The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (11 page)

Spiegel: The authorities are of the opinion that you knew about the storming of the aircraft and the freeing of the hostages, and as a result attempted suicide with a kitchen knife.

Irmgard Möller: That's a lie. I listened to the final news at 11:00
PM.
⁵⁴
I knew that something would happen, that a decision would have to be made. However, I didn't know what decision. I found that unbearable. Then, I went to sleep.

Spiegel: And then?

Irmgard Möller: At some point during the night, I heard a dull noise that I couldn't identify, a distinct noise. I didn't think of a shot: it sounded like a locker falling over or something like that. The next thing I remember I was lying on the floor under neon lights with people all around me grabbing at me and trying to force my eyes open. Then I heard voices say, “Baader and Ensslin are dead.” Then everything faded away.

Spiegel: What do you remember after that?

Irmgard Möller: I regained consciousness for the first time three days later and clearly remember everything that happened after that.

Spiegel: What was the nature of your injuries?

Irmgard Möller: Four stab wounds to my chest. My lungs were injured and filled with fluid from my pericardium, which had also been hit.

Spiegel: A number of medical experts, including some from outside of the country, came to the conclusion that the deaths of your companions were cases of suicide.

Irmgard Möller: I know that. Obviously, they weren't objective. They were intentionally brought in. I'm aware of the details of the autopsy reports, and know, for instance, that one of Gudrun's injuries was not seriously examined.

Spiegel: Who do you think inflicted the injuries?

Irmgard Möller: I don't think it was the guards that were always around there. I think that it was a commando. There were a variety of entries into the prison wing.
⁵⁵

Despite this, the government's suicide theory would eventually come to be accepted by many on the left, and even by a number of former RAF members as well. But in ‘77, the belief that the prisoners had been murdered was widespread. So far as the radical left was concerned, it was clear: as with Meinhof, the other Stammheim prisoners had now been killed by the state.

Confronted with defeat on all fronts, the RAF now issued a communiqué announcing that it had executed Schleyer.

After forty-three days, the most intense clash between the antiimperialist guerilla and the West German state had seemingly come to its bloody conclusion, and yet there would be one more death: on November 11, RAF prisoner Ingrid Schubert was found hanged in her cell, one hour after she had been moved into isolation in Munich-Stadelheim. On the Thursday before her death, she had assured her lawyer that she had no intention of committing suicide.

The RAF's focus on freeing its prisoners was taken to the limit in 1977, yet its seven-month campaign of assassinations and kidnappings had come to naught. With the hijacking carried out by a Third World commando, the FRG was thrown into a state of emergency well beyond the capacity of the West German movement to navigate. The Stammheim deaths contributed an almost incomprehensible element to the equation, and the result was mass psychological trauma, especially pronounced among the ranks of the guerilla and its supporters.

As RAF member Monika Berberich would explain years later:

I see both nights, Ulrike's death as much as those of the other three prisoners in Stammheim, as a complete defeat, not only for the armed groups, but for the entire radical left—and that regardless of what really happened on those nights in Stammheim. In the morning, comrades who were extremely important to the continuation of our struggle were dead. In 1977, with the storming of the airliner, the state triumphed. The death of the prisoners admittedly reduced the level of the triumph, but measured against the victory for the state's position that wasn't terribly relevant. I think
at the time, we didn't deal with this consciously enough, although we all sensed it. Instead, we argued endlessly about whether it was murder or suicide. Of course, this is an important question, but it doesn't change the fact that the comrades were dead.
⁵⁶

The state responded to the ‘77 offensive with a wave of repression against the entire left. In West Berlin, thirty-eight apartments, bookstores, and print shops were raided and forty people taken into custody, prompting a protest outside of police headquarters, which was met by cops swinging rubber truncheons.
⁵⁷
The radical newspaper
Info-BUG
was targeted, with the paper banned and several of its printers sent to prison.

Lawyers who defended RAF prisoners and outside supporters found themselves under arrest and charged with supporting a terrorist organization.

But the fallout went far beyond arrests: as the so-called German Autumn unfolded, the entire political culture seemed to lurch to the right. Anybody who dared speak out in favor of civil liberties, regardless of how critical they might be of armed tactics, became an instant suspect, a potential terrorist. Speaking at Schleyer's state funeral, President Walter Scheel declared:

The fight against terrorism is the fight of civilization against a barbarism trying to destroy all order… They are the enemies of every civilization… The nations of the earth are beginning to realize this. They realize with horror that not this or that order is being attacked, but all order.

Specifically referring to anyone who dared protest following the Stammheim deaths, he remarked that, “They too share the guilt.”
⁵⁸
As described in
New German Critique:

A virtual war atmosphere was created in the country in mid-October: hundreds of thousands of motorists were pulled off the road and searched; constant appeals to the population were issued to encourage their reporting any suspicious types of activities to the police—such as sudden change of address, of
hair cut or any other cosmetic changes, unusual mailings or publications.
⁵⁹

Most people stood behind the government, not only in its hunt for the RAF, but also in its broader clampdown. In one poll, 62 percent of respondents stated that they were willing to accept restrictions on their personal freedoms through controls and house searches, while only 21 percent were opposed.
⁶⁰

At the same time, politicians and the press became ever more merciless. Following the Stammheim deaths, even allowing Ensslin, Raspe, and Baader to be buried in a common grave was enough to earn one the sobriquet of being “soft on terrorism.” Stuttgart's moderate CDU mayor, Manfred Rommel—the son of the famed Field Marshal—refused to forbid such a burial, insisting that “Death must end all animosity.” As a result, he found himself marginalized within the
Land
party organization, and telephone calls poured in from angry citizens demanding that the RAF dead be cremated and their ashes poured into the city sewers.

Just as the RAF's failure in 1977 spelled disaster for the guerilla and the prisoners, it similarly buttressed the power of the state. To this day, counterinsurgency experts point to Mogadishu as a model intervention, and it surprised no one that in its wake Chancellor Schmidt's personal popularity began to rise. Upon their return home, the GSG-9 commandos who had raided the airliner were lionized as heroes, with the unit's head Ulrich Wegener receiving the prestigious Cross of Merit. In response to the events of ‘77, the internal security budget was increased by $100 million, up to $650 million in 1978.

Carlos Marighella, whose
Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla
had influenced so many of the armed groups that emerged from the New Left, had suggested that by provoking a disproportionate response the guerilla could alienate the population from the state. In 1977, however, this tactic was turned on its head, the state's abuse of the prisoners pushing the guerilla to overplay its hand, and in so doing to discredit its own struggle for years to come.

The RAF and its prisoners were isolated as never before.