The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (20 page)

The next bust occurred as 1971 came to a close: on December 17, Rolf Pohle was arrested in a gun shop in Neu-Ulm attempting to buy thirty-two firearms which the police claimed were meant for the RAF.
⁶
Pohle had been a young law student in Munich in the days of the APO. He had organized legal aid during the 1968 Easter riots,
⁷
and had been subjected to heavy police harassment ever since, eventually pushing him to join the underground.

On December 22, exactly two months after officer Schmid’s demise, another cop was killed. Several RAF members were robbing a bank in the small military city of Kaiserslautern—the nearest police station had literally been blocked from interfering, guerilla helpers barricading its entrance with cars. By plain bad luck for all concerned, police officer Herbert Schoner spotted the parked getaway van as he passed by the bank, just as it was being relieved of its funds. When Schoner knocked on the van’s window, he was shot twice—he managed to draw his gun before he was finished off by a third bullet.
¹

In the immediate aftermath of December 22, there was no publicly available evidence to tie the robbery or Schoner’s death to any political organization. To all appearances, this was simply a “normal” crime. Nevertheless, the very next morning, the
Bild Zeitung
led the charge: “Baader-Meinhof Gang Strikes Again. Bank Raid: Policeman Shot,” screamed the headline.

The Springer Press was merely doing what was by now a tradition, tarring the radical left with any and all crimes and misdemeanors. (Except, of course, that in this case they were right.)

The progressive
Gruppe 47
intellectual Heinrich Böll, perhaps the most important author in postwar Germany, was flabbergasted, and publicly accused the anti-RAF smear campaign of bearing all the hallmarks of fascism. While condemning their violence, he tried to put the RAF into perspective, famously describing their struggle as a “war of six against sixty million.”

Böll’s words may have been appreciated by the RAF, but he was certainly no supporter. Of course, this was not the way the right saw things, and he became the target of a hate campaign, branded an apologist for murder and a terrorist sympathizer,
²
to which he replied that those accused of sympathizing were simply “people who have committed the criminal sin of making distinctions.”
³
He and his family would experience unusual levels of police harassment for years to come. At one point, for instance, as he was entertaining guests from out of town, police with submachine guns raided his home, claiming they suspected Ulrike Meinhof of being on the premises. (To the cop in charge, Böll declared that if Meinhof ever did show up he would
shelter her, but only on condition that she not bring any guns into his house. In his words, it would be the Christian thing to do.)
⁴

It wasn’t only the streets that were being policed, but also the cultural and political parameters of debate, and the RAF was being placed clearly beyond the pale.

A second, and at least initially less successful move to solidify public opinion against the RAF was the trial of Karl-Heinz Ruhland, which came to a close in March 1972.

Ruhland had been peripheral to the RAF when he was captured in December 1970. Soon after his arrest, he started providing the police with information, the location of safehouses and the names of those who had sheltered the guerilla.
⁵
When brought to trial on charges relating to a RAF bank robbery, much was made of his class status as a manual worker who was never fully accepted by the other members of the group, all in a fairly transparent ploy to show the guerilla up as hypocritical middle class revolutionaries with no real affinity for the proletariat.

Ruhland provided the police with their first real break, however slight, into the world of the RAF, a service for which he received a relatively lenient sentence of four and a half years. Although even the corporate press had to admit that he did not make a very convincing witness, often changing his testimony to fit the latest police theory, he would remain a fixture in future RAF trials
⁶
until someone more convincing could be turned. In retrospect, his significance appears to be as a template for future state witnesses to come.
⁷

In the meantime, guns continued to blaze as the police and guerilla played an increasingly deadly game of hide and seek. Following a narrow escape, Andreas Baader even sent off a letter to the non-Springer press that he authenticated with his thumbprint, essentially to thumb his nose at the cops, and to prove that he was still alive.
⁸

Then, on March 2, police in the Bavarian city of Augsburg killed Tommy Weissbecker and captured Carmen Roll (a former SPK member). Weissbecker was the son of a Jewish concentration camp survivor,
¹
and had cut his teeth in the Hash Rebels scene before gravitating to the RAF. Twenty-three years old, he was never given a chance to surrender.

Tommy Weissbecker, murdered by Augsburg police on March 2, 1972
.

The killing took place as the two left Weissbecker’s apartment. It was later revealed that the police had had him under surveillance since February, renting an apartment above his, and had been listening in on him just before he went out. This would suggest to many not a chance identity check, but a carefully staged murder.

In retaliation, the 2nd of June Movement bombed the police headquarters in West Berlin and, as in the case of Georg von Rauch, an empty building in Berlin was occupied and renamed the Tommy Weissbecker House.

While in custody Roll was drugged, apparently in the hope that she would provide police with information; as part of this chemically assisted interrogation, on March 16 the prison doctor gave her such a large dose of ether that she almost died.
²

News of Weissbecker’s murder spead quickly. In Hamburg, RAF members Manfred Grashof and Wolfgang Grundmann feared this meant the safehouse they were staying at—which had been rented by Weissbecker—might also be compromised. RAF policy in such situations was to simply leave the house and never return, but Grashof, whose speciality was producing false documents, decide to risk one trip back to gather some items he needed. When he and Grundmann returned, three cops were sitting inside in the dark. As soon as the guerillas opened the door, even before they turned on the lights on, a cop panicked and started shooting.
³
Grashof was shot three times. He
returned fire, aiming blindly in the dark, and hit police commissioner Hans Eckardt, fatally wounding him.
⁴

Grundmann had come to the RAF from
Schwarze Hilfe
, or Black Aid, a support group for anarchist political prisoners in West Berlin.
⁵

As for Grashof, he had come to West Berlin in 1968 as an army deserter, and had joined with Horst Mahler in the Republican Club arguing that the semi-city be turned into an official refuge for others fleeing military service.
⁶
He had been with the guerilla from the beginning, being particularly close to Petra Schelm and especially upset by her death.

Despite his injuries, Grashof was moved from the hospital to a regular prison cell by Federal Supreme Court Judge Wolfgang Buddenberg, who had been put in charge of all RAF arrests. After two months, he was moved into isolation, only allowed to exercise for a half hour each day, and even then only with his wrists handcuffed behind his back. As a result of this treatment, his wounds opened up again, but he did not die.
⁷

All of this unfolded within a context of increasing and increasingly visible police control and new repressive legislation. After having offered the carrot of amnesty and limited reforms, Brandt’s SDP-FDP coalition was now showing that it also knew how to wield the stick.

In September 1971, a new Chief Commissioner was appointed to the 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. Over the next decade, he would oversee a six-fold increase in the BKA budget, and a tripling of its staff as he personally pushed West Germany to the worldwide forefront of computerized repression.
⁸

By 1979, Herold’s computers contained files on 4.7 million names and 3,100 organizations, including the photos of 1.9 million people and 2.1
million sets of fingerprints.
¹
While today it is 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 and technical sophistication.

One of Herold’s first moves was to set up a “Baader-Meinhof Special Commission,” and hunting for the RAF remained his utmost priority throughout his tenure.

The significance of these changes in the BKA was overshadowed, though, by a new clampdown on the legal left, arguably the greatest since the ban on the KDP, as the Interior Ministers Conference passed the
Radikalenerlass
(Anti-Radical Act) on January 28, 1972. The new legislation was supported by all three major political parties, as well as all the major trade unions.
²
Known as the
Berufsverbot
(Professional Ban) by its opponents, its intention was to bar leftists from working in the public sector. The potential targets of this ban included some 14% of the workforce, not only government bureaucrats, but also anyone employed by the post office, the railways, public hospitals—and most importantly university professors and school teachers.
³

The decree also dramatically increased the visibility of the
Verfassungsschutz
political police—the so-called “Guardians of the Constitution”—as the names of all applicants for public sector jobs were now sent to this agency, which determined on the basis of its own files whether a special hearing was necessary to gauge the applicant’s loyalty to the state. Not only did the
Verfassungsschutz
comb open sources—speeches, pamphlets, doctoral theses, etc.—for names, but it also engaged in covert surveillance, telephone taps, and a network of informers which was said to include students hired to note who among their classmates held radical views.
⁴
(Little surprise that the agency’s president until 1972 was Hubert Schrübbers, who had spent the early forties as a Nazi prosecutor notorious for seeking harsh sentences against antifascists, which would certainly have meant confinement in a concentration camp.)
⁵

As Georgy Katsifiacis has noted, “the decree resulted in loyalty checks on 3.5 million persons and the rejection of 2,250 civil service applicants. Although only 256 civil servants were dismissed, the decree had a chilling effect.”
⁶
So much so that according to one survey carried out in the city of Mannheim, “84 percent of university students there refrained from regularly checking leftist materials out of public libraries for fear of being blacklisted.”
⁷

Obviously, those students who had refused the SPD’s amnesty in 1971 found themselves among the first to be targeted. While most of these people would no doubt have rejected the RAF’s politics, fears about the guerilla were exploited to help push through the legislation. As Heinz Kühn, SPD President of North Rhine-Westphalia, put it, “We could hardly have Ulrike Meinhof employed as a teacher, or Andreas Baader in the police force.”
⁸

In the wake of the sixties student movement, the state was establishing the conditions under which erstwhile rebels would be allowed to join the establishment. As its corollary, this rollback included ongoing attacks on the universities themselves. For instance, in early 1972, the Free University hired the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel as professor of economics: the Berlin Senate responded by vetoing this appointment,
⁹
and despite student strikes, Mandel was barred from entering the FRG. (This ban was only lifted in 1978.)
¹⁰

In this context, in April 1972, the RAF released its second theoretical statement,
Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle
. As with
The Urban Guerilla Concept
, this text was distributed in magazine form at the May Day demonstrations that year.

In a text almost twice as long as the previous one, the RAF was trying to provide an analysis of the previous year’s events, both within the left and within the Federal Republic as a whole. Considerable energy was spent analyzing the unsuccessful workers’ struggles in the chemical sector in 1971 and the failure of the legal left to respond to class oppression
within the FRG. These weaknesses were pointed to as so many factors underscoring the necessity for armed politics.

A real attempt to find a strategic connection between class oppression, working class struggle (outside of the unions, of course) and the guerilla is apparent in all the RAF’s theoretical documents in this period.