The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (8 page)

Holger Meins captured

The state, having apprehended its armed adversaries, was not content to simply remove them from the field. Instead, it hoped to render them ineffective not only as combatants, but also as spokespeople for anti-imperialist resistance. To this end, it set up special “dead wings” inside its prisons, where captured guerillas were subjected to severe isolation, with the clear hope that if this did not induce them to recant, it might at least drive them insane.

Isolation—which at its worst took the form of sensory deprivation—had been developed by an unholy alliance of secret services, penal
authorities, doctors, and psychologists working in Western Europe and North America, their goal being to find a form of “clean torture,” i.e., one that could break a prisoner without leaving physical marks. The RAF and other guerillas in West Germany would be among the first test-subjects for this program.

Astrid Proll, a RAF member who had been picked up on bogus charges of shooting at a police officer in 1971, was one of the first to be so confined. She was held for four and a half months in an empty section of Cologne-Ossendorf,
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with her cell painted white and acoustically sealed, receiving absolutely no sensory stimuli or contact with other inmates. Her physical and mental health deteriorated to such a point that she could barely walk, and the state was obliged to release her to a sanitarium in the Black Forest, where she stayed for a year before escaping and making her way to England. Even when recaptured years later, Proll remained scarred by her ordeal. In 1978, she wrote:

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.
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Ulrike Meinhof was held in these conditions for 237 days following her arrest in 1972. After eight months of this torture, she wrote:

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…
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Opposition to isolation and the various “dead wings” quickly became the most important issue for the RAF's supporters, and would remain so throughout the 1970s. In this way, despite capture and isolation, the guerilla managed not only to survive, but in a sense even turned things around, for through the strategic use of hunger strikes, they would call attention to both their conditions of incarceration and their strategy of anti-imperialist armed struggle. Indeed, the hunger strikes became a way for the prisoners to maintain their dignity as well as their political identity.
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Beginning with the RAF's third hunger strike in 1974, a key demand was “association” for political prisoners. As explained in our first volume:

The prisoners had come to the conclusion that the demand for integration [into general population], 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…

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.
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After six weeks on hunger strike, on November 9, 1974, RAF member Holger Meins died, setting off protests across West Germany. Thousands met in university auditoriums in West Berlin to discuss how to respond, while thousands more braved the ban on demonstrations and took to the streets, battling police with stones and bottles, with protesters in Frankfurt and Mannheim smashing the windows of court buildings.
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The next day, in the course of a failed kidnapping attempt meant to avenge Meins and potentially even win the freedom of some prisoners, the 2nd of June Movement shot and killed the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court, Judge Günter von Drenkmann.

RAF-prisoner support groups had already been established, an International Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners in Europe
(Internationales Komitee zur Verteidigung politischer Gefangener in Europa,
IVK) working alongside various Committees Against Torture as well as a Relatives Committee in the FRG, but now the prisoners' struggle would serve to gain them more than just sympathy: it would win new recruits. For, in the eyes of many German leftists, the RAF had come to symbolize resistance to the imperialist state, to the “new fascism” or “fascist drift.”

Following the death of Meins, the prisoners would continue their third hunger strike until a regenerated RAF issued a communiqué addressed to them, in which it ordered them to start eating again. The guerilla promised that they would carry out the necessary actions on their behalf, explaining that the prison struggle “is now something that we must settle with our weapons.”
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This would soon come to pass: on April 25, the RAF's “Holger Meins Commando” seized the top floor of the West German embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, taking twelve hostages and killing the military and economic attachés. They demanded the release of twenty-six West German political prisoners, including all of the captured members of the RAF.

The KPD/ML, while hostile to the RAF, was one of the only Marxist-Leninist parties to support the 1974-1975 hunger strike. Graffiti reads, “Holger Meins, the people will avenge you.”

Under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the West German government refused to give in to the commando's demands, and as police were
preparing to storm the building, the explosives the guerilla had laid detonated. The state and media would claim that the explosives went off due to some error on the part of the commando; the guerilla would suggest that the police intentionally triggered the explosion. One RAF member, Ulrich Wessel, was killed on the spot. Police rushed in, and RAF members Siegfried Hausner, Hanna Krabbe, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, and Bernd Rössner were all captured.

Despite the fact that he had a fractured skull and burns over most of his body, Hausner was only hospitalized for a few days. Then, over the objections of doctors in Sweden and Germany, he was flown to Stammheim prison in the FRG where he died soon after.
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The state was confronted with the fact that from within prison the RAF's “first generation”
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had managed to inspire its own successors. Chancellor Schmidt went so far as to state that “anarchist guerillas” now posed the greatest threat the Federal Republic had encountered during its twenty-six-year history. Destroying the prisoners, or at least undercutting their support, became a top priority.

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

These dirty tricks were complemented by the rapid growth of the state's repressive infrastructure. In September 1971, a new Chief Commissioner was appointed to the
Bundeskriminalamt
(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. By the end of the 1970s, its budget had grown sixfold and its staff tripled, as it became one of the most advanced political police forces in the world.
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In 1975, Herold authored a document entitled “The Principles of Disinformation in Combating Terrorism.” Arguing that “Disinformation is a new form of struggle that must be further developed and that should take its place beside other forms of combating war-like activities,” he proposed that false information be fed to “the press, radio, and television” and circulated within the radical left. The objective was to “create dissent within oppositional groups, so as to destroy them,” with “making the terrorists appear less heroic” being listed as one means.
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By 1979, Herold's computers contained files on 4.7 million individuals and over three thousand organizations, as well as photos of 1.9 million people and 2.1 million sets of fingerprints.
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While it has since become 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.

During this same period, a range of measures were taken against the prisoners. Cells were routinely raided and papers relating to their trials seized. Even their lawyers came under attack, accused of supporting the guerilla and in some cases barred from conducting their defense. All of this took legal form when the
Lex Baader-Meinhof,
or “Baader-Meinhof Laws,” became constitutional amendments in 1975. In particular, §138a-d allowed for the exclusion of any lawyers deemed to be “forming a criminal association with the defendant,” while §231a and §231b allowed for trials to continue in the absence of a defendant if the reason for this absence was found to be of the defendant's own doing—a stipulation directly aimed at the prisoners' effective use of hunger strikes.
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Under §146, it was prohibited to present a joint defense, even though many of the prisoners were facing joint trials. Surveillance of defense correspondence was sanctioned by §148 and §148a, while
the previously held right of the accused and defense lawyers to issue statements under §275a was withdrawn.
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By 1976, these were supplemented with §129a—an antiterrorist subsection to §129 which dealt with criminal organizations—and §88a, criminalizing all those who “produce, distribute, publicly display, and advertise materials that recommend unlawful acts—such as disturbing the peace in special (e.g., armed) cases, murder, manslaughter, robbery, extortion, arson, and the use of explosives.”
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Concrete form—literally—was given to this repressive atmosphere with the construction of a special “terrorist-proof” bunker, for holding the “RAF ringleaders” trial in the regular Stuttgart courthouse was declared to be out of the question. This dungeon-courtroom adjacent to Stammheim prison came equipped with antiaircraft defense against helicopter attack, listening devices sown in the ground around the building, scores of closed-circuit TV cameras, and an underground tunnel to the prison so that the defendants could be brought to and from court without ever appearing in the open.
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What came to be known as the Stammheim trial—where Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Ulrike Meinhof would face charges relating to the May Offensive—did not start until 1975, three years after the defendants had been arrested and barely a year after Meins had died on hunger strike. (Had he not died, he too would have stood trial there.) Due to the attacks on sympathetic lawyers, not all of the defendants had legal representation of their choosing, and it would later be revealed that one of the judges was leaking court documents to a conservative newspaper throughout the proceedings. Despite the state's assertions that it held no political prisoners, there was never any pretence that this was a mere “criminal” case, nor was there much effort put into even pretending that it would be a fair trial.

This already bad situation got dramatically worse on May 9, 1976, just as the proceedings were entering their most critical phase. On that day, the state announced that Ulrike Meinhof had died in her cell, having apparently committed suicide by hanging. The BKA circulated excerpts from notes that had been found during cell raids months earlier, in order to create the impression that there had been a falling out, with Meinhof on the one side and Baader and Ensslin on the other. The
prisoners, and most of the left, immediately denounced the suicide story as impossible, and did not hesitate to accuse the state of killing the woman who many viewed as the RAF's chief theoretician.