The 1960s were
turbulent times throughout the world. The New Left had begun to
emerge and demonstrations against the Vietnam War and nuclear power
were becoming commonplace in first world nations. West Germany was no
exception but youth activists in that country, which was divided by
communists and capitalists into East and West respectively with the
Wall dividing Berlin in half, had a deeper problem than other
nations. World War II had ended and the Nazis were defeated but many
members of the National Socialist party were later given prominent
positions in the media, the police, and the government of West
Germany. Even worse, the West German government were supplying the
U.S. military with weapons produced in German factories. Many
activists feared another Nazi uprising was imminent in their country.
Some of them were content with ordinary protests while others saw the
situation in more drastic terms. Underground urban guerilla movements
began to coalesce and one of these, the Red Army Faction, were
prepared to commit acts of terrorism and violence in the name of
revolution.
Andreas
Baader’s mother raised him by herself. His father was a member of
the Wehrmacht and he got caught during the invasion of Russia, never
to return. As a teenager, Andreas Baader dropped out of high school
and embraced the bohemian lifestyle of the fledgling hippie movement.
He got involved in political activism up to 1968 when he and his
girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, firebombed a department store in
Frankfurt am Main to protest Germany’s involvement with the
American military in Vietnam. The pair got arrested but after their
sentencing, activists sympathetic to their cause, helped them escape
and smuggled them across the border into Switzerland. They traveled
clandestinely around Europe, staying in communes and squats to
establish contacts with radicals all across the continent. Eventually
they sneaked back into West Germany.
Andreas Baader
had a habit of hot-wiring sports cars. One night when he ran a red
light in a stolen vehicle, the police pulled him over. After checking
his counterfeit driver’s license, they were not convinced he was
who he claimed to be so they hauled him off to jail, discovering his
true identity later. Gudrun Ensslin tracked down a journalist named
Ulrike Meinhof because she had a plan for breaking Baader out of
prison.
Ulrike Meinhof
had been involved with political activism and communism since the
late 1950s. As time went on she became more radical and more
militant. Throughout the 1960s, she had been working as a journalist,
writing stories for Konkret magazine. In 1968, a right-wing
extremist tried to assassinate the Marxist sociologist Rudi Dutschke;
he shot Dutschke in the head but the scholar survived and escaped
with his family to England to live in safety. Meinhof wrote an angry
article about the attempted murder and denounced political protests,
declaring that the time for fighting in the streets had come. Around
that same time, she made contact with Baader and Ensslin in order to
report on their arson attack against the store in Frankfurt.
When Ensslin
contacted Meinhof in 1970, the journalist had quit writing for
Konkret magazine because she felt they were becoming too
mainstream. Nonetheless, Ensslin persuaded her to use her
journalistic credentials to arrange for an interview with Andreas
Baader who was then living in prison. The authorities agreed to allow
the interview to take place in a university library in West Berlin.
While Ulrike Meinhof was waiting inside, Baader arrived with two
armed guards. He sat down with her and they began their interview. As
they talked, two females entered the library with suitcases
accompanied by a man who had been hired because of his professional
experience with firearms. The two women opened their suitcases which
were filled with guns. A firefight broke out between them and the two
armed guards. The gunman opened fire and accidentally shot the
elderly librarian in the liver. Baader and his three companions
escaped through an open window. Ulrike Meinhof went with them.
Originally, she had planned to stay behind and deny any knowledge of
the escape plan but at the last minute she gave in and went along.
Later that day she called a friend and asked her to pick up her
children from school. Ulrike Meinhof never returned home and she
never saw her children again.
About that
time, the police and the press began referring to the escapees as the
Baader-Meinhof Gang. But the urban guerillas saw themselves in a
different light. While living underground with the revolutionaries,
Ulrike Meinhof wrote a manifesto which was soon printed, published,
and distributed around the activist scene. The pamphlet’s cover had
an assault rifle against the background of a red star with the
letters “R.A.F.” The intention was to announce the establishment
of the Red Army Faction; the Baader-Meinhof Gang were to be just one
part of this group which also included the 2 June Movement, the
Socialist Patient’s Collective, Kommune 1, and the Situationists.
Members of these groups did not recognize each other by sight but
knew each other through the use of code names and secret communiques.
Together they would unite to fight a class war against the forces of
capitalism, fascism, and imperialism.
Then the
Baader-Meinhof Gang disappeared. They re-emerged in Jordan where the
Popular Front For the Liberation of Palestine were waiting for them.
The PFLO had made arrangements to give the guerillas training in
terrorist and urban warfare techniques. The partnership was short
lived. The Muslim PFLO did not approve of drugs, alcohol, or free
love and insisted they be separated along lines of gender with the
women kept sheltered in a separate housing unit. The RAF members were
not physically fit and objected to the exercises and drills they were
instructed to do in the harsh desert sun. Andreas Baader decided to
leave and the others followed him.
In the winter
of 1972 the Red Army Faction embarked on a campaign of bombings, bank
robberies, and murders back in their home country of West Germany.
The first bomb was set off in the British Yacht Club, killing a
German boat maker. The 2 June Movement claimed responsibility citing
their support for the Irish Republican Army as their cause. In the
spring, the Baader-Minehof Gang set off a bomb in the American
Consulate in Frankfurt am Main, killing one officer and injuring
thirteen others; their stated objective was to support the communists
in North Vietnam. That same month they targeted the right-wing Axel
Springer media group by planting six bombs in their Hamburg office
building; only three bombs went off and nobody died. Soon after that,
several car bombs blew up at an American military base where West
German manufactured weapons were being stored for shipment to the war
in Vietnam; three U.S. soldiers were killed and five others were
injured. They also robbed some banks here and there to obtain funding
for their movement.
After a series
of police raids, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof,
Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe were capture and brought to prison.
The five suspects were taken to Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart. Each
was locked in their own solitary confinement cell which was painted
white and equipped with fluorescent lights on the ceilings that never
shut off. Only a small barred window near the top of each cell gave
them any indication as to what time it really was. The only human
contact they were allowed was with their lawyers. Gudrun Ensslin
devised a system where names from Herman Melville’s classic novel
Moby Dick were given to the
attorneys who passed the
messages on to the other inmates. This is how they orchestrated a
hunger strike to protest their living conditions.
When
Holger Meins died of starvation on November 9, 1974, the emaciated
remaining three RAF prisoners were taken out of their cells and
forced to eat.
Inspired
by the death of Meins, the 2 June Movement recruited other associates
of the Red Army Faction for a kidnapping operation, an action that
alerted the West German public to the fact that the Baader-Meinhof
Gang were not the only RAF members. In February of 1975, Peter
Lorenz, a Christian Democrat campaigning in the election for mayor of
Berlin, was taken hostage and held in a secret location. The
second-wave RAF members demanded the release of seven Red Army
Faction affiliated supporters who were imprisoned for non-violent
criminal activities. They were quickly released and they sent Peter
Lorenz away unharmed.
One
month later, six RAF members seized the West German embassy in
Stockholm, Sweden. They took hostages and planted bombs all around
the building. Their demand was that all members of the Baader-Meinhof
gang be released from prison or the whole building would get blown to
pieces with the hostages inside. The police refused their request
so two of the hostages were murdered. But some of the bombs went off
prematurely and two members of the Red Army Faction got killed. The
four remaining terrorists later surrendered and the hostages
were released.
While
Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe spent Spring in their cells, work
began on a maximum security courthouse located on the prison grounds
to be used solely for the Baader-Meinhof trial, the first indication
that this was to be no ordinary criminal court case. Before
the trial began, lawmakers agreed to a special law specifically
written for the RAF: defense attorneys were to be illegal and any
attempt made by their attorneys to assist the Baader-Meinhof
defendants were to be liable to criminal penalties. Unfortunately,
the law was retroactive and police proceeded to raid the homes and
offices of any lawyers associated with the Red Army Faction. Several
of them were arrested for being accomplices to terrorist activities.
The police also raided the homes of suspected sympathizers and
associates of the RAF as well as some left-wing bookstores. The team
of judges overseeing the trial were all former Nazi Party members and
known to be right-wing extremists.
The
four surviving Red Army Faction prisoners were made to defend
themselves. Their line of defense was that the American invasion of
Vietnam was an illegal act of war, therefore
attacking their military base in Germany was punishment for an
international crime. During their testimony, their microphones were
sometimes shut off, making the defendants impossible to hear. They
were removed from the court several times due to outbursts of anger.
At one point, a prison psychiatrist tried to have the trial delayed
because he said the conditions of living in solitary confinement were
a form of torture and the defendants were no longer physically or
psychologically fit to stand trial.
Shortly
after the court case
began, Ulrike Meinhof was found dead in her cell. She committed
suicide by hanging herself with a
rope she had made by tying prison towels together.
To
no one’s surprise, the three remaining Baader-Meinhof Gang members
were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary
confinement.
In
retaliation for the convictions, something had to be done. Hanns
Martin Schleyer, a former SS officer and later a prominent
industrialist and businessman was being
driven in his Mercedes with a
police escort. They passed by a woman pushing a baby carriage on the
sidewalk and pulled up behind a car at a red light. When the light
turned green,
the car ahead went into reverse, colliding with Schleyer’s
Mercedes. Five masked gunmen got out and the woman on the sidewalk
reached into her baby carriage and drew a loaded rifle. Bullets
sprayed everywhere and three policemen and Schleyer’s chauffeur
died. The masked men pushed
Schleyer into the trunk of their car and drove off. They
held Schleyer hostage for more than a month. They mailed a
typewritten letter to the police demanding that all imprisoned
members of the Red Army Faction be released in exchange for the Nazi
businessman. The police decided to delay negotiations while they
searched for the kidnapper’s location.
Meanwhile
members of the PFLO who had tried to train the Baader-Meinhof Gang in
Jordan hijacked an airplane flying out of Bonn. They forced the pilot
to fly to Dubai then Aden in Yemen and finally on to Mogadishu,
Somalia where a German sniper succeeded in shooting the terrorists,
setting the airplane’s hostages free.
When
Schleyer’s kidnappers heard this news, they put him into an Audi,
drove him over the border into France, shot him, and put his dead
body in the trunk, leaving the car on the side of the road. Later
they called the police and gave them the location of the vehicle.
The
next day, the inmates at Stammheim heard all this news. The next
morning
they were all found dead. Andreas Baader died of gunshot wounds in
his neck. Gudrun Ensslin was found hanging. Jan-Carl Raspe was killed
by a gunshot wound in the back of his head. Imgard Moller, another
RAF affiliate who had been transferred to Stammheim after being found
guilty of car-bombing the American military base, was found bleeding
with several stab wounds in her heart. Moller survived but the others
were declared dead from suicide.
Throughout
the 1980s, members of the Red Army Faction continued to carry out
bombings and assassinations but their
objectives were becoming less and less clear. By the 1990s, the
Soviet Union had collapsed and East and West Germany were reunited to
be one country again. RAF activities dwindled until 1998 when a
typewritten letter was sent to the media bearing their logo with the
red star and rifle. The dispatch declared that all Red Army Faction
urban guerilla campaigns would cease and the organization would exist
no more.
As
a united Berlin became the capital city of Germany again, secret
Stasi documents were found revealing that communist East Germany had
been supplying money, materials, and support to the RAF all along.
Reference
Aust,
Stefan. Baader – Meinhof: The Inside Story Of the R.A.F.
Oxford University Press, New
York: 2009.
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