The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History Page 19

  (Ironically, while their supporters may not have had an inkling of the GDR’s assistance to the RAF at this time, with the help of its mole Chalid Dschihad the BND quickly found out about the exiles’ new where-abouts.63 Hoping to capitalize on the exodus, the Verfassungsschutz visited relatives, friends, and former colleagues of suspected guerillas, promising that any future defectors would be relocated with new names, passports, and anywhere up to 250,000 DM. There were no takers.)64

  The presence of so many guerillas with misgivings about the armed struggle had been an obstacle blocking the RAF’s path forward and a serious drain on its resources. With this obstacle now removed, and with help now being provided by the East, the guerilla was ready to forge ahead, with hopes of finally putting the setbacks of recent years behind them.

  _____________

  1. See “Attack on Alexander Haig,” page 116.

  2. Bill Vann, “Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Jimmy Carter—the ‘Friendly’ Face of U.S. Imperialism,” World Socialist Website, October 12, 2002.

  3. Edward Jay Epstein, “Secrets of the Tehran Archive,” The People’s Voice, August 3, 2009.

  4. Associated Press, “Iranian Assets under U.S. Control Set at $8 billion,” The Lethbridge Herald, November 20, 1979.

  5. Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 267.

  6. Bill Vann, “Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Jimmy Carter—the ‘Friendly’ Face of U.S. Imperialism.”

  7. Scott Erb, German Foreign Policy: Navigating a New Era (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), 56.

  8. Mushaben, 99.

  9. Michael A. Genovese, Encyclopedia of the American Presidency (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 76.

  10. Carl Christoph Schweitzer, Politics and Government in Germany 1944-1994 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995), 197.

  11. Geronimo, 111.

  12. Marianne Strauch, “Krawall gegen Massengelöbnis vor 30 Jahren,” buten un binnen Magazin, RB TV, May 5, 2010.

  13. Schweitzer, 197-198.

  14. Strauch, “Krawall gegen Massengelöbnis vor 30 Jahren.”

  15. Despite a possible reading of their name in English, readers should keep in mind that “Autonomen” is a gender-neutral German word, roughly meaning “autonomists.” In many cities, women formed the backbone of the movement. Somewhat confusingly, many radical women (some of whom were part of the Autonomen, some of whom were not) often referred to their movement as the “autonomous women’s movement”; in the interests of clarity, we will use the term “militant women’s movement” in their regard.

  16. Katsiaficas, 101-103. Geronimo, 51-53.

  17. Geronimo, 89.

  18. Ibid., 115-116.

  19. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 325-326.

  20. Peter O. Chotjewitz, Mein Freund Klaus (Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2007), 232-233. The reasons for Pohl’s marginalization in many histories is at least partly due to the state’s ringleader theory, which led the media to focus on Baader, Raspe, Meins, Meinhof, and Ensslin initially, and then Klar and Mohnhaupt later on.

  21. Helmut Pohl, “Wir müssen jetzt Wege zur Entlassung finden,” Angehörigen Info, June 15, 1996. This interview has been translated by the editors and is available at http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/96_06_15.php.

  22. Baptist Ralf Friedrich, interviewed by Spiegel, “Ich bitte um Vergebung,” Spiegel, August 20, 1990; Wunschik (1997), 375.

  23. Ibid., 203-204.

  24. Ibid., 298.

  25. Ibid., 224-225.

  26. Spiegel, “Hier bleibt jeder für sich,” June 25, 1990; Lars-Broder Keil and Sven Felix Kellerhoff, “Aufstieg und Fall der zweiten RAF-Generation,” Welt, February 15, 2007.

  27. See Appendix II: Boock’s Lies, page 330.

  28. Viett, 220.

  29. Ibid., 210-211.

  30. Carsten Holm, “Die wollen’s nicht hören,” Spiegel, September 8, 2008.

  31. Spiegel, “Da waren die Vögel schon ausgeflogen,” October 13, 1980; Spiegel, “Sieben singen,” May 12, 1980.

  32. Pruthi, 29.

  33. Libération, “Deux allemandes devant la chambre d’accusation,” June 11, 1980.

  34. Annette Levy-Willard, “Cinq allemandes devant la chambre d’accusation,” Libération, June 25, 1980.

  35. Annette Levy-Willard, “Cinq Allemandes à isolement… à Paris,” Libération, May 29, 1980.

  36. Annette Levy-Willard, “Fleury-Mérogis à l’heure de Stammheim,” Libération, June 12, 1980.

  37. Annette Levy-Willard, “Les cinq Allemandes en isolement portent plainte,” Libération, June 16, 1980.

  38. Annette Levy-Willard, “Cinq Allemandes devant la chambre d’accusation.”

  39. Annette Levy-Willard, “Fleury-Mérogis à l’heure de Stammheim.”

  40. Annette Levy-Willard, “R.A.F.: Les cinq Allemandes seront extradées,” Libération, July 10, 1980.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Libération, “À Nouveau Oriach, Lapeyre, et Gérard,” July 12-13, 1980. The three would be amnestied on September 14, 1981, as part of the Mitterand government’s attempt to defuse its own guerilla problem.

  43. Viett, 209-217.

  44. For instance, Gabriele Rollnik has stated that there were a series of meetings in 1977 about the 2JM participating in a prisoner-liberation action, but, in a sudden about-face, the RAF had demanded a self-criticism, which the 2JM members refused. The RAF then proceeded to carry out the offensive on its own—with consequences that are now well known. Rollnik and Dubbe, 74.

  45. Viett, 209-217.

  46. Peters, 515.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Ibid., 509.

  49. Marion Schreiber, “Wir fühlten uns einfach starker,” Spiegel, May 11, 1981.

  50. As detailed on pages 58-59.

  51. Wunschik (1997), 226-227.

  52. Fridtjof Theegarten, “Im Hosenbund steckte die Pistole,” Hamburger Abendblatt, July 26, 1980.

  53. Pruthi, 29.

  54. dpa, “Vier Terrorautos kamen unbemerkt über die Grenze,” Hamburger Abendblatt, July 31, 1980.

  55. Viett, 209-217.

  56. Ibid., 221-224.

  57. Baptist Ralf Friedrich, “Ich bitte um Vergebung.”

  58. Schmeidel, 156.

  59. Helmut Pohl and Rolf Clemens Wagner, interviewed by junge Welt.

  60. Hans Wolfgang Sternsdorff, “Im Schützengraben für die falsche Sache.”

  61. See Appendix II: Boock’s Lies, page 331.

  62. Wunschik (1997), 396.

  63. Holm, “Die wollen’s nicht hören.” Dschihad claimed to have learned this while RAF members were spending time at a Middle Eastern training camp. He fell out of contact in 1983; the BND assumes he was killed.

  64. Spiegel, “Angebot des Verfassungsschutzes: Geheimdienst lockte RAF-Aussteiger mit Millionenprämie,” September 6, 2008. This would not be the last attempt to bribe RAF members into defecting; according to Stefan Aust, in 1982 agent Werner Mauss met with the lawyer Hans-Heinz Heldmann, who had defended Baader, to offer Brigitte Mohnhaupt a cash payment to defect. Heldmann and Mauss met in a neutral country, and cash changed hands, despite the fact that Mohnhaupt had no contact with either man. (Winkler, 391.)

  Statement Dissolving the 2nd of June Movement

  After ten years of armed struggle, we want to reflect critically on our history and clarify why we have decided to dissolve the 2nd of June Movement as an organization in order to continue the anti-imperialist struggle within the RAF—as the RAF.

  The 2nd of June Movement was founded in contradiction to the RAF with the vague purpose of carrying out “spontaneous proletarian politics.” We considered revolutionary theory and analysis—on the basis of which the strategy and tactics, the continuity and perspective for struggle could be developed—to be unimportant, and “jumped into the struggle” with the goal of blowing the minds of young people. And so we determined our practice on the basis of what would blow their minds, and not on the basis of what the real contradictions
and weaknesses in imperialist strategy were that we should focus our attacks on.

  The Movement was a putative alternative to the RAF for those comrades for whom struggle without compromise went too far.

  This produced ten years of splits, competition, and disorientation on the left and also within the guerilla, and it also hindered our own revolutionary development.

  We carried out our actions following a populist line, without providing political direction and without managing to mobilize people against the pigs’ strategy.

  It is never the responsibility of the guerilla to please the people and win their praise, but rather—in a country where social democracy is tied to Nazi fascism and U.S. imperialism, depriving the working class of any proletarian organizations—it is the guerilla’s responsibility to be the cutting edge, deepening the central political contradictions through armed attacks, so as to drive the state into political crisis.

  In the metropole, in the context of imperialism, only the guerilla is in a position to be the politically explosive factor, the form of attack—as such the revolutionary politics—that forces open the rupture between society and the state, developing the proletarian politics and anti-imperialist organizing necessary to shift the balance of power in our favor.

  The political attack—made material through armed means—is always a victory, even in cases where the operation is militarily defeated, because it anticipates this process and sets it in motion.

  That is also the difference between Schleyer and Lorenz. Today, we are certainly critical of our most important action. All the errors that we’ve made over the past ten years are to be found in it, and we’ve learned from these errors.

  The ‘75 liberation action unfolded in a politically charged context. The Stammheim comrades’ struggle had given rise to a national and international mobilization, which the widespread hunger strike had brought to a highly developed point with which Schmidt was having difficulty coping. We not only completely ignored this context, but by our choice of prisoners we shifted the political focus.

  Therein, as well as by the guy we chose—from a party that was of only secondary importance to the imperialist strategy—lay a calculation rather than a strategy. In our propaganda work before and after Peter Lorenz, the short-term success—the consumable ritual—was more important than the politico-military level of struggle required to break through the imperialist strategy. Therein one can also see the perversion of the fun guerilla1 of Reinders, Teufel, etc. The RAF’s ‘77 offensive and the state’s reaction finally placed the question of strategy before us in a new way. ‘77 was a step forward in the development of imperialist strategy, as well as in the concept of the guerilla in the metropole. Since the Mogadishu and Stammheim massacres, Schmidt has given Western Europe—under the leadership of the FRG—its political definition: the project and model for imperialism in the crisis created by the liberation struggles in the Third World and in the West European metropole.

  The unconditional integration of Western Europe into U.S. military strategy and the internal militarization of the metropolitan states through an increasingly unified apparatus—this is the imperialist response to the coming together of revolutionary struggles worldwide.

  Revolutionary strategy takes on an international significance insofar as anti-imperialist groups are recognized as the main enemy of the U.S.A. and its West European project.

  The U.S.A. and its accomplices knew that the next strategic defeat anywhere in the world would put them on the road to ultimate defeat.

  The “post-Vietnam era”—that is to say, the attempt to recover from the defensive position that followed U.S. imperialism’s politico-military defeat in Vietnam—through a strategy relying on political and economic means—collapsed in Iran, following the chain of defeats that stretched from Angola to Kampuchea.2

  Imperialist politics now seeks a military solution that cannot be achieved, and this leads—through the preparations for widespread destruction—to the development of total annihilation as a naked concept.

  A new, and in reality, final strategic military defeat in the Third World is to be prevented by launching war from Europe, a war that right from the start is meant to be a nuclear war. A new perverse variation on the theory of “limited war.”

  They are not preparing war to divide the world into imperialist spheres of control. The issue is revolution or counterrevolution—which is to say, the decisive stage of the confrontation is unfolding.

  This decisive stage of the confrontation will, in the final analysis, occur in the metropole, because it is obvious that the victorious Third World liberation movements that have achieved state power can be blackmailed as long as they have to function within the East-West contradiction, and as long as the imperialist centers can apply pressure militarily and through the world market.

  This is the essence of the entire international revolutionary process—destruction of the state, self-determination, and identity—which has come into sharp relief in the conflict arising from the struggle against communism in the metropole in recent years. It happens now—or it doesn’t happen at all.

  The question facing the entire West European left is whether, in this escalating situation, which will settle things one way or another, they will take on their historic responsibility or betray it.

  UNITY IN THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST ARMED STRUGGLE

  For the last time:

  2nd of June Movement

  June 2, 1980

  _____________

  1. In German this is a play on words: Spaßguerilla meaning fun guerilla and Stadtguerilla meaning urban guerilla, both sounding similar.

  2. Democratic Kampuchea was the name of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, under the Khmer Rouge government.

  Regarding the Alleged Dissolution of the 2nd of June Movement

  That’s right, the faction that has been trying for three years to shift the 2nd of June Movement to the RAF line has now joined the RAF. In the heat of the moment, these comrades have also dissolved the entire 2nd of June Movement—in an ocean of words.

  To the comrades who have spoken with us and asked who wrote this politically empty nonsense, we have to say that that is not entirely correct. If it were only “nonsense,” we wouldn’t have to worry about this “nonsense” expressing itself through idiotic actions, such as airline hijackings, etc. In this instance, we are taking the advice of Comrade Mao tse Tung seriously: one cannot leave unaddressed the subjective bullshit that some comrades present as an appraisal of the political situation. There are always inexperienced comrades who follow such theories and hurt not only themselves, but also the rest of us—the entire left movement.

  This “dissolution paper” contains no material analysis, only a series of sentences following one after the other.

  An initial comment regarding the claim that now the roots of the “perversion of the fun guerilla of Reinders, Teufel, etc.” have finally been exposed. To this we say: following a critique from steadfast “combatants,” the fun guerilla as a source of “leadership” and strategy is at long last disbanded by the dissolution. “Reinders, Teufel, etc.” have confirmed it by affixing their thumbprints:1 the fun guerilla is dissolved! That’s it! For years we’ve made our own perversion a mainstay of the resistance. Down with it! Fun is perverse! And fun during the struggle is perverse fun! For weeks now we’ve been in a state of elated self-flagellation.

  Smack… aaahh… smack… aaahh…

  However, not everything in this “dissolution paper” is so funny. For instance, the assertion that the 2nd of June Movement “was founded in contradiction to the RAF.” The 2nd of June Movement resulted from the fusion of three West Berlin groups that wanted to develop and organize the armed struggle.

  The largest group was the “Tupamaros West Berlin,” which since 1968 had been carrying out various actions in Berlin. Imperialist and Zionist facilities and symbols were attacked. Factories where workers were being laid off were attacked. And, above all, in the context of the A
PO’s 1969 Justice Campaign, courthouses, judges, and state prosecutors were attacked.

  The 2nd of June Movement was able to learn from this practice. The broad range of targets and forms of struggle came out of the experiences of the youth revolt at the time.

  The 2nd of June Movement was certainly correct to not develop an Urban Guerilla Concept theory like the RAF. That was completely unrealistic. This was a country where after twelve years of Nazi terror and a twenty-year anticommunist campaign, a youth movement was just beginning to consider socialist ideas; a country where after a few years of grappling with the fact that they had no unbroken tradition to fall back on, a mass of proletarian youth began to tentatively and selfconsciously take up the struggle against antisocial policies and oppression, against apathy in the face of genocide and imperialism, against the absurd capitalist machinery of consumption, which hideously deforms human needs into alien sources of profit. Their resistance developed out of their own distress, and they drew their strategic and tactical understanding from the experiences this led to, an ever-deepening analysis of the overall social situation. This dialectical development, based on theory and practice, is the process that Marx recognized as the precondition for revolutionary politics to succeed.

  At the time, there was no satisfactory practical experience from which to develop such a definitive Concept. The fact that at the time the RAF couldn’t put their Urban Guerilla Concept into practice proves this.

  The contradiction between the RAF and the 2nd of June at that time was the result of the different ways the groups had evolved: the 2nd of June Movement out of their members’ social scene and the RAF on the basis of their theoretical revolutionary model. And, equally, as a result of the RAF’s centralized organizational model on the one hand, and our autonomous, decentralized structures on the other. Another point of conflict was to be found in the question of cadre going underground, which the RAF insisted on as a point of principle.