The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (52 page)

Ingrid Schubert, Berlin

Annerose Reiche, Berlin

Ilse Stachowiak, Hamburg

Irmgard Möller, Hamburg

Sigurd Debus, Hamburg

Christa Eckes, Hamburg

Wolfgang Stahl, Hamburg

Margrit Schiller, Lübeck

Monika Berberich, Berlin

Johannes Weinrich, Karlsruhe

1. Within 6 hours, by 9:00
PM
, the imprisoned comrades must be brought to the Rhine-Main airport in Frankfurt. There, they must be allowed to speak freely amongst themselves and with their lawyers. They must be allowed to broadcast information by radio and television concerning the course of events.

Contact between ourselves and the prisoners must be provided, first by telephone, and later by radio, and must be maintained until their arrival in whatever country agrees to receive them.

A Lufthansa Boeing 707, fully fueled, with a 3-man crew, must be held at the ready at the Rhine-Main airport.

Within 10 hours, by 1:00 am, the prisoners must be flown out of the FRG. They must be accompanied only by Backlund, the Kingdom of
Sweden’s Ambassador in the FRG, and one of their lawyers. We will tell you the destination once the flight is underway.

The federal government must give each of the prisoners 20,000 dollars.

2. Our statement and statements from the prisoners or their lawyers must be immediately distributed to the international press agencies and broadcast unedited over radio and television in the FRG.

Throughout the entire process, the government must announce its decisions through the mass media. The departure of the comrades must be broadcast live by television in the FRG and Sweden.

3. Our demands are not negotiable, nor will we extend the period of time in which they are to be fulfilled. If the Federal Republic tries to delay the freeing of the prisoners, we will shoot one official from the FRG’s foreign office for each hour that the time limit of the 1st or 2nd ultimatum is exceeded. Any attempt to storm the embassy will result in the death of everyone in the building. In the case of an attack, 15 kg of
TNT
will detonate in the embassy enclosure.

After they land, the freed comrades will confirm by radio that they have been granted permission to stay. We will then free some of the embassy employees and announce our means of departure.

We will be human beings—freedom through armed anti-imperialist struggle.

Responsibility for the shooting of Military Attaché Andreas von Mirbach lies with the police, who, despite repeated warnings, failed to vacate the embassy building.

Holger Meins Commando

April 24, 1975

Attorney General Buback and the state security police are attempting to have me imprisoned on the basis of a series of totally fabricated allegations.

During the search of my home and my offices, with the participation of Federal Prosecutor Zeis, who was also armed, state security police seized a large number of files concerning my clients’ defense, notes from discussions regarding the preparation of their defense, as well as correspondence. At the same time, they seized my personal notes for the impending trial against Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, and Jan-Carl Raspe.

Given the gravity of what has happened here, the intentional destruction of the last place where the accused prisoner might still place some trust—the trust a defendant places in his lawyer—this can be qualified as an openly fascist act of violence.

This is a state where the extermination of revolutionaries is part of the program, with legislation and the justice system mobilized towards this end, a state that tortures political prisoners by subjecting them to systematic isolation for extended periods and to brainwashing in special units created for this purpose within the prisons. This is a state where functionaries have executed Holger Meins and Siegfried Hausner. This is a state that slanders its lawyers using the entire arsenal of psychological warfare—using the media to conduct its malicious campaign—that excludes them, treats them like criminals, and finally imprisons them. In a state like this, I will not allow my freedom to be threatened any longer, nor will I be exercising my profession as a lawyer any more.

It is time for those of us who are struggling against imperialism to move on to more important tasks.

Siegfried Haag

May 11, 1975

W
HILE THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF
Germans never approved of the RAF or their declared strategy, there was a small but not insignificant base of support and sympathy for the guerilla amongst young people and the radical left.

Apart from the undeniable pleasure many felt at seeing certain targets physically attacked, there was widespread outrage at the brutal and seemingly excessive repression the state indulged in. Despite capture, the prisoners from the guerilla were managing to beat the odds and turn this repression to their advantage in a way that was consistent with their strategy of bringing out the violence inherent in the system.

“The position of citizens in a powerful state—Don’t forget, Berlin has a Social Democratic tradition.” (Police action in West Berlin on the night of March 4/5, 1975)

Even before this strategy had won the new recruits who carried out the Stockholm action, countering this rise in sympathy had been designated a top priority for all sections of the political establishment. In the words of Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of the FDP, “The sympathizers are the water in which the guerilla swims: we must prevent them from finding that water.”
¹

Or as the CDU opposition leader Helmut Kohl put it, “We need to drain the swamp … in which the flowers of Baader-Meinhof have grown.”
²

To this end, a variety of propaganda maneuvers, described by the prisoners as psychological warfare, combined with renewed efforts to isolate and neutralize those who were considered to be sympathizers and supporters, often through use of the
Berufsverbot
, §129, and specially crafted legislation. Such repression took on new dimensions under Siegfried Buback, who succeeded Ludwig Martin as Attorney General on May 31, 1974, just weeks after the SPD’s Helmut Schmidt replaced Willy Brandt as Chancellor. (Brandt had been forced to step down following a spy scandal known as the Guillaume Affair.)

The guerilla’s lawyers were among the first to be targeted.

On October 16, 1974, the Federal Supreme Court filed to seize defense correspondence between attorney Kurt Groenewold and the RAF prisoners, alleging that he and other lawyers were at the core of the prisoners’ communication network, known as
Info
. This move came in the midst of the third hunger strike, and constituted the first foray in the state’s newest offensive against the prisoners’ supporters.

Info
was a system of prison communication devised with the help of lawyers from the Committees Against Torture, whereby messages would be passed between the prisoners. It represented a covert means of breaking through the isolation conditions, of maintaining group identity, sharing political opinions, and coordinating hunger strike activities. As we shall see, because it was so vital to the prisoners’ survival, it was severely repressed.

An explosion of rage and rebellion swept across West Germany following the death of Holger Meins in November 1974. On November 26, the state responded with Operation Winter Trip, which according to Attorney General Buback was specifically aimed at “the sympathizers’
scene,”
³
both through direct repression and by preparing public opinion to accept new restrictions on civil liberties.

On December 13, the Attorney General filed to seize legal correspondence between the prisoners and defense attorneys Klaus Croissant and Hans-Christian Ströbele. Buback accused Croissant of belonging to a “criminal association” with his clients, a claim he based on Croissant’s use of the “terminology of left extremism, such as isolation torture, extermination conditions, brainwashing units, and the like.”
⁴
Buback also pointed to Croissant’s public statements in support of the prisoners’ hunger strike and regarding the death of Holger Meins.

On December 30, Second Senate Judge Theodor Prinzing ruled that Croissant was indeed acting as “supporter” and “mouthpiece” for the prisoners and, as such, for a “criminal association.” Ströbele was also alleged to be a member of a criminal association for referring to himself as a “socialist and a political lawyer,” and for expressing “solidarity with the thinking of the prisoners,” whom he referred to as “comrades.”
⁵

(Ströbele’s wife, Juliana Ströbele-Gregor, was for a time banned from her job as a schoolteacher, subject to the
Berufsverbot
due to her husband’s work on the prisoners’ behalf. Although she succeeded in forcing the Administrative Court in Berlin to withdraw the ban, she remained stigmatized as the wife of a “terrorist lawyer.”)
⁶

On January 1, 1975, all of this was given added legal significance as legislation known as the
Lex Baader-Meinhof
, or “Baader-Meinhof Laws,” became constitutional amendments to the Basic Law. This solidified the attacks on the defense, §§138a-d allowing for the exclusion of any lawyers deemed to be “forming a criminal association with the defendant.” §231a and §231b allowed for trials to continue in the absence of a defendant if the reason for this absence was found to be of the defendant’s own doing—a stipulation directly aimed at the prisoners’ effective use of hunger strikes.
⁷
Under §146, joint defenses were now prohibited, even though the Stammheim prisoners were facing a joint trial. This paragraph was used to forbid Otto Schily from speaking to those of the accused whom he was not defending, even when he
saw them every day in court. Surveillance of defense correspondence was sanctioned by §148 and §148a, while the previously held right of the accused and defense lawyers to issue statements under §275a was withdrawn.
¹

On March 17, 1975, Prinzing approved Buback’s motion and Croissant was barred from representing Baader. The court listed three reasons for this decision. First, in November 1974, Croissant had refused to share information that the lawyers were circulating amongst the prisoners with his client Bernhard Braun because of Braun’s decision to break off his hunger strike. Second, Croissant had spoken at a solidarity event for the hunger strikers on November 8, 1974, the day before the death of Holger Meins. Third, Croissant had represented the prisoners in their negotiations with
Spiegel
regarding an interview conducted in January 1975.
²

All three acts were deemed to constitute punishable offenses under §129.

On May 5, 1975, Groenewold was barred from representing Baader on the basis of allegations that his office served as an “information central” to allow prisoners to communicate between themselves. What this likely meant was that he had passed letters from one prisoner to another, and may have photocopied letters meant to be shared with several prisoners, all as part of the
Info
system.

The next day, on May 6, Ströbele was similarly excluded, again on the basis of accusations that he was key to an “information central.”

It is clear that this series of exclusions, as well as those that followed, were meant to serve several functions.

The most apparent objective was to prevent the prisoners from adequately defending themselves in the Stammheim trial which was about to begin on May 21.

Croissant argued that by facilitating the prisoners’ interview with
Spiegel
, and making public statements on their behalf, he was merely doing what any good lawyer was supposed to do: presenting his clients’ version of events and their motivations to the public. Yet, it would seem the prisoners were not supposed to have lawyers who did their job properly, for as Croissant observed, “By this court decision, just a few weeks before his trial, Andreas Baader is being denied a lawyer who has spent several years preparing his defense …”
³

Indeed, as the pretrial hearing began, Baader no longer had a single attorney of his choosing.

These exclusions also served a second, and in some ways more insidious function. The prisoners had come to depend on their attorneys, and the role they played in facilitating communication. The lawyers’ visits and the
Info
communication system provided a form of human contact, a source of information regarding developments outside of the prison, and a modicum of political discussion.

As RAF prisoner Brigitte Mohnhaupt explained:

Info … was the only possibility—that is how we conceived of and understood it—the only possibility, in general, of social interaction between isolated prisoners. Even if it was only a surrogate for communication, only letters and paper, it was, nonetheless, the only option for discussion, for political discussion, for political information and, obviously, for orientation.