The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (45 page)
Read The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History Online
Authors: J Smith
In mid-September 1982, it was reported that three RAF members had successfully robbed a bank in Bochum making off with 100,000
DM
.
36
What was planned next remains unclear, as the state was about to score a major victory.
At some point in October, the BKA located a RAF supply cache outside of Frankfurt. Among other things, they found a series of coded documents, which they quickly shipped off to the Wiesbaden headquarters. Within forty-eight hours the code had been cracked, allowing the BKA to locate a series of similar depots in wooded areas throughout the FRG.
37
Besides a large quantity of fake driver's licenses and passports, military IDs, guns, as well as notes about various prisons, police stations, politicians, and Israeli and U.S. institutions, these depots provided the perfect opportunity to trap members of the guerilla, for none of the discoveries were made public.
38
Under the rubric
Operation Eichhörnchen
(“Operation Squirrel”), GSG-9 agents and MEK special police units were deployed around each of these locales, and an indefinite stakeout ensued.
On November 11, Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Heidi Schulz were captured as they approached a cache outside the town of Heusenstamm, close to Frankfurt. Although they were armed, they were taken by surprise and overpowered before they could defend themselves.
Left to right: Heidi Schulz, Christian Klar, and Brigitte Mohnhaupt; all captured in November 1982.
Five days later, Christian Klar was similarly captured as he approached an arms cache outside of Hamburg. He too was armed, but
did not put up a fight, leading to media propaganda that he must have been despondent following the capture of his companions the week before. Indeed, Attorney General Rebmann gloated that he was “astonished” that Klar, “a man so sensitive to police hunts and such a practiced criminal could have made this mistake after the events in Frankfurt last week.”
39
In the wake of these arrests, houses were searched throughout the FRG, and several anti-imps were arrested, including Dag Maaske and Karin Avdic who had worked on the 1978 Russell Tribunal, as well as Peter Alexa, who had been one of the dpa occupiers. (Most of these would be released almost immediately, with the exception of Maaske, police claiming that his fingerprints had been found on a sketch recovered at the Wiesbaden depot.)
40
It was a major setback for the RAF, and one that some saw as indicative of even deeper problems. In his 2007 book
Das Projektil sind wir,
Karl-Heinz Dellwo was characteristically blunt:
With their arrests, an infrastructure created over years was swept away, because the central depot contained a list of numerous other depots. Those of us in Celle viewed this with a mixture of sadness and solidarity, as well as angerâ¦. The central depot indicated a clear hierarchy. All experiences with resistance structure indicate that one must organize independent circles, so that if one of them collapses the rest remain intactâ¦. The collapse of the structure brought the defeat of 1977 to its ultimate conclusion. A military defeat was, so to speak, added to the political and moral setbacks without the latter ever being addressed.
41
The 1982 arrests were a disaster for the RAF, which had finally been hitting its stride for the first time since â77.
To all appearances, the initiative had passed to the state.
Verfassungsschutz
At some point in 1981, Verena Becker, who had been captured along with Günter Sonnenberg in 1977, began providing the secret police with information. Among other things, Becker claimed that Stefan Wisniewski had been the shooter in the Buback assassinationâa story that was suppressed by the
Verfassungsschutz
in order to avoid legal complications, as Knut Folkerts was already serving a life sentence for this crime.
1
The reasons why Becker provided information are difficult to ascertain, though subsequent reports would point to the harsh prison conditions that she, like the other RAF prisoners, was subject to. Similarly, there are serious doubts about how trustworthy her claims were, some suspecting that she simply provided misinformation in order to diminish her own responsibility and curry favor with her captors.
The
Verfassungsschutz
would pick Becker up from prison with a civilian automobile under the pretext of bringing her to a medical clinic, while in fact she was taken to an apartment in Cologne where she was debriefed for days on end. Although she received no immediate benefit in terms of her prison sentence, she was paid 5,000 DM, which she spent on
language courses
2
âa paltry sum indeed, considering that the
Verfassungsschutz
was at the time offering up to a quarter-million DM to any RAF members at large who might turn themselves in.
Regardless of why she did it, Becker was clearly torn by her decision to cooperate with the state. At some point in 1982 she managed to get word to the other RAF prisoners about what she had done, and according to some accounts offered to kill herself.
3
The others took their distance from her, but sent word discouraging her from doing herself any harm. Strikingly, there was no public condemnation, and the matter was hushed up. While the prisoners now knew that Becker could not be trusted, they made no move to exclude her from what support they were receiving from the outside.
While it has been reported that her interrogators were mainly interested in the RAF's internal structure, the exact details of what Becker divulged remain unknown; when the story broke almost thirty years later, in 2007, the
Verfassungsschutz
was characteristically tight-lipped about what they had learned from their informant, whose debriefing was codenamed
Operation Zauber
(“Operation Charm”).
Indeed, they have even refused requests from the BAW for copies of their files.
4
Verena Becker from a mugshot (right) and while being escorted by police following her 1977 arrest (opposite page)
_____________
1
For more on this see
pages 273â274.
Ironically, in 2010, at a time when Becker and Peter-Jürgen Boock were each making public statements accusing other RAF members of involvement in the Buback hit, Becker herself was brought up on charges related to the killing. She would go to trial in 2012 and was found guilty, receiving a sentence of four years for aiding and abetting. As two and a half years of that are considered served as part of her previous life sentence, she is expected to be released in less than a year. Tagesschau.de “Haft für Ex-Terroristin Becker wegen Beihilfe,” October 5, 2012.
2
Dahlkamp et al., “Operation Zauber.”
3
Werner Mathes and Rainer Nübel, “âVerräterin' bot RAF Selbstmord an,”
Stern,
April 25, 2007.
4
Christian Rath, “Verena Becker will raus,”
taz,
November 19, 2009.
_____________
1
. Jackson, 15; Grauwacke, 59.
2
. Jackson, 16.
3
. Geronimo, 105; Jackson, 17, 22-27.
4
. “Ten meters without a head.”
5
. Peters, 528.
6
. Viett, 220.
7
. Indeed, female RAF prisoners who corresponded with WAIW would routinely reject this kind of politics.
8
. Autonome und Knast-Gruppen BRD und West-Berlin, “Guerilla und Widerstandâeine âFront',”
radikal
no. 108 (September 1982): 2.
9
. Dellwo (2007), 173.
10
.
Antiimperialistischer Kampf
“Zum Mai-Papier der RAF,” no. 3: 5.
11
. See for instance, the
Fragment Regarding the Soviet Union
written by Gudrun Ensslin in Stammheim Prison on January 19, 1976, available at
http://www
. germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/76-01-19-ensslin.html.
12
. See for instance, the September 1982 communiqué by the anti-imps who firebombed the NATO weapons depot and Faber and Schnepp in Grebenhain-Oberwald in Vogelsberg district, Hessen; “Kommunique,” in Marat, 103.
13
.
Antiimperialistischer Kampf
, “Zum Mai-Papier der RAF,” no. 3: 8, 9.
14
. Tolmein, 147-148.
15
. William Safire, “Changing Relations between U.S., Bonn,”
New York Times
in
European Stars and Stripes,
March 1, 1982.
16
. Jackson, 18.
17
. Ibid., 20.
18
. Ian Q.R. Thomas,
The Promise of Alliance: NATO and the Political Imagination
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 126.
19
. Associated Press, “West German Bombs Precede Reagan Visit,”
The Wisconsin State Journal,
June 2, 1982.
20
. Associated Press, “Protesters Decry U.S. Arms Policies,”
The Capital
(Annapolis, MD), June 10, 1982. As part of this campaign, Bourns Ketronic Flugtecknik in Hamburg was firebombed on June 4, and the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut in Tübingen was bombed on June 5.
21
. United Press International, “Thousands Protest Reagan's Visit to Bonn,”
Logansport Pharos-Tribune
, June 10, 1982.
22
. “Summary of a Brochure by Autonomist and Anti-imperialist Groups,” in Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, 12.
23
. Ibid.; Geronimo, 113.
24
. “Summary of a Brochure by Autonomist and Anti-imperialist Groups,” in Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, 12-13. This source also explains that police had in fact drawn up a list of 500-800 people to arrest preventatively, but as they noted, “When the pigs came on the night before the 11th, they found houses empty. Most comrades had preferred to sleep elsewhere. Only 29 people were arrested that day.”
25
. Alexander, 261.
26
. Jackson, 21.
27
. Ibid.; J.I. Kominicki, “Hecklers Fail to Dampen Berlin Welcome,”
European Stars and Stripes
, June 12, 1982; Grauwacke, 73-74.
28
. Alexander, 261.
29
. “Redebeitrag: Zur Entwicklung der Antiimperialistischen Front in der BRD seit Bremen,” in Marat, 99.
30
. Grauwacke, 74.
31
. Alexander, 264.
32
. Ibid., 263-264.
33
. Ibid., 265.
34
. Mushaben, 220. These observations about social movement dynamics seem è propos: “the reactions of established political actors typically reinforce divisions among the activists, which leads to a twin process of moderation and radicalization,” (Koopmans, 645) and subsequently, “The presence of a radical minority may in turn strengthen the moderate faction's tendency toward moderation and institutionalization.” (Ibid., 655).
35
. See Appendix III: For Us It Was a Question of Learning Explosives and Shooting Techniques,
page 339
.
