The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (10 page)

On August 8, the RAF prisoners who had been moved to Stammheim just one month earlier were transferred back to Hamburg. The precise excuse used was a “fight” with guards: essentially a set-up whereby the guards provoked an incident and used it as an excuse to attack and beat the prisoners. It appeared that Buback's replacement Kurt Rebmann was reversing his previous decision to grant association. Baader, Raspe, Ensslin, and Möller were once again alone on the seventh floor of Stammheim prison.

In reaction to these machinations and to the attack on Ponto, all RAF prisoners went on hunger strike, some escalating to a thirst strike almost immediately. Within days force-feeding had begun: a sadistic penal tactic whereby prisoners were drugged, strapped down to a table, and had a pipe rammed down their throat for hours at a time. It was not meant to save the lives of the hunger strikers, but was another form of torture which the state had come to depend on in its struggle against the prisoners. Holger Meins, for instance, who had died during the 1974 hunger strike, had been force-fed for weeks. As he wrote shortly before his death:

A red stomach pipe (not a tube) is used, about the thickness of a middle finger (in my case between the joints). It is greased, but doesn't manage to go down without causing me to gag, because it is only between 1 and 3 mm narrower than the digestive tract (this can only be avoided if one makes a swallowing motion and remains completely still). 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. The more extreme and the longer this lasts, the worse it is.
⁴³

In the words of Margrit Schiller, a RAF member who had been captured in 1974: “I was force-fed every day for a month. Each time was
like a rape. Each time, I felt totally humiliated and destroyed.”
⁴⁴

Defense attorneys Armin Newerla and Arndt Müller began organizing public support for the striking prisoners and came under heavy police surveillance as a result. On August 15, the lawyers' offices were firebombed, almost certainly with the collusion of the police who had them staked out twenty-four hours a day. Newerla was subsequently arrested when copies of a left-wing magazine were found in his car; he was charged with “supporting a criminal organization” under §129a. Seeing the writing on the wall, defense attorney Klaus Croissant had already fled the country to France, where he requested political asylum. (Croissant had been harassed for years as a result of his tireless work on behalf of RAF defendants.)

The new attorney general staked out the hard-line position that he would be remembered for. “I know that the population is not at all interested if these people go on hunger and thirst strikes,” Rebmann told the press. “The population wants these people to be hit hard, just as hard as they have earned with their brutal deed.”

He was asked about the possibility of prisoners dying. “That is always a bad thing,” he answered, “but it would be the consequence which has been made clear to them and their lawyers and which is clear to them. The conditions of imprisonment don't justify such a strike; they are doing very well considering the circumstances.”
⁴⁵

On August 25, the RAF responded by targeting Rebmann's offices. An improvised rocket launcher was aimed at the attorney general's headquarters, but the timing device was not set properly, so it failed to fire.

The RAF attempted to put this mishap in the best possible light, issuing a communiqué a week later in which they claimed that the entire exercise had merely been intended for show. The guerilla went on to warn that it was more than willing to act should it prove necessary to save the prisoners:

Should Andreas, Gudrun, and Jan be killed, the apologists for the hard line will find out that they are not the only ones with an arsenal at their disposal. They will find out that we are many, and that we have enough love—as well as enough hate and imagination—to use both our weapons and their weapons against them, and that their pain will equal ours.
⁴⁶

The guerilla was clearly concerned, following Meinhof's death, and given Rebmann's bloodthirsty statements, that the state might move to kill Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe. This fear was shared by the prisoners themselves, who knew that they might suffer reprisals for the RAF's actions.

As such, following the breakdown of negotiations between Amnesty International and the Federal Government, the prisoners called off their hunger and thirst strike on September 2. In a short statement, Jan-Carl Raspe explained that the attacks on Ponto and on Rebmann' s office had created an environment in which the prisoners had become hostages of a state that was ready and willing to kill them to set an example.
⁴⁷

The failed Ponto kidnapping had been intended to be the first of a two-pronged action to put pressure on the West German ruling class to force the state to free the prisoners.
⁴⁸
Despite their failure to take Ponto alive, it was decided to follow through on the second part of this plan.

On September 5, the RAF's “Siegfried Hausner Commando” kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer, the most powerful businessman in West Germany at the time. Schleyer's car and police escort were forced to a stop by a baby stroller that was left in the middle of the road, at which point they were ambushed by guerillas who killed his chauffeur and three police officers before making their getaway.

A note received soon after warned that, “The federal government must take steps to ensure that all aspects of the manhunt cease—or we will immediately shoot Schleyer without even engaging in negotiations for his freedom.”
⁴⁹

Like Ponto, Schleyer was a powerful representative of the ruling class. He was the president of both the
Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie
(Federal Association of German Industrialists) and the
Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände
(Federal Association of German Employers), and had earned a reputation for aggressively opposing workers' demands when he had ordered a lock-out of striking metal workers in Baden-Württemberg in 1966. As a veteran of Hitler's SS, he was a perfect symbol of the integration of former Nazis into the postwar power structure.

Hanns Martin Schleyer as a young man in uniform (left), and later on as a giant of industry, meeting with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1974.

Within a day of Schleyer's kidnapping, the commando demanded the release of eleven prisoners, including Ensslin, Raspe, and Baader, and their safe passage to a country of their choosing.

Despite the fact that the prisoners offered assurances that they would not return to West Germany or participate in future armed actions if exiled, on September 6, the government declared that it would not release them under any circumstances.

On that same day, a total communication ban was instituted against all political prisoners. The so-called Contact Ban law, which had been rushed through parliament specifically to deal with this situation, deprived the prisoners of all contact with each other, as well as with the outside world. All visits, including those with lawyers and family members, were forbidden. The prisoners were also denied all access to mail, newspapers, magazines, television, and radio.

In short, those subjected to this law were placed in 100 percent individual isolation.

Over the next weeks, as the guerilla attempted to negotiate with the state through a series of ever-more-desperate communiqués, the hunt for Schleyer and his captors continued. During this time he was moved between a series of safehouses in West Germany, Holland, and Belgium.

On September 22, RAF member Knut Folkerts was arrested in Utrecht after a shoot-out which left one Dutch policeman dead and two more injured. Another RAF member managed to get away. The search for Schleyer was extended to Holland, but to no avail, as the state continued to stall for time, and the guerilla let one deadline after another pass.

In this situation, with negotiations deadlocked, a Palestinian commando intervened in solidarity with the RAF, moving the already
intense confrontation to an entirely different level. On October 13, the four-person Commando Martyr Halimeh, led by Zohair Youssef Akache of the PFLP (EO),
⁵⁰
hijacked a Lufthansa airliner traveling from Majorca, Spain to Frankfurt in West Germany—ninety people on board were taken hostage.

The airliner was first diverted to Rome to refuel and to issue the commando's demands: the release of the eleven RAF prisoners as well as two Palestinian guerillas being held in Turkey.

The plane then flew on to Cyprus, and from there to the Gulf, where it landed first in Bahrain and then in Dubai. The FRG's Minister in Charge of Special Affairs, Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, promised that there would be no military intervention. The plane departed the next day, the plan being to fly to the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen), where the PFLP (EO)'s training camp was located, and whose government had a history of tolerating guerilla fighters from the FRG and elsewhere in Western Europe.

Here, however, the hijackers' plan went off the rails. Instead of providing refuge, as had been expected, the South Yemeni government tried to prevent the airliner from landing, going so far as to station tanks to block its access to a runway. When this did not work (the plane made an emergency landing), the hijackers were allowed to refuel, but then forced to depart. This represented a critical setback; with misgivings, they now charted a course to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.

The hijacked airliner landed in Mogadishu on October 17. As negotiations continued, West Germany's “antiterrorist” GSG-9 unit was secretly flown into the Somali capital. That night, sixty GSG-9 commandos attacked the airliner, killing the guerilla fighters Zohair Youssef Akache, Hind Alameh, and Nabil Harb, and seriously wounding Souhaila Andrawes. All hostages were rescued unharmed, though Flight Captain Jürgen Schumann had been executed the night before and his body left in South Yemen.
⁵¹

At seven the next morning, October 18, a government spokesperson publicly announced the resolution of the hijacking.

One hour later, another spokesperson announced the “suicides” of Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader and the “attempted suicides” of Jan-Carl Raspe and Irmgard Möller in Stammheim prison. Raspe subsequently died of his injuries.

A plethora of bizarre “coincidences” and irregularities were put forth by the state to explain how this had been possible, that four individuals in the most high-security prison in Western Europe had allegedly not only acquired guns (Baader and Raspe were shot in the head), but also managed to coordinate a group suicide as a reaction to a military raid happening on a different continent, all while being subjected to a strict ban on communication with one another and the outside world (no radio, television, newspapers, etc.).

In the year since Meinhof's death, the Stammheim prisoners had repeatedly expressed their fear of being similarly “suicided.” They had belabored this point in conversations with prison chaplains and letters to their lawyers sent in the days before their deaths. Ensslin in particular had told two chaplains that there were letters in her cell containing important information that should be forwarded to the appropriate authorities if she were killed—needless to say, initially it was denied that any such letters had been found. Only later would the BAW admit they had been confiscated; to this day, they have not been released.
⁵²

“Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe murdered in Stammheim.”

Making the state's suicide story even more unbelievable, the closed circuit cameras that were supposed to film everything occurring on the prisoners' floor had mysteriously malfunctioned that evening. And the inconsistencies just kept coming.
⁵³
For many, the clincher was the fact that one of the prisoners did not die from her injuries: Irmgard Möller, who survived several stab wounds to the chest, has consistently and adamantly denied the state's suicide story, insisting instead that a government commando must have killed her comrades, just as it tried to
kill her on the night in question. From an interview with
Spiegel
magazine in 1992: