The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (14 page)

Angelika Speitel

The next encounter between the guerilla and its pursuers occurred on November 1, when Rolf Heißler and Adelheid Schulz were identified crossing into Holland. A firefight ensued and Dutch border guards Dionysius de Jong, nineteen years old, and Johannes Goemans, twenty-four, were both shot dead.

Several former RAF members who subsequently chose to cooperate with police have claimed that the RAF was considering a number of new actions in this period. Besides the stories about potential jailbreaks and kidnappings that we have already detailed, there are others even
more daring, or foolhardy, depending on how one sees these things. For instance, Maier-Witt would later claim that following the killings and the arrest in Düsseldorf and Dortmund, there was talk of a retaliation action. According to this tale, the idea would have been to lure police to a trap set with land mines.
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Less outrageously—and, given subsequent events, more believably—it has also been said that there were plans to kidnap a high-ranking NATO officer.

Whatever may have been planned, the fact of the matter is that the constant arrests and killings were keeping the guerilla off balance, preventing it from going on the offensive. Perhaps not surprisingly, several members began to doubt the wisdom of even continuing with the armed struggle. Depleted and dazed, the RAF's future seemed less certain than ever before.

As such, this is perhaps an appropriate point for us to turn our attention to the fortunes of the other main guerilla groups and their supporters in the FRG.

The 2nd of June Movement, with its roots in the communes of the West Berlin counterculture, had been active for almost as long as the RAF. While the latter had developed its positions in a series of lengthy manifesto-style documents grounded in Marxism-Leninism, the 2JM's approach was more accessible and even light-hearted in tone. These qualities were perhaps most famously expressed in a 1975 bank robbery, during which they distributed pastries to customers and employees while the bank's registers were being emptied. Even during trials, the court statements of 2JM defendants could include clever jokes, and it was not for nothing that they became known as the
Spaßguerilla,
or “fun guerilla.”
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The 2JM's initial strategy was to seek out contradictions within the metropole, to ground their struggle in their own society. While repeatedly acting in solidarity with the RAF, they were critical of the way in which the latter framed its struggle so much in terms of the international context. As 2JM member Werner Sauber argued in 1975:

The RAF has failed to orient itself around the forms of struggle of the most exploited: women, foreigners, and young German unskilled laborers. A practical debate about the connection between the armed struggle and the militant proletariat is something the RAF refuses. Instead, the comrades act as a revolutionary “secret
service” that sees its basis solely in the liberation movements on the Three Continents. Their anti-imperialist concept as such is that it makes the most sense for them to attach themselves to a Third World liberation struggle and struggle against the metropole on that basis. As a result, however, the RAF are neither fish in the sea nor birds in the sky. They have only worked with marginalized groups or with the left to gain more support for anti-imperialist terrorism, not to develop a strong class struggle of the oppressed in the metropole.
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Being like “fish in the sea” or “birds in the sky”—i.e., remaining grounded and camouflaged by a larger sympathetic mass—was a priority for the early 2JM, and for that reason the group tried to restrict its activities to West Berlin, the scene from which it had developed and that its members knew best. As we have seen, graduating from bank robberies and firebombings, in a 1974 kidnapping gone awry, the 2JM killed Berlin's Supreme Court Judge Günter von Drenkmann in retaliation for the death of RAF prisoner Holger Meins. More successfully, in early 1975, the group kidnapped CDU mayoral candidate Peter Lorenz, demanding 120,000
DM
and the release of six political prisoners. After five days of negotiations, the state acquiesced and the prisoners were granted safe passage to South Yemen.
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Some presumed 2JM members, from left to right: Anne Reiche, Inge Viett, Ralf Reinders, Werner Sauber, and Till Meyer.

These actions were relatively well received in the radical scene, but of course this alone could not shield the guerilla from state counterattack. Indeed, the heat that followed the Lorenz abduction kept the 2JM hemmed in for years to come, a situation that was aggravated by a general lack of agreement as to what strategy to pursue going forward.

It started with the capture of 2JM members Gerald Klöpper and Ronald Fritzsch in West Berlin on April 28, 1975, just weeks after Lorenz had been released. Then, on May 9, Werner Sauber was killed in a late-night shootout with police in a Cologne parking garage. One police officer, Walter Pauli, also died in the exchange. Two other men, Karl-Heinz Roth and Roland Otto, were arrested, but not before Roth (a former SDS leader and important left communist intellectual) was shot and seriously wounded. (Both Roth and Otto would face charges, but were ultimately found not guilty of Pauli's murder.)
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Next, on September 9, 2JM members Inge Viett, Juliane Plambeck, and Ralf Reinders were captured in West Berlin. A few days later, 2JM members Fritz Teufel and Gabriele Rollnik were similarly apprehended. All were suspected of involvement in the Lorenz kidnapping, with Plambeck accused of killing Judge von Drenkmann as well. Viett had been sought since escaping from prison two years earlier by sawing through her cell bars; she had been first captured in 1972 asleep in a car with other guerillas and a certain quantity of explosives. (They had allegedly been planning to bomb the Turkish consulate.) These arrests would be followed with the capture of Andreas Vogel, on March 26, 1976, also charged in connection with the Lorenz kidnapping.
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The 2JM had been dealt one blow after another, but it was not yet down for the count. Several guerillas remained on the outside, and in less than a year, with their help, Viett would once again manage to escape—this time from Lehrter Straße prison, in the company of Plambeck, Rollnik, and RAF member Monika Berberich. As the Associated Press would report:

The women locked themselves out of their cells early Wednesday. When two female guards came through the cellblock on a routine inspection, Miss Viett pulled a gun on them. They bound and gagged the guards with bedsheets and locked them in an outer room of the library. The prisoners climbed out onto the third-story roof from the library, made their way to a corner of the building by hanging onto window bars and dropped over the wall to the outside where a getaway car was apparently waiting.
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The question of just how the women had managed to acquire a gun and keys to their cells would provoke some consternation among partisans
of the state, and lead to the resignation of West Berlin's SPD minister of justice and deputy mayor, Hermann Oxfort.

The July jailbreak put a number of experienced combatants back on the street. Viett, Plambeck, and Rollnik soon made their way to the Middle East, passing through Iraq to the PFLP (EO)'s base in South Yemen.
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Berberich was less fortunate, as just two weeks later, while on her way to arrange a meeting between the 2JM and the RAF, she was recaptured after unexpectedly bumping into her brother walking down the street: he had been under constant BKA surveillance since her escape. Before she could flee she was taken back into custody,
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and the meeting between the 2JM and the RAF—most likely to discuss closer cooperation—had to be postponed.

It was in the wake of the RAF's failed ‘77 offensive that the 2JM would carry out its largest fundraiser since Lorenz: on November 9 of that year, several guerillas kidnapped stockings-magnate Walter Palmers in Vienna, dragging him from his car as he arrived home for dinner.

This was an action that the guerillas had been preparing prior to Schleyer's abduction by the RAF, and due to the added heat caused by the latter there was some debate about whether or not to proceed. They decided to persevere, but because Austria was a relatively safe zone and provided a convenient route into Italy, they tried to disguise the political nature of the kidnapping, hoping that it would be reported as a merely criminal endeavor.
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Initially at least, the ruse worked, and in the days that followed, both Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and police chief Otto Kornek publicly discounted the possibility that any guerilla group might be involved.
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West German newscaster Eduard Zimmermann announces Palmers's kidnapping: the guerillas hoped this might seem the work of non-political criminals.

According to Viett, it was only once they had Palmers that they realized with some unease that he was in fact not as young as he looked in his photos; in her words, “we suddenly had an old man on our hands.”
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Despite this potential complication, all went smoothly—in fact, Palmers would thank his captors for the good treatment he received
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—and he was released unharmed four days later, his son having delivered the 31 million shillings ransom.
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The 2JM took the money and divided it three ways, giving sorely needed funds to the RAF and to a Palestinian resistance group.

It wasn't long, however, before police found their first clue that this had been no merely criminal abduction. Ten days after Palmers's release, two theater students were arrested crossing into Italy from Switzerland: Thomas Gratt and Othmar Keplinger were already known as members of the
Arbeitskreis politische Prozesse
(APG; Political Trials Working Group), a political prisoner support group in Vienna. Upon searching their vehicle, border guards found two weapons previously used in guerilla actions, money from the Palmers ransom, as well as the typewriter the ransom note had been typed on. At the same time, police received a tip implicating Reinhard Pitsch, a philosophy student who had founded the APG the year previously, as having made the ransom call to Palmers's family; he was arrested on November 28.
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It would seem that the 2JM had recruited three supporters, barely out of their teens (in fact, Keplinger was only nineteen), to help out with the logistics of the operation, such as procuring getaway cars and train tickets, and making the necessary phone calls, the hope being that their Austrian accents would help obscure the German guerilla's presence. While well-intentioned, the three students were clearly not prepared to deal with the consequences of working with the guerilla; Pitsch was interrogated and abused by the police for the better part of five days before being brought before an investigating judge, and it was reported in the newspapers that he provided extensive information. Both he and Gratt were denounced as traitors in the support scene.
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Pitsch was sentenced to six and a half years, of which he would serve three years and eight months, and Keplinger was sentenced to five years, which the courts later reduced to four years—he served his entire sentence. Gratt—who had guarded Palmers, and had been fully integrated into the 2JM
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—would be sentenced to fifteen years, of which he would serve thirteen.
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