The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (69 page)

May 1972

A major RAF document entitled
Stadtguerilla und Klassenkampf
(The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle) is released. The document is sometimes referred to as
Dem Volk dienen
(Serve the People).

May 11, 1972

Responding to the mining of Haiphong harbor and the intensified carpet-bombing of Vietnam, the RAF's Petra Schelm Commando bombs the Headquarters of the U.S. Army V Corps in Frankfurt. One lieutenant colonel is killed and thirteen soldiers are injured.

May 13, 1972

The RAF's Thomas Weissbecker Commando bombs the police headquarters in both Augsburg and Munich.

May 15, 1972

The RAF plants a bomb in the car of Judge Wolfgang Buddenberg, head judge for the trial of RAF member Manfred Grashof. (The judge had ordered Grashof held in strict isolation despite the serious injuries he sustained during a shootout at the time of his arrest.) Buddenberg's wife is seriously injured, when she, instead of him, uses the car.

May 19, 1972

The RAF's 2nd of June Commando bombs the Springer Building in Hamburg. Despite three warnings, the building is not cleared and seventeen workers are injured.

May 24, 1972

The RAF's July 15th Commando bombs the Headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe in Heidelberg. Three soldiers are killed.

May 28, 1972

A false communiqué is issued claiming that the RAF will place three random car bombs in Stuttgart on June 2, the anniversary of the killing of Benno Ohnesorg.

May 29, 1972

The RAF issues a communiqué addressing the false communiqué regarding the attacks threatened against Stuttgart.

May 31, 1972

A recorded message from Ulrike Meinhof is played at a teach-in in Frankfurt organized by the prisoner support group Red Aid.
The BKA initiates a massive manhunt for RAF members, known as Operation Washout.

June 1–July 7, 1972

In the wake of the May Offensive, numerous RAF members are arrested in a series of separate incidents. Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe, Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Jünschke, Irmgard Möller, Gerhard Müller, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, and Bernhard Braun are all captured, and Katharina Hammerschmidt, a supporter being sought, turns herself in on her lawyer's advice.

November 1972

The RAF releases a major document entitled
Die Aktion des Schwarzen September in München—Zur Strategie des antiimperialistischen Kampfes
(The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle). In it, they use the Black September attack in Munich as a starting point for a sweeping discussion of anti-imperialist resistance in West Germany and throughout the world.

January 17–February 16, 1973

Forty prisoners from the RAF participate in the first collective hunger strike, demanding an end to isolation and the closing of the dead wing at Cologne-Ossendorf prison.

May 8–June 29, 1973

Eighty prisoners from the RAF participate in the second collective hunger strike, demanding integration into the general prison population and free access to political information.

November 16, 1973

The Revolutionary Cells (RZ) attacks ITT in West Berlin in response to the company's role in the September 11 Chilean coup. This is the first action by a new guerilla group that will quickly take its place alongside the RAF and the 2JM as a force to be reckoned with.

February 4, 1974

In simultaneous predawn actions, RAF safehouses in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and the Netherlands are raided. RAF members Helmut Pohl, Ilse Stachowiak, Christa Eckes, and Eberhard Becker are arrested in Hamburg, while Margrit Schiller, Kay Werner-Allnach, and Wolfgang Beer are arrested in Frankfurt.

September 13, 1974

Ulrike Meinhof announces the third collective hunger strike of the prisoners from the RAF while testifying at Andreas Baader's trial. For the first time, the prisoners demand association with one another rather than integration into the general prison population. Meinhof releases a
Provisorisches Kampfprogramm für den Kampf um die politischen Rechte der gefangenen Arbeiter
(Provisional
Program of Struggle for the Political Rights of Imprisoned Workers), the only RAF document ever issued in which prisoners in general are addressed.

September 27, 1974

Monika Berberich reads a statement expelling Horst Mahler from the RAF during a trial at which she is testifying. Mahler has by this time joined the Maoist KPD/AO.

November 9, 1974

RAF member Holger Meins dies after two months on hunger strike. Demonstrations break out all over West Germany.

November 10, 1974

Günter von Drenkmann, president of the West Berlin Supreme Court, is killed during an attempted kidnapping by the 2JM. A communiqué explains the action was in retaliation for the death of Holger Meins.

November 11, 1974

In Berlin, a mass demonstration to support the prisoners and protest the death of Holger Meins draws 15,000 people.

November 18, 1974

Holger Meins is buried in the family grave in Hamburg. Five thousand people attend the funeral. As Meins's coffin is lowered into the ground, student leader Rudi Dutschke, in what will become an iconic moment in West German left history, steps forward, and standing over the grave, gives the clenched fist salute, shouting, “Holger, the struggle continues.”

December 7, 1974

A bomb explodes in Bremen Central Station, and five people are injured.

December 9, 1974

The RAF issues a communiqué denouncing the Bremen bombing as a police action.

January 1975

The
Internationales Komitee zur Verteidigung politischer Gefangener in Europa
(IVK) is founded by lawyers of political prisoners.

January 1, 1975

The
Lex Baader-Meinhof
(Baader Meinhof Laws) come into effect. Among other things, the laws allow the court to exclude defense attorneys who are suspected of forming a criminal association with their clients and allows trials to continue without the accused present if the reason for the absence is deemed to be the fault of the prisoner, e.g., the result of illness due to hunger striking.

January 20, 1975

Spiegel
publishes an interview with prisoners from the RAF Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, and Jan-Carl Raspe.

February 2, 1975

The RAF writes a letter to the hunger striking prisoners asking them to call off their hunger strike and promising to pursue the struggle from there on in.

February 18, 1975

The construction site of the planned Wyhl nuclear power plant is occupied in the opening salvo of what will become a powerful antinuclear movement in West Germany. This initial occupation is soon cleared by police.

February 23, 1975

Over 20,000 people reoccupy the nuclear power plant construction site in Wyhl.

February 27, 1975

The 2JM kidnaps Peter Lorenz, CDU candidate for mayor in West Berlin. The Lorenz kidnappers demand the release of six imprisoned guerillas: Rolf Pohle, Rolf Heißler, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, Verena Becker, Ina Siepmann, and Horst Mahler. All except Mahler, who declines to be released, will be flown to sanctuary in South Yemen, and Lorenz will be released unharmed.

March 20, 1975

Elisabeth von Dyck is arrested along with Petra Krause and three Swiss citizens in Zurich, Switzerland.

April 24, 1975

The RAF's Holger Meins Commando, which includes a number of former SPK members, occupies the West German Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden and demands the release of twenty-six political prisoners. During a tense standoff, the guerilla executes the West German Military and Economic attachés. Police storm the building after explosives the guerilla had laid detonate. RAF member Ulrich Wessel is killed, and Siegfried Hausner, Hanna Krabbe, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, and Bernd Rössner are all captured. Hausner, who is seriously injured, is denied appropriate medical care; he will die ten days later.

June 4, 1975

The European Commission of Human Rights declares that prisoners from the RAF have been held in unacceptable conditions since 1972.

June 29, 1975

RAF supporter Katharina Hammerschmidt dies of cancer in a West Berlin hospital, having been held in prison and denied adequate treatment until it was too late.

March 16, 1976

The Hamburg LG sentences RAF member turned state witness Gerhard Müller to ten years in prison. In exchange for his cooperation, Müller is never charged with the murder of police
officer Norbert Schmid. Instead, he is released after six and a half years, paid 500,000 DM, and relocated to the U.S.A. RAF member Irmgard Möller is sentenced to four and a half years.

May 9, 1976

RAF member Ulrike Meinhof is found hanged in her cell. The state claims it is a suicide. Fellow prisoners and supporters assert that she was murdered. An International Investigatory Commission into the Death of Ulrike Meinhof will be established and will eventually rule that the evidence indicates murder. Bombings and demonstrations will occur throughout Western Europe for several weeks in response to Meinhof's death.

June 27, 1976

A mixed commando made up of members of the PFLP (EO) and of the RZ hijack an Air France airliner traveling from Tel Aviv, Israel to Paris, France, and divert it to Entebbe, Uganda, demanding the release of fifty-three political prisoners in Israel, West Germany, France, Switzerland, and Kenya. The West Germans demanded were RAF members Werner Hoppe, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Ingrid Schubert, and 2JM members Ralf Reinders, Fritz Teufel, and Inge Viett.

July 1976

The influential French newspaper
Le Monde Diplomatique
interviews prisoners from RAF and their attorneys.

July 4, 1976

An Israeli special operations force storms the airliner in Entebbe, killing the four guerillas, three hostages, and a squad commander, as well as forty-five Ugandan soldiers. RZ members Wilfred Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann lose their lives in the action.

July 7, 1976

RAF member Monika Berberich and 2JM members Juliane Plambeck, Gabriele Rollnick, and Inge Viett overpower a guard and escape from the Lehrter Straße Women's Prison in West Berlin.

July 21, 1976

RAF member Monika Berberich, who escaped from a West Berlin prison with three other women on July 7, is rearrested.

October 30, 1976

Eight thousand people participate in the first occupation of the proposed nuclear power plant site in Brokdorf. The occupation is broken up with what the mainstream radio station NDR refers to as “unbelievable brutality.”

November 13–14, 1976

Forty thousand people participate in a renewed occupation of the proposed nuclear power plant site in Brokdorf. Approximately 1,000 people are injured by police clearing the site, some seriously.

February 8, 1977

RAF member Brigitte Mohnhaupt is released from prison and immediately goes back underground.

March 19, 1977

Twenty thousand people demonstrate against the construction of a nuclear power plant in Grohnde.

March 29–April 30, 1977

Prisoners from the RAF begin their fourth collective hunger strike, demanding to be treated as guaranteed by the Geneva Convention, association in groups of no less than fifteen, abolition of isolation, an international investigation into the deaths of Holger Meins, Siegfried Hausner, and Ulrike Meinhof, and an end to psychological warfare through false flag actions and communiqués.

April 7, 1977

The RAF's Ulrike Meinhof Commando assassinates Attorney General Siegfried Buback, his driver, Wolfgang Göbel, and a bodyguard, George Wuster.

April 28, 1977

The Stuttgart
Oberlandesgericht (Land
Court of Appeal—OLG) finds RAF members Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader guilty of six murders and thirty-four attempted murders in connection with six bomb attacks. Baader is sentenced to life plus twenty years, Raspe to life plus ten years, and Ensslin to life plus six years.

April 30, 1977

The minister of justice for Baden Wurttemburg agrees to meet the prisoners' demand for association. In response, the prisoners end their hunger strike. Shortly thereafter work begins on the seventh floor of Stammheim to allow association with additional prisoners from the RAF.

May 3, 1977

RAF members Günter Sonnenberg and Verena Becker, the latter a former 2JM member, are arrested in Singen. Following a firefight, Sonnenberg is shot in the head and Becker in the leg.

July 8, 1977

Klaus Croissant, an attorney who has defended imprisoned RAF members, flees to Paris to escape increasingly threatening harassment. He holds a press conference at which he requests political asylum.

July 30, 1977

Jürgen Ponto, the president of West Germany's largest bank, the Dresdner Bank, is shot and killed in his home. The RAF claims responsibility. Susanne Albrecht, who is the sister of Ponto's goddaughter, was recognized, and so signs her name to the communiqué.

August 9, 1977