The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (78 page)

One name that did not immediately appear on the wanted posters was that of Peter-Jürgen Boock, the husband of RAF prisoner Waltraud Boock, and yet it was later revealed that this man had in fact been central to the events of 77.

Boock had wanted to join the RAF ever since he was a teenaged runaway, one of the kids Baader and Ensslin had worked with in Frankfurt back in 1970. They had rejected him as a member at the time, not least because of his drug habit, a curse which only worsened as the years went on. Nevertheless, by the mid-seventies, with the original leadership largely removed from the field, Boock became a trusted recruit and was sent to South Yemen for training in 1975.
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In the wake of 77, Boock and other RAF fugitives had found shelter in Baghdad, but he remained plagued by his addiction, and when he began going through withdrawal, some of his comrades became desperate. At this point, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, the senior guerilla in the field, made the incredible decision to ask RAF members and supporters still in Europe to buy or steal drugs, which would then presumably be smuggled into the Middle East.
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The first RAF members arrested after the Stammheim deaths were on one such mission. Christof Wackernagel and Gerd Schneider were in
Amsterdam looking to score for Boock, but unknown to the two men, their safehouse had been identified during the Caransa investigation, and the police had it under constant observation. On November 11, the two men were followed as they left the apartment; when they realized that police were surrounding them, they drew their weapons and began to fire, even throwing a hand grenade. Sharpshooters took them out: one guerilla was hit in the chest and stomach, the other received a bullet in the head.
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Schneider was being sought in connection with the Schleyer kidnapping, Wackernagel in connection with the recent Zweibrucken courthouse bombing. Both men were extradited to the Federal Republic.

On January 21, 1978, Christine Kuby was arrested following a shootout with police in a Hamburg drugstore; she had been attempting to use a forged prescription to buy narcotics for Boock.
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Shortly afterwards, the
Verfassungsschutz
tried to carry out an ambitious false flag action, meant to entrap the guerillas. Dynamite was set off in the wall of Celle prison with the goal of allowing Sigurd Debus to escape. Debus, while not a member, was a political prisoner who had participated in hunger strikes with the RAF: the hope was that he would unwittingly lead the
Verfassungsschutz
to the underground guerillas. (As it turned out, Debus did not escape. When the details of this operation came to light in the mid-eighties it caused some consternation.)
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In March, the prisoners went on an unsuccessful and uneventful sixth collective hunger strike, demanding association, an international inquiry into the Stammheim deaths and that of Ingrid Schubert, and a return of all documents that had been seized from the dead prisoners’ cells. This time, Klaus Croissant was not able to organize support on the outside: his trial on charges of supporting a terrorist organization had just begun on March 9.
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Refusing to distance himself from his former clients, he now joined them in their hunger strike.

As progressive journalist Oliver Tolmein wrote years later, “Klaus Croissant was a lawyer who had a political understanding of justice and, as a result, never drew a firm line between defending his clients
and political engagement.”
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As a result of such commitment, on February 16, 1979, the tireless advocate was found guilty of supporting a terrorist organization and sentenced to two and a half years in prison, plus four years of
Berufsverbot
.
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On May 11, 1978, Stefan Wisniewski was apprehended at the Paris airport as he disembarked off a flight from Yugoslavia. Not only was Wisniewski carrying drugs, police also found a letter from Karl-Heinz Dellwo that had been smuggled out of prison, in which the RAF prisoner strongly criticized the hijacking that ended in the Mogadishu debacle.
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On June 30, four RAF members—Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Sieglinde Hofmann, Peter-Jürgen Boock, and Rolf Clemens Wagner—were arrested in Zagreb. The Yugoslav government entered into negotiations with the FRG, hoping to exchange the RAF combatants for eight members of the Croatian far right being held by West Germany. When this crass attempt at a trade broke down, the RAF prisoners were ferreted out of Yugoslavia to an undisclosed third country.

On September 6, RAF member Willi-Peter Stoll was shot dead by police in a Chinese restaurant in Düsseldorf. A few days later, the cops located his apartment, where they found a coded diary, an arsenal of weapons (including a homemade “Stalin Organ” capable of firing primitive missiles), and fingerprints of six other suspected RAF members.
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Later that month, police surprised three people engaged in target practice in the woods outside of Dortmund. Michael Knoll and Angelika Speitel were both shot, police officer Hans-Wilhelm Hansen was killed while another RAF member managed to escape with his submachine gun. Knoll, who was said to have assisted the RAF by traveling back and forth to Italy as a courier,
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died of his wounds on November 25.

Also in September, a figure from the earliest days of the guerilla once again made the headlines: Astrid Proll, who had fled from a medical clinic in 1974, was identified and arrested in England. Proll had not been involved in armed struggle since her escape, but had rather found a place for herself in the feminist and squatting communities in London, where the former getaway car driver worked as a mechanic and ran an
auto maintenance class for women. It would later be said that
Gruppe 47
poet Erich Fried had been one of those who secretly helped her get by while she was in hiding.
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right: Demonstration organized by the Friends of Astrid Proll campaign in London, England.

Astrid Proll

A campaign took shape, largely at the initiative of radical feminists, to support Proll and attempt—unsuccessfully—to fight against her extradition, for in the fugitive’s own words, “I do not expect to survive if I am returned to Germany.”
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Nevertheless, once she was returned, the state quickly agreed to drop the most serious charges: the main evidence against her was that of the discredited Karl-Heinz Ruhland, and the memo from state security that proved her innocence had come to light.

Meanwhile, on November 1, 1978, Rolf Heissler and Adelheid Schulz were identified as they were attempting to cross into Holland. A firefight ensued and border guards Dionysius de Jong and Johannes Goemans were both shot dead.

The guerilla was still regrouping, and yet there would be more casualties before it was operational again.

In the midst of the prisoners’ seventh hunger strike, Elisabeth von Dyck was identified by police while entering a suspected RAF safehouse in Nuremberg on May 4, 1979. She was shot in the back, and died on the spot.
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A month later, Rolf Heissler was captured after he miraculously survived being shot in the head as he entered a Frankfurt apartment.
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Heissler’s capture would actually go down in history as one of the first public successes of computer data mining in defense of the state. As an engineering magazine explains:

Much was already known about the terrorists. “The police knew that they rented apartments to conduct their crimes,” recalls Hansjürgen Garstka, the State of Berlin’s commissioner for data protection and freedom of information. “But they used them only a couple days before the event. Also, the police knew these people paid their electricity and rent only in cash.” The terrorists preferred high-rise apartments with underground garages and direct access to the highway, and they were primarily young and German.

Profile in hand, the police contacted electricity companies, to find out which apartments used no or little electricity, and apartment complexes, to find out which people paid in cash; they also combed through household registrations (German citizens are required to register with the state). “The results were all merged, and in the end, they found one flat which fit absolutely absolutely this profile,” Garstka says. Police put the apartment under surveillance and soon nabbed RAF member Rolf Heißler.
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While such law enforcement techniques might not raise an eyebrow today, it must be remembered how advanced—as if from science fiction—such levels of surveillance seemed to most people just a generation ago. There was a public outcry when it was learned how the bust had been carried out, and that Horst Herold’s BKA, with its massive computers, was behind it. (Learning a lesson from this, legislation was passed in the mid-eighties allowing such data mining in the FRG.)
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While the guerilla were the only ones actually being gunned down, 1977 and the years that followed challenged an entire society, as the state unleashed a wave of repression, and anyone to the left of Helmut Schmidt felt they might be a potential target:

A virtual war atmosphere was created in the country in mid-October: hundreds of thousands of motorists were pulled off the road and searched; constant appeals to the population were issued to encourage their reporting any suspicious types or activities to
the police—such as sudden change of address, of hair cut or any other cosmetic changes, unusual mailings or publications.
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That September and October, as Schleyer was being held in captivity, one hundred and fifty agents were on duty round the clock at the special headquarters set up in Cologne. Every day, over 15,000 phone calls were monitored, as 3,000 other police officers took part in the hunt.
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Conservatives took advantage of the frenzied atmosphere to settle scores with the progressive intelligentsia, the overwhelming majority of whom were firmly opposed to the guerilla and the revolutionary left. The Hessen CDU Chair Alfred Dregger accused the Frankfurt School academics of contributing to terrorism, a sentiment echoed by the CDU Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Hans Filbinger.
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At the same time, in September 1977, CSU representative Dietrich Spranger issued a list of public figures whom he held responsible for “terrorism” in the Federal Republic, an unlikely collection which included Willy Brandt, Peter Brückner, Pastor Helmut Gollwitzer, and authors Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll.
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The fact that two of those on this list—Böll and Gollwitzer—had recently joined pastor Heinrich Albertz and Bishop Kurt Scharf in a public appeal for the release of Schleyer did not seem to make a difference.
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Böll in particular remained tarred by the Springer Press as a “terrorist sympathizer” no matter what he did. This could have dramatic
consequences; for instance, an anonymous call was received stating that armed men had been seen entering the home of the famous author’s son. As a result, forty heavily armed cops from the special antiterrorist unit raided the house; of course, there were no guerillas there. When the elder Böll complained of this in an interview the next day, Bavarian radio refused to broadcast it on the grounds that it was “inflammatory.”
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Most people stood behind the government, not only in its hunt for the RAF, but also in its general crackdown on the radical left. In one poll, 62% of respondents stated that they were willing to accept restrictions on their personal freedoms through controls and house searches, while only 21% were opposed.
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At the same time, politicians and the press became ever more bloodthirsty. Years later, RAF member Christian Klar recounted that:

On September 8, 1977, the Crisis Management Team allowed Die Welt to demand that Rebmann’s plan [that the prisoners be killed] be carried out. On September 10, the Suddeutsche Zeitung published the same thing as reflecting a discussion within the CSU
Land
group, which wanted a prisoner shot at half-hour intervals until Schleyer was released. A day later, Frühschoppen demanded the introduction of bloody torture, noting that the guerilla groups in Latin America had been defeated in that way. The next day, Spiegel provided a platform for the CSU’s Becher and Zimmermann to express their longing for the deaths of the Stammheim prisoners. On September 13, the same idea was put forward by the SPD through Heinz Kühn, but in a more delicate way: “The terrorists must be made to understand that the death of Hanns Martin Schleyer will have grave consequences for the fate of the violent prisoners they are hoping to free through their disgraceful actions.”
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