and right-wing critics have gone further, accusing Meinhof of making antisemitic comments as the RAF text was being delivered. This story has gained some currency in recent years, especially on the internet, so it is worth extending this already lengthy examination in order to establish the facts of the matter.

As already mentioned, the Black September document was read out in court by Horst Mahler, taking the form of a “cross examination” of Ulrike Meinhof, who had been called to the witness stand. At one point, Meinhof interrupted the reading with an impromptu observation of her own, specifically regarding the nature of German antisemitism and the Holocaust. The only record of what Meinhof said is in an article from the ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', in which many of her words were paraphrased. Here is what the FAZ reported Meinhof as saying:<blockquote>''“Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were murdered and carted off to Europe’s garbage heap, dispensed with as money Jews.” Finance capital and banks, “the hard core of the system” of imperialism and capitalism deflected the hate of the people for money and oppression from itself and transferred it to the Jews.''<ref>Peter Jochen Winters, “Ulrike Meinhof läßt sich nur die Stichwort geben,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', December 15, 1972. Our translation. Note that those sections not in quotes consist of the summary by Winters. The entire relevant portion of the faz article is reproduced in German and English in Appendix I, pages 544-47</ref> </blockquote>The FAZ, like all initial observers, seems to have understood Meinhof as saying that the Nazis took advantage of anticapitalist sentiment, using stereotypes about “rich Jews” to mobilize gentiles behind a program of genocide. That Meinhof saw herself as opposed to this, and therefore opposed to antisemitism, was taken for granted.

Such an analysis of Nazism may be criticized for being facile, economistic, or simply incorrect. Nevertheless, it has an established place on the left, and is not in and of itself in any way anti-Jewish. Rather, it can trace its lineage directly back to the early 20th century social democrat, August Bebel, who famously described antisemitism as “the socialism of fools.”

Even so, Meinhof’s words were to be turned against her, especially in the English-speaking world. One of the first translations of the FAZ quote into English appeared in an article by one George Watson in the British literary magazine ''Encounter'', a CIA-funded publication, which had as its aim the winning over of “progressive” intellectuals to the American side in the Cold War.<ref>In the words of Andrew Roth, a friend of the magazine’s editor Melvin Lasky: “Encounter’s function was to combat anti-Americanism by brainwashing the uncertain with pro-American articles. These were paid for at several times the rate paid by the New Statesman and offered British academics and intellectuals free U.S. trips and expenses-paid lecture tours. There was no room for the objective-minded in this cold war to capture intellectuals.” (Andrew Roth, “Melvin Lasky, Cold Warrior who Edited Encounter Magazine,” The Manchester Guardian [online], Obituaries, May 22, 2004.)</ref> This translation had a curious wording, though, one which seemed to give new meaning to what Meinhof had said. According to Watson, the guerilla leader had stated that “Auschwitz means that 6 million Jews were killed, and thrown onto the waste heap of Europe, ''for what they were'': money-Jews.”<ref>George Watson, “Race and the Socialists,” ''Encounter'' 47 (Nov. 1976): 23.</ref> (emphasis added)

The clear implication here is that Meinhof approved of their murder— that she approved of the Holocaust and Nazism and also Auschwitz. This would flatly contradict everything Meinhof and the RAF had stated both before and after this point, and this fact alone should suffice to cast doubt on Watson’s translation. As should the fact that those who have gone back to the original German FAZ article have disputed Watson’s interpretation with apparent unanimity.<ref>Scholar Diane Paule, for instance states: “Watson’s translation and analysis make Meinhof’s point appear to be much clearer than in fact it is, and his charge that she ‘spoke up publicly in the Good Old Cause of revolutionary extermination’ is not obviously supported by the text.” [“‘In the Interests of Civilization’: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” J''ournal of the History of Ideas''</ref>

However, most people do not return to the original, and this conveniently damning translation has subsequently found its way into all sorts of studies and discussions, not only of the RAF, but of the left in general. Saul Bellow quoted it as he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976,<ref>Nobel Foundation “Saul Bellow—Nobel Lecture,” http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-lecture.html</ref> and it has been featured in books “proving” that revolutionary anticapitalism is antisemitic.<ref>Paul Lawrence Rose, ''Revolutionary anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).</ref> All over the internet it appears as “evidence” that not only the RAF, but indeed the entire German New Left, was anti-Jewish, if not crypto-Nazi.

We are not claiming that there are no legitimate criticisms to be made of how the West German left dealt with—or failed to deal with—the question of antisemitism. It has been noted that many radicals’ fierce antifascism rested on an analysis which saw the persecution of Jews as merely incidental to Nazism. Some radicals, including the RAF, often did seem to view the Third Reich as nothing more than a case of hyper-capitalism, the solution to which could be as simple as hyper-anticapitalism.

Combined with a persisting lack of clarity regarding the status of Germany—imperialist? or colonized?<ref>For more on this, see Not Wanted in the Model: the KPD, pages 17-18.</ref>—and a keen awareness of Israel’s role in world imperialism, these weaknesses pushed sections of the left to occasionally espouse positions which belied a certain antisemitism. This was a serious error at times in the 1970s, and coming to grips with it would eventually acquire some importance for some individuals within both the K-groups and the undogmatic left.

Despite these facts, being a left-wing German anti-Zionist was in no way tantamount to being an antisemite. Far from it. In the precise case of the RAF, those who would accuse the group of antisemitism have yet to make their case.

As to Ulrike Meinhof’s words in question, Watson’s translation is simply wrong. Whether this was an “honest mistake,” or whether it had something to do with the CIA funding the magazine for which he wrote is a question readers had best ponder for themselves. Certainly, the timing is suspect: his article appeared in November 1976. As detailed in Section 10, Meinhof had been found dead—with convincing evidence pointing to murder—in her prison cell earlier that year, and this had elicited much sympathy for the RAF within the left. In this context, discrediting the guerilla leader took on great importance for the state and counterinsurgency forces.

(For more on the original FAZ article, Watson’s loose translation style, and our own translation, see Appendix I—Excerpts from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, pages 544-47.)

As has already been mentioned, the RAF did not limit itself to dealing with the Munich events in its Black September document. For the RAF, these merely provided a starting point from which to launch into a discussion of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the Arab world, including the possible use of petroleum as a weapon. This was a year before the OPEC nations carried out their partial oil embargo as retaliation against western support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

From the question of oil, the RAF went on to consider the problem of opportunism within the imperialist countries, the “metropole.” This discussion focused on Oskar Negt, a former assistant of Jürgen Habermas and a professor of sociology at the Technical University in Hannover, who following the May Offensive had publicly called on socialists to deny the RAF any solidarity or support.

In the early seventies, Negt was considered a leading left-wing intellectual. In 1973, for instance, in the first issue of New German Critique, he would be described as “the most innovative theorist in Germany today.”<ref>Horst Mewes, “The German New Left,” ''New German Critique 1'', (Winter 1973): 39.</ref> He was particularly prominent in the West German campaign to provide solidarity for the Black Liberation Movement militant Angela Davis. Accused of complicity in a failed hostage taking which had been meant to free imprisoned Black revolutionaries (the Soledad Brothers), Davis was incarcerated in the United States for eighteen months between 1970 and 1972. For Negt, the connection was both political and personal, as he had gotten to know Davis when she had spent time studying in Frankfurt in the 1960s.<ref>“The Angela Davis Case,” ''Newsweek'' [online], October 26, 1970, 20.</ref> It was only natural for him to now support her as a political prisoner.

Davis’ trial wound up in San Jose, California, in the late spring of 1972, and the jury began its deliberations on Friday, June 2. That same weekend, as a show of solidarity, an Angela Davis Congress had been organized in Frankfurt by the ''Sozialistisches Büro'', a loose network that had emerged out of the APO in 1969, and had since established itself as an important force within the undogmatic left.<ref>Mewes, 32-35.</ref> Keynote speakers included Frankfurt School personalities Herbert Marcuse and Wolfgang Abendroth, and, of course, Oskar Negt. Close to ten thousand people attended, and one can only imagine what the scene must have been when news arrived on the Sunday that Davis had been found not guilty.<ref>Jürgen Schröder,“USA Black Panther Party (BPP) und Angela Davis Materialien zur Analyse von Opposition,” http://www.mao-projekt.de/int/na/usa/usa_ Black_Panther_Party_und_Angela_Davis.htm</ref>

While the conference was scheduled perfectly to coincide with this victory across the Atlantic, it also occurred at a very particular moment in the FRG. As we have seen, the entire month of May had been filled with bombings carried out by the RAF. Just days before the Congress opened, also in Frankfurt, Red Aid had held a Teach-In Against Repression at which a tape-recorded statement from Ulrike Meinhof had been played. The very next day, the first of the arrests came: Andreas Baader, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe were captured in Munich.

At this critical juncture, at what should have been an ideal occasion to make the connection between revolutionary movements in West Germany and the United States, Negt dropped his own bombshell. His address at the Congress took aim not at imperialism or racism or state repression, but at the RAF, and at those who supported its strategy of armed struggle in the FRG.

According to Negt, the RAF’s politics were disconnected from the experiences of most citizens of the FRG, and for that reason could only be self-defeating. Whereas he believed the Black Liberation Movement was justified in using political violence in the United States, and he fully supported the Black Panther Party and similar groups, he argued that people were not particularly oppressed in the FRG, and, as such, the guerilla could only alienate the working class there. Armed politics in such a context were vanguardist, counterproductive, and doomed to fail, as anyone who robbed banks or planted bombs would only cut themselves off from the very people whose support they should be seeking.

Perhaps worst of all, Negt accused the RAF of being simple “desperadoes” trying to put a political veneer on apolitical crimes. Arguing that “uncritical solidarity” ran contrary to socialist organizing principles, Negt called on leftists to refuse the RAF any support—be it safehouses or IDs or whatnot—smugly adding that if this was done, the guerilla would simply not be able to survive.<ref>Linksnet “Rede zum Angela-Davis-Kongress 1972,” [http://www.linksnet.de/ artikel.php?id=374. http://www.linksnet.de/ artikel.php?id=374.]</ref>

It has been reported that his words did not go over so well with everyone at the Congress, and he was vigorously denounced by many in attendance, notably members of Frankfurt’s ''sponti'' scene.<ref>Schröder, ”USA Black Panther Party.”</ref>

It might have been enough that he speak out against the guerilla in order for the RAF to take him to task, but Negt would be accused of doing far more than that.

Apparently the Hannover sociology professor was friends with Fritz Rodewald—the same Fritz Rodewald who set Ulrike Meinhof and Gerhard Müller up to be captured within a few weeks of the Frankfurt conference. According to Meinhof’s biographer Jutta Ditfurth, Rodewald, uneasy about his prior decision to aid the fugitives, had turned to Negt for advice. Negt repeated his position that nobody owed anyone “mechanical” or “automatic” solidarity, and as a result, the police were contacted.<ref>Jutta Ditfurth, interview by Arno Luik, “Sie war die große Schwester der 68er.”</ref>

In Negt’s hard line, one can discern the first clear rejection of the guerilla by a section of the undogmatic left. While this position can’t have done the guerilla any good, the evidence seems to indicate that in 1972, and for several years thereafter, it failed to achieve hegemony. Which is not to say that the undogmatic left was pro-guerilla, but rather that different people held different opinions, and it would have taken more than the ravings of one left-wing intellectual to cause a definite repudiation. When such a move away from political violence did eventually occur, it would be as a result of former street fighters, guerillas, and semi-legal activists re-examining the question. It would take militants like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer, and former combatants like Bommi Baumann and Hans-Joachim Klein, to do what Negt could not.

If the RAF saw a thread connecting its negative evaluation of Negt to its glowing appraisal of Black September, it was the question of the labor aristocracy. It is surely no accident that the ''Black September'' document provides the guerilla’s most detailed examination of this concept.

Specifically, the “labor aristocracy” refers to those more well-to-do layers of the working class, people who no longer have any material incentive to engage in the dangerous, grueling task of carrying out a revolution against capitalism. Lenin had argued that the labor aristocracy was a product of imperialism, as the profits earned from exploitation in the developing countries were used to pay for the elevated position of certain sections of the working class in the metropole. This concept has been accepted by almost all strains of the Marxist-Leninist tradition, though often accorded little actual importance in practice.

To the first wave of the RAF, however, the question of the labor aristocracy had by this point become central. The labor aristocracy was not seen simply as a section of the West German working class, but as the dominant section, almost to the exclusion of any classical proletariat. As such, the idea of using popular support in the FRG as a barometer of political legitimacy—which is what Negt seemed to propose—was not simply wrong, it reeked of opportunism.

This analysis was hinted at in ''Serve the People'' earlier in 1972, but ''Black September'' spelled it out clearly, while also exploring what this might imply.

In the RAF’s view, in 1972, there was no material basis for revolution in the FRG: the crumbs from the imperialist table were enough to win most people’s loyalty for the system. Yet the RAF did not see this as a reason to give up on revolutionary politics, or to abandon armed struggle; instead, they argued that “the situation is ‘ripe’ to take up the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole—not ‘ripe’ for revolution, but ‘ripe’ for the anti-imperialist offensive.”

The RAF emphasized the alienation which persisted even in an affluent consumer society, zeroing in on people’s individual dissatisfaction and misery in the midst of plenty. Much was made of the way in which consumerism distorted and manipulated people’s desires, “the exploitation of their feelings and thoughts, wishes, and utopian dreams.”

This psychological misery—insufficient, perhaps to carry out a revolution, but enough to establish a revolutionary tradition—was seen as providing a subjective basis for armed resistance to imperialism within the metropole. As the capitalist system would find itself increasingly besieged by the liberation struggles in the Third World—or so the theory went—this base could grow, and then, “the masses here will eventually find their political identity on the side of the liberation struggles, and will eventually free themselves from the grip of the system, with its lies, its glitziness, its election promises, and its lotteries.”

''Black September'' provides the RAF’s most explicit attempt to link the concepts of imperialism, the labor aristocracy, and the subjective basis for revolt in the metropole. In hindsight, it is clear that the optimistic notion that the West German masses might rally to an anti-imperialist position has not been borne out. Nevertheless, this should not detract from the fact that the RAF was at least trying to deal with questions that most leftists in imperialist societies preferred—and still prefer—to ignore.

As we have seen, ''Black September'' was a document firmly embedded in the context of its time. Perhaps for this reason, it did not “age” well, and would be increasingly ignored by those sympathetic to the guerilla in years to come. Yet it was an important document, and the relationship to the national liberation struggles in the Third World and to the working class in Germany as elaborated here would not be revisited by subsequent waves of guerilla fighters for years to come.
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Appeal of the Fedayeen: To All the Free People of the World
!<blockquote>''On Monday, September 11, 1972, the Palestinian Press Agency published a group statement from the Black September members who were killed in Munich. This statement was drafted before the operation in Munich began. (M. & S.)''</blockquote>We do not intend to kill any innocent people with our action. We are struggling above all against injustice. We do not want to disturb the peace, rather we want to draw the world’s attention to the filthy Zionist occupation and the real tragedy our people are suffering.

We ask that the free people of the world understand our action, the goal of which is to thwart imperialism’s international interests, to expose the relationship between imperialism and Zionism, and to clarify for our Arab nation what “Israel” is and who its allies are.

We are a significant element in the armed Palestinian revolutionary movement, which is itself part of the Arab revolution. We ask you, in spite of the enemy’s conspiracy and the difficulties presented by the struggle, not to lay down your weapons. The earth can only be freed with blood.

The world only respects the strong. Our strength does not lie in speeches, but in action.

We apologize to the young athletes of the world if their sensibilities are disturbed by our undertaking. But they should know that there is a people whose homeland has been occupied for 24 years. This people has suffered anguish at the hands of an enemy that moves amongst them in Munich.

It is irrelevant where we are buried; the enemy can defile our corpses. What we hope is that Arab youth are ready to die in the service of the people and the fatherland. We call upon the “Black September” fedayeen and the Palestinian revolutionary movement to carry the struggle forward.

LONG LIVE OUR PEOPLE!

LONG LIVE THE WORLDWIDE REVOLUTION FOR FREEDOM
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=== The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle ===
<blockquote>''Proletarian Revolutions… are constantly self-critical, repeatedly come to a standstill, return to past undertakings to begin them anew, pitilessly and thoroughly mocking their own half-measures, and the weakness and shabbiness of their own preliminary efforts. They seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them. They shrink time and again from the unimaginable enormity of their own goals, until they reach a time which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: hic rhodus, hic salta.''<ref>A quote from Karl Marx’s ''The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte''.</ref></blockquote>THE STONE YOU HAVE THROWN AT US WILL FALL AT YOUR OWN FEET.

The Black September action in Munich has simultaneously clarified both the nature of the imperialist ruling class and of the anti-imperialist struggle, in a way that no revolutionary action in West Germany or West Berlin has. It was simultaneously anti-imperialist, antifascist, and internationalist. It indicated an understanding of historical and political connections, that are always the province of the people—that is to say, those from whom profit is sucked, those who are free from complicity with the system, those who have no reason to believe the illusions fostered by their oppressors, no reason to accept the fantasy their oppressors pass off as history, no reason to pay the slightest attention to their version of reality. It revealed the rage and the strength that these revolutionaries get from their close connection to the Palestinian people, a connection resulting in a class consciousness that makes their historical mission to act as a vanguard perfectly clear. Their humanity is firmly based in their knowledge that they must resist this ruling class, a class which as the historical endpoint of this system of class rule is also the most cunning and the most bloodthirsty that has ever existed. It is based in the knowledge that they must resist this system’s character and its tendency towards total imperialist fascism—a form which has many fine representatives: Nixon and Brandt, Moshe Dayan and Genscher, Golda Meir and McGovern.

The West German left can reclaim their political identity—antifascism—antiauthoritarianism—anti-imperialist action—if they cease to embrace the Springer Press and opportunism, if they begin to once again address Auschwitz, Vietnam, and the systemic indifference of the masses here.

BLACK SEPTEMBER'S STRATEGY IS THE REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY FOR ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE, BOTH IN THE THIRD WORLD AND IN THE METROPOLE, GIVEN THE IMPERIALIST CONDITIONS CREATED BY MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS.

# '''IMPERIALISM'''

''Anti Imperialist Struggle''

The action was anti-imperialist.

The comrades from Black September, who had their own Black September in 1970 when the Jordanian army massacred 20,000 Palestinians,<ref>In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had fled to Jordan, where they lived in ramshackle refugee camps. On September 16, 1970, alarmed at the growing power of Palestinian revolutionaries, King Hussein declared martial law, and the Jordanian armed forces attacked suspected militant strongholds: according to most sources, between four and ten thousand Palestinians, including many non-combatants, were slaughtered. This is the source of the group’s name.</ref> went back to the place that is the origin of this massacre: West Germany—formerly Nazi Germany—now at the centre of imperialism. Back to the site of the power that forced the Jews of both West and East Europe to emigrate to Israel. Back to those who had hoped to profit from the theft of Palestinian land. Back to where Israel got its reparation payments and, until 1965, officially, its weapons. Back to where the Springer Corporation celebrated Israel’s 1967 Blitzkrieg in an anticommunist orgy. Back to the supplier who provided Hussein’s army with panzers, assault rifles, machine-pistols, and munitions. Back to where everything possible was done—using development aid, oil deals, investments, weapons, and diplomatic relationships—to pit Arab regimes against each other, and to turn all of them against the Palestinian liberation movement. Back to the place from which imperialism launches its bombers when other means of repressing the Arab liberation movement fail: West Germany—Munich—the NATO airport at Fürstenfeldbruck.

Vietnam

Do people think Vietnam is a joke? Guatemala, Santo Domingo, Indonesia, Angola are all just jokes? Vietnam is an atrocious example for the people of the Third World, an example of how determined imperialism is to commit genocide against them if nothing else achieves the desired results—if they don’t agree to being markets, military bases, sources of raw materials and cheap labor.

And the opportunistic left in the metropole behaves idiotically—being the labor aristocracy of imperialism (Lenin) who benefit from this theft, they sit on their arses. They only take to the streets if something affects them, if the war escalates, if some of them are shot—like during Easter 1968 in Berlin or May 1970 at Kent State.<ref>On May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating at Kent State University in Ohio against the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Four students were killed and nine others were wounded. Of the wounded, one was permanently paralyzed, and several were seriously maimed.</ref> If the system does something against them like what is always being done in the Third World, all of a sudden they get upset, they run to the police, they chase after that rat-catcher McGovern, they run for a post on the labor council and they write a bunch of poems against the war.

The Imperialist Centre

Black September has brought its war from the Arab periphery of imperialism into the centre. The centre means: central to the multinational corporations, the market’s command centre, where they determine the laws of economic, political, military, cultural, and technological development for all countries within their market. The centre is the U.S.A., Japan, and West Europe under the leadership of the FRG. The volume of business, the numbers employed by the corporations, these are only the formal, quantitative data—their weapons production is only one of the sectors of their productive capacity that is directed against the liberation movements, their price controls for raw materials constitute just one of the many ways they ensure their rule over the Third World.

''The Aggressive Character of Imperialist Investment Policy''

Marx analyzed machinery as a weapon that led workers in the 19th century to destroy machines. Marx:<blockquote>''Machinery is the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes, those periodical revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital. It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions made since 1880''<ref>In the correct version of this quote (''Capital'' Volume I, chapter 15, volume 5), this year is 1830. An error was made either as this document was being written by the RAF or when it was transcribed by supporters, and the year became 1880.</ref> ''for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class.''</blockquote>This was the machinery that created unemployment for the working class, that created the wageworker, at the same time offering the proletariat no choice but starvation or overthrowing the dictatorship of capital.

It is now time for someone to write a history of the imperialist investment strategy and in their analysis to demonstrate that it was “made for the sole purpose” of eliminating the liberation movements in the Third World.

''Multinational Corporations''

The multinational corporations control everything in the countries that imperialism has deprived of the opportunity to develop. They use this control against them. At one and the same time, capital creates divisions, skims profits, and then uses these same projects, investments, and profits to play the countries dependent on them off against each other—they use the very raw materials they rely upon the Third World for to oppress the people of the Third World.

''Weapons''

Their weapons consist of the potential of capital, technology, the means of communication and information control, and the means of transportation. Their strategy for conquest is based on investments, transfer of profits, information policy, diversification, marketing, sales planning, and stockpiling. Their occupier or colonial ideology means controlling currency and creating work. Their goal is to assimilate, repress, and rob—the alternative offered is starvation and extermination.

''Oil Investments''

Oil is the primary issue in the states that support the Palestinian liberation movement. 70% of Western Europe’s oil imports come from there. Western Europe’s demand for oil will double by 1985 (1970: 647 million tons). The corporations and their governments are determining their oil policy based on the spectre of revolutionary Arab regimes using this demand for oil to carry through their own industrialization. This would mark the end of oil corporations making profits of more than 100%.

''Algeria's Natural Gas''

American corporations are investing millions of dollars in profit liquefying Algerian natural gas and shipping it by sea, so as to play Algerian natural gas off against that of Libya and against Arab oil: Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia.

''Pipelines''

West European consortiums (Bayerngas—Saarferngas—Gasversorgung Süddeutschland) invest billion-DM sums to build pipelines (1 km costs between 1 and 2 million DM)<ref>Roughly between $364,000 and $728,000.</ref> to transport Algerian natural gas so as to partially reduce their dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

''North Sea Oil''

Oil companies and governments invest billions in oil and natural gas extraction in the North Sea. With regards to development costs, North Sea oil is ten times as expensive as oil from the Persian Gulf—only every sixth drill point is successful, construction and installation expenses for platforms, underwater pipelines. (North Sea oil makes up an estimated 1% of the world reserves; reserves in the Middle East make up 60%.) This is considered preferable to having a flexible approach to the Middle East. According to the European Economic Community (EEC) Europe Committee, “The increasing pressure on Western societies from some oil countries could lead to supply problems in the case of a political crisis”—meaning the problems that corporations will have maintaining their current high rates of profit.

''Australia and Canada''

Regarding raw materials available in Australia and Canada, the economic edition of FAZ wrote with cynical, capitalist bluntness, “The developing countries’ position has deteriorated as a result of the discovery of enormous natural resource reserves in Canada and Australia. The geologically favorable sites in these countries, with their stable governments, lower taxes, and developed industry, have attracted the attention of multinationals from all over the world.”

''The Conference in Santiago de Chile''

In April and May 1972, at the conference in Santiago de Chile, the “developing countries” attempted to establish fixed prices for raw materials. In response to their powerlessness, the FAZ writes, with the condescension and consciousness of a corporate bulletin, “The developing countries overlook the fact that natural resource reserves alone do not constitute wealth. In the final analysis, development, transport, and technical research are more important, and we control an ample share of the world’s reserves of those. It is no accident that the powerful multinational corporations, with their restrictive policies, exercise substantial restraint in their investments in the developing countries.”

''Overexploitation and Stockpiling''

For one thing, the corporations over-exploit the raw materials of the Third World. In Kuwait, for example, the fear is that in 16 years—the oil boom in Kuwait began in 1934—the oil could be exhausted. 95% of Kuwait’s income comes from oil—800 million dollars per year for 740,000 residents. Kuwait, with 12.8% of the world’s annual oil income, has built up the royal treasury—a sort of nest egg. What will they do when the oil and the money is all used up, return to herding sheep? Libya and Venezuela have already reduced their oil production to safeguard their reserves.

At the same time, a policy of stockpiling has been developed in the EEC and the FRG, increasing stocks from 85 to 90 days—Iran’s portion of that is 10 million tons—the FRG needs approximately 133 million tons of oil per year.

The U.S.A. has undertaken a massive conservation program—by 1980, 365 million tons of oil will have been saved—however 770 million tons will still be required. The conservation measures will include shifting commercial transportation from trucks to the railroad, passenger traffic from the air to the ground, and city traffic from automobiles to mass transit.

''Oil and Traffic Related Deaths''

In the FRG, to give one example, the automobile industry has demanded a tribute of 170,000 traffic-related deaths over the past ten years—in the U.S.A., 56,000 deaths are projected for 1972, in the FRG it’s 20,000—all in the service of greater profits for oil and automobile corporations.

This idiotic automobile production will be reduced to create a situation suitable to corporate interests: the wiping out of the liberation movements in the Third World. In this way the obstacle presented by the people of the Third World will be eliminated.

The fear and the circular logic of consumption—the anarchy of capitalist commodity production, which is governed by the market and not the needs of the people—can exceed the limits of the human psyche, especially with the drivel about “quality of life,” for instance. In a situation where everything has been reduced to consumption—“shitty products”—the decline of the masses’ loyalty has already begun. The mass mortality in the streets through the alienation and brutalization of the people is hitting the system in the pocketbook in a way they don’t like.

''Boycott''

The goal is another oil boycott like that of the early 50s against Mossadegh’s<ref>Mohammed Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1951. He quickly began to nationalize Iranian assets including oil. In 1953, he was removed from power by the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in a CIA-backed coup. He died in prison in 1967.</ref> nationalization of Persian oil, which cleared the way for the Shah, that puppet of U.S. imperialism. In response to the nationalization measures in Iraq at that time, Iran quickly stated its willingness to increase annual production from 271 million tons to 400 million tons. This is the kind of government that suits imperialism.

In the 60s, it was hoped that atomic energy would allow for the gradual reduction of dependence on oil as the most important source of energy. By that time—or so it was hoped—high temperature ovens with which coal could be converted to oil would also exist—which was the basis for the talk of the comeback of coal.

The objective of imperialist energy policy is not only to guarantee the continuing theft of oil from the oil-producing nations for all time to come, but also to prevent them from industrializing and establishing their political independence.

''Encirclement Policy''

Regarding the rest of the Middle East, imperialism is hoping its policy of quiet encirclement will succeed.

In the West, they are thoroughly implanted in the Maghreb—Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. West German corporations have invested in mining (raw materials), in the clothing industry (cheap labor), in dam projects (electrical power), and in the automobile industry. Tunisia and Morocco are the main recipients of West German development aid among the Arab states—both countries also receive West German military aid.

In the East and the North, it’s Turkey and Iran. Both countries are also the sites of American military bases. In the context of NATO, the FRG supplies weapons to Turkey. In the context of the free market economy, Siemens has recently been supplying television relay stations, with which the government’s message—“This is the criminal police speaking”—can reach Eastern Turkey.<ref>Turkey’s East is home to the oppressed Kurdish minority, and also bordered on the Soviet Union.</ref> The German enclave in Tehran is well known—the quantity of weapons being provided by West Germany is not.

''Military Bases''

There should be no illusions about the desire to transform the Maghreb in the West and Turkey and Iran in the East from markets into military bases.

And there should certainly be no illusions about what conditions will be like in Algeria in three years if natural gas development by American corporations—that is to say, by big money—has begun and Algeria still attempts to maintain its principled solidarity with the other Arab states. It could only end in disaster.

''Imperialism is the Weapon''

Imperialism is the weapon that the multinational corporations use to address the contradictions between developed countries and the desire for development in the countries they plunder, between states with elected governments and states with CIA-backed governments, between rich and poor countries. Imperialism unifies North and South as the centre and the periphery of a single system.

It is a system that allows the constitutional state to function in much the same way as fascism. It doesn’t eliminate the contradictions, it simply coordinates them, plays them off against one another, integrates them as various interrelated profit-making conditions for their various subsidiaries.

''"Slaves of the System"''

Outwardly, they adjust to the existing conditions—making use of them where possible—creating domestic capital reserves, surrendering middle management to the local population, learning the local language, respecting local laws, all the time using their normative power to establish their control of the market.

The FAZ condescendingly informs “developing countries” that are attempting to protect their mineral resources by reducing mining that they misjudge the marketplace. It informs them that they are actually establishing themselves as slaves of the system if they fail to take note of the “dilemma” created by their own foreign currency needs, on the one hand, and the necessity to protect their natural resources, on the other: “The developing countries, in implementing policies against international natural resource companies, are tying their own hands.”

This imperialism avoids provocation. Where possible, they absorb Third World governments into the facade of their system. They operate within the “confines of their means”—and they have more means at their disposal than any ruling class before them.

''The Means at Their Disposal''

They use illiteracy and hunger to control the people of the Third World; in the metropole, people are made stupid and alienated and are brutalized by television, Springer, and automobile accidents. they saw to the liquidation of the McGovern left. They use torture against the Persian, Turkish, and Palestinian comrades; against the antiimperialist left in West Germany and West Berlin, they use the BAW. In November, following on the heels of the September massacre of Palestinian freedom fighters, they will hold free elections here, having used the spectacle of the Olympic Games to divert attention away from the horror.

This imperialism only reveals its fascist character when it encounters resistance—it has no need for a late capitalist seizure of power. Its historical tendency is towards fascism, towards exploitation and oppression, annihilation, waste, defoliation, the destruction of people, and the plundering of natural resources. It has a greater potential for destruction than any ruling class in history, the potential to leave a wasteland in its wake—wherever there is nothing more to be gained, where everything is devastated, the country and the people—shattered and crippled—Vietnam.

''Black September's Strategy''

The bomb attack on the Strüver Corporation in Hamburg was an attack on one of Israel’s military suppliers.

With their action at the Olympic Village, they brought the conflict between the imperialist metropole of Israel and the Palestinians from the periphery of the system into its centre—they tore off the FRG’s “constitutional” mask and revealed the true objective nature of imperialism’s facade: that they are waging war against the liberation movements of the Third World and that their final objective is strategic extermination and fascism.

Through this action, the Arab people were mobilized for anti-imperialist struggle. They celebrated the revolutionaries as heroes, and their will to struggle received an enormous boost.

That it would have been better to take Genscher hostage is something that Black September itself knows full well.<ref>During negotiations with the Palestinian commando, Minister of the Interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher is reported to have offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the Israeli athletes. The commando is said to have refused this offer. Given Horst Mahler’s comments at his October 1972 trial (see page 188), it seems likely that the raf was attempting an oblique criticism of this decision.</ref> Functioning as it does at a very high level of Marxist theory combined with revolutionary practice, Black September doesn’t need to be told this. The fact is that it would have been better to exchange the Israeli athletes for people who make up the facade of the Social-Liberal Coalition, as this would have destroyed the complicity between Israeli and West German imperialism and isolated Israel. It would have forced the contradiction between the fascism of the developing imperialist system and Israeli Nazi fascism (see the chapter on National Socialism) into the open. It would have made use of the system’s contradictions to split the imperialist forces!

These observations are not meant as a criticism of the action, but rather as an expression of our appreciation of the action. These observations are an excellent example of how practice leads to theoretical development and how theory leads to developments in practice—of the dialectic of theory and practice.

'''2. OPPORTUNISM'''

''Opportunism in the Metropole''

The Marxist bible thumper—equipped with quotes and not thinking any further—will argue that Marx himself said that smashing machines was “stupid.” Marx:<blockquote>''Machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labor, but, when in the service of capital, lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labor, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labor; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of Nature, but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital, makes them paupers…''<ref>Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, chapter 15, volume 5. <nowiki>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S5</nowiki></ref></blockquote>So it is not machinery that should be resisted, but its capitalist application.

On the face of it, it is not clear that everything about imperialist investment policy is intended to eliminate of the Third World liberation movements. “Considered alone” and not as a waste of raw materials and labor power, or as a means of war, one might even speak of military production as being a part of the civilian sector. However, it is meant to reinforce the unequal development between the imperialist centre and the countries of the Third World, which is to say, to reinforce the ongoing rule of the imperialist system.

''Sabotage''

The rejection of sabotage in the metropole, based on the argument that it would be better to take things over instead of destroying them, is based on the dictum: the people of the Third World should wait for their revolution until the masses in the metropole catch up.

This ignores the problem of the labor aristocracy within imperialism, first addressed by Lenin. Furthermore, this demands that the people of the Third World allow all sectors of the world proletariat—most of whom form part of the backbone of the imperialist system—to ride on their coattails. It is the rallying cry of opportunism.

''the Opportunistic Concept of Solidarity''

It’s no surprise that the opportunists no longer know what to do with the concept of solidarity—they betray their claim to leadership with an incorrect analysis of imperialism. They must exclude a section of the disempowered from their concept of solidarity. This is the section that rejects their leadership, and instead turns to the people of the Third World. They must exclude anyone who by “serve the people” doesn’t mean sucking up to the people disempowered by imperialism, but rather means by this that one must struggle against the imperialism which is disempowering people.

''Negt - The Pig''

Negt, who in Frankfurt resurrected Noske’s<ref>Gustav Noske, the SPD Minister responsible for the military during bloody suppression of the November Revolution of 1918, during which communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were killed.</ref> axiom “One must be a bloodhound,” thereby formulated the opportunistic position, with all the jargon, all the contempt for the masses, all the appeals to “the politicians,” and all the pleas for sound, common sense that are fundamental to it. However—like Bernstein<ref name=":1">Eduard Bernstein, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, who helped instigate that party’s rejection of revolutionary Marxism in the late 19th century.</ref><ref name=":1" />—without the slightest hint of an economic analysis.

Given, however, that the problem of opportunism is not objectively a question of the theoretical level he has expressed, it is necessary to engage him in debate. Objectively, it is the result of unequal development within the system, of the inequality in forms of oppression employed by the system and of the inequality of experiences of exploitation under this system.

That Negt has generally been applauded, in spite of the feeble theoretical level of his work, is an objective indication of the pressure that exists here for people to take an opportunistic position. We are dealing with Negt in the hope that his supporters will see what a crock of shit they’re being fed.

''Negt on Solidarity''

Negt: “Mechanical solidarity will destroy socialist politics. It is the worst aspect of the legacy of the protest movement.”

People like to “mechanically” paw for their wallets if they come across someone playing harmonica on the Hauptwache,<ref>The Hauptwache is a popular pedestrian mall in Frankfurt.</ref> and Bertold Beitz<ref>Bertold Beitz, Krupp manager and a member of the National and International Olympic Committee.</ref> feels good about writing a cheque for the ''Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten'' ''in Bethel''.<ref>''Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten'' ''in Bethel'' is a large Bielefeld-based charity</ref> Solidarity is not a reflex action, as anyone who has ever acted in solidarity knows. Or does Negt, with his concept of “mechanics,” also intend to address in a backhanded way the concept of spontaneity?—“spontaneous solidarity”…?

One cannot surpass Negt when it comes to dragging the concept of solidarity through the mud, while at the same time expressing solidarity for all of those who, lacking the necessary courage and psychological stamina, out of fear for themselves, fail to act in solidarity.

''Negt's Fairy Tale''

“Unbidden and often anonymous” they stood at the door—a total lie, nobody ever stood at Negt’s door, at least not without having sent their business card in advance or having used the phone to fill a ''Verfassungsschutz'' tape with babble. There they stood completely unshaven, and then they came in and made a mess of the bathroom. Is that what being revolutionary means? Where do we fit in?

''Opportunistic Arrogance''

Instead of offering an analysis of the connection between wealth here and poverty there—that is to say, an analysis of the system as a unitary whole—Negt renders a judgment based on the alleged power structure, in which he proclaims: “…that political morality is indivisible”— oh, you don’t say—“that those who tolerate or condone the genocide in Vietnam lose the right to speak in the name of democracy”—the Federal Constitutional Court read him the riot act for that one—that should clear that up for him.

''The Principle of Seperation''

Negt makes it his primary task to prevent any awareness of the connection between poverty here and poverty there—to prevent solidarity based on an awareness of this connection. Localizing conflicts is an objective that the system pursues in every way it can.

Negt: “The politicized masses that make up the solidarity movement, the university students, the high school students, and the young workers who have broken with family drudgery and the enforced discipline of the work world and the educational institutions”—(not are emancipated, not are in the process of breaking free, not are going forward, not of wanting more, but “have broken with”)—“gradually lose the ability to have their own experiences”—(the gall of a social worker)—“always putting themselves in a position to be in touch with the most radical positions, thereby establishing a fragile and superficial identity”—(where does he get off attacking those he is talking about with socio-psychological, Youth Authority jargon?)— “based on a shameless identification with the experiences of others.”

So, the people at ''Bild Zeitung'' should only report on what they themselves feel, and only the Viet Cong should celebrate Viet Cong victories. The validity of bombs against the U.S. Headquarters depends on who lays them—or what?

''"The Self-Proclaimed Vanguard"''

Negt: “Self-proclaimed vanguards”—(not appointed by the Minister of Culture, not a legitimate market niche—or what?)—“lay claim to social and historical experiences”—(so the anti-imperialist struggle is not in fact occurring)—“that individual high school students, workers, apprentices, and university students can neither reconcile with their own work environments nor use as the basis for political decisions.”

How then are they supposed to develop an identity? Does Negt believe that ideas develop on their own within the mind? Apparently.

''Dialectical Materialism''

Mao:<blockquote>''Dialectical materialism regards external reality as the condition for change and internal reality as its basis—and in this way external reality conditions internal activity''</blockquote>Meaning: Negt—as external reality—gained applause for his idiotic blather in Frankfurt, because opportunism has deep roots in the metropole. People want “Freedom for Angela Davis”—but they don’t carry out the struggle as relentlessly as the Viet Cong, or as Black September—never that—so great is their despair about the system, so uncertain are they about their cause, that they abandon the cause and embrace hopelessness. Enter Negt, saying that none of that is necessary; we’re already doing what needs to be done—they are relieved, they applaud.

In opposition to this stands the RAF—as sure of our cause as the people of the Third World, because they accept their leadership role, because they know that the struggle must be carried out relentlessly, and that is how they carry it out.

The RAF—as external reality—has found increasing support among high school students, university students, and apprentices. Negt has seen this, even biased “polls” have noted it; the leaflets, slogans, demonstrations, teach-ins, etc.

How could this occur, other than through “internal reality”? If not their own everyday working and living conditions, what else could make them see that only with this perseverance, the same perseverance with which the people of the Third World conduct their struggle, can they achieve the goal—their freedom?

Negt’s scolding proves the opposite of what he asserts; precisely because their experience of living and working conditions—internal reality—leads high school students, apprentices, and university students to begin to understand the situation of the people of the Third World, they identify with the struggle the RAF has conducted in the metropole on their behalf—as external reality.

Were it otherwise, one would not have heard a peep about the RAF, not from Genscher or Ruhnau,<ref>Heinz Runau, SPD Senator for Internal Affairs in Hamburg at the time.</ref> and Negt would have had to be satisfied in Frankfurt with taking a cheap shot out of the side of his mouth at the RAF—or being and consciousness have nothing to do with each other and dialectical materialism is a pipe dream.

We know that it will be an extremely slow, difficult and exhausting process to get things underway in even a few places. That they are, however, in motion indicates that the situation is “ripe” to take up the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole—not “ripe” for revolution, but “ripe” for the anti-imperialist offensive.

Already, at this early stage of “ripeness,” there are comrades who disgrace themselves by losing sight of the realities of their lives and their liberation. Seeing this process at work, we see the system’s continuing appeal in the metropole. That there are comrades who cannot see any purpose to life outside of the liberation struggle attests to how great the appeal of revolution is. Insofar as there is not a single idea, not a thought that does not have its origin in life and in society—positive thoughts, ideas, and people have been thoroughly locked away, cast aside, excluded and treated as insane.

The metropolitan left is beginning to split into a revolutionary, antiimperialist wing and an opportunistic wing. This is not because opportunism has won the struggle on the ground, but because they’ve lost it. They still hope to win this struggle on the ground, even as the left wing gains in strength. Negt’s attacks were a rearguard action. Given that the argument he mounted can only be described as disgraceful, he has helped to unmask opportunism. He has made our work easier.

''Negt as Alexander the Great''

“The knots” of “mechanical solidarity,” “inferiority complexes,” “fear of isolation,” “overblown perceptions of reality,” and “self-delusion” “must be cut” (he’s right about that)—and can no longer be resolved “through polite engagement.”

Which means: allowing the fascists to liquidate the growing left wing of the socialist movement. Which means: Marxist theory and serious discussions constitute “polite engagement”—one is spared socialist discussion with Negt’s fatherly advice and his seminar pedagogy.

Marx and Freud could only say in response to all this: Pardon me?

A complete nut, a truculent, self-confessed petit bourgeois—this Negt. If one did not know that being determines consciousness, one might begin to think that through these thoroughly corrupted rats “corruption has claimed the day.”

''The Objective Role of the Opportunists''

Regarding his own profession, Negt—bluntly—stated: “One should beware of attempts to push left professors and teachers out of the high schools and universities” they being the only ones who, “through routine overtime and small organized groups,” keep this catastrophic institution “running.” The students of the ''Berliner Gegenuniversität''<ref>''Berliner Gegenunivesitaät'', literally Berlin Counter-University, refers to presentations organized by students independent of formal lectures.</ref> fought tooth and nail against exactly this system-stabilizing integration of their work as “overtime”—in this way the opportunistic cat comes out of the seminar Marxist bag.

''The Core: Scholarship for the Bourgeoisie''

Bourgeois scholarship still remains the practical core: “If a fraction of the money spent fighting crime was used to fight the causes of crime, one could count on a long-term impact; a society that cannot guarantee this minimum has lost its authority”—(leave it to Negt and everything will soon be running smoothly).

The investment strategy of multinational corporations is based on this kind of long-term use of money rather than on military adventures.

And to finally accomplish his true goal, Negt tosses the entirety of Marxism-Leninism overboard: “There is no clear and objective criteria for the distinction between right and left.” Why is this stupid pig still called a “socialist”?

Rosa Luxemburg on Bernstein:<blockquote>''What? Is that all you have to say? Not the shadow of an original thought! Not a single idea that was not refuted, crushed, reduced into dust by Marxism several decades ago! It was enough for opportunism to speak out to prove it had nothing to say.''<ref>This quote is from Rosa Luxemburg’s 1900 text, Reform or Revolution, Chapter X: Opportunism and Theory in Practice, available from <nowiki>http://www</nowiki>. marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch10.htm.</ref></blockquote>Negt need only come out into the open for all to see that he is in bed with the fascists—his “qualification,” most probably an “unqualified tool.” (R.L.)

Lenin:<blockquote>''The most dangerous people are those who do not want to understand that the struggle against imperialism is empty and meaningless if it is not unreservedly connected to the struggle against opportunism.''</blockquote>Just as the oppressed themselves could smash this entire “catastrophic institution,” the system could well collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. The consciousness that says we’re all in the same boat, ties opportunism and the system together. They prattle on about socialism, but they mean the system. They ask no questions; they miss the answers. Setbacks for revolutionaries fill them with glee; once again they’ve backed the right horse.

''The Revolutionary Subject''

The problem with opportunism is that by making use of it Negt reveals things about himself, but nothing about the world. Having analyzed the system, the revolutionary subject bases his identity on the knowledge that the people of the Third World are the vanguard, and on an acceptance that Lenin’s concept of the “labor aristocracy” regarding the masses in the metropole cannot be discounted or dismissed. On the contrary: everything starts from that point.

The exploitation of the masses in the metropole has nothing to do with Marx’s concept of wage labourers from whom surplus value is extracted.

It is a fact that with the increasing division of labor, there has been a tremendous intensification and spread of exploitation in the area of production, and work has become a greater burden, both physically and psychologically.

It is also a fact that with the introduction of the 8-hour workday—the precondition for increasing the intensity of work—the system usurped all of the free time people had. To physical exploitation in the factory was added the exploitation of their feelings and thoughts, wishes, and utopian dreams—to capitalist despotism in the factory was added capitalist despotism in all areas of life, through mass consumption and the mass media.

With the introduction of the 8-hour workday, the system’s 24-hour-a-day domination of the working class began its triumphal march— with the establishment of mass purchasing power and “peak income” the system began its triumphal march over the plans, desires, alternatives, fantasies, and spontaneity of the people; in short, over the people themselves!

The system in the metropole has managed to drag the masses so far down into their own dirt that they seem to have largely lost any sense of the oppressive and exploitative nature of their situation, of their situation as objects of the imperialist system. So that for a car, a pair of jeans, life insurance, and a loan, they will easily accept any outrage on the part of the system. In fact, they can no longer imagine or wish for anything beyond a car, a vacation, and a tiled bathroom.

It follows, however, that the revolutionary subject is anyone that breaks free from these compulsions and refuses to take part in this system’s crimes. All those who find their identity in the liberation struggles of the people of the Third World, all those who refuse, all those who no longer participate; these are all revolutionary subjects—comrades.

This is the reason we have analyzed the 24-hour-a-day imperialist system, why we have addressed all of the living and working conditions in this society, the role that the production of surplus value plays in each of them and the connection to factory exploitation, which in any case is really the point. With the supposition: the revolutionary subject in the imperialist metropole is the person who recognizes that a life under the mandatory 24-hour-day is a life under the system’s control— here we have only sketched the outline of the parameters necessary for a class analysis—we are not claiming that this supposition constitutes such an analysis.

The fact is that neither Marx nor Lenin nor Rosa Luxemburg nor Mao had to deal with ''Bild'' readers, television viewers, car drivers, the psychological conditioning of young students, high school reforms, advertising, the radio, mail order sales, loan contracts, “quality of life,” etc. The fact is that the system in the metropole reproduces itself through an ongoing offensive against the people’s psyche, not in an openly fascist way, but rather through the market.

Therefore, to write off entire sections of the population as an impediment to anti-imperialist struggle, simply because they don’t fit into Marx’s analysis of capitalism, is as insane and sectarian as it is un-Marxist.

Only by integrating the 24-hour workday into our understanding of imperialism and anti-imperialism can we get a picture of the actual problems facing the people, so that they will not only understand our actions—and thereby understand the RAF—but also our propaganda, our speech, our words. Serve the people!

If the people of the Third World are the vanguard of the anti-imperialist revolution, then that means that they objectively represent the greatest hope for people in the metropole to achieve their own freedom. If this is the case, then it is our duty to establish a connection between the liberation struggle of the peoples of the Third World and the longing for freedom in the metropole wherever it emerges. This means in grade schools, in high schools, in factories, in families, in prisons, in office cubicles, in hospitals, in head offices, in political parties, in unions—wherever. Against everything that openly negates, suppresses, and destroys this connection: consumerism, the media, co-management, opportunism, dogmatism, authority, paternalism, brutality, and alienation.

“This means us!” We are revolutionary subjects.

Whoever begins to struggle and to resist is one of us.

The answer to the question of how and at what level to struggle against the system, where best to apply pressure when one is at one’s weakest point—we’ve answered this question—is not to be found in a stream of slogans, but rather in the dialectic of theory and practice.

'''3. FASCISM'''

''The Black September action was antifascist''

They established the connection between Nazi fascism and the direction in which imperialism is developing.

''The Olympic Games''

They clearly established this connection by attacking the Olympic Games, from which all reminders of 1936, Auschwitz, and Kristallnacht<ref>Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was an enormous pogrom against German Jews on the part of the Nazis and their supporters on the night of November 9/10, 1938.</ref> were to be excluded. The games were meant to serve as a spectacle distracting attention from what is currently going on in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Israel’s prisons, in Turkey, in Uruguay, in Brazil, in Greece, and in Persia. Insofar as these grueling contests have only winners and losers, they are the opposite of liberation struggles, of acts of solidarity. Instead they are competitions/struggles to reinforce imperialist consciousness in the industrialized nations—games of aggression.

''Bild''

“GOLD-GOLD-GOLD,” ''Bild'' panted, badgered, wheezed, and nagged during the first days of the Olympic Games. “I saw you fade away at 11:00 pm—how will the games continue,” was ''Bild''’s headline on September 7.

Do you want total victory—Yesssss!

''The Athletes''

This is not directed against the athletes. Those who hope to win the competitions have trained for years. They are not the ones who give the Olympic Games the character of an imperialist event. They are connected to the games like a wage laborer to capitalism—without them nothing happens, but they are objects in a spectacle, objects of Neckermann’s ''Sporthilfe''.<ref>Josef Neckermann was a successful Frankfurt-based businessman and horse trainer and founder of the ''Stiftung Deutsche Sporthilfe'' (German Benevolent Sports Association).</ref> That the athletes enjoy what they’re doing changes nothing.

''National Socialism''

National Socialism was nothing other than the political and military precursor to the imperialist system of the multinational corporations.

The ruling class—and especially the German ruling class—is so rapacious that, lead by the Flick, Thyssen, Krupp, and IG Farben corporations,<ref>All are major corporations that participated in and profited from National Socialism’s reign in Germany. All of them continue to flourish.</ref> it hoped to achieve, in conditions that were not yet ripe, that which they managed to achieve later anyway. They formed an uneasy alliance with the old, declining petit bourgeoisie, and they bought into the irrational and deadly antisemitism. Instead of relying on their shareholders, as should have been the case, they developed the imperialist middle class to meet the corporations’ extreme demand for capital—they formed an alliance with the retrograde and ideologically backwards Nazi Party. Instead of waiting to grow strong enough to subjugate peoples and countries without military adventures, they started the Second World War. Antisemitism and war compromised German fascism in the long run, once again completely unmasking the ruling class in the eyes of the masses—and making possible an antifascist alliance between communists and a section of the bourgeoisie.

''Antifascism''

It was this domestic and foreign antifascism that effectively prevented the expansion of West German imperialism. It is antifascist sensitivity to injustice, transgression, state brutality and executive arrogance that has forced this state to maintain a constitutional form.

Just as imperialism has a fascist tendency, antifascism has an anti-imperialist tendency.

For a section of antifascist sympathizers, the RAF has brought the anti-imperialist struggle up to date. The §129 trials at the beginning of the 50s and the ban on the KPD had the effect of separating the KP from their own antifascism and of dismantling their alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie. Liquidating what remained of antifascism in the SPD and amongst the intelligentsia was a significant challenge for the Brandt/Scheel/Heinemann administration. Antifascism was still a part of the 1967-1968 APO, and was supported by the student movement, in the Republican Clubs, at Vietnam demonstrations, and in the movement against the Emergency Powers legislation and police terror.

''The Antiauthoritarian Position''

That the leaders of the student movement are themselves shying away from their anti-imperialist consciousness is a reflection of their revisionism. The positions of the antiauthoritarian movement were clearly anti-imperialist: June 2, Vietnam, Springer, and opposition to the development of West German imperialism, of which the final step in the postwar FRG was the formation of the Grand Coalition.

This movement proved itself to be primarily petit bourgeois when it stripped its political theory of anti-imperialist consciousness, as soon as the first shots were fired. Shots which were not just fired by a single private fascist (Kurras), but rather were the result of systematic imperialist terror—directed at Dutschke, cheered on by Springer<ref>This is a retort to Negt, who at the Angela Davis Congress in Frankfurt had referred to Kurras as a lone gun-nut, and to the June 2, 1967, shooting as an isolated tragedy that did not represent state policy.</ref>

They began to compensate for their obvious powerlessness through organizational fetishism—their decline into a dogmatic and pathologically competitive closed circle that only reproduced the structures of the ruling system, alienation, a know-it-all attitude, and indifference to oppression. They express a hatred of spontaneity equal to that of the system itself, and with their “party chairmen”—Marxism’s guardians of the grail—they turn the proletariat into an object of their leadership aspirations. They see in the masses nothing but what the system has made them: Bild readers, television viewers, car nuts, tourists, SPD voters, Germans—as the squares (already a classic) always ask: “What do the people say?”

The narrow-minded nation-state perspective of the opportunist left is petit bourgeois. It fails to recognize or acknowledge that the people of the Third World are the vanguard and that the struggle in the metropole is the struggle of international brigades of the people’s war in Quang Tri and Hue,<ref>Refers to areas in the far North of the former Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) that became important staging points for communist guerillas from the North during the Vietnam War.</ref> Palestine, Lebanon, Angola, Mozambique, and Turkey, without which no advances will be made. It is also petit bourgeois and un-Marxist to not recognize that the masses here will eventually find their political identity on the side of the liberation struggles, and will eventually free themselves from the grip of the system, with its lies, its glitziness, its election promises, and its lotteries.

Petit bourgeois impatience led to them giving up their anti-imperialist position after one disappointing year in which the student movement failed to win the support of the proletariat and discovered that Springer could not be expropriated quickly and without further ado.

''Anarchism - A Reproach''

Some dismiss the antiauthoritarian movement as anarchist and the international anti-imperialist struggle as anarchist internationalism. In so doing the system’s only objective is denunciation—when people mount this sort of dogmatic argument, they are not drawing their conclusions from an analysis of the system and its process of development, but from a chemical analysis of explosives—from historical analogies based on nothing—a case in point: Harich.<ref>Wolfgang Harich, an academic from the GDR, who for a time in the late 70s lived in Austria and the FRG, where he worked with the Green Party before returning to the GDR.</ref>

Neither the actual socio-economic conditions nor the conception of the state held by earlier anarchists—from Blanqui to Kropotkin—(the Makhno movement<ref>An early twentieth century anti-Soviet, anarchist guerilla army active in Ukraine</ref> and Spanish anarcho-syndicalism are not targeted as such in this critique) have the slightest thing to do with the objective conditions or subjective positions of the antiauthoritarian movement or the RAF. And this is equally true in the case of comrades who refer to themselves as anarchists. They are clearly anti-imperialist—overflowing with distrust for all the “Marxists” who patronize them and hope to subjugate them on the basis of nothing more than bourgeois educational advantages. Their antiauthoritarian characteristics allow them to keep their distance from this paternalism.

The old anarchist concepts are no longer useful—not in the form they had when Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg purged them from the Social Democratic movement—and correctly so. Not in the form that Blanqui, Bakunin, Most, and Kropotkin developed them— immature ideas in an unripe situation.

The legal left completely lacks any critical self-awareness if it compares its tiny mass base to the mass base behind the anti-imperialist struggle. No progress can be made this way. They hope to force us into a discussion by raising the issue of anarchism, but with the problems we have before us, this is just a distraction.

Whether the old anarchists’ understanding of the authority structure anticipated capital’s rule over the people that first developed with imperialism—their understanding of work certainly anticipated the concept of freedom put forward in the anti-imperialist struggle—should be subject to analysis—it could be the case.

''Integration''

To integrate the KP, it was necessary only to ban them, and for the integration of the bourgeois antifascists, the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties sufficed—the student movement required only an amnesty—a cheap bribe.

''The Foolishness of the Left''

The petit bourgeois, spiteful, nit-picking blather that comrades are engaging in about Munich is an example of this foolishness, and Genscher will turn it against them. So it goes. What is expressed here is not the political consciousness of Marxists, but rather the pique of bit players— “It’s all about me!”

''Fürstenfeldbruck and the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties''

The Fürstenfeldbruck massacre would not have been possible without the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties, without the complete demoralization of the old antifascists and extreme opportunism in those sections of the New Left that let themselves be sidetracked by the ML and AO<ref>AO is an acronym for AusBildung Organisation, roughly translating as “formation organization,” and was used by Marxist-Leninist organizations in Germany that did not yet consider themselves to be parties, but held the goal of eventually forming a party. In North America, such groups were called pre-party formations.</ref> deviation—completely blind now, as compared to their terrible clarity in 1967/68.

Not even Strauß, but only Schmidt,<ref>Franz Josef Strauß was head of the right-wing CSU in Bavaria, where the Munich events took place. Helmut Schmidt, who would become Chancellor in 1974, was at this point the SPD Minister of Defense.</ref> could have committed the crimes at Fürstenfeldbruck: sending the fire brigade of West German imperialism onto an American NATO base to offer Israel support—for their torture, their murders, the oppression, the napalm, the land stolen from the Palestinian people.

Not even Dregger, but only Scheel’s party comrade Genscher,<ref>Alfred Dregger was a CDU politician from the conservative and nationalist section of the party. At the time, Genscher was the Minister of the Interior from the small liberal FDP.</ref> could arrange for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the FRG; Palestinians who are here because of the nationalist extermination policy, which has become the Israeli extermination policy. A public policy couldn’t be more clearly morally bankrupt, devoid as it is of historical content, acquiescing without once reflecting upon how extreme the hate will be on the part of those who once again must suffer the retaliation.

''The Social-Liberal Coalition and''

Since the SPD entered the government coalition in 1966, more elements of “democracy” have been eliminated than under all of the CDU governments of the previous 17 years; the Emergency Powers Act, the Hand Grenade Law, the ''Verfassungsschutzgesetz'',<ref>The ''Verfassungsschutzgesetz'' was a law passed by the SPD-FDP coalition in 1972; it extended the purview of the ''Verfassungsschutz'', the police organization central to the struggle against the guerilla.</ref> the Presidential Decree,<ref>The Presidential Decree here referred to here is the statute that established the ''Berufsverbot''.</ref> Federal Labor Court rulings against strikes, and the Federal Border Patrol Law.

Disoriented by their fear of Strauß, a section of the left will only realize that they have already had their vocal cords—which they require for whining—ripped out should Strauß take over these instruments which have in fact been crafted by the Social-Liberal coalition.

But Strauß couldn’t knock off more people than the comrades<ref>A sarcastic reference to the SPD, which was the leading government in parliament when each of the events listed occurred.</ref> have: McLeod’s liquidation, the deportation of Arabs, Prinzregentenstraße,<ref>In 1971, police opened fire on bank robbers holding hostages at a bank on Prinzegerntenstraße in Munich. Two hostages were killed. Strauß was personally present when this occurred.</ref> Löwenthal, Bild, show trials, police operations. The policies of the Social-Liberal Coalition are the policies of the corporations; their opinion is the opinion of the Springer corporation; their foreign policy is the foreign policy of Wolff von Amerongen, Beitz, Messerschmidt, BölkowBlohm, Siemens, Hochtief, Schickedanz, and Gelsenberg AG; their domestic policy is the domestic policy of Daimler-Benz, Glanzstoff, Klöckner, Bayer in Leverkusen; their high school education policy comes from BASF.<ref>All the companies mentioned in this paragraph are major German corporations.</ref>

It’s not a question of parliamentary democracy (Brandt) on one side and fascism (Strauß) on the other, but rather it is a question of the imperialist centre on one side and on the other side the revolutionary liberation struggle of the people of the Third World along with the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole—not to give this or any other government a kick in the ass, but rather to serve the people.

''Acceptable Imperialism''

The Social-Liberal Coalition has made West German imperialism acceptable for the bourgeois left, with its obsession with form—they see the application of imperialist policy as responding to the people’s wishes—they work within “reasonable parameters,” they speak the national language, they make use of parliamentary debate in the same way that they make use of BGS terror troops—they use constitutional means in the same way that they use fascism.

The anti-imperialist left had it easier with Strauß. He at least wore the disconcerting garb of colonial and Nazi imperialism, not the friendly mask of the corporate manager. He had the fucked relationship to power of Thyssen, Flick, and Krupp in 1933,<ref>Major German corporations that supported the Nazi rise to power.</ref> not the evolved self-consciousness of a multinational corporation. He would have been heckled had he entered the factories. He not only sowed hatred, he reaped it.

THE "RIGHT WING TAKEOVER"

The “right-wing takeover” is a bugaboo created out of thin air by the left of the SPD, the chant of brainless opportunists devoid of theory, directed against the anti-imperialist left—their way of covering up the fact that Brandt and Strauß are simply two different masks on the same imperialist system.

The flipside of this is the ideology that considers the masses to be hopeless and stupid—the best example being the filthy journalism of the Springer corporation and the organization of the newsstands, which is to say, the concentration of the media.

'''4. ANTI-IMPERIALIST ACTION'''

''The Massacre''

Brandt, Genscher, Merck, Schreiber, Vogel, Daume, Brundage,<ref>Leading politicians and police representatives who participated in the decisions that led to the massacre at the Fürstenfeldbruck airport.</ref> and all the others who make up imperialism’s cast of characters didn’t pause for a moment to consider agreeing to the revolutionaries’ demand for the release of prisoners. Even before Golda Meir was informed and had taken a position, they had already on their own considered how best to massacre the revolutionaries—with gas or storm troopers or a precision strike or whatever else.<ref>Genscher in consultation with police chief Schreiber had considered sending in tear gas through the Olympic Village air conditioning, and also storming the Israeli dorms with regular police officers. Both plans were rejected as unlikely to succeed.</ref>

All delays to the ultimatum, reached through lies and false promises, served to allow them to reach their sole objective, to win time to plan the massacre. They had only one goal, not to prove in any way inferior to the fascism of Moshe Dayan—Israel’s Himmler.

The September 7 reports from the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior— the first reports were less clear than what followed—consisted of nothing but rhetoric and assertions that it is in fact possible to be a pig just like Moshe Dayan, that everything was planned to resemble his underhanded action against the hijackers in Tel Aviv,<ref>A reference to the fact that the paratroopers Dayan had led in May at Lod airport had been disguised as maintenance workers, whereas the assault team which had been ordered to take out the commando at Fürstenfeldbruck (see page 234, fn 1) were to be disguised as flight attendants.</ref> that everything had been done to spring the same kind of brutal trap on the revolutionaries—truly tragic, tragic…

That Genscher went so far as to guarantee the exchange of hostages on September 6 at 8 in the morning in Cairo is concealed in the West German reports—this was first made public by the leader of the Egyptian Olympic delegation.

Foreign imperialist countries were horrified by the Germans’ incompetence. Once again they had failed to liquidate the communists without also liquidating the Jews.

Israel cried crocodile tears. Isreal burned their own athletes just as the Nazis had burned the Jews—kindling for the imperialist policy of extermination. They won’t even bother to use Munich as a pretext if they now bomb Palestinian villages—they will do what the imperialist system always does: they will bomb the liberation movement. They bomb because the Arab people have embraced the Black September action, because the masses understand the action; their enemy is not only Israel, their enemy is imperialism. It is not only Israel that is bloodthirsty, nor is it only the U.S. in the case of Vietnam, but rather it is all of imperialism against all of the liberation movements. They understand that without an anti-imperialist struggle there can be no victory for the people’s war.

''The Establishment Unmasked''

The West German establishment has unmasked itself—the more they assert themselves, the more the system’s inherent contradictions have proven what this means in the context of developing imperialism: phony campaigns, the social substance of which is a lot of blah blah blah.

The ''Rundschau'' demands the immediate dissolution of all Palestinian organizations in the FRG and the expulsion of all members, again making liberal use of old ''Bild'' arguments from the days of the student movement—“our taxes.” The formulation from the FAZ references to Habash<ref>George Habash, Secretary General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) at the time.</ref>—frothing at the mouth—in the style of the Mainzer ''Baader Meinhof Report''<ref>A farcically hysterical “study” of the RAF produced in 1972 by the BKA, the Bonn Security Group, and the Baader-Meinhof Special Commission. The ''Allgemeinen Zeitung Mainz'', a German regional newspaper based in Mainz, serialized it in its pages.</ref>—he is obviously a cynical man suffering from an inferiority complex. Wischnewski<ref>Hans Jürgen Wischnewski was a long-time SPD politician, known for his good relations with many Arab leaders, one result of his having firmly supported the Algerian National Liberation Front at a time when Adenauer had firmly supported the French.</ref> wants to expel “all Arabs” whose governments support the Palestinians. Augstein<ref>Rudolph Augstein, founder and editor of ''Spiegel'' magazine.</ref> demands painful “sanctions.” Nannen<ref>Henri Nannen, editor of the German newsweekly ''Stern''.</ref> presents ''Stern'' readers with the order of the day: immediate expulsion, a Lufthansa boycott of Arab airports, “not a penny” of development aid or trade credit. Scheel speaks for the “civilized section” of humanity. Heinemann demands that Arab governments act as representatives of the World Court.

In the long run, this overblown outburst in the Springer Press will prove to be as useless as the authorities’ information strategy before and in the first hours following the massacre.<ref>Immediately following the Fürstenfeldbruck showdown, the government announced that all of the Israeli athletes had been rescued unharmed. This news was then broadcast around the world. The rationale for this escapes our comprehension.</ref> When Brandt telephoned Sidki, the Egyptian President, he still believed he could screw around with the revolutionaries in the same way he does with the West German left. He didn’t understand what they wanted. He claimed he didn’t need to know, as everyone must surely agree that they were criminals, anarchists, subhumans, sick, or whatever else. They would be disposed of with no questions asked. Sidki hung up.<ref>Sidki had been contacted to see if the Egyptian government would agree to receive the hostages and the Palestinian commando, the FRG’s goal being to get them out of the country. Sadat’s government later explained that to do so would have done nothing to resolve the crisis, and would have meant simply making it Egypt’s problem.</ref>

Genscher, Merck, Schreiber did not think they would have to admit the embarrassing truth, that they themselves caused the death of the hostages. They thought they would have time to make up a story and people would quickly lose interest, as was ultimately the case with the self-defense version of the assassinations of Petra Schelm, Georg von Rauch, and Thomas Weissbecker.

Right from the start, Genscher thought he could shift the blame to the Bavarians, repeating the approach used to shift the blame for McLeod’s death onto the Stuttgart cops.

The Munich Prosecutors Office thought they would be able to raise a smokescreen to block investigations and deny journalists information. They intended to draw upon the counterpropaganda they’ve been using against the RAF for two years, claiming that there really is no anti-imperialist struggle, that it is only an illusion—to the left of the Social-Liberal Coalition, there is nothing but crackpots, anarchists, criminals, and sick people.

''Eppler''<ref>Erhard Eppler, SPD member and left-leaning Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation from 1968 until 1974.</ref>

The tactically appropriate position, the position required to serve the immediate interests of the FRG, was developed by Eppler: no blanket judgment, no sanctions, continuing development aid, though only in the Maghreb in keeping with the imperialist policy of encirclement, undermining through investments, etc. Those who are prepared to allow the theft of their oil, their mineral resources, and their labor force, will benefit from friendship between nations and partnership.

''Their Unmasking''

Black September stripped the mask off of the Social-Liberal Coalition and their propagandists by forcing the system’s real, rather than the purported, contradiction out into the open. The contradiction between imperialism and the people of the Third World forced them at a certain point to abandon their original goals and intentions, because they could clearly no longer be achieved. The cops wouldn’t play along, refusing to carry out the massacre on the plane.<ref>Twenty minutes before the Palestinian commando arrived at Fürstenfeldbruck, police abandoned their posts inside the Boeing plane, claiming that the mission they had been given was suicidal.</ref> The news media wouldn’t play along. Foreign powers wouldn’t play along. The West German masses weren’t consulted. The Arab people for the most part grasped what West Germany represented: the imperialist policy of extermination.

Unmasking them means forcing them to take the step after next before they have time to take the next one, forcing them to abandon their goals, so that everyone can see what has been going on for a long time now. Pressure must be brought to bear while the revolutionary left is still able to mount a counterstrategy, not after everyone has been banned and fired and is sitting in prison. Unmasking them means forcing the contradictions out into the open, clarifying laws governing trade, seizing the initiative while it’s still possible, not waiting until it becomes impossible.

It is childish to imagine or to assert that the system can once again use ruling class control of the press and the fundamental unity of the establishment to hide behind a smokescreen, and that lacking a smokescreen it might actually collapse, and that therefore whoever contributes to the smokescreen contributes to the system’s preservation. The anti-imperialist struggle doesn’t take place at the level of election campaigns and detergent ads.

''Anti-Imperialist Consciousness''

The propaganda target of anti-imperialist action is the dialectical relationship between being and consciousness, because the masses’ loyalty to the system is based on their accepting its pretty exterior, its promises, and its lies. Their loyalty to the system is based on its capacity to discourage all spontaneity in its quest to completely assimilate the masses into the “the silent bondage of the relationship” (Marx), which it forces the masses to accept as if it were only natural. Anti-imperialist action rips apart the system’s facade and manipulation, along with the loyalty of the masses, and forces it to admit the truth, about which the masses say, as always, “This is not what we wanted.” That they would then act to put an end to the horror of the system, which has long been apparent, is not the madness the opportunists make it out to be.

Who wanted the Fürstenfeldbruck massacre? The athletes who were dragged away from the Olympics didn’t want it. The aggrieved and frightened people who experienced the aftermath and who felt the enormous cold-bloodedness of the IOC and the Springer Press didn’t want it. It would be idiotic to believe that the revolutionaries wanted it. They wanted the release of the prisoners. They wanted what millions in this country still want: not to be tortured—just as political prisoners here don’t want to be tortured—and an end to the theft of land, the murder, the napalming and the bombing terror Israel carries out against the Palestinian refugees. And that is why they were massacred. Because success would have meant an unimaginably higher level of identification with them and their revolution—with their “humanity,” their rage, their solidarity—which would have been a setback.

Anti-imperialist consciousness attempts to prevent the perfection of imperialist rule from being firmly established. The masses are assaulted by ''Bild'' everyday. They are swamped on every side with prefabricated positions and postulations, making it difficult for them to express their actual pain and suffering.

''"Terror"''

The RAF’s actions are directed towards developing anti-imperialist consciousness. The system’s cast of characters understand that. They have understood that this form of struggle gradually builds a mass base, because resistance that grows slowly more powerful and more courageous cannot easily be defeated.

With the tactic of phony bomb threats—used against Stuttgart—they have turned their full attention to addressing this problem. They do this after failing to achieve any breakthroughs, even though they have raided hundreds of houses, scoured thousands of kilometres of streets, and released a million media appeals directed at RAF sympathizers. With the tactic of phony bomb threats and the simultaneous banning of statements from RAF prisoners from the media, the cops themselves are trying to create chaos, which is intended to lead to calls for greater law and order. The socialist left proved incapable of telling the difference between genuine and false bomb threats, although all of the genuine ones were directed against the ruling class and aimed to clear buildings and disrupt the ruling class’s establishments, cultural venues, communication structures, and media outlets—only the Stuttgart threat was directed against the people and was openly fascist and hostile to the masses.

The anti-imperialist war turns the system’s weapons against the system itself—the counterrevolutionary terrorizes the people. The legal left—confused by the police actions—has ceded the issue to the opportunists (Negt).

(What needs to be said in detail about the June and July arrests, the imprisoned comrades must say themselves.)

''Black September''

The Black September action in Munich leaves no room for misunderstanding. They took hostages from a people who are carrying out an extermination policy against them. They put their lives on the line to free their comrades. They didn’t want to die. They put off their ultimatum. In the face of the uncompromising attitude advocated by Israel, they held the Israeli hostages prisoner. The Israeli hostages understood that this was a last resort. They were betrayed by the German authorities just as the revolutionaries were. The German police massacred the hostages and the revolutionaries.

The Black September action in Munich will live on in the memory of the anti-imperialist struggle.

The death of the Arab comrades weighs as heavily as Mount Tai.

THE STONES THAT THESE BEASTS THREW AT FÜRSTENFELDBRUCK WILL FALL AT THEIR OWN FEET!

SOLIDARITY WITH THE LIBERATION STRUGGLE OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!

SOLIDARITY WITH THE VIETNAMESE REVOLUTION!

REVOLUTIONARIES OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!

RAF

November 1972

== 7 - Staying Alive: Sensory Deprivation, Torture, and the Struggle Behind Bars ==
<blockquote>''By 1972, practically the whole founding generation of the RAF were behind bars. Yet there was still a second generation and a third generation. Why? Primarily because of the conditions of imprisonment and state-organized terror''

Dieter Kunzelmann

former K.1 Communard<ref>''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.''</ref> </blockquote>Having captured the ideological leadership of the RAF, the West German state set in motion the second element of their counterinsurgency project: one which would eventually become known as the “Stammheim Model.” The mere incarceration of the guerilla was insufficient. Those captured were to be rendered ineffective not only as combatants, but also as spokespeople for the anti-imperialist resistance. If at all possible, they were to be deconstructed as human beings and reconstructed as representatives of the counterinsurgency project. If this was not possible, at a bare minimum, they were to be destroyed.

The state’s weapon on this terrain was complete and total isolation of the prisoners, both from each other and from the outside world.

As early as June 7, 1972, the importance of isolation was enunciated by Horst Ehmke, the SPD minister responsible for coordinating intelligence operations. “We all… have an interest in completely breaking all solidarity [with the RAF], to isolate them from all others with radical opinions in this country,” Ehmke told the Bundestag. “That is the most important task.”<ref>Statement to Bundestag, June 7, 1972, quoted in ''Texte des prisonniers de la “fraction armée rouge” et dernières lettres d’Ulrike Meinhof'', Draft Version, Cahiers Libres 337 (Paris: François Maspero).</ref>

The prisoners were scattered around the country.<ref>For instance, Andreas Baader was in Schwalmstadt (Düsseldorf), Gudrun Ensslin in Essen, Holger Meins in Wittlich (Cologne), Irmgard Möller in Rastatt (Baden), Gerhard Müller in Hamburg, Jan-Carl Raspe in Cologne, and Horst Mahler in Moabit (West Berlin). (Aust, 231.)</ref> While they would all be targeted by the state, particular pains were taken to attack those who were considered the five ringleaders: Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe.

Andreas Baader was held in total isolation from the day of his arrest on June 1, 1972, until November 11, 1974. In that entire time, he did not see another prisoner.

As of April 11, 1973, Holger Meins was held in Wittlich prison in solitary isolation, with the cells above, below, to the left, and to the right of him kept empty. His cell was searched daily, he was denied all group activities, including church services,<ref>RAF members’ desire to attend church services was not due to any religiosity, although in their youth Meinhof, Ensslin, and Meins had all been quite devout. Rather, these services provided one of the only places where they could meet with and be amongst other prisoners.</ref> and he was shackled whenever he left his cell.

Ulrike Meinhof was put in the so-called “dead wing” at Cologne-Ossendorf prison,<ref>The formulation used in Germany is to put the city name first, and then the name of the prison. So Cologne-Ossendorf refers to Ossendorf prison in the city of Cologne.</ref> where Astrid Proll had previously been held. In order to ensure the women remained separate, Proll was transferred to the men’s wing.

The “dead wing” was intended not only to isolate, but also to induce a breakdown through sensory deprivation torture. It consisted of a specially soundproofed cell painted bright white with a single grated window covered with fine mesh, so that even the sky could not be viewed properly. The cell was lit twenty-four hours a day with a single bald neon light. It was forbidden for the prisoner to hang photographs, posters, or anything else on the walls. All other cells in the wing were kept vacant, and when other prisoners were moved through the prison—for instance, to the exercise yard—they were obliged to take a circuitous route so that even their voices could not be heard. The only minimal contact with another human being was when food was delivered; other than that, the prisoner spent twenty-four hours a day in a world with no variation.

The use of sensory deprivation had been studied by doctors in Canada and the United States since the late 1950s, the line of research being taken up in the FRG by Dr. Jan Gross of Hamburg’s Eppendorf University Hospital. Studies carried out by Gross found that sensory deprivation consistently caused feelings of unease ranging from fear to panic attacks, which could progress to an inability to concentrate, problems of perception (including hallucinations), vegetative disorders including feelings of intense hunger, chest pains, disequilibrium, trouble sleeping, trembling, and even convulsions.<ref>Sjef Teuns, “La Torture par Privation Sensorielle,” ''in à propos du procès BaaderMeinhof, Fraction Armée Rouge : de la torture dans les prisons de la RFA'', Klaus Croissant (ed.) (Paris : Christian Bourgeois Éditeur, 1975), 65-66.</ref>

(It is worth noting that just as research into isolation was not limited to the FRG, many prisoners in the United States today are also subjected to various forms of isolation clearly intended as a form of torture.)<ref>Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, “The People’s Tribunal to Expose the Crimes of the Control Units”; Dr. Mutulu Shakur et al., “Genocide Waged Against the Black Nation Through Behavior Modification/Orchestrated by Counterinsurgency and Low-Intensity Warfare in the U.S. Penal System.” Both reprinted in Matt Meyer, ed. ''Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners'' (Montreal/Oakland: Kersplebedebpm Press, 2008.) Also: Russell Maroon Shoatz, Death by Regulation: Pennsylvania Control Unit Abuses (Montreal: Kersplebedeb 2008).</ref>

Astrid Proll had been held in the dead wing for two periods, from November 1971 to January 1972 and from April 1972 to June 1972. She would later describe this experience:<blockquote>''…I was taken to an empty wing, a dead wing, where I was the only prisoner. Ulrike Meinhof later called it the “Silent Wing”. The shocking experience was that I could not hear any noises apart from the ones that I generated myself. Nothing. Absolute silence. I went through states of excitement, I was haunted by visual and acoustic hallucinations. There were extreme disturbances of concentration and attacks of weakness. I had no idea how long this would go on for. I was terrified that I would go mad.''<ref>Proll, 11.</ref></blockquote>After four and a half months of this torture, Proll’s physical and mental health were so badly damaged that she could hardly walk. When she was brought to trial in September 1973, the court ordered her examined by a heart specialist, a man who happened to be a former POW from Russia: he testified that her condition reminded him of the prisoners interned in Siberia.<ref>Ibid., 12.</ref> The state was obliged to release her to a sanitarium in the Black Forest where she stayed for a year and then escaped, making her way to England.

Even when recaptured years later, she remained scarred by her ordeal, as she wrote in 1978:<blockquote>''During the 2½ years of remand I was 4½ months completely isolated in the Dead Wing of Cologne-Ossendorf. Not even today, six years later, have I completely recovered from that. I can’t stand rooms which are painted white because they remind me of my cell. Silence in a wood can terrify me, it reminds me of the silence in the isolated cell. Darkness makes me so depressive as if my life were taken away. Solitude causes me as much fear as crowds. Even today I have the feeling occasionally as if I can’t move.''<ref>Friends of Astrid Proll, ''Astrid Proll: The Case Against Her Extradition'' (London: 1978), 8. It is worth remembering that she was being charged with attempted murder for shooting at police, an incident that the state already knew had not happened, thanks to the surveillance reports of its own intelligence agents. Cf 60. 3 Aust, 246.</ref> </blockquote>Ulrike Meinhof was held in these conditions for 237 days following her arrest on June 15, 1972, and for shorter periods in December 1973 and February 1975. After eight months of this torture, she wrote:<blockquote>''I finally realized I had to pull myself out of this, I myself had no right to let these frightful things keep affecting me—it was my duty to fight my way out of it. By whatever means there are of doing that in prison: daubing the walls, coming to blows with a cop, wrecking the fitments, hunger strike. I wanted to make them at least put me under arrest, because then you get to hear something—you don’t have a radio babbling away, only the bible to read, maybe no mattress, no window, etc.—but that’s a different kind of torture from not hearing anything. And obviously it would have been a relief to me…''<ref>Aust, 246.</ref></blockquote>Through it all, she would remain unbroken.

Having failed to destroy Meinhof through such severe isolation, the state moved to directly and medically attack her brain. On the basis of an operation she had undergone in 1962 to correct a swollen blood vessel in her brain, Federal Prosecutor Peter Zeis theorized that her political behavior might be the result of some neurological problem.

In a letter dated April 18, 1973, Zeis asked the right-wing<ref>Formerly associated with the Nazi regime, Witter had publicly opposed the payment of reparations to victims of the Holocaust.</ref> director of the University of Homburg-Saar’s Institute for Forensic Medicine and Psychiatry, Dr. Hermann Witter, to ascertain what interventions might prove necessary. In a letter dated May 10, Witter responded that he felt both x-rays and a scintigraphy—a routine and normally harmless diagnostic test which involves the injection of radioisotopes—would be required to establish a diagnosis. On July 13, Federal Supreme Court Judge Knoblich ruled that the state could proceed with these tests, even against Meinhof’s will, and with the use of constraining devices or anesthesia if she resisted.<ref>Commission internationale d’enquête sur la mort d’Ulrike Meinhof. ''La Mort d’Ulrike Meinhof: Rapport de la Commission international d’enquête'' (Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1979), 78-79</ref> Correspondence between Witter and the Attorney General indicates that an appropriate diagnosis would have been used to mandate neurosurgery, regardless of the prisoner or her relatives’ wishes.<ref>In this volume see the interview with ''Le Monde Diplomatique'', pages 410-412.</ref>

All of this was a transparent attempt to discredit the RAF by pathologizing Meinhof: “It would be so embarrassing,” Zeis mused at the time, “if it turned out that all the people began to follow a mad woman.”<ref>“Political Internment in the FRG,” in ''War on the War Makers'', 27.</ref>

It was only through public protests organized by the prisoner support group Red Aid, which mobilized many doctors, that the government was forced to drop its plan.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 131, 133.</ref> Yet as we shall see, this was not the last time that the state would seek to score a propaganda victory by attacking and discrediting the woman who was routinely described as the RAF’s chief theoretician.

On top of imposing internal isolation, the state did all it could to cut the prisoners off from the outside world. They were limited to visits from lawyers and family members. Visits from family members were overseen by two state security employees who recorded all conversations, the contents of which could be introduced at trials, sometimes followed by analysis from a psychologist. Political letters, books, and packages were routinely withheld.

Starting in 1975, everyone arrested under §129 in connection with “political crimes” would be held under the so-called “24-Point Program.” This formalized many of the conditions that had been imposed unevenly up until then, while also adding new restrictions. The program specified, among other things, that the prisoners were banned from all common activities. The prisoners now received one hour of solitary yard time each day, which was immediately interrupted if they failed to heed an order, insulted a staff person, or caused any damage. The prisoners were permitted to keep twenty books in their cells. Visits were limited to people cleared by the authorities, and could only last a maximum of thirty minutes (the standard was two such visits a month). It was prohibited to discuss activities of the so-called “terrorist scene” or its support groups (the latter was a grab bag for all revolutionary organizations), prison revolts, or hunger strikes. All visitors were searched, and this included lawyers.<ref>“24-Punkt-Haftstatut.” <nowiki>http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/</nowiki> PolitischeStroemungen/Stadtguerilla+raf/raf/brd+raf/053.html.</ref>

In a statement regarding such isolation, Till Meyer and Andreas Vogel, both 2nd of June Movement prisoners who were subjected to these conditions for years, wrote:<blockquote>''With the isolation wings, years of isolation have been carried to the extreme and the process of extermination has been perfected: the perfection of spatial limitation and the total isolation, electronic observation with cameras and microphones (openly in each cell)—and we are guarded by special corps (corps who are trained in psychology and conditioned through BKA training).''<ref>Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd of June Movement), D''er Blues: Gesammelte Texte der Bewgung 2. Juni'', ''Vol. 2'', self-published illegally in the FRG, n.d. (1982?), 680.</ref></blockquote>RAF prisoner Helmut Pohl would express himself similarly:<blockquote>''Isolation represents a more intense version of the situation which dominates on the outside, which led us to engage in clandestine armed struggle in the first place. Isolation represents its pure state, its naked reality. Whoever doesn’t find a way to struggle against this situation is destroyed—the situation controls him and not the other way around.''<ref>Helmut Pohl’s Testimony at the Stammheim trial, July 29, 1976.</ref></blockquote>As Andreas Baader described it:<blockquote>Isolation aims at alienating prisoners from every social relationship including their history, their history above all… It makes the prisoner unconscious or kills him or her.<ref>Bakker Schut (ed.), ''Das Info: brief von gefangen aus der RAF aus der discussion 1973-1977'' (Neue Malik Verlag, Plambeck & Neuss, 1987), 218.</ref> </blockquote>Professor Wilfried Rasch of the Institute of Forensic Psychiatry at the Free University of Berlin, who was called upon to examine the RAF prisoners, had this to say about the isolation conditions in which they were held:<blockquote>''The high security wing has simply the quality of torture, that is to say, an attempt to use special measures to achieve something amongst the prisoners through difficult or unbearable conditions, specifically, a change of heart, a defection.''<ref>Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd of June Movement), ''Der Blues: Gesammelte Texte der Bewgung 2. Juni, Vol. 1'', self-published illegally in the FRG, n.d. (1982?), 341.</ref></blockquote>Even those visits that were permitted were designed to add to the prisoners’ stress-level. Eberhard Dreher, held on charges of supporting the 2nd of June Movement, described the closed visiting conditions:<blockquote>''[T]he screen offers a pretense of contact, simultaneously limiting the contact to visual contact and making the contact unfamiliar due to the reflective quality of the glass… Further pain is created by the lack of air and the particular acoustics. The construction of ventilators would rectify this problem… To make oneself understood, one must speak very loudly. One’s own voice within the aquarium-like cabinet is amplified into an acoustic mountain crashing down directly onto one’s own head.''<ref>Ibid., 320.</ref></blockquote>Dreher further described the effect of one such visit with his lawyer as follows:<blockquote>''After… forty minutes, I had a splitting headache and, with the consent of my lawyer, had to break off the visit. I had a headache, needed air, was fed-up, wanted to be in my cell in peace.''<ref>Ibid., 321.</ref></blockquote>In 1978, the European Commission of Human Rights would observe that their prison and trial conditions had contributed to Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader all developing “problems of concentration, marked fatigue, difficulties of expression or articulation, reduced physical and mental performance, instability, diminished spontaneity and ability to make contacts, depression.”<ref>European Commission of Human Rights, ''Decisions and Reports 14'', Strasbourg, June 1979, 96-97.</ref>

If the results of imprisonment in the isolation wing were horrifying, isolation combined with sensory deprivation was even more destructive, as is indicated in Ulrike Meinhof’s harrowing description of her ordeal in Cologne-Ossendorf (see Ulrike Meinhof on the Dead Wing, pages 271-73)

Early on, it became clear to the prisoners that their only hope lay in resistance, and so on January 17, 1973, forty captured combatants from the RAF and other guerilla groups began a hunger strike, demanding access to independent doctors and transfer to the general population.<ref>Rote Armee Fraktion, 181.</ref>

This first hunger strike lasted four and a half weeks, and was only called off when Attorney General Ludwig Martin agreed to move Meinhof out of the dead wing—a promise which was not kept, and was likely never meant as anything but a ploy.<ref>Vague, 50.</ref>

Nevertheless, even though the hunger strike did not achieve any immediate victory, it did manage to break through the wall of silence surrounding prison conditions, galvanizing support from a section of the far left. In a way that was perhaps impossible to foresee, it marked the beginning of a strategy which would give the RAF a new lease on life.

Support had so far come mainly from the Red Aid network, a situation which was less than satisfactory in the eyes of the prisoners, as Red Aid offered solidarity while remaining critical of the RAF’s politics. Furthermore, within Red Aid, the focus on the RAF prisoners had begun causing dissension, especially in Munich, as Bavaria held a large number of prisoners from the antiauthoritarian scene, and it was felt that they were being neglected, too much energy being spent defending the Marxist-Leninist RAF.

Thus, following the first hunger strike in April 1973, several lawyers came together with some of the RAF’s closest political sympathizers to set up the ''Komitees gegen Folter'' (Committees Against Torture) that would take over support work for the prisoners in the future, while promoting the RAF’s particular brand of anti-imperialist politics. This political orientation was no great liability for the legal left, as even many liberals were not yet ready to completely repudiate those who engaged in armed struggle.<ref>Dellwo, 95.</ref>

Several lawyers took leading roles in the Committees, Hans-Christian Ströbele, Klaus Croissant, Otto Schily, Siegfried Haag and Kurt Groenewold being their most prominent members. It was Groenewold who took the lead in establishing the Committees, their Hamburg headquarters being a block away from his office.<ref>Ibid., 93-94.</ref>

As it turned out, the decision to set up the Committees proved fortuitous. Due in part to ongoing tensions between antiauthoritarians and others, the Maoist KPD/ML managed to take control of Red Aid at a national conference in April 1974. This was the second successful attempt by a K-group to move in on the network: the KPD/AO had already formed a rival “Red Aid registered association” to capitalize on its reputation. While the KPD/ML and KPD/AO may have been occasionally sympathetic to the RAF prisoners, they were definitely hostile to their politics, and so the RAF would have been at a disadvantage had they remained dependent on either Red Aid network for support.

Committees Against Torture were established West Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Kassel, Cologne, Munich, Münster, Stuttgart, Tübingen, and Heidelberg<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 97.</ref>—the latter in particular being a magnet for former SPK members.<ref>Dellwo, 94.</ref> Backed by many progressive intellectuals, they worked to focus public attention on the prisoners’ struggle and the destructive conditions in which they were held, setting up information tables, issuing leaflets, and holding teach-ins.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 97-98.</ref> The hope was to win the support of people with their roots in the sixties antiwar movement, people who shared much of the RAF’s analysis and could be expected to express political solidarity, particularly for the idea that the captured combatants were political prisoners who had acted in the context of an international anti-imperialist movement.
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Lawyers
!Hans-Christian Ströbele had helped to found the West Berlin Socialist Lawyers Collective along with Horst Mahler in 1968.<ref>Aust, 66</ref> He was an SPD member in the early seventies, and, in 1978, would be a founding member of the Alternative List, a forerunner to the left wing of the Green Party, in which he would also be active as an elected member of the Bundestag from 1985 to 1987 and again from 1992 on.
Klaus Croissant was a member of the Stuttgart Socialist Lawyers Collective; he had been under surveillance by the state from at least May 1972, suspected of having himself located safehouses for the RAF.<ref>Aust, 207; Becker, 306.</ref> Over the years, he became one of the prisoners’ most ardent and notorious advocates—disgusted at what he saw of West German “justice,” he would eventually begin working with the East German Stasi in the 1980s. He would unsuccessfully run for mayor of Berlin-Kreuzberg on the Alternative List ticket, before joining the ''Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus'' (Party of Democratic Socialism)—the successor to East Germany’s SED—in 1990.[[File:RAF Lawyers from RAF - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Lawyers Klaus Croissant, Otto Schily, and Hans-Christian Ströbele at a press conference in 1974.'']]Otto Schily was a committed civil libertarian, deeply concerned about the rule of law. He had befriended Rudi Dutschke while studying in West Berlin, and had been active in circles around the SDS.<ref>Hockenos, 119.</ref> Probably the only one of the lawyers to take pride in referring to himself as “bourgeois,” Schily would join Ströbele in the Green Party in the 1980s, before crossing over to the Social Democrats in 1989. In 1998, years after he had left our story, Schily was appointed Minister of the Interior, the former civil libertarian now in charge of domestic repression. As such, he was personally responsible for the highly repressive “anti-terrorist” legislation that was passed in the FRG in the wake of September 11, 2001.<ref>Ibid., 290.</ref> The legislation earned him a “Big Brother Award”, a negative prize presented to those who excel in rolling back civil liberties.
Siegfried Haag was a court-appointed attorney. While he had not been prominent in the APO or the political left previously, he was so moved by the prisoners’ plight that he would eventually make their struggle his own.
Kurt Groenewold, the son of a wealthy property owner, had previously represented Ulrike Meinhof in her divorce from Klaus Rainer Röhl in 1968. He was active in the Hamburg Socialist Lawyers Collective, defending cultural radicals like the composers Ernst Schnabel and Hans-Werner Henze for their oratorio to Che Guevara, Floß der Medusa. He also defended the poet Erich Fried, who was accused of slandering the West Berlin police when he described the shooting of Georg von Rauch as a “preventive murder” in a letter to ''Spiegel''.<ref>“Kurt Groenewold,” <nowiki>http://www.literaturhaus.at/autoren/F/fried/</nowiki> gesellschaft/mitglieder/groenewold/.</ref> In recent years, Groenwold has written extensively about the legal and civil rights ramifications of the state’s response to the armed movements in West Germany in the 70s and 80s.
|}
While the Committees welcomed support from many intellectuals and celebrities who still rejected the prisoners’ politics, by and large militants were expected to toe the RAF line. While some involved did have their own quiet reservations in this regard, it is equally clear that many others were sincerely won over to the guerilla’s politics. The state certainly contributed to this process, as activists would find themselves the object of police surveillance, raids, and even in some cases criminal charges, simply for disseminating information about the conditions in West German prisons.<ref>In 1975, for instance, two activists received respective sentences of six and nine months in prison under §129, simply for handing out pamphlets with information about isolation conditions. The Supreme Court’s decision made clear the object of such prosecutions: “The accused did not limit themselves to speaking to individuals in private, but by means of the leaflets sought to make contact with large numbers of people, and principally with young people, who are easily influenced in this way… Nor should the possibility of imitation by potential criminals be ignored. Whether the sentence on the accused will remain largely unknown is not important; what is important is the effect it will inevitably have on people who do know of it.” (Cobler, 114-115)</ref>

In subsequent years, the underground would include several veterans of this prisoners’ support scene, and even some from their legal team, a fact which the state would exploit time and again to attack the RAF’s lawyers. While most of the legal support team never did join the guerilla despite their increasing horror at the Kafkaesque trials and inhumane prison conditions, it is clear in retrospect that work in the Committees did constitute a rite of passage into the RAF for an astonishing number of future guerillas.

It is, of course, equally true that the overwhelming majority of those who were active in this scene never joined the guerilla, and while they remained operational, the Committees Against Torture always limited themselves to nonviolent forms of protest and popular education.

Before long, they got their first opportunity for such public activity: on May 8, 1973—the anniversary of the defeat of the Third Reich— sixty prisoners throughout the Federal Republic began a second hunger strike. The Committees stepped up their activities, organizing for lawyers to engage in a solidarity hunger strike and holding a demonstration outside the Federal Court in Karlsruhe.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 86-87.</ref>

The Committees’ most significant event occurred on May 11, when they held a teach-in where several high-profile supporters spoke out against isolation torture. Heinz Brandt, an official from the IG Metall trade union, described the isolation conditions that the prisoners were subjected to as even worse than what he had suffered during four years in a Nazi concentration camp:<blockquote>''As crass and paradoxical as it may sound, my experiences with strict, radical isolation were worse than my time… in a Nazi concentration camp… [I]n the camp, I still had the bases for human life, namely, communication with my fellow inmates… We were able in the camps to see, not only outrageously fascistic and sadistic mistreatment, but also the possibilities of resistance and collective life among the prisoners, and, with this, for the fulfillment of the fundamental need of a human being: social existence.''<ref>Varon, 218.</ref></blockquote>Dutch psychologist Dr. Sjef Teuns described isolation and sensory deprivation as programmed torture. Dr. Christian Sigrist, who had worked alongside anticolonial freedom fighters in Africa, described the West German torture system as part of the worldwide counterstrategy against anti-imperialist combatants.

This last point was certainly as important to the prisoners as the former two. The RAF viewed human rights campaigns as being worse than useless; indeed, they viewed such humanitarianism as an attack on their fundamental principles. When Red Aid had put out leaflets accusing the state of denying the prisoners’ basic human rights, Baader had angrily objected that, “Because our comrades are half-dead they can’t think we’re anything else ourselves. They’re twisting the thing the same way the pigs twist it worldwide: Violence is taboo…”<ref>Aust, 242.</ref>

Similarly, Baader would later find it necessary to criticize defense attorney Otto Schily in this regard:<blockquote>''We certainly can’t agree with the argument regarding torture as it is developed by Schily in his petition […] In reacting to revolutionary politics, the state does not know what to do except torture, and in doing so it exposes itself as an imperialist state. The indignation of degenerate bourgeois antifascism only masks this. The latter is already so weak, corrupted by social democracy, and locked in revisionism, that it can no longer express itself in a meaningful way.''<ref>Andreas Baader Regarding Torture, reprinted in this volume on pages 319-323.</ref></blockquote>On May 24, 1973, fourteen days into the second hunger strike, the prison authorities began withholding water from Baader, despite a court decision two days earlier forbidding such tactics, as even short term water deprivation under a doctor’s supervision can seriously damage one’s health.<ref>Klaus Croissant, “La justice et la torture par l’isolement,” in Croissant, 120-121.</ref> Indeed, after several days without water and in critical condition—suffering kidney pains, a sore throat, and difficulty seeing— Baader was forced to end his hunger strike. Apparently pleased with their success, the authorities targeted Bernhard Braun next, attempting to have him placed in the so-called “dry cell,” but his lawyer managed to intervene and have this blocked.<ref>Ibid., 120.</ref>

The hunger strike continued until June 29, when the District Court in Karlsruhe ordered the release from isolation of two prisoners.<ref>Rote Armee Fraktion, 181.</ref> (Although accounts are vague on this point, there is some indication that the two were former SPK members Carmen Roll and Siegfried Hausner.)<ref>Hausner had been arrested in 1972 for building bombs and sentenced to three years in a youth facility; he was released from prison in 1974, at which point he made contact with other former SPK members and returned to the underground with the RAF.</ref>

Yet, soon after these two prisoners had their conditions relaxed for health reasons, another RAF prisoner was effectively sentenced to death by medical neglect.

Katharina Hammerschmidt had fled to France in 1971, but when the May Offensive had ended in a wave of arrests, she had turned herself in, returning to face the relatively minor charges relating to her having located safehouses for the guerilla. Despite the fact that she had surrendered voluntarily, she was remanded to the West Berlin Women’s Prison while awaiting her trial.

In August 1973, Hammerschmidt underwent a routine medical exam, which included some x-rays. These revealed an abnormal growth in her chest, but the prison doctors took no steps to evaluate whether this was benign or malignant. In fact, they did not even inform her of the results.<ref>“Des medecins portent plainte,” in Croissant, 104-107.</ref>

In September, Hammerschmidt began to complain of intense pain in her chest and throat. She had difficulty breathing and it hurt to swallow, yet the prison doctors simply told her that if the symptoms continued, more x-rays would be taken in another three months.
{| class="wikitable"
|+Press Release from Andreas Baader's Lawyers
!Even though Baader was doing well, at noon on May 22, 1973, the prison doctor, Dr. Degenhardt from Kassel, came to his cell with a squad of ten guards in order to force him to swallow a solution through a tube as thick as of one’s thumb. Three times Baader requested a spoon so that he could take the solution on his own. Despite this fact, the doctor ordered the guards to hold him down. Pinching his nose, he then forced the tube into his mouth, down his throat and into his digestive tract. Baader vomited and almost suffocated. The tube opened up his throat and his digestive tract and he vomited blood. After this torture Dr. Degenhardt gave him three intravenous injections and he then lost consciousness for eight hours.
On the morning of May 22, Baader had been visited by one of his lawyers, Koch, from the Frankfurt Legal Collective. The lawyer was able to see that Baader’s state of health was relatively good. When he came back that afternoon to continue his visit, a guard told Koch that the doctor had instructed that Baader should remain in bed. It was not possible for him to visit with his lawyer. The lawyer asked to see the warden Metz, but this was refused.
As attorneys of Andreas Baader we note: Andreas Baader is not only subjected to psychological torture in the Ziegenhain prison (Hessen), but he is also being tortured physically by methods which are carbon copies of those practiced in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, and Brazil. Force-feeding, when the prisoner has agreed to feed himself, is a form of torture.
We demand that Dr. Degenhardt and his helpers be punished.
Andreas Baader’s lawyers
Golzem, von Plonitz, Riedel and Koch
May 23 1973
Klaus Croissant, “La justice et la torture par l’isolement,” in Croissant, 119.
|}
In October, the pain was so great that Hammerschmidt could not sleep; she was told by medical staff that her throat hurt from “too much yelling.” As her condition deteriorated to the point that her tumors became visible to the naked eye, the doctors simply prescribed water pills.<ref>Soligruppe Christian S., “Der Spiegel, 1975, baader/meinhof Müdes Auge,” <nowiki>http://www36.websamba.com/Soligruppe/data/spiegel1975.htm</nowiki>; “Les democraties face à la violence” la Lanterne Noire 5 (December 1975).</ref>

In November, her lawyers finally won a court judgment forcing the prison authorities to allow her to be seen by an independent physician. This specialist immediately issued a letter indicating that Hammerschmidt needed follow-up tests as soon as possible. These were not carried out, and she was returned to prison.

Two weeks later, on the night of November 28/29, Hammerschmidt almost suffocated from difficulty breathing. She was brought directly to a hospital, where it was found she had a cancerous tumor as large as a child’s head in her chest. It was determined that the tumor was inoperable, although it was also stated that this might not have been the case just weeks earlier.<ref>Viktor Kleinkrieg, “Les combattantes anti-impérialistes face à la torture,” in Croissant, 47.</ref>
[[File:Katharina Hammerschmidt from RAF a documentary history.jpeg|thumb|''Katharina Hammerschmidt'']]
An independent physician would later remark that the fact that Hammerschmidt had cancer should have been obvious from the x-rays taken in August, and yet six different prison doctors were all seemingly unable to notice that anything was wrong. Or perhaps they simply did not want to: in a public accusation signed by 131 doctors, it was suggested that she was denied necessary medical care because this would have required an end to the isolation conditions that she, like all other RAF prisoners, was being subjected to at the time.

It was January 1974 before the court adjourned her trial, ruling that she was too sick and needed to be released to a clinic for treatment. If anything could have been done, it was now too late: Katharina Hammerschmidt struggled on for the next year and a half, finally succumbing to her illness on June 29, 1975—three years to the day after she had turned herself in.

Many observers considered Hammerschmidt’s death to be a case of “judicial murder.” Independent physicians who examined her upon her release declared that the prison doctors’ findings had been “medically incomprehensible,” evidence of “incredible medical shortcomings.”<ref>Ibid.</ref> A court would eventually award her family the measly sum of 5,000 DM, admitting that the prison administration bore some responsibility for her death.<ref>Peters Butz, RAF Terrorismus in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1991), 454, quoted in “Katharina Hammerschmidt,” <nowiki>http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_Hammerschmidt</nowiki>.</ref>

The RAF and its supporters would lay Katharina Hammerschmidt’s death at the door of the West German prison authorities. Yet, by the time she had died, hers was not the first such case of “judicial murder.”
[[File:RAF Prisoner Support Poster from RAF - a Documentary History.jpeg|thumb]]
On September 13, 1974, forty prisoners led by the RAF had begun their third collective hunger strike against prison conditions.<ref>Apart from the declaration included in this section on pages 274-78, Ulrike Meinhof used the occasion of her testimony in court to announce the strike. See Ulrike Meinhof Regarding the Liberation of Andreas Baader, page 370.</ref> The Committees Against Torture sprang into action, and Amnesty International had its Hamburg offices occupied in an attempt to pressure the liberal organization to take a stand in support of the prisoners. (Notably, several of those involved in this occupation would join the guerilla within a few years.)<ref>For instance: Susanne Albrecht, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, Günter Sonnenberg, Christian Klar, and Knut Folkerts. (Becker, 340-341)</ref>

Not only had the previous hunger strikes failed to achieve integration of all RAF prisoners into the general population, in situations where they had been able to have contact with social prisoners, the latter often found themselves harassed or transferred. The prisoners had come to the conclusion that the demand for integration, while it had undeniable appeal given the high esteem in which the New Left held marginalized groups like social prisoners, was simply not going to work. As a result, integration was dropped, and the struggle was now defined as one against isolation and for the association of political prisoners with each other.

As Karl-Heinz Dellwo, who was active in the Committees Against Torture at the time, explains:<blockquote>''Up until then the hunger strikes were carried out with the goal of achieving “equality” with the other prisoners. I had long been critical of this. I thought it absolutely could not work. Either one would be placed somewhere where the prisoners changed every day, or with prisoners with whom one could not, for various reasons, talk. I was pleased when the RAF prisoners changed their line and chose the demand for association. That created some conflicts on the outside, for instance with the Frankfurt Committee,''<ref>Throughout the 1970s, Frankfurt was the bastion of the ''spontis'', who would have been critical of such a separation from social prisoners.</ref> ''which had a social revolutionary line: they were of the opinion that all prisoners were frustrated social rebels. I seriously doubted that.''<ref>Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Das Projektil sind wir (Hamburg: Nautilus, 2007), 98-99.</ref></blockquote>This new demand for association became a rallying point for the prisoners and their supporters for the next two decades. Years later, 2nd of June Movement prisoner Till Meyer, writing from the dead wing, would express the goal this way:<blockquote>''Our demand—association of all prisoners—is the opposite of what the pigs offer us. Association means, above all, survival, collective political imprisonment, political identity, self-organization—while the dead wing means annihilation.''<ref>Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd of June Movement), ''Der Blues: Gesammelte Texte der Bewgung'' 2. Juni, Vol. 2, 684.</ref></blockquote>In practical terms, association meant bringing together political prisoners in groups large enough to be socially viable, fifteen being the minimum number normally suggested. Political prisoners in some other European countries, such as Italy and Northern Ireland, had already won such conditions for themselves, and so it was hoped that this might prove a realistic goal.

As a brief aside, it should be noted that this reorientation, along with the third hunger strike, provided the occasion for a very public split amongst the prisoners, as Horst Mahler not only refused to participate, but also took the opportunity to publicly repudiate armed struggle and break with the RAF. It has been suggested that one reason for this was his refusal to abandon the demand for integration, though clearly he had had other disagreements with the rest of the guerilla for some time now.<ref>Otto Billig, “The Lawyer Terrorist and his Comrades,” ''Political Psychology'' 6, no. 1 (March 1985): 35.</ref>

In point of fact, Mahler had joined Red Aid e.v., the network that had been set up by the KPD/AO in 1970. He would explain that this was intended as an attempt to “close ranks and organize a criticism of the RAF’s sectarian line in the spirit of solidarity.”<ref>Rote Hilfe e.v. “Zwischen raf-Solidarität und „linker Caritas“ - Teil 1 / 1 / 2007 / Die Rote Hilfe Zeitung / Publikationen / Rote Hilfe e.V. - Rote Hilfe e.V.,” http:// www.rote-hilfe.de/publikationen/die_rote_hilfe_zeitung/2007/1/zwischen_raf_ solidaritaet_und_linker_caritas_teil_1.</ref> Mahler’s move into orthodox Maoism would win him some support: that October, Red Aid e.v. organized a demonstration, during which, according to the Verfassungsschutz, 5,000 people rallied to demand his freedom.<ref>Ibid.</ref> Nevertheless, it failed to do any good in court, where Mahler was now facing his third RAF-related trial, the second time he would face charges relating to Baader’s 1970 jailbreak. Despite his break with the guerilla, he would eventually be sentenced to fourteen years in prison; Ulrike Meinhof, who also stood accused in these proceedings, would receive an eight-year sentence, while Hans-Jürgen Bäcker, who had testified against the guerilla, would be acquitted.<ref>''European Stars and Stripes'', “Meinhof: Female German Guerrilla Leader gets 8-year term for role in murder plot,” November 30, 1974.</ref>

The other prisoners considered Mahler’s public split to be serious enough to warrant a public reply, and on September 27 Monika Berberich delivered a statement at the Mahler-Meinhof-Bäcker trial formally expelling her former comrade, accusing him of being a “filthy, bourgeois chauvinist” who had attempted to “transfer his ruling class arrogance… into the proletarian movement.”<ref>The Expulsion of Horst Mahler, see pages 288-91</ref>
{| class="wikitable"
|+Horst Mahler After the RAF
!Horst Mahler left the RAF for the KPD (previously the KPD/AO) in 1974, but remained a Maoist for only a few years: in 1977 he publicly announced that he was now “internally freed from the dogmatic revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism.”<ref>German Law Journal, “Federal Constitutional Court Issues Temporary Injunction in the NPD Party Ban Case,” ''German Law Journal'' [online] 2, no. 13, (August 1, 2001).</ref> As a repentant guerilla, he was supported on humanitarian grounds by ''Jusos'' chairman Gerhard Schröder, who began acting as his lawyer in 1978.
With time off for good behavior, Mahler was released from prison in 1980, at which point his only real political activity was to cooperate with government propaganda programs and appear before young people to condemn political violence.<ref>United Press International, “Parting shots,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', October 4, 1980.</ref>

In the 1990s, however, a new Horst Mahler emerged as the former guerilla-lawyer publicly repositioned himself on the far right of the German political spectrum. Mahler had crossed the Rubicon, and has since earned international renown as a “third position” fascist, and legal defender of Holocaust Deniers and neo-nazis, racists whose opinions the former communist now shares.
His expulsion in 1974 does not stop journalists from routinely describing Mahler as a founding member of the RAF, implying a connection between his previous views and those he holds today. Indeed, Mahler the neo-nazi has attempted to exploit this smear himself, arguing dishonestly that were Meinhof alive today, she, too, would have crossed over to the neofascist camp.
While several leading lights from the sixties APO generation have indeed moved to the far right, these represent only a small minority. In the case of the RAF itself, despite its degeneration and decline in the late eighties and early nineties,<ref>As will be detailed in our second volume, ''The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume II: Dancing with Imperialism: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.''</ref> Mahler is the only former member to have followed this sad trajectory.
|}
[[File:RAF Prisoner Solidarity Poster from RAF - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''“Solidarity with the RAF Comrades’ Hunger Strike”: poster for a public meeting organized by the sponti left, with Rudi Dutschke, Johannes Agnoli, and Peter Brückner. September 1974.'']]
This split, and tensions around the new demand for association, may explain the RAF’s “Provisional Program of Struggle for the Political Rights of Imprisoned Workers,” which was also released that September. An attempt to explain how the struggle against isolation could relate to a wider radical prisoners’ movement, the Provisional Program left the door open to the possibility of struggle alongside other prisoners. While this strategy seems to have borne no fruit, it may have assuaged the dissatisfaction felt by some of those who were unhappy at the new orientation away from integration.

Despite this rocky beginning, the RAF’s third hunger strike was a momentous event, rallying support in a way no previous hunger strike had and serving as a major radicalizing experience for various tendencies of the left.

At first, however, little attention was paid to the striking prisoners, especially in the media, which barely mentioned the strike. The main solidarity activity remained public outreach. Students at the West Berlin Technical University staged a solidarity hunger strike,<ref>Peter Jochen Winters, “Unklarheit über die Rolle der verhafteten Pfarrersfrau,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', November 23, 1974.</ref> and supporters in that city occupied a Lutheran Church demanding an end to isolation, extermination imprisonment, and “clean torture”—they were greeted with support by the Church’s superintendent and several clergymen.<ref>Peter Jochen Winters, “Die Verquickung in Machenschaften der Meinhof-Bande began mit einer Kirschenbetzung,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', Nov. 25, 1974.</ref>

Notable among the prisoners’ Lutheran supporters were Undine Zühlke, a clergyman’s wife, and Vicar Cornelius Burghardt. Both Zühlke and Burghardt organized a public assembly at their church on November 4, where they spoke alongside a number of the prisoners’ lawyers, and where resolutions were passed against isolation torture. Burghardt also publicly admitted having sheltered Meinhof in 1971, explaining that he did so in “the Christian tradition.”<ref>Winters “Unklarheit über die Rolle der verhafteten Pfarrersfrau.”</ref> (Zühlke and Burghardt were soon sentenced under §129—he for sheltering Meinhof and she for smuggling a letter out from Meinhof in early November.<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Verdacht der Unterstützung von Terroristen beunruhigt die Berliner evangelische Kirche,” November 12, 1974. The letter in question, likely about prison conditions, was in fact never delivered—losing her nerve, Zühlke destroyed it rather than pass it on to Burghardt. This did nothing to help her following the Drenkmann action, when police accused her of acting as a courier of a letter which allegedly had to do with his killing, and she was unable to produce said letter to prove that it was about nothing of the sort.</ref> Later that month, the Lutheran Church Council attempted to clamp down on radical church members, issuing a “Statement Against Terrorism” and calling on unnamed clergymen to “reorient themselves” accordingly.<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Erklärung der Kirche gegen Terorismus,” November 29, 1974.</ref>)

At the same time, another noteworthy source of support was the KPD/ML, which had successfully taken over the main Red Aid network in April of that year. The KPD/ML remained hostile to the RAF’s politics, especially to what it viewed as their soft line on the East German and Soviet revisionists. Yet, on the basis of opposing state repression, it and the Red Aid network would provide substantial support, issuing leaflets and organizing demonstrations throughout the hunger strike.

During the strike’s first month, two prisoners—Ronald Augustin and Ali Jansen—were both deprived of water for days at a time.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 28, 30.</ref> Jansen had been sentenced in 1973 to ten years in prison on two counts of attempted murder for having shot at cops when they caught him and other RAF members stealing a car in 1970. Augustin was a graphic artist from Amsterdam, who had joined the RAF after meeting members in that city in 1971; he was arrested on July 24, 1973, attempting to enter the FRG, and charged under §129, as well as for resisting arrest and possession of false documents.<ref>He was sentenced to six years, and received another six months “coercive detention” for refusing to testify in the Stammheim trial. He was finally released and extradited back to Holland in 1980.</ref>

While these two applications of the “dry cell” alarmed the prisoners and their supporters, the strike did not falter, and, in the end, this tactic was not repeated.<ref>It is possible that this reticence to use water deprivation was at least partly due to the RAF prisoners’ threat to escalate to a thirst strike if such measures were adopted. See Ulrike Meinhof Regarding the Liberation of Andreas Baader, cf 370.</ref> Rather, the state sought to keep things defused; as part of this strategy, in early October, the president of the Federal Supreme Court, Theodor Prinzing, ruled in favor of force-feeding Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader. The purview of this ruling was soon extended to the other prisoners.

Force-feeding has been used since at least the early twentieth century by governments and penal authorities wishing to break hunger strikes: not only does this countermeasure seem to diminish what is at stake, as it suggests hunger strikers may no longer die from their protests, but the entire ordeal is designed to be excruciatingly painful, in large part to discourage strikers from continuing. Holger Meins described the procedure:<blockquote>''A red stomach pipe (not a tube) is used, about the thickness of a middle finger… The slightest irritation when the pipe is introduced causes gagging and nausea and the cramping of the chest and stomach muscles, setting off a chain reaction of extremely intense convulsions throughout the body, causing one to buck against the pipe…''</blockquote>He concluded that, “The pipe is, regardless of circumstances, torture.”<ref>Holger Meins’ Report on Force-Feeding, see pages 392-95.</ref>

Adelheid Schulz, a raf member imprisoned in the 1980s, described the effects of force-feeding as hours of nausea, a racing heartbeat, pain, and effects similar to fever—“At times one experiences hot flashes; then one is freezing cold.”<ref>''Von der Zwangernährung zur'' “Koma-Losung,” West Germany, Sept. 1985, 25.</ref>

In the words of Margrit Schiller: “I was force-fed every day for a month. Each time was like a rape. Each time, I felt totally humiliated and destroyed.”<ref>''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.''</ref>

The prisoners insisted that force-feeding was never meant for any purpose other than torture. Events soon convinced many that they were right.<references />
[[Category:Library works by Ulrike Meinhof]]
[[Category:Library works about military theory]]

File:RAF Prisoner Solidarity Poster from RAF - A Documentary History.png

2024-07-22T03:16:41Z

Connolly1916:

Library:The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People

2024-07-22T03:02:24Z

Connolly1916: added more to the chapter

{{Library work|title=The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People|image=Red Army Faction - A Documentary History Volume One Cover.jpeg|author=Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt|written in=1968-1977|published_date=2009|summary=A collection of official Red Army Faction communiques and documents as well as speeches, letters, and other works by individual Red Army Faction members, with historical analysis accompanying the works.}}

“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

== Reviews ==
''This book about the Red Army Faction of American-occupied Germany is one that should be read by any serious student of antiimperialist 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''

== 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.
{| class="wikitable"
|+
|''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.<ref>http://labourhistory.net/raf/</ref> 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.<ref>http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/PolitischeStroemungen/Stadtguerilla+raf/ raf/raf-texte+materialien.pdf</ref> 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 ==
{| class="wikitable"
|+
|2JM
|''Bewegung 2. Juni'' (2nd of June Movement); Berlin-based anarchist guerilla group formed in early 1972, its name comes from the date of the police shooting of protester Benno Ohnesorg in 1967.
|-
|APO
|''Außerparlemtarische Opposition'' (ExtraParliamentary Opposition); the name given to the broad-based militant opposition with its roots in the student movement that encompassed the left-wing anti-imperialist and social revolutionary movements of the late sixties and early seventies.
|-
|ARD
|''Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland'' (Syndicate for Publicly Regulated Radio Stations in the Federal Republic of Germany); state-funded radio.
|-
|BAW
|''Bundesanwaltschaft'' (Federal Prosecutors Office); noted for its aggressive prosecution of cases against the guerilla and the left.
|-
|BGS
|''Bundesgrenzschutz'' (Federal Border Patrol); border security police.
|-
|BKA
|''Bundeskriminalamt'' (Federal Criminal Bureau); the German equivalent of the FBI, particularly active in police activities against the guerilla and the left.
|-
|BND
|''Bundesnachrichtendienst'' (Federal Intelligence Service); the FRG’s foreign intelligence service.
|-
|CDU
|''Christlich Demokratisches Union Deutschlands'' (Christian Democratic Union of Germany); Germany’s mainstream conservative party.
|-
|CSU
|''Christlich-Soziale Union'' in Bayern (Bavarian Christian-Social Union); Bavaria’s mainstream conservative party, the Bavarian partner to the cdu.
|-
|DGB
|''Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund'' (German Union Federation); the largest union federation in the FRG.
|-
|DKP
|''Deutsche Kommunistische Partei'' (German Communist Party); the pro-Soviet communist party founded in 1968, in effect the rebranding of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany), which was banned in 1956.
|-
|FAZ
|''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung''; a high-quality, national, moderate conservative, German daily newspaper.
|-
|FDP
|''Freie Demokratische Partei'' (Free Democratic Party); Germany’s mainstream liberal party.
|-
|GIM
|''Groupe Internationale Marxisten'' (International Marxist Group); West German section of the Trotskyist Fourth International active in the FRG in the seventies and eighties, fused with the KPD/ML to form the VSP in 1986.
|-
|GSG-9
|''Grenzschutzgruppe 9'' (Border Patrol Group 9); officially part of the BGS, in practice Germany’s antiterrorist special operations unit.
|-
|KB
|''Kommunistischer Bund'' (Communist League); a small Maoist group active in the seventies.
|-
|KBW
|''Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschland'' (West German Communist League); founded in Bremen in 1973. A Maoist organization originally associated with China, subsequently shifted their support to Albania and Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime. Dissolved in 1985.
|-
|KPD
|''Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands'' (Communist Party of Germany); pro-Soviet communist party founded in 1919, banned under Hitler in 1933 and under Adenauer in 1956, rebranded as DKP (German Communist Party) in 1968. Also a Maoist party founded by the KPD/AO in 1971 and dissolved in 1980.
|-
|KPD/AO
|''Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands/ Aufbauorganisation'' (Communist Party of Germany/ Pre-Party Formation); a Maoist organization founded in 1970, became the KPD in 1971.
|-
|KPD/ML
|''Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands/Marxisten-Leninisten'' (Communist Party of Germany/Marxist-Leninist); a Maoist party founded on December 31, 1968. It fused with the Trotskyist GIM in 1986 to form the VSP.
|-
|KSV
|''Kommunistische Studentverband'' (Communist Student Association); student wing of the KPD/AO and later the KPD, founded in 1971 and dissolved in 1980.
|-
|ID
|''Informationsdienst''; a left-wing news service published weekly from 1973 until 1981. In 1988, its archives were used to launch the left-wing publisher, Verlag Edition ID-Archiv, specializing in books about the German far left.
|-
|LG
|''Landesgericht'' (Land Court); each of the ''Länder'' had it’s own court system.
|-
|LKA
|''Landeskriminalamt'' (Land Criminal Bureau); the equivalent of the BKA functioning at the level of a state or province.
|-
|LWA
|''Landesanwaltschaft'' (Land Prosecutors Office); the equivalent of a state or provincial prosecutors office.
|-
|NPD
|''Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands'' (National Democratic Party); far-right political party, supported by many neo-nazis.
|-
|OLG
|''Oberlandesgericht'' (Land Court of Appeal); each of the ''Länder'' had it’s own Court of Appeal.
|-
|ÖTV
|''Gewerkschaft öffentliche Dienste, Transport und Verkehr'' (The Public Service, Transport, and Communication Union).
|-
|PFLP
|Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; founded in 1953, secular nationalist and Marxist, the second largest tendency within the PLO after Fatah.
|-
|PFLP (EO)
|Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (External Operations); originally a section of the pflp, expelled in the early seventies for conducting controversial actions outside of Israel, effectively dissolved in 1978 after the death of its leader Waddi Haddad, who had been poisoned by the Mossad.
|-
|RAF
|''Rote Armee Fraktion'' (Red Army Faction).
|-
|RH
|''Rote Hilfe'' (Red Aid); an important prisoner support network which came out of the APO.
|-
|RH e.v.
|''Rote Hilfe e.v.'' (Red Aid registered association); a Red Aid network set up by the KPD/AO in 1970.
|-
|RZ
|''Revolutionäre Zellen'' (Revolutionary Cells); founded in 1973, most groups within its structure ceased activity in 1991, with the final action occurring in 1994.
|-
|SDS
|''Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund'' (Socialist German Students Federation); founded by the SDS in 1946. By the late sixties it was an independent left-wing student federation and the most significant organization in the APO. It dissolved in 1970.
|-
|SHB
|''Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund'' (Social Democratic Student Federation); founded in 1960 by the SPD, dissolved in 1992.
|-
|SPD
|''Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands'' (Social Democratic Party of Germany); Germany’s mainstream social democratic party.
|-
|SPK
|''Socialistiches Patientenkollektiv'' (Socialist Patients’ Collective); founded in 1970, part of the antipsychiatry movement. It dissolved under extreme state pressure in 1971, many of its core members later joining the RAF.
|-
|VSP
|''Vereingte Sozialistische Partei'' (United Socialist Party); formed in 1986 through the fusion of the KPD/ML and the GIM, splintered into various groups in 1993.
|-
|ZDF
|''Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen'' (Second German Television); German publicly regulated television, Europe’s largest broadcasting corporation.
|}

== German Terms ==
<blockquote>''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.''</blockquote>''Bundestag'': The federal 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.

== 1 - “Democracy” Comes to Deutschland: Postfascist Germany and the Continuing Appeal of Imperialism ==
[[File:Germany Map from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb]]
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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>Markus Wolf and Anne McElvoy, ''Man without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster'' (New York: Times Books, 1999), xi.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Charles Higham, ''Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949'' (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983)</ref>

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:<blockquote>''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.<ref>William D. Graf, “Anti-Communism in the Federal Republic of Germany,” ''Socialist Register'' (1984): 167.</ref>''</blockquote>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.<ref>Women Against Imperialist War (Hamburg), “War on Imperialist War,” in Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, ''War on the War Makers: Documents and Communiqués from the West German Left'' (San Francisco: John Brown Book Club n.d.), 21.</ref>

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 insecurity.<ref>There has been much written over the past thirty years about the ways in which the non-Jewish German working class benefited from the Third Reich’s policies, enjoying the position of a labor aristocracy. The most noteworthy book on this subject is Götz Aly’s ''Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial war, and the Nazi Welfare State''; translated by Jefferson Chase, 1st U.S. ed. (New York: Metropolitan, 2007).</ref> 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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>“How to Fight Communism,” March 25, 1948, OMGUS in Patrick Major, ''The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945- 1956'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 247.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Graf, “Anti-Communism,” 169.</ref>

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,<ref>Werner Hülsberg, ''The German Greens: A Social and Political Profile.'' Translated by Gus Fagan. (London: Verso, 1988), 22.</ref> roughly 25% below that of workers in the United States,<ref>5 Karl Heinz Roth, ''L’autre movement ouvrier en Allemagne 1945-78''. Translated by Serge Cosseron. (Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1979), 50.</ref> 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.<ref>Hülsberg, 22-3.</ref>

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%.<ref>Ibid., 23.</ref>

As Werner Hülsberg notes:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>Ibid., 24.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Ibid., 22.</ref>

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.”<ref>Roth, 47.</ref> 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.<ref>Major, 174, 192.</ref>

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:<blockquote>[[File:Greek Workers West German Factory from RAF - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''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.'']]''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.''<ref>Hülsberg, 25.</ref> </blockquote>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,<ref>Roth, 121.</ref> 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?”<ref>David Haworth, “Why German Workers Don’t Ask For Raises,” ''Winnipeg Free Press'', December 11, 1968.</ref>

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.”<ref>Hülsberg, 25.</ref> Left-wing trade unionists were expelled from the party, as were the editors of the socialist newspaper ''Die Andere Zeitung'',<ref>Graf, “Anti-communism,” 183.</ref> 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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>William Graf, “Beyond Social Democracy in West Germany?” ''Socialist Register'' (1985/86): 118.</ref> </blockquote>

=== 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.<ref>“Die Integration der Bundesrepublik ins westliche Bündnissystem,” <nowiki>http://www.kssursee.ch/schuelerweb/kalter-krieg/kk/integration.htm</nowiki>.</ref> 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.”<ref>Women Against Imperialist War, 22.</ref>

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 soldiers<ref>Regarding all these, see ''The Neo-colonialism of the West German Federal Republic'' (German Democratic Republic: Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, 1965), 20-35, 39-45, 62-65, 82-85.</ref> and mercenaries, including veterans of the Nazi SS.<ref>Madeleine G. Kalb, ''The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa from Eisenhower to Kennedy'' (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 193.</ref>

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.<ref>Frieder Sclupp, “Modell Deutschland and the International Division of Labour: The Federal Republic of Germany in the World Political Economy,” in ''The Foreign Policy of West Germany: Formation and Contents'', ed. Ekkert Kruippendorf and Volker Rittberger (London: sage Publications, 1980).</ref> 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:<blockquote>''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.''</blockquote>Or, as the American ''Evening Star'' wrote that same year:<blockquote>''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…''<ref>Quoted in ''The Neo-colonialism of the West German Federal Republic'', 96-7.</ref> </blockquote>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.<ref>Daniel Ganser, ''NATO’s Secret Army: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe'' (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 190-211.</ref>

=== Better Dead Than Red ===
[[File:'All Marxist Roads Lead to Moscow' poster from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''“All Marxist Roads Lead to Moscow”: election poster for the CDU, 1953.'']]
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.<ref>Hülsberg, 15.</ref>

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:<blockquote>''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.''<ref>German Bundestag, Administration, Public Relations section, ''Law for the Federal Republic of Germany'' (Berlin, 2001), 22.</ref> </blockquote>The following restriction to Article 21, limiting the right to form political parties, was added to this already ominous provision:<blockquote>''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''.<ref>Ibid., 23.</ref> </blockquote>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 State, and Offenses against Public Order.<ref>Sebastien Cobler, ''Law, Order and Politics in West Germany'' (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1978), 76.</ref> Minister of Justice Thomas Dehler explained that these laws would be used to combat “ideological high treason,” “ideological subversion,” and “ideological sabotage.”<ref>Ibid., 74.</ref> In short, thought crime.

The immediate target of all these statutes and constitutional restrictions became clear with due haste. On November 23, 1951, the federal government applied to the Constitutional Court to have the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) proscribed, on the basis of the aforementioned Article 21 of the Basic Law. This was at a time when the party held fifteen seats in the ''Bundestag''.

The Communists had opposed integration into NATO and as late as 1952 paid lip service to the revolutionary overthrow of the Adenauer regime. While it clearly didn’t have mass political support—it had garnered only 2.2% of the vote in the 1952 elections<ref>Wolfgang Abendroth, Helmut Ridder and Otto Schonfeldt, eds., ''KPD Verbot oder mit Kommunisten leben'' (Hamburg: Rororo Taschenbuch Verlag, 1968), 38.</ref>—the KPD nevertheless constituted a potential nuisance as the only political institution to speak up for a number of popular interests which were poorly represented by the major parties:<blockquote>''Its continued advocacy of an anti-fascist, socialist front, its opposition to rearmament and atomic weapons, its resistance to authoritarian trends such as restrictions on free speech and emergency laws, and its demands for a greater measure of economic democracy were aims shared by members of a great range of groups, including neglected interests within the established parties. It was evident… that to discredit or even criminalize the KPD would also be to reduce the appeal of all groups that shared any of its aims.''<ref>Graf, “Anti-communism,” 179.</ref> </blockquote>The trial of the KPD began on November 11, 1954. Sensing the direction things were going in, the party distanced itself from revolutionary politics in public statements in early 1956. It was already too late: on August 17 of that year, the KPD was declared illegal. Hundreds of arrests followed; not only party members, but also their families, members of alleged front groups, and anyone suspected of communist sympathies, were targeted, and a comprehensive apparatus developed to undertake surveillance of all these individuals and organizations.<ref>Ibid., 180.</ref>

The suppression of the KPD was just the most obvious volley in a broader process of constitutional repression. On August 2, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that the organization and promotion of demonstrations, meetings, and strikes could also constitute treason. A few months later, the Federal Supreme Court ruled that, “No action in a strike which goes beyond the cessation of work and violates interests protected by the law is justified by the so-called strike law.”<ref>Cobler, 183-184.</ref> In 1955, the essential nature of the Basic Law was further confirmed by a general ban on all political strikes.<ref>Ibid., 80.</ref>

At the same time, ample use was made of Dreher’s new security measures. By the 1960s, thousands of cases of treason were being brought before the courts:<blockquote>''…in 1963 10,322 actions were started against people alleged to have committed treasonable offenses of one kind or another. In many cases these actions were against more than one person. In 1961 a total of 442 people were sentenced for various categories of “treason”. Admittedly, of these 36 were only fined and 212 only got between 9 months and 5 years and 5 were sentenced to between 5 and 15 years. Many others had their careers ruined by court actions in which the State failed to prove its case.''<ref>David Childs, ''From Schumacher to Brandt: The Story of German Socialism 1945-1965'' (New York: Pergamon Press, 1966), 49.</ref> </blockquote>With its culture sterilized and its traditions of worker militancy broken, the postfascist, post-genocidal society provided an ideal foundation for a new authoritarian and technocratic capitalist state.
{| class="wikitable"
|+Not Wanted in the Model: The KPD
|Immediately after the war, the KPD benefited from an unambiguous anti-Nazi track record, but this strong position quickly crumbled due to a variety of factors. Patrick Major of Warwick University has provided a valuable overview of this decline in his book ''The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956''.
According to Major, the postwar Party leadership found itself frequently at odds with its more radical rank and file. It was ill placed to connect with its supposed constituency—the proletariat—as many working class grievances took aim at the occupying powers, one of which was the Soviet Union. Indeed, as Major notes, “the earliest proponents of strikes tended to be Social Democrats, whereas, like their French comrades, the German Communists placed national reconstruction before wage increases or even denazification of management.”<ref>Patrick Major, ''The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 170.</ref>

The Party was further handicapped by its ties to East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). The SED encouraged the KPD’s conservative tendencies, insisting that it prioritize forging a progressive nationalist opposition to the Western occupiers, relegating class struggle to the back burner. Not only was it still hoped that the “Western Zone” could be pried out of the hands of imperialism, but it was also recognized that the KPD’s chief competition—the SPD—was winning support with its own “nationalistic rabble rousing.”<ref>Ibid., 115.</ref>

During this patriotic phase, anticapitalist rhetoric was toned down; in some ''Länder'', Party members were instructed to stop singing the ''Internationale'' in public, and the hammer and sickle and Soviet star emblems were removed from their paraphernalia.<ref>Ibid., 116.</ref> To the disgust of many comrades who had barely survived the Third Reich, the KPD even briefly attempted to establish a broad “anticolonialist” National Front, appealing to middle class elements, patriotic capitalists, and even former Nazi supporters.<ref>Ibid., 133.</ref>

Although the KPD was banned in 1956, this dubious “anticolonialism” represented real class forces, and a significant section of progressive opinion. While these gestures failed to win the Communists any significant nationalist support, the politics they represented remained visible in the future campaigns against rearmament and nuclear weapons. Though overwhelmingly left-wing, these campaigns were still able to attract (and accept) support from conservatives and even fascists who opposed integration within the western bloc as “unpatriotic.”
The connection to East Germany’s SED became an ever-greater liability as the Cold War descended: while western communists opposed rearmament in the FRG, they had to make excuses for it in the GDR; while they decried exploitative work conditions in the west, they had to defend piece work policies in the east; while they complained of “colonization” of the FRG by the Americans, they had to remain pointedly silent about “integration” of the GDR into the Soviet Bloc.
Thus, even as the Party played an important role in articulating opposition to the authoritarian Adenauer regime, it faced an uphill battle, not only because of right-wing repression, but also due to the contradictory demands of struggling in the Western Zone while its counterpart ruled in the East.
These political weaknesses, combined with the deep changes to Germany’s class structure that occurred during the Hitler period, prevented the KPD from ever mounting a serious challenge to the new FRG. So much so that according to Major, “In some ways the KPD leadership was ‘saved by the bell’, banned before an internal party discussion could look for scapegoats for the disastrous policies of the past decade.”<ref>Ibid., 226.</ref>
|}

== 2 - The Re-Emergence of Revolutionary Politics in West Germany ==
In the years before the Hitler regime, Germany was home to one of the strongest and most militant left-wing movements in Europe, firmly based in the country’s large and well organized working class. The years after World War I saw insurrections in Bavaria and the Ruhr region, and had it not been for errors and betrayals on the left, many still believe that communist revolution in Germany could have succeeded in giving birth to a radically different twentieth century.

That, of course, is not what happened, and as events unfolded the left that had impressed generations of European socialists was decimated by the rise of German fascism, forced into exile, reduced to inactivity, or sent off to the camps.

When the organized institutions of the left reappeared in the postwar period, they were incapable of overcoming their own historical weaknesses, weaknesses that were actively reinforced by the Allies’ corrupt and repressive policies. Those few independent antifascist groups which had formed in the last days of the war quickly found themselves banned, unwelcome intruders on the victors’ plans, this Allied suppression of any autonomous workers’ or antifascist revolt constituting the flipside to the charade of denazification.

The eclipse of any authentic left-wing opposition continued in the years following the division of Germany. The Christian Democratic Union, the concrete expression of the alliance between the German ruling class and American imperialism, experienced little in the way of opposition as it helped implement the Marshall Plan and establish the legal machinery with which to fight any resurgence of left-wing militancy.

Yet, while the political aspects of the Marshall Plan were carried out with little difficulty, the rearming of West Germany, not surprisingly when one considers the outcome of both World Wars, met with intense opposition.

In the immediate postwar period, West Germans were overwhelmingly opposed to rearmament. By 1952, this sentiment had coalesced into a broad movement, including the not-yet-banned KPD, trade unions, socialist youth groups, Protestant church groups,<ref>Paul Hockenos has noted that for some Protestants, their religion may have made them particularly receptive to the first postwar protest movements, due to feelings of marginalization within the new truncated state: whereas Protestants had outnumbered Catholics by nearly two to one in prewar Germany, there was rough parity between the two religions in the FRG. See Paul Hockenos, ''Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: an Alternative History of Postwar Germany'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22. Despite this fact, the churches remained overwhelmingly anticommunist and hostile to left-wing politics.</ref> pacifists, and, at times, sections of the SPD. This progressive alliance was flanked on its right by small numbers of nationalists and even fascists who objected to the way in which rearmament would anchor the country in the western bloc.<ref>As one deputy from the neo-nazi Socialist Reich Party put it, “First we were told that guns and ammunition were poison and now this poison has turned to sweets which we should eat. But we are not Negroes or idiots to whom they can do whatever they want. It is either they or us who should be admitted to the insane asylum.” [Martin Lee, ''The Beast Reawakens'' (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 65.]</ref> Despite this, the “Without Us Movement” (as it was known) was a predominantly left-wing amalgam. It was the first large protest movement in the new Federal Republic,<ref>For the sake of clarity, it should be remembered that in the years between the Nazi defeat and the establishment of the FRG, there was a large strike movement in favour of nationalization of the country’s largest industries. This movement, which initially seemed to have the wind in its sails, was opposed by the Allied occupiers. Its fate was sealed when the new trade unions obediently redirected it towards token co-management and de-cartelization. As such, it provides a stark example of workers’ political activity sabotaged by their putative left-wing representatives even before the occupation had ended. (Roth, 50-51; Hülsberg, 29-32; Childs, 67-84.)</ref> and while it may appear timid and ineffectual in retrospect, it represented a real break in the postwar consensus at the time.

The response from the Adenauer regime revealed the limits of CDU democracy: in 1951, a KPD referendum initiative on the question was banned, as according to the Basic Law only the federal government was empowered to call a plebiscite. The Communists decided to go ahead anyway, polling people on street corners, through newspaper questionnaires, and at popular meeting places. The “referendum” was more agit prop than a scientific study; at one movie cinema in the town of Celle, for instance, there is a report that just as the feature film ended an eager pollster asked everyone opposed to rearmament to stand up—100% opposition was recorded. Little surprise that the KPD eventually found that almost six million West Germans had “registered” their opposition to the government’s plans.<ref>Major, 145</ref>

Suffice it to say that Adenauer was not amused, and polling people soon became a risky endeavor: there were a total of 7,331 arrests, and the KPD Free German Youth front group was banned simply for engaging in what amounted to a glorified petition campaign.<ref>5 Ibid., Hülsberg, 33.</ref>
[[File:Philipp Müller from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''Philipp Müller, April 5, 1931– May 11, 1952'']]
At the same time, as if to make matters crystal clear, on May 11, 1952, a peace rally in the city of Essen was attacked by police, at first with dogs and clubs, and then with live ammunition. Philipp Müller, a member of Free German Youth, became the first person to be killed in a demonstration in the new Federal Republic. As a sign of things to come, no police officer would ever face charges for Müller’s death, but eleven demonstrators were subsequently jailed for a total of six years and four months for disorderly conduct and “crimes of treason against the Constitution.”<ref>Bernd Langer, ''Art as Resistance''. Translated by Anti-Fascist Forum. (Göttingen: Aktiv-Dr. und Verl., 1998), 8.</ref>

Not that repression was the only tool against incipient revolt: misdirection also remained an important weapon in the ruling class arsenal. Throughout 1953, there were almost one hundred strikes at different factories to protest against the CDU’s rearmament policies. As the politicized sections of the working class were moving aggressively against Adenauer’s plans, the SPD and trade union leadership lined up to rein things in. All energy was now funneled into one big rally in Frankfurt. However, the initiative was removed from the rank and file, and in the end the rally was simply used to drum up support for the SPD.<ref>Hülsberg, 34.</ref> As the CDU moved ahead regardless, the Social Democrats withdrew organizational support, and the movement (now robbed of any autonomous basis) dissipated almost immediately.<ref>Hockenos, 42-3.</ref>

With its most steadfast opponents kept in disarray by their “leaders,” the Adenauer regime easily ratified rearmament through the Treaty of Paris in 1954. The next few years saw the establishment of voluntary military service, universal male conscription, and the production of war materials, further sealing the ties between big business and the state. Demoralized by their failure to prevent any of this, the opposition began to melt, a 1955 poll finding that almost two thirds of the population now considered remilitarization to be a “political necessity.”<ref>Nick Thomas, ''Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy'' (New York: Berg, 2003), 33.</ref>

For the CDU, rearmament, like the Basic Law, was simply part of the Federal Republic acquiring the powers of a “normal” state, part of West Germany’s integration into the imperialist bloc. While there were numerous such state powers bestowed during this period, one which will bear some relevance to our study is the 1951 establishment of the ''Bundesgrenzschutz'', the Federal Border Guard, also known as the BGS. Under the jurisdiction of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the BGS was initially a paramilitary force of 10,000, its activity restricted “to the border area ‘to a depth of thirty kilometres.”<ref>Cobler, 134.</ref>

In 1951, most leftists had feared that the BGS was a roundabout way to establish a standing army. As we have seen, such a ploy did not prove necessary (although many border guards would be integrated into the new armed forces). Rather, the Border Guard would eventually serve as the basis for a national semi-militarized police force.

Despite these discouraging beginnings, antimilitary sentiment remained high, and when, in 1956, the Adenauer government responded favorably to a U.S. “offer” of tactical nuclear weapons, this set off a series of spontaneous mobilizations across the country. In 1957, members of West Germany’s second largest union, the Public Service, Transport, and Communication Union (ÖTV) voted 94.9% in favor of a strike against nuclear armament, a call which was echoed by the president of the powerful IG Metall trade union. In Hannover, 40,000 people demonstrated against nuclear arms, while in Munich there was a turnout of 80,000, and in Hamburg 120,000 people took to the streets.<ref>Thomas, 35.</ref> Opinion polls showed 52% of the population supporting an antinuclear general strike.

The SPD and trade union brass moved to quash this mass movement, which was spinning out of control, by redirecting the campaign away from the streets and factories and into the ballot boxes, proposing a referendum instead of a general strike. Predictably, the government challenged this referendum proposal before the Constitutional Court, where it was ruled unconstitutional in 1958.

The ploy worked, the momentum was broken, and the antinuclear weapons movement entered a period of sharp decline. For years to come, its only visible legacy would be the annual peace demonstrations held every Easter Weekend, the so-called Easter Marches.

Of great relevance to the future history of the West German left, and our story in particular, an important counterpoint to the disreputable machinations of the SPD emerged from its own youth wing: the Socialist German Student Union (SDS).

The SDS had been founded in 1946 as a training ground from which to groom the future party elite (Helmut Schmidt, West Germany’s future Chancellor, was the group’s first president). In the context of the anti-rearmament movement, though, a shift began to occur, and at its 1958 conference, the leadership of the SDS was won by elements significantly to the left of the SPD:<blockquote>''Their main interest was in the development of socialist policies and, in particular, they wanted to build the campaign against nuclear weapons, a campaign which the SPD had already deserted. The resolutions of the SDS conference were a “declaration of war” on the SPD leadership. The SDS first of all developed an anti-imperialist position and demanded the right of national self-determination for the Algerians and the withdrawal of French colonial troops. After this there were congresses against nuclear weapons, for democracy and in opposition to militarism. The SPD strongly condemned this development.''<ref>Hülsberg, 38.</ref> </blockquote>In May of 1960, to counter this leftwards drift, students loyal to the SPD leadership formed the Social Democratic Student Union (SHB).

This move by the right was answered in October 1961 by SPD left wingers forming the Society for the Promotion of Socialism (SF). Unable to neutralize this growing left-wing revolt, the SPD leadership decided to do what it could to isolate it, purging the SF and SDS in a move which completed the alienation of the critical intelligentsia and youth from the party for years to come. (Ironically, the SHB itself continued to be pulled to the left, forced to tail positions staked out by the SDS, until it too would find itself expelled in the 1970s.)<ref>Graf, “Beyond Social Democracy,” 104-5.</ref>

Things were brewing beneath the surface, and a new generation was finding itself increasingly miserable within the suffocating and conservative ''Modell Deutschland''. American expatriate Paul Hockenos describes the fifties cultural climate that surrounded these young people:<blockquote>''Corporal punishment in schools… was still routine, and at universities students could be expelled for interrupting a lecture. The Federal Republic still had “coupling laws” on the books that forbade single men and women under twenty-one to spend the night together—or even to spend time together unchaperoned. Parents who allowed their children to stray could face legal penalties. In contrast to the GDR’s school curricula, in which the churches had no say, in the West German schools there weren’t sexual-education programs until the 1960s.''<ref>Hockenos, 31.</ref></blockquote>
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Old Left and the New Reality
|Under the postwar occupation regime, various intellectuals who had been exiled under Nazism returned home, while others who had remained silent found their voices.
While this was a broader phenomenon, two groups in particular stand out: the Frankfurt School and the ''Gruppe 47''.

The Frankfurt School had emerged from the Institute for Social Research, founded at the University of Frankfurt in 1924 under the tutelage of one of its prominent members, Max Horkheimer. Critical of the narrow intellectual nature of traditional Marxism, members integrated new ideas from the fields of sociology, philosophy, and psychiatry to produce a highly influential and intellectually rigorous theoretical platform, eventually known as “Critical Theory.” Key members, almost all of them men, many of them Jewish, included Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. Going into exile in 1933, the Frankfurt School was based out of Columbia University in New York City until 1943. While Horkheimer and Adorno chose to return to Germany after the war, many others remained in the United States.
The ''Gruppe 47'' was a literary circle founded in 1947 to help give expression to a new generation of German writers who had lived through the war, and who hoped to use their cRAFt as a way to reckon with the with the Nazi experience. Key members included Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Ilse Aichinger, and Erich Fried. There were few Jews or women involved, and amongst the Germans, some were later revealed to have previously been active Nazis. Yet, despite these shortcomings, the ''Gruppe 47'' established itself as an important progressive influence on postwar German culture.

While they may have all initially sympathized with the sixties revolt, many of these intellectuals soon felt alienated by the younger generation’s goals and methods of direct action and violent protest.
Ironically, while the Frankfurt School influenced many of the sixties revolutionaries, it also provided the strongest negative reaction, with Jürgen Habermas going so far as to accuse student radicals of flirting with “left-wing fascism.” Though an inability to agree about the meaning of the student revolt led to the precipitous decline of the ''Gruppe 47'', some of its members remained vocal critics of the political establishment. Heinrich Böll and Erich Fried in particular continued to denounce the state’s penchant for authoritarian solutions, even in regards to its war against the guerilla.
|}
In the words of Detlev Claussen, who would later participate in his generation’s revolt, “They try to make it look better than it was but it really was that bad! It was a terrible, terrible time to grow up.”<ref>Ibid., 29.</ref>

Another indication of what life was like in the post-genocidal society came in the winter of 1959-60, as a wave of antisemitic graffiti and attacks on Jewish cemeteries swept over the country. This prompted some Frankfurt School sociologists to carry out a study which revealed that behind an apathetic 41% who remained indifferent, a hardcore 16% of the population was openly antisemitic, supportive of the death penalty (banned under the Basic Law) and expressing “an excessive inclination for authority.”<ref>Jean-Paul Bier, “The Holocaust and West Germany: Strategies of Oblivion 1947-1979” ''New German Critique'' 19, Special Issue 1: Germans and Jews Winter (1980): 13.</ref>

One of the projects most responsible for challenging this reactionary and stultifying culture was the magazine ''konkret'', published in Hamburg by Klaus Rainer Röhl. An increasingly important forum for progressive youth who rejected the CDU consensus and the country’s conservative cultural mores, the magazine was widely read within the SDS. As Karin Bauer notes, “the magazine thrived from the happy union of intellectual, aesthetic, and popular appeal…”<ref>Karin Bauer, ''Everybody Talks About the Weather… We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof'' (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 27.</ref> Decidedly political, “Recurrent themes were Cuba, anticolonialism, German fascism, the antinuclear struggle, human rights, and social justice.”<ref>Ibid., 30.</ref>

Unbeknownst to its public, ''konkret'' was actually funded and in part controlled by one of the remaining clandestine KPD cells which had gone into exile in East Germany.<ref>“My Mother, The Terrorist”, ''Deutsche Welle'' [online], March 14, 2006.</ref> The magazine’s chief editor was Röhl’s wife, a woman who had been active in the SDS since 1957, and had secretly joined the illegal KPD in 1959. Her name was Ulrike Meinhof.

Another radicalizing event for many young people at the time was the Auschwitz trials, held in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965. Largely a propaganda exercise to cover up the far greater number of Nazis who had found their way into the new West German establishment, twenty-two former SS-men and one ''Kapo'' were tried for murder or complicity in murder. Regardless of the hypocritical aspect of the trial, the fact that for two and a half years almost three hundred witnesses came and testified, and had their testimony reported in the media, gave an inkling of what Auschwitz meant to a generation of German youth, who—quite understandably—now saw their teachers, civic leaders, and even their parents in a horrible new light.

These trials, and the general “discovery” of the Holocaust, were a radicalizing event for many young people at that time;<ref>Hockenos, 34-35. See also Dagmar Herzog, “‘Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together’: Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany,” ''Critical Inquiry'' 24, 2: Intimacy, (Winter 1988): 402-403.</ref> as one veteran of the New Left would later recall:<blockquote>''That the Germans could kill millions of human beings just because they had a different faith was utterly inexplicable to me. My whole moral world view shattered, got entwined with a rigorous rejection of my parents and school. If religion had not prevented this mass destruction of human beings, then it is no good for anything, then the whole talk of love of your neighbor and of meekness. . . was just a lie.''<ref>Eberhard Knodler-Bunte, in Herzog, 416.</ref> </blockquote>Despite what in retrospect may seem to have been a growing potential for revolt, during these early years, the SDS was silent, turned inward, engaging in “seminar Marxism” as it found its bearings outside of the SPD and struggled to elaborate a consistent analysis and strategy. When it did return to the public arena, it was as a small, consciously anti-imperialist organization influenced by the experiences of China, Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam, advancing the analysis that “liberation movements in the Third World, marginal groups in society, and socialist intellectuals now constituted the revolutionary subject in society and the appropriate strategy was direct action.”<ref>Hülsberg, 39.</ref> (It is worth noting that the German Democratic Republic was pointedly not one of the ideological reference points for the new SDS.)

A line was crossed when Moise Tschombe visited Berlin in December 1964. To the applause of the West German ruling class, and with the help of German mercenaries, Tschombe had led a bloody, anticommunist secession in the Congolese province of Katanga. He was considered responsible for the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first president of the Congo and a beloved symbol of the anticolonial struggle in Africa.

Hundreds of protesters turned out against Tschombe, and when the police tried to clear them away, they fought back in what would later be described as the starting point of the antiauthoritarian revolt in West Germany.<ref>Thomas, 94. See also Gretchen Dutschke, ''Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schönes Leben'' (Köln: K&W, 1996), 60-61.</ref>

The SDS played a prominent part in this protest. Based on university campuses, it was becoming the most important organization in the growing and increasingly militant protest movement against imperialist domination of the global South, most especially against the war in Indochina. Demonstrations ceased to be the timid rituals they had been; for the first time in decades, student protests escalated into street fighting.

1964 was also a year of change for ''konkret''. The communist world was at the time deeply divided by the falling out between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Over the years, this split would only become more bitter until each side came to see the other as being objectively as bad as—or even worse than!—the imperialism represented by the United States. Despite its ties to the KPD, ''konkret'' was taking an increasingly pro-Chinese line, going so far as to support China’s acquiring nuclear weapons. At this, its East German patrons lost patience, and after failing to browbeat Meinhof into submission at a secret meeting in East Berlin, they cut off all funding.<ref>Jutta Ditfurth, ''Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biographie'' (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007), 180-181.</ref> In their turn, Meinhof and Röhl resigned from the kpd. As a solution to this new lack of money, Röhl made drastic changes to the magazine’s presentation, turning it into a glossy publication which now featured scantilyclad women in every issue—its circulation almost tripled.<ref>David Kramer, “Ulrike Meinhof: An Emancipated Terrorist?” in ''European Women on the Left: Socialism, Feminism, and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present.'' Jane Slaughter and Robert Kern, eds. Contributions in Women’s Studies. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press 1981), 201.</ref> Far from suffering as a result of their separation from the SPD, the SDS, ''konkret'', and others on the left were now particularly well placed to benefit from a series of economic and political developments, even though these were not of their doing and lay well beyond their control.

In 1966-67, a recession throughout the capitalist world pushed unemployment in the FRG to over a million for the first time in the postwar era, a situation the ruling class attempted to exploit to tip the balance of power even further in its favor. As Karl Heinz Roth explains:<blockquote>''Threats of job losses and elimination of all the groups of workers who would have been able to initiate advanced forms of struggle laid the basis for a general anti-worker offensive.''<ref>Roth, 101.</ref> </blockquote>Furthermore:<blockquote>''The bosses freely admitted that they were using the crisis to intensify work conditions amongst all layers of the global working class. From their point of view, the temporary investment strike was necessary to create the basis for a recovery through a “cleansing of the personnel.” Three hundred thousand immigrant workers and almost as many German workers were thrown out into the street.''<ref>Ibid., 100.</ref></blockquote>In a move to consolidate support amongst more privileged German workers and thus exploit the divisions within the proletariat, the SPD was brought into a so-called “Grand Coalition” government alongside the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union. This created a situation in which former resistance fighter and SPD chief Willy Brandt was now vice-chancellor alongside former Nazi Georg Kiesinger of the CDU, and the CSU’s far-right Franz Josef Strauß was Minister of Finance alongside the SPD’s young luminary, Karl Schiller, who held the Economics portfolio.

The SPD was completely discredited by its open embrace of these reactionaries, and it now appeared that any real change could only come about outside of government channels. Disenchantment struck at West Germany’s youth in the universities, in the factories and on the street, as younger workers were increasingly marginalized by the new corporatist compact. The ''Außerparlamentarische'' ''Opposition'' (APO), or Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, was born.

The revolt was focused in West Berlin, an enclave that was a three-hour drive into East Germany, and which remained officially under western Allied occupation, and so enjoyed the bizarre status of being a de facto part of the Federal Republic even though it remained legally distinct.<ref>There was one autobahn through the GDR connecting the city to the Federal Republic, which the East Germans were obligated by international agreements to keep open. The highway ran through desolate countryside, and was flanked by East German armed forces at all times.</ref> In a sense, West Berlin afforded the personal freedoms of the capitalist west while its odd diplomatic status provided its residents with extra room to maneuver outside of the west’s constraints.<ref>For many examples of just how careful the Federal Republic had to be in imposing itself in West Berlin, see Avril Pittman, ''From Ostpolitik to reunification: West German-Soviet political relations since 1974'' (Cambridge, England & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32-62.</ref> This had many important consequences, not the least of which was that young men who moved to West Berlin could avoid the dRAFt, as they were technically living outside of the FRG.

Not surprisingly, the city became a magnet for the radicals and counterculture rebels of the new generation. In the words of one woman who lived there, it was “a self-contained area where political developments of all kinds… become evident much earlier than elsewhere and much more sharply, as if they were under a magnifying glass.”<ref>Hilke Schlaeger and Nancy Vedder-Shults, “West German Women’s Movement,” ''New German Critique'' 13 (Winter 1978): 61.</ref>
[[File:West Berlin Dancing from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Andreas Baader, Dorothea Ridder and Rainer Langhans, dancing in the streets of West Berlin (August, 1967)'']]
Thus, it was in West Berlin that a group of students, gathered around Hans-Jürgen Krahl and the East German refugees Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl, began questioning not only the economic system, but the very nature of society itself. The structure of the family, the factory, and the school system were all challenged as these young rebels mixed the style of the hippy counterculture with ideas drawn from the Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism.

Communes and housing associations sprung up. Women challenged the male leadership and orientation within the SDS and the APO, setting up daycares, women’s caucuses, women’s centers, and women-only communes. The broader counterculture, rockers, artists, and members of the drug scene rallied to the emerging political insurgency. Protests encompassed traditional demonstrations as well as sit-ins, teach-ins, and happenings. So called “Republican Clubs” spread out to virtually every town and city as centers for discussion and organizing, bridging the divide between the younger radicals and veterans of the earlier peace movements.

As one historian has put it:<blockquote>''Everywhere it could, the 1960s generation countered the German petit bourgeois ethic with its antithesis, as they interpreted it: prudery with free love, nationalism with internationalism, the nuclear family with communes, provincialism with Third World solidarity, obedience to the law with civil disobedience, tradition with wide-open experimentation, servility with in-your-face activism.''<ref>Hockenos, 80.</ref> </blockquote>Or, as one former SDS member would recall, it was a time when “everything”—hash, politics, sex, and Vietnam—“all seemed to hang together with everything else.”<ref>Eckhard Siepmann in Herzog, 427.</ref>

Despite its growing popularity on campus and amongst hipsters, this new radical youth movement was not embraced by the population at large, and demonstrations would often be heckled or even attacked by onlookers. This widespread hostility was a green light for state repression, with results which would soon become clear for all to see.

On June 2, 1967, thousands of people turned out to demonstrate outside the German Opera against a visit by the Shah of Iran, whose brutal regime was a key American ally in the Middle East. Many wore paper masks in the likeness of the Shah and his wife; these had been printed up by Rainer Langhans and Holger Meins of the K.1 commune,<ref>Kommune 1 in German.</ref> “So the police couldn’t recognize us [and so] they only saw the face of the one they were protecting.”<ref>G. Conradt and H. Jahn, ''Starbuck Holger Meins'', directed by G. Conradt. (Germany: Hartmut Jahn Filmproduktion, 2002).</ref> Thus adorned, the protesters greeted the Iranian monarch and his wife with volleys of rotten tomatoes and shouts of “Murderer!”

(As Ulrike Meinhof would later write in ''konkret'': “the students who befouled the Shah did not act on their own behalf, but rather on behalf of the Persian peasants who are in no position to resist under present circumstances, and the tomatoes could only be symbols for better projectiles…”)<ref>“Women in the sds; or, Or Our Own Behalf, (1968)” in German Feminist Writing, eds. Patricia A. Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 160.</ref>

The June 2 rally would be a turning point, as the protesters were brutally set upon by the police and SAVAK, the Iranian secret service. Many fought back, and the demonstration is reported to have “descended into the most violent battle between protesters and police so far in the postwar period… It was only around 12:30 am that the fighting came to an end, by which time 44 demonstrators had been arrested, and the same number of people had been injured, including 20 police officers.”<ref>Thomas, 111-112.</ref>
[[File:Benno Ohensorg murdered by police from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Benno Ohnesorg, shot by police, lies dying in the arms of fellow student Fredericke Dollinger.'']]
Most tragically, a young member of the Evangelical Student Association, Benno Ohnesorg, attending his first demonstration, was shot in the back of the head by Karl-Heinz Kurras, a plainclothes police officer with the Red Squad. Even after Ohnesorg was finally picked up by an ambulance, it was another forty minutes before he was brought to a hospital. He died of his wounds that night.

This police murder was a defining event, electrifying the student movement and pushing it in a far more militant direction. It has been estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 students took part in demonstrations across the country in the days immediately following Ohnesorg’s death. For many, especially those outside of West Berlin, it was their first political protest. As has been noted elsewhere, “Although two-thirds of students in the period before the shooting declared themselves to be apolitical, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting a survey found that 65 per cent of students had been politicized by Ohnesorg’s death.”<ref>Ibid., 114.</ref>

The murder catapulted the SDS into the center of student politics across the Federal Republic. As one student activist later recalled years later:<blockquote>''The SDS didn’t have more than a few hundred members nationwide… and then all at once there was such a huge deluge that we couldn’t cope. Our offices were overrun. So we just opened SDS up and decentralized everything. We let people in different cities and towns organize themselves into autonomous project groups and then we’d all meet at regular congresses to thrash things out. More or less by chance it turned out to be an incredible experiment in participatory democracy.''<ref>Christian Semler in Hockenos, 69.</ref> </blockquote>Initially, the state and the newspapers owned by reactionary press magnate Axel Springer<ref>The Springer chain consisted of conservative tabloids, among them ''Bild, Berliner Zeitung'', and ''Berliner Morgenpost''. They led a campaign to smear progressive students as “muddle heads,” East German spies, and storm troopers—at times even crossing the line and advocating vigilante violence. As Jeremy Varon notes, “Springer publications accounted for more than 70 percent of the West Berlin press and more than 30 percent of the national daily newspaper market. As the press fed a climate of anti-student hysteria, the reaction of the media to the New Left itself became a major object of protest.” [Jeremy Varon, ''Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 38-39.]</ref> tried to justify this murder, repeating lies that the protesters had had plans to kill police and that Kurras had shot in self-defense. Springer’s ''Bild Zeitung'' ominously warned that “A young man died in Berlin, victim of the riots instigated by political hooligans who call themselves demonstrators. Riots aren’t enough anymore. They want to see blood. They wave the red flag and they mean it. This is where democratic tolerance stops.”<ref>Hockenos, 68.</ref>

On June 3, the Berlin Senate banned demonstrations in the city— twenty-five year old Gudrun Ensslin was one of eight protesters arrested for defying this ban the next day<ref>Stefan Aust, ''The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon''. Translated by Anthea Bell. (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1987), 44.</ref>—and the chief of police Duensing proudly explained his tactics as those he would use when confronted with a smelly sausage: “The left end stinks [so] we had to cut into the middle to take off the end.”<ref>Thomas, 115.</ref> As for the Shah, he tried to reassure the Mayor of Berlin Heinrich Albertz, telling him not to think too much of it, “these things happen every day in Iran…”<ref>Aust, 44.</ref>

Nevertheless, given the widespread sense of outrage and the increasing evidence that Ohnesorg had been killed without provocation, Duensing was forced out of his job, and Senator for Internal Affairs Büsch and Mayor Albertz were eventually made to follow suit.

If June 2 has been pointed to as the “coming out” of the West German New Left mass student phenomenon, the international circumstances in which this occurred were not without significance. Just three days after Ohnesorg’s murder, West Germany’s ally Israel attacked Egypt, and quickly destroyed its army—as well as Jordanian and Syrian forces—in what became known as the Six Day War.

In the FRG, the Six Day War provided the odd occasion for a broad-based, mass celebration of militarism. To some observers, it suddenly seemed as if the same emotions and social forces that had supported German fascism were now expressing themselves through support for the Israeli aggressors, described (approvingly) as the “Prussians of the Middle East.”<ref>George Lavy, ''Germany and Israel: Moral Debt and National Interest'' (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 154.</ref> Although the SDS was already pro-Palestinian, most leftists had previously harbored sympathies for the Jewish state. The 1967 war put a definite end to this, establishing the New Left’s anti-Zionist orientation; as an unfortunate side effect of this turn, it also discouraged attempts to grapple with the gravity of Germany’s antisemitic past from a radical, anticapitalist point of view. (For more on Germany’s relationship to Israel, see Appendix III—The FRG and the State of Israel, pages 550-553.)

An uneasy calm reigned in the wake of the June 2 tragedy, and yet the movement continued to grow. More radical ideas were gaining currency, and at an SDS conference in September Rudi Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl went so far as to broach the possibility of the left fielding an urban guerilla. This was the first time such an idea had been mentioned in the SDS or the APO, and for the time being, such talk remained a matter of abstract conjecture.
[[File:Newspaper Clipping Internaitonal Vietnam Conference West Berlin from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb]]
On February 17 and 18, 1968, the movement reached what was perhaps its peak when 5,000 people attended the International Congress on Vietnam in West Berlin, including representatives of anti-imperialist movements from around the world. Addressing those present, Dutschke called for a “long march through the institutions,” a phrase with which his name is today firmly associated.<ref>Tariq Ali, Street fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (New York: Verso, 2005), 243.</ref> (By this, the student leader did not mean joining the system, but rather setting up counterinstitutions while identifying dissatisfied elements within the establishment that might be won over or subverted.)<ref>While one cannot mention Dutschke today without referring to the “long march,” the phrase is interpreted wildly differently by different writers. The description offered here is Herbert Marcuse’s, as it appeared in his 1972 essay “The Left Under the Counterrevolution” in which he endorsed the concept while crediting it to his former student Dutschke. [Herbert Marcuse, ''Counterrevolution and Revolt'' (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 55-57</ref> The congress closed with a demonstration of more than 12,000 people, and would be remembered years later as an important breakthrough for the entire European left.<ref>Ali, 246.</ref>

The establishment mounted its response on February 21, as the West Berlin Senate, the Federation of Trade Unions, and the Springer Press called for a mass demonstration against the student movement and in support of the U.S. war against Vietnam. Eighty thousand people attended, many carrying signs reading “Rudi Dutschke: Public Enemy Number One” and “Berlin Must Not Become Saigon.”

Increasing polarization was leading to a definitive explosion: less than one year after Ohnesorg’s murder, another violent attack on the left served as the spark.

On April 11, 1968, Josef Bachmann, a young right-wing worker, shot Rudi Dutschke three times, once in the head, once in the jaw, and once in the chest. Dutschke, who was recognized as the leading intellectual in the SDS and the APO, had been the target of a massive anticommunist smear campaign in the media, particularly the Springer Press, which would be widely blamed for setting the stage for the attack. Indeed, Bachmann would later testify in this regard, saying, “I have taken my daily information from the ''Bild Zeitung''.”<ref>Thomas, 170.</ref>

The shooting occurred one week after Martin Luther King had been assassinated in the United States, and to many young German leftists, it appeared that their entire international movement was under attack. One young working-class rebel, like Dutschke a refugee from the East, summed up how he felt as follows:<blockquote>''Up to this point they had come with the little police clubs or Mr Kuras(sic) shot; but now it had started, with people being offed specifically. The general baiting had created a climate in which little pranks wouldn’t work anymore. Not when they’re going to liquidate you, regardless of what you do. Before I get transported to Auschwitz again, I’d rather shoot first, that’s clear now. If the gallows is smiling at you at the end anyway, then you can fight back beforehand.''<ref>Bommi Baumann, ''Terror or Love? The Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla'' (London: John Calder Publications, 1979), 41.</ref> </blockquote>Bachmann had carried out his attack on the Thursday before Easter, and the annual peace demonstrations were quickly transformed into protests against the assassination attempt; it has been estimated that 300,000 people participated in the marches over the weekend, the largest figure achieved in West Germany in the 1960s.<ref>Thomas, 171.</ref> Universities were occupied across the country, and running battles with the police lasted for four days. “Springer Shot Too!” became a common slogan amongst radicals, and in many cities, the corporation was targeted with violent attacks. Thousands were arrested, hundreds were hospitalized, and two people (a journalist and a protester) were killed, most likely by police. On May 1, 50,000 people marched through West Berlin.

Unprecedented numbers of working-class youth took part in these battles, with university students constituting only a minority of those arrested by police, a development that worried the ruling class. <ref>Ibid., 176.</ref>

By the time it was over, there had been violent clashes in at least twenty cities. Springer property worth 250,000 dm (roughly $80,000) was damaged or destroyed, including over 100,000dm worth of window panes.<ref>Ibid.</ref>

This rebellion and the police repression pushed many radicals’ thinking to an entirely new level. Bommi Baumann, for instance, credited the riots with opening his eyes to the possibility of armed struggle:<blockquote>''On the spot, I really got it, this concept of mass struggle-terrorism; this problem I had been thinking about for so long became clear to me then. The chance for a revolutionary movement lies in this: when a determined group is there simultaneously with the masses, supporting them through terror.''<ref>Baumann, 41.</ref> </blockquote>Ulrike Meinhof was clearly thinking along similar lines, only she put her thoughts in print, sharing them with the public in a groundbreaking ''konkret'' article entitled “From Protest to Resistance.” Arguing that in the Easter riots “the boundaries between protest and resistance were exceeded,” she promised that “the paramilitary deployment of the police will be answered with paramilitary methods.”<ref>Thomas, 180.</ref>

On May 31, the ''Bundestag'' passed the ''Notstandgesetze'', or Emergency Powers Act, which besides providing the state with tools to deal with crises such as natural disasters or war, was also intended to open the movement up to greater intervention. The CDU had been trying to pass such repressive legislation for years, and short-circuiting opposition to it had been one of the advantages of forming a Grand Coalition along with the SPD. Coming as it did on the heels of the April violence, the legislation passed easily. (The fact that, just across the Rhine, France seemed also on the brink of revolution, enjoying its defining rebellion of the sixties, certainly didn’t hurt matters.)

Under the new Act, the Basic Law was amended to allow the state to tap phones and observe mail unhindered by previous stipulations requiring that the targeted individual be informed. Provisions were introduced in particular for the telephone surveillance of people suspected of preparing or committing “political crimes,” especially those governed by the catch-all §129 of the penal code, criminalizing the “formation or support of a criminal association.” The Emergency Powers Act also officially sanctioned the use of clandestine photography, “trackers” and Verfassungsschutz informants and provocateurs.
[[File:Demonstration against emergency powers poster from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Poster for a demonstration against the Emergency Powers Act, organized by the Munich Board for the Emergency Facing Democracy: “The Emergency Powers Act Plans for War, Not Peace!” Amongst those who gave closing speeches was one Rolf Pohle, at the time a law student prominent in the Munich APO.'']]
Throughout the month of May, as the Act was being passed into law, universities were occupied, students boycotted classes, and tens of thousands of people protested in demonstrations across the country, while a similar number of workers staged a one-day strike. To its critics, the Act represented a dangerous step along the road to re-establishing fascism in the Federal Republic, and this fear was simply reinforced by the way in which the Grand Coalition could pass the legislation regardless of the widespread protests against it.

Anti-''Notstandgesetze'' activities were particularly impressive in Frankfurt, the financial capital of West Germany, which had also become something of an intellectual center for the student movement. On May 27, students occupied the Frankfurt University, and for several days held seminars and workshops addressing a variety of political questions. It took large scale police raids on May 30 to clear the campus.

All this notwithstanding, the Act was passed into law.

The failure of the anti-''Notstandgesetze'' movement was experienced as a bitter defeat by the New Left. Many entertained alarmist fears that the laws would be used to institute a dictatorship, in much the same way as Hindenburg had used similar powers in 1930 and 1933 to create a government independent from parliament, which had facilitated the Nazi dictatorship. In the words of Hans-Jürgen Krahl:<blockquote>''Democracy in Germany is finished. Through concerted political activism we have to form a broad, militant base of resistance against these developments, which could well lead to war and concentration camps. Our struggle against the authoritarian state of today can prevent the fascism of tomorrow.''<ref>Hockenos, 88.</ref> </blockquote>In this heady climate, matters continued to escalate throughout 1968, sections of the movement graduating to more organized and militantly ambitious protests. The most impressive examples of this were probably those that accompanied attempts to disbar Horst Mahler.

Mahler was a superstar of the West Berlin left, known as the “hippy lawyer” who defended radicals in many of the most important cases of this period. He had been involved with the SDS, and was a co-founder of the West Berlin Republican Club and the Socialist Lawyers Collective.<ref>Aust, 65-6.</ref> He had been arrested during the anti-Springer protests that April, and in what would prove to be a foolish move, the state had initiated proceedings to see him disbarred.<ref>Ibid., 64.</ref>

Mahler’s case became a new lightning rod for the West Berlin left, which felt that the state was trying to muzzle their most committed legal defender. The student councils of the Free University and the Technical University called for protests the day of his hearing, one organizer describing the goal as “the destruction of the justice apparatus through massive demonstrations.”<ref>Associated Press, “Student ‘Army’ Battles With Berlin Police,” ''Fresno Bee'', November 4, 1968.</ref>

The street fighting which broke out on November 3 would go down in history as the “Battle of Tegeler Weg.”<ref>Tegeler Weg is a fashionable street in West Berlin where the Bar Association was located.</ref> On the one side, the helmet-wearing protesters (roughly 1,500) attacked with cobblestones and two-by-fours, on the other the police (numbering 1,000) used water cannons, tear gas, and billy clubs:<blockquote>''Several lawyers and bystanders were hit by cobblestones ripped from the sidewalks and hurled by the youths, most of them wearing crash helmets, as they moved forward in waves directed by leaders with megaphones.''

''Injured demonstrators were carried to waiting ambulances marked with blue crosses and staffed by girls wearing improvised nurses’ uniforms.''<ref>Associated Press, “Student ‘Army’.”</ref> </blockquote>Nor were the police spared. As another newspaper reported:<blockquote>''The demonstrators caused a heavy toll of police casualties with their guerrilla style of battle: thrusting at police, withdrawing, consolidating and then thrusting again from another angle.''

''At one stage they managed to beat back a 300-man police force a distance of 150 yards… Police counted 120 injured in their own ranks. Ten of them had to be treated at a hospital. A police spokesman said seven of 21 injured demonstrators were taken to a hospital. The number of arrests was placed at 46.''<ref>George Thomson, “Berlin police, leftists battle,” ''Lowell Sun'', November 4, 1968.</ref> </blockquote>That same night a horse was injured when several molotov cocktails were thrown into the police stable.<ref>Ibid.</ref> It would later be suggested that this attack was the work of an agent provocateur by the name of Peter Urbach.<ref>Aust, 145.</ref>

The court declined to disbar Mahler. Within a few days, the firebrand lawyer was once again making headlines with his latest case: the defense of the young antifascist Beate Klarsfeld, who had smacked CDU Chancellor—and former Nazi—Kurt Georg Kiesinger, hitting him in the face.<ref>Associated Press, “Woman gets Jail for Slapping Bonn Chief,” ''Fresno Bee'', November 8, 1968.</ref> Mahler would eventually win Klarsfeld a suspended sentence, at which point he counter-sued Kiesinger on her behalf, arguing that the very fact that a former Nazi was Chancellor constituted an insult to his client.<ref>Associated Press, “Hit Kiesinger; Term Suspended,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', August 26, 1969.</ref>

The Battle of Tegeler Weg was another milestone, representing a willingness to engage in organized violence the likes of which had not been seen for decades. This period also saw the first experiments with clandestine armed activities, a subject to which we will soon return.

Thus, we can see that even as the spectre of increased repression haunted sections of the militant left, there existed both the desire and the capacity to rise to the next level.

At the same time, however, other developments offered the tempting promise that change might come about in a more comfortable manner by backing down and working within the system.

In October, 1969, the Grand Coalition came to an end, and under the slogan “Let’s Dare More Democracy!” an SPD government (in coalition with the FDP) was elected. SPD leader Willy Brandt was now Chancellor, and FDP leader Walter Scheel became Foreign Minister. The largely symbolic post of president went to political old-timer Gustav Heinemann, widely considered one of the Federal Republic’s most liberal politicians, despite the fact that he had been the Grand Coalition’s SPD Minister of Justice.<ref>Heinemann had in fact held a cabinet position for the CDU as early as 1949, a post he left, along with the CDU, in the early fifties in protest against Adenauer’s rearmament policies. When Ulrike Meinhof was sued for slander by CSU leader Franz Josef Strauß in 1961 as a result of a ''konkret'' article, Heinemann agreed to take on her case, successfully defending her—the two had become allies if not friends during the peace movements of the 1950s.</ref>

For the first time in its history, the Christian Democrats had lost control of the West German parliament.

The new SPD government announced a series of measures which partially fulfilled the students’ more “reasonable” demands: there were new diplomatic overtures to East Germany, it was made easier to be declared a conscientious objector, the age of consent and the legal voting age were lowered from twenty-one to eighteen, no fault divorce legislation was passed, and a series of reforms aimed to modernize and open up the stuffy, hierarchical German school system.

For many, it seemed like a brand new day.

At the same time, Brandt announced an “immediate program to modernize and intensify crime prevention,” which included:<blockquote>''strengthening of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, the modernization of its equipment and the extension of its powers, the re-equipping and reorganization of the Federal Border Guard as a Federal police force, together with the setting up of a “study group on the surveillance of foreigners” within the security services.''<ref>Cobler, 154-155.</ref> </blockquote>Nevertheless, these measures would not affect most activists, and the government shift away from the anachronistic conservatism of the CDU helped confuse and siphon off less committed students, draining potential sources of support for the radical left. At the same time, the movement itself was beginning to fragment.

Problems of male supremacy in the APO had become increasingly difficult to bear for radical women inspired by the feminist movements in the United States, France, and England. In September 1968, things had come to a head at an SDS conference in Frankfurt, where Hans-Jürgen Krahl found himself being pelted by tomatoes after he refused to address the question of chauvinism in the SDS. While many (but not all) of the women from the APO would continue to identify as being on the left, their political trajectory became increasingly separate, both as a result of dynamics internal to the women’s movement and of the continuing sexism outside of it.
[[File:Agit 883 magazine demonstration from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''The different tendencies to emerge from the APO tapped into different aesthetic traditions—above: a call-out from the radical magazine Agit 883 for a demonstration against the Vietnam War.'']]
The decline of the APO also occurred alongside renewed attempts to build various workers’ parties in line with the “correct” Marxist analysis. In 1968, the banned KPD (“Communist Party of Germany”) had been re-established under a new name as the DKP (“German Communist Party”), but boasting the same program and leadership. To most young radicals, though, this “new” Communist Party was of little interest, not only because of its association with the clearly unattractive East German regime, but also because of what was seen as its unimpressive and timid track record in the years before Adenauer had had it banned.
[[File:'Red May First Resist Wage Slavery' poster from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''“Everybody Out to the Red May 1st; Resist Wage Controls; Resist Wage Slavery; A United Working Class Front Against the Betrayal of the SPD Government”'']]
Rather, there followed a veritable alphabet soup of Maoist parties, most of which were as virulently anti-Soviet as they were anti-American. These were joined by a much smaller number of Trotskyist organizations, and together all these would eventually become known as the “K-groups,” in a development roughly analogous to the New Communist Movement which developed at the same time in North America.

Those who remained to the left of the SPD while not joining any of these new party-oriented organizations included the ''sponti'' (“spontaneous”) left which had grown out of the APO’s antiauthoritarian camp, anarchists, and assorted independent socialists. Together, these were referred to as the “undogmatic left,” their bastions being the cities of Frankfurt, Munich, and—of course—West Berlin.

The movement continued to struggle, but with increasing difficulty, fragmenting in all directions, as the APO seemed to be coming apart at the seams.

In March 1970, following a chaotic congress at the Frankfurt Student Association Building, the SDS was dissolved by acclamation. In a brilliant ploy, two months later the government decreed an amnesty for protesters serving short sentences, thereby winning many of these middle class students back to the establishment. The student movement in West Germany was particularly vulnerable to this kind of recuperation, being overwhelmingly comprised of young people for whom there was a place in the more comfortable classes; in 1967, for instance, only 7% of West German students were from working class families (by comparison, in England the figure was almost one in three).<ref>Thomas, 144.</ref>

Despite the APO’s inability to meet the challenges before it, one cannot deny that in just a few years it had thoroughly transformed West German society:<blockquote>''Among the consequences were the reform of education; a new Ostpolitik;''<ref>''Ostpolitik:'' the FRG’s official policy towards the GDR and the east bloc.</ref> ''the deconstruction of the authoritarian patriarchal relations in the family, school, factory and public service; the development of state planning in the economy; a greater integration of women into professional life and a reform in sexual legislation… the APO also provided the impetus to a socio-cultural break with the past. There was a very rapid change in social outlook and behavior patterns. The old ascetic behavior based on the notion of duty came to an end. Along with a different conception of social roles came a new set of sexual mores and a dissolution of the old respectful and subservient attitude towards the state and all forms of authority. There developed, in other words, a new culture which was to pave the way for the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s.''<ref>Hülsberg, 42-43.</ref> </blockquote>

== 3 - Taking up the Gun ==
As the APO foundered, the majority of those to the left of the SPD remained committed to legal, aboveground activism. Nevertheless, a section of the movement had begun testing the waters with another kind of praxis, and for the purposes of our study, it is to this that we will now turn.

The first experiments with armed struggle developed out of the counterculture, as individuals around the K.1 commune in West Berlin began carrying out firebombings and bank robberies. Coming from a milieu where drugs and anarchism mingled freely, these young radicals hung out in a scene known as “the Blues,” and would take on the purposefully ironic name of the “Central Committee of the Roaming Hash Rebels.” As Bommi Baumann later explained, with perhaps a tongue in his cheek:<blockquote>''Mao provided our theoretical basis: “On the Mentality of Roaming Bands of Rebels.” From the so-called robber-bands, he and Chu-Teh had created the first cadre of the Red Army. We took our direction from that. We directed our agitation to make the dopers, who were still partly unpolitical, conscious of their situation. What we did was mass work.''<ref>Baumann, 50.</ref> </blockquote>The Hash Rebels carried out actions under a number of different names, but became best known as the Tupamaros-West Berlin, after the urban guerillas in Uruguay.<ref>Ibid., 59.</ref> Initially, this antiauthoritarian, pre-guerilla tendency suffered from anti-intellectualism, unquestioned male chauvinism, and a lack of any coherent strategy. It has also been criticized for tolerating and engaging in antisemitism under cover of anti-Zionism, one of its first actions being to firebomb a cultural centre housed in a synagogue on the anniversary of a Nazi pogrom.<ref>Tilman Fichter, interview by Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “The anti-Semitism of the 68ers,” ''die tageszeitung'', October 25, 2005. The action was intended to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. See Baumann, 60-61 and 67-68.</ref>

On the other hand, it did seem to enjoy an organic relationship with its base, such as that was.

As the APO fell apart and many of the Hash Rebels’ leading members were arrested or simply had a change of heart, what remained of this tendency would crystallize into a guerilla group known as the 2nd of June Movement (2JM—a reference to the date when Benno Ohnesorg had been killed in 1967). Rooted in West Berlin, this group eventually overcame many of its initial weaknesses while retaining an accessible and often humorous rhetorical style that resonated with many in the anarchist and ''sponti'' scenes throughout the country.

The second guerilla tendency, with which we are more directly concerned, brought together individuals who were peripheral to the countercultural milieu of the Hash Rebels, and of a somewhat more serious bent. As Bommi Baumann would later explain, they “formed at about the same time as we did, because they considered us totally crazy.”<ref>Baumann, 76.</ref> This second tendency was much more theoretically rigorous (or pretentious, to its critics), and heavily influenced not only by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but also by New Left philosophers ranging from Nicos Poulantzas to the Frankfurt School.
[[File:West German Counterculture Cartoon from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|''A cartoon from the radical counterculture magazine Agit 883 shows a young man bearing a striking resemblence to Holger Meins (who was a member of the newspaper’s editorial collective) throwing an incendiary device of some sort out of a car. He gets busted because he forgot to change the car’s license plates, but luckily some of his friends are willing to vouch for him and the police are forced to release him, even though they know he did it.'']]
This nascent Marxist-Leninist guerilla scene had its earliest manifestation in the firebombing of two Frankfurt department stores on April 3, 1968, one week before Rudi Dutschke was shot. Petrol bombs with rudimentary timing devices were left in both the Kaufhaus Schneider and Kaufhof buildings, bursting into flames just before midnight. The fires caused almost 700,000 dm ($224,000 U.S.) in damage, though nobody was hurt.

On April 5, Horst Söhnlein, Thorwald Proll, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader, who had all traveled from West Berlin to carry out the action while attending an SDS conference, were arrested and charged with arson.

The four had taken few precautions to protect their identities and avoid arrest. They had issued no communiqué, and in retrospect, the action appears almost flippant in its execution. Indeed, some of those arrested initially denied their participation, and later tried to minimize it all, Baader claiming, “We had no intention of endangering human life or even starting a real fire.”<ref>Aust, 51, 58.</ref>

In court, the four had no united strategy; apparently without bitterness or recrimination, Baader and Ensslin at first tried to present a legal defense, and then switched to accepting full responsibility while insisting that Proll and Söhnlein were both completely innocent.<ref>Ibid., 58.</ref> For their part, these two did not deny their involvement, yet chose not to defend themselves, though Proll did offer an eloquent denunciation of the court and judicial system (see pages 66-78).

In the end, there was no denying that this was a political action, albeit an ill-defined one. In court, Ensslin explained that that the arson was “in protest against people’s indifference to the murder of the Vietnamese,” adding that “We have found that words are useless without action.”<ref>Ibid., 58.</ref>

Then, in a statement that could only be appreciated in retrospect, she told a television reporter, “We have said clearly enough that we did the wrong thing. But there’s no reason for us to discuss it with the law or the state. We must discuss it with people who think as we do.”<ref>Ibid., 62.</ref>

While the four were repudiated by the SDS, they were embraced by others for whom the step into illegality seemed both appropriate and timely. “They were like little media stars for the radical left,” Thorwald’s younger sister Astrid Proll would recall years later.<ref>Astrid Proll, ''Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run'' 67-77 (Zurich: Scalo, 1998), 8.</ref>

One of these admirers was Ulrike Meinhof, who had divorced ''konkret'' publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl and moved to West Berlin with their twin daughters in 1967. Meinhof visited Ensslin in prison, and would approvingly write about the case in her magazine column. “[T]he progressive moment of arson in a department store does not lie in the destruction of goods,” she opined, “but in the criminality of the act, the breaking of the law…”<ref>Aust, 60.</ref>

Publicly, the arsonists’ friends from the K.1 commune declared their solidarity, Fritz Teufel paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht to the effect that “It’s always better to torch a department store than to run one.”<ref>Andreas Elter “Die raf und die Medien: Ein Fallbeispiel für terroristische Kommunikation,” ''Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung'' [online], August 20, 2007. Brecht, the famous communist playwright, had stated that “Small timers rob banks, professionals own them.”</ref> Privately, however, they wondered at how clumsily the whole thing had been carried out, some even supposing that the four might suffer from some “psychic failure,” a subconscious desire to go to jail.<ref>Aust, 51-2.</ref>

In October 1968, the four were each sentenced to three years in prison.

As the judge read out the verdict a familiar figure stood up: “This trial belongs before a student court,” Daniel Cohn-Bendit<ref>A law student at the University of Frankfurt, “Danny the Red” had been barred from France in 1968 for his symbolic leadership role in the May events of that year (it was his expulsion which had provoked students to occupy Nanterre University). Today, a respectable politician in the German Green Party, in 1969, he was (in) famous around the world, the very personification of anarchist student revolt. As we shall see in Section 11, (Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Left…), he would play an important role in deradicalizing a section of the movement in the mid-seventies.</ref> shouted, at which point the gallery erupted into pandemonium, spectators swarming the guards as two of the accused attempted to make a break for it. Three people, including Cohn-Bendit, were arrested as a result of this melee, and all four young arsonists remained in custody.<ref>Associated Press, “Cohn-Bendit Jailed; Court Brawl Follows,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', November 1, 1968.</ref>

The next day, persons unknown lobbed three molotov cocktails into the Frankfurt courthouse.<ref>''European Stars and Stripes'', “New Violence Hits Frankfurt,” November 2, 1968.</ref> Again, no one was hurt.

The arsonists had been represented by Horst Mahler, whom the state failed to have disbarred just days after this defeat, in the hearings which would provoke the aforementioned Battle of Tegeler Weg. The four would not be able to participate in that historic rout of the West Berlin police: despite appealing their sentence, they remained imprisoned until June of 1969. Only then were they finally released on their own recognizance until such a time as the court finally reached its decision.

As the summer of 69 turned to fall and the court continued to deliberate, the newly released Ensslin, Baader, and Proll would busy themselves working in the “apprentices’ collectives” scene. These collectives consisted of young runaways from state homes, and were at the time the object of political campaigning from the disintegrating APO. As Astrid Proll would recall:<blockquote>''When Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin were released from custody they knew exactly what they wanted. Unlike the drugged “communards” they radiated great clarity and resolve… Gudrun and Andreas launched a big campaign in Frankfurt against the authoritarian regimes in young offender institutions. We lived with youths who had escaped from closed institutions, joined them in fighting for their rights, and managed to achieve some successes. Ulrike Meinhof, as a commited (sic), critical journalist, joined us and became friends with Gudrun and Andreas.''<ref>Proll, 8.</ref> </blockquote>In November 1969, the court denied their appeal and ordered the four back to prison: only Söhnlein turned himself in. Ensslin and Baader went underground and set about establishing the contacts that would be necessary for a prolonged campaign of armed struggle. Thorwald Proll was soon abandoned—he was not considered serious enough— but his sister Astrid joined them.

Over the next months, the fugitives would cross into France and Italy and back to West Berlin again, laying the groundwork for the future organization. At this point, they resumed contact with their lawyer Horst Mahler,<ref>Aust, 73.</ref> who was still facing criminal charges stemming from the April 1968 revolt.<ref>Associated Press, “West Berlin Publisher is Sentenced,” ''Danville Bee'', February 16, 1970.</ref> While enduring these legal battles, Mahler had himself been trying to set up a “militant group” in Berlin,<ref>Aust, 77.</ref> and so joining forces with his former clients simply seemed like a wise strategic decision.

At the same time, the serious Marxist-Leninists considered—and rejected—the idea of joining forces with the anarchist guerilla groups that were coalescing within the Roaming Hash Rebels scene. The reasons for this decision to continue following separate paths are not clear-cut, and the consequences were more nuanced than might be expected. It is important to remember that many of the figures involved knew each other from the APO, in some cases were friends, and certainly would have had opinions about each other’s politics and personalities. It has been said that Dieter Kunzelmann, a prominent figure in the Hash Rebels scene, was wary of Baader claiming leadership.<ref>Ibid.</ref> It has also been suggested that the RAF as a whole had a haughty manner, and was made up of middle-class students who didn’t fit in with the supposedly more proletarian 2JM.<ref>Baumann, 77-78.</ref>

While none of the guerillas have ever said as much, one cannot help but wonder what RAF members might have thought of the countercultural scene out of which the Hash Rebels had developed, specifically the sexual arrangements. The K.1 commune was not only famous for its brilliant agit prop, its radical cultural experiments, and its phenomenal drug consumption, but also for its iconic role in the sexual revolution which swept the Federal Republic in the years of the apo. At the same time as K.1’s sexual politics constituted a reaction to the oppressive conservatism of Christian Germany, it was also very much a macho scene built around the desires of key men involved. Polygamy was almost mandatory, and women were passed around between the “revolutionaries”—as one male communard put it, “It’s like training a horse; one guy has to break her in, then she’s available for everyone.”<ref>Herzog, 425.</ref> As Bommi Baumann would later admit regarding the Hash Rebels, “They were just pure oppressors of women; it can’t be put any other way.”<ref>Baumann, 75.</ref>

There were always many women playing central roles in the RAF. It is difficult to imagine Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, or Astrid Proll putting up with the kind of sexist libertinage which has been documented in the West Berlin anarchist scene. Indeed, during her own period in the wild depths of the counterculture, Proll had not gone to K.1 but had chosen to live in a women’s only commune, helping to form a short-lived female version of the Hash Rebels, the Militant Black Panther Aunties.<ref>Eileen MacDonald, ''Shoot the Women First'' (London: Arrow Books Ltd., 1991), 209-210.</ref>

These various explanations, however, are not only difficult to evaluate, they also risk obscuring the fact that cooperation between the anarchist guerilla scene and the Marxist-Leninists would continue throughout the seventies, many members of the former eventually joining the RAF, while a few individuals continued to carry out operations with both organizations. Certainly, from what can be seen, a high level of coordination and solidarity existed between the groups at all times. While their supporters might occasionally engage in unpleasant disputes, the actual fighters seem to have maintained good relations even as they traveled their different roads.

Ultimately, in the early 80s, the 2nd of June Movement would publicly announce that it was joining the RAF en masse. This provided the opportunity for some 2JM political prisoners who opposed the merger to give their own explanation as to why they had always chosen to fight separately. Although these observations were made over ten years later, they help shed light on relations in these early days:<blockquote>''The contradiction between the RAF and the 2nd of June at that time was the result of the different ways the groups had evolved: the 2nd of June Movement out of their members’ social scene and the RAF on the basis of their theoretical revolutionary model. And, equally, as a result of the RAF’s centralized organizational model on the one hand, and our autonomous, decentralized structures on the other. Another point of conflict was to be found in the question of the cadre going underground, which the RAF insisted on as a point of principle.''

''As such, the immediate forerunners to the 2nd of June Movement were always open to a practical—proletarian—alternative; an alternative that had nothing to do with competition, but more to do with different visions of the revolutionary struggle.''

''There was strong mutual support and common actions in the early period of both groups… At the time both groups proceeded with the idea that the future would determine which political vision would prove effective in the long run.''<ref>Ralf Reinders, Klaus Viehmann, and Ronald Fritzsch, “Zu der angeblichen Auflösung der Bewegung 2. Juni im Juni 1980,” <nowiki>http://www.bewegung.in/mate_nichtaufloesung.html</nowiki>. This is an excerpt from a much longer document which, along with the 2JM’s declaration of the merger, will appear (translated) in our second volume, ''The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Vol. II: Dancing with Imperialism: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.''</ref> </blockquote>So, during this germinal period, friendly contacts were maintained even as differences were clarified between the various activists who were choosing to take the next step in the struggle.

For shelter and support, those who were underground became dependent on the goodwill and loyalty of friends and allies who maintained a legal existence. One of those who occasionally sheltered Baader and Ensslin was Ulrike Meinhof, who was already feeling that their commitment and sense of purpose contrasted sharply with what she experienced as her own increasingly hollow existence as a middle class media star, albeit one with “notorious” left-wing politics. At the same time, Meinhof continued to work with young people in closed institutions, specifically girls in reform school, with whom she began producing a television docudrama.

While Meinhof eventually became world famous for what she did next in life, it is worth emphasizing that her time as a journalist was far from insignificant. As her biographer Jutta Ditfurth has argued:<blockquote>''With her columns, and above all with the radio features about things like industrial labor and reform school children, Meinhof had an enormous influence on the thinking of many people. Much more than she realized. She took on themes that only exploded into view years later. For instance, the women’s question. When women in the SDS defended themselves from macho guys, they did it with words and sentences from Meinhof’s articles. She could formulate things succinctly.''<ref>Jutta Ditfurth, interview by Arno Luik, ''“Sie war die große Schwester der 68er,”'' Stern 46 (2007).</ref> </blockquote>Baader was captured in West Berlin on April 3, 1970, set up by a police informant.<ref>Aust, 81.</ref> Peter Urbach had been active around the commune scene for years, all the while secretly acting on behalf of the state. He was particularly “close” to the K.1 commune, and had known Baader since at least 1967. While the bombs and guns Urbach supplied to young rebels never seemed to work, the hard drugs he provided did their job nicely, showing that even as theories of the “liberating” effects of narcotics were being touted in the scene, the state knew on which side its bread was buttered.<ref>Ibid., 47.</ref>

While it has always been stressed that there were neither hierarchies nor favorites amongst the various combatants, Baader seemed to bring with him a sense of daring and possibility which would always make him first amongst equals, for better or for worse. As such, following his capture, all attention was focused on how he could be freed from the state’s clutches.

A plan was hatched, whereby Meinhof would use her press credentials to apply for permission to work with Baader on a book about youth centers, an area in which by now they both had some experience. The prison authorities reluctantly agreed, and on May 14 Baader was escorted under guard to meet her at the Institute for Social Issues Library in the West Berlin suburbs.

This provided the necessary opportunity. Once Baader and Meinhof were in the library, two young women entered the building: Irene Goergens, a teenager who Meinhof had recruited from her work with reform school kids, and Ingrid Schubert, a radical doctor from the West Berlin scene. They were followed by a masked and armed Gudrun Ensslin, and an armed man. Drawing their weapons, these rescuers moved to free Baader. When an elderly librarian, Georg Linke, attempted to intervene, he was shot in his liver.<ref>According to several accounts, Linke was accidentally shot by the man at the scene. Apparently, he had two weapons, an air gun and a real gun, and he intended to scare him with the former, but got confused as to which was which. (MacDonald, 213.)</ref> The guards drew their weapons and opened fire, missing everyone, and all six jumped out of the library window and into the getaway car waiting on the street below.<ref>Aust, 6-9.</ref>

Barely a month after his arrest, Baader was once again free.

The library breakout made headlines around the world, both Meinhof and Ensslin being identified as likely participants. Journalists tried to outdo each other in their sensationalist tripe, describing the one as a middle class poseur and the other as a former porn actress.<ref>Neil Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed by Violence of Berlin Gunmen,” ''Winnipeg Free Press'', July 4, 1970.</ref> Headlines continued to be made when a neofascist arms dealer, Günther Voigt, was arrested and charged with selling the guerilla their guns.<ref>Ibid., Becker, 125.</ref> Then, French journalist Michele Ray declared that she had met with Mahler, Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader in West Berlin—she promptly sold the extensive interviews she had taped to ''Spiegel''.<ref>Aust, 15-16.</ref>

The group had made an impression. Its first action had struck a chord. Yet this was very much a mixed blessing, as Astrid Proll, who had driven the getaway car during the jailbreak,<ref>Ben Lewis and Richard Klein, ''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror'' (United Kingdom: a Mentorn production for bbc four, 2002).</ref> would later explain:<blockquote>''I think we were all very nervous; I remember some people throwing up. Because we weren’t so wonderful criminals, we weren’t so wonderful with the guns, we sort of involved a socalled criminal who could do it so much better than we, and… he was so nervous that he shot somebody. He didn’t kill him, but he shot him very very badly, and that was really really very bad for the whole start of it.''<ref>Ibid.</ref> </blockquote>As she elaborated elsewhere:<blockquote>After a man had been severely hurt… we found ourselves on wanted lists. It was an accident that accelerated the development of the underground life of the group. Ulrike Meinhof, who had so far been at the fringes of the group, was all of a sudden wanted on every single billpost for attempted murder against a reward of dm 10,000… When we were underground there were no more discussions, there was only action.<ref>Proll, 10.</ref> </blockquote>In what would be a recurrent phenomenon, the state made use of the media frenzy around the prison-break to help push through new repressive legislation—in this case the so-called “Hand Grenade Law,” by which West Berlin police were equipped with hand grenades, semiautomatic revolvers, and submachine guns.<ref>Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed."</ref>

This was all hotly debated on the left, prompting the fugitives to send a letter to the radical newspaper ''883'', in which they explained (somewhat defensively) the action and their future plans. At the insistence of the radical former film student Holger Meins who was working at ''883'' at the time and who would later himself become a leading figure in the RAF, the newspaper published the statement, making it the first public document from the guerilla. (Even without Meins’ support, it would have been odd for ''883'' to not publish the text: Baader, Meinhof, Mahler, and Ensslin had all formerly served in the editorial collective, as had several other individuals who would go on to join the guerilla.)<ref>Datenbank des deutschsprachigen Anarchismus: Periodika, “Agit 883,” <nowiki>http://projekte.free.de/dada/dada-p/P0000921.htm</nowiki>.</ref>

The Red Army Faction had been born.

The next year was spent acquiring technical skills, including a trip to Jordan where more than a dozen of the aspiring German guerillas received training from the PLO. While this first trip may not have had great significance for the group, given the subsequent importance of its connection with certain Palestinian organizations, it may be useful to examine the context in which it occurred.

At the time, Jordan contained a very large Palestinian refugee population, one which had swollen since the 1967 Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; by 1970, the Palestinians constituted roughly 1,000,000 of the country’s total population of 2,299,000

Based in the refugee camps, the PLO managed to constitute itself as a virtual parallel state within the country. Indeed, many considered that revolution in Jordan could be one step towards the defeat of Israel, an idea expressed by the slogan, “The road to Tel Aviv lies through Amman”—a sentiment which worried King Hussein, to say the least— as did the increasing use of Jordanian territory as a rear base area for all manner of Palestinian radical organizations.<ref>Helen Chapin Metz, Library of Congress Federal Research Division, ''Israel, a Country Study'' (Whitefish, Montana: Keesinger publishing 2004), 110.</ref>

In September 1970, the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine skyjacked three western aircRAFt, landing them in Dawson’s Field, a remote desert airstrip in Jordan. This provided Hussein with the excuse he needed, and the PLO soon came under attack from the monarch’s armed forces, supported by Israel. By the time a truce was brokered, between 4,000 and 10,000—Yassir ARAFat would claim as many as 20,000—Palestinians had been killed, including many noncombatants. (This would be remembered as “Black September,” and it was in memory of this massacre that the PLO’s unofficial guerilla wing would adopt that name.)

Prior to this, the Palestinians’ Jordanian bases were important sources of inspiration and education for revolutionaries, not only in the Arab world, but also in many European countries. While the largest number of visitors came from Turkey<ref>Cengiz Candar, “A Turk in the Palestinian Resistance,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 30, no. 1. (Autumn, 2000): 68-82.</ref>—many of whom would stay and fight alongside the Palestinians—there were also Maoists, socialists, and aspiring guerillas from France, Denmark, Sweden, and, of course, West Germany. (It would be claimed that members of the Roaming Hash Rebels scene had already received training from the Palestinians, and Baumann has pointed to this as a turning point in its transformation into a guerilla underground.)<ref>Baumann, 59: “There was a split when people got back from Palestine. The Palestinian faction said, ‘things don’t make sense the way they’re going now. We have to really start with the armed struggle.’ That meant giving up the Blues, the whole broad open scene.”</ref>

Even during their Middle Eastern sojourn, the RAF continued to make headlines in Germany, Horst Mahler sending a photo of himself waving a gun and dressed like a fedayeen to a radical newspaper with the message, “Best wishes to your readers from the land of A Thousand and One Nights!”<ref>Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed.”</ref>

Juvenile theatrics aside, this trip signaled the very public beginning of an aspect of the RAF which would bedevil the police, namely, their proficient use of foreign countries as rear base areas. As has been discussed elsewhere:<blockquote>''Rear base areas are little discussed, but essential to guerillas. This is something precise: a large area or territory, bordering on the main battle zone, where the other side cannot freely operate. Either for reasons of remoteness or impenetrable mountain ranges, or because it crosses political boundaries.''<ref>Butch Lee, ''Jailbreak Out Of History: The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman'' (Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2000), 25.</ref> </blockquote>The RAF would make extensive use of various Arab countries as rear base areas throughout their existence, places where one could go not only to train, but also to hide when Europe got too “hot.” During the 1970s at least, it does not seem to have been the governments of these countries which provided the group with aid and succor, but rather various revolutionary Palestinian organizations which were deeply rooted in the refugee populations throughout the region. In this way, in the years following the Palestinians’ defeat at the hands of Jordan’s armed forces in 1970, Lebanon and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen emerged as homes away from home for more than one West German revolutionary.

Another source of foreign support, of course, was the “communist” German Democratic Republic—East Germany—from which the RAF and other guerilla groups would receive various forms of assistance over the years. As far as the RAF is concerned, it is unclear exactly how or when this relationship began. Certainly if it existed in the early seventies, this was very secret, and indeed unimagined on the radical left, for which the “other” German state remained a corrupt and authoritarian regime, alternately “Stalinist” or “revisionist,” but in any case one from which little good could come.

And yet it is known that, as early as 1970, the GDR did choose to knowingly allow the guerilla to pass through its territory, for instance on flights to and from the Middle East. After the first trip to Jordan, it even detained one member—Hans-Jürgen Bäcker—and questioned him about the underground for twenty-four hours, but then released him.<ref>Aust, 99-100. Bäcker would claim that based on their questions, it was clear the East Germans were already well informed about the group’s activities. In November 1972, Bommi Baumann was similarly detained at the East German border while in possession of false identification papers; he was similarly questioned, and provided information on almost one hundred people in the West German underground before being released. Jan-Hendrik Schulz “Zur Geschichte der Roten Armee Fraktion (raf) und ihrer Kontexte: Eine Chronik,” ''Zeitgeschichte Online,'' May 2007</ref> Clearly, by the end of the decade, this policy had been extended to provide other sorts of assistance. It has also been claimed that even at the time of the 1970 training expedition, there were plans to relocate Meinhof’s twin daughters to East Germany if their father won custody away from her sister.<ref>Ditfurth, 290. See Appendix V—Strange Stories: Peter Homann and Stefan Aust, pages 557-558.</ref>

Given the unpopularity of the GDR, why was this aid accepted, and what effects did it have on the RAF?

The answer to the first of these questions is easy enough to guess: at first, East German “aid” seems to have been very limited in scope, really little more than turning a blind eye to what was going on.<ref>''Deutsche Presse-Agentur'', “Stasi soll raf über Razzien informiert haben,” September 29, 2007</ref> Who could complain about that?

Eventually, as we will see, more substantial favors would be forthcoming: shelter, training, even new identities—and yet, for most of its history, there is absolutely no indication that the RAF was choosing its targets or formulating its ideology to please foreign patrons. This would become more debatable near the end, but certainly in the 1970s, the RAF-''Stasi'' connection seems to have been casual if not ephemeral.

At most, one might perhaps argue a case of the GDR egging the guerilla on as a way to get at the Americans, in the context of the ongoing conflagration in Vietnam.

Certainly, throughout the 1970s, the Palestinian connection was of far greater importance, and yet the guerilla’s first visit to the Middle East ended on an unpromising note: according to several reports, the West Germans were far from ideal guests, and the Palestinians eventually sent them on their way.

They returned to West Berlin—via the GDR—as the summer of 1970 came to an end.<ref>Aust, 99, 101.</ref>

The group now set about obtaining cars and locating safehouses. New contacts were made, and new members were recruited, among them Ilse Stachowiak, Ali Jansen, Uli Scholze, Beate Sturm, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe, this last being an old friend of Meinhof’s, and himself a founding member of Kommune 2.<ref>Kommune 2 was another West Berlin commune, one with a more “serious” and “intellectual” reputation than the yippiesque K.1.</ref> Some of these individuals would soon think better of their decision and drop out at the first opportunity, others would determine the very course of the RAF, and in some cases give their lives in the struggle.

But first, the young guerilla needed to acquire funds, and to this end a daring combination of bank raids was planned in cooperation with members of the Roaming Hash Rebels scene.<ref>Reinders, Viehmann, and Fritzsch.</ref> Within ten minutes, on September 29, three different West Berlin banks were hit: the revolutionaries managed to make off with over 220,000dm (just over $60,000) without firing a shot or suffering a single arrest.<ref>Aust, 108.</ref> As Horst Mahler’s former legal assistant Monika Berberich, who had herself joined the RAF, would later explain, “It was not about redistributing wealth, it was about getting money, and we weren’t going to mug grannies in the streets.”<ref>''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.''</ref>

The “triple coup” was a smashing success. Things were looking good.

Then, on October 8, police received an anonymous tip about two safehouses in West Berlin: Mahler and Berberich, as well as Ingrid Schubert, Irene Goergens, and Brigitte Asdonk, were all arrested. (It was suspected that Hans-Jürgen Bäcker had snitched to the police. He was confronted and denied the charge, but quickly parted ways with the guerilla. The fact that he was left unmolested should be taken into account when evaluating later claims that the RAF executed suspected traitors or those who wished to leave its ranks.)<ref>Aust, 111-112.</ref>

Following these arrests, the RAF moved to transfer operations outside of West Berlin, and members of the group began crossing over into West Germany proper. During this period, the fledgling guerilla burglarized the town halls of two small towns, taking blank id cards, passports, and official stamps for use in future operations.

On December 20, Karl-Heinz Ruhland and RAF members Ali Jansen and Beate Sturm were stopped by police in Oberhausen. Ruhland, who was only peripheral to the group, surrendered while Jansen and Sturm made their getaway. The next day Jansen was arrested along with RAF member Uli Scholze while trying to steal a Mercedes-Benz. (Sturm soon left the guerilla, as did Scholze when he was released one day after his capture. Ruhland cooperated with police, helping to reveal the location of safehouses and testifying in court against RAF members. Jansen received a ten year sentence for shooting at police.)

On February 10, 1971, Astrid Proll was spotted by Frankfurt police along with fellow RAF member Manfred Grashof. The police opened fire in a clear attempt to kill the two as they fled; luckily, they missed. Subsequently, the cops involved would claim that they had shot in self-defense, yet unbeknownst to them the entire scene had been observed by the ''Verfassungsschutz'', who filed a report detailing how neither of the guerillas had even drawn their weapons. This fact would remain suppressed by the state for years.<ref>Ibid., 140.</ref>

The alleged “firefight” with Proll and Grashof was added to a growing list of propaganda stories used by the police to justify a massive nationwide search, with Federal Minister of the Interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher publicly declaring the RAF to be “Public Enemy Number One.” Apartments were raided in Gelsenkirchen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Bremen, yet the guerilla managed to elude capture.

Meanwhile, the trial of Horst Mahler, Ingrid Schubert, and Irene Goergens opened in West Berlin on March 1. Schubert and Goergens were charged with attempted murder and using force in the Baader jailbreak, while Mahler (who had arranged to be in court during the action, and so had an alibi) was charged as an accessory, and with illegal possession of a firearm.

This first RAF trial would set the tone for twenty years of collusion between the media, the police, and shadowy elements intent on presenting the guerilla in the most horrific light. The term “psychological warfare” was eventually adopted by the left to describe the phenomenon.

Already in February, police had announced that the RAF had plans to kidnap Chancellor Willy Brandt in order to force the state to release Mahler.<ref>Associated Press, “Paper reports plot to kidnap Willy Brandt,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', February 13, 1971.</ref> The guerilla would subsequently deny this charge, claiming it was intended to make them look like “political idiots.”<ref>See page 84.</ref>

Then, on February 25, a seven-year-old boy was kidnapped. Newspapers announced that his captors were demanding close to $50,000 ransom as well as the release of “the left-wing lawyer in Berlin,” which journalists quickly explained must be a reference to Mahler.<ref>Associated Press, “Terrorists Take Child as Hostage,” ''Troy Record'', February 25, 1971.</ref>

Clearly horrified, Mahler made a public appeal to the kidnappers to release the child.<ref>Associated Press,“Wrong Boy Kidnaped, Released; Ransom Paid,” ''Panama City News Herald'', February 27, 1971.</ref> At the same time the provincial government of North Rhine-Westphalia agreed to pay the ransom—the boy was from a working class family that could not afford such a sum.<ref>Ibid.</ref>

Arrangements were made, a well-known lawyer agreeing to act as the go between. The money was delivered on Saturday February 27 and a young Michael Luhmer was released in the woods outside Munich, suffering from influenza but otherwise unharmed. According to the lawyer who personally delivered the money to the kidnappers, they denied being in the least bit interested in Mahler or anyone else from the RAF. Indeed, he came away with the impression that they were in fact “a rightist group like the Nazi party.”<ref>Associated Press, “Kidnaped German Boy, 7, Freed After Ransom,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', February 29, 1971.</ref> Police later announced that they suspected the son of a former SS officer of being involved in the plot.<ref>Associated Press, “Police Hunting SS Member’s Son in Kidnapings,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', March 2, 1971.</ref>

This first kidnapping occurred just as Mahler, Schubert, and Goergens were about to go on trial. This is what could be called a “false flag” action, a term referring to an attack carried out by certain parties under the banner of another group to which they are hostile in order to discredit them. As we shall see, false flag attacks were to plague the RAF throughout the 1970s, as all manner of antisocial crimes would be carried out or threatened by persons pretending to be from the guerilla.

The RAF repeatedly denied its involvement in these actions, and yet the slander often stuck.

Doubly vexing is the fact that in most of these false flag actions, no firm evidence has ever come to light proving who in fact was responsible. Suspicions have ranged from some secret service working for the state, or for NATO, or else perhaps neofascists, or some combination thereof. Or perhaps these were “normal” criminal acts, and it was the media or police who were fabricating details to tie them to the RAF.

Judging from experiences elsewhere in Europe, it is entirely possible that elements within the state, within NATO, and within the far right collaborated in some of these attacks. Such scenarios are known, for instance, to have played themselves out in France, Italy, and Turkey. The goal for such operations was generally not simply to discredit the left-wing guerilla, but rather to create a general climate of fear in which people would rally to the hard right.

In most cases, we may never know, but amazingly enough, there was a second false flag kidnapping during the first RAF trial, and the authors of this second crime actually ended up admitting the ruse.

On Sunday April 25, newspapers reported that a university professor and his friend had been kidnapped by the guerilla, which was threatening to execute them if Mahler, Schubert, and Goergens were not released. The kidnappers were allegedly demanding that the three be allowed to travel to a country of their choosing, and insisted that this be announced on television.<ref>United Press International, “Professor Endangered by Kidnapper’s Threat,” ''Dominion Post'', April 25, 1971.</ref>

Two days later, the men were found, one of them tied to a tree. The kidnappers, however, were nowhere in sight. After some questioning, the “captives” broke down and admitted that they had staged the entire thing in the hopes of scaring people into voting against the “left-wing” SPD in the provincial elections in Schleswig-Holstein.<ref>United Press International, “West German Professor Admits Kidnaping Hoax,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', April 27, 1971.</ref> The mastermind behind this plan, Jürgen Rieger,<ref>Jürgen Rieger is a lawyer whose career has been devoted to defending those charged under Germany’s anti-Nazi laws. Ironically, in 2006, both Rieger and Mahler, the latter by this time a Holocaust denier himself, would end up working on the legal defense team of neo-nazi publisher Ernst Zundel, who was charged in connection with the publication of Holocaust denial literature.</ref> was active in neofascist circles; he would eventually be sentenced to six months in prison as a result.

As a corollary to these staged actions, the police were happy to oblige by setting the scene at the trial itself:<blockquote>''The criminal court in the Moabit prison had been transformed into a fortress for the trial. There were policemen armed with submachine guns patrolling the corridors, the entrances and exits; outside the building stood vehicles with their engines running and carrying teams of men, there were officers carrying radio equipment, and more units waited in the inner courtyard to go into action if needed.''<ref>Aust, 144.</ref> </blockquote>Far-right hoaxes were helping to justify shocking levels of police militarization and repression. One did not need to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to think that the state was more than willing to play dirty in order to get rid of its new armed opponents and that the talk of a “fascist drift” was more than mere rhetoric.

Not that the radical left was unwilling to fight for the captured combatants, though kidnapping innocent children or academics would never feature amongst its strategies. When kidnappings would eventually be carried out, the targets would always be important members of the establishment, men with personal ties to the system against which the guerilla fought.

In 1971, however, nobody was in a position to carry out such operations, and so the struggle for the prisoners’ freedom took place largely in the streets. As the trial wrapped up, rioting broke out for two days in West Berlin: “youths blocked tRAFfic, and smashed store and car windows,” all the while shouting slogans like “Free Mahler!” and “Hands off Mahler!”<ref>Associated Press, “Berlin Cops, Leftists Clash for 2nd Night,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 17, 1971.</ref>

Clearly, although its capacities were not yet developed, a section of the left was willing to carry out militant actions in support of the guerilla, while itself preferring to remain aboveground.

In late May, after twenty-two days in court, the verdicts came down. Goergens was sentenced to four years youth custody, and Schubert received a six-year sentence.<ref>Jillian Becker, ''Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader Meinhof Gang'' (London: Panther Granada Publishing, 1978), 307.</ref>

It should be noted that both women would soon have additional years tacked on, as they also faced charges relating to various bank robberies.<ref>When Goergens was finally released in May 1977, she did not return to the guerilla. Schubert, as we shall see, never made it out of prison alive.</ref>

Throughout the trial, other combatants had been picked up by the state.

On April 12, 1971, Ilse Stachowiak was recognized by a policeman and arrested in Frankfurt. Known by her nickname “Tinny,” Stachowiak was probably the youngest member of the guerilla, having joined in 1970 at the age of sixteen.

The next day, Rolf Heissler was arrested trying to rob a bank in Munich. Heissler had previously been active in the Munich Tupamaros (a Bavarian group inspired by the West Berlin Tupamaros),<ref>Baumann, 63.</ref> but had followed his ex-wife Brigitte Mohnhaupt into the RAF.

Then, on May 6, not three months after her narrow escape in Frankfurt, Astrid Proll was recognized in Hamburg by a gas station attendant who called the police—she tried to escape by car, but was surrounded by armed cops and arrested.<ref>Macdonald, 214-215.</ref>

Two documents appeared about this time, each allegedly produced by the RAF. The first of these, ''Regarding the Armed Struggle in West Europe'', was published under the innocent title “New TRAFfic Regulations” by the radical West Berlin publishing house of Klaus Wagenbach.<ref>Aust, 142.</ref> Not only did this lead to Wagenbach receiving a suspended nine-month sentence under §129<ref>Cobler, 113.</ref> —the catch-all “supporting a criminal organization” paragraph of the Orwellian 1951 security legislation— but the document was quickly disavowed by the RAF itself: it had been written by Mahler in prison, without consultation with any of the others, and did not sit well with the rest of the group.

While Mahler would remain in the RAF for the time being, this was the first visible sign of an ongoing process of estrangement between the former attorney and the rest of the guerilla.

Almost at the same time as Mahler’s document began to circulate, a second text, one which enjoyed the approval of the entire RAF, was released. On May 1, at the annual May Day demonstrations, supporters distributed what became known as the RAF’s foundational manifesto, emblazoned with a red star and a Kalashnikov submachine gun: The Urban Guerilla Concept. This text was widely reprinted, not only in radical publications like ''883'', but in the mainstream ''Spiegel'', the result of a deal whereby the liberal weekly agreed to “donate” 20,000 dm to youth shelters.<ref>''tageszeitung'' “30 Jahre Deutscher Herbst ‘Die RAF war nicht ganz so schlicht,’” Deutschlandradio, October 17, 2007.</ref>

=== Faced With This Justice System, We Can't Be Bothered Defending Ourselves ===
<blockquote>''This was Thorwald Proll’s closing statement in the Frankfurt Department Store Firebombing Trial. (M. & S.)''</blockquote>The trial for conspiracy to commit arson followed the trial for committing arson. But that’s obviously another question. Justice is the justice of the ruling class. Faced with a justice system that speaks in the name of the ruling class—and speaks dishonestly—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that forced a student couple underground by using laws regarding breach of the public peace and causing a disturbance from the year 1870/71 to sentence them to 12 months without parole, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (breachers of the public peace, torch their ramshackle peace).

Faced with a justice system that uses laws from 1870/71 and then talks about what’s right—and speaks dishonestly—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that gave Daniel Cohn-Bendit<ref>Earlier that summer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit had received an eight-month suspended sentence for getting through security at a protest against the German Book Trade’s “Peace Prize” being bestowed upon President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal.</ref> (lex Benda, lex Bendit) an 8-month suspended sentence for jumping over a security fence, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that, on the other hand, only pursued most Nazi trials in order to ease their own guilty right-wing conscience, trials in which they charge anyone that swore the Führer Oath<ref>An oath of fealty to Hitler and the NSDAP that all people working in the public sector were obliged to swear. Millions of people swore this oath for no other reason than to retain their employment.</ref> as a criminal, an act which the entire justice system quite willingly engaged in itself in 1933; faced with a justice system like that, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that prosecutes the minor murderers of Jews and lets the major murderers of Jews run around free, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that in 1933 shamelessly plunged into fascism and in 1945 just as shamelessly deserted it, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that already in the Weimar Republic always sentenced leftists more heavily (Ernst Niekisch,<ref>Ernst Niekisch, briefly involved in the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919, went on to become a leader of German chauvinist “National Bolshevism”—it is unclear why Proll singles him out as an example of the Weimar regime persecuting leftists, although under the Nazis he would be sentenced to life imprisonment for “literary high treason” in 1937.</ref> Ernst Toller<ref>Ernst Toller was a Bavarian Jew and an anarchist who was imprisoned for his role on the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. (He subsequently went into exile, eventually committing suicide in his hotel room in New York City in 1939.)</ref>) than right wingers (Adolf Hitler<ref>On April 1, 1924, Hitler was sentenced to five years for his November 8, 1923, attempted fascist coup, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. He was pardoned and released in December of 1924, having served less than a year of his sentence.</ref>), that rewarded the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht<ref>Luxemburg and Liebknecht were leading figures in the failed 1918 German communist uprising. They were both captured, tortured, and murdered by rightwing militias, the ''Freikorps''.</ref> (and in so doing became complicit in their deaths), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Comrades, we want to take a moment to remember Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—stand up!—the eye of the law sits in this court.

Faced with a justice system that never dismantled its authoritarian structure, but constantly renews it, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that says might makes right and might comes before right (might is always right), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. All power to freedom! Faced with a justice system that defends property and possessions better than it does human beings, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that is an instrument of social order, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that makes laws against the people rather than for them, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Human rights only for the right humans (the state that leans to the right). Right is what the state does, and it’s always right. The state is the only criminal activity allowed. In a capitalist democracy such as this, in an indirect democracy such as this, it is possible for anyone to end up ruling over anyone, and that’s how it should stay, and don’t ask for how much longer. The ruling morality is bourgeois morality, and bourgeois morality is immoral. Bourgeois morality is and will remain immoral. If it is reformed, it will only result in a new form of immorality (and nothing more). Faced with a justice system that undermines the ethical underpinnings of the people (whatever they may be), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. This state prosecutor is nothing more than a piece of the criminal justice system. He requested 6 years of prison time.

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that says it represents the people, but means that it represents the ruling class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that works to assure the ongoing reproduction of existing relationships, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system for which the (so-called) criminal class is and will remain the criminal class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. What does return to society mean? Back to which society? Back to the capitalist society where you will have the opportunity to re-offend? Back to the bourgeois, capitalist society that is itself a prison, which amounts to going from one hole to another

Every reform to criminal law only reforms the existing criminal injustice; criminal law is criminal injustice; the sentence is the injustice. I wouldn’t again offend against society, if they didn’t give me another reason to do so. How am I supposed to return changed to an unchanged society, and so on, and so forth. It is not the laws that need to be changed; it’s the society that must be changed. We want a socialist society. Faced with a justice system that plays homage to an abstract concept of law (Roman law is Bohemian law) and does not see individuals as the result of their society, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that treats defendants as second-class citizens, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that is a system of the ruling class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. (And furthermore) faced with a justice system that doesn’t reduce delinquency, but creates ever more of it (guilty verdicts and acquittals), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (the outcome can only serve their interests). In an authoritarian democracy like this one, it can never amount to more than an assessment of guilt or innocence. The judge sentences the individual, not the society and not himself. What’s the magic word? The magic word is power, and it means the death of freedom! What do we have here that does not come from Nietzsche, that sociopath? For example, the will to power. You should think about power, but do not think that power thinks about disempowering itself at some point; ergo: destroy power (the question of power, the power of the question). Faced with a justice system that wants power and not freedom, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (what freedom do you mean—bourgeois freedom is servitude, and socialist freedom is a long way off).

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that seeks to criminalize Kommune 1 and has persecuted them with an endless series of trials, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Such a justice system should itself be put on trial. Faced with a justice system that seeks to criminalize a section of the SDS, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. How can the public peace of 1870/71 be broken in 1967/68? Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace!

Furthermore, faced with a justice system with a concept of law—a deceitful concept—that is shaped by the opinions of the ruling class (already the case with Franz von Liszt<ref>Franz von Liszt (not to be confused with his cousin, the composer Franz Liszt) was a Prussian law professor whose work heavily influenced the 1882 Marburger Program, a conservative document that influenced the 1933 Nazi German Prevention of Crime Act.</ref> in 1882) we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that doesn’t see crime as a social phenomenon and which passes sentences that serve no social function (Franz von Liszt), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that speaks of punishment— meaning oppression, meaning repression—helping the offender, while in fact defending bourgeois society, always defending it, defending it to the end; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Quotes from the first draft of the reforms to the criminal code: “The bitter necessity of punishment.” “Responsibility lies with the law breakers” (and not the representatives of the law), “given the flawed nature of people” (and so it will remain in a capitalist society such as this, in which antiauthoritarian structures that promote perfection don’t exist and there are no examples of moral perfection—the principle of guilt, which guarantees the continuation of the principle of punishment, lives on, spelling the death of freedom and assuring the integrity of power). Another quote from the first draft of the criminal law reforms (this will be the last one): “(W)hat the principle of punishment presupposes is a virtually unchallenged standard of criminal law, etc., etc.” When will this stop?

Faced with a justice system that holds that the irrational standards of criminal law and criminology are appropriate, that denies the reality of the capitalist social order, that denies and suppresses psychology and the study of crime in a particularly nauseating way, constantly impeding them, that treats criminology as a science of social relationships; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that represents the law of the ruling class—represents duplicity—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Furthermore, bourgeois morality is and remains immoral, and if reformed, it is only as a new immorality. All attempts at reform are pointless, because they are inherent to the system. We demand the resignation of Minister of Justice Heinemann (also a pointless demand). Where is the judge who will turn his back on this crap and join the general strike, instead of remaining eternally stuck up to his armpits in this shit? Where are the antiauthoritarian judges? I can’t see them. This is your chance, Herr Zoebe,<ref>Gerhard Zoebe was the judge in this case.</ref> to be the first. I wrote that before I knew you. Later, you responded to the word democracy like it was leprosy, which is to say, you shrunk away from the concept. And for you, resocialization sends you into a rage; it’s the final blow. And for you it should be the final blow. Always: the final blow.

Faced with a justice system that has completely authoritarian judges, like the judge Schwalbe,<ref>A judge in Frankfurt who often presided over trials against left-wing defendants.</ref> we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (but one Schwalbe doesn’t make for an authoritarian summer). Faced with a justice system that has judges like the judge in Hamburg, who on August 15 of this year, following a 2½ minute hearing, sentenced a young worker to 4 months with the possibility of parole, beginning at Easter, with the comment that the young worker should be happy —in spite of the brevity of the hearing—that he was given a chance to clarify his political motivations, and then went on to tell this young worker that he should stop worrying about things that don’t concern him; faced with a justice system that is made up of such judges, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace.

Faced with a justice system that has judges like those that presided over the Timo Rinnelt trial,<ref>In 1964, seven year-old Timo Rinnelt of Wiesbaden was kidnapped and murdered. Some years later, his neighbour, a twenty-seven year-old man, was arrested for the crime. In 1968, he received a life sentence.</ref> once more extending the reach of the German billy club, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

And finally, faced with a justice system that has judges like the judge presiding in the case against Jürgen Bartsch,<ref>Jürgen Bartsch, a German serial killer, who as a child suffered both emotional and sexual abuse, was responsible for four brutal child murders in the 60s.</ref> who was sentenced to life imprisonment on the grounds that if he had wanted to he could have struggled to control his abnormal appetites (whatever that means), with the judge saying in conclusion, “And may God help you to learn to control you appetites”—so God and not society—and for such a judge it would be preferable if he had never been born or had died long ago; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

It has been said that the trial of Jürgen Bartsch was the trial of the century. It was actually a trial against this century, and the sentence spoke for this century, which is to say, it spoke for the morality of the preceding century (it will only get worse), which in this trial was celebrated as a barbaric triumph. When the judgment was read, the spectators, a petit bourgeois gathering, clapped and cheered. Nobody forbid that. The teeth of justice were chattering, but nobody heard that. Child murderers are useful. They eliminate all consciousness that criminals were once themselves children (the authoritarian upbringing). A hundred children of West German families are beaten to death every year. Beaten to death. Child murderers work to ease our conscience about this slaughter. And what of the daily murder of children in Vietnam (with its breathtaking body-count)? What do respectable people pray for? Today we get our daily ration of murder (The Springer papers are the centerpiece of every breakfast).

Furthermore, bourgeois morality is the ruling morality, and bourgeois morality is immoral. Faced with a justice system that has state prosecutors like state prosecutor Griebel,<ref>Walter Griebel was the prosecutor in the case at hand.</ref> who told me “under four eyes”<ref>In German “''unter vier Augen''”; this is an obvious reference to the Nazi term for a meetings involving only Hitler and one of his close associates. The content of these discussions was meant to stay between the two men.</ref> that he holds Marx’s teachings in the highest regard (but what does he do about it?), that he is as much a prisoner of a labyrinthine bureaucracy as I (but what does he do against it?). He accuses the left here of only wanting to change superficial things, but nothing beyond that (but he bears the mark of Cain of repression on his forehead), and he had the effrontery to bare his broken bourgeois heart to me, saying that on the one hand he is troubled by the rigidity of the ruling conditions, while on the other—how grotesque—he continued to speak of the legitimacy of the laws of 1870/71—speaking deceptively—faced with such a justice system, I can’t be bothered defending myself, and we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Imprison the state prosecutors. Where is the state prosecutor who will indict the state?

Faced with a justice system that is charging us with life-threatening arson, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system, in the eyes of which, we have every reason to believe, we are politically tainted from the outset, we cannot defend ourselves (all the charged are arsonists and all judges are honest men). Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace.

And furthermore, faced with a justice system that speaks for the ruling class—and speaks deceptively—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system with custodial judges as authoritarian as judge Kappel, who gave every impression of being convinced of the guilt (whatever that is) of all of the accused before the trial even started. Amongst other things, his macho aggressiveness is such that he said to me, “Take your hand out of your pocket.” When I put my other hand in my pocket (obviously not the same one), he didn’t say anything, he just laughed, and my laughter caught in my throat at the thought that he and I could ever laugh at the same thing for the same reason—a question of consciousness. Faced with such a justice system, I can’t be bothered defending myself, and we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with such a decadent justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (a legal right is only what is right legally). Faced with a justice system that grotesquely misuses detention, I can’t be bothered defending myself. If you have a fixed address, the justice system holds on to you until you lose it, which is to say, until you’re tossed out. Then the justice system says, “Ah, you don’t have one. In any event, if you’re released you will no longer have one. That essentially makes you a flight risk.” Faced with a justice system that grotesquely abuses preventive detention, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. In this way they reveal the abyss that is the justice system. If you have a fixed address, the police make sure you lose it, so they can take you into custody. It happened to August Klee, who like me has been held in detention for some months now. While all of this has not been enough to convince me that life is a theatrical drama, I do believe that the remand centre can be. When Klee was detained in this way, the police assured him that it was not the first time they had done this; making the criminal police potential criminals.

Risk of flight always offers the necessary excuse. For instance, August Klee is also classified a flight risk because his closest relatives, first and foremost among them his wife, live outside of Germany. He must divorce her (what’s that about?) if he wants to get out. On the other hand, if you live in Germany, but do not live with your wife (what’s that about?), if you have no family ties (because you’re not chained to that structure), then you’re a flight risk. If you lived outside the country 40 years ago, you’re a flight risk. If you’ve recently come back from a trip (and not from some crappy tourist trip), in that case you’re a flight risk. If you’re a foreigner, then you’re a flight risk. (I can recite all of this by heart). If there is a mix-up of some sort in your arrest, as occurred recently on ''Hammelsgasse'' (bourgeois freedom is a ''Hammelsgasse''<ref>''Hammelsgasse'', a street in an upper class neighbourhood in Frankfurt, could be translated literally as Mutton Alley; a play on words referencing sheeps being led to the slaughter is intended.</ref> ), there’s no need for concern, phony paperwork will be prepared. Here the danger is that one will be silenced.

Following conviction, it may be the case that you will be released for good behavior. He, however, has been refused this, because he has behaved so well that he has become institutionalized, and will surely be unable to find his bearings on the outside. He must remain inside until the end. This is an example of the risk of unadorned reconstruction. If you happen to be an arsonist, there is the danger of evidence being suppressed, etc.; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that supports a prison system that attacks and violates the personal freedom and dignity of 365 people every second—first the attack, then the violation—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

What is permissible and what is not permissible in remand: prisoners in remand are permitted to do what the justice system—acting as administrators—permits them to do. You are not permitted to be afraid. You are not permitted to lie around in bed, but you can lie under the bed. You are not permitted to play ping-pong with multiple balls; you are only permitted one ball. You are not permitted to refuse dinner; you are not permitted to show any kind of defiance. As a revolutionary socialist, you can never show defiance.

A rate of 1.23 dm<ref>Roughly forty cents.</ref> per day is designated for meals (what a fantastic amount). You are not permitted to throw your dinner in the guard’s face, or he’s not responsible for what happens next. The guards are prisoners just like you, and most of them know it. The guards are only the little warlords.

You are not permitted to smoke outside of your cell, only in it. You are permitted to experience the hell of it all inside your cell. You are not permitted to light fires, because you can’t use the fire alarm, because you can’t reach it, because you can’t leave your cell, because the door is locked.

You are not permitted to take the opportunity to engage in discussion with the other prisoners, the so-called criminals, whatever might come out of it. Let’s be perfectly clear, they are staple products of the capitalist social order. You need to be clear about this.

Furthermore, you are not permitted to hang anything on the walls, but you are permitted to hang up the memo that tells you that you are not permitted to hang anything on the walls. You are not permitted to loiter. You are not permitted to lean against the wall. You are not permitted to just hang around. You should spend every day formulating a more thorough understanding of the justice system.

If you go to see the minister, don’t forget it’s just a crutch. Don’t go to church; God is dead, but Che lives. Study the rudiments of socialism, and you will have everything you need.

You are only permitted a half-hour a day to walk. You are not permitted to yell out the window. You are not permitted to have as many comrades as you like. You are permitted to spend 35 dm<ref>Roughly $11.20.</ref> per week. That’s how it goes in Hessen. And don’t forget, Hessen has the most liberal penal system. You are not permitted to drink as much coffee as you wish. You are not permitted to drink any alcohol. You are not permitted to smoke hash. You are not permitted to consume in the way you wish, and you are not permitted to consume what you wish, and all of that in a society based on consumption. Note that in prison consumption becomes a treat.

Correspondence is monitored. Sexual intercourse is not monitored, but then there’s not much of it. Adultery is not permitted (what’s that about?), but it is not permitted to consummate a marriage (what’s that about?). All of those in the hole who still cling onto bourgeois existence (woe be it to those who see no alternative), and that’s most of them, will be driven crazy by the bourgeois social order. That’s how it is. How, for instance, are they to maintain their marriages? They will all fail, and that’s good.

Every citizen should go to prison to gain a real understanding of the situation.

Every socialist should go to prison to gain a real understanding of the situation.

Every citizen should go to prison so that he develops a correct relationship to socialism.

Yet every individual capitalist or socialist has the opportunity to be the first to blow up a prison. Don’t read any of the Springer papers; burn them. Then blow Springer up.

You are not permitted to beat off or masturbate if that’s what you want to do. You can do what you want with your body. The duality of homosexuality exists. If new sexual laws are passed, will you still be permitted to fuck chicks; not to speak of other prisoners. In Butzbach penitentiary there was a flourishing trade in bras. Forced sodomy (what’s that all about?). Rape the guards that torment you.

You aren’t permitted to commit a break-in, but you are permitted to break out. Out of prison I mean. Attempted escape is not an indictable offense. You are not permitted to receive photos 1-3 from the Kommune 1 book, ''Klau Mich'',<ref>Steal Me.</ref> because their obscene content is a threat to the moral order of the remand centre.

The way Glojne, alias Globne, the Regional Court Judge explained it to me in a letter—who asked?—you are not permitted to hang anything in your cell or hang yourself in the cell. You are not permitted to hide in your cell. Try it some time. You are not permitted to take anything from the library. You are not permitted to lose your mind. You are permitted to buy food and specialty items, as well as other items you require in keeping with a reasonable lifestyle. You are not permitted to violate these conditions. The administrators decide what reasonable means (each individual administrator in this mental asylum).

If for reasons of order they want to reduce the number of newspapers and magazines you receive, you must attempt to have them delivered to you by means of disorder—in the sense of antiauthoritarian order. You must pull them out of the guard’s hands, just as he pulled them out of yours. You have to try. You can’t give up without trying. If the warden addresses you with du, you must also address him with du.<ref>German has two forms of the singular you; ''du'', which is used with social inferiors, younger people, and very close friends, and ''Sie'', which is the polite form of address. What the writer is saying is that patronizing behaviour should be answered with patronizing behaviour.</ref> You mustn’t work—for 80 pfennig<ref>Roughly thirty cents.</ref> a day. You can’t let yourself be exploited. The justice system practices the most secretive, most efficient and most disgraceful exploitation possible. It fattens itself by using primitive capitalist techniques in a modern capitalist system. Grievances are pointless, particularly as you are not permitted to file common grievances. Grievances are suppressed at will. Grievances are pointless, because you must submit them to the ruling structure. Common dispositions are common dispositions, and solitary dispositions are solitary dispositions. You can’t give in to loneliness. You can’t lose the dialogue. You can’t lose the socialist dialogue. In prison you have nothing to lose and lose nothing. You have everything to win.

Note that the rights and responsibilities of remand prisoners mentioned here are an introduction to inequality and bondage; you’re a first class citizen, you’re a second class citizen, you’re a fourth class citizen, you’re a fifth class citizen, etc., and that’s what you’ll remain. You’re a criminal and that’s what you will remain. Conduct regarding the attendants: the prisoner must immediately disengage himself from the attendants; he must immediately disengage.

Life in the penal institution is one in which work time, free time, and quiet time are carefully divided, and the prisoner is bound to this division. Life in the penal institution is life in barracks. It consists of sitting around. Life in the penal institution is divided into time for oppression, time for bondage, and time of dead silence. The time of unconsciousness is over. The time for realism has begun. Bourgeois life is its own kind of remand. If you didn’t already know that, now you do. You are not permitted to live and you are not permitted to die; you are not permitted to die and you are not permitted to live. Exactly. You are not permitted to run amok in the house. You are not permitted, of your own free will, to leave your assigned place. You are not permitted to break out. You are not permitted to scream, yell, or speak out the window. You aren’t allowed to speak to your cellmates (what’s that about?). You are not permitted to threaten the security of the institution. You are not permitted to withhold, store, or use anything. You are not permitted to retain anything, etc.

You must do everything that you are not permitted to do, and you must not let your guard down. Always think about it. Send every state prosecutor to prison. You are not permitted to defend yourself. Never. Those who defend themselves incriminate themselves. Do forget that. You are not permitted to have unauthorized telephone contact. Your correspondence is monitored. Letters you send from prison cannot be sealed. You are not permitted to seal them yourself. You are not permitted to… You are not permitted to…

You cannot give in to fatigue. You cannot, at risk of retribution, pass parliamentary representative Güde<ref>Max Güde, a former Nazi, and at the time a member of parliament for the cdu.</ref> in the street without pushing him around. He brings out the best in you. But beforehand you must paint your hand red. The left one, obviously.

Yet again (in the hole), you cannot give in to fatigue. Concentrate. You’re sitting in bourgeois capitalism’s concentration camp. Beyond that, the prisoner has a cell to keep clean. The most oppressive power in prison is the power of cleanliness. Cleaning is the major form of torture. You are not permitted to get dirty while cleaning things. Only clean up when it suits you. Otherwise you aren’t in prison; prison is in you. Keep in mind: the cleaner the cell, the more complete the hell. Furthermore, the prisoner and his seven suitcases<ref>A reference to a poem by Soviet poet Samuel Marschak about a woman bringing her valued possessions with her to the train station, the title of which in German is Die Sieben Sachen (which would translate as “Seven Suitcases” in English).</ref> and his cell can be searched at any time. When you are searched, ask them if they’re looking for new people, etc., etc.

I can’t continue talking about this. Faced with a justice system that has such an indescribable prison system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Such a justice system must itself be indicted. Such a justice system must be exposed by the revolutionary process. It is the responsibility of every antiauthoritarian judge to take legal action against this justice system. We encourage the antiauthoritarian segment of the justice system to use its strength to call a general strike. We particularly encourage antiauthoritarian interns to call a general strike.

I declare my solidarity with Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader, although they have chosen to defend themselves here, which was obviously a decision that no one really understood. This solidarity will continue through the next period while they are in prison and the penitentiary. I have, in any event, every reason to do so. I declare my solidarity with Horst Söhnlein. And if I do so, although he chose not to defend himself, it is as much ''prollidarisch''<ref>A neologism combining the author Thorwald Proll’s last name and ''solidarisch'', the German word for solidarity.</ref> as it is in solidarity. And with that, I stop.

We declare our solidarity with all of the actions that the SDS has undertaken in response to the recent attempts to undermine their public support. We demand the abolition of judicial unaccountability, because they use their power to assure the rule of some people over other people

We demand the abolition of the power of some people over other people.

Workers of the world unite!

Venceremos!

Thorwald Proll

October 1968<ref>The version of this text on Ronald Augustin’s website is dated March 1968, however we believe this is an error, as the arson in question was only committed in April 1968.</ref>

=== Build the Red Army! ===
Comrades of ''883'',

It is pointless to explain the right thing to the wrong people. We’ve done enough of that. We don’t want to explain the action to free Baader to babbling intellectuals, to those who are freaked out, to know-it-alls, but rather to the potentially revolutionary section of the people. That is to say, to those who can immediately understand this action, because they are themselves prisoners. Those who want nothing to do with the blather of the “left,” because it remains without meaning or consequence. Those who are fed up!

The action to free Baader must be explained to youth from the Märkisch neighbourhood, to the girls from Eichenhof, Ollenhauer, and Heiligensee, to young people in group homes, in youth centers, in Grünen Haus, and in Kieferngrund.<ref>Places where disenfranchised youth could be found. RAF members had previously worked with such young marginalized youth in the “apprentices collectives.” Some of these young people became members of the RAF and were involved in the action to free Baader.</ref>

To large families, to young workers and apprentices, to high school students, to families in neighborhoods that are being gentrified, to the workers at Siemens and AEG-Telefunken, at SEL and Osram, to the married women who, as well as doing the housework and raising the children, must do piecework—damn it.

They are the ones who must understand the action; those who receive no compensation for the exploitation they must suffer. Not in their standard of living, not in their consumption, not in the form of mortgages, not in the form of even limited credit, not in the form of midsize cars. Those who cannot even hope for these baubles, who are not seduced by all of that.

Those who have realized that the future promised to them by their teachers and professors and landlords and social workers and supervisors and foremen and union representatives and city councilors is nothing more than an empty lie, but who nonetheless fear the police. It is only necessary that they—and not the petit bourgeois intellectuals—understand that all of that is over now, that this is a start, that the liberation of Baader is only the beginning! That an end to police domination is in sight! It is to them that we want to say that we are building the red army, and it is their army. It is to them that we say, “It has begun.” They don’t pose stupid questions like, “Why right now precisely?” They have already traveled a thousand roads controlled by the authorities and managers—they’ve done the waiting room waltz; they remember the times when it worked and the times when it didn’t. And in conversations with sympathetic teachers, who are assigned to the remedial schools that don’t change anything, and the kindergartens that lack the necessary spaces—they don’t ask why now—damn it!

They certainly won’t listen to you, if you aren’t even able to distribute your newspaper before it is confiscated. Because you don’t need to shake up the left-wing shit eaters, but rather the objective left, you have to construct a distribution network that is out of the reach of the pigs.

Don’t complain that it’s too hard. The action to free Baader was hardly a walk in the park. If you understand what’s going on (and your comments indicate that you do understand, so it’s opportunism to say that the bullet also hit you in the stomach<ref>A reference to Georg Linke, the sixty-four-year-old librarian at the Institute for Social Studies who was shot during the action to free Baader. This shooting led to substantial criticism, even from otherwise sympathetic leftists.</ref>—you assholes), if you understand anything, you need to find a better way to organize your distribution. And we have no more to say to you about our methods than we do about our plans for action—you shitheads! As long as you allow yourselves to brought in by the cops, you aren’t in a position to be giving anyone else advice about how to avoid being brought in by the cops. What do you mean by adventurism? That one only has oneself to blame for informers. Whatever.

What does it mean to bring conflicts to a head? It means not allowing oneself to be taken out of action.

That’s why we’re building the red army. Behind the parents stand the teachers, the youth authorities, and the police. Behind the supervisor stands the boss, the personnel office, the workers compensation board, the welfare office, and the police. Behind the custodian stands the manager, the landlord, the bailiff, the eviction notice, and the police. With this comes the way that the pigs use censorship, layoffs, dismissals, along with bailiff’s seals and billy clubs. Obviously, they reach for their service revolvers, their teargas, their grenades, and their semi-automatic weapons; obviously, they escalate, if nothing else does the trick.<ref>A reference to the Hand Grenade Law passed shortly after Baader’s prison break, whereby police in West Berlin were equipped with hand grenades, semi-automatic revolvers, and submachine guns.</ref> Obviously, the GIs in Vietnam are trained in counterguerilla tactics and the Green Berets receive courses on torture. So what?

It’s clear that prison sentences for political activities have been made heavier. You must be clear that it is social democratic bullshit to act as if imperialism—with all its Neubauers<ref>Kurt Neubauer was a member of the SPD and the Berlin Senator for Youth and Sports.</ref> and Westmorelands,<ref>General William Westmoreland was Commander of the U.S. troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 and army Chief-of-Staff from 1968 to 1972.</ref> with Bonn, the senate, ''Länder'' youth offices, borough councils, the whole pig circus—should be allowed to subvert, investigate, ambush, intimidate, and suppress without a fight. Be absolutely clear that the revolution is no Easter March. The pigs will certainly escalate their means as far as possible, but no further than that. To bring the conflict to a head, we are building the red army.

If the red army is not simultaneously built, then all conflict, all the political work carried out in the factories and in Wedding<ref>A neighborhood in West Berlin.</ref> and in the Märkisch neighborhood<ref>A working-class suburb of West Berlin.</ref> and at Plötze<ref>A working-class suburb of West Berlin.</ref> and in the courtrooms is reduced to reformism; which is to say, you end up with improved discipline, improved intimidation, and improved exploitation. That destroys the people, rather than destroying what destroys the people! If we don’t build the red army, the pigs can do what they want, the pigs can continue to incarcerate, lay off, impound, seize children, intimidate, shoot, and dominate. To bring the conflict to a head means that they are no longer able to do what they want, but rather must do what we want them to do.

You must understand that those who have nothing to gain from the exploitation of the Third World, of Persian oil, of Bolivian bananas, of South African gold, have no reason to identify with the exploiter. They can grasp that what is beginning to happen here has been going on for a long time in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Guatemala, in Oakland and Watts, in Cuba and China, in Angola and in New York.

They will understand, if you explain it to them, that the action to liberate Baader was not an isolated action, that it never was, but that it is just the first of its kind in the FRG. Damn it.

Stop lounging around on the sofa in your recently-raided apartment counting up your love affairs and other petty details. Build an effective distribution system. Forget about the cowardly shits, the bootlickers, the social workers, those who only attempt to curry favor, they are a lumpen mob. Figure out where the asylums are and the large families and the subproletariat and the women workers, those who are only waiting to give a kick in the teeth to those who deserve it. They will take the lead. And don’t let yourselves get caught. Learn from them how one avoids getting caught—they know more about that than you.
[[File:Picture at the End of RAF's 'Build the Red Army' from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|thumb|400x400px]]
DEVELOP THE CLASS STRUGGLE

ORGANIZE THE PROLETARIAT

START THE ARMED STRUGGLE

BUILD THE RED ARMY

RAF

June 5, 1970

=== The Urban Guerilla Concept ===
<blockquote>''We must draw a clear line between ourselves and the enemy.''

Mao

''I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear dividing line between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear dividing line between the enemy and ourselves but have achieved spectacular successes in our work.''

Mao tse Tung

May 26, 1939<ref>This version is close to that in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 15. Please note, however, that in keeping with the German translation, the ending here differs slightly from the standard English translation, which reads simply “achieved a great deal in our work.”</ref></blockquote>

# '''Concrete Answers to Concrete Questions'''<blockquote>''I still insist that without investigation there cannot possibly be any right to speak.'' Mao<ref>Ibid., 230.</ref>

Some comrades have already made up their minds about us. For them, it is the “demagoguery of the bourgeois press” that links these “anarchist groups” with the socialist movement. In their incorrect and pejorative use of the term anarchism, they are no different than the Springer Press. We don’t want to engage anyone in dialogue on such a shabby basis.

Many comrades want to know what we think we’re doing. The letter to ''883'', in May 1970, was too vague. The tape Michele Ray had, extracts of which appeared in ''Spiegel'', was not authentic and, in any event, was drawn from a private discussion. Ray wanted to use it as an aide-mémoire for an article she was writing. Either she tricked us or we overestimated her. If our practice was as hasty as she claims, we’d have been caught by now. ''Spiegel'' paid Ray an honorarium of $1,000.00 for the interview.

Almost everything the newspapers have written about us—and the way they write it—has clearly been a lie. Plans to kidnap Willy Brandt are meant to make us look like political idiots, and claims that we intend to kidnap children are meant to make us look like unscrupulous criminals. These lies go as far as the “authentic details” in ''konkret'' #5, which proved to be nothing more than unreliable details that had been slapped together. That we have “officers and soldiers,” that some of us are slaves of others, that comrades who have left us fear reprisals, that we broke into houses or used violence to take passports, that we exercise “group terror”—all of this is bullshit.

The people who imagine an illegal armed organization to be like the ''Freikorps'' or the Feme,<ref>The ''Freikorps'' were right-wing paramilitary groups that sprang up in the period following World War I; many were later integrated into the Nazi rise to power. The Feme was a secret medieval court which meted out the death sentence, the bodies of its victims generally being left hanging in the streets.</ref> are people who hope for a pogrom. The psychological mechanisms that produce such projections, and their relationship to fascism, have been analyzed in Horkheimer and Adorno’s ''Authoritarian Personality'' and ''Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism''. A compulsive revolutionary personality is a contradictio in adjecto— a contradiction in terms. A revolutionary political practice under the present conditions—perhaps under any conditions—presumes the permanent integration of the individual’s personality and political beliefs, that is to say, political identity. Marxist criticism and self-criticism has nothing to do with “self-liberation,” but a lot to do with revolutionary discipline. It is not the members of a “left organization,” writing anonymously or using pen names, who are just interested in “making headlines,” but ''konkret'' itself, whose editor is currently promoting himself as a sort of left-wing Eduard Zimmermann,<ref>Eduard Zimmermann was tv moderator for the German equivalent of Crimewatch. This program was used in the search for RAF members.</ref> producing jack-off material for his market niche.

Many comrades spread untruths about us too. They brag that we lived with them, that they organized our trip to Jordan, that they know about our contacts, that they are doing something for us, when, in fact, they are doing nothing. Some only want to make it look like they are “in the know.” Günther Voigt<ref>Günther Voigt was a West Berlin arms dealer. A pistol that could be linked to him was dropped during the Baader liberation. Voigt fled to Switzerland where he gave an interview that led to his arrest, claiming he was involved in the liberation of Baader.</ref> had to pay for puffing himself up in a conversation with Dürrenmatt,<ref>Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss playwright and essayist.</ref> claiming he was the one who freed Baader, which he regretted when the cops showed up. It’s not easy to clear things up with denials, even when they’re true. Some people want to use these lies to prove that we’re stupid, unreliable, careless, or crazy. By doing so, they encourage people to oppose us. In reality, they are irrelevant to us. They are only consumers. We want nothing to do with these gossipmongers, for whom the anti-imperialist struggle is a coffee klatch. Many are those who don’t gossip, who have some understanding of resistance, who are pissed off enough to wish us luck, who support us because they know that there is no point spending life implicated in and adapted to this crap.

What happened at the Knesebekstr. 89 house (Mahler’s arrest) was not due to carelessness on our part, but to betrayal. The traitor was one of us. There is no guarantee against that for people who do what we do. There is no certainty that comrades will not break under extreme police pressure, or will hold up in the face of the terror that the system uses against us, with which it attacks us. The pigs wouldn’t have the power if they didn’t have these tools.

Our existence makes some people feel pressured to justify themselves. To avoid political discussion with us, to avoid comparing their practice to ours, they distort even the smallest details. For example, the rumor is still circulating that Baader had only three or nine or twelve months to serve, though the correct length of time is easily ascertained: three years for arson, a further six months on probation, and approximately six months for falsifying documents. Of these 48 months, Andreas Baader had served 14 in ten different Hessian prisons—nine times he was transferred because of bad behavior, for example, organizing mutinies and resistance. Reducing the remaining 34 months to three, nine or twelve is intended to reduce the moral justification for the May 14 breakout. In this way, some comrades rationalize their fear of the personal consequences of entering into a political discussion with us.

The question frequently asked, as to whether we would have proceeded with the breakout if we had known that Linke would be shot, can only be answered with a no. The question of what we would have done if… is ambiguous—pacifist, moralistic, platonic, and detached. Anyone who thinks seriously about the breakout would not pose this question, but would think it through for himself. In asking this question, people only want to see if we are as brutal as the Springer Press claims. It’s like an interrogation in catechism class. It is an attempt to trivialize the question of revolutionary violence, by treating revolutionary violence and bourgeois violence as the same thing, which leads nowhere. In anticipating all the possible developments, there was no reason to believe that a civilian would intervene. It is suicidal to think that one can conduct a jailbreak unarmed.

On May 14, the cops fired the first shots. This was the case in Frankfurt as well, where two of us ran for it, because we are not going to just let ourselves be arrested. The cops shot to kill. Sometimes we didn’t shoot at all, and when we did, we didn’t shoot to kill. In Berlin, in Nuremburg, in Frankfurt.<ref>Berlin refers to the Knesebeckstr. arrest mentioned above. On December 21, 1971, RAF member Ali Jansen was arrested following a shootout at a police roadblock in Nuremberg. On February 10, 1971, police in Frankfurt opened fire on Astrid Proll and Manfred Grashof, who escaped unharmed.</ref> It can be proven, because it is true. We do not “use firearms recklessly.” The cop who finds himself in the contradiction of being a “little man” and a capitalist pawn, a low paid employee and monopoly capitalism’s agent, is not obliged to follow orders. We shoot back if someone shoots at us. The cop who lets us go, we let him go as well.

It is clear that the massive hunt for us is really directed against the entire socialist left in the Federal Republic and West Berlin. This circus cannot be justified by the small amount of money or the few cars and documents we are alleged to have stolen, or by the attempted murder they’re trying to pin on us. The ruling class has been scared out of its skin. They thought that they had this state and all of its inhabitants, classes, and contradictions under control, right down to the last detail: the intellectuals reduced to their magazines, the left isolated in its own circles, Marxism-Leninism disarmed, and internationalism demoralized. However fragile it may pretend to be, the power structure is not so easily damaged. One should not be tricked by this hue and cry into contributing to all this noise.

We are not saying that the organization of armed resistance groups can replace the legal proletarian organizations, that isolated actions can replace the class struggle, or that armed struggle can replace political work in the factories or neighborhoods. We are arguing that armed struggle is a necessary precondition for the latter to succeed and progress, that armed struggle is “the highest form of Marxism-Leninism” (Mao), and that it can and must begin now, as without it there can be no anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole. We are not Blanquists nor are we anarchists, though we think Blanqui was a great revolutionary and the personal heroism of many anarchists is certainly above reproach.

We have not even been active for a year yet. It is too soon to draw conclusions. The extensive publicity that Genscher, Zimmermann<ref>Friedrich Zimmermann (CDU) was, at this time, the Chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary faction.</ref> and Co. have given us opens up a propaganda opportunity which we are using to share a few thoughts.

'''2. The Metropole: The Federal Republic'''<blockquote>''The crisis isn’t the result of the stagnation of development, but of development itself. Since the aim is to increase profit, development encourages parasitism and waste, harming whole social sectors, multiplying needs that it cannot satisfy, and accelerating the disintegration of social life. A monstrous apparatus is necessary to control, by means of manipulation and open repression, the tensions and revolts which it itself often provokes. The crisis in American political unity caused by the student rebellion and the Black Movement, the spread of the student struggle in Europe, the vehement renewal and the growth of worker and mass struggles leading to the “May” explosion in France, the tumultuous social crisis in Italy, and the rebirth of dissatisfaction in Germany all indicate the nature of the situation.''

Il Manifesto: The Necessity of Communism, extract from Thesis 33<ref>Expelled from the Italian Communist Party in 1969, Il Manifesto was an influential group in the Italian autonomist movement, having 6,000 members in 1972. They advocated council communism, whereby decisions would be made by workers’ councils, not by a vanguard party or state. Il Manifesto was extremely influential for the entire European New Left. The quote comes from a manifesto of 200 theses issued by the group in 1971.</ref> </blockquote>The comrades from Il Manifesto rightly place the Federal Republic of Germany last in their analysis, vaguely describing the situation here as dissatisfaction. West Germany, which Barzel<ref>Rainer Barzel was, at this time, the party Chairman of the cdu.</ref> described six years ago as an economic giant but a political dwarf, has not lost any of its economic power since, while its external and internal political power has increased. With the formation of the Grand Coalition in 1966, the political danger posed by the coming recession was forestalled. With the Emergency Laws the instrument was created to secure unified ruling class action in the event of future crises—the unity of political reactionaries and all those who cling to legality was established. The Social-Liberal coalition succeeded, neutralizing the “dissatisfaction” that had become evident in the student revolt and the extra-parliamentary movement. Insofar as the SPD’s supporters have not broken with reformism, this section of the intelligentsia has been prevented from embracing a communist alternative; in this way reformism acts as a brake on the anticapitalist struggle. ''Ostpolitik'' is opening new markets for capitalism, while at the same time it represents the German contribution to an accommodation and alliance between U.S. imperialism and the Soviet Union, which the U.S.A. requires in order to have a free hand for its wars of aggression in the Third World. This government seems to have managed to separate the New Left from the old antifascists, cutting off the New Left from its own history, the history of the working class movement. The DKP, which can thank the new collusion between U.S. imperialism and Soviet revisionism for its new legal status, has organized demonstrations in favor of this government’s Ostpolitik. Niemöller—a symbol of antifascism—is shilling for the SPD in the upcoming election.

Using the smokescreen of “the common good,” the government has established state control and curbed the union bureaucracy with its wage guidelines and its notion of concerted action. The strikes of September 69 showed that things have been overwhelmingly skewed to the benefit of profit; and the fact that these strikes only addressed economic issues indicates how firmly the government holds the reins.

The system shows its strength in the way that the Federal Republic, with its 2 million foreign workers and unemployment approaching 10%, can make use of the looming recession to develop the terror and the disciplinary measures that unemployment implies for the proletariat, without having to deal with any political radicalization of the masses.

In exchange for development aid and military support for the U.S.A.’s wars of aggression, the Federal Republic profits from the exploitation of the Third World, without having to take responsibility for these wars, and without having to struggle against internal opposition. While it is no less aggressive than U.S. imperialism, the Federal Republic is less vulnerable.

The political options open to imperialism here have not been exhausted in either their reformist or their fascist forms, and imperialism has not exhausted its ability to either integrate or repress the contradictions that it produces.

The RAF’s urban guerilla concept is not based on an optimistic evaluation of the situation in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

'''3. The Student Revolt'''<blockquote>''The conclusion that it is impossible to separate the revolution in the “heartland” from that in “underdeveloped areas” is based on an analysis of the unique character of the capitalist ruling system. Without a revival of revolution in the West, the imperialists, with their logic of violence, will be able to develop their exit strategy through a catastrophic war, and it will be impossible to prevent the world’s superpowers from imposing crushing oppression.''

Il Manifesto: from Thesis 52</blockquote>To dismiss the student movement as a petit bourgeois revolt is to reduce it to the grandiose claims that accompanied it, to deny its roots in the contradiction between bourgeois society and bourgeois ideology; it means recognizing its obvious shortcomings while ignoring the theoretical level that this anticapitalist protest managed to achieve.

The pathos with which the student movement became aware of its mental immiseration in the knowledge factories was certainly exaggerated, as was the identification of this with the situation of the exploited peoples of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The comparison between the mass circulation of ''Bild Zeitung'' here and the massive bombing of Vietnam was a grotesque oversimplification, just as it was arrogant to compare the ideological critique of the system here and the armed struggle over there. The students’ belief that they were the revolutionary subject, insofar as it was based on the appeal of Marcuse, betrayed their ignorance as to the actual nature of bourgeois society and the mode of production which it has established.

The student revolt in the Federal Republic and West Berlin—with its street fighting, its arsons, its use of counterviolence, its pathos, as well as its exaggerations and ignorance… in short, with its practice—has the merit of having reconstructed Marxism-Leninism, at least in the consciousness of the intelligentsia, as that political theory without which the political, economic, and ideological factors and their outward manifestations cannot be combined into an overall analytical perspective. Without this, internal and external relationships cannot be described.

The student movement was based on the contradiction between the theory of academic freedom and the reality of monopoly capitalism’s control of the universities. Precisely because it was based on this, and not merely on ideology, it didn’t run out of steam before it had established the relationship between the crisis in the universities and the crisis of capitalism, if only in theory. Not before it was clear to the student movement and their public that “liberty, equality, and fraternity” would not be achieved by appeals to human rights or the UN Charter, that what was occurring here was what had always occurred in the colonialist and imperialist exploitation of Latin America, Africa, and Asia: discipline, subordination, and brutality for the oppressed and for those who take up their struggle by protest, those who resist and wage the anti-imperialist struggle.

In its ideological critique, the student movement viewed almost all aspects of state repression as expressions of imperialist exploitation: in the Springer campaign, in the demonstrations against American aggression in Vietnam, in the campaign against class justice, in the ''Bundeswehr'' campaign,<ref>An SDS campaign encouraging soldiers to desert from the ''Bundeswehr'', the West German Army.</ref> in the campaign against the Emergency Laws, and in the high school student movement. Expropriate Springer! Smash NATO! Resist Consumer Terror! Resist Education Terror! Resist Rent Terror!—these were all correct political slogans. They aimed to expose the contradiction between new needs which could be satisfied through the development of productive forces, on the one hand, and the pressure of irrational subordination to class society, on the other. Their identity was not based on class struggle here, but rather on the knowledge that they were part of an international movement, that they were dealing with the same class enemy as the Viet Cong, the same paper tigers, the same pigs.

The second merit of the student movement was that it broke through the old left’s parochialism: the old left’s popular front strategy in the form of the Easter Marches, the German Peace Union, the ''Deutsche Volkszeitung'', an irrational hope for a “massive landslide” in some election or another, a parliamentary fixation on Strauß here or Heinemann there, their pro- and anticommunist vacillation about the GDR, their isolation, their resignation, and their moral conflicts: ready for every sacrifice, incapable of any practice. The socialist section of the student movement developed its consciousness, in spite of theoretical errors, from the correct recognition that “the revolutionary initiative in the West can be based on the crisis in the global balance of power, and on the development of new forces in old countries.” (Il Manifesto, Thesis 55) They based their agitation and propaganda on what can be considered the most important aspect of German reality. They opposed the global strategy of imperialism by internationalizing national struggles, by creating a connection between the national and international aspects of the struggle, between traditional forms of struggle and international revolutionary initiatives. They managed to turn their weakness into strength, because they recognized that continuing resignation, parochialism, reformism, and popular front strategies could only lead to a dead-end for socialist politics in the post- and pre-fascist conditions existing in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

The left knew that it was correct to link the distribution of socialist propaganda in factories with actually preventing the distribution of ''Bild Zeitung''. It was correct to link propaganda against GIs being sent to Vietnam with actual attacks on military planes targeting Vietnam, and the ''Bundswehr'' campaign with attacks on NATO airports. It was correct to link the critique of class justice with the blowing up of prison walls, and the critique of the Springer Corporation with the disarming of its private security services. It was correct to set up radio stations, to demoralize the police, to have safehouses for ''Bundeswehr'' deserters, to combine agitation amongst foreign workers with the production of false documents, to prevent the production of napalm by sabotaging factories.

It was an error, however, to make their own propaganda dependent on supply and demand: to have no newspaper if the workers could not yet finance it, no car if the “movement” could not afford it, no transmitter because they had no license for it, no sabotage because capitalism wouldn’t collapse immediately as a result.

The student movement fell apart when its typically student and petit bourgeois form of organization, “antiauthoritarianism,” proved itself ill-suited to achieving its goals. Its spontaneity proved ineffective in the factories, nor could it create a functioning urban guerilla movement or a socialist mass organization. Unlike in Italy and France, the spark of the student movement here failed to ignite the prairie fire of class struggle, and it was at that point that it collapsed. It could enumerate the aims and contents of the anti-imperialist struggle, but it could not be the revolutionary subject, could not offer the necessary organizational structure.

Unlike the proletarian organizations of the New Left, the Red Army Faction doesn’t deny its roots in the history of the student movement, a movement that reshaped Marxism-Leninism into a weapon of class struggle and established the international basis for revolutionary struggle in the metropole.

'''4. The Primacy of Practice'''<blockquote>''If you want to know a certain thing or a certain class of things directly, you must personally participate in the practical struggle to change reality, to change that thing or class of things, for only thus can you come into contact with them as phenomena; only through personal participation in the practical struggle to change reality can you uncover the essence of that thing or class of things and comprehend them.''

''Marxism emphasizes the importance of theory precisely and only because it can guide action. If we have a correct theory but merely prate about it, pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice, then that theory, however good, is of no significance.''

Mao tse Tung: ''On Practice''<ref>''Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung'' (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967). The first of these two paragraphs comes from pages 299-300, the second from page 304</ref> </blockquote>The decision of leftists and socialists, the student movement’s authority figures, to turn to the study of scientific socialism and transform the critique of political economy into a self criticism of the student movement, was at the same time a decision to retreat into the classroom. Considering their paper output, their organizational models, and their bombastic statements, one might think that these revolutionaries were leading a violent class struggle, as if 1967/68 was the 1905 of socialism in Germany. In 1903, Lenin pointed out, in ''What Is to Be Done'', that the Russian workers needed a specific theory, and postulated, in opposition to the anarchists and the Social Revolutionaries, the necessity of class analysis, organization, and all-encompassing propaganda, because a broad-based class struggle was unfolding:<blockquote>''The fact is that the working masses are roused to a high pitch of excitement by the social evils in Russian life, but we are unable to gather, if one may so put it, and concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular resentment that are brought forth to a far larger extent than we imagine by the conditions of Russian life, and that must be combined into a single gigantic torrent.''

Lenin: What Is to Be Done?<ref>Marxists Internet Archive “Lenin’s What is to be Done? Trade-Unionist Politics and Social Democratic Politics,” [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1901/witbd/iii.htm. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1901/witbd/iii.htm.]</ref> </blockquote>Under the existing conditions in the Federal Republic and West Berlin, we doubt it will be possible to create a strategy to unify the working class or to create an organization that could simultaneously express and initiate the necessary unifying process. We doubt that the unity of the socialist intelligentsia and the proletariat can be “molded out of” the political programs or the declarations coming from the proletarian organizations. The drops and streamlets based on the horrors have long been collected by the Springer Corporation, to which they then add new horrors.

We believe that without a revolutionary initiative, without the practical revolutionary intervention of the vanguard, the socialist workers and intellectuals, and without concrete anti-imperialist struggle, there will be no unifying process. Unity can only be created through the common struggle of the conscious section of the working class and the intellectuals, one which they do not stage-manage, but which they model, or else it will not happen at all.

The paper output of these organizations shows their practice to be mainly a contest between intellectuals for the best Marx review before of an imaginary jury, which couldn’t possibly be the working class, as the language used excludes their participation. They are more embarrassed when they are caught misquoting Marx than when they are caught lying in their practice. Talking is their practice. The page numbers in their footnotes are almost always correct, the membership numbers they give for their organizations seldom are. They fear the accusation of revolutionary impatience more than corruption by bourgeois careers. It’s more important to them to spend years pursuing a degree with Lukacs<ref>George Lukacs was an influential Hungarian Marxist philosopher and art critic. His work greatly influenced the New Left of the 60s and 70s.</ref> than to allow themselves to be spontaneously inspired by Blanqui. They express internationalism in the form of censorship by favoring one Palestinian guerilla organization over another. White masters who claim to be the true guardians of Marxism, they express themselves through patronage, begging their rich friends for alms in the name of the Black Panther Party—not with a view to “victory in the people’s war,” but to soothe their consciences. That’s not a revolutionary method of intervention.

Mao, in his ''Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society'' (1926), contrasted the revolution and the counterrevolution in this way:<blockquote>''Each has hoisted a huge banner: one is the red banner of revolution held aloft by the Third International as the rallying point for all the oppressed classes of the world, the other is the white banner of counterrevolution held aloft by the League of Nations as the rallying point for all the counterrevolutionaries of the world.''<ref>Mao Tse-Tung “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” Marxists Internet Archive, [http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/ mswv1_1.htm. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/ mswv1_1.htm.]</ref></blockquote>Mao differentiated between classes in Chinese society based on the positions they took towards the red and white banners. It wasn’t enough for him to analyze the economic situation of different classes in Chinese society. Part of his class analysis involved the relationship of different classes to the revolution.

There will be no leadership role for Marxist-Leninists in future class struggles if the vanguard doesn’t hold up the red banner of proletarian internationalism, if the vanguard can’t answer the question of how to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, of how to develop the power of the proletariat, of how to break the power of the bourgeoisie, if it isn’t prepared to do anything to answer these questions. The class analysis we require cannot be developed without revolutionary practice or revolutionary initiative.

The “provisional revolutionary demands” put forward by the proletarian organizations throughout the country—such as the struggle against the intensification of exploitation, for a shorter work week, against the squandering of social wealth, for wage parity for men, women, and foreigners, against production quotas, etc.—are nothing but trade union economism as long as they don’t address the question of how to break the political, military, and propaganda power that always stands firmly in the way of these demands when they are put forward in mass class struggles. If these demands stay the same, one can only call them economistic shit, because they are not worth the revolutionary energy wasted in fighting for them, and they won’t lead to victory if “victory means to accept the principle that life is not the most precious thing for a revolutionary” (Debray<ref>Regis Debray was a French Marxist intellectual and a proponent of foco theory, the theory that a small group of guerillas could act as an inspiration to revolutionary activity. He joined Che Guevara on his ill-fated Bolivian adventure</ref>). Trade unions intervene with demands like these—but “the trade union politics of the working class are bourgeois working class politics” (Lenin). That’s not a revolutionary method of intervention.

The proletarian organizations failed to pose the question of armed struggle as a response to the Emergency Laws, the army, the BGS, the police, or the Springer Press. This shows that the proletarian organizations differ in their opportunism from the DKP only in that they are even less rooted in the masses, even if they are more verbally radical and theoretically advanced. In practice, they function at the level of civil rights and are concerned with gaining popularity at any price. They support the lies of the bourgeoisie by supporting the idea that with this state it is still possible to correct social problems by parliamentary means. They encourage the proletariat to engage in struggles that have no chance of success, given the state’s capacity for violence and its barbaric ways. “These Marxist-Leninist factions or parties,” Debray writes of the communists in Latin America, “move within the political environment as if they were controlled by the bourgeoisie. Rather than challenging the political status quo, they reinforce it….”

These organizations don’t offer any alternatives to the thousands of apprentices and young people who, as a result of being politicized by the student movement, became determined to put an end to exploitation in their workplaces. They simply advise them to adapt to capitalist exploitation. Concerning youth crime, when it comes down to it they share the position of prison wardens. Regarding the comrades in prison, they share the point of view of the judges. And regarding the underground, they share the point of view of social workers.

Without political practice, reading ''Capital'' is nothing more than bourgeois study. Without political practice, political programs are just so much twaddle. Without political practice, proletarian internationalism is only hot air. Adopting a proletarian position in theory implies putting it into practice.

The Red Army Faction asserts the primacy of practice. Whether it is right to organize armed resistance now, depends on whether it is possible, and whether it is possible can only be determined in practice.

'''5. The Urban Guerilla'''<blockquote>''Hence, imperialism and all reactionaries, looked at in essence, from a long-term point of view, from a strategic point of view, must be seen for what they are—paper tigers. On this we should build our strategic thinking. On the other hand, they are also living tigers, iron tigers, real tigers which can devour people. On this we should build our tactical thinking.''

Mao tse Tung, January 12, 1958<ref>''Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung'' (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 74.</ref></blockquote>If it is true that American imperialism is a paper tiger, this means it can, in the final analysis, be defeated. And if the thesis of the Chinese communists is correct, then victory over American imperialism is possible, because struggles against it have erupted all over the world, and as a result imperialism’s power is divided. It is this division that renders its defeat possible. If this is true, then there is no reason to exclude or leave out any country or any region from the anti-imperialist struggle simply because the forces of revolution are especially weak, and the forces of reaction are especially strong.

If it is incorrect to demoralize the revolutionary forces by underestimating them, it’s equally incorrect to push them into confrontations that can only lead to defeat. In the conflicts between the honest comrades in the proletarian organizations—let’s leave the big talkers out of it—and the Red Army Faction, we accuse them of demoralizing the revolutionary forces, whereas they feel we are leading the revolutionary forces down a blind alley. There is an attempt to bridge this divide between the comrades in the factories and the neighborhoods and the Red Army Faction, and if we succeed in doing so, we will arrive at the truth. Dogmatism and adventurism are typical deviations in any country during periods in which the revolutionary movement is weak. Since the anarchists have always been the strongest critics of opportunism, everyone who criticizes opportunism is called an anarchist—this is nothing more than fashionable nonsense.

The concept of the urban guerilla comes from Latin America. There, like here, it is the method of revolutionary intervention by generally weak revolutionary forces.

The urban guerilla struggle is based on an understanding that there will be no Prussian-style marching orders, which so many so-called revolutionaries are waiting for to lead the people into revolutionary struggle. It is based on the analysis that by the time the conditions are right for armed struggle, it will be too late to prepare for it. It is based on the recognition that without revolutionary initiatives in a country with as much potential for violence as the Federal Republic, there will be no revolutionary orientation when the conditions for revolutionary struggle are more favorable, as they soon will be given the political and economic developments of late capitalism.

The urban guerilla is the consequence of the long since complete negation of parliamentary democracy by the elected representatives themselves. It is the inevitable response to the Emergency Laws and the Hand Grenade Law. It is the willingness to struggle with the very means that the system appropriates for itself to neutralize its enemies. The urban guerilla is based on facing facts, not making excuses for them.

The student movement already had a partial understanding of what the urban guerilla could achieve. It can give concrete form to the agitation and propaganda work to which the left has been reduced. For instance, in the Springer campaign, in the Carbora Bassa campaign of the Heidelberg students,<ref>A campaign to stop the building of a massive dam in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. The right-wing Portuguese government had plans to settle over one million European colonists in the African country. By 1969, five German companies were implicated in the project. There were protests in the FRG, particularly in Heidelberg, against the project when the U.S. Minister of Defense Robert McNamara visited the country.</ref> in the squatting movement in Frankfurt, in the context of the military aid that the Federal Republic gives the comprador regimes in Africa, and in the security measures and the inhouse justice in the factories. The urban guerilla can make verbal internationalism concrete by providing weapons and money. It can blunt the system’s weapons and the banning of communists by organizing an underground that can elude the police. The urban guerilla is a weapon of class struggle.

The urban guerilla struggle is armed struggle in a situation in which the police use their weapons recklessly and in which class justice finds Kurras not guilty and buries comrades alive. The urban guerilla struggle means not being demoralized by the violence of the system.

The urban guerilla aims to destroy certain aspects of the state structure, and to destroy the myth of state omnipotence and invulnerability.

The urban guerilla requires the organization of an illegal structure, including safehouses, weapons, cars, and documents. What one needs to know about this, Marighella describes in his ''Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla''. What needs to be known beyond that, we are always ready to tell anyone who wants to participate in the guerilla struggle. We don’t know that much yet, but we know a little bit.

Before deciding to take up the armed struggle, it is important that one first experience the legal struggle. When one’s connection to the revolutionary left is based on just wanting to follow the latest fad, then it is better not to start anything you will not be able to get out of later on.

The Red Army Faction and the urban guerilla represent the only faction and practice which draws a clear line between ourselves and the enemy, and is therefore subject to the sharpest attack. This requires that one have a political identity, and it presumes that a learning process has already occurred.

Our original organizational concept implied a connection between the urban guerilla and the work at the base. We wanted everyone to work in the neighborhoods, the factories, and the existing socialist groups, to be influenced by the discussions taking place, to have some experience, to learn. It has become clear that that doesn’t work. The degree to which the political police can monitor these groups, their meetings, their appointments, and the contents of their discussions is already so extensive that one has to stay away if one wants to escape this surveillance.

The urban guerilla struggle requires that one be totally clear about one’s motivations, that one not be put off by the attacks from ''Bild Zeitung'', the antisemitic-criminal-subhuman-murderer-arsonist label that they apply to revolutionaries. All that shit they spit out and are willing to say, and which still influences what many comrades think about us, must have no effect.

Naturally, the system doesn’t give any ground, and there is nothing they will not do and no slander they will not use against us.

There are no publications that have any goals that can be distinguished from those that serve the interests of capital. There is still no socialist publication that reaches beyond itself, its circle, the people handed copies, and its subscribers, and which does not exist primarily in an incidental, private, personal, bourgeois context. All forms of media are controlled by capital, through advertising sales, as a result of the ambitions of the writers, who want to write their way into the establishment, through the radio stations’ boards of directors, and through the market control of the press corporations. The leading publications are the publications of the ruling class. They divide the market opportunities between themselves, developing ideologies for specific milieus, and what they publish serves to assure their market domination. Journalism is about one thing: sales. News is a commodity; information is a consumer product. Whatever isn’t suitable for consumption is vomited back out. The need to retain the readership for advertisement-heavy publications, and point system ratings for television, prevent antagonistic contradictions from developing between these media and the public; no antagonism, nothing of consequence. Whoever wants a place in the market must maintain connections with these extremely powerful opinion shapers. This means that dependence on the Springer Corporation grows in step with the Springer Corporation itself, which has also started to buy up local papers. The urban guerilla can expect nothing but bitter hostility from this public. It has to orient itself around Marxist criticism and self-criticism, and nothing else. As Mao said, “Whoever is not afraid of being drawn and quartered, can dare to pull the emperor from his horse.”

Long-term, meticulous work is crucial for the urban guerilla, insofar as we want to go beyond discussion to action. If the option of retreating to a bourgeois profession is not kept open, if the option of leaving behind the revolution for a townhouse is not maintained, if none of this is even desirable, then, with the full pathos of Blanqui’s statement, “The duty of the revolutionary is to always struggle, in spite of everything to struggle, to struggle until death.” There is no revolutionary struggle, and there has been no revolutionary struggle, in which this hasn’t shown itself to be true: Russia, China, Cuba, Algeria, Palestine, Vietnam.

Some say that the political possibilities of organization, agitation, and propaganda are far from being exhausted, and only when they have been exhausted should one consider armed struggle. We say that the political possibilities will not be fully utilized until armed struggle is recognized as the political goal, as long as the strategic conclusion that all reactionaries are paper tigers is not grasped despite the tactical conclusion that they are criminals, murderers, and exploiters.

We will not talk about “armed propaganda”: we will do it. The prison breakout didn’t take place for reasons of propaganda, but to get the guy out. The bank robberies they try to lay at our doorstep, we’d only do that to grab the money. The “spectacular successes” that Mao tells us we must have scored if “the enemy paints us as utterly black” are not our successes alone. The big clamour that has been made about us is due more to the Latin American comrades—given the clear line they have already drawn between themselves and the enemy—which has led the ruling class here, suspecting us of some bank robberies, to “energetically oppose” us, because of what we have begun to build here: the urban guerilla in the form of the Red Army Faction.

'''6. Legality and Illegality'''<blockquote>''Revolution in the West, the challenge to capitalist power in its strongholds, is the order of the day. It is of decisive importance. The current world situation offers no place and no power that is in a position to guarantee peaceful development and democratic stability. The crisis is intensifying. Parochialism or the decision to postpone the struggle would mean being sucked into the abyss of complete collapse''.

Il Manifesto, extract from Thesis 55</blockquote>The anarchists’ slogan, “Destroy what destroys you,” is aimed at mobilizing the base, young people in prisons and reformatories, in high schools and training centres. It reaches out to all of those in the shittiest situations. It is meant to be spontaneously understood, and is a call for direct resistance. Stokely Carmichael’s<ref>Stokely Carmichael was a prominent militant in the Black Liberation Movement in the United States, playing a leading role in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and then the Black Panther Party.</ref> Black Power slogan, “Trust your own experience!” means just that. And the slogan is based on the insight that in capitalism there is absolutely nothing that oppresses, tortures, constrains, and burdens that does not have its origin in the capitalist mode of production, and that each oppressor, in whatever form he may appear, is a representative of the class interests of capital, which makes him the class enemy.

To this extent the anarchists’ slogan is correct, proletarian, and in line with the class struggle. It is incorrect insofar as it leads to false consciousness. One goes on the offensive simply to give them a kick in the teeth, and organization then takes second place, discipline becomes bourgeois, and class analysis superfluous. If you don’t work out the dialectic of legality and illegality in terms of organization, you will be defenseless against the heavy repression that will follow your actions, and you will be legally arrested.

The statement of some organizations, “Communists are not so stupid as to get themselves banned,” renders them a mouthpiece for class justice, that is to say, for no one. The statement is correct insofar as it means that the legal possibilities for communist agitation, propaganda, and organizing for a political and economic struggle must be fully utilized and cannot be carelessly jeopardized—but that is not what they mean. They mean that there is no way of getting around the limits that the class state and its justice system establish for the socialist project, that one must stop at these limits, that one must retreat from the state’s illegal encroachments as these encroachments are legalized—legality at any price. Illegal imprisonment, terroristic sentences, police harassment, blackmail and coercion on the part of the BAW—eat shit or die— Communists are not that stupid….

This statement is opportunist. It shows a lack of solidarity. It abandons the comrades in prison. It excludes the organization and politicization in a socialist context of anyone who, as a result of their social background and situation, has no choice but to survive through crime: the underground, the subproletariat, innumerable proletarian youth, and guest workers. It facilitates the theoretical criminalization of all those who are not members of these organizations. It expresses complicity with class justice. It is stupid.

Legality is a question of power. The relationship between legality and illegality has to be determined by examining the contradiction between reformist and fascist domination, whose representatives in Bonn are, on the one hand, the Social-Liberal coalition, and on the other, Barzel and Strauß. Their media representatives are, for the former: the ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'', ''Stern'', the WDR<ref>''Westdeutscher Rundfunk'', West German Radio.</ref> Third Program, SFB, and the ''Frankfurter Rundschau''. And, for the latter: the Springer Corporation, the ''Sender Freies Berlin'', the ''Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen'', and the ''Bayernkurier''. The Munich police line here, and the Berlin model there. Here the justice of the Federal Administrative Court and there that of the Federal Supreme Court.

The reformist line attempts to avoid conflicts by using institutional options (co-management) and promises of improvements (in prison conditions, for example), by addressing obsolete sources of conflict (the Chancellor’s genuflection in Poland, for example), by avoiding provocation (the soft line of the Munich police and the Federal Administrative Court in Berlin, for example), and by airing grievances (regarding public education in Hessen and Berlin, for example). As part of this reformist line of avoiding conflict, they move a bit further inside and a bit less outside of legality. They do this to look legitimate. With the Constitution in hand, they intend to neutralize contradictions and leave left-wing criticism dead in the water and empty of content, thereby keeping the ''Jusos'' within the SPD.

There is no doubt that, in the long run, the reformist line is the more effective way of stabilizing capitalist domination, but it relies on certain conditions being met. It requires economic prosperity, because the soft line of the Munich police, for example, is much more expensive than the hard line of Berlin—as the Munich police chief pointed out: “Two officers with machineguns can hold a thousand people in check. 100 officers with truncheons can control a thousand people. Without weapons of this sort, 300 or 400 police officers are necessary.” The reformist line requires a situation in which no organized anticapitalist opposition exists, as one can see by the Munich example.

Camouflaged by political reformism, the concentration of state and economic power accelerates. What Schiller has achieved with his financial policy and Strauß has pushed through with his financial reforms is an increase in exploitation through the intensification of work and heightened division of labor in the productive sector, and through long-term rationalization in the administrative sector and the service industries.

The concentration of violent power in the hands of the few can occur unopposed if it is done quietly, if unnecessary provocation, which can set a process of solidarity in motion, is avoided—that is something that was learned as a result of the student movement and the Paris May. Therefore, the Red Cells<ref>The Red Cells were an independent university-based Marxist organization.</ref> are not yet banned. Therefore the KP can exist as the DKP without the ban on the KP being lifted. Therefore there are still some liberal television programs. And, therefore, some organizations can get away with thinking that they are not as stupid as they really are.

The margin of legality that reformism affords is capital’s response to the attacks of the student movement and the APO—the reformist response is the more effective one, so long as they can manage it. To rely on this legality, to count on it, to perpetuate it metaphysically, to base statistical projections on it, to want to defend it, means repeating the errors of the Latin American self-defense zones. It means you haven’t learned anything and have provided the reactionaries with time to regroup and reorganize, creating a situation in which they won’t ban the left, they’ll smash it.

Willy Weyer<ref>Willy Weyer (SPD) was, at this time, the Minister of the Interior for North Rhine Westphalia and a key proponent of the militarization of the police force.</ref> doesn’t play at tolerance. When the liberal press complains that his highway breathalyzers treat all drivers like potential criminals, he maneuvers and audaciously responds, “We will carry on!”—and in so doing he demonstrates the irrelevance of the liberal public. Eduard Zimmerman creates a whole nation of police agents, and the Springer Corporation has taken on the role of leading the Berlin police—''Bild Zeitung'' columnist Reer recommends arrest warrants to the custodial judges. The mass mobilization in favor of fascism, of crackdowns, of the death penalty, and for more and better-armed police carries on unabated—the New Look of the Brandt-Heinemann-Scheel administration is a facade for Bonn’s policies.

The comrades who only deal with the question of legality and illegality superficially have obviously misunderstood the amnesty with which the student movement was to be tamed. In lifting the criminalization of hundreds of students, they sent them away with just a fright, preventing further radicalization and impressing upon them the value of the privileges that come with being a bourgeois student—that in spite of the nature of the knowledge-factory, the universities are helpful to social climbers. This deepens the class divide between students and the proletariat, between their privileged everyday life and the everyday life of those who do the shit work and who were not offered the same amnesty by the same class enemy. So once again the division between theory and practice is maintained. The equation: amnesty equals pacification.

The social democratic voter initiative involving some respected writers—not only that fuck-up, Grass<ref>At the time a member of ''Gruppe 47'', Günter Grass is one on the most significant German post-World War ii authors and a noted liberal.</ref>—is an attempt at a positive, democratic mobilization, and is a form of resistance against fascism, and therefore should not be dismissed lightly. It is having some effect on the reality presented by certain publishers and some radio and television editorial departments, those that have not yet capitulated to the logic of the monopolies and have not yet been absorbed into the superstructure, with its overarching political reality. The areas of increasing repression are not those with which writers are normally concerned: prison, class justice, intensified work, work-related accidents, installment plans, schools, ''Bild'' and the ''Berliner Zeitung'', barrack-style housing in the suburbs,<ref>Unlike North America, suburbs in Northern Europe are generally occupied by the subproletariat and poorly paid immigrant workers.</ref> and ghettos for foreigners—all of this troubles these writers aesthetically, not politically.

Legality is the ideology of parliamentarianism, of social partnership, and of a pluralistic society. Legality becomes a fetish when those who insist upon it ignore the fact that phones are legally tapped, mail is legally monitored, neighbors are legally interrogated, and informants are legally paid. The organization of political work, if it is not to be under constant observation by the political police, must be simultaneously conducted both legally and illegally.

We don’t count on terror and fascism provoking a spontaneous antifascist mobilization, nor do we think that legality is always corrupt. We understand that our work offers pretexts, just as alcohol does for Willy Weyer, just as the increase in crime does for Strauß, just as ''Ostpolitik'' does for Barzel, just as a Yugoslav running a red light does for a Frankfurt taxi driver, just as a tool in the pocket does for the murderers of car thieves in Berlin. Regarding other pretexts that result from the fact that we are communists, whether communists organize and struggle will depend on whether terror and repression produce only fear and resignation, or whether they produce resistance, class hatred, and solidarity, and whether or not everything goes smoothly for imperialism. It depends on whether communists are so stupid as to tolerate everything that is done to them, or whether they will use legality, as well as other methods, to organize illegality, instead of fetishizing one over the other.

The fate of both the Black Panther Party and ''Gauche Prolétarienne''<ref>''Gauche Prolétarienne'' was a French Maoist organization that, in 1968, began attempts to build a factory-based guerilla group. They were banned in 1970.</ref> resulted from an incorrect understanding of the contradiction between the constitution and legal reality and the increased intensity of this contradiction when organized resistance occurs. And this incorrect understanding prevents people from seeing that the conditions of legality are changed by active resistance, and that it is therefore necessary to use legality simultaneously for political struggle and for the organization of illegality, and that it is an error to wait to be banned, as if it were a stroke of fate coming from the system, because then the banning will constitute a death blow, and the issue will be resolved.

The Red Army Faction organizes illegality as an offensive position for revolutionary intervention.

Building the urban guerilla means conducting the anti-imperialist struggle offensively. The Red Army Faction creates the connection between legal and illegal struggle, between national struggle and international struggle, between political struggle and armed struggle, and between the strategic and tactical aspects of the international communist movement. The urban guerilla means intervening in a revolutionary way here, in spite of the weakness of the revolutionary forces in the Federal Republic and West Berlin!

Cleaver said, “Either you’re part of the problem or your part of the solution. There is nothing in between. This shit has been examined and analyzed for decades and generations from every angle. My opinion is that most of what happens in this country does not need to be analyzed any further.”<ref>Eldridge Cleaver was the Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party. When the party splintered into warring factions, he went into self-imposed exile in Algeria. He is the author of several books, including ''Soul on Ice'', from which this quote is drawn.</ref>
[[File:RAF Petra Schelm Flier.png|thumb|''Flier denouncing the murder of Petra Schelm, who was shot in the head by police. Hamburg Red Aid 1971.'']]
SUPPORT THE ARMED STRUGGLE!

VICTORY TO THE PEOPLE'S WAR

Red Army Faction

April 1971

== 4 - Building a Base and "Serving the People" ==
With safehouses and supporters in several cities, and dozens of guerillas living underground, the RAF patiently built up its organization over two years, a period during which there occurred several clashes with police, leaving two members dead and many more in prison.

The state’s first serious attempt to eradicate the RAF had begun shortly after the publication of ''The Urban Guerilla Concept'' in 1971. Named ''Aktion Kobra'' (“Operation Cobra”), it involved three thousand heavily armed officers patrolling cities and setting up checkpoints throughout northern Germany.

On July 15, 1971, a new line was crossed when RAF members Petra Schelm and Werner Hoppe were identified by police in the port city of Hamburg. A firefight ensued, and while Hoppe managed to surrender,<ref>He would eventually receive a ten year sentence for allegedly shooting at police. (Associated Press, “German Draws 10-year term,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 27, 1972.)</ref> Schelm was shot dead. A working class woman who had entered the guerilla though the commune scene, moving on from the Roaming Hash Rebels to the RAF,<ref>Baumann, 53.</ref> she was nineteen at the time.

There was widespread outrage at this killing, and in an opinion poll conducted shortly thereafter by the respected Allensbach Institute, “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.”<ref>Varon, 199.</ref>

In the wake of the APO, the RAF began to take on the aura of folk heroes for many young people who were glad to see someone taking things to the next level. As one woman who joined the group in this period put it, “For the first time, I found a theoretical foundation for something that, until then, I had only felt.”<ref>Margrit Schiller in ''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror''</ref>

Or in the words of Helmut Pohl, who stole cars for the guerilla at this time:<blockquote>''What was clear was the drive, the resolve, quite simply, the search for something new—something different from the shit here. That was what made it attractive and created the base of support. This existed from the beginning, and there is no way it could have been otherwise.''<ref>Helmut Pohl’s Testimony at the Stammheim Trial, July 29, 1976. This testimony is available on the internet at <nowiki>http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/</nowiki> documents/76_0708_mohnhaupt_pohl.html#22.</ref> </blockquote>Thousands of students secretly carried photographs of RAF members in their wallets, and time and time again, as the police 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 not a few middle class supporters—academics, doctors, even a clergyman.<ref>Philip Jacobson, “Show Trial,” ''Sunday Times Magazine'', February 23, 1975, 17.</ref> Newspapers at the time carried stories under headlines like “Celebrities Protect Baader Gang” and “Sympathizers Hamper Hunt for Baader Group.”<ref>Aust, 141.</ref>

The guerilla continued to attract new members, including several former members of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), a radical therapy group that had carried out some armed actions before its leading members were arrested in July 1971 (see sidebar on next page).
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Socialist Patients' Collective
|While the RAF was forming, other groups in the Federal Republic were also experimenting with armed politics. One of these, the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), started as a radical therapy group based at Heidelberg University in southwest Germany. Under the leadership of psychiatrist Wolfgang Huber, the group adopted the slogan, “The system has made us sick: let us strike the death blow to the sick system!”
In tying together political radicalism and psychotherapy, the SPK were not as odd as they might be considered today. As already mentioned, the student left was deeply indebted to the Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism, and the Frankfurt School in turn was deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, as were philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and revolutionary theorists like Frantz Fanon, all of whom greatly influenced sixties radicals. As such, there was much enthusiasm about psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy within the New Left, and this was nowhere more true than in West Germany.
According to government officials, the SPK held that only the maladjusted can survive in modern society, and the insane are actually too sane to live under present social conditions.<ref>United Press International, “U.S. Hunts German Terrorists,” ''Pacific Stars and Stripes'', July 23, 1978.</ref> The SPK members began carrying out armed attacks after Huber was fired from his post at the university in February 1970, burning down the State Psychiatric Clinic, robbing banks, and even trying (unsuccessfully) to plant a bomb on a train in which the president of the Federal Republic was traveling. In July of 1971, Huber, his wife, and seven SPK members were arrested on charges of having formed a criminal association and illegally procuring arms and explosives.<ref>Becker, ''Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang''. Please note that this book, written by a right-wing South African journalist, is counterinsurgency tripe. Nevertheless, it has been used for specific details like dates and places, when no other source is available.</ref>

Many of the SPK members who remained at large would go on to join the RAF.
|}
On October 22, there was another shooting in Hamburg, but this time a police officer was killed. Margrit Schiller, a former SPK member who had joined the RAF, was being pursued by two policemen when Gerhard Müller (also formerly of the SPL) and a female RAF member came to her defense: in the ensuing melee, officer Norbert Schmid was shot dead.

Schiller was nevertheless captured, and a macabre scene played out as police called a press conference to display their trophy. Millions of television viewers watched, amazed, as the young woman—clearly unwilling to play the part assigned to her—was carried in front of the cameras by a pack of cops, her head pulled back by her hair so that all could see her face as she struggled to break free.<ref>la Times—Washington Post Service, “West Germany’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ Have Country in an Uproar,” ''The Lawton Constitution'', December 3, 1972. Margrit Schiller being dragged into press conference by Hamburg police. could not in fact be tied to any RAF actions, and so was simply charged with illegal possession of a firearm and false identification papers. In February 1973, she received a twenty-seven-month sentence, but was released pending an appeal, at which point she went back underground, only to be captured again in 1974. (United Press International, “Raided Flat is Suspected Anarchist HQ.” ''European Stars and Stripes'', October 28, 1971; ''European Stars and Stripes'' “Released from Custody,” February 11, 1973; Associated Press, “Raids in German Cities Smash New Terror Ring,” ''European Stars and Stripes,'' February 5, 1974.)</ref>
[[File:Georg von Rauch.png|thumb|''Georg von Rauch, murdered by police in West Berlin.'']]
Police searches and checkpoints increased as the hunt for the guerilla continued. On December 4, police in West Berlin stopped a car carrying Bommi Baumann and Georg von Rauch, leading figures in the nascent 2nd of June Movement anarchist guerilla. Von Rauch was immediately shot and killed, which many people took as proof that the cops had adopted a policy to “shoot first, ask questions later.” Thousands participated in demonstrations protesting this killing, and an abandoned nurses’ residence at the Bethanien Hospital was occupied and renamed the Georg von Rauch House.<ref>The Georg von Rauch House still exists today, housing approximately forty itinerant youth at any given time.</ref>

(Subsequent to leaving the guerilla, Baumann told an interviewer from Spiegel that von Rauch had fired his weapon first, though he later backtracked, claiming instead, “I no longer know who first pulled the trigger.”<ref>Baumann, 95.</ref> All of this was viewed with some suspicion, many observers feeling that Baumann’s move to an anti-guerilla position rendered it tantamount to counterinsurgency propaganda.)
[[File:“The Police- Genscher’s Killer Elite or the New Stormtroopers?” - from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png|left|thumb|''“The Police- Genscher’s Killer Elite or the New Stormtroopers?” - from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png'']]
The “shoot first” hypothesis would be given further credence on March 1, 1972, when Richard Epple, a seventeen-year-old apprentice, was mowed down by police submachine gun fire after a car chase through Tübingen. Epple had run a police checkpoint because he was driving without a license—he had no connections to the RAF or any other guerilla group.<ref>Vague, 42-43.</ref> Later that year, in Stuttgart, a Scottish businessman, Ian McLeod, was similarly killed by police fire as he stood naked behind a bedroom door. Depending on who one believes, Macleod was either completely unconnected to the RAF, or else was himself a British intelligence agent intent on infiltrating the group—in either case it was clear the police shot without cause or provocation. Hundreds of people took to the streets to protest this police murder.<ref>United Press International, “Paper Says Macleod was a British Spy,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 3, 1972.</ref>

The next bust occurred as 1971 came to a close: on December 17, Rolf Pohle was arrested in a gun shop in Neu-Ulm attempting to buy thirty-two firearms which the police claimed were meant for the RAF.<ref>Associated Press, “Trial starts in Munich for accused Meinhof-gang munitions supplier,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', September 26, 1973. Pohle went to trial in 1973, charged with possession of firearms and support for a criminal organization under §129; during the trial, he spit at reporters and refused to acknowledge his court appointed lawyers. While he denied the charges against him, and repeatedly claimed that he was not a member of the raf, he maintained solidarity with the guerilla. In 1974, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison, a term which he did not serve without some interruptions.</ref> Pohle had been a young law student in Munich in the days of the APO. He had organized legal aid during the 1968 Easter riots,<ref>Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union, “Nachruf auf Rolf Pohle,” <nowiki>https://www.fau.org/artikel/art_040308-182546</nowiki>.</ref> and had been subjected to heavy police harassment ever since, eventually pushing him to join the underground.

On December 22, exactly two months after officer Schmid’s demise, another cop was killed. Several RAF members were robbing a bank in the small military city of Kaiserslautern—the nearest police station had literally been blocked from interfering, guerilla helpers barricading its entrance with cars. By plain bad luck for all concerned, police officer Herbert Schoner spotted the parked getaway van as he passed by the bank, just as it was being relieved of its funds. When Schoner knocked on the van’s window, he was shot twice—he managed to draw his gun before he was finished off by a third bullet.<ref>Aust, 190.</ref>

In the immediate aftermath of December 22, there was no publicly available evidence to tie the robbery or Schoner’s death to any political organization. To all appearances, this was simply a “normal” crime. Nevertheless, the very next morning, the ''Bild Zeitung'' led the charge: “Baader-Meinhof Gang Strikes Again. Bank Raid: Policeman Shot,” screamed the headline.

The Springer Press was merely doing what was by now a tradition, tarring the radical left with any and all crimes and misdemeanors. (Except, of course, that in this case they were right.)

The progressive ''Gruppe 47'' intellectual Heinrich Böll, perhaps the most important author in postwar Germany, was flabbergasted, and publicly accused the anti-RAF smear campaign of bearing all the hallmarks of fascism. While condemning their violence, he tried to put the RAF into perspective, famously describing their struggle as a “war of six against sixty million.”

Böll’s words may have been appreciated by the RAF, but he was certainly no supporter. Of course, this was not the way the right saw things, and he became the target of a hate campaign, branded an apologist for murder and a terrorist sympathizer,<ref>Ibid., 190-191.</ref> to which he replied that those accused of sympathizing were simply “people who have committed the criminal sin of making distinctions.”<ref>Cobler, 41.</ref> He and his family would experience unusual levels of police harassment for years to come. At one point, for instance, as he was entertaining guests from out of town, police with submachine guns raided his home, claiming they suspected Ulrike Meinhof of being on the premises. (To the cop in charge, Böll declared that if Meinhof ever did show up he would shelter her, but only on condition that she not bring any guns into his house. In his words, it would be the Christian thing to do.)<ref>Robert Spaemann, “Kaffee, Kuchen und Terror,” ''Die Zeit'' [online], 19 (1998)</ref>

It wasn’t only the streets that were being policed, but also the cultural and political parameters of debate, and the RAF was being placed clearly beyond the pale.

A second, and at least initially less successful move to solidify public opinion against the RAF was the trial of Karl-Heinz Ruhland, which came to a close in March 1972.

Ruhland had been peripheral to the RAF when he was captured in December 1970. Soon after his arrest, he started providing the police with information, the location of safehouses and the names of those who had sheltered the guerilla.<ref>Aust, 140.</ref> When brought to trial on charges relating to a raf bank robbery, much was made of his class status as a manual worker who was never fully accepted by the other members of the group, all in a fairly transparent ploy to show the guerilla up as hypocritical middle class revolutionaries with no real affinity for the proletariat.

Ruhland provided the police with their first real break, however slight, into the world of the RAF, a service for which he received a relatively lenient sentence of four and a half years. Although even the corporate press had to admit that he did not make a very convincing witness, often changing his testimony to fit the latest police theory, he would remain a fixture in future RAF trials<ref>Ruhland testified against Horst Mahler, Ali Jansen, and Astrid Proll amongst others. Several years later, after the Stammheim deaths, Ruhland was once again trotted out as an “old comrade” of the prisoners in order to explain how they must have felt suicidal. (United Press International, “Suicide Victim Died of Despair— Comrade,” ''Raleigh Register'', November 14, 1977).</ref> until someone more convincing could be turned. In retrospect, his significance appears to be as a template for future state witnesses to come.<ref>Heinrich Hannover, “Terrorsitenprozessen,” <nowiki>http://www.freilassung.de/div/texte/kronzeuge/heinhan1.htm</nowiki>.</ref>

In the meantime, guns continued to blaze as the police and guerilla played an increasingly deadly game of hide and seek. Following a narrow escape, Andreas Baader even sent off a letter to the non-Springer press that he authenticated with his thumbprint, essentially to thumb his nose at the cops, and to prove that he was still alive.<ref>Andreas Eichler, “Die raf und die Medien.” This document is reprinted in this volume: Andreas Baader: Letter to the Press, see pages 120-121.</ref>
[[File:Tommy Weissbecker from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Tommy Weissbecker, murdered by Augsburg police on March 2, 1972.'']]
Then, on March 2, police in the Bavarian city of Augsburg killed Tommy Weissbecker and captured Carmen Roll (a former SPK member). Weissbecker was the son of a Jewish concentration camp survivor,<ref>Tilman Fichter, interview by Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “The anti-Semitism of the 68ers.”</ref> and had cut his teeth in the Hash Rebels scene before gravitating to the RAF. Twenty-three years old, he was never given a chance to surrender.

The killing took place as the two left Weissbecker’s apartment. It was later revealed that the police had had him under surveillance since February, renting an apartment above his, and had been listening in on him just before he went out. This would suggest to many not a chance identity check, but a carefully staged murder. In retaliation, the 2nd of June Movement bombed the police headquarters in West Berlin and, as in the case of Georg von Rauch, an empty building in Berlin was occupied and renamed the Tommy Weissbecker House.

While in custody Roll was drugged, apparently in the hope that she would provide police with information; as part of this chemically assisted interrogation, on March 16 the prison doctor gave her such a large dose of ether that she almost died.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, ''Der Kampf Gegen die Vernichtungshaft'' (n.p.) (n.d.), 131.</ref>

News of Weissbecker’s murder spead quickly. In Hamburg, RAF members Manfred Grashof and Wolfgang Grundmann feared this meant the safehouse they were staying at—which had been rented by Weissbecker—might also be compromised. RAF policy in such situations was to simply leave the house and never return, but Grashof, whose speciality was producing false documents, decide to risk one trip back to gather some items he needed. When he and Grundmann returned, three cops were sitting inside in the dark. As soon as the guerillas opened the door, even before they turned on the lights on, a cop panicked and started shooting.<ref>Gabriele Goettle, “Die Praxis der Galaxie,” ''die tageszeitung'', July 28, 2008.</ref> Grashof was shot three times. He returned fire, aiming blindly in the dark, and hit police commissioner Hans Eckardt, fatally wounding him.<ref>In 1977, Grashof received a life sentence for murder and other offenses; Grundmann received four years on lighter charges (Associated Press, “2 German Terrorists Given life,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', June 3, 1977.)</ref>

Grundmann had come to the RAF from ''Schwarze Hilfe'', or Black Aid, a support group for anarchist political prisoners in West Berlin.<ref>Becker, 273.</ref>

As for Grashof, he had come to West Berlin in 1968 as an army deserter, and had joined with Horst Mahler in the Republican Club arguing that the semi-city be turned into an official refuge for others fleeing military service.<ref>David Binder, “‘Republic of West Berlin’ Suggested by Radical Group,” ''Charleston Gazette'', November 7, 1968. Whereas young men living in West Berlin were already exempt from the draft, those who lived elsewhere and had already been drafted were liable to prosecution if they deserted.</ref> He had been with the guerilla from the beginning, being particularly close to Petra Schelm and especially upset by her death.

Despite his injuries, Grashof was moved from the hospital to a regular prison cell by Federal Supreme Court Judge Wolfgang Buddenberg, who had been put in charge of all RAF arrests. After two months, he was moved into isolation, only allowed to exercise for a half hour each day, and even then only with his wrists handcuffed behind his back. As a result of this treatment, his wounds opened up again, but he did not die.<ref>Aust, 203.</ref>

All of this unfolded within a context of increasing and increasingly visible police control and new repressive legislation. After having offered the carrot of amnesty and limited reforms, Brandt’s SD{-FDP coalition was now showing that it also knew how to wield the stick.

In September 1971, a new Chief Commissioner was appointed to the BKA (Federal Criminal Bureau): Horst Herold, former Chief of the Nuremberg police, and an expert on the new methods of using computerized data processing as a law enforcement tool. Under Herold’s leadership, the BKA was transformed from a relatively unimportant body into the West German equivalent of the FBI. Over the next decade, he would oversee a six-fold increase in the BKA budget, and a tripling of its staff as he personally pushed West Germany to the worldwide forefront of computerized repression.<ref>Ibid., 181.</ref>

By 1979, Herold’s computers contained files on 4.7 million names and 3,100 organizations, including the photos of 1.9 million people and 2.1 million sets of fingerprints.<ref>Ibid.</ref> While today it is routine for such data to be available at the touch of a police keyboard, in the 1970s this represented a simply unheard of level of surveillance and technical sophistication.

One of Herold’s first moves was to set up a “Baader-Meinhof Special Commission,” and hunting for the RAF remained his utmost priority throughout his tenure.

The significance of these changes in the BKA was overshadowed, though, by a new clampdown on the legal left, arguably the greatest since the ban on the KPD, as the Interior Ministers Conference passed the Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Act) on January 28, 1972. The new legislation was supported by all three major political parties, as well as all the major trade unions.<ref>Gerard Braunthal, ''Political Service and Public Loyalty in West Germany: the 1972 decree against radicals and its consequences'' (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 36-37.</ref> Known as the Berufsverbot (Professional Ban) by its opponents, its intention was to bar leftists from working in the public sector. The potential targets of this ban included some 14% of the workforce, not only government bureaucrats, but also anyone employed by the post office, the railways, public hospitals—and most importantly university professors and school teachers.<ref>Monica Jacobs, “Civil Rights and Women’s Rights in the Federal Republic of Germany Today,” ''New German Critique'' 16 Special Feminist Issue (Winter 1978): 166.</ref>

The decree also dramatically increased the visibility of the Verfassungsschutz political police—the so-called “Guardians of the Constitution”—as the names of all applicants for public sector jobs were now sent to this agency, which determined on the basis of its own files whether a special hearing was necessary to gauge the applicant’s loyalty to the state. Not only did the Verfassungsschutz comb open sources—speeches, pamphlets, doctoral theses, etc.—for names, but it also engaged in covert surveillance, telephone taps, and a network of informers which was said to include students hired to note who among their classmates held radical views.<ref>Braunthal, 42.</ref> (Little surprise that the agency’s president until 1972 was Hubert Schrübbers, who had spent the early forties as a Nazi prosecutor notorious for seeking harsh sentences against antifascists, which would certainly have meant confinement in a concentration camp.)<ref>Ibid., 43.</ref>

As Georgy Katsifiacis has noted, “the decree resulted in loyalty checks on 3.5 million persons and the rejection of 2,250 civil service applicants. Although only 256 civil servants were dismissed, the decree had a chilling effect.”<ref>Georgy Katsiaficas, ''Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life'' (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 64.</ref> So much so that according to one survey carried out in the city of Mannheim, “84 percent of university students there refrained from regularly checking leftist materials out of public libraries for fear of being blacklisted.”<ref name=":0">Ibid.</ref><ref name=":0" />

Obviously, those students who had refused the SPD’s amnesty in 1971 found themselves among the first to be targeted. While most of these people would no doubt have rejected the RAF’s politics, fears about the guerilla were exploited to help push through the legislation. As Heinz Kühn, spd President of North Rhine-Westphalia, put it, “We could hardly have Ulrike Meinhof employed as a teacher, or Andreas Baader in the police force.”<ref>Aust, 192</ref>

In the wake of the sixties student movement, the state was establishing the conditions under which erstwhile rebels would be allowed to join the establishment. As its corollary, this rollback included ongoing attacks on the universities themselves. For instance, in early 1972, the Free University hired the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel as professor of economics: the Berlin Senate responded by vetoing this appointment,<ref>''Time Magazine'' [online], “Battle of Berlin,” July 3, 1972.</ref> and despite student strikes, Mandel was barred from entering the FRG. (This ban was only lifted in 1978.)<ref>Rote Armee Fraktion, ''Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF'', (Berlin: id-Verlag, 1997), 82.</ref>

In this context, in April 1972, the RAF released its second theoretical statement, ''Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle''. As with ''The Urban Guerilla Concept'', this text was distributed in magazine form at the May Day demonstrations that year.

In a text almost twice as long as the previous one, the RAF was trying to provide an analysis of the previous year’s events, both within the left and within the Federal Republic as a whole. Considerable energy was spent analyzing the unsuccessful workers’ struggles in the chemical sector in 1971 and the failure of the legal left to respond to class oppression within the FRG. These weaknesses were pointed to as so many factors underscoring the necessity for armed politics.

A real attempt to find a strategic connection between class oppression, working class struggle (outside of the unions, of course) and the guerilla is apparent in all the RAF’s theoretical documents in this period.

This will not always be the case. In contradistinction to its anti-imperialism, this class orientation at times approximated left-communism in its focus on working class self-activity and alienation. Partly, the explanation for this can be found in the political experiences and trajectories of the core members of the RAF at this point: the sixties revolt and the APO, with their grounding in not only Marxism-Leninism and anti-imperialism, but also Frankfurt School Marxism, the “apprentices collectives,” and, via the SPK, radical therapy.

At the same time, the period between 1969 and 1973 was one of heightened class conflict in the FRG, beyond and at times against the trade union leadership, with wildcat strikes often being led by women, youth, and immigrant workers. Combined with the sudden turn of many former APO comrades to the new “proletarian” K-groups, this created a context in which it would have been difficult to elaborate a revolutionary strategy without dealing with the question of the working class.

As we shall see later on, some of the ideas in this document were soon qualified, if not rejected, while others were sharpened, finding their place in the centre of the RAF’s worldview.

Finally, ''Serve the People'' provides the RAF’s response to Karl-Heinz Ruhland, who had been turned into an instrument of police propaganda. Similarly, two drop-outs from the guerilla, Beate Sturm and Peter Homann, were also excoriated as traitors.

Unlike Ruhland, Sturm’s main crime seems to have been that, subsequent to leaving the RAF, she contacted the media, providing ''Spiegel'' with a highly unflattering portrait of the group.

Homann’s story, on the other hand, was more complex; some controversy about his falling out with the group remains even today. While there are radically different versions of the circumstances, it is clear that he was on very bad terms with his erstwhile comrades upon his return from the Jordan training trip in 1970. Immediately after this, he and his friend Stefan Aust traveled to Sicily where Meinhof’s seven-year-old twin daughters were being cared for by comrades. Pretending to be members of the RAF, the two men took Meinhof’s girls with them, delivering them to their father, ''konkret'' editor Klaus Rainer Röhl.

It seems likely that this direct intervention to thwart Meinhof’s plans for her children played some part in provoking his denunciation as a traitor in Serve the People. There are contradictory versions of why Homann did what he did,<ref>See Appendix V—Strange Stories: Peter Homann and Stefan Aust, on pages 557- 58.</ref> but regardless of the facts surrounding this initial “treason,” he would fully earn the sobriquet later that year, going so far as to provide the police with information, and to testify against the guerilla in court.<ref>United Press International, “Meinhof-Al Fatah Ties Described,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', October 19, 1972.</ref>

In retrospect, ''Serve the People'' is significant not so much in its contents, but in its timing, by which it serves as the end of a chapter. With its explanations of the bank robberies and the painstaking preparations undertaken, it allowed the guerilla to deal with some preliminary questions before moving on to grander schemes.

It would be the last theoretical document produced by the RAF outside of prison for almost ten years.

=== Andreas Baader: Letter to the Press ===
<blockquote>''The cops will continue to fumble about in the dark, until circumstances oblige them to see that the political situation has become a military situation.''

Marighella</blockquote>The truth of the matter is that no further information has come out about the group since the first twenty were trained in Jordan. The RAF’s work is clandestine. The “security forces,” the security agencies, the police, the BND, the Verfassungsschutz, the BAW, Spiegel, and the Springer Press know nothing.

They know nothing about the size, the number of members, the organization, the firepower, or the tactics of the group. Everything written about us by the police state for public consumption over the past year and a half is false, is speculation, or is counterpropaganda with the objective of discrediting the theory and practice of the urban guerilla and driving a wedge between us and our base.

I haven’t considered turning myself in. No RAF members have considered turning themselves in. So far no RAF prisoner has provided testimony. Announcements of successes against us have only been about arrests or killings. The guerilla’s strength lies in the determination of each of us. We are not on the run. We are here organizing armed resistance against the regime of the propertied classes and the ongoing exploitation of the people.

The RAF’s current activities are directed towards the formation of politico-military cadre, acquiring better arms and training for revolutionaries, and the anchoring of the group in a sympathetic scene that is ready to support armed resistance. The tactical line that we are currently following is to develop the propaganda of the urban guerilla through the revolutionary organizations that are still legal and to develop broad-based logistical support amongst all layers of the population.

None of us see any subjective or objective basis for betraying the struggle to which we have committed ourselves; not Genscher’s dirty amnesty deal, not Ruhland, the Social Democrats’ van der Lubbe,<ref>Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, confessed to the 1933 Reichstag fire under Gestapo torture. It remains unclear if he was, in fact, guilty. Karl-Heinz Ruhland, a fringe member of the RAF, under pressure from the BKA and with coaching from the BAW, provided clearly fabricated testimony against RAF prisoners during a series of trials.</ref> not the extensive militarization of the police, not prison, not torture, and not the police terror against the population. “The stones they have thrown will fall at their own feet.”<ref>This phrase, which will reoccur in a number of different forms in RAF documents over the years, comes from a speech Mao gave at the Meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. in Celebration of the 40th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution on November 6, 1957: “‘Lifting a rock only to drop it on one’s own feet’ is a Chinese folk saying to describe the behaviour of certain fools. The reactionaries in all countries are fools of this kind. In the final analysis, their persecution of the revolutionary people only serves to accelerate the people’s revolutions on a broader and more intense scale. Did not the persecution of the revolutionary people by the tsar of Russia and by Chiang Kai-shek perform this function in the great Russian and Chinese revolutions?”</ref>
[[File:Baader Fingerprint on Letter to the Press.png|left|thumb]]
If the price for our lives or our freedom is to be the betrayal of the anticapitalist struggle, there is only one response: we won’t pay it.

The armed struggle does not develop from one headline to the next. The politico-military strategy of the urban guerilla is based in the resistance to parliamentary democracy’s fascist drift and the organization of the first regular units of the Red Army in the people’s war. The battle has just begun.

Andreas Baader

January 24, 1972

=== Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and the Class Struggle ===
<blockquote>''Everyone dies, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said, “Though death befalls all men alike, it may be heavier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.” To die for the people is heavier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascist and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.''

Mao tse Tung</blockquote><blockquote>''“The armed struggle is a technical issue and therefore requires technical knowledge: training, morale and last of all practice. In this area, improvisation has cost many lives and led to failed attacks. The ‘spontaneity’ that some people romanticize, speaking vaguely about the people’s revolution and ‘the masses,’ is either simply a dodge or it indicates that they have decided to rely upon improvisation during a critical phase of the class struggle. Every vanguard movement must, if they want to remain true to themselves at the decisive moment in the class struggle, analyze and understand the violence of the people, so as to correctly direct it against oppression, thereby achieving the goal with the least sacrifice possible.”''<ref>Although not referenced as such by the RAF, this is a quote from ''30 Questions to a Tupamaro'' (see page 128, fn 1).</ref></blockquote>'''ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!'''

20,000 die every year because the stockholders of the automobile industry only care about profit and, therefore, don’t stop to consider technical safety issues for automobiles or road construction. 5,000 people die every year at their workplace or on their way to or from it, because the owners of the means of production only consider their profits and don’t care about an increase or a decline in the number of accidental deaths. 12,000 commit suicide every year, because they don’t want to die in the service of capital; they’d rather just get it over with themselves. 1,000 children are murdered every year, as a result of living in low quality housing, the only purpose of which is to allow the landlord to pocket a large sum.

People treat death in the service of the exploiter as normal. The refusal to die in the service of the exploiter leads to what people think of as “unnatural deaths.” The desperate actions of people, coping with the working and living conditions that capital has created, are perceived as crimes. People feel there’s nothing to be done about the situation. To ensure that the incorrect perspective of the people is not replaced with a correct perspective, the Federal Minister of the Interior, the Länder Ministers of the Interior and the BAW have set up police death squads. Without this incorrect perspective about crime and death, the ruling class could not maintain its rule.

Petra, Georg, and Thomas died in the struggle against death at the hands of the exploiters. They were murdered so that capital could continue killing undisturbed, and so that people would continue to think that nothing can be done about the situation. But the struggle has begun!
[[File:Murdered - The Struggle Continues from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.jpeg|center|thumb|''“Murdered—The Struggle Continues”: poster protesting the police killings of Petra Schelm, Thomas Weissbecker, and Georg von Rauch.'']]

# '''PERSIA AND THE CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN THE NEW LEFT'''

Brandt has flown to Tehran to visit the Shah and calm his remaining distress about the greeting he received from West German and West Berlin students during the summer of 67; to inform him that the left in the Federal Republic and in West Berlin is dead, that what remains will soon be liquidated, that the Confederation of Iranian Students<ref>The Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS) was a Maoist student organization based in the refugee communities and active on university campuses throughout the western world.</ref> is effectively isolated, and about the Foreigners Act that is in the works and that will allow for their legal liquidation.

In this way Brandt has revealed the true nature of his foreign and domestic policies; they are the foreign and domestic policies of the corporations meant to control foreign and external markets and to determine who holds political power.

In Tehran Brandt said, “The foreign policy of the Federal Republic must be based on its own interests and must remain free of ideological bias.” The interests of the Federal Republic in Persia are the interests of the German enclave in Tehran, which is to say Siemens, AEG-Telefunken, Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Bank, Mannesmann, Hochtief, Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz, Merck, Schering, Robert Bosch, the Bayerische Vereinsbank, Thyssen, Degussa, and others. They are the ones that had the greetings to the Chancellor published in Tehran’s newspapers.

The Shah also contributed a statement to the daily press celebrating the Chancellor as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, because the Shah also has no ideological biases; concerning cheap labor in Iran, concerning stable political conditions in Iran, not to mention raw materials and certain nearby markets.

Under “ideological biases,” the Chancellor and the Shah subsume the interests of the German and Persian peoples regarding the relationship between their two countries. Three days before Brandt’s arrival, four comrades were murdered in Tehran and Thomas Weissbecker was murdered in Augsburg. A week after Brandt’s return, nine death penalties were carried out against comrades in Tehran. Meanwhile, Attorney General Martin<ref>Ludwig Martin, Attorney General from 1963 until 1974, when he was replaced by Siegfried Buback.</ref> praised the police officers for so impressively proving their worth in the manhunts in Augsburg and Hamburg.

German capital in Persia is taxed at a lower rate than other capital in Persia. German development aid credit finances German projects in Persia; and the imperial arsenal in Persia is to be modernized with the help of the German military. A 22 million dm<ref>Roughly $6 million.</ref> investment in the Persian arms industry in 1969 meant 250 million dm<ref>Almost $69 million.</ref> in follow-up orders for the German arms industry. The Shah’s regime plans to use g-3s and mg-3s<ref>The g-3 is an assault rifle and the mg-3 is a machinegun.</ref> in the struggle against “crime” in Persia, so that in the future wages will remain low, political conditions will remain stable and the conditions of exploitation will remain favorable for German capital. Meaning that pressure for increased wages at home can be handled with threats to move production out of the country. Pressure will also be applied to the public at home, because antifascist protest against the Shah threatens the foreign policy interests of the Federal Republic of Germany.

After prostrating himself in Poland,<ref>This is a reference to the so-called ''Warshauer Kniefall'', the “Warsaw Genuflection,” Brandt’s December 1971 public atonement at the monument commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.</ref> the Chancellor now prostrates himself before the murderous Shah. The repression of the Polish, Russian, Czech, and Hungarian peoples by German fascism is no longer going on. The repression of the Persian people under German imperialism is what is going on now. The Nuremberg Conventions are no longer in effect, but laws against Iranian students, against Greek, Turkish, and Spanish workers, who all come from countries with fascist regimes, are a current reality. German corporations profit from the fascism in these countries, controlling foreign workers here with the threat of what the fascism at home means for them. They are safe from the death penalty, which imprisoned comrades here are spared, but which is enforced in Persia, Turkey, Greece, and Spain.

The West German left met Brandt’s Persian trip with silence. They left him free to babble twaddle. They let Howeida<ref>Amir Abbas Howeida, Prime Minister of Iran during the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi. He was executed in 1979 following the Islamic revolution.</ref> babble twaddle about how the death penalty is only used against common criminals. Given that the Shah is sensitive, given that the 2nd of June disturbed the relationship between Germany and Iran, given that the Shah’s reputation is hardly stellar, as would have to be the case, given that, as everyone knows, enemies of the people dread being called enemies of the people, given that one can presume that even Brandt wasn’t all that comfortable with the hypocrisy, given that German capital is predisposed to fascism, and given that it’s relatively easy to demonstrate the connection between fascism in Iran and German capital in Iran… given all these things, nobody can defend the relationship without presenting themselves in a poor light.

The intellectual left came to the conclusion that only the proletarian masses can change the current situation, that only the West German masses can expropriate the profits that the corporations make from the Shah’s fascism—a situation from which the Shah’s fascism also profits. With this realization, the left stopped criticizing the Shah’s fascism and the domination imposed by West German capitalism in the Third World. With the realization that the resistance of the West German masses against the rule of capital would not be sparked by the problems of the Third World, but only by the problems developing here, they stopped posing the problems of the Third World as a factor in politics here.

This shows both the dogmatism and the parochialism of a section of the left. The fact that the working class in West Germany and West Berlin can only think and act in the national context, while capital thinks and acts in a multinational context, is first and foremost an example of the splitting of the working class, as well as of the weakness of a left that only focuses on capital’s domestic policies in its critique and ignores capital’s foreign policy, thus internalizing the split in the working class. They tell the working class only half of the truth about the system, about what capitalist policy means for the working class on a daily basis and what it means for wage demands in the foreseeable future.

The contradiction facing the New Left is that their basic economic analysis and political assessment is more radical and incisive than anything produced by the West German left prior to the 66/67 recession. This left experienced the end of the postwar reconstruction phase and the strengthening of West German imperialism and understood that they had to base themselves on the extraordinary class struggle, which led to them restricting their propaganda and organizational efforts to the national context. As a result, they have an unimaginative and narrow view of what revolutionary methods of intervention are possible.

In their efforts to give a scientific orientation to the anticapitalist protest—which reaches into the schools, the unions and the SPD— to maintain and develop their position in the high schools, they used Marxism to make the history of the working class more accessible to teachers and students. They hoped in this way to gain a foothold in the factories and schools.

Through these activities they show a willingness to act and to intervene that stands in contradiction to their actual methods of intervention, which remain those that were appropriate for the working class during the phase of competitive capitalism and parliamentarianism. They were appropriate in the period when Rosa Luxemburg, looking at the mass strikes in Russia in 1905, recognized the immense importance of strikes in the political struggle and Lenin recognized the importance of union struggles. It is the contradiction between their use of the German working class as their historical reference point, and the increasing tendency today of West German capitalism to organize itself in the form of West German imperialism.

A section of the left still sees the RAF as Baader and Meinhof’s personal thing and—like Howeida, the ''Bild'' and the ''BZ''—discusses armed struggle as if it were a form of criminal activity. In a similar vein, they also attribute our activity to faulty reasoning and misrepresent our positions. As a result, they will fail to resolve the contradiction between what they know to be the state of the class struggle, and what they perceive to be the revolutionary methods of intervention. They transform the objective problem that we all face into our subjective problem alone. They conduct themselves as if they fear the difficult task ahead of them—they bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about it. The denunciation of the concept of the urban guerilla within a section of the left succeeds far too easily and without much thought, thereby allowing us to see the growing distance between their theory and their practice, a distance that we do not believe can be closed by our efforts alone. Their claim that they are actually involved in this debate proves, we think, that we and they have different self-perceptions.

A year ago, we said that the urban guerilla unites the national and international class struggle. The urban guerilla makes it possible for the people to become aware of the interconnectedness of imperialist rule. The urban guerilla is the revolutionary form of intervention suited to an overall position of weakness. An advance in the class struggle only occurs if legal and illegal work are connected, if political propaganda has a perspective that includes armed struggle and if political organization includes the possibility of the urban guerilla. This was made clear through the concrete example of the chemical workers strike in 1971, which showed the objective reality of the social question, the subjective reality of the question of capitalist ownership and the militarization of the class struggle in West Germany and West Berlin.<blockquote>''In the current phase of history no one can any longer deny that an armed group, however small it may be, has more of a chance of becoming a people’s army than a group that has been reduced to spouting revolutionary rhetoric.''

30 Questions to a Tupamaro<ref>The Tupamaros were a guerilla group in Uruguay at the time. This short interview started circulating as an internal document in 1967, and was first made public in a Chilean journal in mid-1968. Within a few years, it had become a text of some importance to the revolutionary edge of the New Left in the metropole.</ref></blockquote>'''2. THE CHEMICAL WORKERS STRIKE OF 1971'''

The widespread strikes in the chemical and metal industries in 1971— among the most developed industries in West Europe—made it clear what the problems facing the working class will be in the coming years. They exhibited a widespread readiness to struggle on the part of the workforce, while simultaneously showing the economic and political advantages the chemical and metal industries have vis-à-vis the working class; they showed the complicity of the union bureaucracies with the Social-Liberal government and the role of the government as the executive organ of this “corporate state.”

The workers lost the strikes. They struck for 11 and 12 percent, and the unions settled with the employers for 7.8 and 7.5 percent. The situation that socialists in the Federal Republic and West Berlin will face in coming years was certainly clarified by this strike: subjectively, an increase in readiness to struggle on the part of the working class and, objectively, the reduced capacity to struggle; objectively, a decrease in wages and the loss of “vested social rights,” subjectively, increased class antagonism and class hatred.

Economically speaking, the strength of the chemical industry was the result of the trends towards concentration and the export of capital which have been forced upon the entire West European economy by North American competition. Politically, it was the result of the lessons that West German industry drew from May 68 in France and the wildcat strikes of September 69. Their counteroffensive against the September strikes here certainly increased class consciousness.

''Concentration''

Due to their size and technological advantages, the large American industrialists can achieve lower production costs despite paying higher wages. Hugh Stephenson of Time magazine:<blockquote>''the problem of size is not essentially one of the size of factory installations, rather the key is understanding the grandeur of the financial and economic factors that stand behind this. A large volume of business means almost nothing. However, it does have advantageous implications regarding dominant market position. And that is an advantage that can’t be achieved without substantial investment in modern industry, even if it is not in the area of developing technologies. The type of competition between industrialists in developing branches of industry, such as the automobile, chemical and oil industries, has completely changed. The cost of new investments is so high for the enterprises involved that as stable a future market as the intense competition allows for must be guaranteed. Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that European industry must in the future enter a phase of concentration into fewer and larger groups.''

''Die Welt'', February 23, 1972

</blockquote>''Public Funds''

Concentration is the first reality. The influx of public funds to cover the costs of research and development is the second. North American industries have access to greater funds of this variety as a result of their size and the U.S.A.’s permanent war economy. In 1963-64, the U.S.A. used 3.3 percent of its gross national product for research purposes—compared to an average of 1.5 percent in West Europe. Hugh Stephenson:<blockquote>''In the area of developing technologies, Europe will never be able to deal with the immense and ever-growing research and development costs if a constant flow of public funds is not guaranteed.''</blockquote>If not, then it would be better to just sign deals with American firms right away. That is the pressure that today’s economy places on the state. Concentration and state subsidies have become a question of survival for capitalist West Europe.

''The Export of Capital''

The third thing is the export of capital. This entails cooperation with foreign industries and building factories in foreign countries, with the aim of profiting from the cheaper raw materials and lower wages available in these countries, and of reducing transportation costs by buying from foreign markets.

Because the chemical industry stands at the forefront of this development, the chemical workers strike of 1971 had a central significance. It serves as an example of an entire trend, from the chemical companies’ strike preparations in December 1970, through the purge of teachers who are members of the DKP from the public service and the incorporation of the BGS into the federal police force, from the first signs of fascism in the Federal Republic to the CSU seizing control of ''Bayerischen Rundfunk'',<ref>''Bayerischen Rundfunk'': Bavarian Broadcasting, the public radio station in Bavaria.</ref> from the refusal to allow Mandel to teach at the Free University to the application of the death penalty to the Red Army Faction.

As a result of this, in the coming years increasing numbers of people from all levels of society, with the exception of the owners of capital, will find themselves dissatisfied with the structure of ownership. It therefore follows that it is tactically and strategically incorrect not to treat the question of ownership, which is now addressed with trivial and wishy washy arguments about co-management<ref>The practice of union representatives having a vote on the corporate boards dates from the late 1940s. Also referred to as co-determination.</ref> and “protecting what we’ve begun,” as the general and ongoing central issue. The situation has also led to a development whereby anyone who profits from these circumstances can conceal that fact.

''Bayer – BASF– Farbwerke Hoechst''

The chemical industry is among the industries with the highest levels of concentration in West Germany. The market share of just three, IG Farben-Nachfolger Bayer, Farbwerke Hoechst, and BASF, makes up 50 percent of the industrial sector. These three chemical corporations are among the four largest companies incorporated in the Federal Republic.

Of the 597,000 employed in the sector, 200,000 work for the big three. They control over 50 percent of the funds for research and development in the chemical industry. In the years 1965-70 alone, BASF gained control of business and corporate concerns that conducted 4 billion dm<ref>Roughly $1.45 billion.</ref> worth of business, which was more than it had itself been conducting in 1965.

Regarding the cooperation between the state and the chemical corporations, the 1969 Federal Research Report states:<blockquote>''In the chemical industry one can speak of a genuine division of labor between state-funded basic research and industrial research. The chemical industry can only continue their recent rate of growth and retain their international importance if a high level of (state-supported) basic research continues.''</blockquote>What export of capital means in the chemical industry is that while in 1970 West German industry did 19.3 percent of their business outside of Germany, for Farbwerke Hoechst it was 44 percent, for BASF 50 percent, for Bayer 56 percent. South Africa, Portugal, Turkey, Iran, and Brazil are some the places where they have production facilities.

The Federal Republic also provides military aid to Portugal, Turkey and Iran. Obviously, this military aid serves to ensure conditions of exploitation beneficial to West German capital in these countries, which is to say, holding wages down and gunning down workers who resist. It is also clear that since the mid-60s this military aid has also served to build up “security forces,” which is to say the police, who conduct the anti-guerilla war under the guise of fighting crime, saying whatever is necessary to support that position: there is no resistance, the masses are completely satisfied, it’s only a question of criminals and crime.

American military aid to Iran was given to support the campaign against drug dealing and smuggling, and Brandt has no “ideological biases” if the execution of revolutionaries is disguised as sentences carried out against criminals. Scheel spoke recently—in the context of the signing of a contract, in which the Federal Republic secured future Brazilian uranium discoveries—of the common interest of the Federal Republic and the Brazilian military junta in resisting “terrorism and subversive activities,” which is in reaction to the Latin American guerillas who laid bombs at the BASF installation.

Together with American corporations, the West German chemical corporations control almost the entire chemical and pharmaceutical market in Iran. Iran is the site of the greatest rate of expansion of western interests; South Africa offers the highest rate of profit—Volkswagen for example averaged dividends of 30 percent last year, and in 1968 they were as high as 45 percent. Between what they produce and what they sell, the West German chemical and pharmaceutical industry controls 10 to 12 percent of the South American market.

Pressure on wages and the reduction of the wage-cost ratio in production was achieved through the exploitation of lower wage standards in foreign countries, through guest workers, and through investments at home, all of which the chemical industry has used in recent years to achieve a 75 percent increase in capacity, as well as rationalization and redundancy in the labor force.

The figures: between 1950 and 1970, the number of people employed in the chemical industry increased by only 100 percent, compared to an increase in sales of 636 percent. In general, the tendency is for the number of people to decrease. The closing of Phrixwerke made the headlines. Hüls announced this February that in 1972 the number of people it employs will decrease by 3 to 4 percent. The chemical industry speaks of the “the increasing importance of labor costs.” This indicates that they intend lay-offs and wage rollbacks. They entered the 1971 round of negotiations with the aim of asserting their concept of “labor costs,” which is to say, with the hope of putting the working class on the defensive through a massive attack.

''The Strength of the Capitalist Class''

Concentration as the precondition for a strong negotiating position for capital requires nothing more than a unified position on the part of the employers, in a situation where the Employers Association is controlled by the corporations that control the market: Bayer, BASF and Hoechst. Export of capital is a source of strength for the chemical industry, given that it creates a situation in which the working class that confronts it is not the industry’s only source of profit. In the workers’ struggle, the elimination of competition between wage workers always finds its practical limits within national borders, and so a strike only stops a part of capital’s profitable production. While the workers gamble everything, capital only gambles part of what it has.

Just because the chemical industry ruthlessly uses its strengths to gain the upper hand politically is absolutely no reason for whining. It is an error to see the chemical companies as especially evil because they make use of slave labor in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to put pressure on wages, because they use investments to get the labor force off their backs, and because they use concentration to secure economic and political mobility and flexibility. The brutality of their exploitative behavior—in the form of political repression and pressure to reduce the costs of social reproduction—indicates the effect of North American competition on West Europe’s economy, as well as the rationalization of the sector, its products, and the market. It is an integral part of the inhumanity and criminality of the system and will only be eliminated when the system is eliminated, or it will not be eliminated at all.

The chemical industry prepared meticulously for the strike; it was they and not the unions that wanted the strike, and they and not the unions that won the strike. The workers suffered a setback. Everybody played different roles against them: capital, the government and the union bureaucracy.

''Preparing for the Strike''

In February 71, the unions called for a wage increase beginning March 31 in Hessen, North Rhine and Rhineland Palatinate, demanding 11 to 12 percent, and for Hessen a flat 120 marks,<ref>Roughly $43. Regarding the flat rate: wage increases in many German industries were indexed by workers’ “skill category,” which meant that every wage increase in fact served to increase the divide between different layers of the working class. The demand for a flat wage increase was meant to counter this trend, as such an increase would benefit all workers equally. On this, see Roth, 116-117</ref> which for Hessen meant the same wage increase for all wage levels, the freezing of wage cuts and a step forward in the unity of the working class. The chemical industry refused to make any deal.

In December 70, the chemical industry had already created “mutual support systems” between their companies in case of a strike. This took the form of transferring money related to wage payments to the development and conversion of raw materials, to the production of primary and intermediate products, and to the setting aside of capital for production facilities and transportation. They also provided their customers with an 8-week stock of their products, including the smaller clients such as drugstores and universities—the rector of Düsseldorf University, for example, called upon the institutes and seminars to stock up as a precautionary measure.

Operating measures were worked out in detail: instruction manuals for strike breakers, secure plant telephone systems, a list of the names of union representatives, facilities to print leaflets, contacts with the local press and opinion-makers such as teachers, ministers and associations. Lists were drawn up of supposed members of an “underground political force” to be forwarded to the ''Verfassungsschutz'' and the police. Contacts with the police, government departments, and Interior Ministers. A line of argument was also developed about the “danger to the workplace posed by the strike,” etc.

In December 70, the union representatives at Farbwerke Hoechst polled their members regarding the proposed wage demands. The Wage Commission—made up of representatives from the IG Chemie trade union and the larger companies—refused the demands. The vote with which the demands were rejected wasn’t even close: 4 to 1. The union representatives from Merck in Darmstadt demanded 160 marks<ref>Roughly $58.</ref> or 12 percent. They also had little luck with the Wage Commission.

''State Support for the Capitalist Class''

The Employers Association received state support. The basic 9 percent wage increase projected in the government’s wage guidelines was reduced to 7.5 percent at the beginning of the year. Brandt, on May 11 in parliament: “In the current phase, wage costs that are too high risk causing underemployment.” The experts in their opinions supported the chemical industry, stating that “a very slow reduction in the rate of wage increases” is not enough, but that “extreme measures are necessary.” (May 71)

In May, the chemical industry made an offer of 5 percent, and IG Chemie issued a press release stating that they wouldn’t insist upon 11 or 12 percent, but would accept 8 or 9 percent

''The Betrayal of Rhineland Palatinate''

On May 24, however, Rhineland Palatinate—to great public surprise— signed a wage contract for 7.8 percent over ten months, which on the basis of a real duration of twelve months is 6.5 percent, less than that suggested in Schiller’s<ref>2 Karl Schiller was the SPD’s Federal Minister of Economic Affairs and Minister of Finance at the time. His reference data would presumably have determined the government’s wage guidelines.</ref> reference data. Rhineland Palatinate is controlled by BASF. BASF won’t accept strikes.

Bayer and Hoechst also later avoided strikes. The employees of the large companies don’t want the humiliation of a setback during a strike; they have been disciplined by a broad and diverse system of pacification: company housing, purported profit sharing, training grants, a body of company representatives alongside the unions, the organization of the workplace whereby the employees are split into hundreds of separate factory units, a wage system split into different wage levels, separate low wage groups for men and women.

The chemical industry in Hessen circulated to its own employees the leaflet that the IG Chemie trade union had prepared for its members regarding this outcome. The Wage Commission in North Rhine and Hessen bristled at the outcome in Rhineland Palatinate. They talked about options for struggle, but didn’t prepare them. IG Chemie simply demanded that their members get their dues in order and recruit new members.

''The Strike''

In the face of the chemical industry’s resistance, federal government arbitration eventually failed in North Rhine and Hessen, and later in Westphalia and Hamburg. Following the failure of federal government arbitration, the strike began. From the beginning of June until the beginning of July, a total of 50,000 workers in these four areas were on strike and 150,000 were involved in support actions. In North Rhine they struck for 9 percent, in Hessen for a flat increase of at least 120 marks,<ref>Roughly $43.</ref> or 11 percent, and in the other areas for 11 or 12 percent. It was the first strike in the chemical industry in 40 years, since the wage struggles at the beginning and end of the 1920s.

The organizational initiative didn’t come from the unions; it came from the workers. At Glanzstoff in Oberbruch, it started with 120 skilled workers, who spontaneously walked out on June 3. Later, when the union called for a work stoppage in the key sectors, other workers spontaneously joined the strike. At Dynamit Nobel in Troisdorf, the action began with a spontaneous walkout on the part of skilled workers in the explosives factories. At Clouth-Gummiwerken in Cologne, where the strike lasted 4 weeks, it began with the mill workers. At Degussa in Wolfgang, small groups of skilled workers walked out of the various production centres, calling for a demonstration against the factory committee and the union representatives. At Braun in Melsungen, it began with workers in the engineering building. In Glanzstoff in Kelsterbach, the action began with a sit-down strike by some Spanish workers. In Merck, at Farbwerken Hoechst, the action began with different small groups. In some factories the strike lasted for the entire month of June.

On June 8, 10,000 workers took part in a mass IG Chemie trade union demonstration at the Cologne Arena. On June 14, there was a day of action in North Rhine; 19,000 workers from 38 factories joined the strike. On June 16, 10,000 workers again participated in a second mass IG Chemie demonstration in Cologne. Simultaneously, 16,000 took part in actions in Hessen—4,000 workers from Farbwerke Hoechst participated in a union demonstration; it was the first time in 50 years that there was a strike at Hoechst—even if it only lasted a few hours. At the end of June, 38,000 workers were on strike in Hessen, North Rhine, Hamburg and Westphalia. If one considers the dubious behavior of the union bureaucracy, and the fact that the strike initiative came from small groups, these are impressive numbers.

At Merck, the employees were pressured by the chairman of the factory committee to back the union’s demands. The strike motion put forward by strike leaders at Bayer in Leverkusen wasn’t accepted by the regional strike headquarters. Many didn’t want to strike, because they felt not enough was being demanded. Many didn’t want to strike, because they feared it would end in a rotten compromise. That activities were restricted to isolated actions at Farbwerken Hoechst and at Bayer in Leverkusen—the largest factories in Hessen and North Rhine— demoralized many people. The corporations’ system of pacification paid off.

During the strike, the chemical industry took every possible step to remain on the offensive—and to keep the unions on the defensive. Pressure was kept on the workers by claims that the strike was illegal because no strike vote had been held—at IG Chemie, a strike vote is not required, as is also the case at IG Metall. At Hoechst, the argument that there could be “no strike without a strike vote” prevented the strike. The strike leadership at Merck treated the issue of rights as an issue of power in the class struggle: “In the workers’ struggle, and everything is in the wording, we are governed first and foremost by the opinion of the majority, or more specifically the strikers.” IG Chemie can only conceive of things in terms of their own bylaws.

The chemical industry made equal use of legal and illegal methods; Merck spread rumors about injuries; they claimed that stones had been placed on the tracks of the factories’ rail system, that “anticorporate elements” had engaged in sabotage and that strike centres were defended with bicycle chains and brass knuckles. At Glanzstoff in Oberbruch, rumors were spread about shootings. Police units ensured that strike breakers could gain access to the factories at Merck and Glanzstoff. The Kripo photographed and attacked strike centres. Buses carrying strike breakers drove into strike centres (Glanzstoff). Company management at Merck disrupted radio communication between strike centres and increased plant security. Riot police stood at the ready. Outside workers were brought in as strike breakers. An encampment was forced off the factory premises. At Glanzstoff, the police units were so vicious that young police officers were crying and older ones had to be replaced before the police could clear a path for the strike breakers.

''Class Justice''

An injunction issued by the Labor Court ensured strike breakers access to the factories, sanctioned the use of police units, and criminalized strike actions. In Merck, following this injunction, IG Chemie accepted a settlement, the contents of which did not respect the work stoppage— the entry for strike breakers—and held that if anything the injunction sanctioned the unions. As a result, union strike leaders of Merck in Rükken said regarding the injunction, “The eyes of the law look out from the face of the ruling class.” (Ernst Bloch)<ref>Ernst Bloch was an important 20th century German Marxist theorist and art critic who counted the much younger Rudi Dutschke among his friends and intellectual peers.</ref> “We accuse society’s leaders of violence; the violence begins and ends with society’s leaders.” Regarding the injunction, they said, “The injunction makes a mockery of the right to work, using it to permit strike breakers. But the employers refuse to protect the real right to work. Where was the right to work during the crisis of 1966-67?”

The mayor of Darmstadt followed a declaration of state and police neutrality with the threat that surely no one wanted a vacation in the hospital.

The workers at Merck, resisting the police, sometimes with the support of students, continued to block the entry of strike breakers. The fact that they conducted their strike aggressively indicates that the workers had no doubts about the legitimacy of their actions. In response to this, 17 apprentices and young workers from Merck were illegally terminated after the strike ended.

As the unions gradually scaled back their demands, and while the workers were still striking, the chemical industry announced without further ado that, as of June 1, wages would be increased by 6.5 percent. Corruption proceedings launched by the workers were an overall failure. The workers were no match for the machinations of the union leadership. The latter released a Communiqué on Concerted Action in what amounted to a call for the workers to accept defeat and end the strike: “The language of the Common Concerted Action was completely the work of the employers and the unions, to make sure that not everyone will benefit from the anticipated rise in prices and incomes being created by the boom, but rather that everyone will be subjected to the dictates of a phase of macroeconomic consolidation.”

At the beginning of July, the Board of Directors of IG Chemie reached an agreement with the chemical industry: 7.8 percent = wage guidelines = the outcome at Rhineland Palitinate. The Merck strike leadership sent a protest telegram to the board requesting that the decision be rescinded. At Clouth-Gummiwerken, the union traitors were shouted down when the outcome was announced. The strike was over.

The chemical industry had achieved its goal. They wanted the first strike in the chemical industry, the first strike by chemical workers of this generation, to end in defeat, because “given the increasing importance of labor costs, they must consider the possibility that in future wage negotiations in the chemical industry, serious confrontations, possibly even labor disputes, may prove unavoidable” [from: ''Hilfeleistung im Arbeitskampf'' <ref>Support During Labor Disputes.</ref> ]—because for the chemical industry this strike was not an isolated incident, but rather one step in a long term strategy of struggle against the working class. In the words of the Deutsche Bank’s spokesman, Ulrich, “It requires many steps, each of which must be large enough to reach the goal—rates of increase of only two or three percent.” (February 72)

The workers didn’t achieve what they hoped for: more unity—that was the objective of the 120 mark demand in Hessen; wage increases that do not lag behind price increases—that was the objective of the entire strike movement; close relations—unity and not separation between the workers from Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst; success.

This wage agreement is an expression of the actual power relations between the classes. One could say that capital has almost all of it and the workers almost none: capital has closed ranks and “concentrated,” while the working class suffers from numerous divisions; capital has powerful organizations that are firmly in control, while the workers have unions that are out of their control, with a bureaucracy and a leadership that, like the current government, advance anti-worker policies; capital has the state, and the state is against the working class; capital is organized internationally, while the working class is still only able to organize in the national context; capital has a clear, long term strategy and uses propaganda to promote it at every opportunity, with the goal of attacking the working class; the workers can counter this only with their rage—that is all they have.

''The Militarization of the Class Struggle''

In spite of capital’s strength and the weakness of the working class, the state is arming itself and preparing for the militarization of the class struggle. The political means correspond with the economic facts: capital’s aggression. The political facts signal the extent and the strength of the attack.

The less the common good—which is to say general affluence, increasing income, and improved living conditions for all—is addressed by capitalist policy, the more it must be promoted, so as to reduce possibilities for criticizing the methods employed by capital. Therefore, critical journalists have been fired everywhere; therefore the schools have been cleared of leftists; therefore, the CSU has seized control of the ''Bayerischen Rundfunk'', which can only signal the beginning of the acquisition of ARD stations by the ZDF<ref>2 The ARD is the ''Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland'' (Consortium of PublicLaw Broadcasting Institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany); ''Bayerischen Rundfunk'' is a member of the ARD. ZDF is the ''Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen'' (Second German Television), owned by Deutche Telekom; it is commercial TV, partially funded through advertising.</ref>—even if the process can’t proceed as quickly in other ''Länder''.

To the extent that the system can no longer purchase the loyalty of the masses, they must be coerced. As it will no longer be given willingly, it will be gained through threats of violence; the BGS will be transformed into a federal police force and increased from a force of 23,000 to a force of 30,000; the police will be armed with submachine guns, and the citizenry should become as accustomed to seeing submachine gun-armed police on street corners as they are of paying taxes;<ref>This is a reference to a statement by Willy Weyer, Interior Minister of North-Rhine-Westphalia, who stated that “Citizens must get as used precisely to the sight of policemen with machine pistols as they are to paying tax.” (Cobler, 141).</ref> penal law will be stiffened; emergency exercises will be conducted using sharpshooters; comrades will be taken into preventive custody; RAF suspects will be subject to the death penalty.

To the extent that people have no further reason, once capitalism is finally enforced in West Germany, to continue being anticommunist, communists must be forcibly separated from the people. Therefore, the left is being pushed out of the factories. Therefore the price the DKP must pay to remain legal will get higher and higher (and it is apparent that they’ll pay any price). Therefore, the chemical industry threatens the Free University; they will not hire Free University graduates if peace and order are not re-established at the Free University.

To the degree that the ideas of the communist alternative win ground as a result of the system’s own contradictions, the liberated spaces from which such ideas can be propagated must be closed; therefore Mandel should not be permitted to teach at the Free University; therefore the president of the university in Frankfurt calls in the police to make sure that exams supported by industry are written; therefore Löwenthal<ref>Gerhard Löwenthal was a German journalist and a ZDF news anchor from 1969 until 1988.</ref> rants about the Spartacus Youth,<ref>“Spartacus Youth”: the DKP’s student section, by far the largest self-styled communist organization active on campuses during this period.</ref> and Löwenthal’s cameramen attack students to get photos of as many violent scenes that can be used to incite the people as possible.

After ten years of employing foreigners in the Federal Republic— since the wall in 1961<ref>The construction of the Berlin Wall cut off the flow of refugees from the East that had been providing a reservoir of cheap labor up until that time. This signaled the beginning of a guest worker policy of recruiting cheap labor from southern Europe, Turkey, and elsewhere.</ref>—the accident rate of foreigners has reached a level double that of German workers, which is already high enough, and they still live in ghettos and discrimination is still prevalent in the factories and neighborhoods. As foreign workers have now begun to organize to better protect themselves, the Basic Law is to be changed to make it easier to monitor foreigners’ organizations, so as to make it easier to dismantle them, something that is already possible with the fascist laws governing foreigners and the anticommunist law governing association.

Capitalist propagandists use the narrow opportunity that the Red Army Faction affords them to argue that their core problem, the escalation of the class struggle, is caused by us, and that the rise of right wing radicalism is a response to us. This is objectively the argument of the class enemy and subjectively an entirely shallow approach based on nothing more than the superficial assessment of the issues found in the bourgeois press.

''The Legal Left and Public Enemy No. 1''

In the face of capital’s offensive, the legal left is not just on the defensive, it is objectively helpless. They respond with their leaflets and their newspapers and their agitation among the workers, in which they say all the blame lies with capital, which is true, that the workers must organize themselves, that the social democratic line must be overcome in the factories, that the workers must learn to conduct economic struggles so as to regain their class consciousness—all of which is important work. But proposing it as the only form of political work it is shortsighted.

They see semi-automatic pistols and say, “Organize the economic struggle.” They see the emergency exercises and say, “Class consciousness.” They see fascism and say, “Don’t bring the class struggle to a head.” They see war preparations and say, “Develop a policy of unity with the middle class.” They see Labor Court and Federal Labor Court decisions that will ban future strikes and say, “Legality.”

The counterrevolution believes that it is possible to get rid of all of the problems that it itself produces, and no means is too dirty in achieving that goal. But they can’t wait until fascism has really been established and the masses have been mobilized in their service. They need the security offered by a monopoly of weapons and armed violence—so that the rage of the working class, which they did so much to provoke, does not lead the working class to the idea, and with the idea, the means: the idea of the revolutionary guerilla’s armed struggle, striking from the shadows and not easily caught, imposing accountability, demoralizing the police, and resisting their violence with counterviolence.

Genscher would not be the Minister of the Interior of the ruling class if he were not prepared to use unimaginable measures to take us “out of circulation,” if he hadn’t declared us Public Enemy No. 1 even before we did anything, if he hadn’t indicated that he was prepared to do anything, to engage in any action, to isolate us from the left, the labor force and the people, if he wasn’t prepared to murder us. This situation will surely get worse.

But they can no longer continue their war preparations covertly, and they cannot continue to act within their own legal parameters. They are obliged to violate their own system, and in so doing they show their true colors as enemies of the people—and the left creates accurate propaganda at a high dialectical level, as ought to be the case, when they say: this terror is not directed against the RAF, but rather against the working class. Obviously its target isn’t the RAF, but rather the development of the coming class struggle. This is why the idea of armed struggle is met with all the violence the system is currently capable of, in order to prevent the working class from embracing it.

We’re not feeling edgy; the system is feeling nervous.

Capital can’t wait until it has established fascism because American competition won’t wait. The hysteria of the system doesn’t make our strategy or tactics incorrect. And the system is not incorrect in making it incredibly difficult for us to anchor the guerilla in the masses. Knowing this, it is not incorrect to develop resistance, given that the war will be a protracted war.

What could comrades be waiting for in a country that allowed Auschwitz to occur without resistance? Doesn’t the current workers’ movement bring with it the history of the German workers’ movement and this police force the history of the SS?<blockquote>Communists struggle for the satisfaction of the goals and interests of the working class immediately at hand, but they also show the way forward for the movement as well as its future.

''Communist Manifesto''</blockquote>That is what we mean by SERVE THE PEOPLE.

'''3. THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP AND THE MILITARIZATION OF THE CONFLICT'''

The argument that the Federal Republic is not Latin America obscures local conditions more than it clarifies them. This is indicated by (and the debate is liberally seasoned with these): “The same horrifying poverty doesn’t exist here as does there”; “Here the enemy is not a foreign power”; “Here the state is not so hated by the people”; “We are not ruled by a military dictatorship here as is the case in many Latin American countries.”

Meaning: conditions there are so intolerable that violence is the only option—here things are still good enough that the conditions are not ripe for violence.

In the Rowohlt<ref>A prominent German publishing company</ref> volume ''Zerschlagt die Wohlstandsinseln der iii''. Welt,<ref>Destroy the Islands of Wealth in the Third World.</ref> which includes Marighella’s ''Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla,'' it says in the preface that the decision to publish his text is a protest against arrests and torture in Brazil, not a guide for action here, “however weak parliamentary democracy may be and whatever threat is posed by its own economic system.”—“To use counterviolence (the Latin American urban guerilla model) which is meant to be used against a terrorist capitalist ruling class, in a country where one can discuss workers’ participation, is to make a mockery of the wretched of the earth.”

Following this logic, to bomb BASF in Ludwigshafen would be to mock the people who bombed BASF in Brazil. The Latin American comrades feel differently. BASF does as well.

The argument that the Federal Republic is not Latin America is advanced by people who speak about current affairs from a perspective in which their monthly income is secure, and who speak in a way which keeps it secure; it is an example of human coldness and intellectual arrogance in the face of the problems of people here. Reality in the Federal Republic is in this way factually and analytically removed from the table. An analysis of questions here must be based on the objective relevance of social questions, on the subjective relevance of the question of ownership, and on the militarization of the class struggle.

''Poverty in the Federal Republic''

The objective relevance of social questions means the reality of poverty in the Federal Republic. The fact that this poverty is largely hidden doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. The fact that there is no chance that this poverty will lead to social revolution is no reason to act as if it doesn’t exist.

Jürgen Roth,<ref>Jürgen Roth is a German investigative journalist.</ref> in his book ''Armut in der Bundesrepublik''<ref>Poverty in the Federal Republic.</ref> has assembled almost everything that needs to be said on this topic. 14 million people in the Federal Republic and West Berlin are living in poverty today. 1.1 million people living in rural areas must get by on 100 to 400 marks<ref>Roughly $35 to $140.</ref> per month; these are the families of small farmers and people retired from sharecropping. 4.66 million households with an average of three members must get by on a monthly net income of less than 600 marks;<ref>Roughly $220.</ref> that is 21 percent of all households. Over 5 million pensioners have a monthly pension of around 350 marks.<ref>Roughly $127.</ref> To this add 600,000 people in low-income housing projects, 450,000 in homeless shelters, 100,000 institutionalized children, 100,000 in mental asylums, 50,000 adults in prison and 50,000 youth in reform schools. Those are the official figures. Everyone knows that official figures in this area are always underestimates. In Bremen, 11,000 people receive heating subsidies because they can’t afford to buy coal. The Munich Housing Bureau calculates that the number of homeless will increase from 7,300 to 25,000. In Cologne, in 1963, 17,000 lived in low-income housing projects.

In the Nordweststadt neighborhood in Frankfurt one pays 460 marks<ref>Roughly $167</ref> rent for two rooms totaling about 60 square metres. In Nordweststadt the electricity metres are found in the basement. In almost every highrise at least one electricity metre is turned off, regardless of whether there are small children in the apartment and regardless of whether it is winter. The city of Frankfurt turns off the electricity to 50 homes every day; approximately 800 families a month have their electricity cut.

Approximately 5,000 vagrants live in Frankfurt. At night, water is used to drive them from the area where they sleep on the B level of the Hauptwache pedestrian mall. When the police leave, they come back, lie newspapers on the wet ground, and go back to sleep.

7 million homes in the Federal Republic have neither a bath nor a toilet. 800,000 families live in barracks. In Frankfurt, 20,000 people are searching for homes. In Düsseldorf, it’s 30,000.

600,000 people in the Federal Republic suffer from schizophrenia. If schizophrenia is not treated it is debilitating. 3 percent of the population is unable to work or pursue a career. 5 to 6 million people require some form of psychological support. Some psychiatric institutions have only 0.75 square metres of space per patient.

High school teachers estimate that 80 percent of working class children do not attend classes.

Poverty in the Federal Republic is not decreasing; it is increasing. Demand for housing is increasing. The need for schools is increasing. Child abuse is increasing. At the end of 1970, 7,000 cases were reported; it is estimated that in reality there were 100,000. It is also estimated that 1,000 children are beaten to death each year.

“To describe the school system in the Federal Republic is to describe poverty in a rich country,” says Luc Jochimsen<ref>Lukrezia Jochimsen was a sociologist and TV journalist. Today she is a member of parliament for the left-wing Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (PDS).</ref> in her book ''Hinterhöfe der Nation'',<ref>Backyards of the Nation.</ref> which provides the necessary details:<blockquote>''The public education system is a slum with the characteristics of any slum: deprivation, budget shortfalls, shortages, obsolescence, crowding, disrepair, discontent, resignation, indifference, and ruthlessness.''

''What occurs today with six- and seven-year-olds in the primary schools of the Federal Republic reflects a conscious plan to use compulsory education to later deny these children the right to education and training. It is a crime against education. A crime for which no punishment exists. A crime that will never face prosecution.''</blockquote>In 1970, 35,000 people lived in the Märkisch neighborhood in Berlin. It is projected to reach 140,000 by 1980. The people are saying, “It’s brutal here, totally squalid; in any event, it destroys the will to live— but inside the houses are well laid out.” Everything is available in the Märkisch neighborhood: playgrounds, a transportation system, schools, cheap shopping, doctors and lawyers; and they are cesspools for poverty, child abuse, suicide, criminal gangs, bitterness and need. The Märkisch neighborhood shows the future of social conditions.

(Bourgeois authors, faced with the conclusions we are drawing here, make no effort to place their observations within a context which recognizes that poverty is caused by the mobility of capital and the concentration of capital by banks, insurance companies, and home and property owners. They come to terms with the research data through verbal protests.)

The reality of poverty is not the same thing as revolutionary reality. The poor are not spontaneously and of their own accord revolutionary. They generally direct their aggression against themselves rather than against their oppressors. The objects of their aggression are usually other poor people, not those who benefit from their poverty. Not the real estate companies, the banks, the insurance companies, the corporations and the city planners, but rather other victims. Inactive, truly depressed, a discouraging example providing material for the fascism of ''Bild'' and ZDF.

The ZDF showed the following scene: in the slums of Wiesbaden, ZDF had children play in the dirt, beating on each other and screaming. The adults had to scream at them to let each other be. The television voice-over says, “The Federal Republic is not Latin America”; the poor in the Federal Republic have only themselves to blame; they are criminals; there are very few poor people—this is the concrete evidence. The Springer Press prints stuff like this. The material of fascism.

''The Reality of Ownership Conditions''

But the objective reality of poverty has in no small way clarified the subjective fact that capitalist ownership since the early postwar years— the CDU’s Ahlener Program<ref>The Ahlener Program, adopted by the CDU on February 3, 1947, in the town of Ahlen, stated in its opening that the interests of capitalism and those of the German people were identical.</ref>—has provided nothing. No gains came spontaneously, all were won through negotiations. Little was developed for the poor, but in the rest of society Citizens Initiatives with their platitudes became more widespread, albeit very poorly organized and vague, not worth repressing.

The 20,000 sacrificed in car accidents to the automobile industry’s lust for profit has not led to any consideration of the future of the highway system; the insurance aristocracy that represents capital guarantees illness, the downside of which being miserable hospital stays; the contradiction between community debt and the dividends enjoyed by the corporations that engage in production on their territory; between the exploitation of guest workers and the accommodations provided to guest workers; between the misery of children and the profits of toy companies; between profit made by landlords and miserable housing conditions—all of this is common knowledge. It is covered at length in Spiegel every week, and daily in ''Bild'', in most cases as isolated incidents. But this state of affairs has been worsening so quickly that it can no longer be covered up. Deutsche Bank spokesman Ulrich babbles about “the demonization of profit,” “the attack against our economic system,” and the “criticism of profit”: “We are insufficiently committed to broadly clarifying the nature of employers’ profits, without which development and progress are impossible in a free market system”—that a part of this should also be for the common good is rejected by almost all owners of capital.

Eppler<ref>Erhard Eppler, a member of the SPD and left-leaning Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation. He resigned in 1974.</ref> hopes to secure support for the unpopular sales tax increase by using the taxation of higher income brackets for propaganda purposes. The CDU is afraid that the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties<ref>Signed in August and December 1970, these two treaties were milestones in the SPD’s ''Ostpolitik'', normalizing the FRG’s relations with Poland and the Soviet Union for the first time since World War ii.</ref> could lead to an ideological softening within the Federal Republic—Schröder’s<ref>Gerhard Schröder was a CDU politician, Minister of the Interior from 1953 until 1961, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1961 until 1966 and Minister of Defense from 1966 until 1969.</ref> key argument is that the demonization of communism could lose credibility, because communism has come to represent expropriation and collectivization of the means of production. The CDU does not attack the contents of the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties, they struggle against ideological tolerance of the thinking of sworn enemies of capitalism.

The initiatives of the left after 1968, when they had a broad base everywhere, addressed the question of ownership and created a consensus behind their criticism. They did this in a way that constituted an attack against capitalist ownership and acted as a brake on capitalist profiteering. This took place in the squats in cities throughout the Federal Republic, in the Citizens Initiatives opposed to gentrification, in the initiatives for non-profit development in the suburbs—the Märkisch neighborhood, Nordweststadt in Frankfurt—and in the Citizens Initiatives opposed to the development of industrial sites in residential neighborhoods.

The Heidelberg SPK, through collective study and action, developed such a persuasive critique of the connection between illness and capitalism that SPK cadre have been detained in prison under §129 since July 71. The struggle of the students against the standardized testing which capital has imposed, and the campaign of the ''Jusos'' against private property development on public lands in the countryside, both have capitalist ownership as their target.

The most important strikes occurred in September 69, and were sparked by the year’s high profits. The most powerful campaign of the student movement was that against the Springer Corporation: “Expropriate Springer.” The most brutal police action was against the Belgian community’s squats in Kassel, where women and children were beaten with clubs, and against the squats in Hannover, which were destroyed through trials for damages. After Georg’s murder, a sticker appeared in Berlin that read: “Killer cops murdered our brother Georg because they were worried about their loot.”

''Social Democracy and Reformism''

Promise of reform has become the ersatz religion, the opium of the people. Promises of a better future have only one function, to provide a motivation for patience, endurance, and passivity. With all the efforts that are required to push reforms through, one could have a revolution. The people who say otherwise—like the ''Jusos'', and like those who believe that the ''Jusos'' have the power to push through meaningful reforms— misunderstand the system’s ability to resist change. They misunderstand its determination to adapt society to the exploitative conditions of capitalism and not the other way around. They do not understand that the system no longer feels constrained to act “within the bounds of the constitutional state.” Above all, they fail to understand that the ''Jusos'' are the cream of the younger generation of social democrats

There is, however, a difference between the SPD and the CDU. They despise the working class and the people in different ways. The SPD believes in the carrot and the stick. The CDU is only interested in the stick. The SPD is more experienced at leading the working class around by the nose. Wehner<ref>Herbert Wehner was leader of the SPD’s parliamentary group from 1958 until 1983, and Deputy Chairman of the SPD from 1958 until 1973.</ref> is more experienced in deceiving and purging the left. Brandt is more experienced in the way to take over the leadership of a movement so as to neutralize it (e.g., the antinuclear movement in Berlin in 1958). They are more imaginative than the CDU in their tactics against the people.

The SPD pushed the amnesty through to defuse the solidarity that was developing around the trials of students, to disrupt the criticisms of the justice system, to break the solidarity the left was receiving against the justice system and the administration, thereby eliminating the rebellion without involving state security.

With their ''Ostpolitik'', they beat back the criticism that their reform policies were in disarray. The Berlin Senate didn’t send in the police in response to the occupation at the Bethanien Hospital and the establishment of the Georg von Rauch House, instead they chose to shut off the water and take over administration of the building. Because of the protests against his Persian trip, Heinemann is still gun-shy about diplomacy. Under Brandt’s leadership, the ban on foreigners’ organizations was already in the works. It is the SPD that has influence with the unions and the workers, while the CDU distrusts the unions and their method of functioning: accumulation of capital through voluntary membership donations instead of through the extraction of profits. And Posser<ref>Diether Posser, SPD Minister of Justice in the Land of North Rhine Westphalia from 1972 until 1978.</ref> in many ways avoids lying: Mahler is a “fellow human being,” and in his impact report he says Brigitte Asdonk had been mistreated.

The difference between the SPD and the CDU has been defined by some comrades as the difference between the plague and cholera. That’s the choice the West German people face when they vote.

The system is taking the steps necessary to preserve the social status quo. Preserving the status quo requires: the concentration of European businesses to resist American competition; tax funded basic research to maintain high rates of profit; supplying weapons to the Third World through capital export markets so as to keep the liberation movements in check and using foreign production to keep wages down at home; keeping Siemens Annual General Assembly free from criticisms about Carbora Bassa investments;<ref>The project to build a massive dam in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. The right-wing Portuguese government had plans to settle over one million European colonists in the African country. By 1969, five German companies were implicated in the project.</ref> protecting the Shah from criticism about the death penalty in Persia.

Preserving the status quo requires: keeping anyone who is poor away from people who are addressing the issue of ownership; keeping the working class divided; using the accumulation of wealth and promises of reform to rein in the working class; keeping up a steady flow of propaganda: consumer ownership is the same as ownership of the means of production; all attacks against private property are the same; all attacks against private property are criminal; capitalist production is the natural state of affairs; capitalism is the best option available and the best that humans have come up with; criticisms of capitalism serve particular, selfish agendas of individuals and groups; wages are responsible for inflation; employers’ profits serve the common good; whoever has a different perspective is making problems and stands alone and is, in the final analysis, a criminal.

It is a status quo of relations of ownership and ideas that cannot be preserved without the militarization of the class struggle and the criminalization of the left.

''The Springer Press''

The role of the Springer Press in the militarization of the class struggle was well described in 1968 during the “Expropriate Springer” campaign:<blockquote>''One can see the way in which the Springer Press’ public is produced following a simple formula: The Springer Press treats every attempt by people to free themselves from the constraints of late capitalism as a crime. Political revolutionaries are assigned the attributes of violent criminals. Political struggle is presented as individual, abstract terror, and the campaign against imperialism as pointless destruction.''

''The Springer Corporation represents the propaganda vanguard of aggressive anticommunism. The Springer Press is the enemy of the working class. They undermine its ability to act freely and in solidarity. They transform the reader’s desire for equality into a lynching instinct and the longing for a free society into hatred against everybody who wants to build a free society. The Springer Press serves the interests of war preparations. Their construct of the enemy is a way of saying, “If you’re ever disruptive, if you don’t leave your divorce to the divorce lawyers, the question of wage increases for contract negotiations, the issue of housing in the hands of the Housing Office, injustice in the hands of the judges, your security with the police, and your destiny to the vicissitudes of late capitalism, the response will be murder, torture, rape, and criminal attacks.”''

from: ''Destroy Bild''</blockquote>The situation has gotten increasingly critical since the Molotov Cocktail Meeting in February 68.<ref>1 In February 1968, a film by Holger Meins showing how to make a molotov cocktail was presented at a meeting held in Berlin to discuss the campaign against the Springer Press.</ref> ''Bild'' has launched the column “''Bild'' Fights for You!” and reports daily successes in the struggle against exorbitant rents, against the criminalization of foreigners, against denunciations of large families, against forced retirement and the impoverishment of retirees. Before the oppressed masses turn their backs on the institutions of the constitutional state, ''Bild'' turns them against themselves; before their dissatisfaction with the institutions of the class state can become class consciousness, ''Bild'' takes the lead in expressing this dissatisfaction, and just as was the case with the Nazis in 1933, ''Bild'' speaks for capital, not for the proletariat.

Böll called this fascist, by which he meant, so there is no misunderstanding, the “agitation, lies, dirt.”<ref>On December 20, 1971, Heinrich Böll famously said that Bild’s news coverage “isn’t crypto-fascist anymore, nor fascistoid, but naked fascism, agitation, lies, dirt.”</ref> In this he, analytically and politically, hit the nail on the head. The reaction showed how sensitive the system really is, how unstable the status quo, how fascistic Bild, and how agitated the climate at the Springer Corporation.

''The Dialectic of Revolution and Counterrevolution''<blockquote>''It isn’t a question of whether we want the reactionary militarization or not; it is a question of whether we have the conditions necessary to transform the fascist militarization into a revolutionary mobilization, whether we can transform the reactionary militarization into a revolutionary one, whether it is better to lay down and die or to stand up and resist.''

Kim Il Sung</blockquote>Most people say, “It’s unacceptable.” Most people say, “The masses do not want this.” Many people say, “Fighting now will provoke fascism.” Böll says, “Six against 60,000,000—capital has everything, we have nothing.”

They see only the status quo. They see in the system’s violence only the violence, not the fear. They see in the militarization only the weapons, not the crumbling mass base. They see in ''Bild''’s hatred only the hatred, not the dissatisfaction of ''Bild'' readers. They see cops with semiautomatic pistols and see only cops with semi-automatic pistols, not the lack of mass support for fascism. They see the terror against us and see only the terror, not the fear about the social explosiveness of the RAF, which must be “nipped in the bud.” They see in the political apathy of the proletariat only the apathy, not the protest against a system that has nothing to offer them. They see in the high level of suicide amongst the proletariat only the act of desperation, not the protest. They see in the proletariat’s disinterest in economic struggle only a disinterest in struggle, not the refusal to struggle for a paltry percentage and the right to idiotic consumption. They see in the proletariat’s lack of union organization only the lack of organization, not the mistrust of union bureaucrats as accomplices of capital. They see in the population’s hostility towards the left only the hostility towards the left, not the hatred against those who are socially privileged. They see in our isolation from the masses only our isolation from the masses, not the insane lengths to which the system will go to isolate us from the masses. They see in the long periods comrades spend in preventive custody only the long periods in preventive custody, not the system’s fear about the free members of the RAF. They see in the exclusion of DKP teachers only the end of the march through the institutions,<ref>A reference to Rudi Dutschke’s proposed strategy. See p. 35, fn 2</ref> not the beginning of the adoption of revolutionary politics by children and their parents, which must be choked off. They see everything in terms of the existing movement, not the future one, only the bad, not the good: the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution.

We’re not saying it will be easy to build the guerilla, or that the masses are just waiting for the opportunity to join the guerilla. However, we do, above all, believe that the situation will not change by itself. We don’t believe that the guerilla will spontaneously spring forth from the mass struggle. Such illusions are unrealistic. A guerilla that developed spontaneously out of the mass struggle would be a bloodbath, not a guerilla group. We do not believe that the guerilla can be formed as the “illegal wing” of a legal organization. Such an illegal wing would lead to the illegalization of the organization, i.e., its liquidation, and nothing else. We don’t believe that the concept of the guerilla will develop by itself from political work. Therefore, we believe that the options and the specific role of the guerilla in the class struggle can only be collectively perceived and understood, that the guerilla stands in opposition to the consciousness industry.

We have said that any talk of their defeating us can only mean our arrests or deaths. We believe that the guerilla will develop, will gain a foothold, that the development of the class struggle will itself establish the idea of armed struggle only if there is already an organization in existence conducting guerilla warfare, an organization that is not easily demoralized, that does not simply lie down and give up.

We believe that the idea of the guerilla developed by Mao, Fidel, Che, Giáp, and Marighella is a good idea that cannot be removed from the table. If one underestimates the difficulties in establishing the guerilla, if one is scared off by the difficulties against which we must struggle, this also shows that one underestimates the difficulties which the guerilla had to face even in those places where it has made a good deal of progress and is now anchored in the masses. We believe that these reservations are an indication of how far capital is prepared to go when it’s a question of securing exploitative conditions, an area where they have never hesitated: not with the Paris Commune, not in Germany in 1918, not in 1933, not in Algeria, Vietnam, the Congo, Cuba, Latin America, or Mozambique, not at Attica, not in Los Angeles, Kent State, Augsburg or Hamburg.

MAKE THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP THE KEY QUESTION FOR ALL MOVEMENTS!

ADVANCE THE REVOLUTIONARY GUERILLA AGAINST THE REACTIONARY MILITARIZATION!<blockquote>''No party can call itself revolutionary if it fails to prepare for armed struggle, and that is true at all levels of the party. That is the way to most effectively confront the reactionaries at every step of the revolutionary process. Any disregard for this factor can only lead to missed revolutionary opportunities.''</blockquote>That's what we mean by SERVE THE PEOPLE!

'''4. On Current Issues'''

''The Ruhland Trial''

There is still a liberal press in the Federal Republic for whom the trial was a scandal. Ruhland was never as close to the Red Army Faction as he claims. His fawning, his reliance on evidence from the investigation rather than his own memory, the fact that Mahler’s lawyer Schily was prevented from attending his trial, the fact that from the beginning of the trial it was established that there would be a verdict based on negotiations that neither the federal prosecutor nor the defense attorney would challenge (the FAZ reported this). As the Frankfurter Rundschau describes it, “like a nice teacher delivering a worn out speech to a sympathetic student” —proving very clearly that discovering the truth and due process have nothing to do with anything anymore.

The assurance that Ruhland is certainly telling the truth, the fulminations that those he has incriminated are not telling the truth, the assumption that anyone who doesn’t cooperate with the justice system is guilty… that is exactly what class justice means, show trials, making them an—effectively ornamental—component of capital’s general offensive against the left as the vanguard of the working class in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

One cannot offer up ''Verfassungsschutz'' informants, as in earlier communist trials or as with Urbach, to a public increasingly polarized by the growing class contradictions. They expect the left-wing public to be dazzled by state witnesses presented by the Bonn Security Group, and it’ll probably work. The person who’s really screwed in this situation is Ruhland himself, since he no longer knows his friends from his enemies, up from down, the revolution from the counterrevolution. The poor pig doesn’t understand how they’re using him.

Urban guerilla struggle requires that one not be demoralized by the system’s violence. One certainly should not be demoralized by a trial that shows us to be morally and politically in the right. Demoralization is in fact their goal. The Ruhland trial is only a very superficial event in the unfolding of history, the development of class struggle and the question of whether the urban guerilla is legitimate.

''On Traitors''

There are people who believe there might be some truth in the things Homann and the like are spreading around. At least, they say, Homann is no idiot. They take him to be what he presented himself as in ''Spiegel'', a “political scholar”; from a vocabulary that encompasses both hunter and prey.<ref>Peter Homann had previously worked as a journalist for the ''Spiegel''.</ref> These terms have nothing to do with class antagonism. The assertion that you are a scholar doesn’t make you one when you deal in the techniques used by Spiegel journalists. The substance of Marxism, the dialectic of being and consciousness, excludes the possibility that police statements can contribute to the revolutionary strategy. Marxism can only be taught by Marxists, as Margharita von Brentano<ref>Margharita von Brentano was a sociology professor at the Free University, where a prize and a building are now named in her honour.</ref> told Spiegel. What Mandel has to say, Schwan<ref>A. Schwan, a West Berlin professor and a member of the ''Bund Freiheit de Wissenshaft'' (Alliance for Free Scholarship). The BFW was an organization of right-wing university professors who accused the student movement of attempting to establish a left-wing educational system to the exclusion of free thought.</ref> couldn’t spell.

Anybody who shares the interests of the status quo cannot possibly have anything to say about social change. But it is the nature of traitors to share the interests of the status quo, to want to return to their hereditary place in class society, to not feel right in unfamiliar circumstances, to only have a sense of identity in their own milieu, and to remain the object of their own development.

Ruhland only really feels comfortable in his old role as a criminal proletariat, handcuffed and oppressed, and Homann in the role of the lost son of the lumpen proletariat, ever at the beck and call of the bourgeoisie—in ''Spiegel'' and ''konkret''—in his heart of hearts he has no interest in matters of the market. Sturm had an adventure and then fled back home to the bosom of her family.

Ruhland remains a victim and Homann a consumer, the overpaid illiterate and the profiteering academic—the class balance is re-established, legality is obviously the natural state of affairs. Regarding Homann, FAZ wrote: “…a journalist and visual artist, with a politically untrained but sensitive intelligence”; about Ruhland: “…he doesn’t want to be a villain, he is perhaps an honest man with a guileless mind. Facing his guards in the court room, two young security police officers, he exhibits a completely natural and comradely bearing.”

The psychological makeup of traitors is venal and conservative. The conservative FAZ sympathizes with these sons and servants.

We suffered from a false fascination and have underestimated illegality. We’ve overestimated the unity of some groups. That is to say that we have not taken into account all of the implications of the student movement being a relatively privileged movement, that we have failed to observe that for many people much of the politics of 67/68 is no longer relevant, as it offers them no way of increasing their own privilege. It can be pleasant to know a little Marxism, to have some clarity about the conditions of the ruling class’ economic domination and their psychological techniques, to shed the self-imposed pressure to perform of a bourgeois overachiever, to embrace an alienated form of Marxism, acquired by privilege, as an item for one’s intellectual wellbeing and benefit and not directed towards serving the people.

A preference for certain actions because they are illegal is an expression of bourgeois self-indulgence. The student movement, given its suppositions, could not be free of blind followers and people with a mercenary mentality. The tedious, long-term drudgery that must first of all be undertaken to lay the basis for the urban guerilla must seem to these people, who are so falsely programmed, like a scene from a horror show. Anyone who arrives with criminal fantasies, anyone who only wants to improve their personal situation, will certainly and inevitably improve their situation through treason.

We believed if someone said he had worked in this or that organization for such and such a period of time, then he must know what political work entails, what organization means, or else they would already have tossed him. We now know that we should ourselves have established the political organization necessary for the urban guerilla, that we made a mistake when we relied so readily upon others.

Above all, we think that on our own it would have been very difficult for us to have avoided this error and prevented the treason. We think that a false understanding of the police and the justice system, a false understanding of what SERVE THE PEOPLE means, and a false approach to contradictions within the New Left made the treason inevitable.

As long as traitors still find a place with comrades, not even receiving a single punch in the face, but rather finding understanding as to why they must quickly resume their bourgeois existence and do away with their other existence—because they can’t tolerate another day in prison, they send others inside for years or deliver them up to the police death squads—as long as political cooperation with the armed power of capital continues to be tolerated as a political difference of opinion, as long as something that has long been politically condemned is treated as a private matter, treason will continue to exist. Without criticizing liberalism within the left, we cannot eliminate treason.

Traitors must be excluded from the ranks of the revolution. Tolerance in the face of traitors produces more treason. Traitors in the ranks of the revolution cause more harm than the police can without traitors. We believe that is a general rule. It is impossible to know how much they will betray if they are threatened. Given that they are little pigs, one cannot permit them to be in a situation where they can be blackmailed. Capital will continue to turn people into little pigs until we overthrow its rule. We are not responsible for capital’s crimes.

''On Bank Robberies''

Some people say robbing banks is not political. Since when is the question of financing a political organization not a political question? The urban guerilla in Latin America calls bank robberies “expropriation actions.” Nobody is claiming that robbing banks will be all it takes to change the oppressive social order. For revolutionary organizations, it mainly represents the solution to their financial problems. It makes logical sense, because there is no other solution to the financial problem. It makes political sense, because it is an expropriation action. It makes tactical sense, because it is a proletarian action. It makes strategic sense, because it finances the guerilla.

A political concept that bases itself on parliamentary democracy, the political concept of competitive capitalism, a concept that understands class antagonism to be nothing more than a power struggle, that perceives the institutions of the class state to be institutions of a constitutional state, thereby definitely turning its back on progress and humanity… such a political concept cannot condone bank robbery. In the imperialist metropole, where the organization of the anti-imperialist struggle must have both legal and illegal components, the political struggle and the armed struggle, bank robbery cannot be dispensed with. It is, in practice, expropriation. And it points to the necessary method for establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat against the enemy: armed struggle.

''On Logistics and Continuity''

Many comrades are impressed by the Tupamaros’<ref>Most likely a reference to the ''West German Tupamaros'', not to be confused with their South American namesake. These groups had existed in West Berlin and Munich at the beginning of the decade, part of the same amorphous scene as the Roaming Hash Rebels. The 2nd of June Movement grew out of this scene, although several members would instead join the RAF.</ref> actions. They don’t understand why, instead of carrying out popular actions, we’re preoccupied with logistics. They can’t be bothered with going to the trouble to consider what the urban guerilla is and how it functions.

It is most likely maliciously intended when comrades recite the position of the Düsseldorf judge in Ruhland’s trial: Ruhland was a handyman and the gang’s mascot. The concept of the capitalist division of labor has proven to be an abstraction for them. In practice, they still conceive of proletarian comrades as jack-of-all-trades prefiguring some Silesian idyll. That the technical means can only be developed by working and learning collectively, that the urban guerilla must abolish the division of labor so that the arrest of one individual is not a disaster for us all—these comrades’ imagination can’t get that far. Not having the logistical problems at least partially resolved, not having oneself learned how to resolve logistical problems, not engaging in a collective learning and working process, would mean leaving the outcome of actions to chance technically, psychologically, and politically.

Resolving logistical problems assures the ongoing security of a revolutionary organization. We place great importance in the tactical requirements necessary to secure the continuity of the Red Army Faction. It is in the interest of capital to divide, to destroy, to break down solidarity, to isolate people, and to deny the historical context—in the area of production as well as that of housing, of commerce, of opinion making, of education—so as to guarantee ongoing profits. It is in the interest of capital to guarantee that conditions remain the opposite of those necessary for proletarian revolution: unity, continuity, historical consciousness, class consciousness. Without organizational continuity, without guaranteeing the organizational permanence of the revolutionary process, the revolutionary process is left to the anarchy of the system, to chance, to historical spontaneity.

We consider disregard for the question of organizational continuity to be a manifestation of opportunism.

''On Solidarity''

The revolutionary process is revolutionary because it makes objects out of the laws of capitalist commodity production and exchange, rather than being their object. It cannot be measured by market criteria. It can only be measured by criteria that simultaneously destroy the power of market criteria for success.

Solidarity, insofar as it is not based on market criteria, destroys the power of those criteria. Solidarity is political, not so much because solidarity is based on politics, but because it is a refusal to be subservient to the law of value and a refusal to be treated like a mere aspect of exchange value. Solidarity is the essence of free action ungoverned by the ruling class; as such it always means resistance against the influence of the ruling class over relationships between people, and as resistance against the ruling class, it is always correct.

In the view of the system, people whose behavior is not guided by the system’s criteria for success are lunatics, halfwits, or losers. In the view of the revolution, all those who conduct themselves with solidarity, whoever they may be, are comrades.

Solidarity becomes a weapon if it is organized and is acted upon in a consistent way against the courts, the police, the authorities, the bosses, the infiltrators, and the traitors. They must be denied any cooperation, afforded no attention, denied access to evidence, offered no information, and afforded absolutely no time and energy. Solidarity includes struggling against liberalism within the left and addressing contradictions within the left as one addresses contradictions amongst the people, and not as if they were a class contradiction.<ref>In his 1957 “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” Mao differentiated between two kinds of conflict or contradiction—“those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people.” While the former should be dealt with by attacking the class enemy, the latter should be dealt with through criticism with the goal of bringing about unity.</ref>

All political work is based on solidarity. Without solidarity, it will crumble in the face of repression.

“We must prevent the possibility of unnecessary victims. Everybody in the ranks of the revolution must take care of each other, must relate to each other lovingly, must help each other.”

SERVE THE PEOPLE!

MAKE THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP THE KEY QUESTION EVERYWHERE!

SUPPORT THE ARMED STRUGGLE!

BUILD THE REVOLUTIONARY GUERILLA!

VICTORY IN THE PEOPLE'S WAR!

RAF

April 1972
{| class="wikitable"
|+a note from the editors: On the Treatment of Traitors
!There have been insinuations, always vague on details or proof, that the RAF was an intensely authoritarian organization, particularly in regards to people not being allowed to leave. Claims have been made that Baader murdered Ingeborg Barz, a young woman who had joined the RAF from the anarchist Black Aid, simply because she wanted to quit the underground. These claims have been contradicted by other witnesses.<ref>See page 352.</ref>
Some have pointed to ''Serve the People'' as evidence that the RAF endorsed the assassination of drop-outs, one passage in particular being mentioned in this regard:

''Traitors must be excluded from the ranks of the revolution. Tolerance in the face of traitors produces more treason. Traitors in the ranks of the revolution cause more harm than the police can without traitors. We believe that is a general rule. It is impossible to know how much they will betray if they are threatened. Given that they are little pigs, one cannot permit them to be in a situation where they can be blackmailed. Capital will continue to turn people into little pigs until we overthrow its rule. We are not responsible for capital’s crimes.''<ref>Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle, cf 156-7.</ref>

This position should be evaluated in light of the RAF’s documented practice, and the realities of armed struggle.
No clandestine organization can tolerate informants, nor should any revolutionary movement do so, regardless of its legal or illegal status. Yet many observers are wary, and rightly so, of such calls to “exclude” traitors; the reason for this unease is the strong tendency for factions or entire organizations to end up using such a line as cover to attack any and all dissidents, drop-outs, critics or even rivals, accusing them all of “treason.” Examples abound of revolutionary movements gutting themselves and doing inestimable damage to their cause and their political integrity through this error.
Despite allegations to the contrary, there is no substantive evidence of the RAF ever going down that road. The RAF was criticized throughout its existence, yet none of the critics were ever targeted. What is striking about the cases of Sturm, Homann, and Ruhland is not that they were insulted or berated, but that no harm befell them even after they all took public stands against the guerilla. Another guerilla member, Hans-Jürgen Bäcker, suspected of being an informant, was not targeted by any attack even after testifying in court against the RAF.
Stefan Aust and Jillian Becker have both claimed that members of the guerilla made what can only be described as half-hearted attempts to exact vengeance, but their stories are difficult to gauge. Both authors claim that Baader and Mahler were trying to find Homann and Aust to kill them, but if so, they evidently gave up the search quickly.<ref>Aust, 104; Becker, 255-256</ref> This is just one aspect of the story that casts doubt on its veracity. Becker furthermore claims that Astrid Proll shot at Bäcker but missed; the way in which she phrases the allegation, however, indicates the source may be Karl-Heinz Ruhland, himself far from reliable.<ref>Becker, normally not shy about stating that various combatants actually did various things, in this case merely writes, “Astrid Proll (‘Rosi’) was to claim later that she shot at him from a car but missed.” (Becker, 228)</ref> No charges were ever laid against Proll for this.

There is one, and only one, documented case of the RAF doing violence to an informant. In 1971, a friend of Katharina Hammerschmidt’s, Edelgard Graefer, was arrested on bogus charges and threatened with having her five-year-old son permanently taken away from her. Under pressure, Graefer gave information to the police. In early 1972, she was abducted by the RAF and had a bucket of tar poured over her. Following this attack on her person, she stopped working with the police.<ref>Aust, 170-172.</ref>

While unpleasant, such a violent warning is not on the order of a death sentence. Indeed, as Brigitte Mohnhaupt later argued in Stammheim, the fact that a known informant was assaulted and not killed should suffice to discredit claims that other members were executed merely for dropping out.<ref>The relevant excerpts from Mohnhaupt’s testimony are included in this volume, see page 357</ref>

Certainly, given the guerilla’s ability to carry out attacks against even heavily guarded targets, the fact that all of those who testified against them remained unscathed should tell us something.
As for the many others who left over the years, if they did not cooperate with the police or run with tall tales to the media, there is no indication that the guerilla bore them any ill will.[[File:Informer picture from RAF a documentary history.png|center|thumb]]
|}

== 5 - The May Offensive: Bringing the War Home ==
<blockquote>''This decision, this project, was arrived at through collective discussions involving everyone in the RAF; in other words, there was a consensus of all the groups, of the units in each of the cities, and everyone clearly understood what this meant, what the purpose of these attacks was.''

Brigitte Mohnhaupt

Stammheim Trial

July 22, 1976</blockquote>In may 1972, shortly after the release of ''Serve the People'', the RAF left the stage of logistics and preparation, launching a series of attacks that were to go down in history as the “May Offensive.”

On the evening of May 11, the day the United States mined the harbors of North Vietnam, the RAF’s “Petra Schelm Commando” bombed the U.S. Army V Corps headquarters and the site of the National Security Agency in Frankfurt. At least three blasts went off, killing Lieutenant Colonel Paul A. Bloomquist and injuring thirteen others. As one military police officer noted, the toll would have been much worse had the bombs gone off during duty hours. Damage to property was estimated at $300,000.<ref>Dan Synovec,“Security Beefed Up at U.S. installations,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 13, 1972; Dave Lams, “Police Trace Leads in V Corps Blasts,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 13, 1972.</ref>

“We expected things like this in Saigon,” a captain just back from Vietnam was quoted as saying. “Not here in Germany.”<ref>Synovec,“Security Beefed Up.”</ref>

One can imagine that words like that put smiles on many a face, and within twenty-four hours, U.S. military officials reported receiving a number of threats promising all kinds of follow-up attacks. These quickly snowballed, and by early June, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was reporting that thousands of such calls had been made by “high school students, drunks, psychopaths, and criminals.”<ref>Thomas Kirn, “Bombendrohungen werden schnell geahndet,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', June 9, 1972.</ref>

“These calls,” complained the American Lieutenant General Williard Pearson in a similar vein, “were made by mentally unbalanced or irresponsible individuals seeking to create tension or panic within our community.”<ref>3 “General Pearson seeks community help in solving Frankfurt bombings,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 16, 1972.</ref>

Given that the RAF always issued proper communiqués, these threats were most likely the work of people who were simply glad to see the Americans finally being hit. The state was far from amused, and it was noted that the financial consequences of false bomb threats were substantial for warehouses, newspapers, factories, and banks. More importantly, the wave of political prank calls helped create a signal-to-noise situation that can only have helped the guerilla. Nor was the activity without some risk: prison sentences for these false bomb threats ran from a couple of months to as high as three years.<ref>Kirn, “Bombendrohungen werden schnell geahndet.”</ref>

The day after the first bombing, on May 12, attacks were carried out in two Bavarian cities in response to the March 2 shooting of Weissbecker. In Augsburg, bombs were planted inside the police headquarters, and one cop suffered mild injuries. In the state capital Munich, a car bomb was parked just outside the six-storey police building; when it went off, it blew out the windows up to the top floor. A nearby pay station had received a telephone warning, but by the time the police got wind of it, there was not enough time to evacuate—twelve people were injured, and damages were estimated at $150,000.<ref>''European Stars and Stripes,'' “German Facilities Struck by Bombs,” May 13, 1972.</ref> These bombings were claimed by the RAF’s “Thomas Weissbecker Commando.”

On May 16, in Karlsruhe, the RAF’s “Manfred Grashof Commando” placed a bomb in the car of Federal Supreme Court Judge Buddenberg, who had been put in charge of all RAF cases. However, it was not the judge who was behind the wheel, but his wife on her way to pick him up from work. Gerta Buddenberg sustained serious injuries, but survived.

On May 19, the Springer Press building in Hamburg was bombed in retaliation for the constant red baiting and counterinsurgency propaganda published in its newspapers. One bomb went off in the proofreaders’ room, and two in the toilets. Three telephone warnings were ignored and, as a result, seventeen employees were injured, two of them seriously. The attack was claimed by the RAF’s “2nd of June Commando.”

A Springer editor was later quoted saying, “I was only surprised that if they wanted to hit a Springer Building they’d go for the proofreaders, whose views are rather left of centre. I’d have thought there were more rewarding targets if they wanted to strike a real blow. If they’d picked the computer centre, that would have done the building much more damage.”<ref>Aust, 211.</ref>

As many workers had been injured, this attack caused some consternation on the left, and it was subsequently alleged that it caused dissension within the RAF itself.<ref>See the RAF’s interview with Le Monde Diplomatique, on page 422 of this volume. See also Brigitte Mohnhaupt’s testimony at the Stammheim trial, cf. 357-58.</ref> An anonymous tip the next day led to the discovery of three more bombs in the building, which were all safely defused.<ref>Aust, 211.</ref>

On May 24, the RAF bombed the Heidelberg headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe. Two cars loaded with explosives had been parked 140 meters apart near a data processing center and the officers’ club at Campbell Barracks. They were timed to go off after most people had finished work for the day,<ref>Dan Synovec, “Bombs kill 3 at USAREUR Hq,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 25, 1972.</ref> but nevertheless three soldiers were killed<ref>They were: Clyde Bonner of El Paso, Texas, Ronald Woodward of Otter Lake, Michigan, and Charles Peck of Hawthorne, California. (Associated Press, “W. Germans Sentence 3 Guerrillas to Life for Bomb Deaths,” Tri-City Herald, April 28, 1977.)</ref> and six others were injured. This was the work of the “July 15th Commando,” commemorating the date Petra Schelm had died in a firefight with police.

This was a more daring attack than any of the others so far: unlike the V Corps headquarters in Frankfurt, the Campbell Barracks were fenced off and military police were always stationed at the gates. Any person in civilian clothes or in a vehicle without U.S. military plates was supposed to show identification before entering.<ref>Synovec, “Bombs Kill.”</ref>

The computer destroyed in this attack had been used to make calculations for carpet-bombing sorties in South and North Vietnam with the aim of achieving the highest possible number of deaths. This at a time when, though it was clear the war had been lost, the United States had stepped up bombings of Hanoi, Haiphong, and Thanh Hoa province.<ref>''Internazionale Kommission zum Schutz der Gefangenen une Gegen Isolationshaft'', October 1980, 2.</ref> The RAF would later claim that their pictures had gone up on walls in Hanoi as a result of this action,<ref>“Wir waren in den Durststreik treten,” ''Spiegel'' 4/1975, translated in this volume on pages 300-318.</ref> and this clearly remained a point of pride among guerilla veterans even decades later.

Regarding the May Offensive, it has been noted:<blockquote>''Although people were injured or killed in most of these bombings, with the exception of the Buddenberg bombing, they differ from later RAF attacks in not being directed against specific individuals, a point that should be kept in mind when examining the RAF’s history.''<ref>Arm The Spirit, “A Brief History of the Red Army Faction,” <nowiki>http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/61/191.html</nowiki>.</ref></blockquote>Despite the many anonymous bomb threats called in during this period, and the fact that the RAF’s actions coincided with a global wave of protest against ongoing American military aggression in Southeast Asia, some observers have claimed that the May Offensive alienated many of the RAF’s liberal sympathizers. Those who had seen them as modern day Robin Hoods, or as romantic idealists, took a step back once they realized that this was for real.

It would be more true to say that the 1972 bombing campaign polarized the left, and, in a healthy way, provided direction and inspiration to numerous activists who had been considering armed politics, while clarifying the disagreements which existed with opponents of the guerilla struggle. Indeed, the period in question showed a marked rise in newspaper articles describing molotov cocktail attacks and other low level actions against symbols of state power, encouraged by the context the guerilla’s bombs had helped create. Years later, the Revolutionary Cells (another West German guerilla group) would explain the longterm effect of the May Offensive in this way:<blockquote>''At the time, these actions drew the widespread anti-imperialist movement together, causing the further development of an idea that had been rattling around in the heads of thousands of people. We saw that what had long been thought about was in fact possible. Without the RAF, there wouldn’t be an RZ today, there wouldn’t be groups that understand that resistance doesn’t stop where the criminal code starts.''<ref>RZ Letter to the RAF Comrades, reprinted in this volume on pages 457-463.</ref></blockquote>
{| class="wikitable"
|+Alienating Which Masses?
!“When we heard about the RAF bombing the American Headquarters in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, we jumped with joy. At last someone had done something against the imperialist bases in the Federal Republic of Germany.”
These were not the words of a petit bourgeois sect, but rather come from the report of a freedom fighter fighting for national liberation in a land occupied by Portugal. He and his comrades had heard the news while he was in a guerilla base. For years the people there had heard of the FRG being one of the worst enemies of the African people—as a source of arms for Portuguese colonialism—and now for the first time the guerillas could see something happening in the Federal Republic which they considered to be an effective form of resistance to imperialism.
I remarked that their reaction was quite different from that of Marxist groups in the Federal Republic, to which the African comrade responded, “When you are struggling, you see things differently.”
Christian Sigrist
______________
Christian Sigrist, “De Heidelberg au Cap Vert” in ''à propos du procès Baader-Meinhof, Fraction Armée Rouge: de la torture dans les prisons de la RFA'', Klaus Croissant (ed.) (Paris : Christian Bourgeois Éditeur, 1975), 53-54.
|}
One thing is certain: the RAF’s bombing campaign was strongly criticized by the Maoist K-groups who were enjoying their heyday and rejected such attacks as infantile adventurism. The KP (Communist League), whose newspaper ''Arbeiterkampf'' would later distinguish itself by offering some of the most intelligent commentary on the guerilla in Germany, even went so far as to suggest that the Springer attack might have been the work of right-wing extremists.

For its part the KSV (Communist Student Association), the youth section of the Maoist KPD,<ref>Not to be confused with the pro-Soviet KPD that was banned in the 50s and later reconstituted as the DKP.</ref> complained about the RAF’s violence:<blockquote>''[It is] neither practiced by the masses… nor is it understood by the masses as an expression of their interests. The masses, on the contrary, perceive the actions as a threat, and therefore identify with the reactions of the state apparatus… The violence is not revolutionary. It sabotages the struggle against state repression in that it helps to conceal the class character of this repression and encourages the isolation of communists.''<ref>Varon, 213.</ref></blockquote>These comments were delivered at a Teach-In Against State Repression, which was held at Frankfurt University on May 31, just a couple of weeks after the Springer Building in that city was bombed. Organized by Rote Hilfe (Red Aid), a network of autonomous prisoner support collectives which had their roots in the antiauthoritarian wing of the APO, the event attracted hundreds of people, not all of whom were as negative as the Maoists.<ref>Hockenos, 114.</ref> Indeed, one leaflet produced for the event argued that, “If imperialism is a worldwide system, and that it is, then the struggle against it must be waged worldwide. It will and must be a violent and armed struggle, or it will not be waged at all.”<ref>Varon, 213.</ref>

The RAF itself sent a statement to the Red Aid Teach-In in the form of a tape recording by Ulrike Meinhof in which she once again encouraged the radical left to organize armed struggle, arguing that increasing repression and popular resentments were providing the potential which, properly exploited, could lead to a revolutionary situation. As was typical of the RAF at this time, Meinhof was attempting to engage directly with the guerilla’s left-wing critics.<ref>Statement to the Red Aid Teach-In, reprinted in this volume on pages 183-85.</ref>

Remarkably, the Teach-In brought together Maoists and ''spontis'', and as such was representative of the revolutionary left. As for the tamed left, in its eyes the RAF remained well beyond the pale. The pro-Soviet DKP made a point of condemning “anarchist demonstrations” in Frankfurt, pontificating that, “The anarchist groups have clearly made hysteria the order of the day. We are making the struggle to win the solidarity of the people of Frankfurt for the Vietnamese liberation struggle the order of the day.”<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “DKP verurteilt anarchistische Demonstrationen in Frankfurt,” May 26, 1972.</ref> Various labor leaders also took turns condemning the “political adventurists,” “terror,” and “murder.” The chairman of the Public Service, Transport, and Communication Union explained that his union supported the government, for, while it was independent, it shared many common concerns with employers.<ref>''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Keine Solidarisierung mit Abenteurern,” May 29, 1972.</ref>

Clearly not reassured by claims that the RAF was driving people away from left, the state recognized that if it did not move quickly, the May bombings could easily inspire renewed resistance. “The longer the Baader-Meinhof gang remains at large,” Attorney General Ludwig Martin worried, “the easier it will be for the public to gain the impression that the powers of the state have broken down.”<ref>Dan Synovec, “Terrorists: odd solidarity prompts aid to the Baader-Meinhof gang,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', June 3, 1972.</ref>

An essential feature of the campaign against the RAF consisted of psychological operations, meant to discourage any solidarity or identification with the guerilla, while legitimizing the state’s own repressive response. As an example of this, in the midst of the May Offensive, communiqués attributed to the RAF, but most likely penned by the secret services or police, were received claiming that on June 2 (the anniversary of Benno Ohnesorg’s murder) three car bombs would be set off in random locations in Stuttgart “as a reminder of the bombing war of the U.S. imperialists in Vietnam.”<ref>Associated Press, “Bombers Threaten 3 Blasts Friday in Stuttgart Area,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 29, 1972.</ref>

The RAF promptly issued its own communiqué repudiating this as a false flag provocation.<ref>Regarding the Fascist Bomb Threats Against Stuttgart, reprinted in this volume on pages 181-82.</ref> Nevertheless, this denial was largely ignored, and on the day in question, “Stuttgart presented the appearance of a beleaguered city. Thousands of police checked all access roads, vehicles and ‘suspicious persons.’”<ref>Cobler, 169.</ref>

One hundred and thirty thousand cops were mobilized, supported by both West German and U.S. intelligence units, in a determined effort to hunt down the guerilla. A $59,000 reward was offered for their capture, and Chancellor Willy Brandt warned the public that any solidarity shown would be treated as criminal complicity.<ref>Dan Synovec, “Anarchist gang blamed,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', May 27, 1972.</ref> At the same time, Genscher announced that supporters could hope for light sentences if they turned themselves in and helped in the hunt;<ref>“Bescheidene Mitgleiderzahlen radikaler Organisation,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', June 7, 1972.</ref> there do not seem to have been any takers.

Nevertheless, the wave of arrests was not long in coming

On June 1, RAF members Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader were cornered as they arrived at a safehouse in Munich that had been identified by police. Raspe tried to make a run for it, but was quickly apprehended. Meins gave himself up, following police orders to strip down to his underwear before he did so.

Three hundred cops surrounded the warehouse where Baader was holed up, and eventually an armored vehicle tried to enter the building; Baader shot out its wheels. At that point, a sniper took aim and shot the eponymous guerilla fighter in the leg and the police moved in quickly to take him into custody.

Holger Meins was the only one of the three who had surrendered without resistance, a fact that did not stop the police from beating him so severely that he required hospitalization. “I didn’t squeal or scream,” he would later tell his father. “They kicked me black and blue with their big boots. It’s a thing you just can’t describe.”<ref>Aust, 219.</ref>

It later came out that the RAF had intended to kidnap the three U.S. Army City Commanders in Berlin, but called off this action due to security concerns following the June 1 arrests.<ref>Brigitte Mohnhaupt’s Testimony at the Stammheim Trial, July 22, 1976, <nowiki>http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/</nowiki> documents/76_0708_mohnhaupt_pohl.html.</ref>

On June 7, Gudrun Ensslin was arrested in Hamburg when a store clerk noticed a gun in her handbag. (The government’s somewhat farcical Mainz report would later explain this bust in memorably sexist terms: “The arrest of her boyfriend Baader affected this deviant woman to such a degree that she simply had to buy something new, like any normal woman does when something is wrong.”)<ref>Clare Bielby, “‘Bonnie und Kleid’: Female Terrorists and the Hysterical Feminine,” ''Forum 2'', <nowiki>http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue2/bielby.html</nowiki>.</ref>

On June 9, Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Bernhard Braun were arrested in West Berlin; they were both former SPK members. Mohnhaupt had gravitated to the RAF via the Munich Tupamaros. Braun, who was also close to 2JM, had come to the RAF via the West Berlin Tupamaros.

On June 15, Ulrike Meinhof and Gerhard Müller were arrested in Hannover, turned in by a left-wing trade unionist who had agreed to put them up for the night.<ref>They were turned in by Fritz Rodewald, who evidently did not know if he was coming or going: he would donate the reward money to the prisoners’ defense fund (Vague, 49). For more details on Rodewald’s motivations, see page 201.</ref> Police found forged passports, gun oil, a four-and-a-half-kilo homemade bomb, two homemade hand grenades, a semi-automatic pistol, two 9mm handguns, numerous fully loaded magazines, and more than three hundred rounds of ammunition in Meinhof’s luggage, which weighed over twenty-five kilos.<ref>Wolfgang Tersteegen, “Mit der Bombe im Handgepäcke,”''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', June 19, 1972; ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', “Erst nach Stunden identifiziert,” June 19, 1972.</ref> With her capture, some observers felt that the guerilla’s entire leadership was now in custody, and yet there were more arrests to come.

On June 30, Katharina Hammerschmidt, who had fled to France, was convinced to turn herself in by her lawyer Otto Schily. The police suspected Hammerschmidt of setting up safehouses and perhaps having a role in the recent bombings.<ref>United Press International, “Ends French Stay: Member of Gang Turns Self In,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 1, 1972.</ref>

Finally, on July 7, Klaus Jünschke and Irmgard Möller were arrested in Offenbach, set up by a nineteen-year-old who had been recruited by the guerilla earlier that year, and who had since been identified and turned by the police. Jünschke was a former SPK member sought in relation to the December 22, 1971, bank robbery in which police officer Herbert Schoner had been killed.<ref>He was sentenced to life in prison in 1977. Associated Press, “2 German terrorists given life,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', June 3, 1977.</ref> Irmgard Möller was sought in connection to the 1971 killing of police officer Schmid in Hamburg, and was suspected of participating in the May bombings.<ref>Four years later, she was sentenced to four and a half years for forging documents, resisting arrest, possession of an unlicensed firearm, and membership in a criminal organization. In 1979, she was found guilty of three counts of murder and sentenced to life for planting the bombs in the Augsburg and Heidelberg attacks. By the time she was released in 1994, she had survived 22 years behind bars, making her Germany’s longest held female prisoner at that time.</ref> (With typical hype, Stars and Stripes described her as “the gang’s new chief, replacing jailed Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader.”)<ref>United Press International, “8 Terrorist gang suspects still sought,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', July 10, 1972.</ref>

The RAF was decimated, and what few members remained at large could do little more than concentrate on their own survival.

Following the successes of this counterinsurgency campaign, the West German government felt confident it had snuffed out its fledgling armed opposition. Even sympathetic observers felt that the RAF might have met its end.

They were all wrong.
{| class="wikitable"
|+"The objective of these actions was clear..."
!The RAF was at the time organized in the following way: there were eight groups established in six cities, and of these there were two strong groups in two cities. There was one group in Munich. The groups, the different units, were integrated into a logistical system. There was contact between the different groups for discussions, but they were autonomous in their decisions regarding how to carry out operations. That was left to the individual groups—and it couldn’t have been otherwise. We didn’t know anything in advance about these actions. However, even if we had known, we wouldn’t have prevented them, because, yeah, it’s not a simple thing to stop a group from doing what it has decided to do. In fact, we couldn’t have prevented it, both because of the underlying perspective and for practical reasons; it would have been impossible given the circumstances. The objective of these actions was clear: they were a response to the fact that fighters were shot in the street, for example, Petra and Tommy. It would never have been our intention to prevent them.
Brigitte Mohnhaupt
Stammheim Trial
July 22, 1976
|}

=== For the Victory of the People of Vietnam ===
On Thursday May 11, 1972—the day the U.S. imperialist mine blockade of North Vietnam began—the Petra Schelm Commando detonated three bombs containing 80kg of TNT at the Frankfurt Headquarters of the V Army Corps of the U.S. Forces in West Germany and West Berlin. West Germany and West Berlin shall no longer be a safe hinterland for the strategy of extermination against Vietnam. They must understand that their crimes against the Vietnamese people have created new and bitter enemies for them, and there is nowhere left in this world where they will be safe from the attacks of revolutionary guerilla units.

We demand an immediate stop to the bomb blockade against North Vietnam.

We demand an immediate end to the bombing of North Vietnam.

We demand the withdrawal of all American troops from Indochina.

VICTORY TO THE VIET CONG!

BUILD THE REVOLUTIONARY GUERILLA.

DARE TO STRUGGLE - DARE TO WIN!

BUILD TWO, THREE, MANY VIETNAMS!

Petra Schelm Commando

May 14, 1972

=== Attacks in Augsburg and Munich ===
On Friday, May 12, 1972, the Thomas Weissbecker Commando detonated three bombs at the police headquarters in Augsburg and in the LKA office in Munich.

On March 2, Thomas Weissbecker was murdered in a well-planned surprise attack by a death squad of the Munich ''Kripo'' and the Augsburg police; he had absolutely no chance to defend himself. The police had no intention of taking Thomas Weissbecker prisoner; they intended to shoot him.

The authorities responsible for the manhunt must understand that they can’t liquidate any of us without having to anticipate that we will strike back. The security services, the special squads, the Kripo, the BGS and their organizational and political employers must be made aware that their attempts to “solve” the problems of this fascist country by arming the police, by militarizing the class struggle, and by the ruthless and vicious use of guns will provoke resistance. This is also true of the police operations in response to the Munich bank robbery, in response to the Cologne bank robbery, against the Tübingen apprentice Epple, and against foreign workers.

The tactics and tools that we use are the tactics and tools of guerilla warfare. The Minister of the Interior and the BAW assess the situation incorrectly if they think that they can rule with their death squads. It is in the nature of the guerilla—because they struggle in the interests of the people—that they cannot be wiped out by military actions, because their freedom of action can be developed anew whenever it suffers temporary setbacks. Faced with the brutal arrogance of the authorities responsible for the manhunt and the “short cuts” of the fascists, our response is the steady development of the revolutionary guerilla and the long, protracted process of the struggle for liberation from fascism, from capitalist exploitation, and from the oppression of the people.

RESIST THE POLICE DEATH SQUADS!

RESIST THE SS PRACTICES OF THE POLICE!

STRUGGLE AGAINST ALL EXPLOITERS AND ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE!

Thomas Weissbecker Commando

May 16, 1972

=== Attack on Judge Buddenberg ===
On Monday, May 16, 1972, the Manfred Grashof Commando carried out a bomb attack against Judge Buddenberg of the Karlsruhe Federal Supreme Court. Buddenberg is the judge at the Federal Supreme Court responsible for the arrests and investigations in the current political proceedings under §129.

Buddenberg, the pig, allowed Grashof to be moved from the hospital to a cell; the transfer and the risk of infection in the prison put his life at risk. He attempted to murder Grashof. The police having failed, he tried again to kill the defenseless Grashof.

Buddenberg, the pig, is responsible for Carmen Roll being drugged in order to get her to talk. The foreseeable effect of the drug indicates that this was attempted murder.

Buddenberg, the pig, doesn’t give a shit about existing laws and conventions. The strict isolation in which prisoners are held to destroy them psychologically: solitary confinement, isolated yard time, the ban on speaking to other prisoners, constant transfers, punitive confinement, observation cells, the censoring of mail and the confiscation of mail, books, and magazines. The means used to destroy them physically—the glaring cell lights at night, frequent interruption of sleep for searches, chaining during yard time, and physical abuse—are not the bullying of insignificant, frustrated prison wardens; these are Buddenberg’s decrees, meant to force the prisoners to make statements. It is institutionalized fascism in the justice system. It is the beginning of torture.

We demand the immediate application of laws governing remand prisoners, the Geneva Human Rights Convention, and the United Nations Charter regarding the use of remand custody for political prisoners. We demand the justice system call off the systematic destructive attacks upon the lives and health of the prisoners.

We will carry out bomb attacks against judges and federal prosecutors until they stop violating the rights of political prisoners. We are, in fact, demanding nothing that is impossible for this justice system. We have no other means to compel them to do so.

FREEDOM FOR THE POLITICAL PRISONERS!

RESIST CLASS JUSTICE! RESIST FASCISM!

Manfred Grashof Commando

May 20, 1972

=== Attack on the Springer Building ===
Yesterday, Friday May 19, at 3:55 pm, two bombs exploded in the Springer Building in Hamburg. Despite prompt and early warnings, the building wasn’t evacuated and 17 people were injured. At 3:29 pm, the first warning was given to number 3471, who was told to evacuate the building within 15 minutes because a bomb would detonate shortly. The answer was, “Stop this nonsense.” The call was cut off. With a second call at 3:31 pm, we said, “If you don’t evacuate immediately, something horrible will happen.” But the telephone operators obviously had instructions not to pay attention to such calls. The third call, at 3:36 pm, was to the cops saying, “Goddamn it, see to it that the building is immediately evacuated.” Because the Springer Corporation can’t cover up the fact that they were warned, they distort it, stating, “There was only one call and it came too late.” Two telephone operators and the police can confirm that the Springer Press is lying once again.

Springer would rather risk his workers and staff being injured by a bomb than risk losing a couple of hours of work time, and therefore profit, as a result of a false alarm. For capitalists, profit is everything, and the people who make it for them are dirt. We regret that workers and staff were injured.

Our demands of Springer: that his newspapers stop the anticommunist hysteria against the New Left, against working class solidarity actions such as strikes, and against communist parties here and in other countries; that the Springer Corporation stop the hysteria against liberation movements in the Third World, especially against the Arab people who struggle for the freedom of Palestine; that he stop his propagandistic support for Zionism—the imperialist politics of the Israeli ruling class; that the Springer Press stop spreading lies about foreign workers here.

We demand that the Springer Press print this communiqué.

We demand nothing impossible. We will stop our attacks on the enemies of the people if our demands are met.

EXPROPRIATE SPRINGER!

EXPROPRIATE THE ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE!

2nd of June Commando May 20, 1972

=== Attack on the Heidelberg Headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe ===
<blockquote>''Every form of monstrosity will be abolished''

Mao</blockquote>Yesterday evening, May 24, 1972, two bombs with an explosive capacity of 200 kg of TNT, were detonated in the Heidelberg Headquarters of the American Armed Forces in Europe. The attack was carried out after General Daniel James, Department Head at the Pentagon, said, on Wednesday in Washington, “For the U.S. Air Force, no target north or south of the 17th parallel in Vietnam will be exempt from bombing attacks.” On Monday, the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Hanoi again accused the United States of bombing densely populated areas of North Vietnam. In the last 7 weeks, the American Air Force has dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II. Many millions of additional bombs is the response the Pentagon intends to use to stop the North Vietnamese offensive. This is genocide, the slaughter of a people; this is “the final solution”; this is Auschwitz.

The people of the Federal Republic don’t support the security service in its search for the bombers, because they want nothing to do with the crimes of American imperialism and the support it receives from the ruling class here, because they haven’t forgotten Auschwitz, Dresden, and Hamburg, because they know that the bomb attacks against those who commit mass murder in Vietnam are just, and because they know from experience that demonstrations and words are of no use against the crimes of imperialism.

WE DEMAND AN END TO BOMB ATTACKS IN VIETNAM!

WE DEMAND A HALT TO THE MINE BLOCKADE AGAINST NORTH VIETNAM!

WE DEMAND THE WITHDRAWL OF AMERICAN TROOPS FROM INDOCHINA!

July 15th Commando

May 25, 1972

=== To the News Editors of the West German Press ===
On May 26, Willy Brandt said in his television broadcast that the bombings of recent weeks have no logical political basis, and that they have endangered innocent lives.

The Federal Chancellor can deceive the people with these assertions because the West German press has almost completely suppressed the communiqués of the urban guerilla commandos.

Instead the ''Frankfurter Rundschau'' published a letter created out of cut out letters—which, when compared to authentic RAF communiqués, can clearly be seen to be a fake—to create the impression that the bombers are brainless twits who act chaotically in an effort to create fear amongst the people.

The Chancellor’s statement does not differ from similar statements by General Franco, General Patakos, von Howeida, the followers of Salazar, or the Turkish military dictator: the reasons for the actions are ignored, and only the condemnation of the Chancellor and the pundits is presented. The reasons for this conduct are obvious:

* The communiqué of the Thomas Weissbecker Commando was intended to bring every individual police officer to the point where he must think about whether or not he wants to be an active part of the hunt for the RAF;
* An investigation would have proven that the 2nd of June Commando warned the Springer Corporation on time and that Springer, as always, has lied;
* The people, who know from their own experience all about genocide and the terrorist bombing of civilian populations, can draw their own conclusions about the bomb attacks against those who commit mass murder in Vietnam and against the fascism of the Springer Corporation;
* And because of this, there can be no doubt that the bomb attacks were directed solely against the enemies of the people, the enemies of the working class, the enemies of the Vietnamese people, the imperialists.

“We’re all in the same boat” has always been the motto of the exploiters and fascists.

Springer has, under threat of further bomb attacks, published the demands made of him, albeit in a mutilated form.

The rest of the press must understand that they themselves will be provoking actions against Springer if they, as a result of economic pressure coming from Springer, submit voluntarily and opportunistically to this practice of censorship. We therefore demand that they no longer deceive the people about the political reasons behind the bomb attacks, that is to say, that they not aggravate the situation unnecessarily. We demand that they print in full the following communiqués: the communiqué of the Thomas Weissbecker Commando, the communiqué of the 2nd of June Commando and the communiqué of the July 15th Commando.

SERVE THE PEOPLE!

EXPROPRIATE SPRINGER!

RAF

May 28, 1972

=== Regarding the Fascist Bomb Threats Against Stuttgart ===
The two bomb threats pasted together out of letters cut from newspapers for next Friday, June 2, in Stuttgart don’t come from the Red Army Faction. Genuine communiqués of the urban guerilla commandos can easily be authenticated by comparing their contents with other RAF communiqués. And they are typewritten, as the cops well know.
[[File:Fake bomb threat by German police and blamed on RAF.png|thumb|''Fake communiqué threatening random bombings in Stuttgart.'']]
The fake communiqués, given their contents, their purpose, their essence, and their style, more likely come from the cops themselves.

The cops know this. The Springer journalists, who have published the false communiqués without reservation, know this. Filbinger,<ref>Hans Filbinger (CDU) was, at this time, the ''Land'' Chairman of Baden-Württemberg, of which Stuttgart is the capital.</ref> Krause,<ref>Walter Krause (SPD) was, at this time, the Minister of the Interior and acting President of Baden-Württemberg.</ref> and Klett<ref>Arnulf Klett was, at this time, the Mayor of Stuttgart.</ref> know this. They are taking precautions only as a pretext to prepare new police actions and to drive the war of nerves to the extreme.

Because the authorities leading the manhunt are receiving no help from the people, they are seizing upon fascist provocation. It is possible that if by Friday they haven’t had any success in their hunt—if they haven’t met their kill quota—they will carry through on the crimes they have threatened. Just as Springer didn’t allow his building to be evacuated, although he himself said he could foresee the attacks coming. Just as the Nazis set the Reichstag on fire and attacked the Gleiwitz transmitter. One must assume that they intend similar communiqués and attacks in the future.

We are not responsible for the crimes of fascists.

The actions of the urban guerilla are directed against the institutions of the class state, imperialism, and capital. They are never directed against working people or against people who have nothing to do with the crimes of imperialism. They are directed against those who plan vicious attacks against the people, such as those announced in the false communiqués, and those carried out daily by U.S. imperialism against the Vietnamese people.

FIGHT FASCISM!

DESTROY AND OBLITERATE THE POWER OF IMPERIALISM!

EXPROPRIATE SPRINGER

RAF

May 29, 1972

=== Statement to the Red Aid Teach-In ===
Comrades, some of you still believe that you don’t have any reason to dialogue with the Red Army Faction.

Some of you still believe that the cops will soon have a handle on the armed struggle in the metropole. Some of you still believe what you read in the newspapers: that the RAF is on the run, that there are splits in the RAF, that the RAF has a hierarchical structure, that the RAF is isolated. You aren’t seeing reality.

The KB in Hamburg believed that the attack against the Springer Corporation was the work of right-wing extremists. Instead of engaging us in debate, they assure the police that they themselves are not guilty. And the Frankfurt KSV Frankfurt asserts, in agreement with the ''Rundshau'', that the recent bomb attacks have nothing to do with the class struggle in West Germany and Berlin. These comrades no longer understand what’s going on.

Although they now understand that Genscher didn’t call out the police for show, that the murders of Petra, Georg, and Thomas were not mistakes on the part of the system, that the ''Kripo'' was responsible for the destruction of strike centrals during the strikes last year, that the Emergency Laws weren’t adopted just for the fun of it, that the banning of foreigners’ organizations isn’t just for show and that over sixty prisoners are being abused in prison—although they know all of this full well, they still believe it is too early to begin to resist.

They protest the death penalty in Persia and in Turkey; they wish the Palestinian resistance success; they protest the terror in Greece and Spain; they protest the complicity of the system with fascist regimes— but they are afraid to intervene or to act. They are clearly afraid to arrive at the obvious conclusion. They hide behind the masses and present their problem as one located outside of themselves.

We see things differently than these comrades. We are of the opinion that the hateful assembly-lines and piecework in the factories have gotten so bad that hardly anyone has any illusions any more about the fact that corporate profits require irreparable damage to the health of the workers. The masses already know that in the Federal Republic they must work themselves to death because that is the source of their employers’ profits, that the factory workers already know who they’re working for—soon it will be for themselves.

We are of the opinion that the problem these comrades see as lying elsewhere is their own subjective problem, that they project onto the masses their own lack of clarity. They want to identify their own inability—an inability to express solidarity with the masses because of their own privileged class position—as lying with the masses, to present it as an objective problem based in the masses’ need to develop a higher level of consciousness.

If, as occurred recently in Frankfurt, some women comrades say, for example, that they want to take to the streets if another one of us is murdered, then that indicates it would be easy to spontaneously intervene. Which is to say: the problem of agency is, as Springer journalists put it in a headline, one of marketing and competition. Political content as the commodity, the masses as the market. So they are ready to moan about imperialist crimes, but not to prevent them with clubs and bombs. For the imperialists, the assembly lines are still not going fast enough and the time required must be further reduced. They will consume as much as they can extract.

There is no reason for further delay in addressing the problem of armed struggle and resistance. Reduced hours, lay-offs, strikes, two million foreign workers, “Bild fights for you!”, “the extortionist of the week” in Stern, Citizens Initiatives, squatted houses—there is hardly any area in which the system can maintain its facade. The people’s desires must be unified and transformed into an organized leap forward.

This greed-driven system is ravaging the cities. Teachers must learn to muzzle themselves or they are fired. The mass media has been purged of decent critical journalists. Riot police are mobilized against strike centrals. Rulings of the Federal Labor Court prepare the way to criminalize future strikes. The BKA hopes to eliminate the remaining press freedoms. They are not waiting for the legal left to take up the armed struggle before proceeding with this. It’s happening now; it has begun. Is this the point when you will start to resist—or are you still waiting for something?

Comrades, stop hiding behind the masses! Stop shifting the question of resistance to the masses! Stop rationalizing your fear of the system’s excessive violence as a problem of agency! Stop presenting your confusion as erudition and your helplessness as a broad perspective!

The system is now producing contradictions at such a rate that they can no longer be integrated, and the masses no longer believe talk of reforms. It is equally true that the guerilla can only be anchored in the people to the degree that we carry out appropriate actions and you make effective propaganda. For this to happen, the revolutionary process and revolutionary consciousness must be developed further; the consciousness that action is justified—and possible!

When we build the revolutionary guerilla, we are creating an instrument that is beyond the reach of the system’s repression, that does not depend on the system’s tolerance for its capacity to act, that does not have its room to maneuver determined by the ''Verfassungsshutz''. If you are domesticated like Müller’s<ref>Frankfurt police chief at the time.</ref> demonstrators in Frankfurt on May 18, you can continue to demonstrate for some time to come, and you can celebrate it along with the KSV as the most powerful and most insular demonstration in a long time. Under the watchful eye of the police and funneled between two water cannons and rows of batons, you can go on celebrating successes long into the future. But the price to be paid is the distance people took from Tuesday’s demonstration, the denunciation of the comrades who broke free from the Hauptwache;<ref>The Hauptwache is the central point on a major pedestrian mall in Frankfurt.</ref> the price in the end was betrayal of the goals in exchange for permission to walk in the streets.

Today, everyone understands our actions against the extermination strategy in Vietnam. Everybody should be able to understand our actions to defend the lives and health of the prisoners and of the RAF comrades still at large. That the media no longer publishes our communiqués about our bomb attacks, but publishes false statements of fascist origin, that they downplay attacks on U.S. imperialism and play up fascist provocations such as that against the citizens of Stuttgart, demonstrates how things really are, demonstrates what they are afraid of and how far they’ll go to hide the truth from the masses, to prop up their facade.

Dare to struggle; dare to win! Attack and smash the power of imperialism! It is the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution! We call on all militants in the Federal Republic to make all American establishments targets of their attacks in their struggle against U.S. imperialism!

Long live the RAF!

Ulrike Meinhof

for the RAF

May 31, 1972

== 6 - Black September: A Statement from Behind Bars ==
In the fall of 1972, operationally devastated, the RAF issued its first document from behind bars: The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle. Written by one or several of the captured combatants, the text was first made public in West Berlin at Mahler’s second RAF trial, during which he faced charges of conspiracy and establishing a terrorist organization. The former lawyer worked it into the court record by using it as the basis for questions to Ulrike Meinhof, whom he had called as a witness. By November, it was being distributed by outside supporters in magazine format as the RAF’s third major publication.

In this paper, the RAF re-examined the geopolitics of anti-imperialism and the class base for revolution in the First World while responding angrily to Frankfurt School intellectual Oskar Negt, who had recently emerged as a vocal critic of armed struggle in the FRG. What caught people’s attention most was the RAF’s expression of warm solidarity with the Palestinian group Black September, which had carried out a daring, and ultimately tragic, hostage-taking during the Munich Olympics just months earlier.

“The guerillas took part in a courageous action,” Mahler explained, “in which they were ready to sacrifice themselves. The only fault the Black September guerillas can be reproached for is that they did not take Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher as a hostage.”<ref>United Press International, “Baader-Meinhof lawyer praises guerillas,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', October 10, 1972. As we shall see, this was not moot criticism.</ref>

At this point, the courtroom full of left-wing supporters erupted into cheers, prompting the judge to order it cleared.

There is no indication that the RAF played any part in the Black September operation; it was effectively out of action at the time, gutted by the arrests it had suffered following the May Offensive. Even so, given the group’s public statement of solidarity, it may be best to revisit the events at the Munich Olympics that year. (For more about the relationship between the West Germany and Israel, and how this affected the New Left, see Appendix III—The FRG and the State of Israel, pages 550-53.)

Black September had its origin in the aftermath of the civil war between Palestinian forces and the Jordanian state in September 1970. Formed by militants within Arafat’s Al Fatah, its first action had been the assassination, on November 28, 1971, of Jordan’s Prime Minister Wasfi Tel.<ref>Christopher Dobson, Black September: Its Short, Violent History (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 1.</ref> Not one month later, the group had attempted its second assassination, wounding Zaid el Rifai, Jordan’s ambassador to England, as he drove through the streets of London.<ref>Ibid., 12.</ref> By September of 1972, Black September had carried out a number of operations in Europe, including skyjacking a Sabena Belgian World Airlines plane en route from Vienna to Tel Aviv. The plane was flown to Lod airport, where Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan sent in a squad of paratroopers disguised as maintenance workers, who carried out a successful assault. Two of the hijackers were killed and two others captured.<ref>Ibid., 65-79.</ref>

Meanwhile, opening on August 26, the 1972 Olympic Games were supposed to be a symbolic graduation ceremony for the FRG. The last time the Olympics were held on German soil had been the 1936 Berlin games, which became a propaganda vehicle for the Hitler regime. Commentators were not shy to admit that the 1972 Munich Olympics were meant to signal a moving on, a testament to how well West Germany had gotten over its fascist past.

As an unrecognized portent of things to come, that June, the International Olympic Committee refused requests to allow a Palestinian team to participate in the games.<ref>Simon Reeve, ''One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre'' (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000), 40.</ref>

Early on September 5, midway through the games, an eight-man Black September commando entered the “Olympic Village” housing athletes from around the world. The commando made directly for the Israeli dorms, which they secured, in the process killing two sportsmen who tried to resist. They seized nine other Israeli athletes as hostages and issued their demands: the release of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs from Israeli prisons, the release of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in the FRG, and safe passage to Egypt for all concerned.<ref>Black September would later tell Voice of Palestine radio that they had demanded the release of five “revolutionary German girls belonging to the Baader-Meinhof organization,” which five being left open to conjecture. (United Press International, “Other Arab guerrilla demand told,” ''Hayward Daily Review'', September 8, 1972.)</ref>

Black September named this its “Operation Iqrith and Kafr Bir’im.”<ref>Iqrith (also spelled Ikrit) and Bir’im were two Christian villages in the upper Galilee. In 1948, shock troops from the Zionist Hagana expelled the towns’ inhabitants at gunpoint. “The pogrom-like expulsion was carried out without the Israeli government approval,” writes Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh. “However, the democratic Israeli state never allowed the Christian inhabitants to return, despite several rulings to the contrary by the Israeli High Court.” (Khaled Amayreh, “Christians, too, suffer the evilness of the occupation,” at [http://www. thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/12/26/christians_too_suffer_ the_evilness_of_th). http://www. thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/12/26/christians_too_suffer_ the_evilness_of_th).]</ref>

Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister, informed the West German authorities that Israel would not release any of the prisoners. At that point, the West Germans developed a plan to pretend to arrange for the safe passage of the commando and the hostages out of the FRG, while in fact preparing an ambush.

At 10:20 pm, the guerillas and their captives were flown to the military airfield at Fürstenfeldbruck, halfway between Munich and Augsburg. A Lufthansa Boeing 727 waited on the tarmac, ostensibly to fly the group to Tunis. But the area was crawling with cops, and five snipers had been positioned with orders to take the “terrorists” out as soon as the signal was given.

Two members of the commando checked out the Boeing to make sure that all was as had been promised. They then started back to the helicopters where the hostages and the other commando members had remained. At this point, the police sharpshooters opened fire: they missed, and there ensued intermittent volleys of bullets lasting over an hour. Finally, unable to subdue the Palestinians with gunfire, just after midnight police in armored vehicles moved in to try and storm the helicopters.

Seeing this, the commando executed the nine hostages.

By the time the cops were in control, five members of the Palestinian commando and a police officer also lay dead. The entire hostage-taking had lasted barely twenty hours.

It was later revealed that the Bavarian police had seriously bungled their ambush. A team that had been designated to overpower the commando inside the Boeing had voted (!) to desert their posts just twenty minutes before the helicopters landed at Fürstenfeldbruck—they considered the proposed ambush “suicidal.”<ref>Aaron J. Klein, ''Striking Back: the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s deadly response'' (New York: Random House, 2005), 72-73.</ref> This put all the pressure on the marksmen, and yet there were only five deployed, they were not equipped with the recommended rifles for such an operation, nor had they received infrared sights, bulletproof vests, or walkie talkies.<ref>Reeve, 116.</ref> They were not even informed of each other’s positions, which led to one police sniper shooting another, whom he mistook for a member of the commando!<ref>Ibid., 121-122.</ref>

The authorities had obviously underestimated the Palestinian guerilla. “At the moment we fired there were not enough terrorists exposed,” explained Bruno Merck, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior. “We had expected, nevertheless, that those who had not been shot would surrender in the shock of the gun battle. That didn’t happen… All we could do was hope for a mistake. But these people are not amateurs.”<ref>Dobson, 85.</ref>

The distinction between “amateurs” and “professionals” is an odd one. Two of the commando members were teenagers, and the others mostly in their early twenties; obviously, none had participated in other actions of this sort. Their determination most likely came from their own personal experiences. They had all grown up in refugee camps, their families forced to endure extreme poverty, hunger, and the constant threat of Israeli violence, while most of the world happily ignored their existence.<ref>Reeve, 41-42.</ref> In the words of Abu Daoud, who claims to have organized the operation, “They were people who had left their homes in ’48, forced to flee, and then languished in the Lebanese camps since then. They were people whose houses were now the homes of Polish, French and American Jews who had replaced them in their own country, living as citizens there without any right to.”<ref>Ibid, 42.</ref>

The three survivors from the commando—Sammar ‘Adnan ‘abd alGhani al-Jishshi,<ref>The frg press reported his name as Ibrahim Badran.</ref> ‘Abd al-Qadir ad-Dinnawi, and Samer Muhammad ‘Abdallah<ref>Mahmud Abdallah Kallam, ''Sabra wa-Shatila, dhakirat ad-Damm'' (Beirut: Beisan Publishing), 40-41.</ref>—were taken into West German custody. Less than two months later, on October 29, a second Black September commando skyjacked a Lufthansa jet en route from Beirut to Ankara, threatening to blow up the plane if the three were not released. Still licking its wounds from the Fürstenfeldbruck fiasco, the West German government agreed: the Munich survivors were granted safe passage to Libya.<ref>''Time Magazine'' [online], “Return of Black September,” November 13, 1972.</ref>

Operation Iqrith and Kafr Bir’im sent shockwaves around the world. To Israel and its supporters, Black September had massacred innocents, and the Germans had been criminally incompetent. In the words of one Israeli diplomat, “The human mind fails to grasp the barbaric depravity of the cruel murderers of the Israeli athletes.”<ref>Associated Press, “Bay Area service for slain Jews,” ''Hayward Daily Review'', September 8, 1972.</ref>

The response was not long in coming and took the form of collective punishment:<blockquote>''[On September 8] Israeli Skyhawk planes attacked villages and refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria… killing a total of 59 people and wounding 40 others, all of whom were civilians. Among the victims were 19 children.''<ref>Sami Hadawi, ''Crime and No Punishment: Zionist-Israeli Terrorism 1939-1972'' (Beirut: Palestine Research Centre, 1972), 83.</ref></blockquote>Eight days later, a second exercise in collective punishment was carried out:<blockquote>''The Israeli army, supported by tanks, armored cars and jet aircraft, crossed into Lebanese territory, and for 36 hours attacked a number of Lebanese villages within an area of some 250 square kilometers, killing people at random and destroying houses and blowing up bridges…''

''The refugee camp at Nabatiya was attacked from the air by napalm bombs, wounding eight of its inmates…''

''By the time the Israelis withdrew, they left behind a trail of death and destruction. About 200 civilians, including women and children, were killed or wounded, and over 200 houses destroyed or damaged. In addition, 18 Lebanese soldiers died in defense of their homeland.''<ref>Ibid., 84.</ref></blockquote>The United States vetoed a United Nations resolution condemning these massacres, and in doing so put Israel’s policy of carrying out reprisals against Palestinian civilians on a firm international footing for decades to come.<ref>Henry Cattan, ''The Palestine Question'' (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 122-123.</ref>

Not only did the Munich operation provoke attacks against Palestinian civilians, it also spelled the beginning of the end of Black September as an organization. On the one hand, Israeli secret services embarked on a bloody campaign of retribution, letter bombs and targeted assassinations, which would eventually claim dozens of lives.<ref>Reeve, 160-169, 175-195. For more on Israel’s reaction, see Brad E. O’Neill, ''Armed Struggle in Palestine: A Political-Military Analysis'' (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1978), 87-88.</ref> At the same time, various Arab regimes which supported the PLO began to worry that the Palestinians’ struggle might endanger their relationship with the imperialist west. The final turning point for these regimes occurred just six months later when a Black September commando took over the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan during a farewell party for the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires<ref>Black September was demanding the release of Sirhan Sirhan, who had assassinated Bobby Kennedy, a number of Palestinians held in Jordan, all Arab women held in Israel, as well as Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader in the FRG.</ref>—one Belgian and two American diplomats were executed before the commando surrendered.<ref>Patricia McCarty, “The Terrorist War,” ''European Stars and Stripes'', August 9, 1973.</ref> The pressure from conservative Arab states increased, and the PLO and Fatah withdrew their support for hijackings and hostage-takings, which caused Black September operations to rapidly taper off.<ref>O’Neill, 151.</ref> Within a few years, the organization was no more.

As for the West German reaction to the events at the Munich Olympics, the whole mess was seen as a great embarrassment. One result was the decision to establish a crack special operations unit, the ''Grenzschutzgruppe'' 9 (literally, “Border Protection Group 9” but shortened to GSG-9), announced within weeks of the Fürstenfeldbruck blunder. Led by Ulrich Wegener, Genscher’s liaison officer with the BGS, who had been present on the scene at the airfield, it would receive its initial training from Britain’s SAS and Israel’s ''Sayeret Mat’kal''. As its name implies, the GSG-9 fell under the umbrella of the Border Police, not the armed forces, legally enabling it to attempt long-term “deep cover” infiltration of the radical scene. The GSG-9 would eventually win international recognition as one of the most fearsome “counterterrorism” units in the world, some of its operatives receiving additional training in NATO’s International Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) School.<ref>“Terrorism 101—Counter-Terrorism Organizations: Germany - GSG-9,” http://www.terrorism101.org/counter/Germany.html.</ref>

Of more immediate consequence was the crackdown against the FRG’s small Arab population.

Earlier that year, Black September had already carried out less dramatic attacks in West Germany. On February 6, the group had assassinated five Jordanians, believed to be intelligence officers who had been active in the civil war, near Cologne.<ref>Edgar O’Balance, ''Arab Guerilla Power'' (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 215.</ref> Then, on February 8, a bomb had gone off in a factory belonging to the Strüver Corporation near Hamburg. The factory produced electrical generators for Israeli aircraft.<ref>MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, “Black September Attacked Business Target (Feb. 8, 1972, Federal Republic of Germany),” http://www.tkb.org/Incident.jsp?incid=790.</ref> On February 22, the Esso Oil pipeline near Hamburg had been similarly damaged.<ref>Dobson, 65.</ref>

Now, with the Munich attack passing under the glare of the Olympic spotlight, the state moved into action; raids were carried out, and the FRG’s 4,000 Arab students and 37,000 Arab “guest workers” came under intense scrutiny. In short order, approximately one hundred Palestinian activists were expelled, and two Fatah front groups—the General Union of Palestinian Students and the General Union of Palestinian Workers—found themselves banned.<ref>Ibid., 132.</ref>

At the same time, within the radical left, some saw the events of September 5 quite differently. To anti-imperialists and others who sympathized with Black September, the operation had been a legitimate one, even if it had ended in tragedy. Some would even argue that the operation had been a success, for although no prisoners had been freed and so many people had died, the world could no longer pretend it did not know about the plight of the Palestinians.<ref>Decades later, Abu Daoud remained adamant on this point. “I would be against any operation like Munich ever again,” he told Sports Illustrated magazine in 2002. However, “[a]t the time, it was the correct thing to do for our cause. … The operation brought the Palestinian issue into the homes of 500 million people who never previously cared about Palestinian victims at the hands of the Israelis.” (Alexander Wolff, “Thirty years after he helped plan the terror strike, Abu Daoud remains in hiding -- and unrepentant,” ''Sports Illustrated'', August 26, 2002.</ref> Furthermore, it was argued that blame for the Israeli athletes’ death lay squarely with the West German police, who had attempted a double-cross which simply blew up in their faces.

Sympathetic observers pointed out that the Palestinians had certainly not wanted to kill their hostages. They hoped rather to free their own comrades. This argument was more difficult to dismiss in 1972 than it would be today, as skyjackings and exchanging hostages for prisoners had not yet exhausted their utility for guerillas at that time, and often did meet with success (as the October 29 skyjacking would demonstrate).<ref>Indeed, the years 1969-1972 can be considered the golden age of political hostage takings. While kidnappings were a particularly prevalent tactic for the South American guerilla, skyjackings in this period were pioneered by various Palestinian organizations. Whereas there had been only twenty-seven aircraft hijacked between 1961 and 1968, and most of these had been non-political acts, between 1969 and 1972, two hundred seventy-seven aircraft were hijacked, many of them successfully, i.e. the hijackers got away and their demands were met. During this period, seventy-eight political prisoners were released as demanded by various skyjackers. [Alona E. Evans, “Aircraft Hijacking: What is Being Done?” ''American Journal of International Law'' ''67'' (1973): 641-645].</ref>

Furthermore, although the athletes were noncombatants, they were nonetheless representatives of a colonial state, one which was for all intents and purposes waging war against the Palestinian people. Certainly, far bloodier actions had been carried out in anticolonial campaigns around the world. No less than Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian guerilla leader, had argued in his famous ''Minimanual'' that “non-political” celebrities could constitute legitimate targets:<blockquote>''The kidnapping of personalities who are well-known artists, sports figures or who are outstanding in some other field, but who have evidenced no political interest, can be a useful form of propaganda for the guerrillas, provided it occurs under special circumstances, and is handled so the public understands and sympathizes with it.''<ref>Carlos Marighella, “Kidnapping,” ''Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla'', [[Library:Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla#KIDNAPPING]]</ref></blockquote>Whether the operation was understood or enjoyed public sympathy depended very much on who one thought of as constituting the “public.” Certainly, in the Arab world, the action was widely understood, and met with a large measure of sympathy. When the bodies of the slain commando members were brought to Libya, for instance, over 30,000 mourners followed their funeral procession from Tripoli’s Martyr’s Square to the Sidi Munaidess Cemetery.<ref>Reeve, 147.</ref>

It is equally true that in the imperialist countries, most people neither understood nor sympathized with the aims of the Palestinians. The commando’s public testament, released shortly afterwards, met with simple incomprehension. Thus the outrage, not only at Black September, but also at anyone who dared to speak up in defense of the Palestinian guerilla action.

If it has been necessary to our study to consider these events in such detail, it is precisely because of this outrage.

Critics of the RAF have zeroed in on the ''Black September'' document, scandalized at this support for the Munich operation. The guerilla’s penchant for purposefully shocking formulations (i.e. “Israel burned their own athletes just as the Nazis had burned the Jews”) did not help matters. Likewise, a strong argument could be made that the RAF, like much of the revolutionary left, did a poor job at acknowledging and analyzing the specifically antisemitic dimensions of German fascism.

What is important to stress in the context of our study is that this is not why the RAF was criticized. Rather, the fact that the captured combatants dared to stand in solidarity with Black September has been construed as “proof” that they were antisemites, not in the sense of having a weak analysis or oppressive blindspots, but in the sense of “hating Jews.” According to the state, various “terrorism experts,” and some right-wing and liberal pundits, it was in this sense that the RAF was accused of being an antisemitic organization.

Yet regardless of whether one finds it to have been correct or ill-conceived, justified or egregious, it is plainly evident that the Munich hostage taking had nothing to do with antisemitism. It was simply part of the struggle of the Palestinian people against colonial oppression. There may be plenty of moral and political arguments with which to object to the targeting of the Olympic athletes, but opposition to antisemitism is not one of them. Indeed, while anti-Jewish racism may well have led some bigots to applaud the action, anti-Arab racism seems to have led far more to automatically condemn it, and with it all those who would not turn their backs on the Palestinian people.

Yet the accusation did not stop there: some liberal and right-wing critics have gone further, accusing Meinhof of making antisemitic comments as the RAF text was being delivered. This story has gained some currency in recent years, especially on the internet, so it is worth extending this already lengthy examination in order to establish the facts of the matter.

As already mentioned, the Black September document was read out in court by Horst Mahler, taking the form of a “cross examination” of Ulrike Meinhof, who had been called to the witness stand. At one point, Meinhof interrupted the reading with an impromptu observation of her own, specifically regarding the nature of German antisemitism and the Holocaust. The only record of what Meinhof said is in an article from the ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', in which many of her words were paraphrased. Here is what the FAZ reported Meinhof as saying:<blockquote>''“Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were murdered and carted off to Europe’s garbage heap, dispensed with as money Jews.” Finance capital and banks, “the hard core of the system” of imperialism and capitalism deflected the hate of the people for money and oppression from itself and transferred it to the Jews.''<ref>Peter Jochen Winters, “Ulrike Meinhof läßt sich nur die Stichwort geben,” ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'', December 15, 1972. Our translation. Note that those sections not in quotes consist of the summary by Winters. The entire relevant portion of the faz article is reproduced in German and English in Appendix I, pages 544-47</ref> </blockquote>The FAZ, like all initial observers, seems to have understood Meinhof as saying that the Nazis took advantage of anticapitalist sentiment, using stereotypes about “rich Jews” to mobilize gentiles behind a program of genocide. That Meinhof saw herself as opposed to this, and therefore opposed to antisemitism, was taken for granted.

Such an analysis of Nazism may be criticized for being facile, economistic, or simply incorrect. Nevertheless, it has an established place on the left, and is not in and of itself in any way anti-Jewish. Rather, it can trace its lineage directly back to the early 20th century social democrat, August Bebel, who famously described antisemitism as “the socialism of fools.”

Even so, Meinhof’s words were to be turned against her, especially in the English-speaking world. One of the first translations of the FAZ quote into English appeared in an article by one George Watson in the British literary magazine ''Encounter'', a CIA-funded publication, which had as its aim the winning over of “progressive” intellectuals to the American side in the Cold War.<ref>In the words of Andrew Roth, a friend of the magazine’s editor Melvin Lasky: “Encounter’s function was to combat anti-Americanism by brainwashing the uncertain with pro-American articles. These were paid for at several times the rate paid by the New Statesman and offered British academics and intellectuals free U.S. trips and expenses-paid lecture tours. There was no room for the objective-minded in this cold war to capture intellectuals.” (Andrew Roth, “Melvin Lasky, Cold Warrior who Edited Encounter Magazine,” The Manchester Guardian [online], Obituaries, May 22, 2004.)</ref> This translation had a curious wording, though, one which seemed to give new meaning to what Meinhof had said. According to Watson, the guerilla leader had stated that “Auschwitz means that 6 million Jews were killed, and thrown onto the waste heap of Europe, ''for what they were'': money-Jews.”<ref>George Watson, “Race and the Socialists,” ''Encounter'' 47 (Nov. 1976): 23.</ref> (emphasis added)

The clear implication here is that Meinhof approved of their murder— that she approved of the Holocaust and Nazism and also Auschwitz. This would flatly contradict everything Meinhof and the RAF had stated both before and after this point, and this fact alone should suffice to cast doubt on Watson’s translation. As should the fact that those who have gone back to the original German FAZ article have disputed Watson’s interpretation with apparent unanimity.<ref>Scholar Diane Paule, for instance states: “Watson’s translation and analysis make Meinhof’s point appear to be much clearer than in fact it is, and his charge that she ‘spoke up publicly in the Good Old Cause of revolutionary extermination’ is not obviously supported by the text.” [“‘In the Interests of Civilization’: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” J''ournal of the History of Ideas''</ref>

However, most people do not return to the original, and this conveniently damning translation has subsequently found its way into all sorts of studies and discussions, not only of the RAF, but of the left in general. Saul Bellow quoted it as he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976,<ref>Nobel Foundation “Saul Bellow—Nobel Lecture,” http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-lecture.html</ref> and it has been featured in books “proving” that revolutionary anticapitalism is antisemitic.<ref>Paul Lawrence Rose, ''Revolutionary anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).</ref> All over the internet it appears as “evidence” that not only the RAF, but indeed the entire German New Left, was anti-Jewish, if not crypto-Nazi.

We are not claiming that there are no legitimate criticisms to be made of how the West German left dealt with—or failed to deal with—the question of antisemitism. It has been noted that many radicals’ fierce antifascism rested on an analysis which saw the persecution of Jews as merely incidental to Nazism. Some radicals, including the RAF, often did seem to view the Third Reich as nothing more than a case of hyper-capitalism, the solution to which could be as simple as hyper-anticapitalism.

Combined with a persisting lack of clarity regarding the status of Germany—imperialist? or colonized?<ref>For more on this, see Not Wanted in the Model: the KPD, pages 17-18.</ref>—and a keen awareness of Israel’s role in world imperialism, these weaknesses pushed sections of the left to occasionally espouse positions which belied a certain antisemitism. This was a serious error at times in the 1970s, and coming to grips with it would eventually acquire some importance for some individuals within both the K-groups and the undogmatic left.

Despite these facts, being a left-wing German anti-Zionist was in no way tantamount to being an antisemite. Far from it. In the precise case of the RAF, those who would accuse the group of antisemitism have yet to make their case.

As to Ulrike Meinhof’s words in question, Watson’s translation is simply wrong. Whether this was an “honest mistake,” or whether it had something to do with the CIA funding the magazine for which he wrote is a question readers had best ponder for themselves. Certainly, the timing is suspect: his article appeared in November 1976. As detailed in Section 10, Meinhof had been found dead—with convincing evidence pointing to murder—in her prison cell earlier that year, and this had elicited much sympathy for the RAF within the left. In this context, discrediting the guerilla leader took on great importance for the state and counterinsurgency forces.

(For more on the original FAZ article, Watson’s loose translation style, and our own translation, see Appendix I—Excerpts from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, pages 544-47.)

As has already been mentioned, the RAF did not limit itself to dealing with the Munich events in its Black September document. For the RAF, these merely provided a starting point from which to launch into a discussion of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the Arab world, including the possible use of petroleum as a weapon. This was a year before the OPEC nations carried out their partial oil embargo as retaliation against western support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

From the question of oil, the RAF went on to consider the problem of opportunism within the imperialist countries, the “metropole.” This discussion focused on Oskar Negt, a former assistant of Jürgen Habermas and a professor of sociology at the Technical University in Hannover, who following the May Offensive had publicly called on socialists to deny the RAF any solidarity or support.

In the early seventies, Negt was considered a leading left-wing intellectual. In 1973, for instance, in the first issue of New German Critique, he would be described as “the most innovative theorist in Germany today.”<ref>Horst Mewes, “The German New Left,” ''New German Critique 1'', (Winter 1973): 39.</ref> He was particularly prominent in the West German campaign to provide solidarity for the Black Liberation Movement militant Angela Davis. Accused of complicity in a failed hostage taking which had been meant to free imprisoned Black revolutionaries (the Soledad Brothers), Davis was incarcerated in the United States for eighteen months between 1970 and 1972. For Negt, the connection was both political and personal, as he had gotten to know Davis when she had spent time studying in Frankfurt in the 1960s.<ref>“The Angela Davis Case,” ''Newsweek'' [online], October 26, 1970, 20.</ref> It was only natural for him to now support her as a political prisoner.

Davis’ trial wound up in San Jose, California, in the late spring of 1972, and the jury began its deliberations on Friday, June 2. That same weekend, as a show of solidarity, an Angela Davis Congress had been organized in Frankfurt by the ''Sozialistisches Büro'', a loose network that had emerged out of the APO in 1969, and had since established itself as an important force within the undogmatic left.<ref>Mewes, 32-35.</ref> Keynote speakers included Frankfurt School personalities Herbert Marcuse and Wolfgang Abendroth, and, of course, Oskar Negt. Close to ten thousand people attended, and one can only imagine what the scene must have been when news arrived on the Sunday that Davis had been found not guilty.<ref>Jürgen Schröder,“USA Black Panther Party (BPP) und Angela Davis Materialien zur Analyse von Opposition,” http://www.mao-projekt.de/int/na/usa/usa_ Black_Panther_Party_und_Angela_Davis.htm</ref>

While the conference was scheduled perfectly to coincide with this victory across the Atlantic, it also occurred at a very particular moment in the FRG. As we have seen, the entire month of May had been filled with bombings carried out by the RAF. Just days before the Congress opened, also in Frankfurt, Red Aid had held a Teach-In Against Repression at which a tape-recorded statement from Ulrike Meinhof had been played. The very next day, the first of the arrests came: Andreas Baader, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe were captured in Munich.

At this critical juncture, at what should have been an ideal occasion to make the connection between revolutionary movements in West Germany and the United States, Negt dropped his own bombshell. His address at the Congress took aim not at imperialism or racism or state repression, but at the RAF, and at those who supported its strategy of armed struggle in the FRG.

According to Negt, the RAF’s politics were disconnected from the experiences of most citizens of the FRG, and for that reason could only be self-defeating. Whereas he believed the Black Liberation Movement was justified in using political violence in the United States, and he fully supported the Black Panther Party and similar groups, he argued that people were not particularly oppressed in the FRG, and, as such, the guerilla could only alienate the working class there. Armed politics in such a context were vanguardist, counterproductive, and doomed to fail, as anyone who robbed banks or planted bombs would only cut themselves off from the very people whose support they should be seeking.

Perhaps worst of all, Negt accused the RAF of being simple “desperadoes” trying to put a political veneer on apolitical crimes. Arguing that “uncritical solidarity” ran contrary to socialist organizing principles, Negt called on leftists to refuse the RAF any support—be it safehouses or IDs or whatnot—smugly adding that if this was done, the guerilla would simply not be able to survive.<ref>Linksnet “Rede zum Angela-Davis-Kongress 1972,” [http://www.linksnet.de/ artikel.php?id=374. http://www.linksnet.de/ artikel.php?id=374.]</ref>

It has been reported that his words did not go over so well with everyone at the Congress, and he was vigorously denounced by many in attendance, notably members of Frankfurt’s ''sponti'' scene.<ref>Schröder, ”USA Black Panther Party.”</ref>

It might have been enough that he speak out against the guerilla in order for the RAF to take him to task, but Negt would be accused of doing far more than that.

Apparently the Hannover sociology professor was friends with Fritz Rodewald—the same Fritz Rodewald who set Ulrike Meinhof and Gerhard Müller up to be captured within a few weeks of the Frankfurt conference. According to Meinhof’s biographer Jutta Ditfurth, Rodewald, uneasy about his prior decision to aid the fugitives, had turned to Negt for advice. Negt repeated his position that nobody owed anyone “mechanical” or “automatic” solidarity, and as a result, the police were contacted.<ref>Jutta Ditfurth, interview by Arno Luik, “Sie war die große Schwester der 68er.”</ref>

In Negt’s hard line, one can discern the first clear rejection of the guerilla by a section of the undogmatic left. While this position can’t have done the guerilla any good, the evidence seems to indicate that in 1972, and for several years thereafter, it failed to achieve hegemony. Which is not to say that the undogmatic left was pro-guerilla, but rather that different people held different opinions, and it would have taken more than the ravings of one left-wing intellectual to cause a definite repudiation. When such a move away from political violence did eventually occur, it would be as a result of former street fighters, guerillas, and semi-legal activists re-examining the question. It would take militants like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer, and former combatants like Bommi Baumann and Hans-Joachim Klein, to do what Negt could not.

If the RAF saw a thread connecting its negative evaluation of Negt to its glowing appraisal of Black September, it was the question of the labor aristocracy. It is surely no accident that the ''Black September'' document provides the guerilla’s most detailed examination of this concept.

Specifically, the “labor aristocracy” refers to those more well-to-do layers of the working class, people who no longer have any material incentive to engage in the dangerous, grueling task of carrying out a revolution against capitalism. Lenin had argued that the labor aristocracy was a product of imperialism, as the profits earned from exploitation in the developing countries were used to pay for the elevated position of certain sections of the working class in the metropole. This concept has been accepted by almost all strains of the Marxist-Leninist tradition, though often accorded little actual importance in practice.

To the first wave of the RAF, however, the question of the labor aristocracy had by this point become central. The labor aristocracy was not seen simply as a section of the West German working class, but as the dominant section, almost to the exclusion of any classical proletariat. As such, the idea of using popular support in the FRG as a barometer of political legitimacy—which is what Negt seemed to propose—was not simply wrong, it reeked of opportunism.

This analysis was hinted at in ''Serve the People'' earlier in 1972, but ''Black September'' spelled it out clearly, while also exploring what this might imply.

In the RAF’s view, in 1972, there was no material basis for revolution in the FRG: the crumbs from the imperialist table were enough to win most people’s loyalty for the system. Yet the RAF did not see this as a reason to give up on revolutionary politics, or to abandon armed struggle; instead, they argued that “the situation is ‘ripe’ to take up the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole—not ‘ripe’ for revolution, but ‘ripe’ for the anti-imperialist offensive.”

The RAF emphasized the alienation which persisted even in an affluent consumer society, zeroing in on people’s individual dissatisfaction and misery in the midst of plenty. Much was made of the way in which consumerism distorted and manipulated people’s desires, “the exploitation of their feelings and thoughts, wishes, and utopian dreams.”

This psychological misery—insufficient, perhaps to carry out a revolution, but enough to establish a revolutionary tradition—was seen as providing a subjective basis for armed resistance to imperialism within the metropole. As the capitalist system would find itself increasingly besieged by the liberation struggles in the Third World—or so the theory went—this base could grow, and then, “the masses here will eventually find their political identity on the side of the liberation struggles, and will eventually free themselves from the grip of the system, with its lies, its glitziness, its election promises, and its lotteries.”

''Black September'' provides the RAF’s most explicit attempt to link the concepts of imperialism, the labor aristocracy, and the subjective basis for revolt in the metropole. In hindsight, it is clear that the optimistic notion that the West German masses might rally to an anti-imperialist position has not been borne out. Nevertheless, this should not detract from the fact that the RAF was at least trying to deal with questions that most leftists in imperialist societies preferred—and still prefer—to ignore.

As we have seen, ''Black September'' was a document firmly embedded in the context of its time. Perhaps for this reason, it did not “age” well, and would be increasingly ignored by those sympathetic to the guerilla in years to come. Yet it was an important document, and the relationship to the national liberation struggles in the Third World and to the working class in Germany as elaborated here would not be revisited by subsequent waves of guerilla fighters for years to come.
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Appeal of the Fedayeen: To All the Free People of the World
!<blockquote>''On Monday, September 11, 1972, the Palestinian Press Agency published a group statement from the Black September members who were killed in Munich. This statement was drafted before the operation in Munich began. (M. & S.)''</blockquote>We do not intend to kill any innocent people with our action. We are struggling above all against injustice. We do not want to disturb the peace, rather we want to draw the world’s attention to the filthy Zionist occupation and the real tragedy our people are suffering.

We ask that the free people of the world understand our action, the goal of which is to thwart imperialism’s international interests, to expose the relationship between imperialism and Zionism, and to clarify for our Arab nation what “Israel” is and who its allies are.

We are a significant element in the armed Palestinian revolutionary movement, which is itself part of the Arab revolution. We ask you, in spite of the enemy’s conspiracy and the difficulties presented by the struggle, not to lay down your weapons. The earth can only be freed with blood.

The world only respects the strong. Our strength does not lie in speeches, but in action.

We apologize to the young athletes of the world if their sensibilities are disturbed by our undertaking. But they should know that there is a people whose homeland has been occupied for 24 years. This people has suffered anguish at the hands of an enemy that moves amongst them in Munich.

It is irrelevant where we are buried; the enemy can defile our corpses. What we hope is that Arab youth are ready to die in the service of the people and the fatherland. We call upon the “Black September” fedayeen and the Palestinian revolutionary movement to carry the struggle forward.

LONG LIVE OUR PEOPLE!

LONG LIVE THE WORLDWIDE REVOLUTION FOR FREEDOM
|}

=== The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle ===
<blockquote>''Proletarian Revolutions… are constantly self-critical, repeatedly come to a standstill, return to past undertakings to begin them anew, pitilessly and thoroughly mocking their own half-measures, and the weakness and shabbiness of their own preliminary efforts. They seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them. They shrink time and again from the unimaginable enormity of their own goals, until they reach a time which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: hic rhodus, hic salta.''<ref>A quote from Karl Marx’s ''The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte''.</ref></blockquote>THE STONE YOU HAVE THROWN AT US WILL FALL AT YOUR OWN FEET.

The Black September action in Munich has simultaneously clarified both the nature of the imperialist ruling class and of the anti-imperialist struggle, in a way that no revolutionary action in West Germany or West Berlin has. It was simultaneously anti-imperialist, antifascist, and internationalist. It indicated an understanding of historical and political connections, that are always the province of the people—that is to say, those from whom profit is sucked, those who are free from complicity with the system, those who have no reason to believe the illusions fostered by their oppressors, no reason to accept the fantasy their oppressors pass off as history, no reason to pay the slightest attention to their version of reality. It revealed the rage and the strength that these revolutionaries get from their close connection to the Palestinian people, a connection resulting in a class consciousness that makes their historical mission to act as a vanguard perfectly clear. Their humanity is firmly based in their knowledge that they must resist this ruling class, a class which as the historical endpoint of this system of class rule is also the most cunning and the most bloodthirsty that has ever existed. It is based in the knowledge that they must resist this system’s character and its tendency towards total imperialist fascism—a form which has many fine representatives: Nixon and Brandt, Moshe Dayan and Genscher, Golda Meir and McGovern.

The West German left can reclaim their political identity—antifascism—antiauthoritarianism—anti-imperialist action—if they cease to embrace the Springer Press and opportunism, if they begin to once again address Auschwitz, Vietnam, and the systemic indifference of the masses here.

BLACK SEPTEMBER'S STRATEGY IS THE REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY FOR ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE, BOTH IN THE THIRD WORLD AND IN THE METROPOLE, GIVEN THE IMPERIALIST CONDITIONS CREATED BY MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS.

# '''IMPERIALISM'''

''Anti Imperialist Struggle''

The action was anti-imperialist.

The comrades from Black September, who had their own Black September in 1970 when the Jordanian army massacred 20,000 Palestinians,<ref>In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had fled to Jordan, where they lived in ramshackle refugee camps. On September 16, 1970, alarmed at the growing power of Palestinian revolutionaries, King Hussein declared martial law, and the Jordanian armed forces attacked suspected militant strongholds: according to most sources, between four and ten thousand Palestinians, including many non-combatants, were slaughtered. This is the source of the group’s name.</ref> went back to the place that is the origin of this massacre: West Germany—formerly Nazi Germany—now at the centre of imperialism. Back to the site of the power that forced the Jews of both West and East Europe to emigrate to Israel. Back to those who had hoped to profit from the theft of Palestinian land. Back to where Israel got its reparation payments and, until 1965, officially, its weapons. Back to where the Springer Corporation celebrated Israel’s 1967 Blitzkrieg in an anticommunist orgy. Back to the supplier who provided Hussein’s army with panzers, assault rifles, machine-pistols, and munitions. Back to where everything possible was done—using development aid, oil deals, investments, weapons, and diplomatic relationships—to pit Arab regimes against each other, and to turn all of them against the Palestinian liberation movement. Back to the place from which imperialism launches its bombers when other means of repressing the Arab liberation movement fail: West Germany—Munich—the NATO airport at Fürstenfeldbruck.

Vietnam

Do people think Vietnam is a joke? Guatemala, Santo Domingo, Indonesia, Angola are all just jokes? Vietnam is an atrocious example for the people of the Third World, an example of how determined imperialism is to commit genocide against them if nothing else achieves the desired results—if they don’t agree to being markets, military bases, sources of raw materials and cheap labor.

And the opportunistic left in the metropole behaves idiotically—being the labor aristocracy of imperialism (Lenin) who benefit from this theft, they sit on their arses. They only take to the streets if something affects them, if the war escalates, if some of them are shot—like during Easter 1968 in Berlin or May 1970 at Kent State.<ref>On May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating at Kent State University in Ohio against the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Four students were killed and nine others were wounded. Of the wounded, one was permanently paralyzed, and several were seriously maimed.</ref> If the system does something against them like what is always being done in the Third World, all of a sudden they get upset, they run to the police, they chase after that rat-catcher McGovern, they run for a post on the labor council and they write a bunch of poems against the war.

The Imperialist Centre

Black September has brought its war from the Arab periphery of imperialism into the centre. The centre means: central to the multinational corporations, the market’s command centre, where they determine the laws of economic, political, military, cultural, and technological development for all countries within their market. The centre is the U.S.A., Japan, and West Europe under the leadership of the FRG. The volume of business, the numbers employed by the corporations, these are only the formal, quantitative data—their weapons production is only one of the sectors of their productive capacity that is directed against the liberation movements, their price controls for raw materials constitute just one of the many ways they ensure their rule over the Third World.

''The Aggressive Character of Imperialist Investment Policy''

Marx analyzed machinery as a weapon that led workers in the 19th century to destroy machines. Marx:<blockquote>''Machinery is the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes, those periodical revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital. It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions made since 1880''<ref>In the correct version of this quote (''Capital'' Volume I, chapter 15, volume 5), this year is 1830. An error was made either as this document was being written by the RAF or when it was transcribed by supporters, and the year became 1880.</ref> ''for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class.''</blockquote>This was the machinery that created unemployment for the working class, that created the wageworker, at the same time offering the proletariat no choice but starvation or overthrowing the dictatorship of capital.

It is now time for someone to write a history of the imperialist investment strategy and in their analysis to demonstrate that it was “made for the sole purpose” of eliminating the liberation movements in the Third World.

''Multinational Corporations''

The multinational corporations control everything in the countries that imperialism has deprived of the opportunity to develop. They use this control against them. At one and the same time, capital creates divisions, skims profits, and then uses these same projects, investments, and profits to play the countries dependent on them off against each other—they use the very raw materials they rely upon the Third World for to oppress the people of the Third World.

''Weapons''

Their weapons consist of the potential of capital, technology, the means of communication and information control, and the means of transportation. Their strategy for conquest is based on investments, transfer of profits, information policy, diversification, marketing, sales planning, and stockpiling. Their occupier or colonial ideology means controlling currency and creating work. Their goal is to assimilate, repress, and rob—the alternative offered is starvation and extermination.

''Oil Investments''

Oil is the primary issue in the states that support the Palestinian liberation movement. 70% of Western Europe’s oil imports come from there. Western Europe’s demand for oil will double by 1985 (1970: 647 million tons). The corporations and their governments are determining their oil policy based on the spectre of revolutionary Arab regimes using this demand for oil to carry through their own industrialization. This would mark the end of oil corporations making profits of more than 100%.

''Algeria's Natural Gas''

American corporations are investing millions of dollars in profit liquefying Algerian natural gas and shipping it by sea, so as to play Algerian natural gas off against that of Libya and against Arab oil: Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia.

''Pipelines''

West European consortiums (Bayerngas—Saarferngas—Gasversorgung Süddeutschland) invest billion-DM sums to build pipelines (1 km costs between 1 and 2 million DM)<ref>Roughly between $364,000 and $728,000.</ref> to transport Algerian natural gas so as to partially reduce their dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

''North Sea Oil''

Oil companies and governments invest billions in oil and natural gas extraction in the North Sea. With regards to development costs, North Sea oil is ten times as expensive as oil from the Persian Gulf—only every sixth drill point is successful, construction and installation expenses for platforms, underwater pipelines. (North Sea oil makes up an estimated 1% of the world reserves; reserves in the Middle East make up 60%.) This is considered preferable to having a flexible approach to the Middle East. According to the European Economic Community (EEC) Europe Committee, “The increasing pressure on Western societies from some oil countries could lead to supply problems in the case of a political crisis”—meaning the problems that corporations will have maintaining their current high rates of profit.

''Australia and Canada''

Regarding raw materials available in Australia and Canada, the economic edition of FAZ wrote with cynical, capitalist bluntness, “The developing countries’ position has deteriorated as a result of the discovery of enormous natural resource reserves in Canada and Australia. The geologically favorable sites in these countries, with their stable governments, lower taxes, and developed industry, have attracted the attention of multinationals from all over the world.”

''The Conference in Santiago de Chile''

In April and May 1972, at the conference in Santiago de Chile, the “developing countries” attempted to establish fixed prices for raw materials. In response to their powerlessness, the FAZ writes, with the condescension and consciousness of a corporate bulletin, “The developing countries overlook the fact that natural resource reserves alone do not constitute wealth. In the final analysis, development, transport, and technical research are more important, and we control an ample share of the world’s reserves of those. It is no accident that the powerful multinational corporations, with their restrictive policies, exercise substantial restraint in their investments in the developing countries.”

''Overexploitation and Stockpiling''

For one thing, the corporations over-exploit the raw materials of the Third World. In Kuwait, for example, the fear is that in 16 years—the oil boom in Kuwait began in 1934—the oil could be exhausted. 95% of Kuwait’s income comes from oil—800 million dollars per year for 740,000 residents. Kuwait, with 12.8% of the world’s annual oil income, has built up the royal treasury—a sort of nest egg. What will they do when the oil and the money is all used up, return to herding sheep? Libya and Venezuela have already reduced their oil production to safeguard their reserves.

At the same time, a policy of stockpiling has been developed in the EEC and the FRG, increasing stocks from 85 to 90 days—Iran’s portion of that is 10 million tons—the FRG needs approximately 133 million tons of oil per year.

The U.S.A. has undertaken a massive conservation program—by 1980, 365 million tons of oil will have been saved—however 770 million tons will still be required. The conservation measures will include shifting commercial transportation from trucks to the railroad, passenger traffic from the air to the ground, and city traffic from automobiles to mass transit.

''Oil and Traffic Related Deaths''

In the FRG, to give one example, the automobile industry has demanded a tribute of 170,000 traffic-related deaths over the past ten years—in the U.S.A., 56,000 deaths are projected for 1972, in the FRG it’s 20,000—all in the service of greater profits for oil and automobile corporations.

This idiotic automobile production will be reduced to create a situation suitable to corporate interests: the wiping out of the liberation movements in the Third World. In this way the obstacle presented by the people of the Third World will be eliminated.

The fear and the circular logic of consumption—the anarchy of capitalist commodity production, which is governed by the market and not the needs of the people—can exceed the limits of the human psyche, especially with the drivel about “quality of life,” for instance. In a situation where everything has been reduced to consumption—“shitty products”—the decline of the masses’ loyalty has already begun. The mass mortality in the streets through the alienation and brutalization of the people is hitting the system in the pocketbook in a way they don’t like.

''Boycott''

The goal is another oil boycott like that of the early 50s against Mossadegh’s<ref>Mohammed Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1951. He quickly began to nationalize Iranian assets including oil. In 1953, he was removed from power by the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in a CIA-backed coup. He died in prison in 1967.</ref> nationalization of Persian oil, which cleared the way for the Shah, that puppet of U.S. imperialism. In response to the nationalization measures in Iraq at that time, Iran quickly stated its willingness to increase annual production from 271 million tons to 400 million tons. This is the kind of government that suits imperialism.

In the 60s, it was hoped that atomic energy would allow for the gradual reduction of dependence on oil as the most important source of energy. By that time—or so it was hoped—high temperature ovens with which coal could be converted to oil would also exist—which was the basis for the talk of the comeback of coal.

The objective of imperialist energy policy is not only to guarantee the continuing theft of oil from the oil-producing nations for all time to come, but also to prevent them from industrializing and establishing their political independence.

''Encirclement Policy''

Regarding the rest of the Middle East, imperialism is hoping its policy of quiet encirclement will succeed.

In the West, they are thoroughly implanted in the Maghreb—Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. West German corporations have invested in mining (raw materials), in the clothing industry (cheap labor), in dam projects (electrical power), and in the automobile industry. Tunisia and Morocco are the main recipients of West German development aid among the Arab states—both countries also receive West German military aid.

In the East and the North, it’s Turkey and Iran. Both countries are also the sites of American military bases. In the context of NATO, the FRG supplies weapons to Turkey. In the context of the free market economy, Siemens has recently been supplying television relay stations, with which the government’s message—“This is the criminal police speaking”—can reach Eastern Turkey.<ref>Turkey’s East is home to the oppressed Kurdish minority, and also bordered on the Soviet Union.</ref> The German enclave in Tehran is well known—the quantity of weapons being provided by West Germany is not.

''Military Bases''

There should be no illusions about the desire to transform the Maghreb in the West and Turkey and Iran in the East from markets into military bases.

And there should certainly be no illusions about what conditions will be like in Algeria in three years if natural gas development by American corporations—that is to say, by big money—has begun and Algeria still attempts to maintain its principled solidarity with the other Arab states. It could only end in disaster.

''Imperialism is the Weapon''

Imperialism is the weapon that the multinational corporations use to address the contradictions between developed countries and the desire for development in the countries they plunder, between states with elected governments and states with CIA-backed governments, between rich and poor countries. Imperialism unifies North and South as the centre and the periphery of a single system.

It is a system that allows the constitutional state to function in much the same way as fascism. It doesn’t eliminate the contradictions, it simply coordinates them, plays them off against one another, integrates them as various interrelated profit-making conditions for their various subsidiaries.

''"Slaves of the System"''

Outwardly, they adjust to the existing conditions—making use of them where possible—creating domestic capital reserves, surrendering middle management to the local population, learning the local language, respecting local laws, all the time using their normative power to establish their control of the market.

The FAZ condescendingly informs “developing countries” that are attempting to protect their mineral resources by reducing mining that they misjudge the marketplace. It informs them that they are actually establishing themselves as slaves of the system if they fail to take note of the “dilemma” created by their own foreign currency needs, on the one hand, and the necessity to protect their natural resources, on the other: “The developing countries, in implementing policies against international natural resource companies, are tying their own hands.”

This imperialism avoids provocation. Where possible, they absorb Third World governments into the facade of their system. They operate within the “confines of their means”—and they have more means at their disposal than any ruling class before them.

''The Means at Their Disposal''

They use illiteracy and hunger to control the people of the Third World; in the metropole, people are made stupid and alienated and are brutalized by television, Springer, and automobile accidents. they saw to the liquidation of the McGovern left. They use torture against the Persian, Turkish, and Palestinian comrades; against the antiimperialist left in West Germany and West Berlin, they use the BAW. In November, following on the heels of the September massacre of Palestinian freedom fighters, they will hold free elections here, having used the spectacle of the Olympic Games to divert attention away from the horror.

This imperialism only reveals its fascist character when it encounters resistance—it has no need for a late capitalist seizure of power. Its historical tendency is towards fascism, towards exploitation and oppression, annihilation, waste, defoliation, the destruction of people, and the plundering of natural resources. It has a greater potential for destruction than any ruling class in history, the potential to leave a wasteland in its wake—wherever there is nothing more to be gained, where everything is devastated, the country and the people—shattered and crippled—Vietnam.

''Black September's Strategy''

The bomb attack on the Strüver Corporation in Hamburg was an attack on one of Israel’s military suppliers.

With their action at the Olympic Village, they brought the conflict between the imperialist metropole of Israel and the Palestinians from the periphery of the system into its centre—they tore off the FRG’s “constitutional” mask and revealed the true objective nature of imperialism’s facade: that they are waging war against the liberation movements of the Third World and that their final objective is strategic extermination and fascism.

Through this action, the Arab people were mobilized for anti-imperialist struggle. They celebrated the revolutionaries as heroes, and their will to struggle received an enormous boost.

That it would have been better to take Genscher hostage is something that Black September itself knows full well.<ref>During negotiations with the Palestinian commando, Minister of the Interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher is reported to have offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the Israeli athletes. The commando is said to have refused this offer. Given Horst Mahler’s comments at his October 1972 trial (see page 188), it seems likely that the raf was attempting an oblique criticism of this decision.</ref> Functioning as it does at a very high level of Marxist theory combined with revolutionary practice, Black September doesn’t need to be told this. The fact is that it would have been better to exchange the Israeli athletes for people who make up the facade of the Social-Liberal Coalition, as this would have destroyed the complicity between Israeli and West German imperialism and isolated Israel. It would have forced the contradiction between the fascism of the developing imperialist system and Israeli Nazi fascism (see the chapter on National Socialism) into the open. It would have made use of the system’s contradictions to split the imperialist forces!

These observations are not meant as a criticism of the action, but rather as an expression of our appreciation of the action. These observations are an excellent example of how practice leads to theoretical development and how theory leads to developments in practice—of the dialectic of theory and practice.

'''2. OPPORTUNISM'''

''Opportunism in the Metropole''

The Marxist bible thumper—equipped with quotes and not thinking any further—will argue that Marx himself said that smashing machines was “stupid.” Marx:<blockquote>''Machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labor, but, when in the service of capital, lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labor, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labor; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of Nature, but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital, makes them paupers…''<ref>Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, chapter 15, volume 5. <nowiki>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S5</nowiki></ref></blockquote>So it is not machinery that should be resisted, but its capitalist application.

On the face of it, it is not clear that everything about imperialist investment policy is intended to eliminate of the Third World liberation movements. “Considered alone” and not as a waste of raw materials and labor power, or as a means of war, one might even speak of military production as being a part of the civilian sector. However, it is meant to reinforce the unequal development between the imperialist centre and the countries of the Third World, which is to say, to reinforce the ongoing rule of the imperialist system.

''Sabotage''

The rejection of sabotage in the metropole, based on the argument that it would be better to take things over instead of destroying them, is based on the dictum: the people of the Third World should wait for their revolution until the masses in the metropole catch up.

This ignores the problem of the labor aristocracy within imperialism, first addressed by Lenin. Furthermore, this demands that the people of the Third World allow all sectors of the world proletariat—most of whom form part of the backbone of the imperialist system—to ride on their coattails. It is the rallying cry of opportunism.

''the Opportunistic Concept of Solidarity''

It’s no surprise that the opportunists no longer know what to do with the concept of solidarity—they betray their claim to leadership with an incorrect analysis of imperialism. They must exclude a section of the disempowered from their concept of solidarity. This is the section that rejects their leadership, and instead turns to the people of the Third World. They must exclude anyone who by “serve the people” doesn’t mean sucking up to the people disempowered by imperialism, but rather means by this that one must struggle against the imperialism which is disempowering people.

''Negt - The Pig''

Negt, who in Frankfurt resurrected Noske’s<ref>Gustav Noske, the SPD Minister responsible for the military during bloody suppression of the November Revolution of 1918, during which communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were killed.</ref> axiom “One must be a bloodhound,” thereby formulated the opportunistic position, with all the jargon, all the contempt for the masses, all the appeals to “the politicians,” and all the pleas for sound, common sense that are fundamental to it. However—like Bernstein<ref name=":1">Eduard Bernstein, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, who helped instigate that party’s rejection of revolutionary Marxism in the late 19th century.</ref><ref name=":1" />—without the slightest hint of an economic analysis.

Given, however, that the problem of opportunism is not objectively a question of the theoretical level he has expressed, it is necessary to engage him in debate. Objectively, it is the result of unequal development within the system, of the inequality in forms of oppression employed by the system and of the inequality of experiences of exploitation under this system.

That Negt has generally been applauded, in spite of the feeble theoretical level of his work, is an objective indication of the pressure that exists here for people to take an opportunistic position. We are dealing with Negt in the hope that his supporters will see what a crock of shit they’re being fed.

''Negt on Solidarity''

Negt: “Mechanical solidarity will destroy socialist politics. It is the worst aspect of the legacy of the protest movement.”

People like to “mechanically” paw for their wallets if they come across someone playing harmonica on the Hauptwache,<ref>The Hauptwache is a popular pedestrian mall in Frankfurt.</ref> and Bertold Beitz<ref>Bertold Beitz, Krupp manager and a member of the National and International Olympic Committee.</ref> feels good about writing a cheque for the ''Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten'' ''in Bethel''.<ref>''Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten'' ''in Bethel'' is a large Bielefeld-based charity</ref> Solidarity is not a reflex action, as anyone who has ever acted in solidarity knows. Or does Negt, with his concept of “mechanics,” also intend to address in a backhanded way the concept of spontaneity?—“spontaneous solidarity”…?

One cannot surpass Negt when it comes to dragging the concept of solidarity through the mud, while at the same time expressing solidarity for all of those who, lacking the necessary courage and psychological stamina, out of fear for themselves, fail to act in solidarity.

''Negt's Fairy Tale''

“Unbidden and often anonymous” they stood at the door—a total lie, nobody ever stood at Negt’s door, at least not without having sent their business card in advance or having used the phone to fill a ''Verfassungsschutz'' tape with babble. There they stood completely unshaven, and then they came in and made a mess of the bathroom. Is that what being revolutionary means? Where do we fit in?

''Opportunistic Arrogance''

Instead of offering an analysis of the connection between wealth here and poverty there—that is to say, an analysis of the system as a unitary whole—Negt renders a judgment based on the alleged power structure, in which he proclaims: “…that political morality is indivisible”— oh, you don’t say—“that those who tolerate or condone the genocide in Vietnam lose the right to speak in the name of democracy”—the Federal Constitutional Court read him the riot act for that one—that should clear that up for him.

''The Principle of Seperation''

Negt makes it his primary task to prevent any awareness of the connection between poverty here and poverty there—to prevent solidarity based on an awareness of this connection. Localizing conflicts is an objective that the system pursues in every way it can.

Negt: “The politicized masses that make up the solidarity movement, the university students, the high school students, and the young workers who have broken with family drudgery and the enforced discipline of the work world and the educational institutions”—(not are emancipated, not are in the process of breaking free, not are going forward, not of wanting more, but “have broken with”)—“gradually lose the ability to have their own experiences”—(the gall of a social worker)—“always putting themselves in a position to be in touch with the most radical positions, thereby establishing a fragile and superficial identity”—(where does he get off attacking those he is talking about with socio-psychological, Youth Authority jargon?)— “based on a shameless identification with the experiences of others.”

So, the people at ''Bild Zeitung'' should only report on what they themselves feel, and only the Viet Cong should celebrate Viet Cong victories. The validity of bombs against the U.S. Headquarters depends on who lays them—or what?

''"The Self-Proclaimed Vanguard"''

Negt: “Self-proclaimed vanguards”—(not appointed by the Minister of Culture, not a legitimate market niche—or what?)—“lay claim to social and historical experiences”—(so the anti-imperialist struggle is not in fact occurring)—“that individual high school students, workers, apprentices, and university students can neither reconcile with their own work environments nor use as the basis for political decisions.”

How then are they supposed to develop an identity? Does Negt believe that ideas develop on their own within the mind? Apparently.

''Dialectical Materialism''

Mao:<blockquote>''Dialectical materialism regards external reality as the condition for change and internal reality as its basis—and in this way external reality conditions internal activity''</blockquote>Meaning: Negt—as external reality—gained applause for his idiotic blather in Frankfurt, because opportunism has deep roots in the metropole. People want “Freedom for Angela Davis”—but they don’t carry out the struggle as relentlessly as the Viet Cong, or as Black September—never that—so great is their despair about the system, so uncertain are they about their cause, that they abandon the cause and embrace hopelessness. Enter Negt, saying that none of that is necessary; we’re already doing what needs to be done—they are relieved, they applaud.

In opposition to this stands the RAF—as sure of our cause as the people of the Third World, because they accept their leadership role, because they know that the struggle must be carried out relentlessly, and that is how they carry it out.

The RAF—as external reality—has found increasing support among high school students, university students, and apprentices. Negt has seen this, even biased “polls” have noted it; the leaflets, slogans, demonstrations, teach-ins, etc.

How could this occur, other than through “internal reality”? If not their own everyday working and living conditions, what else could make them see that only with this perseverance, the same perseverance with which the people of the Third World conduct their struggle, can they achieve the goal—their freedom?

Negt’s scolding proves the opposite of what he asserts; precisely because their experience of living and working conditions—internal reality—leads high school students, apprentices, and university students to begin to understand the situation of the people of the Third World, they identify with the struggle the RAF has conducted in the metropole on their behalf—as external reality.

Were it otherwise, one would not have heard a peep about the RAF, not from Genscher or Ruhnau,<ref>Heinz Runau, SPD Senator for Internal Affairs in Hamburg at the time.</ref> and Negt would have had to be satisfied in Frankfurt with taking a cheap shot out of the side of his mouth at the RAF—or being and consciousness have nothing to do with each other and dialectical materialism is a pipe dream.

We know that it will be an extremely slow, difficult and exhausting process to get things underway in even a few places. That they are, however, in motion indicates that the situation is “ripe” to take up the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole—not “ripe” for revolution, but “ripe” for the anti-imperialist offensive.

Already, at this early stage of “ripeness,” there are comrades who disgrace themselves by losing sight of the realities of their lives and their liberation. Seeing this process at work, we see the system’s continuing appeal in the metropole. That there are comrades who cannot see any purpose to life outside of the liberation struggle attests to how great the appeal of revolution is. Insofar as there is not a single idea, not a thought that does not have its origin in life and in society—positive thoughts, ideas, and people have been thoroughly locked away, cast aside, excluded and treated as insane.

The metropolitan left is beginning to split into a revolutionary, antiimperialist wing and an opportunistic wing. This is not because opportunism has won the struggle on the ground, but because they’ve lost it. They still hope to win this struggle on the ground, even as the left wing gains in strength. Negt’s attacks were a rearguard action. Given that the argument he mounted can only be described as disgraceful, he has helped to unmask opportunism. He has made our work easier.

''Negt as Alexander the Great''

“The knots” of “mechanical solidarity,” “inferiority complexes,” “fear of isolation,” “overblown perceptions of reality,” and “self-delusion” “must be cut” (he’s right about that)—and can no longer be resolved “through polite engagement.”

Which means: allowing the fascists to liquidate the growing left wing of the socialist movement. Which means: Marxist theory and serious discussions constitute “polite engagement”—one is spared socialist discussion with Negt’s fatherly advice and his seminar pedagogy.

Marx and Freud could only say in response to all this: Pardon me?

A complete nut, a truculent, self-confessed petit bourgeois—this Negt. If one did not know that being determines consciousness, one might begin to think that through these thoroughly corrupted rats “corruption has claimed the day.”

''The Objective Role of the Opportunists''

Regarding his own profession, Negt—bluntly—stated: “One should beware of attempts to push left professors and teachers out of the high schools and universities” they being the only ones who, “through routine overtime and small organized groups,” keep this catastrophic institution “running.” The students of the ''Berliner Gegenuniversität''<ref>''Berliner Gegenunivesitaät'', literally Berlin Counter-University, refers to presentations organized by students independent of formal lectures.</ref> fought tooth and nail against exactly this system-stabilizing integration of their work as “overtime”—in this way the opportunistic cat comes out of the seminar Marxist bag.

''The Core: Scholarship for the Bourgeoisie''

Bourgeois scholarship still remains the practical core: “If a fraction of the money spent fighting crime was used to fight the causes of crime, one could count on a long-term impact; a society that cannot guarantee this minimum has lost its authority”—(leave it to Negt and everything will soon be running smoothly).

The investment strategy of multinational corporations is based on this kind of long-term use of money rather than on military adventures.

And to finally accomplish his true goal, Negt tosses the entirety of Marxism-Leninism overboard: “There is no clear and objective criteria for the distinction between right and left.” Why is this stupid pig still called a “socialist”?

Rosa Luxemburg on Bernstein:<blockquote>''What? Is that all you have to say? Not the shadow of an original thought! Not a single idea that was not refuted, crushed, reduced into dust by Marxism several decades ago! It was enough for opportunism to speak out to prove it had nothing to say.''<ref>This quote is from Rosa Luxemburg’s 1900 text, Reform or Revolution, Chapter X: Opportunism and Theory in Practice, available from <nowiki>http://www</nowiki>. marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch10.htm.</ref></blockquote>Negt need only come out into the open for all to see that he is in bed with the fascists—his “qualification,” most probably an “unqualified tool.” (R.L.)

Lenin:<blockquote>''The most dangerous people are those who do not want to understand that the struggle against imperialism is empty and meaningless if it is not unreservedly connected to the struggle against opportunism.''</blockquote>Just as the oppressed themselves could smash this entire “catastrophic institution,” the system could well collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. The consciousness that says we’re all in the same boat, ties opportunism and the system together. They prattle on about socialism, but they mean the system. They ask no questions; they miss the answers. Setbacks for revolutionaries fill them with glee; once again they’ve backed the right horse.

''The Revolutionary Subject''

The problem with opportunism is that by making use of it Negt reveals things about himself, but nothing about the world. Having analyzed the system, the revolutionary subject bases his identity on the knowledge that the people of the Third World are the vanguard, and on an acceptance that Lenin’s concept of the “labor aristocracy” regarding the masses in the metropole cannot be discounted or dismissed. On the contrary: everything starts from that point.

The exploitation of the masses in the metropole has nothing to do with Marx’s concept of wage labourers from whom surplus value is extracted.

It is a fact that with the increasing division of labor, there has been a tremendous intensification and spread of exploitation in the area of production, and work has become a greater burden, both physically and psychologically.

It is also a fact that with the introduction of the 8-hour workday—the precondition for increasing the intensity of work—the system usurped all of the free time people had. To physical exploitation in the factory was added the exploitation of their feelings and thoughts, wishes, and utopian dreams—to capitalist despotism in the factory was added capitalist despotism in all areas of life, through mass consumption and the mass media.

With the introduction of the 8-hour workday, the system’s 24-hour-a-day domination of the working class began its triumphal march— with the establishment of mass purchasing power and “peak income” the system began its triumphal march over the plans, desires, alternatives, fantasies, and spontaneity of the people; in short, over the people themselves!

The system in the metropole has managed to drag the masses so far down into their own dirt that they seem to have largely lost any sense of the oppressive and exploitative nature of their situation, of their situation as objects of the imperialist system. So that for a car, a pair of jeans, life insurance, and a loan, they will easily accept any outrage on the part of the system. In fact, they can no longer imagine or wish for anything beyond a car, a vacation, and a tiled bathroom.

It follows, however, that the revolutionary subject is anyone that breaks free from these compulsions and refuses to take part in this system’s crimes. All those who find their identity in the liberation struggles of the people of the Third World, all those who refuse, all those who no longer participate; these are all revolutionary subjects—comrades.

This is the reason we have analyzed the 24-hour-a-day imperialist system, why we have addressed all of the living and working conditions in this society, the role that the production of surplus value plays in each of them and the connection to factory exploitation, which in any case is really the point. With the supposition: the revolutionary subject in the imperialist metropole is the person who recognizes that a life under the mandatory 24-hour-day is a life under the system’s control— here we have only sketched the outline of the parameters necessary for a class analysis—we are not claiming that this supposition constitutes such an analysis.

The fact is that neither Marx nor Lenin nor Rosa Luxemburg nor Mao had to deal with ''Bild'' readers, television viewers, car drivers, the psychological conditioning of young students, high school reforms, advertising, the radio, mail order sales, loan contracts, “quality of life,” etc. The fact is that the system in the metropole reproduces itself through an ongoing offensive against the people’s psyche, not in an openly fascist way, but rather through the market.

Therefore, to write off entire sections of the population as an impediment to anti-imperialist struggle, simply because they don’t fit into Marx’s analysis of capitalism, is as insane and sectarian as it is un-Marxist.

Only by integrating the 24-hour workday into our understanding of imperialism and anti-imperialism can we get a picture of the actual problems facing the people, so that they will not only understand our actions—and thereby understand the RAF—but also our propaganda, our speech, our words. Serve the people!

If the people of the Third World are the vanguard of the anti-imperialist revolution, then that means that they objectively represent the greatest hope for people in the metropole to achieve their own freedom. If this is the case, then it is our duty to establish a connection between the liberation struggle of the peoples of the Third World and the longing for freedom in the metropole wherever it emerges. This means in grade schools, in high schools, in factories, in families, in prisons, in office cubicles, in hospitals, in head offices, in political parties, in unions—wherever. Against everything that openly negates, suppresses, and destroys this connection: consumerism, the media, co-management, opportunism, dogmatism, authority, paternalism, brutality, and alienation.

“This means us!” We are revolutionary subjects.

Whoever begins to struggle and to resist is one of us.

The answer to the question of how and at what level to struggle against the system, where best to apply pressure when one is at one’s weakest point—we’ve answered this question—is not to be found in a stream of slogans, but rather in the dialectic of theory and practice.

'''3. FASCISM'''

''The Black September action was antifascist''

They established the connection between Nazi fascism and the direction in which imperialism is developing.

''The Olympic Games''

They clearly established this connection by attacking the Olympic Games, from which all reminders of 1936, Auschwitz, and Kristallnacht<ref>Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was an enormous pogrom against German Jews on the part of the Nazis and their supporters on the night of November 9/10, 1938.</ref> were to be excluded. The games were meant to serve as a spectacle distracting attention from what is currently going on in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Israel’s prisons, in Turkey, in Uruguay, in Brazil, in Greece, and in Persia. Insofar as these grueling contests have only winners and losers, they are the opposite of liberation struggles, of acts of solidarity. Instead they are competitions/struggles to reinforce imperialist consciousness in the industrialized nations—games of aggression.

''Bild''

“GOLD-GOLD-GOLD,” ''Bild'' panted, badgered, wheezed, and nagged during the first days of the Olympic Games. “I saw you fade away at 11:00 pm—how will the games continue,” was ''Bild''’s headline on September 7.

Do you want total victory—Yesssss!

''The Athletes''

This is not directed against the athletes. Those who hope to win the competitions have trained for years. They are not the ones who give the Olympic Games the character of an imperialist event. They are connected to the games like a wage laborer to capitalism—without them nothing happens, but they are objects in a spectacle, objects of Neckermann’s ''Sporthilfe''.<ref>Josef Neckermann was a successful Frankfurt-based businessman and horse trainer and founder of the ''Stiftung Deutsche Sporthilfe'' (German Benevolent Sports Association).</ref> That the athletes enjoy what they’re doing changes nothing.

''National Socialism''

National Socialism was nothing other than the political and military precursor to the imperialist system of the multinational corporations.

The ruling class—and especially the German ruling class—is so rapacious that, lead by the Flick, Thyssen, Krupp, and IG Farben corporations,<ref>All are major corporations that participated in and profited from National Socialism’s reign in Germany. All of them continue to flourish.</ref> it hoped to achieve, in conditions that were not yet ripe, that which they managed to achieve later anyway. They formed an uneasy alliance with the old, declining petit bourgeoisie, and they bought into the irrational and deadly antisemitism. Instead of relying on their shareholders, as should have been the case, they developed the imperialist middle class to meet the corporations’ extreme demand for capital—they formed an alliance with the retrograde and ideologically backwards Nazi Party. Instead of waiting to grow strong enough to subjugate peoples and countries without military adventures, they started the Second World War. Antisemitism and war compromised German fascism in the long run, once again completely unmasking the ruling class in the eyes of the masses—and making possible an antifascist alliance between communists and a section of the bourgeoisie.

''Antifascism''

It was this domestic and foreign antifascism that effectively prevented the expansion of West German imperialism. It is antifascist sensitivity to injustice, transgression, state brutality and executive arrogance that has forced this state to maintain a constitutional form.

Just as imperialism has a fascist tendency, antifascism has an anti-imperialist tendency.

For a section of antifascist sympathizers, the RAF has brought the anti-imperialist struggle up to date. The §129 trials at the beginning of the 50s and the ban on the KPD had the effect of separating the KP from their own antifascism and of dismantling their alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie. Liquidating what remained of antifascism in the SPD and amongst the intelligentsia was a significant challenge for the Brandt/Scheel/Heinemann administration. Antifascism was still a part of the 1967-1968 APO, and was supported by the student movement, in the Republican Clubs, at Vietnam demonstrations, and in the movement against the Emergency Powers legislation and police terror.

''The Antiauthoritarian Position''

That the leaders of the student movement are themselves shying away from their anti-imperialist consciousness is a reflection of their revisionism. The positions of the antiauthoritarian movement were clearly anti-imperialist: June 2, Vietnam, Springer, and opposition to the development of West German imperialism, of which the final step in the postwar FRG was the formation of the Grand Coalition.

This movement proved itself to be primarily petit bourgeois when it stripped its political theory of anti-imperialist consciousness, as soon as the first shots were fired. Shots which were not just fired by a single private fascist (Kurras), but rather were the result of systematic imperialist terror—directed at Dutschke, cheered on by Springer<ref>This is a retort to Negt, who at the Angela Davis Congress in Frankfurt had referred to Kurras as a lone gun-nut, and to the June 2, 1967, shooting as an isolated tragedy that did not represent state policy.</ref>

They began to compensate for their obvious powerlessness through organizational fetishism—their decline into a dogmatic and pathologically competitive closed circle that only reproduced the structures of the ruling system, alienation, a know-it-all attitude, and indifference to oppression. They express a hatred of spontaneity equal to that of the system itself, and with their “party chairmen”—Marxism’s guardians of the grail—they turn the proletariat into an object of their leadership aspirations. They see in the masses nothing but what the system has made them: Bild readers, television viewers, car nuts, tourists, SPD voters, Germans—as the squares (already a classic) always ask: “What do the people say?”

The narrow-minded nation-state perspective of the opportunist left is petit bourgeois. It fails to recognize or acknowledge that the people of the Third World are the vanguard and that the struggle in the metropole is the struggle of international brigades of the people’s war in Quang Tri and Hue,<ref>Refers to areas in the far North of the former Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) that became important staging points for communist guerillas from the North during the Vietnam War.</ref> Palestine, Lebanon, Angola, Mozambique, and Turkey, without which no advances will be made. It is also petit bourgeois and un-Marxist to not recognize that the masses here will eventually find their political identity on the side of the liberation struggles, and will eventually free themselves from the grip of the system, with its lies, its glitziness, its election promises, and its lotteries.

Petit bourgeois impatience led to them giving up their anti-imperialist position after one disappointing year in which the student movement failed to win the support of the proletariat and discovered that Springer could not be expropriated quickly and without further ado.

''Anarchism - A Reproach''

Some dismiss the antiauthoritarian movement as anarchist and the international anti-imperialist struggle as anarchist internationalism. In so doing the system’s only objective is denunciation—when people mount this sort of dogmatic argument, they are not drawing their conclusions from an analysis of the system and its process of development, but from a chemical analysis of explosives—from historical analogies based on nothing—a case in point: Harich.<ref>Wolfgang Harich, an academic from the GDR, who for a time in the late 70s lived in Austria and the FRG, where he worked with the Green Party before returning to the GDR.</ref>

Neither the actual socio-economic conditions nor the conception of the state held by earlier anarchists—from Blanqui to Kropotkin—(the Makhno movement<ref>An early twentieth century anti-Soviet, anarchist guerilla army active in Ukraine</ref> and Spanish anarcho-syndicalism are not targeted as such in this critique) have the slightest thing to do with the objective conditions or subjective positions of the antiauthoritarian movement or the RAF. And this is equally true in the case of comrades who refer to themselves as anarchists. They are clearly anti-imperialist—overflowing with distrust for all the “Marxists” who patronize them and hope to subjugate them on the basis of nothing more than bourgeois educational advantages. Their antiauthoritarian characteristics allow them to keep their distance from this paternalism.

The old anarchist concepts are no longer useful—not in the form they had when Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg purged them from the Social Democratic movement—and correctly so. Not in the form that Blanqui, Bakunin, Most, and Kropotkin developed them— immature ideas in an unripe situation.

The legal left completely lacks any critical self-awareness if it compares its tiny mass base to the mass base behind the anti-imperialist struggle. No progress can be made this way. They hope to force us into a discussion by raising the issue of anarchism, but with the problems we have before us, this is just a distraction.

Whether the old anarchists’ understanding of the authority structure anticipated capital’s rule over the people that first developed with imperialism—their understanding of work certainly anticipated the concept of freedom put forward in the anti-imperialist struggle—should be subject to analysis—it could be the case.

''Integration''

To integrate the KP, it was necessary only to ban them, and for the integration of the bourgeois antifascists, the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties sufficed—the student movement required only an amnesty—a cheap bribe.

''The Foolishness of the Left''

The petit bourgeois, spiteful, nit-picking blather that comrades are engaging in about Munich is an example of this foolishness, and Genscher will turn it against them. So it goes. What is expressed here is not the political consciousness of Marxists, but rather the pique of bit players— “It’s all about me!”

''Fürstenfeldbruck and the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties''

The Fürstenfeldbruck massacre would not have been possible without the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties, without the complete demoralization of the old antifascists and extreme opportunism in those sections of the New Left that let themselves be sidetracked by the ML and AO<ref>AO is an acronym for AusBildung Organisation, roughly translating as “formation organization,” and was used by Marxist-Leninist organizations in Germany that did not yet consider themselves to be parties, but held the goal of eventually forming a party. In North America, such groups were called pre-party formations.</ref> deviation—completely blind now, as compared to their terrible clarity in 1967/68.

Not even Strauß, but only Schmidt,<ref>Franz Josef Strauß was head of the right-wing CSU in Bavaria, where the Munich events took place. Helmut Schmidt, who would become Chancellor in 1974, was at this point the SPD Minister of Defense.</ref> could have committed the crimes at Fürstenfeldbruck: sending the fire brigade of West German imperialism onto an American NATO base to offer Israel support—for their torture, their murders, the oppression, the napalm, the land stolen from the Palestinian people.

Not even Dregger, but only Scheel’s party comrade Genscher,<ref>Alfred Dregger was a CDU politician from the conservative and nationalist section of the party. At the time, Genscher was the Minister of the Interior from the small liberal FDP.</ref> could arrange for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the FRG; Palestinians who are here because of the nationalist extermination policy, which has become the Israeli extermination policy. A public policy couldn’t be more clearly morally bankrupt, devoid as it is of historical content, acquiescing without once reflecting upon how extreme the hate will be on the part of those who once again must suffer the retaliation.

''The Social-Liberal Coalition and''

Since the SPD entered the government coalition in 1966, more elements of “democracy” have been eliminated than under all of the CDU governments of the previous 17 years; the Emergency Powers Act, the Hand Grenade Law, the ''Verfassungsschutzgesetz'',<ref>The ''Verfassungsschutzgesetz'' was a law passed by the SPD-FDP coalition in 1972; it extended the purview of the ''Verfassungsschutz'', the police organization central to the struggle against the guerilla.</ref> the Presidential Decree,<ref>The Presidential Decree here referred to here is the statute that established the ''Berufsverbot''.</ref> Federal Labor Court rulings against strikes, and the Federal Border Patrol Law.

Disoriented by their fear of Strauß, a section of the left will only realize that they have already had their vocal cords—which they require for whining—ripped out should Strauß take over these instruments which have in fact been crafted by the Social-Liberal coalition.

But Strauß couldn’t knock off more people than the comrades<ref>A sarcastic reference to the SPD, which was the leading government in parliament when each of the events listed occurred.</ref> have: McLeod’s liquidation, the deportation of Arabs, Prinzregentenstraße,<ref>In 1971, police opened fire on bank robbers holding hostages at a bank on Prinzegerntenstraße in Munich. Two hostages were killed. Strauß was personally present when this occurred.</ref> Löwenthal, Bild, show trials, police operations. The policies of the Social-Liberal Coalition are the policies of the corporations; their opinion is the opinion of the Springer corporation; their foreign policy is the foreign policy of Wolff von Amerongen, Beitz, Messerschmidt, BölkowBlohm, Siemens, Hochtief, Schickedanz, and Gelsenberg AG; their domestic policy is the domestic policy of Daimler-Benz, Glanzstoff, Klöckner, Bayer in Leverkusen; their high school education policy comes from BASF.<ref>All the companies mentioned in this paragraph are major German corporations.</ref>

It’s not a question of parliamentary democracy (Brandt) on one side and fascism (Strauß) on the other, but rather it is a question of the imperialist centre on one side and on the other side the revolutionary liberation struggle of the people of the Third World along with the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole—not to give this or any other government a kick in the ass, but rather to serve the people.

''Acceptable Imperialism''

The Social-Liberal Coalition has made West German imperialism acceptable for the bourgeois left, with its obsession with form—they see the application of imperialist policy as responding to the people’s wishes—they work within “reasonable parameters,” they speak the national language, they make use of parliamentary debate in the same way that they make use of BGS terror troops—they use constitutional means in the same way that they use fascism.

The anti-imperialist left had it easier with Strauß. He at least wore the disconcerting garb of colonial and Nazi imperialism, not the friendly mask of the corporate manager. He had the fucked relationship to power of Thyssen, Flick, and Krupp in 1933,<ref>Major German corporations that supported the Nazi rise to power.</ref> not the evolved self-consciousness of a multinational corporation. He would have been heckled had he entered the factories. He not only sowed hatred, he reaped it.

THE "RIGHT WING TAKEOVER"

The “right-wing takeover” is a bugaboo created out of thin air by the left of the SPD, the chant of brainless opportunists devoid of theory, directed against the anti-imperialist left—their way of covering up the fact that Brandt and Strauß are simply two different masks on the same imperialist system.

The flipside of this is the ideology that considers the masses to be hopeless and stupid—the best example being the filthy journalism of the Springer corporation and the organization of the newsstands, which is to say, the concentration of the media.

'''4. ANTI-IMPERIALIST ACTION'''

''The Massacre''

Brandt, Genscher, Merck, Schreiber, Vogel, Daume, Brundage,<ref>Leading politicians and police representatives who participated in the decisions that led to the massacre at the Fürstenfeldbruck airport.</ref> and all the others who make up imperialism’s cast of characters didn’t pause for a moment to consider agreeing to the revolutionaries’ demand for the release of prisoners. Even before Golda Meir was informed and had taken a position, they had already on their own considered how best to massacre the revolutionaries—with gas or storm troopers or a precision strike or whatever else.<ref>Genscher in consultation with police chief Schreiber had considered sending in tear gas through the Olympic Village air conditioning, and also storming the Israeli dorms with regular police officers. Both plans were rejected as unlikely to succeed.</ref>

All delays to the ultimatum, reached through lies and false promises, served to allow them to reach their sole objective, to win time to plan the massacre. They had only one goal, not to prove in any way inferior to the fascism of Moshe Dayan—Israel’s Himmler.

The September 7 reports from the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior— the first reports were less clear than what followed—consisted of nothing but rhetoric and assertions that it is in fact possible to be a pig just like Moshe Dayan, that everything was planned to resemble his underhanded action against the hijackers in Tel Aviv,<ref>A reference to the fact that the paratroopers Dayan had led in May at Lod airport had been disguised as maintenance workers, whereas the assault team which had been ordered to take out the commando at Fürstenfeldbruck (see page 234, fn 1) were to be disguised as flight attendants.</ref> that everything had been done to spring the same kind of brutal trap on the revolutionaries—truly tragic, tragic…

That Genscher went so far as to guarantee the exchange of hostages on September 6 at 8 in the morning in Cairo is concealed in the West German reports—this was first made public by the leader of the Egyptian Olympic delegation.

Foreign imperialist countries were horrified by the Germans’ incompetence. Once again they had failed to liquidate the communists without also liquidating the Jews.

Israel cried crocodile tears. Isreal burned their own athletes just as the Nazis had burned the Jews—kindling for the imperialist policy of extermination. They won’t even bother to use Munich as a pretext if they now bomb Palestinian villages—they will do what the imperialist system always does: they will bomb the liberation movement. They bomb because the Arab people have embraced the Black September action, because the masses understand the action; their enemy is not only Israel, their enemy is imperialism. It is not only Israel that is bloodthirsty, nor is it only the U.S. in the case of Vietnam, but rather it is all of imperialism against all of the liberation movements. They understand that without an anti-imperialist struggle there can be no victory for the people’s war.

''The Establishment Unmasked''

The West German establishment has unmasked itself—the more they assert themselves, the more the system’s inherent contradictions have proven what this means in the context of developing imperialism: phony campaigns, the social substance of which is a lot of blah blah blah.

The ''Rundschau'' demands the immediate dissolution of all Palestinian organizations in the FRG and the expulsion of all members, again making liberal use of old ''Bild'' arguments from the days of the student movement—“our taxes.” The formulation from the FAZ references to Habash<ref>George Habash, Secretary General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) at the time.</ref>—frothing at the mouth—in the style of the Mainzer ''Baader Meinhof Report''<ref>A farcically hysterical “study” of the RAF produced in 1972 by the BKA, the Bonn Security Group, and the Baader-Meinhof Special Commission. The ''Allgemeinen Zeitung Mainz'', a German regional newspaper based in Mainz, serialized it in its pages.</ref>—he is obviously a cynical man suffering from an inferiority complex. Wischnewski<ref>Hans Jürgen Wischnewski was a long-time SPD politician, known for his good relations with many Arab leaders, one result of his having firmly supported the Algerian National Liberation Front at a time when Adenauer had firmly supported the French.</ref> wants to expel “all Arabs” whose governments support the Palestinians. Augstein<ref>Rudolph Augstein, founder and editor of ''Spiegel'' magazine.</ref> demands painful “sanctions.” Nannen<ref>Henri Nannen, editor of the German newsweekly ''Stern''.</ref> presents ''Stern'' readers with the order of the day: immediate expulsion, a Lufthansa boycott of Arab airports, “not a penny” of development aid or trade credit. Scheel speaks for the “civilized section” of humanity. Heinemann demands that Arab governments act as representatives of the World Court.

In the long run, this overblown outburst in the Springer Press will prove to be as useless as the authorities’ information strategy before and in the first hours following the massacre.<ref>Immediately following the Fürstenfeldbruck showdown, the government announced that all of the Israeli athletes had been rescued unharmed. This news was then broadcast around the world. The rationale for this escapes our comprehension.</ref> When Brandt telephoned Sidki, the Egyptian President, he still believed he could screw around with the revolutionaries in the same way he does with the West German left. He didn’t understand what they wanted. He claimed he didn’t need to know, as everyone must surely agree that they were criminals, anarchists, subhumans, sick, or whatever else. They would be disposed of with no questions asked. Sidki hung up.<ref>Sidki had been contacted to see if the Egyptian government would agree to receive the hostages and the Palestinian commando, the FRG’s goal being to get them out of the country. Sadat’s government later explained that to do so would have done nothing to resolve the crisis, and would have meant simply making it Egypt’s problem.</ref>

Genscher, Merck, Schreiber did not think they would have to admit the embarrassing truth, that they themselves caused the death of the hostages. They thought they would have time to make up a story and people would quickly lose interest, as was ultimately the case with the self-defense version of the assassinations of Petra Schelm, Georg von Rauch, and Thomas Weissbecker.

Right from the start, Genscher thought he could shift the blame to the Bavarians, repeating the approach used to shift the blame for McLeod’s death onto the Stuttgart cops.

The Munich Prosecutors Office thought they would be able to raise a smokescreen to block investigations and deny journalists information. They intended to draw upon the counterpropaganda they’ve been using against the RAF for two years, claiming that there really is no anti-imperialist struggle, that it is only an illusion—to the left of the Social-Liberal Coalition, there is nothing but crackpots, anarchists, criminals, and sick people.

''Eppler''<ref>Erhard Eppler, SPD member and left-leaning Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation from 1968 until 1974.</ref>

The tactically appropriate position, the position required to serve the immediate interests of the FRG, was developed by Eppler: no blanket judgment, no sanctions, continuing development aid, though only in the Maghreb in keeping with the imperialist policy of encirclement, undermining through investments, etc. Those who are prepared to allow the theft of their oil, their mineral resources, and their labor force, will benefit from friendship between nations and partnership.

''Their Unmasking''

Black September stripped the mask off of the Social-Liberal Coalition and their propagandists by forcing the system’s real, rather than the purported, contradiction out into the open. The contradiction between imperialism and the people of the Third World forced them at a certain point to abandon their original goals and intentions, because they could clearly no longer be achieved. The cops wouldn’t play along, refusing to carry out the massacre on the plane.<ref>Twenty minutes before the Palestinian commando arrived at Fürstenfeldbruck, police abandoned their posts inside the Boeing plane, claiming that the mission they had been given was suicidal.</ref> The news media wouldn’t play along. Foreign powers wouldn’t play along. The West German masses weren’t consulted. The Arab people for the most part grasped what West Germany represented: the imperialist policy of extermination.

Unmasking them means forcing them to take the step after next before they have time to take the next one, forcing them to abandon their goals, so that everyone can see what has been going on for a long time now. Pressure must be brought to bear while the revolutionary left is still able to mount a counterstrategy, not after everyone has been banned and fired and is sitting in prison. Unmasking them means forcing the contradictions out into the open, clarifying laws governing trade, seizing the initiative while it’s still possible, not waiting until it becomes impossible.

It is childish to imagine or to assert that the system can once again use ruling class control of the press and the fundamental unity of the establishment to hide behind a smokescreen, and that lacking a smokescreen it might actually collapse, and that therefore whoever contributes to the smokescreen contributes to the system’s preservation. The anti-imperialist struggle doesn’t take place at the level of election campaigns and detergent ads.

''Anti-Imperialist Consciousness''

The propaganda target of anti-imperialist action is the dialectical relationship between being and consciousness, because the masses’ loyalty to the system is based on their accepting its pretty exterior, its promises, and its lies. Their loyalty to the system is based on its capacity to discourage all spontaneity in its quest to completely assimilate the masses into the “the silent bondage of the relationship” (Marx), which it forces the masses to accept as if it were only natural. Anti-imperialist action rips apart the system’s facade and manipulation, along with the loyalty of the masses, and forces it to admit the truth, about which the masses say, as always, “This is not what we wanted.” That they would then act to put an end to the horror of the system, which has long been apparent, is not the madness the opportunists make it out to be.

Who wanted the Fürstenfeldbruck massacre? The athletes who were dragged away from the Olympics didn’t want it. The aggrieved and frightened people who experienced the aftermath and who felt the enormous cold-bloodedness of the IOC and the Springer Press didn’t want it. It would be idiotic to believe that the revolutionaries wanted it. They wanted the release of the prisoners. They wanted what millions in this country still want: not to be tortured—just as political prisoners here don’t want to be tortured—and an end to the theft of land, the murder, the napalming and the bombing terror Israel carries out against the Palestinian refugees. And that is why they were massacred. Because success would have meant an unimaginably higher level of identification with them and their revolution—with their “humanity,” their rage, their solidarity—which would have been a setback.

Anti-imperialist consciousness attempts to prevent the perfection of imperialist rule from being firmly established. The masses are assaulted by ''Bild'' everyday. They are swamped on every side with prefabricated positions and postulations, making it difficult for them to express their actual pain and suffering.

''"Terror"''

The RAF’s actions are directed towards developing anti-imperialist consciousness. The system’s cast of characters understand that. They have understood that this form of struggle gradually builds a mass base, because resistance that grows slowly more powerful and more courageous cannot easily be defeated.

With the tactic of phony bomb threats—used against Stuttgart—they have turned their full attention to addressing this problem. They do this after failing to achieve any breakthroughs, even though they have raided hundreds of houses, scoured thousands of kilometres of streets, and released a million media appeals directed at RAF sympathizers. With the tactic of phony bomb threats and the simultaneous banning of statements from RAF prisoners from the media, the cops themselves are trying to create chaos, which is intended to lead to calls for greater law and order. The socialist left proved incapable of telling the difference between genuine and false bomb threats, although all of the genuine ones were directed against the ruling class and aimed to clear buildings and disrupt the ruling class’s establishments, cultural venues, communication structures, and media outlets—only the Stuttgart threat was directed against the people and was openly fascist and hostile to the masses.

The anti-imperialist war turns the system’s weapons against the system itself—the counterrevolutionary terrorizes the people. The legal left—confused by the police actions—has ceded the issue to the opportunists (Negt).

(What needs to be said in detail about the June and July arrests, the imprisoned comrades must say themselves.)

''Black September''

The Black September action in Munich leaves no room for misunderstanding. They took hostages from a people who are carrying out an extermination policy against them. They put their lives on the line to free their comrades. They didn’t want to die. They put off their ultimatum. In the face of the uncompromising attitude advocated by Israel, they held the Israeli hostages prisoner. The Israeli hostages understood that this was a last resort. They were betrayed by the German authorities just as the revolutionaries were. The German police massacred the hostages and the revolutionaries.

The Black September action in Munich will live on in the memory of the anti-imperialist struggle.

The death of the Arab comrades weighs as heavily as Mount Tai.

THE STONES THAT THESE BEASTS THREW AT FÜRSTENFELDBRUCK WILL FALL AT THEIR OWN FEET!

SOLIDARITY WITH THE LIBERATION STRUGGLE OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!

SOLIDARITY WITH THE VIETNAMESE REVOLUTION!

REVOLUTIONARIES OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!

RAF

November 1972

== 7 - Staying Alive: Sensory Deprivation, Torture, and the Struggle Behind Bars ==
<blockquote>''By 1972, practically the whole founding generation of the RAF were behind bars. Yet there was still a second generation and a third generation. Why? Primarily because of the conditions of imprisonment and state-organized terror''

Dieter Kunzelmann

former K.1 Communard<ref>''Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.''</ref> </blockquote>Having captured the ideological leadership of the RAF, the West German state set in motion the second element of their counterinsurgency project: one which would eventually become known as the “Stammheim Model.” The mere incarceration of the guerilla was insufficient. Those captured were to be rendered ineffective not only as combatants, but also as spokespeople for the anti-imperialist resistance. If at all possible, they were to be deconstructed as human beings and reconstructed as representatives of the counterinsurgency project. If this was not possible, at a bare minimum, they were to be destroyed.

The state’s weapon on this terrain was complete and total isolation of the prisoners, both from each other and from the outside world.

As early as June 7, 1972, the importance of isolation was enunciated by Horst Ehmke, the SPD minister responsible for coordinating intelligence operations. “We all… have an interest in completely breaking all solidarity [with the RAF], to isolate them from all others with radical opinions in this country,” Ehmke told the Bundestag. “That is the most important task.”<ref>Statement to Bundestag, June 7, 1972, quoted in ''Texte des prisonniers de la “fraction armée rouge” et dernières lettres d’Ulrike Meinhof'', Draft Version, Cahiers Libres 337 (Paris: François Maspero).</ref>

The prisoners were scattered around the country.<ref>For instance, Andreas Baader was in Schwalmstadt (Düsseldorf), Gudrun Ensslin in Essen, Holger Meins in Wittlich (Cologne), Irmgard Möller in Rastatt (Baden), Gerhard Müller in Hamburg, Jan-Carl Raspe in Cologne, and Horst Mahler in Moabit (West Berlin). (Aust, 231.)</ref> While they would all be targeted by the state, particular pains were taken to attack those who were considered the five ringleaders: Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe.

Andreas Baader was held in total isolation from the day of his arrest on June 1, 1972, until November 11, 1974. In that entire time, he did not see another prisoner.

As of April 11, 1973, Holger Meins was held in Wittlich prison in solitary isolation, with the cells above, below, to the left, and to the right of him kept empty. His cell was searched daily, he was denied all group activities, including church services,<ref>RAF members’ desire to attend church services was not due to any religiosity, although in their youth Meinhof, Ensslin, and Meins had all been quite devout. Rather, these services provided one of the only places where they could meet with and be amongst other prisoners.</ref> and he was shackled whenever he left his cell.

Ulrike Meinhof was put in the so-called “dead wing” at Cologne-Ossendorf prison,<ref>The formulation used in Germany is to put the city name first, and then the name of the prison. So Cologne-Ossendorf refers to Ossendorf prison in the city of Cologne.</ref> where Astrid Proll had previously been held. In order to ensure the women remained separate, Proll was transferred to the men’s wing.

The “dead wing” was intended not only to isolate, but also to induce a breakdown through sensory deprivation torture. It consisted of a specially soundproofed cell painted bright white with a single grated window covered with fine mesh, so that even the sky could not be viewed properly. The cell was lit twenty-four hours a day with a single bald neon light. It was forbidden for the prisoner to hang photographs, posters, or anything else on the walls. All other cells in the wing were kept vacant, and when other prisoners were moved through the prison—for instance, to the exercise yard—they were obliged to take a circuitous route so that even their voices could not be heard. The only minimal contact with another human being was when food was delivered; other than that, the prisoner spent twenty-four hours a day in a world with no variation.

The use of sensory deprivation had been studied by doctors in Canada and the United States since the late 1950s, the line of research being taken up in the FRG by Dr. Jan Gross of Hamburg’s Eppendorf University Hospital. Studies carried out by Gross found that sensory deprivation consistently caused feelings of unease ranging from fear to panic attacks, which could progress to an inability to concentrate, problems of perception (including hallucinations), vegetative disorders including feelings of intense hunger, chest pains, disequilibrium, trouble sleeping, trembling, and even convulsions.<ref>Sjef Teuns, “La Torture par Privation Sensorielle,” ''in à propos du procès BaaderMeinhof, Fraction Armée Rouge : de la torture dans les prisons de la RFA'', Klaus Croissant (ed.) (Paris : Christian Bourgeois Éditeur, 1975), 65-66.</ref>

(It is worth noting that just as research into isolation was not limited to the FRG, many prisoners in the United States today are also subjected to various forms of isolation clearly intended as a form of torture.)<ref>Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, “The People’s Tribunal to Expose the Crimes of the Control Units”; Dr. Mutulu Shakur et al., “Genocide Waged Against the Black Nation Through Behavior Modification/Orchestrated by Counterinsurgency and Low-Intensity Warfare in the U.S. Penal System.” Both reprinted in Matt Meyer, ed. ''Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners'' (Montreal/Oakland: Kersplebedebpm Press, 2008.) Also: Russell Maroon Shoatz, Death by Regulation: Pennsylvania Control Unit Abuses (Montreal: Kersplebedeb 2008).</ref>

Astrid Proll had been held in the dead wing for two periods, from November 1971 to January 1972 and from April 1972 to June 1972. She would later describe this experience:<blockquote>''…I was taken to an empty wing, a dead wing, where I was the only prisoner. Ulrike Meinhof later called it the “Silent Wing”. The shocking experience was that I could not hear any noises apart from the ones that I generated myself. Nothing. Absolute silence. I went through states of excitement, I was haunted by visual and acoustic hallucinations. There were extreme disturbances of concentration and attacks of weakness. I had no idea how long this would go on for. I was terrified that I would go mad.''<ref>Proll, 11.</ref></blockquote>After four and a half months of this torture, Proll’s physical and mental health were so badly damaged that she could hardly walk. When she was brought to trial in September 1973, the court ordered her examined by a heart specialist, a man who happened to be a former POW from Russia: he testified that her condition reminded him of the prisoners interned in Siberia.<ref>Ibid., 12.</ref> The state was obliged to release her to a sanitarium in the Black Forest where she stayed for a year and then escaped, making her way to England.

Even when recaptured years later, she remained scarred by her ordeal, as she wrote in 1978:<blockquote>''During the 2½ years of remand I was 4½ months completely isolated in the Dead Wing of Cologne-Ossendorf. Not even today, six years later, have I completely recovered from that. I can’t stand rooms which are painted white because they remind me of my cell. Silence in a wood can terrify me, it reminds me of the silence in the isolated cell. Darkness makes me so depressive as if my life were taken away. Solitude causes me as much fear as crowds. Even today I have the feeling occasionally as if I can’t move.''<ref>Friends of Astrid Proll, ''Astrid Proll: The Case Against Her Extradition'' (London: 1978), 8. It is worth remembering that she was being charged with attempted murder for shooting at police, an incident that the state already knew had not happened, thanks to the surveillance reports of its own intelligence agents. Cf 60. 3 Aust, 246.</ref> </blockquote>Ulrike Meinhof was held in these conditions for 237 days following her arrest on June 15, 1972, and for shorter periods in December 1973 and February 1975. After eight months of this torture, she wrote:<blockquote>''I finally realized I had to pull myself out of this, I myself had no right to let these frightful things keep affecting me—it was my duty to fight my way out of it. By whatever means there are of doing that in prison: daubing the walls, coming to blows with a cop, wrecking the fitments, hunger strike. I wanted to make them at least put me under arrest, because then you get to hear something—you don’t have a radio babbling away, only the bible to read, maybe no mattress, no window, etc.—but that’s a different kind of torture from not hearing anything. And obviously it would have been a relief to me…''<ref>Aust, 246.</ref></blockquote>Through it all, she would remain unbroken.

Having failed to destroy Meinhof through such severe isolation, the state moved to directly and medically attack her brain. On the basis of an operation she had undergone in 1962 to correct a swollen blood vessel in her brain, Federal Prosecutor Peter Zeis theorized that her political behavior might be the result of some neurological problem.

In a letter dated April 18, 1973, Zeis asked the right-wing<ref>Formerly associated with the Nazi regime, Witter had publicly opposed the payment of reparations to victims of the Holocaust.</ref> director of the University of Homburg-Saar’s Institute for Forensic Medicine and Psychiatry, Dr. Hermann Witter, to ascertain what interventions might prove necessary. In a letter dated May 10, Witter responded that he felt both x-rays and a scintigraphy—a routine and normally harmless diagnostic test which involves the injection of radioisotopes—would be required to establish a diagnosis. On July 13, Federal Supreme Court Judge Knoblich ruled that the state could proceed with these tests, even against Meinhof’s will, and with the use of constraining devices or anesthesia if she resisted.<ref>Commission internationale d’enquête sur la mort d’Ulrike Meinhof. ''La Mort d’Ulrike Meinhof: Rapport de la Commission international d’enquête'' (Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1979), 78-79</ref> Correspondence between Witter and the Attorney General indicates that an appropriate diagnosis would have been used to mandate neurosurgery, regardless of the prisoner or her relatives’ wishes.<ref>In this volume see the interview with ''Le Monde Diplomatique'', pages 410-412.</ref>

All of this was a transparent attempt to discredit the RAF by pathologizing Meinhof: “It would be so embarrassing,” Zeis mused at the time, “if it turned out that all the people began to follow a mad woman.”<ref>“Political Internment in the FRG,” in ''War on the War Makers'', 27.</ref>

It was only through public protests organized by the prisoner support group Red Aid, which mobilized many doctors, that the government was forced to drop its plan.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 131, 133.</ref> Yet as we shall see, this was not the last time that the state would seek to score a propaganda victory by attacking and discrediting the woman who was routinely described as the RAF’s chief theoretician.

On top of imposing internal isolation, the state did all it could to cut the prisoners off from the outside world. They were limited to visits from lawyers and family members. Visits from family members were overseen by two state security employees who recorded all conversations, the contents of which could be introduced at trials, sometimes followed by analysis from a psychologist. Political letters, books, and packages were routinely withheld.

Starting in 1975, everyone arrested under §129 in connection with “political crimes” would be held under the so-called “24-Point Program.” This formalized many of the conditions that had been imposed unevenly up until then, while also adding new restrictions. The program specified, among other things, that the prisoners were banned from all common activities. The prisoners now received one hour of solitary yard time each day, which was immediately interrupted if they failed to heed an order, insulted a staff person, or caused any damage. The prisoners were permitted to keep twenty books in their cells. Visits were limited to people cleared by the authorities, and could only last a maximum of thirty minutes (the standard was two such visits a month). It was prohibited to discuss activities of the so-called “terrorist scene” or its support groups (the latter was a grab bag for all revolutionary organizations), prison revolts, or hunger strikes. All visitors were searched, and this included lawyers.<ref>“24-Punkt-Haftstatut.” <nowiki>http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/</nowiki> PolitischeStroemungen/Stadtguerilla+raf/raf/brd+raf/053.html.</ref>

In a statement regarding such isolation, Till Meyer and Andreas Vogel, both 2nd of June Movement prisoners who were subjected to these conditions for years, wrote:<blockquote>''With the isolation wings, years of isolation have been carried to the extreme and the process of extermination has been perfected: the perfection of spatial limitation and the total isolation, electronic observation with cameras and microphones (openly in each cell)—and we are guarded by special corps (corps who are trained in psychology and conditioned through BKA training).''<ref>Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd of June Movement), D''er Blues: Gesammelte Texte der Bewgung 2. Juni'', ''Vol. 2'', self-published illegally in the FRG, n.d. (1982?), 680.</ref></blockquote>RAF prisoner Helmut Pohl would express himself similarly:<blockquote>''Isolation represents a more intense version of the situation which dominates on the outside, which led us to engage in clandestine armed struggle in the first place. Isolation represents its pure state, its naked reality. Whoever doesn’t find a way to struggle against this situation is destroyed—the situation controls him and not the other way around.''<ref>Helmut Pohl’s Testimony at the Stammheim trial, July 29, 1976.</ref></blockquote>As Andreas Baader described it:<blockquote>Isolation aims at alienating prisoners from every social relationship including their history, their history above all… It makes the prisoner unconscious or kills him or her.<ref>Bakker Schut (ed.), ''Das Info: brief von gefangen aus der RAF aus der discussion 1973-1977'' (Neue Malik Verlag, Plambeck & Neuss, 1987), 218.</ref> </blockquote>Professor Wilfried Rasch of the Institute of Forensic Psychiatry at the Free University of Berlin, who was called upon to examine the RAF prisoners, had this to say about the isolation conditions in which they were held:<blockquote>''The high security wing has simply the quality of torture, that is to say, an attempt to use special measures to achieve something amongst the prisoners through difficult or unbearable conditions, specifically, a change of heart, a defection.''<ref>Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd of June Movement), ''Der Blues: Gesammelte Texte der Bewgung 2. Juni, Vol. 1'', self-published illegally in the FRG, n.d. (1982?), 341.</ref></blockquote>Even those visits that were permitted were designed to add to the prisoners’ stress-level. Eberhard Dreher, held on charges of supporting the 2nd of June Movement, described the closed visiting conditions:<blockquote>''[T]he screen offers a pretense of contact, simultaneously limiting the contact to visual contact and making the contact unfamiliar due to the reflective quality of the glass… Further pain is created by the lack of air and the particular acoustics. The construction of ventilators would rectify this problem… To make oneself understood, one must speak very loudly. One’s own voice within the aquarium-like cabinet is amplified into an acoustic mountain crashing down directly onto one’s own head.''<ref>Ibid., 320.</ref></blockquote>Dreher further described the effect of one such visit with his lawyer as follows:<blockquote>''After… forty minutes, I had a splitting headache and, with the consent of my lawyer, had to break off the visit. I had a headache, needed air, was fed-up, wanted to be in my cell in peace.''<ref>Ibid., 321.</ref></blockquote>In 1978, the European Commission of Human Rights would observe that their prison and trial conditions had contributed to Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader all developing “problems of concentration, marked fatigue, difficulties of expression or articulation, reduced physical and mental performance, instability, diminished spontaneity and ability to make contacts, depression.”<ref>European Commission of Human Rights, ''Decisions and Reports 14'', Strasbourg, June 1979, 96-97.</ref>

If the results of imprisonment in the isolation wing were horrifying, isolation combined with sensory deprivation was even more destructive, as is indicated in Ulrike Meinhof’s harrowing description of her ordeal in Cologne-Ossendorf (see Ulrike Meinhof on the Dead Wing, pages 271-73)

Early on, it became clear to the prisoners that their only hope lay in resistance, and so on January 17, 1973, forty captured combatants from the RAF and other guerilla groups began a hunger strike, demanding access to independent doctors and transfer to the general population.<ref>Rote Armee Fraktion, 181.</ref>

This first hunger strike lasted four and a half weeks, and was only called off when Attorney General Ludwig Martin agreed to move Meinhof out of the dead wing—a promise which was not kept, and was likely never meant as anything but a ploy.<ref>Vague, 50.</ref>

Nevertheless, even though the hunger strike did not achieve any immediate victory, it did manage to break through the wall of silence surrounding prison conditions, galvanizing support from a section of the far left. In a way that was perhaps impossible to foresee, it marked the beginning of a strategy which would give the RAF a new lease on life.

Support had so far come mainly from the Red Aid network, a situation which was less than satisfactory in the eyes of the prisoners, as Red Aid offered solidarity while remaining critical of the RAF’s politics. Furthermore, within Red Aid, the focus on the RAF prisoners had begun causing dissension, especially in Munich, as Bavaria held a large number of prisoners from the antiauthoritarian scene, and it was felt that they were being neglected, too much energy being spent defending the Marxist-Leninist RAF.

Thus, following the first hunger strike in April 1973, several lawyers came together with some of the RAF’s closest political sympathizers to set up the ''Komitees gegen Folter'' (Committees Against Torture) that would take over support work for the prisoners in the future, while promoting the RAF’s particular brand of anti-imperialist politics. This political orientation was no great liability for the legal left, as even many liberals were not yet ready to completely repudiate those who engaged in armed struggle.<ref>Dellwo, 95.</ref>

Several lawyers took leading roles in the Committees, Hans-Christian Ströbele, Klaus Croissant, Otto Schily, Siegfried Haag and Kurt Groenewold being their most prominent members. It was Groenewold who took the lead in establishing the Committees, their Hamburg headquarters being a block away from his office.<ref>Ibid., 93-94.</ref>

As it turned out, the decision to set up the Committees proved fortuitous. Due in part to ongoing tensions between antiauthoritarians and others, the Maoist KPD/ML managed to take control of Red Aid at a national conference in April 1974. This was the second successful attempt by a K-group to move in on the network: the KPD/AO had already formed a rival “Red Aid registered association” to capitalize on its reputation. While the KPD/ML and KPD/AO may have been occasionally sympathetic to the RAF prisoners, they were definitely hostile to their politics, and so the RAF would have been at a disadvantage had they remained dependent on either Red Aid network for support.

Committees Against Torture were established West Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Kassel, Cologne, Munich, Münster, Stuttgart, Tübingen, and Heidelberg<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 97.</ref>—the latter in particular being a magnet for former SPK members.<ref>Dellwo, 94.</ref> Backed by many progressive intellectuals, they worked to focus public attention on the prisoners’ struggle and the destructive conditions in which they were held, setting up information tables, issuing leaflets, and holding teach-ins.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 97-98.</ref> The hope was to win the support of people with their roots in the sixties antiwar movement, people who shared much of the RAF’s analysis and could be expected to express political solidarity, particularly for the idea that the captured combatants were political prisoners who had acted in the context of an international anti-imperialist movement.
{| class="wikitable"
|+The Lawyers
!Hans-Christian Ströbele had helped to found the West Berlin Socialist Lawyers Collective along with Horst Mahler in 1968.<ref>Aust, 66</ref> He was an SPD member in the early seventies, and, in 1978, would be a founding member of the Alternative List, a forerunner to the left wing of the Green Party, in which he would also be active as an elected member of the Bundestag from 1985 to 1987 and again from 1992 on.
Klaus Croissant was a member of the Stuttgart Socialist Lawyers Collective; he had been under surveillance by the state from at least May 1972, suspected of having himself located safehouses for the RAF.<ref>Aust, 207; Becker, 306.</ref> Over the years, he became one of the prisoners’ most ardent and notorious advocates—disgusted at what he saw of West German “justice,” he would eventually begin working with the East German Stasi in the 1980s. He would unsuccessfully run for mayor of Berlin-Kreuzberg on the Alternative List ticket, before joining the ''Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus'' (Party of Democratic Socialism)—the successor to East Germany’s SED—in 1990.[[File:RAF Lawyers from RAF - A Documentary History.jpeg|thumb|''Lawyers Klaus Croissant, Otto Schily, and Hans-Christian Ströbele at a press conference in 1974.'']]Otto Schily was a committed civil libertarian, deeply concerned about the rule of law. He had befriended Rudi Dutschke while studying in West Berlin, and had been active in circles around the SDS.<ref>Hockenos, 119.</ref> Probably the only one of the lawyers to take pride in referring to himself as “bourgeois,” Schily would join Ströbele in the Green Party in the 1980s, before crossing over to the Social Democrats in 1989. In 1998, years after he had left our story, Schily was appointed Minister of the Interior, the former civil libertarian now in charge of domestic repression. As such, he was personally responsible for the highly repressive “anti-terrorist” legislation that was passed in the FRG in the wake of September 11, 2001.<ref>Ibid., 290.</ref> The legislation earned him a “Big Brother Award”, a negative prize presented to those who excel in rolling back civil liberties.
Siegfried Haag was a court-appointed attorney. While he had not been prominent in the APO or the political left previously, he was so moved by the prisoners’ plight that he would eventually make their struggle his own.
Kurt Groenewold, the son of a wealthy property owner, had previously represented Ulrike Meinhof in her divorce from Klaus Rainer Röhl in 1968. He was active in the Hamburg Socialist Lawyers Collective, defending cultural radicals like the composers Ernst Schnabel and Hans-Werner Henze for their oratorio to Che Guevara, Floß der Medusa. He also defended the poet Erich Fried, who was accused of slandering the West Berlin police when he described the shooting of Georg von Rauch as a “preventive murder” in a letter to ''Spiegel''.<ref>“Kurt Groenewold,” <nowiki>http://www.literaturhaus.at/autoren/F/fried/</nowiki> gesellschaft/mitglieder/groenewold/.</ref> In recent years, Groenwold has written extensively about the legal and civil rights ramifications of the state’s response to the armed movements in West Germany in the 70s and 80s.
|}
While the Committees welcomed support from many intellectuals and celebrities who still rejected the prisoners’ politics, by and large militants were expected to toe the RAF line. While some involved did have their own quiet reservations in this regard, it is equally clear that many others were sincerely won over to the guerilla’s politics. The state certainly contributed to this process, as activists would find themselves the object of police surveillance, raids, and even in some cases criminal charges, simply for disseminating information about the conditions in West German prisons.<ref>In 1975, for instance, two activists received respective sentences of six and nine months in prison under §129, simply for handing out pamphlets with information about isolation conditions. The Supreme Court’s decision made clear the object of such prosecutions: “The accused did not limit themselves to speaking to individuals in private, but by means of the leaflets sought to make contact with large numbers of people, and principally with young people, who are easily influenced in this way… Nor should the possibility of imitation by potential criminals be ignored. Whether the sentence on the accused will remain largely unknown is not important; what is important is the effect it will inevitably have on people who do know of it.” (Cobler, 114-115)</ref>

In subsequent years, the underground would include several veterans of this prisoners’ support scene, and even some from their legal team, a fact which the state would exploit time and again to attack the RAF’s lawyers. While most of the legal support team never did join the guerilla despite their increasing horror at the Kafkaesque trials and inhumane prison conditions, it is clear in retrospect that work in the Committees did constitute a rite of passage into the RAF for an astonishing number of future guerillas.

It is, of course, equally true that the overwhelming majority of those who were active in this scene never joined the guerilla, and while they remained operational, the Committees Against Torture always limited themselves to nonviolent forms of protest and popular education.

Before long, they got their first opportunity for such public activity: on May 8, 1973—the anniversary of the defeat of the Third Reich— sixty prisoners throughout the Federal Republic began a second hunger strike. The Committees stepped up their activities, organizing for lawyers to engage in a solidarity hunger strike and holding a demonstration outside the Federal Court in Karlsruhe.<ref>Komitees gegen Folter, 86-87.</ref>

The Committees’ most significant event occurred on May 11, when they held a teach-in where several high-profile supporters spoke out against isolation torture. Heinz Brandt, an official from the IG Metall trade union, described the isolation conditions that the prisoners were subjected to as even worse than what he had suffered during four years in a Nazi concentration camp:<blockquote>''As crass and paradoxical as it may sound, my experiences with strict, radical isolation were worse than my time… in a Nazi concentration camp… [I]n the camp, I still had the bases for human life, namely, communication with my fellow inmates… We were able in the camps to see, not only outrageously fascistic and sadistic mistreatment, but also the possibilities of resistance and collective life among the prisoners, and, with this, for the fulfillment of the fundamental need of a human being: social existence.''<ref>Varon, 218.</ref></blockquote>Dutch psychologist Dr. Sjef Teuns described isolation and sensory deprivation as programmed torture. Dr. Christian Sigrist, who had worked alongside anticolonial freedom fighters in Africa, described the West German torture system as part of the worldwide counterstrategy against anti-imperialist combatants.

This last point was certainly as important to the prisoners as the former two. The RAF viewed human rights campaigns as being worse than useless; indeed, they viewed such humanitarianism as an attack on their fundamental principles. When Red Aid had put out leaflets accusing the state of denying the prisoners’ basic human rights, Baader had angrily objected that, “Because our comrades are half-dead they can’t think we’re anything else ourselves. They’re twisting the thing the same way the pigs twist it worldwide: Violence is taboo…”<ref>Aust, 242.</ref>

Similarly, Baader would later find it necessary to criticize defense attorney Otto Schily in this regard:<blockquote>''We certainly can’t agree with the argument regarding torture as it is developed by Schily in his petition […] In reacting to revolutionary politics, the state does not know what to do except torture, and in doing so it exposes itself as an imperialist state. The indignation of degenerate bourgeois antifascism only masks this. The latter is already so weak, corrupted by social democracy, and locked in revisionism, that it can no longer express itself in a meaningful way.''<ref>Andreas Baader Regarding Torture, reprinted in this volume on pages 319-323.</ref></blockquote>On May 24, 1973, fourteen days into the second hunger strike, the prison authorities began withholding water from Baader, despite a court decision two days earlier forbidding such tactics, as even short term water deprivation under a doctor’s supervision can seriously damage one’s health.<ref>Klaus Croissant, “La justice et la torture par l’isolement,” in Croissant, 120-121.</ref> Indeed, after several days without water and in critical condition—suffering kidney pains, a sore throat, and difficulty seeing— Baader was forced to end his hunger strike. Apparently pleased with their success, the authorities targeted Bernhard Braun next, attempting to have him placed in the so-called “dry cell,” but his lawyer managed to intervene and have this blocked.<ref>Ibid., 120.</ref>

The hunger strike continued until June 29, when the District Court in Karlsruhe ordered the release from isolation of two prisoners.<ref>Rote Armee Fraktion, 181.</ref> (Although accounts are vague on this point, there is some indication that the two were former SPK members Carmen Roll and Siegfried Hausner.)<ref>Hausner had been arrested in 1972 for building bombs and sentenced to three years in a youth facility; he was released from prison in 1974, at which point he made contact with other former SPK members and returned to the underground with the RAF.</ref>

Yet, soon after these two prisoners had their conditions relaxed for health reasons, another RAF prisoner was effectively sentenced to death by medical neglect.

Katharina Hammerschmidt had fled to France in 1971, but when the May Offensive had ended in a wave of arrests, she had turned herself in, returning to face the relatively minor charges relating to her having located safehouses for the guerilla. Despite the fact that she had surrendered voluntarily, she was remanded to the West Berlin Women’s Prison while awaiting her trial.

In August 1973, Hammerschmidt underwent a routine medical exam, which included some x-rays. These revealed an abnormal growth in her chest, but the prison doctors took no steps to evaluate whether this was benign or malignant. In fact, they did not even inform her of the results.<ref>“Des medecins portent plainte,” in Croissant, 104-107.</ref>

In September, Hammerschmidt began to complain of intense pain in her chest and throat. She had difficulty breathing and it hurt to swallow, yet the prison doctors simply told her that if the symptoms continued, more x-rays would be taken in another three months.
{| class="wikitable"
|+Press Release from Andreas Baader's Lawyers
!Even though Baader was doing well, at noon on May 22, 1973, the prison doctor, Dr. Degenhardt from Kassel, came to his cell with a squad of ten guards in order to force him to swallow a solution through a tube as thick as of one’s thumb. Three times Baader requested a spoon so that he could take the solution on his own. Despite this fact, the doctor ordered the guards to hold him down. Pinching his nose, he then forced the tube into his mouth, down his throat and into his digestive tract. Baader vomited and almost suffocated. The tube opened up his throat and his digestive tract and he vomited blood. After this torture Dr. Degenhardt gave him three intravenous injections and he then lost consciousness for eight hours.
On the morning of May 22, Baader had been visited by one of his lawyers, Koch, from the Frankfurt Legal Collective. The lawyer was able to see that Baader’s state of health was relatively good. When he came back that afternoon to continue his visit, a guard told Koch that the doctor had instructed that Baader should remain in bed. It was not possible for him to visit with his lawyer. The lawyer asked to see the warden Metz, but this was refused.
As attorneys of Andreas Baader we note: Andreas Baader is not only subjected to psychological torture in the Ziegenhain prison (Hessen), but he is also being tortured physically by methods which are carbon copies of those practiced in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, and Brazil. Force-feeding, when the prisoner has agreed to feed himself, is a form of torture.
We demand that Dr. Degenhardt and his helpers be punished.
Andreas Baader’s lawyers
Golzem, von Plonitz, Riedel and Koch
May 23 1973
Klaus Croissant, “La justice et la torture par l’isolement,” in Croissant, 119.
|}
In October, the pain was so great that Hammerschmidt could not sleep; she was told by medical staff that her throat hurt from “too much yelling.” As her condition deteriorated to the point that her tumors became visible to the naked eye, the doctors simply prescribed water pills.<ref>Soligruppe Christian S., “Der Spiegel, 1975, baader/meinhof Müdes Auge,” <nowiki>http://www36.websamba.com/Soligruppe/data/spiegel1975.htm</nowiki>; “Les democraties face à la violence” la Lanterne Noire 5 (December 1975).</ref>

In November, her lawyers finally won a court judgment forcing the prison authorities to allow her to be seen by an independent physician. This specialist immediately issued a letter indicating that Hammerschmidt needed follow-up tests as soon as possible. These were not carried out, and she was returned to prison.

Two weeks later, on the night of November 28/29, Hammerschmidt almost suffocated from difficulty breathing. She was brought directly to a hospital, where it was found she had a cancerous tumor as large as a child’s head in her chest. It was determined that the tumor was inoperable, although it was also stated that this might not have been the case just weeks earlier.<ref>Viktor Kleinkrieg, “Les combattantes anti-impérialistes face à la torture,” in Croissant, 47.</ref>
[[File:Katharina Hammerschmidt from RAF a documentary history.jpeg|thumb|''Katharina Hammerschmidt'']]
An independent physician would later remark that the fact that Hammerschmidt had cancer should have been obvious from the x-rays taken in August, and yet six different prison doctors were all seemingly unable to notice that anything was wrong. Or perhaps they simply did not want to: in a public accusation signed by 131 doctors, it was suggested that she was denied necessary medical care because this would have required an end to the isolation conditions that she, like all other RAF prisoners, was being subjected to at the time.

It was January 1974 before the court adjourned her trial, ruling that she was too sick and needed to be released to a clinic for treatment. If anything could have been done, it was now too late: Katharina Hammerschmidt struggled on for the next year and a half, finally succumbing to her illness on June 29, 1975—three years to the day after she had turned herself in.

Many observers considered Hammerschmidt’s death to be a case of “judicial murder.” Independent physicians who examined her upon her release declared that the prison doctors’ findings had been “medically incomprehensible,” evidence of “incredible medical shortcomings.”<ref>Ibid.</ref> A court would eventually award her family the measly sum of 5,000 DM, admitting that the prison administration bore some responsibility for her death.<ref>Peters Butz, RAF Terrorismus in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1991), 454, quoted in “Katharina Hammerschmidt,” <nowiki>http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_Hammerschmidt</nowiki>.</ref>

The RAF and its supporters would lay Katharina Hammerschmidt’s death at the door of the West German prison authorities. Yet, by the time she had died, hers was not the first such case of “judicial murder.”
[[File:RAF Prisoner Support Poster from RAF - a Documentary History.jpeg|thumb]]
On September 13, 1974, forty prisoners led by the RAF had begun their third collective hunger strike against prison conditions.<ref>Apart from the declaration included in this section on pages 274-78, Ulrike Meinhof used the occasion of her testimony in court to announce the strike. See Ulrike Meinhof Regarding the Liberation of Andreas Baader, page 370.</ref> The Committees Against Torture sprang into action, and Amnesty International had its Hamburg offices occupied in an attempt to pressure the liberal organization to take a stand in support of the prisoners. (Notably, several of those involved in this occupation would join the guerilla within a few years.)<ref>For instance: Susanne Albrecht, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, Günter Sonnenberg, Christian Klar, and Knut Folkerts. (Becker, 340-341)</ref>

Not only had the previous hunger strikes failed to achieve integration of all RAF prisoners into the general population, in situations where they had been able to have contact with social prisoners, the latter often found themselves harassed or transferred. The prisoners had come to the conclusion that the demand for integration, while it had undeniable appeal given the high esteem in which the New Left held marginalized groups like social prisoners, was simply not going to work. As a result, integration was dropped, and the struggle was now defined as one against isolation and for the association of political prisoners with each other.

As Karl-Heinz Dellwo, who was active in the Committees Against Torture at the time, explains:<blockquote>''Up until then the hunger strikes were carried out with the goal of achieving “equality” with the other prisoners. I had long been critical of this. I thought it absolutely could not work. Either one would be placed somewhere where the prisoners changed every day, or with prisoners with whom one could not, for various reasons, talk. I was pleased when the RAF prisoners changed their line and chose the demand for association. That created some conflicts on the outside, for instance with the Frankfurt Committee,''<ref>Throughout the 1970s, Frankfurt was the bastion of the ''spontis'', who would have been critical of such a separation from social prisoners.</ref> ''which had a social revolutionary line: they were of the opinion that all prisoners were frustrated social rebels. I seriously doubted that.''<ref>Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Das Projektil sind wir (Hamburg: Nautilus, 2007), 98-99.</ref></blockquote>This new demand for association became a rallying point for the prisoners and their supporters for the next two decades. Years later, 2nd of June Movement prisoner Till Meyer, writing from the dead wing, would express the goal this way:<blockquote>''Our demand—association of all prisoners—is the opposite of what the pigs offer us. Association means, above all, survival, collective political imprisonment, political identity, self-organization—while the dead wing means annihilation.''<ref>Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd of June Movement), ''Der Blues: Gesammelte Texte der Bewgung'' 2. Juni, Vol. 2, 684.</ref></blockquote>In practical terms, association meant bringing together political prisoners in groups large enough to be socially viable, fifteen being the minimum number normally suggested. Political prisoners in some other European countries, such as Italy and Northern Ireland, had already won such conditions for themselves, and so it was hoped that this might prove a realistic goal.

As a brief aside, it should be noted that this reorientation, along with the third hunger strike, provided the occasion for a very public split amongst the prisoners, as Horst Mahler not only refused to participate, but also took the opportunity to publicly repudiate armed struggle and break with the RAF. It has been suggested that one reason for this was his refusal to abandon the demand for integration, though clearly he had had other disagreements with the rest of the guerilla for some time now.<ref>Otto Billig, “The Lawyer Terrorist and his Comrades,” ''Political Psychology'' 6, no. 1 (March 1985): 35.</ref><references />
[[Category:Library works by Ulrike Meinhof]]
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