Read The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 Online
Authors: J. Smith
The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (39 page)
The Lawyers Hans-Christian Ströbele had helped to found the West Berlin Socialist Lawyers Collective along with Horst Mahler in 1968. Klaus Croissant was a member of the Stuttgart Socialist Lawyers Collective; he had been under surveillance by the state from at least May 1972, suspected of having himself located safehouses for the RAF. |
Lawyers Klaus Croissant, Otto Schily, and Hans-Christian Ströbele at a press conference in 1974. |
Otto Schily was a committed civil libertarian, deeply concerned about the rule of law. He had befriended Rudi Dutschke while studying in West Berlin, and had been active in circles around the SDS. Siegfried Haag was a court-appointed attorney. While he had not been prominent in the APO or the political left previously, he was so moved by the prisoners’ plight that he would eventually make their struggle his own. Kurt Groenewold, the son of a wealthy property owner, had previously represented Ulrike Meinhof in her divorce from Klaus Rainer Röhl in 1968. He was active in the Hamburg Socialist Lawyers Collective, defending cultural radicals like the composers Ernst Schnabel and Hans-Werner Henze for their oratorio to Che Guevara, |
While the Committees welcomed support from many intellectuals and celebrities who still rejected the prisoners’ politics, by and large militants were expected to toe the RAF line. While some involved did have their own quiet reservations in this regard, it is equally clear that many others were sincerely won over to the guerilla’s politics. The state certainly contributed to this process, as activists would find themselves the object of police surveillance, raids, and even in some cases criminal charges, simply for disseminating information about the conditions in West German prisons.
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In subsequent years, the underground would include several veterans of this prisoners’ support scene, and even some from their legal team, a fact which the state would exploit time and again to attack the RAF’s lawyers. While most of the legal support team never did join the guerilla despite their increasing horror at the Kafkaesque trials and inhumane prison conditions, it is clear in retrospect that work in the Committees did constitute a rite of passage into the RAF for an astonishing number of future guerillas.
It is, of course, equally true that the overwhelming majority of those who were active in this scene never joined the guerilla, and while they remained operational, the Committees Against Torture always limited themselves to nonviolent forms of protest and popular education.
Before long, they got their first opportunity for such public activity: on May 8, 1973—the anniversary of the defeat of the Third Reich—sixty prisoners throughout the Federal Republic began a second hunger strike. The Committees stepped up their activities, organizing for lawyers to engage in a solidarity hunger strike and holding a demonstration outside the Federal Court in Karlsruhe.
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The Committees’ most significant event occurred on May 11, when they held a teach-in where several high-profile supporters spoke out against isolation torture. Heinz Brandt, an official from the IG Metall
trade union, described the isolation conditions that the prisoners were subjected to as even worse than what he had suffered during four years in a Nazi concentration camp:
As crass and paradoxical as it may sound, my experiences with strict, radical isolation were worse than my time… in a Nazi concentration camp… [I]n the camp, I still had the bases for human life, namely, communication with my fellow inmates… We were able in the camps to see, not only outrageously fascistic and sadistic mistreatment, but also the possibilities of resistance and collective life among the prisoners, and, with this, for the fulfillment of the fundamental need of a human being: social existence.
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Dutch psychologist Dr. Sjef Teuns described isolation and sensory deprivation as programmed torture. Dr. Christian Sigrist, who had worked alongside anticolonial freedom fighters in Africa, described the West German torture system as part of the worldwide counterstrategy against anti-imperialist combatants.
This last point was certainly as important to the prisoners as the former two. The RAF viewed human rights campaigns as being worse than useless; indeed, they viewed such humanitarianism as an attack on their fundamental principles. When Red Aid had put out leaflets accusing the state of denying the prisoners’ basic human rights, Baader had angrily objected that, “Because our comrades are half-dead they can’t think we’re anything else ourselves. They’re twisting the thing the same way the pigs twist it worldwide: Violence is taboo…”
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Similarly, Baader would later find it necessary to criticize defense attorney Otto Schily in this regard:
We certainly can’t agree with the argument regarding torture as it is developed by Schily in his petition […] In reacting to revolutionary politics, the state does not know what to do except torture, and in doing so it exposes itself as an imperialist state. The indignation of degenerate bourgeois antifascism only masks this. The latter is already so weak, corrupted by social democracy, and locked in revisionism, that it can no longer express itself in a meaningful way.
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On May 24, 1973, fourteen days into the second hunger strike, the prison authorities began withholding water from Baader, despite a court decision two days earlier forbidding such tactics, as even short term water deprivation under a doctor’s supervision can seriously damage one’s health.
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Indeed, after several days without water and in critical condition—suffering kidney pains, a sore throat, and difficulty seeing—Baader was forced to end his hunger strike. Apparently pleased with their success, the authorities targeted Bernhard Braun next, attempting to have him placed in the so-called “dry cell,” but his lawyer managed to intervene and have this blocked.
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The hunger strike continued until June 29, when the District Court in Karlsruhe ordered the release from isolation of two prisoners.
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(Although accounts are vague on this point, there is some indication that the two were former SPK members Carmen Roll and Siegfried Hausner.)
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Yet, soon after these two prisoners had their conditions relaxed for health reasons, another RAF prisoner was effectively sentenced to death by medical neglect.
Katharina Hammerschmidt had fled to France in 1971, but when the May Offensive had ended in a wave of arrests, she had turned herself in, returning to face the relatively minor charges relating to her having located safehouses for the guerilla. Despite the fact that she had surrendered voluntarily, she was remanded to the West Berlin Women’s Prison while awaiting her trial.
In August 1973, Hammerschmidt underwent a routine medical exam, which included some x-rays. These revealed an abnormal growth in her chest, but the prison doctors took no steps to evaluate whether this was benign or malignant. In fact, they did not even inform her of the results.
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In September, Hammerschmidt began to complain of intense pain in her chest and throat. She had difficulty breathing and it hurt to swallow, yet the prison doctors simply told her that if the symptoms continued, more x-rays would be taken in another three months.
Press Release from Baader’s Lawyers Even though Baader was doing well, at noon on May 22, 1973, the prison doctor, Dr. Degenhardt from Kassel, came to his cell with a squad of ten guards in order to force him to swallow a solution through a tube as thick as of one’s thumb. Three times Baader requested a spoon so that he could take the solution on his own. Despite this fact, the doctor ordered the guards to hold him down. Pinching his nose, he then forced the tube into his mouth, down his throat and into his digestive tract. Baader vomited and almost suffocated. The tube opened up his throat and his digestive tract and he vomited blood. After this torture Dr. Degenhardt gave him three intravenous injections and he then lost consciousness for eight hours. On the morning of May 22, Baader had been visited by one of his lawyers, Koch, from the Frankfurt Legal Collective. The lawyer was able to see that Baader’s state of health was relatively good. When he came back that afternoon to continue his visit, a guard told Koch that the doctor had instructed that Baader should remain in bed. It was not possible for him to visit with his lawyer. The lawyer asked to see the warden Metz, but this was refused. As attorneys of Andreas Baader we note: Andreas Baader is not only subjected to psychological torture in the Ziegenhain prison (Hessen), but he is also being tortured physically by methods which are carbon copies of those practiced in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, and Brazil. Force-feeding, when the prisoner has agreed to feed himself, is a form of torture. We demand that Dr. Degenhardt and his helpers be punished. Andreas Baader’s lawyers Klaus Croissant, “La justice et la torture par l’isolement,” in Croissant, 119. |
In October, the pain was so great that Hammerschmidt could not sleep; she was told by medical staff that her throat hurt from “too much yelling.” As her condition deteriorated to the point that her tumors became visible to the naked eye, the doctors simply prescribed water pills.
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In November, her lawyers finally won a court judgment forcing the prison authorities to allow her to be seen by an independent physician. This specialist immediately issued a letter indicating that Hammerschmidt needed follow-up tests as soon as possible. These were not carried out, and she was returned to prison.
Two weeks later, on the night of November 28/29, Hammerschmidt almost suffocated from difficulty breathing. She was brought directly to a hospital, where it was found she had a cancerous tumor as large as a child’s head in her chest. It was determined that the tumor was inoperable, although it was also stated that this might not have been the case just weeks earlier.
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An independent physician would later remark that the fact that Hammerschmidt had cancer should have been obvious from the x-rays taken in August, and yet six different prison doctors were all seemingly unable to notice that anything was wrong. Or perhaps they simply did not want to: in a public accusation signed by 131 doctors, it was suggested that she was denied necessary medical care because this would have required an end to the isolation conditions that she, like all other RAF prisoners, was being subjected to at the time.
It was January 1974 before the court adjourned her trial, ruling that she was too sick and needed to be released to a clinic for treatment. If anything could have been done, it was now too late: Katharina Hammerschmidt struggled on for the next year and a half, finally succumbing to her illness on June 29, 1975—three years to the day after she had turned herself in.
