Last writings of Ulrike

Introduction

Ulrike Meinhof was one of the founders of the RAF. When she was found dead in a cell in Stuttgart-Stammheim prison on 9 May 1976, her comrades did not believe the version of suicide immediately proclaimed by the German authorities. To show who she really was, her comrades in arms have published her last letters written for the group’s discussion in jail as well as texts delivered at the Stammheim trial in which she had participated. In this collection, we have added a statement she delivered at her first trial regarding the release of Andreas Baader, the founding act of the group, as well as an interview with her sister Wienke and other relevant documents, supplemented by chronological and bibliographical references.

In composing this collection, we found that many of the translations that existed in French until now were downright abominable. This is why we have remade translations based on the German originals.

Handwritten page, early 1976

Jan Raspe on the death of Ulrike Meinhof

May 11, 1976

I don’t have much to say.

we believe that ulrike was executed. we do not know how, but we know by whom and we can determine the calculation of the method. i recall herold’s words: “actions against the raf must always be carried out in such a way as to avoid any sympathetic position.”

and those of buback: “the security of the state depends on people committing themselves to it. people like herold and me always find a way.” it was a coldly conceived execution, like that of holger, like that of siegfried hausner.

if ulrike had decided to end it all because she saw it as the last chance to assert her revolutionary identity against the slow destruction of the will in the agony of isolation, she would have told us — at least to andreas: that was how their relationship was.

I believe that the execution of Ulrike now – at this moment – is motivated by the culmination, the first political breakthrough in the international confrontation between the guerrillas and the German imperialist state. There is information circulating, but I do not want to talk about it now. The assassination is part of a strategic line, after all the attempts of the state for six years to overcome, to exterminate physically and morally the RAF. And it targets all the guerrilla groups in the Federal Republic of Germany, for which Ulrike plays an essential ideological role.

what i still have to say

it is that since i have known the relationship between ulrike and andreas – and i have known her for seven years – it was essentially intensity and tenderness, sensitivity and rigor. and i believe that it is precisely the character of this relationship that allowed ulrike to endure the eight months in the dead wing. it was a relationship as can develop between brothers and sisters – oriented by an identical goal and the role that this policy played in it.

and so she was free – because freedom is only possible in the fight for liberation.

There was no break in their relationship during these years. It would not have been possible because it was determined by the politics of the RAF. And if there were essential contradictions in the group, they were defined in a concrete practice. During the process of theoretical work, the only one remaining possible in prison, they cannot be based on anything, given the identical situation of the struggle, and taking into account the history of the group.

Ulrike’s discussions, letters and manuscripts up until Friday evening provide evidence that this was exactly the case. They clearly express the true nature of this relationship.

to claim now that there were “tensions”, a “coldness” between ulrike and andreas, between ulrike and us, is a primary and sinister slander to be able to then use in the psychological warfare the project of executing ulrike: that is indeed buback, in all his stupidity:

All these attempts have so far only led to an increasingly clear view of the reaction in West Germany as fascism.

Herold – President of the BKA, Federal Police Office

Buback – Chief Federal Prosecutor

Holger – Holger Meins, died on hunger strike 1974

Siegfried Hausner – member of the Holger Meins Commando who died in 1975

Fragment on the structure of the group

Here is a fragment on the structure of the group. Ulrike wanted to expose it in the Stammheim trial – in order to destroy the theory of a hierarchical structure that the federal prosecution is trying to push in this trial. Andreas was against it, and we wanted to construct it differently. It doesn’t matter much, but I have released it now anyway because it provides the refutation of Buback’s infamous claims about “contradictions”, and because this is what Ulrike worked on last. It can only be published in full and with Ulrike’s last letters, the two to Hanna Krabbe and the one to the prisoners in Hamburg.

– Jan, May 11, 1976

what habermas analyzes there, has a condition which we say is the form of the proletarianization of the class in the metropolises: individualization by the totality of alienation in completely socialized production. individualization is the condition for manipulation.

freedom from this machine is only possible in its total negation, i.e. in the attack on the machine by the collective in struggle that the guerrilla becomes, must become, if it wants to become strategy, i.e. if it wants to win. collectivity is a moment in the structure of the guerrilla and – presupposing subjectivity as a condition in each one as a decision to fight – its most important moment. the collective is the group that thinks, feels and acts as a group.

leadership in the guerrilla is the one or those who keep open the collective process of the group and organize it during their practice: the anti-imperialist struggle, from their determination and the decision of each one to be a moment of intervention, thus from the notion of each one to be able only what he wants collectively. which means the group in which everything that it is is integrated practically, really, in its process as a group that is engaged in the anti-imperialist struggle: military structure, politics, strategy, embryo of the new society.

The line, i.e., from the strategy the logic and rationality of individual tactical steps, actions, is elaborated by all. It is born in the process of discussion from the experience and knowledge of all, it is therefore established collectively and thus becomes imperative.

in other words: the line is developed in the process of practice and the analysis of its conditions, its experience and its anticipation. which is possible as a unified process because there is unanimity concerning the goal and the will to achieve it.

The process of coordinating the practices of the groups, once the line has been developed and understood, functions as an order in the military sense. Its execution requires absolute discipline at the same time as absolute autonomy, that is, autonomous orientation and decision-making power in each situation under different conditions.

what unites the guerrilla at every moment is the will of each one to lead the fight. thus direction is a function that it needs for its process. it cannot be usurped. it is exactly the opposite of what the psychological warfare affirms about andreas and the leadership of the raf. if andreas were as the federal prosecutor presents him, there would be no raf, there would not be the process of this policy for five years, we simply would not exist. if he assumes a leadership function in the raf, it is because he is, from the beginning, what the guerrilla needs most: will, awareness of the goal, determination, collectivity. When we say: the line develops in the process of practice and analysis of its conditions, its experience and anticipation, it means that the leadership is the one who has the broadest vision, the greatest sensitivity and the greatest strength to coordinate the collective process, the goal of which is the independence and autonomy of each one — in the military sense, the individual fighter. This process cannot be organized in an authoritarian way, no gang is willing to do so, and its leadership in the form of a gang leader is excluded.

the aim of the federal prosecution’s smear campaign against andreas is clear: it seeks to prepare the demobilization of public opinion in the face of his assassination. it presents the whole affair in this way: all that is needed is to kill this one guy, andreas, and the problem that urban guerrilla warfare poses for germany — according to maihofer the only problem that the state does not manage — will be solved.

we allow ourselves to doubt it. over the past five years, we have learned from andreas – because he is for us what we call an example, that is, someone from whom we can learn – to fight, fight again, always fight.

because in what he does, and therefore in what we do, there is nothing irrational, nothing forced or tormented. one of the reasons why the prosecution hates andreas the most is that he fights using all weapons. from him we learned that there is no weapon of the bourgeoisie that cannot be turned and turned against it. the tactical principle that is based on the notion of the process in which capital develops its own revolutionary contradiction. and so andreas is the guerrilla that che says is the group. he is the one among us who, for a long time and since always, has seized the fact of dispossession – the function of the guerrilla that anticipates the group and thus is able to direct its process, because he has understood that it needs it. From the fact of total dispossession, the form that proletarianization has in the metropolises: individualization, isolation, he developed guerrilla warfare, the force of subjectivity and will as a driving force in the process of building a guerrilla organization in Germany.

Hence, it is worth recalling that at the beginning of any revolutionary initiative – and we are thinking of the strike movements of 1905 in Russia, of the October Revolution – which transmitted to an objective and quasi-natural process its direction, duration, coherence, strategy, continuity and thus its political force, that this happened through the decision and the will of individuals.

For Gramsci, will is the sine qua non: the strong will as the driving force of the revolutionary process in which subjectivity becomes practical.

Habermas – philosopher from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School

Maihofer – Minister of the Interior

Gramsci – one of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy

Two letters to Hanna Krabbe

March 19, 1976

what politicians are talking about is not what people think, but what they are supposed to think – and when they say “we”, they are trying to talk about it in such a way that people can relate to it and find it well said – but the state would not need opinion polls, nor the intelligence service, if indoctrination by psychological warfare were so simple –

The legal country is not the real country, Gramsci said, or simply: the dominant opinion is not the opinion of the dominated –

what you’re saying is bullshit. you’re reasoning in the imaginary. as if the enemy were the ideology that he spits out, the spiel, the platitudes served up by tv with the tone of the politicians’ consensus, as if the media and the people to whom all this shit is poured were the same thing. not real, material, the counter-insurgency machine that is the federal police, attorney general, intelligence services, government, media, etc. as if the enemy were not material, but ideal. so you don’t question what the situation that brandt calls “normal” really is — and don’t you notice in relation to buback’s sentence that he understood the character of the confrontation: war, and its dimension: international, i.e. according to multinational american capital, and you only find it “absurd”. instead of analyzing, you find a word — “CIA”,

metaphorically noting the moral decay of Buback’s policy — which is gratuitous. You denounce yourself by this, because in a way you deplore that it is war, after having clearly put yourself on our side and having started to fight in this war.

your text is addressed to public opinion like the civil rights movement. one can then ask: if that’s your thing, why are you here and not there? but you are here.

The internationalism for which you fought in the RAF context is not that of international organizations like the UN or Geneva, it is the international of liberation movements that wage war against imperialism in the Third World and in the metropolises.

war – that’s all. You won’t find your way around it by referring to gossip, but only by studying the facts and their context in the class struggle.

if, in isolation, you do not assume, constantly and always, the effort to grasp reality, by finding its notion, its materialist definition in the context of the struggle – class struggle grasped as war –, you become white, detached, sick, i.e. you begin to have a sick relationship with reality. and it is betrayal, by capitulation to the reality of torture, of the effort that resistance demands – otherwise it is only a word.

it is not about – you cannot afford it in isolation – torturing yourself, on top of everything else. which does not mean – as andreas said over there – that some experiences should not be suffered in the process of liberation from alienation. but to work yourself to understand politics, facts and their relationships, as well as to understand the group and to act, is one thing. it is another to work yourself to death because isolation has taken away all illusions about yourself, and that can be quite bitter. and if it is a question of anxiety and despair due to the performance structure in your socialization, well that is what you will fight from.

Perhaps you should understand – I don’t know – that you can only achieve something with words if they correctly translate the concrete situation, the one in which everyone finds themselves in imperialism; that it is absurd to want to agitate with words, when only explanation raises awareness, the truth – and that, in the environment in which we are fighting – post-fascist state, consumer culture, imperialist chauvinism, mass manipulation by the media, psychological warfare, social democracy – that in the face of the repression we are facing here, indignation is not a weapon. It is limited and purely sterile. He who is truly indignant, therefore concerned and mobilized, does not shout, but thinks about what he can do.

This is SPK-ism – replacing struggle with shouting. It’s not only sickening, it leaves you dying in isolation, because you only oppose brutal material repression with ideology, instead of opposing it with intellectual effort, which also requires physical effort.

arming the masses – this is still primarily done by capital: the cops, the army and the far right. so before you glorify the masses in germany, or simply the “masses”, think carefully about what is actually happening here. in 1922, ho chi minh wrote in l’humanité: “the masses are basically ready for rebellion, but completely ignorant. they want to free themselves, but they don’t know where to start.” this is not our situation.

what we are thinking about here most is how to transmit the experiences, partly horrible, that we have had in isolation and that result in: betrayal, capitulation, self-destruction, depoliticization, so that you do not have to repeat them. so if it is true that in guerrilla warfare everyone learns from everyone else, it must be possible to transmit the experiences – provided only that we understand collectivity as a process – in this stories of authorities, in which people are institutionalized, are an antagonism. collectivity as a process means fighting together – against the machine, i.e. really and not in the imagination.

March 23, 1976

This is stupid: “psychiatry” in the yard. The line at Ossendorf, like everywhere, is to destroy, and psychiatrists participate in it, as much as the methods applied by state security are designed by psychiatrists. Psychiatry, like imperialist science in general, is a means, not an end. Psychiatrization is a method of psychological warfare, using the destroyed fighter to show the absurdity of revolutionary politics, to take away the fighters’ credibility. It is also a method of police tactics – to avoid a possible “liberation by force” as Buback said and thereby its military relevance: recruitment.

on the other hand, what bücker is doing is not psychiatrization — it’s terror. he wants to wear you down. with notions of therapy, of attempts at brainwashing you are way off the mark there, you are introducing a transmission where the attack is frontal.

The Ossendorf method is the prison method in general, but with, in Ossendorf, the perfection of the construction and the design of the application of punishments that it embodies and that Bücker and Lodt personify: therefore aseptic, total. The prisoner is cut off from the air so that he finally loses his dignity, his self-awareness and the sense of what terror is.

The idea is to destroy. psychiatrization is only one moment and one instrument among others. If you let yourself be paralyzed by it like the rabbit in front of the snake, you risk not seeing what is happening in addition to that around you.

“no windows” – of course. but then you get excited again about the isolation, the sadism with which it was conceived, the perfection in its application, the totality of the will to destroy on the part of state security, the amazement at the acuteness of the antagonism into which we have entered by fighting, and thus, the amazement to see that fascism actually reigns here. that it is therefore not only an affirmation on our part, but the exact notion of the character of the repression that strikes you when you begin to practice revolutionary politics in this country.

they can’t psychiatristize anyone who doesn’t accept it/want it. shouting at psychiatry only mystifies isolation. isolation is effective — it is against it that we must fight and naturally you have to confront bücker’s quibbles. so demand: that there be no acoustic control, only visual surveillance control, like in stammheim. here naturally it was also a fight to get the cop who came to listen to us to leave, that we could sit on the ground, etc. of course, only repression works. it is nevertheless clear.

you are also a bitch. you take out of your work box the slogan concentration and as a guideline prisoners of war as if it could be a threat — against müller. it is bullshit. we must aim for concentration and the application of the geneva convention but what do you expect from müller? we are fighting them and this fight will never end and it is not they who will make the conditions of struggle easier for us. obviously if you only reason at the level of bourgeois morality, you will soon run out of ammunition. it is stupid. so take good care of yourself — because no one can do it for you in isolation. bernd not either.

Hanna Krabbe – member of the Holger Meins Commando, 21 years in prison

Brandt – former Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany

SPK – Socialist Collective of Patients

Bücker – Director of Cologne-Ossendorf Prison

Müller – staff member of Cologne-Ossendorf prison

Bernd – Bernd Roessner, like Hanna from the SPK, 17 years in prison

Letter to the prisoners in Hamburg

April 13, 1976

we still find it and above all unbearable – this class position with which you are inflating yourself there. it is not a question of definition either. because the struggle is eliminated there, therefore the essential. it does not exist. it is a pedestal that has little to do with what we want. what we want is the revolution. that is to say there is the goal and in relation to the goal the question is not a position, but only to be the movement, the struggle, the relationship – then, as you say: to fight.

there is the class situation: proletariat, proletarianization, downgrading, debasement, humiliation, expropriation, servitude, misery.

In the total penetration of all relations by the market in the imperialist system, and in the process of nationalization of society by the ideological and repressive state apparatuses, there is no place or moment where you can say: this is where I start from. There is clandestinity and liberated territories, but you do not find it ready-made either, clandestinity as an offensive position of revolutionary intervention, it is itself a moment of attack, that is to say non-existent without it.

the class position is the soviet foreign policy and the so-called socialist accumulation model of the ussr that claim to have come from the position of the world proletariat. it is the position – the apology – of socialism in one country, and this means: an ideology that aims to maintain the domination of a dictatorship that does not define itself precisely in an offensive way against imperialism, but defensively, from the constraints of encirclement. you can say that the soviet domestic and foreign policy was historically necessary – but you cannot reproduce its absolutization as a class position.

the class position, then the interest, the need, the mission of the class to fight for communism in order to be able to live, is contained in its politics. i would say: surpassed in it. which is ridiculous. Position and movement are mutually exclusive. it is a construction of relief and justification – a pretension. it claims to derive class politics from the economy – which is false. class politics is the result of its confrontation with the politics of capital; the politics of capital is a function of its economy. which, in my opinion, poulantzas captures very well when he says that the economic functions of the state are part of its repressive and ideological functions – the class struggle.

the politics of the class is its struggle against the politics of capital, not against the economy, which, directly or through the state, proletarianizes it. the class position of the proletariat is war – it is a contradiction in adjecto, bullshit. the soviet union rambles a lot about the class position because it tries to pass off its state policy as a class struggle. i would say it is the capitalization of soviet foreign policy. which means that they can be allies in the process of liberation, but not a protagonist. the protagonist has no position – he has a goal. but the “class position” has always been a bludgeon – the pretension and granting, through the party apparatus, of a notion of reality that does not correspond to any lived or livable reality. it claims a position of struggle without class struggle. as you say: “from which” only that we will have to act, and not that we are already acting.

in 1969 it was the ml, ksv, ao groups, which with their “class position” depoliticized the political movement in the universities, claiming just a policy that no student could follow emotionally anymore. it was a liquidation position against the anti-imperialist protest. and i think that this is the horror of this notion and its content, namely that it eliminates the possibility of an emotional identification with proletarian politics – it is a catechism.

we do not start from any class position, but from the class struggle as the principle of all history, and from the class war as the reality in which proletarian politics is realized, and this – as we have grasped in practice – only in and through war. the class position can only be the movement of the class in the class war, the world proletariat armed in combat, its real vanguards, the liberation movements. or as jackson says: “connections, connections, connections”. so movement, interaction, communication, coordination, fighting together – strategy. all this is paralyzed in the notion of the “class position”, and that is how you use it too, when you try to convince igel of it. but this – you should have known for a long time that there is nothing more boring than brainwashing.

finally: the class position is a triumphalist position. of course – it also has something heroic. only that is not our thing, ours is the effect.

but enough. i feel like i’m talking into the wind, which is not my intention. what i’m trying to do is get you off your pedestal. so better, come down once. instead of bragging.

ML, KSV, AO – Maoist groups of the time

Jackson – George Jackson, member of the Black Panthers in prison

Igel – Wolfgang Beer, one of the prisoners in Hamburg, died in 1980

Extract from the statement of the prisoners at the Stammheim trial

January 1976

making proclamations is not our thing — and in any case they would be meaningless in front of the pseudo-public that is watching this trial — the distorted, corrupted and totally manipulated public opinion that (as wunder says) lets people observe.

the problem – and this is also an element of this pitiful spectacle, which is why it is taking place in this building and in stammheim instead of in a city where the legal left could organize a minimum of information – is that, basically, no one here is ready to listen to what we say, other than for banal sensations, informer ears or the market. this market is incapable of understanding its content, and where it is a question of our political extermination not even the facts. if the bourgeois public opinion that is admitted, or that is allowed to be observed here, still had a control function, this trial would be impossible. its project in the verbiage of the politicians, in the military character of the staging of this trial and in this corrupt snake that is there in front – this project of imperial self-representation that marks every detail of this pitiful spectacle is demagogic. and it was developed from a smear campaign of five years of psychological warfare.

we are fighting on a terrain that is totally organized down to the smallest details, and I do not want to list them again. everyone knows by now that here all the illegal means of rendering us incapable of defending ourselves have been tried and applied, and are still being tried, because in the spirit of militarized justice it amounts to the same thing, incapable as they are of making the slightest political articulation in this confrontation that the state must fear, but it is around it that everything revolves. just as it reveals the revolutionary character of the confrontation, it defines the attempt of the state to end it, all this enormous effort of reactionary mobilization that has sought to express itself even in architecture – in a counter-revolutionary way, as a class war.

This is why we are here. We are conducting this trial, or we have tried to conduct it, to show and interpret the weakness of the state in demonstrating its strength, in these pitiful measures and the fact that the state is forced here to dispute its legitimacy “by all means” (Schmidt repeated this quite often) with four prisoners.

the argument of a scientific explanation of our policy (which could also be made at this time, I believe) is an absurdity in this situation. our interest can only be the elaboration of a concept – experience and analysis – whose publication cannot be prevented by the federal prosecutor’s office. we have spoken out against a complex presentation, a profound notion of revolutionary strategy, now, at this time, for three reasons:

ulrike:

prinzing would interrupt us anyway, because it would take too much time and because he sees his job as a judge of state security in such a way as to prevent any political content in this trial. secondly – the text will be analysed. this is experience and we are not sure, by giving a reconstruction of strategic determinations, that we are not delivering weapons to state security without at the same time being able to make them available to the organisation of a revolutionary policy. finally – and this is also important – we are only speaking for the prisoners from their discussions and for ourselves. we are not speaking for the groups that fight in the underground. and we must say in this context: the continuity of the urban guerrilla, the continuity of its revolutionary offensive, is only realised in its action, very little in a proclamation of its prisoners.

To want to give the complex development of the whole – it would already be a mistake, because the spectacle here is meaningless for the process of development of urban guerrilla warfare.

we also believe that the attempt at a scientific explanation presupposes a minimum consensus – that of argumentation. whereas the absence of consensus is so clearly and brutally apparent here, if only by the miserable measures that prinzing is taking to obstruct this text – an explanation would be a contradiction in itself. not to mention that this court has demonstrated for months its inability and refusal to follow an argument on the content.

The scientific conception of our policy, its theoretical foundation solely on the basis of the 1970 analysis, would also be completely absurd before this court. It would be revealing only for analysts of state security – while five years of urban guerrilla warfare have sufficiently proven its obviousness.

making a statement also always means wanting to defend something against the brutal machinations that are being carried out here – but then it would be playing its game to present it – just as if it were a matter of presenting a confession – a statement is an interaction that would force us to play the game of this court, of this spectacle. this is impossible – even tactically – and it has become even more impossible in the last three years. This trial does not concern us in its content. what concerns us are its criteria and the possibility of explaining them. andreas has already said a lot about this, and when producing evidence we will certainly say much more – we will see.

Now, Andreas will speak, or we will speak, briefly — well, relatively briefly according to the lines of our discussion — after Zeis stole our written drafts and an important manuscript (at least theoretically) just before the trial — about two aspects of the thing:

1. the need for our policy based on a historical determination and, concretely, on the process of resistance that allowed, five years ago, the development of the RAF; and, from this:

1. the possibility as a fragment of the fragment of the planning of the revolutionary process that the urban guerrilla anticipates as a tactic.

given the level of abstraction that the trial has now reached thanks to prinzing’s narrow-minded behavior in maintaining normal procedure, we really have no choice but to oppose it with our own abstractions. it must be clearly understood here that this was not our intention at the beginning, nor was our plan to confront this trial with revolutionary political content, presenting it here only as if it were a seminar. we were thinking rather of one or more brief statements and our plan was to concretize the content when producing evidence. that is our conception of staging. since then, it has become clear that, firstly, we will probably not be able to carry out this project because of our state of health – which must probably correspond to Prinzing’s plan, since he has fought and is still fighting by all means to render us incapable of defending ourselves, and by the “final” regulation – as he says – of the conditions of detention by which our capacity to appear must be frozen and subsequently aggravated – and secondly, because Prinzing would prevent it directly by, for example, dodging requests during the production of evidence, as – and it must be emphasized – he has already done (he has refused all of them for six months). which simply means that our actions and our entire policy are not representable, not conveyable through the production of evidence. we will therefore try to explain it in the context of a trial anyway, effectively going through the ritual of a statement – in a fragmentary way – which will follow the broad outlines of our analysis. but still, quite a few important documents on this subject were seized from us by the prosecution just before the trial.

andreas: the statement now is marked by these absurd working conditions, and it can only be done if we are not interrupted. if prinzing interrupts us too much, we will stop him – because we only have a partial manuscript, and because, moreover, we have only been able to discuss it for a very short time together. we intend to publish it one day or another once it is structured more clearly.

Our whole attempt to make this available through a protocol is determined by the international discussion of the anti-revisionist militant left in Europe, and not only in Europe. We will demonstrate that the encirclement and total integration of the traditional organizations of the class by and in the politics of capital in Germany is historically determined, and we will try to demonstrate that this process can only be broken on an international scale, by the international political reconstruction of the proletariat; the strategy of the class from the conditions of the development of capital. The guerrilla warfare in the metropolises is the conscious expression, the interpretation, the subjective and conscious attempt to transmit this reconstruction in and from its international dimension.

To describe this and to make it understandable, we are obliged to enter also into economic categories, because it can only be developed, even in a fragmentary and abbreviated way, starting from the concept of the objective tendency (tendency not on the conceptual level of Schmidt but of Marx – Grundrisse).

of course, this is unusual, and i have never heard of anything like this being attempted in a political trial. but it is not only a reaction to the flat and demagogic attempts to deny any political content in this trial – the crime, as sartre said, i think, is to want to treat us like criminals – although we have no problem with that, since revolutionary politics, and not only revolutionary, but any attempt at democratic and social opposition in this state must be assimilated to a crime and indeed is, and, on the other hand, because we have no problem with this form of resistance that class justice calls common law crime. it is rather a practical attempt to break the censorship and illegalization of our texts; what we say here, in its current form, can be published anyway. at least we are trying, although buback will certainly find ways to sabotage it. (This is precisely why we have no concessions to make to those who listen here.)

One fact is that, to say it once again, we are all (i.e. all the prisoners) sure that circumstances will confirm our analysis and our practice, as they have already confirmed them during these five years. We have made mistakes, but one can say that they were objectively necessary mistakes given the weakness of proletarian politics in Federal Germany.

and – if this text could make you believe otherwise – there is no separation between theoreticians and practitioners in the raf – hence this kind of division of labor, exploitation and this kind of hierarchical structure that psychological warfare projects onto us. this has always been perfectly clear to each of us, and there has never been any misunderstanding about how the burdens, problems and structure of a group that organizes and fights in the underground are to be understood and determined. our assessment of its necessity has not changed. on the other hand we have learned that the underground is the only liberated region in the class war where human relations are possible. we have learned to know subjectively its emancipatory and liberating dialectic. There is not much left to say here about the learning process, about the existential radicality of the collective structure – well, not much – because what has happened in the meantime is that the reaction of the imperialist state, of the imperialist social democracy of the SPD, the counter-propaganda and the brutal repression of the state security against us, have turned into propaganda for us once reduced to their meaning – that of counter-insurrection. It reveals the dimension and the relevance that proletarian politics has in this phase of strategic defense of imperialism, that has the attack of small clandestine armed groups that determine their strategy against American capital and the imperialist state, and this in the international framework of the anti-imperialist liberation struggles.

ulrike:

There is something to be said about the leadership structure of the group, because the personalizations of psychological warfare as a method of dividing the proletariat – it personalizes revolutionary politics to prevent it from being understood as class politics – is at the same time the propaganda ground for the physical liquidation of particular fighters.

the isolation was intended to break up the group, and the plan of the prosecution was to first cretinize me in the dead wing, then by a stereotaxic intervention, while andreas at the same time, that is to say in the summer of 1973, was to be murdered by the suppression of water during our hunger strike. we have demonstrated this here by citing the facts, and we are not exaggerating in any way. holger was murdered, because he had a leading function in the group, that is to say because he was an element of orientation within the group.

the guerrilla is a cadre organization – the goal of its collective learning process is the equality of the fighters, the collectivization of each individual, his ability to analyze, practice, independence and the ability he acquires to build an armed nucleus himself and to keep the collective learning process open. it was andreas who started this process in the raf, and andreas was from the beginning in the raf what every fighter wants to be and must be: politics and strategy in the person of each individual. the guerrilla is the group. its collective process as a process subject to the mechanics of the hierarchical imperialist structure, and objectivity, the need for upheaval as an individual and specific will, this is what wunder wants to expose here under the term “political motivation”.

(a copious infamy that the representative of an administration, which here directly represents the interests of American capital and the American army with its 125 military bases and 7,000 nuclear warheads on German territory, imagines that it can still capitalize on the armed struggle against American capital and the imperialist state.)

leadership in guerrilla warfare is the function that transmits the relationship between subjectivity and necessity, will and objectivity in the practice of the group, its structure and action. It develops from the group process, from the complex constraint of the struggle in the underground by transmitting the collective processes of learning and work, from the initiative of each individual in the collective process, as an initiative from and for practice. Its specific function is to make possible the continuity of the learning process, of experience, of interaction, of the capacity to act of the organization against all frictions whose causes are both internal and external. Leadership and collectivity are not in contradiction in guerrilla warfare — they draw their identity from the way in which each individual, and therefore the collective, and therefore its leadership, define the goal: freedom, liberation, and also from the experience that each individual has of the fact that life and subjectivity are only possible in the armed anti-imperialist struggle; that armed struggle in the underground is, in imperialism, the only possibility of critical practical activity.

it is a function that does not constitute the group, but which arises in the process of its constitution. it emerges from its practice and also from its collective process, and it remains attached, like a burden, to the one to whom it has been attributed because of his capacity for anticipation and his decision to keep the collective process open. and it is always – this is our experience – the one or ones for whom leadership is not a need. a need which, in imperialism, can never be anything other than the need for domination.

To be brief, I would say that leadership in guerrilla warfare is initiative, interaction and always, at every moment, the insistence on the primacy of practice, of politics as proletarian politics, action – against the tendency to the reproduction of imperialist structures such as domination, schematization, systematization in the division of labor, competition, and irrational reflexes from solitude and anguish.

this function is assumed by andreas in the raf, because he transmits in the raf the proletarian policy – which is the insurrection – as a leadership, with the function of making it practically – that is to say through collective practice – superfluous. as a conception of the particular in the general, of the possible in the necessary, of the subjective in the objective, of theory for practice. this is why it is andreas that the public prosecutor, this court, the federal police office and the government hate the most. for them, it is a question of exterminating what is new, the new human being, the new society of which the guerrilla in the identity of power, subjectivity, learning process and practice, is the embryo.

Psychological warfare must personalize, because it cannot attack what constitutes guerrilla warfare – the collective struggle in illegality against the state – without at the same time making propaganda for the politics of the guerrilla, its freedom, which is its freedom to fight. It must personalize in order to present the central moment of its freedom, clandestinity and therefore its capacity for action, as an absence of freedom.

but when herold says: “baaders and meinhofs”, this plural also shows that what the method of personalization should make appear — namely to make the action of the guerrilla appear as an affair of individuals — has not worked. obviously herold cannot understand what a collective is. but what his plural reflects is that many of us fight from the objective necessity which is material. direction — this also means to bring into play the dialectic of possibility and necessity: with the necessity to fight also increases the possibility to fight, that is to say to organize, to lead offensives and to succeed in them.

thus, leadership also has, subjectively, a function of encouragement, and it is an element of mobilization. Its function excludes its institutionalization, it depends on the collective interaction of the group, just as much as the group depends on it. it excludes all the dead and so murderous structures of the imperialist bureaucracies, in a radical way. and this from a simple dialectic: as much as the organization of the army is the prototype of the imperialist structure, and this means of alienation, as much in the guerrilla as a military organization practicing a proletarian policy, this alienation is necessarily totally abolished; it is abolished by politics – or it is gradually abolished in a continuous process. the politics of the guerrilla determines its capacity for action – it is its possibility. but we can say that now the counterpropaganda that personalized andreas according to the prototype of the imperialist structure, has failed. What she reveals in the full extent of this smear campaign is in fact the force of subjectivity, the force of proletarian politics – and we know that for a long time this name has meant rebellion; that the propaganda of state security against us has made this name, for many people, the example that Andreas is for us: an example of what Mao calls “politics is the commander”, meaning: proletarian politics, the politics of those who have nothing.

the rationality of the claim that the raf began politically but then became depoliticized means that state security did not find a loophole for itself in the raf, that the raf had from the beginning, thanks to andreas, a revolutionary political conception – the one that feuerbach’s second thesis speaks of: “the question of whether concrete truth belongs to human thought is not a question of theory, but a practical question. in practice, the human being must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the materiality of his thought. the controversy over the reality of a thought that isolates itself from practice is a purely scholastic question.” andreas is pursued as a prototype of this politics, because he embodies the unity between analysis, collectivity and action.

revolutionary theory is critical theory. where we formulated it to publish it, we defined it as a weapon, and we always linked it to clearly defined problems of the practice of struggle in the underground. theory that is not linked to practice, therefore that does not explain our situation for us and does not show us the possibility of changing it, has never interested us. therefore this kind of theory that psychological warfare talks about, when they caricatured us, mahler and me, as “raf theorists” – is nothing but sensational journalism or alienated fabrication using the marxist conceptual apparatus in the false understanding of the ML who transform it into dogma – for the sake of being right, as mahler did in his pamphlet the armed struggle in western europe. the theoretical writings of the raf were newspapers whose purpose was to convince people that it is right and why it is right to support urban guerrilla warfare. We defined them as weapons, because everything that is useful for the armed struggle in the underground is a weapon.

to speak of andreas means to speak of us, because when we say that the function of leadership is practically – through collective practice – to make it superfluous, it means that the guerrilla is a political-military organization, and must be so as a clandestine organization, so that everyone in fact becomes the leadership, or must be capable of becoming it. which means, to become capable of learning – to go beyond experiences, those of oneself, those of the group, those of the liberation movements of the third world; and that everyone is capable of transmitting experiences. even learning is only possible in the struggle against the state, against its method of slanderous campaigns, lies and insults, against the structure of imperialist socialization and indoctrination, and this is only possible collectively and only with the aim of leading to armed action.

collective leadership, if we refer to gramsci, means that the project must be understood by everyone in the guerrilla, so that everyone recognizes his task in the realization and execution as a function of the whole — that the project that decides on an action allows its positive and negative consequences, approval and reaction, to be foreseen, and that it already contains the answers within itself, that it therefore opens a field for organization. this is the relationship between theory and practice.

andreas:

The project of personalizing revolutionary politics in psychological warfare has the aim – and thus constitutes, in the field of propaganda, the equivalent of torture by isolation which aims to desocialize the fighters – to depersonalize the fighters, to pass off, by depersonalizing the fighters, the revolutionary action, which is always (no matter how it is transmitted) understood by the masses, for a foreign body in society. The aim of personalization is to pass off the revolutionary state of exception as imperialist daily life in its brutality, to turn against the guerrilla the latent hatred of the masses towards the state, towards state parasitism, of the repressive and ideological state apparatuses consisting of the federal prosecutor’s office, the justice system, the police, etc., a parasitic machine which only devours surplus. Its purpose is to discourage the people from the state of exception in which they live, to discourage them from transforming it into a real state of exception, that is, into a state of exception in their favor. But precisely because this machine can only project, it is incapable of perceiving anything other than its own reflection and of producing anything other than its reproduction. The shit it has stirred up with psychological warfare inevitably falls back on its feet.

in short: direction – what it should be is the concrete notion of the situation and its overcoming: the goals and their transmission in the structure of the group/organization in struggle. simply: in necessity (it is history that produces the concept, and thereby, the history of the group and of each in its notion: revolutionary struggle) – in the necessity of the antagonism in which we place our politics and ourselves in fighting, therefore its violence and its complex constraint for each, freedom, liberation, is possible.

ulrike:

in this context – psychological warfare – there is wunder’s stupid idea that andreas never worked in a factory – because it shows how in psychological warfare pseudo-scientific anticommunism usurps history, prejudices and existing structures in order to freeze them. his allegation is false. andreas learned and understood in the factory, in the street, in prison. the distortion of the facts is indeed psychological warfare, which also claims for example that the raf is a group of guys and girls belonging to the upper middle class, from a bourgeois socialization. if we want to do sociology, we can say that half of us come from a proletarian background – elementary school, vocational training, factory, youth hostel, prison. the statement denies, but certainly also out of ignorance, that with the third real subordination in the early 1960s, the processes of proletarianization and declassification increased en masse. the massification and technocratization of universities, the concentration of the media etc. – this was an internal condition of the mobilization in universities from 1966 onwards. the external condition was the american war in vietnam. this statement also tries not to see the fact that all the fighters of the raf have learned and worked in the basic projects of the new left since easter 1968. it is the fight itself that proletarianizes the fighters.

the absence of property and – this is the conception of the Korean party – of the proletarian relation in the struggle for communism, the “djoudje”, characterizes the proletariat as an antagonist of imperialism, i.e. as a subject of liberation. it is not a sociological notion of the proletariat. such a notion does not even interest us. “proletariat” is not a notion that comes out of the genetic doctrine of the fascists – it means a relation. the relation of the guerrilla to the people refers to the relation of the proletariat to the imperialist state, defines it as a mortal enemy, as an antagonist, as a class war. proletariat is a notion of struggle.

Sartre said: “It is true that the proletariat carries within itself the death of the bourgeoisie; it is also true that the capitalist system is shaken by structural contradictions; but this does not necessarily imply the existence of a class consciousness or a class struggle. For there to be consciousness and struggle, one must fight.”

but where does wunder’s statement come from? does he mean that arbeit macht frei (work liberates)? hence the concentration camp. or does he mean the protestant work ethic? hence – i quote – “work as the source of all wealth and culture” of the gotha program with which the old social democracy, during the great unemployment crisis in 1930, could do nothing but finally cede political power to the fascists – although it had long since lost it (because it had never wrested it from the war ministry). in this connection, regarding the mystified conception of work of the gotha program, marx says briefly and dryly: “that the human being who possesses no other property than his labor power, is obliged to be, in all forms of society and civilization, the slave of other human beings who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor.”

Marx deduced from this the economic necessity and the political right of workers to leave the factory, to arm themselves and to fight the state. And this is the only reason why we refer to Marx here, because he scientifically explained the necessity of insurrection, the class struggle as class war against the parasitic network of repressive and ideological apparatuses, against the bourgeois state.

This verbiage is nothing but cynicism. While there are over four percent, i.e. over a million unemployed in Germany, and almost five million in Western Europe, the social democratic response to this is its own fascist project of

“internal security” means the integration of the repressive state apparatuses in Western Europe under the command of the information monopoly held by the BKA, as well as the integration of the internal and external security apparatuses within the framework of NATO, therefore under the command of the Pentagon.

(We will talk about this again – the political function of social democracy for American capital, its project of fascism and the institutional strategy of the new fascism.)

the legal country is not the real country, and to the same extent, the real life of the workers is not in the factory. the prosecution naturally sympathizes with the slavery of the proletariat in the factories, and wunder fetishizes, even very logically, factory work, to mask the security machine of the parasitic state, because if the workers no longer went to the factory, that is to say to this factory which is necessarily in question here: where work is under the command of capital, the whole clique of puppets of state security, there in front of us, would have nothing left to eat. (and wunder, as an old social democrat, that is, as an old social democrat rat, obviously knows that it is at the end of our struggle that the liberation of labor lies, through the shaking and finally the dissolution of the repressive and ideological state apparatuses.) the concrete content of this insult is therefore simply this: andreas must, or we must, feed the prosecution much more eagerly. a decent human being according to the prosecution’s conception is a human being who feeds the prosecution — the submissive subject, the human being who exists for the state and who has no other purpose than to exist for the state. it is as andreas said: “the ideal citizen for the prosecution is the prisoner who has the photo of buback in his closet.”

Wunder, Zeis – Federal Prosecutors in the Stammheim Trial

Schmidt – Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany

Prinzing – President of the Court in the Stammheim Trial

SPD – Social Democratic Party of Germany

Mahler – involved in founding the RAF, expelled from the group in 1974

ML – Maoist parties that call themselves Marxist-Leninists

Andreas/Ulrike design for the trial in Düsseldorf

The political process from which urban guerrilla warfare in Germany originated began in Berlin – 1966, 1967, 1968.

role – history of the federal republic of germany – imperialist chain of states

anticommunism

sub-center politically – economically – militarily strategic pivot – development of capital – encirclement – wars of liberation

dividing lines – new left

causes: proletarianization

conditions: strategic sub-center – expansion of US imperialism politically – economically – militarily

possibility: strategic relevance — moment of instability

1. ideological function — as a divided country

1. military/political/economic function – “showcase”, model of development

and capitalist stability, exemplary functions of legitimation and integration for the strategy of American capital – Third World – Europe

in accordance: reaction – as far as Europe is concerned.

its possibility: the “totalization of violence”

1. as to its content: fascism – institutional strategy

1. as to the facts: exceptional laws etc:

counterinsurgency, militarization of politics through the regularization of counterinsurgency

dismantling of the left

ghettoization

agnoli about: criticism of sects criticism of parties

party / institutional strategy

underground policy

from the conditions of extreme and totally structured repression, the tactical possibilities a) industrial state

b) strategic sub-center (proletarian internationalism)

urban guerrilla warfare – raf

revolutionary intervention method

continuity – sense of action

solidarity (signal of identity)

with those who have cut all ties with the system existentially and politically, who have remained faithful to the rupture and have continued to fight and who for this reason are being destroyed in an exemplary way.

meaning of prisoner policy

function of example a) subjectively

b) objectively – obvious.

affirmation of the policy of concrete action: dialectic of defeat – from a military point of view, a defeat

From a political point of view, a victory

Andreas/Ulrike design for another trial

end of April 1976

What is happening is that social democracy is organizing the reactionary process in Western Europe by means of the enormous economic potential of West German imperialism under the hegemony of American capital – which controls all strategic industries in Federal Germany: electronics, chemistry, oil, automobiles, mechanical engineering – on two levels, the intermediary of which is the social democratic model of development: credits linked to political conditions and whose function is to prepare capital investments by imposing, through economic blackmail, the militarization of politics (as Brandt says in a letter to Olaf Palme, “stability is anticipating catastrophe in order to avoid it”) – to dictate to the states subordinate to Federal Germany in the imperialist chain – and this is its project on a broader political strategic level – its model of fascism: institutional strategy, counter-insurgency, organization of the state on the model of parliamentary democracy, with At the same time, the communist parties were sidelined, so that the bloc in power could always only be that of American capital. Within Western Europe, the main enemy, the United States, was represented by the Federal Republic of Germany of social democracy. Because it alone, through its history, had the socialist international and contact with the unions to impose in Europe the project of consolidating a new fascism.

This is how any attack on the presence of American capital here immediately confronts the imperialist state and – sooner or later – directly the American military forces, which act openly. In each case, attacks on American installations here force the state to react according to what it has been since 1945: a function of American capital and the institutional camouflage of the true status of the Federal Republic of Germany in the American chain of states: territory militarily occupied by the United States.

This is also a line for mobilization – but the main thing is that this way of unmasking social democracy by attacking small armed groups can make it incapable of organizing Western Europe into a bloc of military power at the service of the strategy of American capital. Because fascism, made visible here, will necessarily mobilize against Federal Germany all the political resentment there may be abroad against it – the old anti-fascism and all the resentment there may be against German imperialism, against its will for hegemony in all the groups of the spectrum that goes from the extreme left to the social democracies and in the national governments, and precisely on the line: main enemy United States.

so on the strategic line on which at the first demarcation line –

i.e. the front – the north-south conflict is fought in an armed manner: world proletariat / American imperialism.

hence the need to develop the second line of demarcation in the metropolises as a front, as a political-military confrontation, a line that is determined by the dialectic of the repercussions on the metropolises of the wars of liberation on the periphery of the system, therefore by the attempt at reconstruction at the strategic level of American capital by withdrawing its fronts towards the centers – on the ideological, political, military, but also economic level (which we will not develop here). This is the process that defines the class struggle in the metropolises as part of the war of

liberation in the third world, anticipating here what proletarian politics is today: war of liberation.

This is – briefly – the strategy that we have in mind, given our experience and what we have learned here. It is the line in which capital and its state are forced to react disproportionately to the attack of small revolutionary groups, and thus multiply it. That is to say: it is the very mechanics of the apparatus that develops in the imperialist system a front and at the same time its antithesis: a political situation in which the processes of polarization are underway, in which the resistance – clandestine structure, guerrilla – can be understood and will be understood as the cause of each and all those who have become aware of their situation in the imperialist system.

There would also be something to add about the structure and composition of the metropolitan guerrilla organization that is fighting on this front. We will leave that aside here.

Finally – what should be analyzed is the military project of the United States using social democracy: integration of the apparatuses responsible for internal and external security (i.e. the integration of the police apparatuses into the NATO structure), transformation of the entire state apparatus, including the ideological apparatuses (schools, media, administrations), into a gigantic sprawling intelligence network. a process that requires all civil servants and employees to report to the intelligence service. only one newspaper has spoken about it so far.

institutional strategy of the new fascism that makes political justice a function of counterinsurgency – of the political police. while at the same time the state security machine, the BKA, is being expanded, within the BKA the T department in Bonn, the BGS, the MEK, the homogenization of the regional police forces under the command of the BKA, police laws. information technology therefore represents a qualitative leap: from the manual file to the database which is the condition for making possible the new repressive techniques of mass communication institutionalized and used by psychological warfare.

the institutional strategy aims, vertically and horizontally (western europe), then on the intra- and inter-state levels, at the creation of a military apparatus structured by intelligence, which penetrates societies and integrates states by topping the ministries of the interior, beyond the international interconnection of the machines of repression, without having any political expression itself. which means that it completely escapes public control. thus a transnational power structure, ultimately, under the command of the pentagon, a military machine which is at the same time its own propaganda apparatus, insofar as it is an apparatus of total manipulation in the tactic of psychological warfare. that is to say that this system of obtaining and using intelligence in psychological warfare constitutes a closed system, within which manipulation and control, and therefore new schemes of manipulation can, in an apparatus closed on itself, be developed, spat out and perfected, and will not fail to be. What the legal left has completely failed to understand is that, of course, in this whole, his internment is already programmed by the BKA computer, as well as that of the circle of all friends and acquaintances.

What is already clear is that if the BKA can get its hands on 394 gun collectors in a single coordinated action, it is of course also possible for it to transport the entire legal left into the stadiums in a single action.

Urban guerrilla warfare is a tactic that reveals strategy by anticipating it.

In terms of developing the strategy of revolutionary politics, this means understanding the national state as an apparatus of internal repression from its international determination for American multinational capital.

the system of national states within the state system of American imperialism is a system of warring front sectors, which the repressive apparatus of American capital conducts on two sectors: the points of crystallization of the poor/rich demarcation line in the north-south confrontation, and on the second demarcation line, inside the metropolises, here in anticipation of massive proletarian counterviolence.

It is important to realize that, on the one hand, the state of capital acts from the constraints that the movement of capital – which is the material foundation of the whole affair – imposes on it. It is a function of capital. On the other hand, capital can no longer develop a productive perspective itself, or to use an expression from bourgeois economics: it is no longer capable of innovating. It has ceased to be the subject of the social reproduction of state activity.

For a figure like Schmidt it is clear that, without having solved the problem of the economy, of the crisis, of inflation, of unemployment, in a word the problem of the world market, the state existence of the imperialist system is a colossus with feet of clay.

What is new, also new for this fascism, is that it is not only a question of ensuring the domination of capital, markets and consolidation, but of forming a structure of military-economic power which can impose itself as a system of states independently of their political base and the constraints of the movement of capital.

Here the state is the subject of politics and it is no longer governed by competing fractions of capital but it is the immediate expression of capital, because under the hegemony of American capital there is neither economic autonomy nor political autonomy of capital in the face of American capital.

For us, it is a question of showing here, starting from the internationalization of the movement of capital, the dialectic by which the national states in the state system of American imperialism are transformed into a new fascism, organized on an international scale, and by the changed function of the national states starting from the constraints of defensiveness on the strategic level in which imperialism finds itself since its defeat in Vietnam.

The central moment that needs to be highlighted is that from the moment that the reaction has been determined as an organized and projected process on the international level, the revolutionary strategy must be internationalist, that is to say: if it has been said that the political-economic analysis of the situation today coincides with the Marxist conceptual schema, this means concretely that the strategy of the manifesto, “proletarians of all countries, unite!” has found a new ferment on the organizational level in the guerrilla warfare that anticipates the international reconstruction of proletarian politics.

The form of organization of proletarian internationalism in the centers of capital will be metropolitan guerrilla warfare.

BKA Department T – Federal Police Terrorism Department

BGS – border police, which includes the GSG-9 intervention unit, comparable to the GIGN in France

MEK – intervention units, correspond to the CRS in France

Regarding the effects of insulation in a dead wing

the period from June 16, 1972 to February 9, 1973:

The feeling that the head is exploding (the feeling that the skull is going to burst, to detach itself) – the feeling that the spinal cord is being pressed into the brain, the feeling that the brain is gradually shriveling up like a dried fruit, the feeling of being, constantly and unconsciously, under electrical tension, of being remote-controlled, the feeling that associations of ideas are constantly cut off, the feeling that one is pissing one’s soul out of one’s body, as if one can no longer hold water, the feeling that the cell is floating. One wakes up, one opens one’s eyes: the cell is floating. In the afternoon when there is sun, it suddenly stops. But it is still moving, one cannot get rid of this sensation. Impossible to know if one is shivering from the cold or from fever – impossible to explain why one is shivering, why one is freezing.

To speak audibly normally requires effort, as if speaking very loudly, almost as if shouting – the feeling of becoming mute – impossible to remember the meaning of certain words, except by guessing – the use of sibilants – s, sz, tz, z, sch – is an unbearable torture – guards, visitors, the court seem like a celluloid reality – headaches – flashes – no longer mastering sentence construction, grammar, syntax. In writing: after two lines, impossible to remember the beginning of the first.

The feeling that one is burning inside one’s body –

The feeling that if we were to say what was happening, if we were to explain it to someone, it would be like throwing boiling water in the other person’s face, scalding them, disfiguring them for life.

Crazy aggression, without outlet. It’s the worst. Clear awareness that one has no chance of surviving; complete failure to try to transmit this. Of the visits, nothing remains. Half an hour later one can only mechanically note whether the visit took place today or last week – On the other hand, the bath of the week is a moment of respite, of recuperation – for a few hours even –

The feeling that time and space are intertwined – the feeling of being in a labyrinth of distorting mirrors, of wavering –

After: a terrible euphoria of hearing something – the difference between day and night for example.

The feeling that time is moving again, the brain is expanding, the spinal cord is putting itself back in place – for weeks.

The feeling that we had been skinned.

the second time, from December 21, 1973 to January 3, 1974:

Ringing in the ears. Upon waking up, as if you had been beaten.

The feeling of moving in slow motion.

The feeling of being in a vacuum, as if cast in lead.

After: shock. As if you had received an iron plate on your head.

Comparisons, notions that come to mind in this:

Crusher (psycho) –

aeronautical simulator, where people’s skin is crushed under acceleration – Kafka’s penal colony – the man on the board of nails – rolling non-stop on a roller coaster.

As for the radio: it allows a minimum of relaxation, as if we slowed down from 240 to 190 km per hour.

Excerpts from letters to his lawyers on isolation in a dead wing

February 25, 1974

What to do? File a complaint – for assault and battery. That’s clear. Then, what I’ve said a hundred times: call in psychiatrists; and what has come to mind since: ear, nose and throat specialists (because of the ears) so that they can finally explain scientifically that silence has the same effect as electroshocks, that of causing this kind of injury, of devastation in the organ of balance and in the brain. That this is so is no longer in doubt. […] So, a complaint and expert reports. That’s what’s needed regarding the dead wing problem.

PS – It may be that the ear-nosers have something to say about all this isolation shit anyway, since there is also that sounding bell that Jan is in and about which you need arguments, and the noise hell that Carmen was in in Rastatt. In China – it was recently in the Frankfurter Rundschau – capital executions used to be done by noise. And especially Ireland where all this crap is systematized.

February 26, 1974

Of course, there is the difference that I am here for the third time, while for Gudrun it is the first – that for me, therefore, there are lots of “fuses” that have blown, while Gudrun still has reservations. Only, when we say that the matter is now urgent, more urgent than before, it is not just a state of mind or something of the sort. The electric shocks that I receive in full, Gudrun receives them too. Silence is a physical fact. If the federal prosecutor, the chief of the cops here and the political police are not determined to liquidate us before the trial, it should be possible to obtain the transfer – and, if they are, all the more so.

undated

An important element of the brainwashing program is that one is put in a state where one does not realize the causal connection between the means used and the symptoms, the refined combination, the concurrence of means, and finally what happens to one. One can even say: the more invisible and difficult to perceive the means, the more effective it is. One cannot confront what one does not perceive, which means: one cannot resist it. And I know why I said in Berlin that the dead wing was the attempt to force us to commit suicide. Because the energy to resist, in absolute silence, absolutely imperceptible, ultimately has no other object than oneself. And since one cannot fight silence, one then fights only what happens to oneself and to one’s body — and ultimately one fights only oneself. That is the goal of the dead wing: the self-destruction of the prisoner. In this kind of torture, resistance itself is instrumentalized by the torturers. And it is even if the content of the resistance is: hold on. So, it tears you apart at that level. The collapse is the worst, because it means that you are in their hands. Because what is certain is that with totally hungry ears, that is to say when you are totally skinned, and therefore suggestible, there is one thing that you can no longer do: listen to a single sentence from the cops without being forced to push it away, otherwise it risks influencing your feelings and thoughts. And that is when they can drag you into their shit. You can no longer turn a deaf ear. The slightest kind word from the cops, if it is not actively pushed away, already transforms you into a collaborator.

Brainwashing is a conditioning of the prisoner that makes his ears and everything organically connected to them sensitive to noise, which therefore makes him receptive, like a film is sensitive to light. The brain receives everything that comes in, like a film when you open the diaphragm. Not to mention that you also “hear” what you read. The brain, thus conditioned, obviously hurts. This means that, to the extent that resistance is thought, thoughts also hurt. Resistance to this crap is therefore like hurting yourself (I already knew this from the time of my brain surgery: that thoughts hurt, but I also know that it is the only way to get everything going again). Brainwashing is tampering with the prisoner’s brain so that it is nothing more than a burning ball of flesh, cut up and destroyed — at least that’s how it feels. If you then hear something, no matter what, you receive it like a balm. And that’s how they manage to put their shit in it. One day, we come to ourselves and we no longer know which is above and which is below: we are broken. And that is how the enemy can make his power prevail. Destroyed ears, of course, also means: destroyed organ of balance. We float, we stagger from one corner to another. Everything that manifests itself is disproportionate, exaggerated. The whisper is like a cry that grows louder, an allusion like a hammer blow, the smallest sentence like a blow from a truncheon.

[…]

Getting out of here through a doctor’s intervention is not getting out. Because it involves treatment, even if it only consists of coming to see us, being nice, etc. That’s how Götte finished off Astrid. Not to mention the drugs. Good health, strength, etc., are identical to broken resistance. And breaking resistance ultimately means that the goal of “treatment” is to kill. The problem they have with us is that our political consciousness will not leave our body without what is called “life” also leaving it. Why is this so? Obviously, because its content is collectivity — anti-isolation. If our political consciousness, whose content is collectivity (guerrilla warfare, armed struggle), is our identity, then they cannot tear it away through isolation without killing us.

Carmen – Carmen Roll was forcibly anesthetized during her arrest to be fingerprinted

Götte – psychiatrist in the dead wing of Cologne-Ossendorf prison

Astrid Proll – first RAF prisoner in the dead wing of Ossendorf

Statement at trial regarding Andreas’ release

September 13, 1974

This trial is a tactical maneuver in the psychological war of the BKA, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, the judiciary against us — with the aim of concealing the political interest that our trial represents in Germany and to hide the strategy of annihilation of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office that is programmed into it; to convey a scattered image of us through individual convictions; to divide in the public consciousness the political context of all trials against RAF prisoners by staging individualized public displays, to erase from people’s memory the fact that there is an urban guerrilla warfare on the territory of German imperialism. We — RAF — will not participate in this trial.

The anti-imperialist struggle The anti-imperialist struggle, if this is not to be an empty slogan, has as its goal to annihilate, break, destroy the system of imperialist domination – on the political, economic and military level; the cultural institutions that allow it to produce the homogeneity of the dominant elites, as well as the communication systems ensuring its ideological hold.

The annihilation of imperialism on the military level means in the international framework: the military alliances of American imperialism all around the globe, here: NATO and the German army; in the national framework: the armed formations of the state apparatuses that embody the monopoly of violence of the ruling class; its power in the state, here: police, BGS, intelligence services. On the economic level: the power structure of the multinationals. On the political level: the bureaucracies, organizations and apparatuses of state and non-state power – parties, unions, media – that dominate the people.

proletarian internationalism

The anti-imperialist struggle is not, and cannot be, a struggle for national liberation, its historical perspective cannot be socialism in a single country. The transnational organization of capital, the global military alliances of American imperialism, the cooperation of intelligence services, the international organization of capital correspond on our side, on the side of the proletariat, to revolutionary class struggles, to liberation struggles.

of the peoples of the Third World, of urban guerrilla warfare in the metropolises of imperialism: proletarian internationalism.

Since the Paris Commune it is clear that a people in an imperialist state that tries to free itself within a national framework attracts vengeance, armed power, the deadly hostility of the bourgeoisies of all the other imperialist states. Thus NATO is now equipping itself with a reserve for intervention in the event of internal unrest that will be stationed in Italy.

“A people that oppresses others cannot emancipate itself,” Marx said. What gives military relevance to the metropolitan guerrillas, the RAF here, the Red Brigades in Italy, the SLA and other groups in the United States, is the fact that they can, within the framework of the liberation struggles of the peoples of the Third World and as a solidarity struggle, attack imperialism from behind, from where it sends its troops, its weapons, its instructors, its technology, its communication systems, its cultural fascism to oppress and exploit the peoples of the Third World.

This is the strategic determination of the metropolitan guerrilla: to initiate behind imperialism the guerrilla, the anti-imperialist armed struggle, the people’s war — in a long-term process. — because the world revolution is certainly not a matter of a few days, weeks, months, certainly not a matter of a few popular uprisings, of rapid trials, of the seizure of state power — as the revisionist parties and groups imagine or claim, to the extent that they do not imagine anything at all.

the concept of a nation state in the metropolises, the concept of a nation state has become a fiction that no longer corresponds to anything, neither by the reality of the ruling classes, nor by its politics, nor by the structure of power. it can no longer even rely on linguistic borders since there are millions of immigrant workers in the rich countries of western europe. we are rather witnessing in europe the equally subjective formation of a proletarian internationalism through the globalization of capital, through the new media, through the reciprocal dependence of economic development, through the enlargement of the european community, through the crisis – while the trade union apparatuses have already been working for years to subjugate, control, institutionalize and suppress it.

The fiction of the national state to which the revisionist groups cling with their form of organization, corresponds to their legalistic fetishism, their pacifism, their mass opportunism. It is not the fact that the members of these groups come from the petty bourgeoisie that we reproach them for, but that they reproduce the petty bourgeois ideology in their politics and organizational structure. An ideology that has always been foreign to proletarian internationalism and which – this cannot be otherwise given its class situation and its conditions of reproduction – has always organized itself as a complement to the national bourgeoisie, to the ruling class.

The argument that the masses are not ready reminds us of the arguments of colonialist salats in Africa and Asia for the past 70 years: blacks, illiterate people, slaves, colonized people, tortured, oppressed, starved, suffering under the yoke of colonialism “are not ready” to take charge of their administration, industrialization, their education, their future as human beings. This is the argument of people who care about their positions of power, who want the domination of the people, not emancipation and the struggle for liberation.

Guerrilla warfare in the metropolises

our action of May 14, 1970 is and remains the exemplary action of the metropolitan guerrilla. it contains and already contained all the elements of the strategy of the anti-imperialist armed struggle: it was the liberation of a prisoner from the hands of the state. it was a guerrilla action, the action of a group that became the political-military nucleus by its decision to carry out this action. it was the liberation of a revolutionary, of a cadre that was and is indispensable for the construction of the metropolitan guerrilla. not as every revolutionary indispensable in the ranks of the revolution, but because he already embodied at that time everything that makes the guerrilla against the imperialist state possible: determination, the will to act, the ability to determine one’s own person exclusively by the goals, while keeping open the learning process of the group, practicing from the beginning a leadership as a collective leadership, transmitting the learning processes of each one collectively.

The action was exemplary, because in the anti-imperialist struggle it is in any case about the liberation of prisoners, from the prison that the system has always been for all the exploited and oppressed layers of the people, without any historical perspective other than death, terror, fascism, barbarism. Liberation from imprisonment in total alienation, self-alienation, from the state of political and existential exception in which the people are forced to live under the influence of imperialism, consumer culture, the media, the control apparatuses of the ruling class, under the dependence of the market and the state.

the guerrilla, not only here, it was no different in brazil, uruguay, cuba and for che in bolivia – always starts from nothing and the first phase of its constitution is the most difficult; to the extent that the origins from the bourgeois class prostituted by imperialism and the proletarian class colonized by it do not give anything usable for the struggle. we are a group of comrades who have decided to act, to leave the stage of lethargy, of verbal radicalism, of discussions of strategy increasingly pointless, and to fight. but everything is still missing – not only all the means; it becomes clear, at this moment, what kind of human being we really are. it is the metropolitan individual born from the processes of putrefaction and the mortal, false, alienated life contexts of the system – factory, office, school, university, revisionist groups, apprentice jobs, casual jobs. We become aware of the effects of the division between professional and private life, the division between manual and intellectual work, the supervision of hierarchically organised work processes, the psychological deformations by the market society, the metropolitan society which has reached the stage of putrefaction and stagnation.

but that’s what we are, that’s where we come from: the offspring of the destructive processes of metropolitan society, of the war of all against all, of the competition of each against each, of the system where the law of fear reigns, of performance, of one-on-the-backs-of-the-others, of the division of the people into men and women, young and old, healthy and sick, foreigners and Germans and the struggles for prestige. that’s where we come from: from isolation in rabbit hutches, from the concrete cities of the suburbs, from prisons, asylums and high-security neighborhoods; from brainwashing by the media, consumerism, corporal punishment, the ideology of non-violence; from depression, from illness, from downgrading, from the humiliation and insult of the human being, of all the exploited of imperialism. until we understood the distress of each one as the need to free ourselves from imperialism, as the need for the anti-imperialist struggle. and understood that with the destruction of this system there is nothing to lose, with the anti-imperialist struggle everything to gain: collective liberation, life, humanity, identity. that the cause of the people is our cause, that of the masses, of the workers on the assembly line, of the lumpen, of the prisoners, of the apprentices, of the lowest masses here and of the liberation movements of the third world. that our cause, the anti-imperialist armed struggle is the cause of the masses and vice versa. even if this can only be achieved and will only be achieved in a long-term process of developing the political-military offensive of the guerrilla, of unleashing the people’s war.

This is the difference between a truly revolutionary policy and a policy that calls itself revolutionary and is in reality an opportunist policy: we start from the objective situation, the objective conditions, the real situation of the proletariat, of the masses in the metropolises – which includes the fact that the people in all layers and on all sides are under the influence and control of the system. The opportunists start from the alienated consciousness of the proletariat; we start from the fact of alienation, from which follows the necessity of liberation.

“There is no reason,” wrote Lenin in 1916 against the renegade colonialist pig Kautsky, “to suppose that in capitalism the majority of the proletariat could be united in a single organization. Moreover – and this is the main thing – it is not so much a question of the number of members of an organization as of the objective and real significance of its policy: does this policy represent and serve the masses? That is, does it serve the liberation of the masses from capitalism, or does it represent the interests of the minority, reconciliation with capitalism? We cannot and no one can predict with any precision which part of the proletariat follows and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. Only in the struggle will this be revealed, this will be decided in the last resort in the socialist revolution. but it is our duty, if we want to remain socialists, to go deeper towards the most depressed masses, the real masses: that is the whole meaning of the struggle against opportunism and the whole content of this struggle.”

the guerrilla is the group the leadership function in the guerrilla, andreas’ function in the raf is: orientation — not only to be able to distinguish in each situation what is essential from what is accessory, but also in each situation to keep the whole political context in all the details, never in the details and the particular technical and logistical problems to lose sight of the goal, the revolution; in the framework of the politics of alliances never the question of class; in the tactical context never the strategic context, i.e. never fall into the trap of opportunism. it is “the art of dialectically linking the strength of principles with the flexibility of action, the art of applying in the direction of the revolution the law of development that transforms progressive changes into qualitative leaps”, says the duan. It is also the art of “not shrinking from the enormity of one’s own aims” (Marx) but of pursuing them persistently and unwaveringly, the determination to learn from mistakes, in any case to learn. Every revolutionary organization, every guerrilla organization knows this, knows that the principle of practice requires the development of these capacities – i.e. every organization starting from dialectical materialism, whose goal is victory in the people’s war and not the construction of a party bureaucracy, of a partnership in the power of imperialism.

we are not talking about democratic centralism because the urban guerrilla in the metropolis that is Germany cannot have a centralized apparatus. it is not a party but a political-military organization that develops its leadership functions collectively from each unit, from each group – with the tendency to dissolve them in the groups, in the process of collective learning. the goal is always the autonomous, tactical orientation of the fighters, the guerrillas, the cadres. collectivization is a political process that takes place in everything, in interaction and communication, in learning from each other in all the processes of work and training. in the guerrilla, authoritarian leadership structures have no material basis, also because the real, i.e. voluntary, development of the productive forces of each is the condition for the effectiveness of the revolutionary guerrilla: to intervene in a revolutionary way, to unleash the people’s war, with weak forces.

the tactic of psychological warfare

andreas finds himself, because he is and was that from the beginning: revolutionary, in the crosshairs of the psychological war of the cops against us, since 1970, from the first outbreak of the guerrilla in the action for his release from prison.

The principle of the functioning of psychological warfare, which must result in setting the people against the guerrilla, in isolating the guerrilla from the people, is to disfigure and mask the real, material aims of the revolution by personalization and psychologization. Aims which are liberation from imperialist domination, liberation of the territories occupied by colonialism and neo-colonialism, liberation from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, liberation from military dictatorship, from exploitation, from fascism and from imperialism. The tactic is to make incomprehensible what is easy to understand, to make appear irrational what is rational, to present the revolutionaries as inhuman beings. The method is defamation, lies, insults, racism, manipulation, the mobilization of the unconscious anxieties of the people and the reflexes instilled over decades, centuries of colonial domination and exploitation — reflexes of anxiety in the face of existence and superstition in the face of incomprehensible powers, because these structures for ensuring domination are undetectable.

In trying to destroy revolutionary politics, the armed struggle against imperialism in the German metropolis and its effects in the consciousness of the people through psychological warfare — by personalizing and psychologizing it, the cops seek to present us as what they themselves are; they seek to present the structure of the RAF as analogous to their own, a structure of domination — in the image of the organization and functioning of their own apparatuses of domination, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia, the CIA. And they attribute to us the very means that the masks of imperialism and their puppets use to impose themselves: blackmail, bribery, competition, favoritism, brutality, the habit of making their way over corpses.

by using psychological warfare against us, the cops are banking on the confusion between the pressure to perform and the anxiety that the system imposes on everyone who is forced to sell their labor force in order to live. they are banking on the sick practice of defamation, turned by the ruling class for decades, for centuries, against the people: a mixture of anti-communism, anti-semitism, racism, sexual oppression, religious oppression, oppression by the authoritarian school system. they are banking on the brainwashing that consumer society and imperialist media operate, re-education and the “economic miracle”.

What was so shocking about the guerrilla war in its first phase, what was shocking about our first action, was that people acted without letting themselves be determined by the constraints of the system, without seeing themselves through the eyes of the media, without fear. That people acted based on real experiences, their own and those of the people. Because the guerrilla warfare starts from facts that the people experience daily in their own situation: oppression, the terror of the media, the insecurity of living conditions despite extremely advanced technologies and the immense wealth of this country, which translate into mental illness, suicides, mistreatment of children, the misery of schools, the misery of housing. This is what was shocking about our action for the imperialist state: that the RAF could be understood in the consciousness of the people for what it is: a practice, a cause that arises logically and dialectically from existing relationships. a practice which, as long as it expresses real relations, as long as it expresses the only real possibility of changing and overthrowing them, restores the dignity of the people, restores meaning to past struggles, revolutions, uprisings, defeats and revolts; which restores the possibility of the people being aware of their history. because all history is the history of class struggles, because a people who have lost the dimension of revolutionary class struggles are forced to live in a state without history, where they are deprived of their self-awareness, that is to say, of their dignity.

Guerrilla warfare allows everyone to determine for themselves where they stand, to find, often for the first time, where they stand in short and to find their place in class society, in imperialism, to define themselves for themselves. Because many think they are on the side of the people, but as soon as it is a question of confronting the police, as soon as the people start to fight, they run away, denounce, slow down, put themselves on the side of the police. This is the problem that Marx mentioned so often: that we are not what we believe we are but what we are in its real functioning, in its objective role in class society; that we are lived by the system, i.e. instrumentalized by it, if we do not decide to act consciously against the system, i.e. to arm ourselves and fight.

Through psychological warfare, the cops seek to reverse the facts that the guerrilla action had put back on their feet. Namely, that it is not the people who depend on the state, but the state that depends on the people; that it is not the people who need corporations, multinationals and their factories, but that it is the capitalist pigs who need the people; that the police are not there to protect the people from criminals, but to protect the order of the imperialist exploiters of the people; that the people do not need justice, but that it is justice that needs the people; that we do not need the presence of American troops and installations here, but that it is American imperialism that needs us. by personalizing and psychologizing, they project onto us what they are, the clichés of the anthropology of capitalism, the reality of its masks, its judges, its prosecutors, its guards, its fascists: the pig who revels in his alienation, who lives only by oppressing, exploiting, making others suffer, whose basis of existence is career, advancement at all costs, elbows, taking advantage of others, exploitation, hunger, misery and the destitution of a few billion human beings in the third world and here.

what the ruling class hates in us is that the revolution, despite a hundred years of repression, fascism, anticommunism, imperialist wars, genocides, is raising its head again. by waging psychological warfare, the bourgeoisie, with its police state, has accumulated against us everything it hates and fears about the people. especially against andreas.

It is he who embodies the plebs, the street, the enemy. She has recognized in us what threatens her and will overthrow her: the determination to prepare the revolution, revolutionary violence, political and military action; at the same time as her own impotence, the limit of her means from the moment the people arm themselves and begin to fight.

it is not us, it is itself that the system represents in its smear campaign against us. any smear campaign against the guerrilla provides information about those who lead it, about their pork belly, about their goals, their ambitions and their fears. and to say for example that we are “a self-appointed vanguard” makes no sense. being in the vanguard is a function to which one can neither name oneself nor claim. it is a function that the people give to the guerrilla in their own consciousness, in the process of their awareness, of the rediscovery of their own role in history, when they recognize themselves in the action of the guerrilla, when they recognize the necessity “in itself” to destroy the system as a necessity “for oneself”, through the action of the guerrilla that has already transformed it into a necessity for oneself. The idea of a “self-designated avant-garde” reflects a prestige thought, which has its place in the ruling class, which aims at domination. It has nothing to do with the role of the proletariat, which is based on the absence of property, with its emancipation, with dialectical materialism, with the struggle against imperialism.

the dialectic of revolution and counter-revolution

The dialectic of the strategy of anti-imperialist struggles consists in the fact that in its defense, its reaction, the system, through the escalation of the counter-revolution, is led to transform the state of political exception into a state of military exception, unmasking itself, appearing to all as the enemy and leading, by the very means of its terror, the masses to take a position against it.

marighela: “the basic principle of revolutionary strategy in the situation of permanent political crisis is to develop both in the cities and in the countryside such a quantity of revolutionary actions that the enemy is forced to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. in this way dissatisfaction will spread to all layers of the people, and the only ones responsible for all the misdeeds will be the military.”

and ap puyan, an Iranian comrade: “through the pressure of the reinforced counter-revolutionary violence against the resistance fighters, all the oppressed classes and layers will be repressed even more massively. As a result, the ruling classes increase the contradictions between the oppressed classes and themselves and by creating such a climate, the political consciousness of the masses will take a leap forward.”

and Marx: “revolutionary progress advances in the creation of a powerful and unified counter-revolution, by the creation of an adversary who will bring about by the struggle against him only that the party of the insurrection matures by becoming a true revolutionary party.”

When in the summer of 1972 the cops with 150,000 men declared a general mobilization against us and triggered a massive manhunt via television, the intervention of the Federal Chancellor, the centralization of all police power in the BKA – at that time all the material and personal forces of this state were already mobilized because of a small group of revolutionaries; it was seen in a concrete way that the state’s monopoly on violence is limited, that its power can be exhausted, that imperialism is a human-eating monster on the tactical level, that it is a paper tiger on the strategic level. It could be seen concretely that it depends on us whether the oppression continues and also on us whether it is destroyed.

now after all they have prepared against us in their psychological warfare – the pigs are preparing to assassinate andreas. we prisoners from the raf and other anti-imperialist groups are on hunger strike from today. the cops’ search-liquidation against the raf and their psychological warfare against us correspond to the fact that most of us have been in detention-isolation for years, which means detention-liquidation. we are determined not to stop thinking and fighting, we are determined to knock down the stone that imperialism has raised against us on its own feet.

the cops are preparing to kill andreas – as they had already tried during our last hunger strike in the summer of 1973 – by cutting off his water. at the time, lawyers and the public were led to believe that he would be given something to drink after a few days, while he had not been given anything and the pig doctor in schwalmstadt told him after nine days without drinking anything “you drink milk or you will be dead in ten hours”. in the meantime, the minister of justice of the state of hesse came to his cell to see and the body of prison doctors met at the ministry of justice in wiesbaden. in addition, there is a decree stating that in hesse hunger strikes can be broken by depriving him of fluids. the complaints filed for attempted murder against the pig doctor were rejected.

we now declare that if the cops actually carry out their intentions and plans to cut off Andreas’ water, all RAF prisoners on hunger strike will respond by refusing to take any form of liquid. the same will apply if any of the hunger striking prisoners are deprived of liquid regardless of where and whoever is the target of this attempted murder.

Le Duan – one of the founders and first secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party

Marighella – member of the central committee of the Communist Party of Brazil, then one of the founders of the urban guerrilla group ALN, National Liberation Action

Schwalmstadt – the prison where Andreas was held before being transferred to

Stuttgart-Stammheim in November 1974

Interview with the weekly Der Spiegel

Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Jan Raspe

Der Spiegel, January 20, 1975

— Has the RAF collective adopted a new tactic? The campaigns prepared and directed from prisons have aroused the same interest in you among the population as bombs and grenades did in 1972?

This is not about talking about tactics. We are prisoners and we are currently fighting with the only weapon we have left in prison and in isolation: the collective hunger strike, in order to get out of the process of extermination in in which we find ourselves, long years of social isolation. It is a life and death struggle; we have no choice but to win through this hunger strike or to die or be destroyed psychologically. and morally through brainwashing, isolation and special treatment.

— Can we speak of torture by isolation or even of extermination detention? You read a bundle of newspapers, if necessary you listen to the radio and watch television from time to time. Mr. Baader, for example, had at his disposal at one time a library of 400 volumes. You have contacts with other members of the RAF, exchange clandestine messages, you receive visitors and your lawyers come and go in your cells.

If we only have Spiegel and the information disseminated by the state security services, we could ask ourselves the question. After two, three, four years of social isolation, we no longer ask ourselves this question, now we know that we are in a process of extermination. We can tolerate this for a few months, but not for years. Preventing the institutionalization of brainwashing through isolation is for us the condition of our survival, it is on the basis of this that the trials will take place with or without us. To affirm that for us, through this hunger strike, it is a question of making ourselves unfit for detention and unfit to appear before the court — when everyone knows that political prisoners unfit for detention are dead prisoners — this assertion is part of the adversary’s tactic, it is counter-propaganda. The federal prosecutor’s office has been postponing these trials for three and a half years, in order to break the prisoners through isolation, torture, brainwashing, dead wing, psychiatrization. The federal prosecutor’s office no longer wants these trials. Or, if they do want them, then without the accused and without their defense counsel, because it has become obvious that these spectacular trials against revolutionary politics – the self-representation of power by the imperialist state (which is what Buback wants) – can only be staged in our absence.

— Despite their constant repetition, lies do not become credible; and public opinion has long understood that these lies are launched

— in bad faith — to cast doubt on justice, which you have undoubtedly succeeded in doing.

This is because these are facts whose political importance you cannot make disappear by disputing them.

— You are in preventive detention, being charged with serious offences such as murder and attempted murder. Are you not subjected to the same conditions of detention as other prisoners in preventive detention?

We demand the abolition of special treatment, and it is not only for defendants. For political prisoners, justice makes no distinction; and in this regard, we say that any proletarian prisoner who understands his situation politically and who organizes solidarity, the struggle of prisoners, is a political prisoner, whatever the reason that led him to prison. Justice also isolates prisoners who are already convicted, some for four years, like Werner Hoppe, Hellmut Pohl, Rolf

Heissler, Ulrich Luther, Siegfried Knutz. Many thousands here are mistreated by the prison system and from the moment they begin to resist, are broken by isolation. This is what we are fighting against, with this strike, as a collective action against the institutionalization of isolation. In the old prisons, where there is a lack of isolation machines (sections for troublemakers, meaning those who disturb the inhumanity of which they are victims) these machines are set up, as in Tegel, Bruchsal, Straubing, Hannover, Zweibrücken, etc. The new prisons include in the principles of their construction their architecture, isolation as a system of detention. These principles are oriented, in the FRG, not towards the Swedish models, but on the contrary towards the American methods and experiences and the fascist methods of rehabilitation programs.

— Concretely, tell us what this what you call special treatment consists of. We have researched the current conditions of detention of the RAF collective; we have not been able to find any trace of special treatment, but rather a series of privileges.

You did no research. You let yourself be informed by the state security and the federal prosecutor’s office. Special treatment means eight months of dead wing for Ulrike, for Astrid. Years of social isolation for all RAF prisoners. Forced anaesthesia, ordered by a court for investigation purposes. For several years, walking with hands tied. On permanent orders from the courts, immediate use of force, which means harassment in the tranquilisation cells, during transport, interrogations, confrontations, during visits. Censorship of newspapers. Emergency laws. Special buildings for the trials of RAF prisoners in Kaiserslautern and Stammheim, from the state security budget estimated at 150 million marks, in a concrete fortress guarded by police units from three federal states, while it seems that during this trial the defendants and their defense counsel will not be admitted to the hearing – in case the justice system leaves any defendants alive. Obstacles to the defense counsel: publication of defense materials, parts of files and state security files, as part of the government’s campaigns to condition verdicts and oust the defense counsel. Manipulation of files. The Springer press is allowed to have access to files before the defense, while the federal prosecutor’s office refuses to give them to the defense. The defense counsel are monitored day and night, their mail checked, their telephones bugged, and their offices searched. Lawyers face disciplinary sanctions from their bar associations and charges for their work informing public opinion. Parents and visitors are subject to pressure from state security, even at their workplace. They are terrorized by overt surveillance. Those who want to write to us or visit us are spied on and listed by state security. Under pressure from the hunger strike, state security is forced to cover up the reality, and ministries send teams to film. In principle, nothing has changed. But the reality, at present, is organized isolation from inside prisons with deadly precision: while remaining isolated, prisoners can meet, in pairs, and only for two hours a day. This does not prevent the process of destruction, and it remains a system cut off from the outside. This means that brainwashing must continue and social interaction must be made impossible. In relation to the outside world, isolation is perfected by the exclusion of defenders, or in this case the limitation to the number of three. If we refer to the Posser standard, six years of isolation for example for us and to the responsibility of the federal prosecutor’s office for the postponement of the date of the trials, we understand what extermination detention means. Prove to us then that a single one of these “privileges” does not exist!

— At the beginning you described forced feeding as a fascist plot; after the death of Holger Meins you spoke of murder. Isn’t there a contradiction here?

This is not ours, but forced feeding is a means to remove the hunger strike’s impact on the outside; this is how medical resuscitation stations were set up in the prisons, in order to be able to say that everything has been done when the simplest thing has not been done: to eliminate isolation and special treatments. Holger Meins was executed by systematic undernutrition; artificial feeding was, from the beginning, in Wittlich prison a method of murder. At first, brutal, direct, violent, practiced to break the will, and later practiced only in appearance. 400 calories a day: it is only a question of time, of days, until one dies. Federal prosecutor Buback and the security services engineered this by arranging for Holger Meins to remain in Wittlich prison until he is dead. On 21 October, the Stuttgart court had ordered Holger Meins to be transferred to Stuttgart by 2 November at the latest. As early as 24 October, the Federal Prosecutor Buback informed the Stuttgart court that the transfer date could not be met for the sake of state security: this information was only made public after Holger Meins’ death, however. Finally, the prison doctor Hutter completely stopped artificial nutrition and went on a trip. It should also be noted that the Federal Police Office was informed about the condition of the prisoners during the entire hunger strike by the prison management. It should be noted that Hutter, before he stepped down because Holger was dying, asked Degenhardt to assure him that no complaints would be filed against him – in the same way, all complaints against Degenhardt were dropped. Degenhardt is the doctor who, in the summer of 1973, during the second hunger strike, cut off the water supply in Schwalmstadt for nine days for medical reasons, until he fell into a coma. It was this doctor whom Buback described as a medical luminary when speaking to Frey, who was then treating the prisoners in Zweibrücken. Holger Meins was murdered according to a plan to manipulate the transfer date; this is the loophole that allows the federal prosecutor and the state security to target the prisoners directly. The fact that no journalist has yet investigated this or published it says nothing about the facts themselves; on the contrary, it underlines the collaboration and complicity, the amalgamation between the information trusts, the state security, the federal prosecutor, the federal police and the intelligence services.

— We do not accept your version of the so-called temperament murder of Meins in any way. You give us the impression of a persecution psychosis, which would be very understandable after years of hiding and detention. At Spiegel, we criticized the behavior of the prison doctor Hutter; the prosecutor opened an investigation against him.

It’s not about Hutter, he’s just one of the prison doctors, they don’t have to decide anything. Prison medicine is organized hierarchically, and Hutter is at most one of the characters who can be caught. A pig, but a small one; he will at most be held responsible, although here too, none of the people who know the application of sentences and the real function of prison medicine believe it. What you call criticism is an old trick that consists of talking about inconveniences, about accidents along the way in order to make them incomprehensible, when in fact it’s not about accidents along the way, but about class society, its justice, its prison camps. Given the situation in the prisons, the fascist demagogy surrounding this strike in the media, the concerts of the politicians, the uncontrolled reactions to the nonviolent action of a small group on the edge of the defensive – imprisoned and isolated – as if it were a military attack (Strauss spoke of the right to war), everything tends to show to what extent the cover of legitimacy of the system is eaten away by its political and economic crises. This is where you should look for a disease, considering the real interest that the State has in the extermination of the RAF prisoners, rather than talking about persecution psychoses.

— The British have recently abolished forced feeding, for example for IRA terrorists. Hunger strikes were over immediately. How would you behave in that case?

This is not our problem. The CDU demands an end to forced feeding, just as it is openly heading towards a state of emergency, fascism, while the SPD is directing its electoral potential and history towards the same goal, fascism. Penetration of the state into all areas of life, total militarization of politics, manipulation, indoctrination of the people by the media, in line with the goals of the domestic and foreign policy of West German imperialism, i.e. to cover up and pass it off, sell it as a policy for the people, the socially weak, under the guise of reforms. This is how the CDU openly propagates murder, while the SPD is dodging, trying to cover up murders as suicides, and cannot openly take a stand for the hard line of state security, which ultimately decides on our conditions of detention.

— Do you not see ghosts again? Are not all the statements known so far from the RAF based on the untenable analyses about this state, this SPD, this CDU, this justice? We see here the defect that has made you lose, so far, the political influence on the population. For this reason you are not able to fight this state, if it deserved it in an effective way, and for this reason you do not find support at the base!

This is a bit of nonsense that you are trying to spin here. What you declare untenable is not bargaining above all, and our position, the proletarian counter-power, is in relation to yours, the antagonistic imperialist power, analytical and practical. You discuss the shortcomings, the bases and the effects of revolutionary politics, while your job consists of questioning it through a journalism that has long openly declared itself as having a positive role in the internal functioning of the state – this state in relation to which proletarian politics is the negation. To ask this question to us, as a question coming from Spiegel, makes no sense. Theory and practice only become unity in the struggle. This is their dialectic. We develop our analysis as a weapon, so it is concrete; and it has been made public only where we are able to control its publication.

— You want to end your hunger strike only when your demands are met; do you have any prospects of success? If not, will you escalate, and for example, start a thirst strike if the demands are not met? What actions are you preparing inside and outside the prison?

Buback still believes that he can break the hunger strike and use it to exterminate us, by means of murder, forced psychiatrization. This is why resuscitation stations have been installed in the prisons. Stations where we must be tied up twenty-four hours a day, put into a state of drowsiness by psychodrugs, force-fed, in total immobility, both physical and intellectual. This is also the reason for the use of counter-propaganda and psychological warfare.

— Forced psychiatrization, psychological warfare, all this exists only in the imagination of the RAF.

This exists in the reality that you propagate, which is that of imperialism. There was the forced anesthesia against Carmen, in order to take her fingerprints, and against Ulrike the decision to anesthetize her for a scintigraphy and in 1974 the one against six prisoners in Hamburg in order to investigate. Forced feeding is only possible if the prisoner is under anesthesia. Political prisoners, for example, in Hamburg and Essen: Beer, Pohl, Allnach, Blenck, Hoppe, Kroecher, were locked up in the bell (solitary confinement cell) several times for forty-eight hours and more, because they called another prisoner during the walk in the yard, or did not stop running during it, or for nothing: isolated from all noise, not even able to get up to shit, being tied by the hands and feet to a board, this means acoustic deprivation, deprivation of motor, visual functions. The effect is like that of a narcotic. You can say that you find it good, but you cannot say that we invented it, because all these facts are attested by hundreds of court decisions. The support he needed through publications, Büback received, among other things, through Heinemann’s initiative, but also through Ditfurth’s essay in Spiegel, which was precise about fascism through words, for whom forced murder and psychiatrization are only means by which he can convey his cynical tricks, to brutalize the political climate around the hunger strike. When Carstens, in mid-November, began to openly propagate the murder against us, there was still a kind of shock, a contradiction, horror in public opinion. Heinemann’s function was to dispel doubts, where they still remained, about Büback’s hard line: among intellectuals, writers, churches. The role of this character has always been to clothe the aggressive content of the policy of West German imperialism in soft language; an aspect that gives the appearance of what Heinemann believes to be a humanist content – depending on the associations he manipulates. Heinemann’s letters were in reality appeals asking us to submit to brainwashing or murder. In the same way, as Federal President, he pardoned Ruhland; and with his letters, he directed the death sentences against us from the Federal Prosecutor, with the humanist gesture, which frees the conscience of his supporters. What he wanted – as at Easter, in 1968, when, during his legislature, he wanted to integrate the students, the traditional anti-fascists and the new left into the new fascism – is to prepare the ground for the murders. If necessary, we will begin an escalation of this struggle with a thirst strike. We are not preparing actions, neither inside nor outside, because we are prisoners and isolated.

— Was the death of Holger Meins a stroke of luck for the RAF collective?

This is fascist projection; the thinking of someone who can no longer think in any other way than in terms of the market: the system that reduces all human life to money, selfishness, power, success. Like Che we say: the guerrilla must only risk his life if it is absolutely necessary, but in this case without hesitation for a single moment. And this is absolutely true of Holger’s death: the resonance of history, the one that was awakened by the armed anti-imperialist struggle, has entered the history of the peoples of the world. It has broken the boycott of information. Because, if many people only wake up when someone is murdered and from that moment on only begin to understand what it is about, it is because you are also responsible for it. This is how Spiegel passed over the hunger strike of forty political prisoners in silence for eight weeks in order to prevent solidarity and protection.

— We have reported on the RAF hunger strike more than once and critically.

Your first report appeared on the fifty-third day of the hunger strike, five days before Holger Meins’ death.

— Are you prepared to see other fatal cases?

Buback is waiting for this in his office.

— You can well imagine that we find such a suspicion monstrous.

Oestreicher, the Secretary General of Amnesty England, as a professional human rights advocate – who in his attempts at conciliation was entirely on the side of the state – after his interview with Buback was “appalled to see Buback, cold as ice, playing poker with the lives of prisoners” (verbatim).

— What is the starting point of your analysis of the situation in the Federal Republic of Germany?

Imperialist center. American colony. American military base. Imperialist leading power in Europe and the Common Market. Second military power in NATO. Patented representative of the interests of American imperialism in Western Europe. The fusion of West German imperialism (politically, economically, militarily, ideologically, based on the same interests of exploitation of the Third World, as well as on the homogeneity of social structures by means of the concentration of capital and consumer culture) with American imperialism characterizes the position of the Federal Republic towards the countries of the Third World: as a party in the wars waged against them by American imperialism, as a city in the world revolutionary process of encircling cities by villages. To this extent, the guerrilla warfare in the metropolises is an urban guerrilla warfare in both senses of the term: geographically, it emerges, operates and develops in the big cities, and in the strategic and politico-military sense it is an urban guerrilla warfare because it attacks the repressive machine of imperialism in the metropolises from within, it fights as a partisan unit behind the enemy lines. This is what we understand today by proletarian internationalism. In a word: the Federal Republic, being part of the state system of American imperialism, is not an oppressed nation but a nation that oppresses. In such a state, the development of the proletarian counter-power and its liberation struggle, the complete dismantling of the dominant structures of power, can only be internationalist from the beginning, are possible only in tactical and strategic connection with the liberation struggles of the oppressed peoples. Historically: since 1918–1919, the imperialist bourgeoisie – its state – has held the initiative in the course of the class struggles in Germany and is on the offensive against the people; and this until the organizations of the proletariat were completely defeated in fascism until the defeat of the old fascism, a defeat due not to armed struggle, but to the Western allies and the Soviet army. In the 1920s, there was the betrayal of the Third International: total alignment of the communist parties with the Soviet Union, which lies at the origin of the inability of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) to come to a policy oriented towards revolution through armed struggle and the proletarian conquest of political power. After 1945, there was the brainwashing offensive of American imperialism against the people by means of anticommunism, consumer culture, political, ideological, and finally military restoration and re-fascization in the form of the Cold War and a GDR (German Democratic Republic) that did not develop communist policy as a war of liberation. There was no antifascist resistance here, no armed masses as in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Spain, even in Holland. The conditions for this were immediately broken by the Western allies after 1945. All this means for us and for the legal left here: there is nothing to which we can attach ourselves, to which we can rely historically, there is nothing that we can presuppose in one way or another in organizational terms or in terms of proletarian consciousness, not even democratic or republican traditions. In domestic politics, this is one of the reasons that makes possible without restraint the process of fascisation, the overgrowth and outgrowth of the police apparatus, of the state security machine as a state police within the state, the artificial suppression of the division of powers, the promulgation of fascist emergency laws within the framework of the internal security program – from the emergency laws to the current emergency laws that allow trials to be conducted without defendants or defenders, as a pure show business, but also the exclusion of radicals from public services, the expansion of the powers of the Federal Police Office. A democracy that has not been conquered, that is only brainwashing for the people and has no mass base, cannot be defended and is not defended either. All these are conditions specific to the political territory of the Federal Republic.

— So far, with bombs and slogans you have only been able to win the support of very small groups of anarchist intellectuals and sympathisers. Do you still believe that you can change that?

The liberation wars of the peoples of the Third World have economic, political, military and ideological repercussions on metropolitan society, which Lin Piao called cutting off the feet of imperialism. They accentuate the contradictions in the metropolises. The means and methods that the system uses to deny these contradictions become obsolete. Reforms turn into repressions, the military and police apparatus is developed disproportionately, all the more so because the means are lacking. The impoverishment of the population, the militarization of politics, intensified repression, such is the forced development of the crisis of the system. To emerge from a defensive political and historical position and to intervene in this process of disintegration is the basic condition of revolutionary politics here.

— You are often accused of an absolute lack of influence on the masses as well as of connection with the base. Do you attribute this to the fact that the RAF collective is far removed from reality? Have you sharpened your optics in the meantime? Many have the impression that you still only attract attention where you arouse pity, as a result of which you do not even have the approval of the extreme left. Where do you locate your supporters?

There is the trace of the RAF policy. No adherents, followers, successors. But the RAF and the effect of our policy are located: 1° at the level where many, changing their opinion about this State given the measures taken by the government against us, begin to recognize it for what it is: the repressive machine of the imperialist bourgeoisie; 2° at the level where many are those who, identifying with our struggle, become aware, relativize in their thinking, their sensitivity and finally in their action, the absolutism of power of the system, and recognize what it is possible to do, that the feeling of impotence does not reflect objective reality; 3° at the level of proletarian internationalism, of the awareness of the relationship between liberation struggles in the Third World and here, of the possibility and necessity of collaborating legally and illegally. At the level of praxis: that it is not enough just to talk, but that it is possible and necessary, necessary and possible to act.

— Do you want to be executives and remain so and single-handedly bring about the fall of the regime, or do you still believe you can mobilise the proletarian masses?

No revolutionary thinks of overthrowing the system alone, it is absurd. There is no revolution without the people. Such affirmations against Blanqui, Lenin, Che Guevara, against us now have never been anything other than the denunciation of any revolutionary initiative, the reference to the masses having the function of justifying, of selling reformist politics. It is not about fighting alone, but about creating from the daily struggles, the mobilizations and the organizational processes of the legal left, a politico-military vanguard, a nucleus that sets up an illegal infrastructure – a prerequisite for the possibility of acting – developing a practice that can give direction, strength and purpose to the legal struggles in the factories, the neighborhoods, the street and the universities, to achieve what will be at stake in the developments of the economic and political crisis of imperialism: the seizure of political power. The perspective of our policy – the development for which we are fighting: a strong guerrilla movement in the metropolises – is, in the process of defeating American imperialism, a necessary means, a stage, insofar as the legal struggles and the struggles that would develop spontaneously from the contradictions of the system could be broken by repression as soon as they manifest themselves. What the Bolshevik cadre party represented for Lenin, corresponds to the epoch of the multinational organization of capital, of the transnational structures of imperialist repression inside and outside, in which we find ourselves today, to the organization of the proletarian counter-power arising from the guerrilla. In the course of this process – national and international – it develops into a revolutionary party. It is stupid, in the current state of the anti-imperialist struggles in Asia, Latin America, Vietnam, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Palestine, to say that we are alone. In Western Europe there is not only the RAF, there is the IRA, ETA, armed groups fighting in Italy, Portugal, England. Since 1968 there have been urban guerrilla groups in the United States.

— Your base, at present, would be about forty comrades of the RAF in prison, approximately three hundred anarchists in the underground in the FRG. What about the sympathizers?

These figures are those of the Federal Police Office, which are constantly changing. They are false, the processes of awareness cannot be quantified so easily. At present, solidarity is becoming international. In parallel with an awareness of international public opinion, which is acting more and more openly with regard to West German imperialism, we are also witnessing the development of a sensitivity to its internal repression. Among the organizations of the legal left, since the RAF existed, a process of discussions and polarization is developing with regard to the problem of armed policy. A new anti-fascism is being formed, no longer based on apolitical pity for the victims and the persecuted, but identification with the anti-imperialist struggle, directed against the police, state security, multinational trusts, against American imperialism. Helmut Schmidt would not have counted the RAF, on the occasion of his New Year’s speech, among the five realities most threatening imperialism in 1974 — world inflation, the oil crisis, the Guillaume affair, unemployment, the RAF — if we were fish without water, if revolutionary politics here had as narrow a basis as they claim in psychological warfare.

— One of your main support troops, or so it is claimed, would be the dozen lawyers who are responsible for coordination both outside and inside the prison. What roles do your lawyers play?

Committed lawyers, defenders who know our cases, inevitably become politicised, because at every moment they experience, literally from their first visit to an RAF prisoner, that nothing he took for granted as a judicial process works any more. Body searches, mail control, cell searches, persecutions, suspicions, sanctions by the bar, psychological warfare, criminal prosecutions, laws decreed to measure their exclusion, from the defense, to which is added the knowledge of the special treatments we are subjected to, their total powerlessness to change anything, by the normal procedure, that is to say by using legal arguments before the courts and the experience they have at all times, that it is not the judges but the Sicherungsgruppe Bonn (state security) and the federal prosecutor’s office who make all the decisions concerning us, which is a contradiction between text and constitutional reality, between the facade of the constitutional state and the reality of the police state, has made defenders of the constitution anti-fascists. The desire to assimilate these lawyers to us, to make them auxiliary troops, which they are not, is part of the strategy of the BKA and the federal prosecutor’s office. To the extent that justice is annexed in this trial by state security to serve the goals of counterinsurgency, where it is used as an instrument in the strategy of extermination conducted against us, by the attorney general’s office, the defenders who base themselves on the principle of the separation of powers are considered as obstacles to fascisation and must therefore be fought.

— Do you have problems with political demarcation, vis-à-vis other anarchist groups operating underground?

Not vis-à-vis Spiegel.

— What about the June 2^nd movement that approves of the murder in West Berlin of Judge Drenkmann?

Ask the June 2^nd Movement.

— What do you think about this: did the murder of Drenkmann serve any purpose?

Drenkmann did not become the highest judicial authority in a city of three million inhabitants without destroying the lives of thousands of people, without taking away their right to live, without strangling them with paragraphs, locking them in prison cells, without destroying their future. There is also the fact that despite the invitation of the highest West German authorities, the President of the Republic and the President of the Constitutional Court, only 15,000 Berliners attended the funeral, and this in a city that used to mobilize 500,000 to 600,000 people for anti-communist demonstrations. You yourself know that the indignation caused by this attack on the Berlin justice system is nothing but propaganda and hypocrisy, that no one is mourning this mask, and that this imposed exercise was nothing but a means of bourgeois and imperialist communication. The indignation expressed a reflex of adaptation to a certain political climate. He who, without being himself a ruling elite, spontaneously identifies himself with such a masquerade of justice, says only of himself that where exploitation reigns he can only lean towards the side of the exploiter. In terms of class analysis, the protests in favor of Drenkmann, where they emanated from the left and the liberals, only served to unmask them.

— What we know about it is something quite different. We know that Drenkmann was shot and we consider it impudent that the RAF condoned this murder. It amounts to lynch justice for a crime apparently committed collectively by a justice system that you describe as fascist. Even if one accepts the maxim that the end justifies the means (which you openly do), the murder of Drenkmann, given the effect it had on the public, constitutes a defeat for the RAF collective.

We do not justify anything. Revolutionary counter-violence is not only legitimate, it is our only possibility and we know that in the course of its development it will give the class for which you are writing other opportunities for bigoted self-representation than the attempt to take a judge prisoner. Your indignation must be linked to your silence on the attack in Bremen, when a bomb exploded in a locker room shortly after the cancellation of a football match. Unlike the action against Drenkmann, this bomb was not directed against a member of the ruling class but against the people, it was a fascist action on the CIA model. How do you explain, then, that the police at Bremen station were already on alert on the morning of 7 December – the day the bomb exploded at 4.15 p.m. – because they had been warned by the Hessian state police office that this attack was expected at the stations and on the trains? How do you explain that the Bremen-North civil protection had already received the order at 3.30 p.m. to intervene and send five ambulances to the main station because a bomb was going to explode there, that the police were already there immediately after the explosion with the information ready, according to which they had not been informed of a bomb attack at 3.56 p.m. and that concerning a department store in the city centre? So the Bremen authorities were not only informed of the exact time and place, but they also had information immediately after the explosion that concealed, manipulated and diverted from them the real scenario of their own measures? What then of your indignation?

— We will check the facts that you are portraying. You alone, in the underground, have put the emphasis on violence. When the bombs exploded in Munich, Heidelberg and Hamburg, the RAF considered this to be a political fact and claimed it as such. Do you consider violence against things and people to be an ineffective concept — which does not lead to solidarity but repels — or do you rather intend to continue along this path?

The question is, who is pushing whom back? Pictures of us were hung on the fences in the streets of Hanoi because the Heidelberg attack claimed by the RAF destroyed the computer by means of which American bombings on North Vietnam were programmed and directed. American officers, soldiers and politicians felt pushed back because, in Frankfurt or Heidelberg, they were suddenly confronted with the Vietnam War and no longer felt safe behind their backs. Revolutionary politics must today be simultaneously political and military. This is what emerges from the structure of imperialism: the fact that its domination must be ensured, internally and externally, in the metropolises and in the Third World, first militarily by means of pacts and military interventions, counter-guerrilla and internal security programs, that is, the elaboration from within of its apparatus of violence. Given the potential for violence of imperialism, there is no revolutionary politics without resolving the question of violence at every stage of revolutionary organization.

— How do you see yourselves? Do you classify yourself as anarchists or Marxists?

Marxists. But the conception of anarchism through state security is nothing more than an anti-communist firebrand, which is based on nothing but the use of explosives. It is intended as a rhetoric of counter-revolution, given the precariousness of living conditions in the capitalist sphere, to manipulate the latent and always-at-hand anxieties of unemployment, crisis and war, in order to sell, through internal security measures, the people to the state apparatus: police, secret services, army as instruments for maintaining order and security. It aims at the reactionary and fascist mobilization of the people, in order to manipulatively lead to an identification with the apparatus of state violence. It is also an attempt to usurp for the benefit of the imperialist state the old quarrel between Marxist revolutionaries and anarchist revolutionaries, to play against us the opportunist weakening of orthodox Marxism which says that Marxists should not attack the state but capital, that only factories and not the streets can be the center of class struggles, etc. According to this false understanding of Marxism, Lenin was an anarchist and his book The State and Revolution an anarchist writing. It is, however, the strategic book par excellence of revolutionary Marxism. The experience of all guerrilla movements is simple: the instrument of Marxism-Leninism, what Lenin, Mao, Giap, Fanon, Che, borrowed from Marx’s theory, and developed, what was useful for them, is a weapon in the anti-imperialist struggle.

— The people’s war conceived by the RAF has become in the consciousness of the people — it seems — a war against the people. Böll once spoke of the 6 against 60 million.

This is an imperialist wish. This is how in 1972 the newspaper Bild turned the notion of a people’s war into a war against the people. If you consider the newspaper Bild as the voice of the people... We do not share Böll’s contempt for the masses, because NATO, the multinational holdings, state security, the 127 American military bases in Germany, Dow Chemical, IBM, General Motors, the judiciary, the police, the BGS do not constitute the people, and the suggestion that the policy of the oil cartel, the CIA, the BND, the Constitutional Court can be a policy for the people, that the imperialist state embodies the well-being of everyone — hammering this into the heads of the people, that is exactly what the newspaper Bild, Der Spiegel, the psychological warfare waged by state security against the people, against us, is all about.

— Vox populi, vox RAF? Don’t you notice that no one takes to the streets for you anymore? When there is a trial against the RAF, you only gather small groups in the courts; don’t you notice that from the moment you have thrown bombs around you, no one has a bed for you? All this, however, largely explains the success of the investigations undertaken against the RAF since 1972. It is you and not Böll who despise the masses.

Great, that you are still repeating Hacker’s platitudes — but the situation is characterized by a still tactically weak and scattered legal left, which cannot transform the reactionary mobilization into a revolutionary mobilization against the force of repression in a national framework. This question does not even arise. We say that it is precisely in this contradiction that a proletarian policy can become the policy of the proletariat only by arming itself, by transmissions which as problems of revolution, of strategy, of class analysis certainly surpass your flat polemic. The RAF is not the people but a small group that has begun the struggle, as a part of the people, which will only become a force of history for itself in the struggle against imperialism, in the course of the long process of the wars of liberation. The RAF, its policy, its line, its actions are proletarian, are a beginning of a proletarian counter-power. The struggle has begun. You talk about the fact that some of us are prisoners – this is a defeat. You do not talk about the political price already paid by the imperialist state against a small group like the RAF. Because one of the aims of revolutionary action, its tactics in this phase of construction, is to force the state to act openly, to force it to a reaction, which reveals the structures of repression, of the apparatus of repression, which makes them perceptible, and thus proposes itself as a condition of struggle of the revolutionary initiative. Marx says: “Revolutionary progress is made by the creation of a powerful and unified counterrevolution, by the creation of an enemy who will bring the party of the insurrection to reach through struggle the maturity which will make it the true revolutionary party.” The astonishing thing is not that we have suffered a defeat, but that for five years the RAF has existed – the facts of which the government speaks have changed. In 1972, according to a survey, 20% of adults said they would accept legal proceedings in order to hide one of us in their home. In 1973, a survey among schoolchildren revealed that 15% of them identified with the actions of the RAF. Of course, revolutionary politics is not based on demographic surveys, because the process of awareness, knowledge and politicization is not quantifiable. But this is what the theory of the development of armed insurrection into a protracted people’s war means — that in the fight against the power structure of imperialism the people will find their advantage in the long run, will free themselves from the grip of brainwashing by the media. Because our fight is Realpolitik, it is a fight against the real enemies of the people, while the counterrevolution is forced to lie. There is, however, the problem of the chauvinism of the metropolises in the consciousness of the people, which, in terms of economic category, is poorly defined by the concept of the labor aristocracy. There is the problem that national identity in the metropolises can only be reactionary, as identification with imperialism. This means from the beginning that revolutionary consciousness in the people is only possible within the framework of proletarian internationalism, in identification with the anti-imperialist liberation struggles of the peoples of the Third World, and cannot only develop through class struggles here. To be this articulation, to realize proletarian internationalism as the basic condition of revolutionary politics, to be in this way the connection between the class struggles here and the liberation struggles of the Third World, is the business of the guerrilla in the metropolises.

“...because my sister and I were very close.”

Interview with Wienke Zitzlaff, Ulrike Meinhof’s sister

Journal Junge Welt, supplement for the weekend of May 7–8, 2016

When Ulrike Meinhof died forty years ago, she was 41, her sister Wienke 44. Both sisters had their own political history, which they shared with each other. After her sister’s arrest in 1972, Wienke campaigned for decades for RAF prisoners, against solitary confinement and for their release. In an interview with Ron Augustin, she talks about her sister’s development, detention and death.

— There is a documentary about Patrice Lumumba, in which the detailed circumstances of his death were presented after forty years. When you saw this film[1], which was shot by Thomas Giefer, a fellow student of Holger Meins, you said that it might take forty years before we know what happened in Stammheim. Are there any new facts?

No, the findings of the International Commission of Inquiry, which were presented in Paris in 1979[2], demonstrated so many contradictions in the official reports that there were practically only efforts to cover them up. I do not want to list them all again, but Ulrike is said to have hanged herself from a window grille that was covered by a metal mesh plate. The police photos in the criminal investigation file show that her left foot was still resting on a chair when she was found. The rope, from which she was hanging, was so fragile and so long that it should have broken or her head should have slipped out when she jumped. The absence of bleeding in the conjunctiva and other clues are rather atypical for a suicide, and the International Commission of Inquiry concluded that my sister must have already been dead when she was hanged.

— Who do you suspect?

I can only speculate on that. But there was a fire escape, a stairwell completely independent of the prison circulation, which led from outside to exactly in front of his cell on the seventh floor. Anyone could have accessed it.

— How did you learn of her death, were you able to see her again?

So on May 9^th at 9am there was a news report that Ulrike had committed suicide. Together with lawyer Axel Azzola, I immediately went to Stammheim. When we arrived, the body had already been removed from there. Gudrun Ensslin had wanted to see her, but the federal prosecutor forbade it. I had to identify her before the autopsy, apart from that I couldn’t see her. Azzola got us to talk briefly with Gudrun, whom I saw for the first time then. I don’t remember what we talked about, but she talked about her last conversation with Ulrike, the day before at the window, where they both laughed again. The same day there was a press conference of the lawyers in Stuttgart. There I stood up and explained that Ulrike had told me clearly, even when she was in Cologne-Ossendorf, if I die in prison, it’s because I’ve been killed, I’ll never commit suicide. At that time, she was still in a dead wing, totally isolated.

— Then, prosecutor Kaul had it broadcast in the media that there were tensions between the prisoners, which had allegedly “pushed the RAF’s chief ideologue to his death”. The media were given excerpts of letters that were supposed to prove this. In fact, excerpts were broadcast that were almost a year old, from a discussion that had been going on with difficulty but had since ended. Gudrun spoke of a “process of consolidation” that had taken place between them. Because the excerpts of letters were published out of context and partly falsified, the prisoners allowed their lawyers to circulate this correspondence in its entirety. Of course, the media ignored this.

In the end, Ulrike, together with the others in Stammheim, was working on the texts for the trial. When, on May 4, 1976, they discussed Germany’s role in the imperialist chain, Ulrike was not in the courtroom but in a visiting booth in the basement, where she was preparing the next intervention with lawyer Heldmann. Later, this request, on the role of Willy Brandt and social democracy in the Vietnam War, was presented at the trial by Andreas Baader. On May 6, she had with lawyer Oberwinder a, as he called it, “lively discussion in which Mrs. Meinhof explained the group’s point of view” and on May 7, two days before her death, she discussed several international projects with the Italian lawyer Giovanni Capelli. Already in 1971, when the investigations against Ulrike and the others were still ongoing, there were suggestions of “tensions” within the group, in order to slander her. She was “the voice of the RAF” and there are still quite a few people who like to present her as a “seduced”, in order to “save her for her bourgeois class”, as a German newspaper recently wrote. They like to forget that she was a communist, with a long political history dating back to the 1950s. I think the official versions didn’t have much influence on me, because my sister and I were very close.

— When was the last time you saw her alive?

The last visit was in March 1976. Afterwards, so after his death, I was able to visit Jan Raspe, Gudrun and Andreas. There, in a context of work around the creation of an International Commission of Inquiry, a relationship of trust developed. I had an hour and a half visit with each of them each time, so most often in the morning, in the afternoon and the following day an hour and a half. This meant that the prisoners could talk among themselves about what they had discussed with me and that we did not have to repeat everything. And many times Gudrun was the last, so often it happened in such a way that we said to each other, you have already discussed everything, so tell us, how are things with you, and stuff like that. We got on well. That was what was impressive in all these meetings. And that is also why I am so sensitive against ridiculous distortions in the media. You are dealing with people, simply, who in a concrete situation behave concretely. It helps a lot.

— Your first visit to the prison was a week after Ulrike’s arrest. Did she tell you what they did to her before her lawyer was allowed to see her?

The visits were always accompanied by State Security officials. Often there was Alfred Klaus from the Federal Police, the “family cop” who made the first “psychograms” of RAF members. Many things could not be discussed because the visit was threatened to be terminated. But I knew from her lawyer that he was only allowed to see her four days after her arrest, after she had to undergo a lot of degrading body examinations under the threat of forced ether anesthesia. She must have been beaten too, she had bruises everywhere. Jutta Ditfurth described all this again in her book. [3]

Ulrike was in Cologne-Ossendorf in a dead wing, that is, in total isolation, even acoustically, without other prisoners. Isolation as individual detention was already known from the time of the banning of the KPD, the German Communist Party. From the communists, who were locked up during the fifties, we knew that they used knock signs to communicate from cell to cell. But Ulrike was alone in this wing, there was no one to communicate with. I told her about my experiences with severely disabled people, about their isolation in this society, and about their struggle, because isolation reduces the human being so terribly. So, after she had been first eight months and then weeks in the dead wing, she wrote this text that begins with the sentence “the feeling that the head is exploding…”[4], where she describes what happens in there.

Then the federal prosecutor tried to have her admitted to a psychiatric institution for an assessment of her mental state. When this did not work, a brain scan under forced anesthesia was ordered, under the pretext that Ulrike had a brain tumor that could lead to proof of her insanity or justify surgery. In truth, what is presented in the media time and again as a brain tumor was a simple, harmless blood fungus that was discovered and treated during her pregnancy in 1962. Although the federal prosecutor knew this perfectly well, he used it to question Ulrike’s mental health. These attempts at psychiatrization could only be prevented by a broad public mobilization throughout the country and abroad.

Ulrike is often presented as if she had been seduced and used by others, especially by Andreas. It’s ridiculous, she was the one with the longest political experience, she was one of the most eloquent spokespeople of the student movement, more consistent than many of the time. And she had a very strong character. In hiding and in prison she was identical to herself, she wrote, fought, with the others. The clichés in the media are always the same, pre-cut 45 years ago by her ex-husband Röhl and his friend Stefan Aust, to erase in her “the voice”, that is to say the political identity of the group.

— You were the director of a special school, did you never have problems at your workplace or elsewhere because of the story with your sister?

But of course. The whole period from 1970 to 1972, when Ulrike was still wanted, I was constantly observed by the police. Wherever I went, the police followed me, often openly. Twice, Alfred Klaus of the federal police came to my house demanding that I meet my sister to persuade her to surrender, otherwise she would certainly be killed.

Then the Christian Democrats (CDU) opened their election campaign by attacking the school reform of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), using Ulrike Meinhof’s sister as the worst example. I wasn’t in the SPD, so there was no problem on that side, but it was clear that they wanted to hold the local government responsible for the fact that I could maintain my position in my school, and that’s how it went for years. Of course, my political positions were also at stake. I was left-wing, I formulated a fundamental criticism of the pedagogy for people with disabilities, but I was also in solidarity with my sister, I didn’t distance myself from her. During the prisoners’ hunger strike in 1974, I was arrested once in the context of committee work. Then it came on the TV news, and half an hour later the president of the parents’ council, a railway worker, came to the house to see if I was okay, and he called a parents’ meeting, where the parents said, this is not how you treat your headmistress. So there was something there, solidarity, obviously that was also a thorn in the side of the school authorities. In the end, I took my early retirement. They were happy to get rid of me. After the press conference of the International Commission of Inquiry in Paris in 1979, I could no longer visit prisoners until 1992, because I was endangering “the security and order of the establishment”.

— How did you discuss the respective political developments with Ulrike? Did you perceive the decisive moments leading to the RAF?

Ulrike and I each have our own political history, with a lot of exchanges. So, for example, she worked on children in need of special education, and for that she came to my school. She contributed a lot to me getting all the books of the pedagogues of the twenties, because they only existed in illegal reproductions, and she could get them. We both became politicized in the movement against the rearmament of Germany, we participated in the founding of the DFU party, the German Peace Union, which was an attempt to create a broad left-wing coalition. Then, Ulrike was, for five years, a member of the KPD, the banned communist party. After that, it was the SDS, the student organization, which became radicalized and it was the beginnings of the APO, the extra-parliamentary opposition of the sixties. Ulrike gave up her studies to devote herself entirely to journalistic work, mainly in the editorial office of the magazine Konkret, but also in other magazines and for radio and television. She was one of the most important voices of the student movement. Everyone fought over her articles based on in-depth research. When we sisters met, we talked about our children, but also about the political situation, the liberation movements, Vietnam. In February 1968, the international congress on Vietnam took place. Ulrike had moved to Berlin four days before. In October, she met Andreas and Gudrun at their trial for the burning of two department stores in Frankfurt. She told me how impressed she was by their political ideas. With Konkret she already had little left to do, as she had also expressed in one of her last articles under the title “Columnism”[5]. She also worked on the film Bambule (Mutiny), she participated in a neighborhood committee in the Berlin suburb Märkisches Viertel, and above all she led important discussions at the international level.

I didn’t know that Ulrike was involved in the release of Andreas Baader. She had told me that he had been arrested and that somehow he had to be released from prison. Four weeks before she disappeared she came to my house to make sure that I would look after her children in case something happened.

So when Andreas’ release was in the news, I suspected that she had something to do with it, and I immediately went home to pick up the children. In the end, the story with the children happened differently, but in any case her decision to go underground was clear at that moment. Later, she herself motivated this step with the fact that, for her, “political opposition and underground life have become identical.” [6]

Declaration from the International Commission for Enquiry on the Death of Ulrike Meinhof

Conclusions

At the end of its work, the International Commission of Inquiry into the Death of Ulrike Meinhof has taken note of the following report drawn up by its secretariat. Without taking every wording into account, it nevertheless emphasises that this is a serious work carried out thanks to the collaboration of qualified experts. It deserves to be taken into consideration and widely disseminated.

To summarise the sentiment on which its members agreed, the Commission noted:

— that Ulrike Meinhof was repeatedly and for long periods subjected to conditions of detention which must be described as torture. This is the form of torture known as social isolation and sensory deprivation, which is commonly applied in the Federal Republic of Germany to many political prisoners and common law detainees;

— that the State authorities’ claim that Ulrike Meinhof committed suicide by hanging is not proven and that the results of the Commission’s investigation tend to show that Ulrike Meinhof could not have hanged herself; — that the results of the investigation suggest that Ulrike Meinhof was dead when she was hanged and that there are disturbing indications of third-party intervention in connection with her death.

The Commission cannot express any certainty about the circumstances of Ulrike Meinhof’s death.

However, the fact that, apart from the prison staff, the secret services had access to the cells on the 7^th floor through a separate and secret passage gives rise to all suspicions. The results of the investigation that the Commission presents here make the need to set up an international commission of inquiry into the deaths at Stammheim and Stadelheim more urgent.

The Commission thanks Ulrike Meinhof’s sister, who made all the documents in her possession available to it, and all the people and organisations who facilitated the work undertaken, supported it and helped it financially. This work was financed solely by these contributions and would not have been possible without them. The Commission also thanks all those who took care of the publication of this report.

Paris, December 15, 1978

The second death of the prisoners

Ron Augustin, Junge Welt newspaper, September 10, 2007

On the morning of 18 October 1977, three RAF prisoners were found dead or dying in the Stammheim high-security wing, and one female prisoner was seriously injured. Although the autopsies had been postponed until 4pm “for police reasons”, the Baden-Württemberg government was already spreading the news at 9am that the prisoners had committed suicide. At 2pm, the federal government spokesman Klaus Bölling was trying to condition the assembled press for his version of the suicide, while the Social Democratic faction was ordered by Willy Brandt to “set aside” the “minor differences” about the circumstances.

Since at the time I was one of about 70 prisoners subjected to the “communications freeze” (“Kontaktsperre”), I only learned of the prisoners’ deaths the following day, when my cell in Hanover was searched on the orders of the federal police, and I was informed of the “facts” that Andreas Baader and Jan Raspe had killed themselves with firearms, Gudrun Ensslin had hanged herself with an electric cable, and Irmgard Möller had stabbed herself several times.

At first I was shocked by the news – again, several of us had died, including the most important people in my life. I was desperate, but I couldn’t show it too much because at that very moment the terror of constant surveillance and therefore the fight against it began. For months on end I was watched 24 hours a day like the other RAF prisoners. At night the light was left on in the cell; every quarter of an hour the guards looked through the peephole; almost every day the cell was searched from top to bottom. Formally under the pretext of protecting us from further “suicides”, in truth with the explicit aim of destroying us and making us repent.

The “communications freeze” was not lifted for me until 31 October. I was then able to receive visits from my family and lawyers again, but I was still excluded from any contact with other prisoners. All requests from people wanting to visit me, such as Wolfgang Grams, were refused, their letters seized on the most absurd grounds. Private mail, lawyers’ mail, newspapers, books and all sources of information were subject to increased censorship. For example, the report of the Baden-Württemberg Parliament on the night of 18 October in Stammheim was not given to me, on the grounds that it “could endanger order and security”. It therefore took years for me to gain access to the – meager – information about that night and to be able to discuss it with others.

Today, thirty years after the events, I cannot give any credence to the versions of suicide. Not because I would never have had any doubts. Not because I would never have paid attention to the various speculations. Nor because I would never have been close to despair myself, under the pressure of the smear campaigns that I had been confronted with, like the other prisoners, from the beginning: campaigns not based on concrete facts; and continually built from standardized notions, suppositions, slanders, alterations, falsifications. No, what made me remain suspicious each time about the “proven facts” was that I knew them, those who had died, better than anything that was said about them.

First of all, there are the official facts, most of which have been conscientiously collected in a book by the lawyer Weidenhammer.[7] For the record, I will briefly summarize them.

According to the results of the criminological investigations, Andreas Baader allegedly killed himself with an 18 cm long pistol, shooting himself exactly in the middle of the back of the neck, three centimetres above the hairline, with the bullet exiting above the border between the forehead and the hair. According to an expert report by the Federal Police, which is based on fluorescent and radiological analysis, this shot would only have been possible if it had been fired from a distance of 30 to 40 centimetres between the pistol and the back of the neck. Taking into account the position of the weapon, the cartridge cases, as well as the traces of powder and blood spatter on the right hand, it was concluded that the shot had been fired with the right hand and that the weapon had been held with the trigger downwards. Knowing that Andreas was left-handed, a theory was then constructed according to which he had applied the weapon by holding it around the mouth with the right hand, with the trigger upwards. On the other hand, analyses with natriumrhodizonat on both hands “gave no trace of shooting”. The three shots fired in the cell and their casings were not compared with the weapon found at the scene. Therefore, there is no certainty either for the weapon or for the manner in which the three shots were fired. A large sample of blood and tissue from the point of impact (“clue no. 6”) was apparently “lost” at the forensic pathologist, Professor Joachim Rauschke.

In the case of Jan Raspe, no traces of gunpowder could be found on his hands. There was no trace of blood on the weapon found next to him, although he had clearly died from a point-blank shot to the right temple. According to the officials who found him dying in the morning, he was still holding the pistol in his hand. According to forensic science, in such situations, it is always necessary to investigate whether a murder was attempted as a suicide, because the weapon would normally fall out of his hands due to the recoil. In the investigation files and witness interviews, a wide variety of theories were put forward, which can only be interpreted as attempts to cover up the facts. For example, the report of the Baden-Württemberg Parliament states: “The exact position of the weapon has not been established”, which becomes in the decision to close the case by the Public Prosecutor’s Office: “There was a pistol next to his right hand”. Another attempt to rule out foreign intervention was to claim that there was no place for anyone on Jan’s right, a claim that could be easily refuted.

No fingerprints could be found on the weapons. Although there were no traces of blood on the two pistols, the prosecution initially stated that “the weapons were so covered in blood that no traces could be found.” Then it was stated that the blood had “coagulated,” before finally stating that the weapons had been “wiped” and then finally covered with a “layer of grease.” In the comments of one of the police investigators, this is succinctly translated into the sentence: “If the weapons had been wiped with a cloth before use, no usable traces could have remained.” And: “fingerprints cannot last on a greased weapon.”[8]

Gudrun Ensslin was found hanging with an electric cable from the window of her cell. When she tried to lower her, the cable broke immediately. No one asked why the cable had not already torn during the fall to her death. On the neck, a double hanging mark was found on both sides up to the back of the head, with additional bleeding in the crest. A histamine test, by which it is possible to establish whether hanging took place before or after death, was prepared but not carried out. Fingerprint preservations were not carried out, not even on the cable. The chair, which was supposedly used for jumping, was as little examined as, for example, her fingernails. Traces of injuries on the back, mouth, nose, head and left groin were found but not examined further. The fact that letters and other documents had been removed from the cell was first confirmed as a “seizure”, then denied, and later partially admitted by Attorney General Kurt Rebmann. To the extent that they still exist, they are still inaccessible. In the case of Andreas and Gudrun, the determination of the time of death was circumvented by refusing medical examiners access to the cells for eight hours.

Irmgard Möller survived the night of death with cuts on her wrists and four stab wounds near her heart. According to the investigation, she tried to commit hara-kiri with a small chrome knife with a rounded tip typical of prison cutlery. With great force, because the fifth rib was cut and one of the four stabs had penetrated seven centimeters into the heart pocket. In the decision to close the case by the public prosecutor’s office, only 2 to 4 cm of it remained. No fingerprints could be found on the blood-covered knife. All attempts by Irmgard to obtain the X-rays that were taken of her were rejected. The sweater she was wearing was so torn after she was taken to hospital that the damage from the stab wounds could no longer be determined. The police investigators’ report states: “The sweater is so torn that its original shape can no longer be reconstructed in a usable manner.” And: “Damage caused by stab wounds cannot be established with certainty due to the poor condition of the sweater.” The decision to close the case by the Public Prosecutor’s Office states: “The sweater worn by Irmgard Möller as the only item of clothing covering her upper body was soaked in blood, but it was not damaged; from experience, an attacker would not have taken his victim’s clothing into account.” Irmgard has always denied that she injured herself or that there had been discussions about committing a mass suicide.[9]

Barely four weeks later, on 12 November 1977, Ingrid Schubert was found dead in an isolated cell in Munich-Stadelheim prison. She had been in this prison since mid-August 1977 and had been transferred from another cell a few hours before her death, after it had been announced the day before that a cache of explosives had been found in a cell in Stammheim, where Ingrid had been held until August. Ingrid is said to have hanged herself with a rope braided from three strips of bed sheets. The strips were made of sturdy cotton, approximately 8 x 240 cm. The outlines of the tears did not match each other. That is to say, either the strips did not come from the piece of bed sheet that was still in the cell, or there were pieces between them, which were not found. If Ingrid had torn the bed sheet herself, there should have been traces of fibres in the cell. However, according to the police investigators’ report, “no traces of cotton could be found on any of the clothing, as is necessarily the case when tearing a fabric such as a bed sheet.”

After a visit from her father for Ingrid’s 33^rd birthday, she had again spoken to a lawyer on 10 November 1977 about requesting a transfer to Frankfurt-Preungesheim Prison. On these occasions, she had given the impression that she was “increasingly open”. Her family still cannot imagine that she would have killed herself out of resignation or despair.

Ulrike Meinhof had already been found in her cell on 9 May 1976 in similar conditions. She was hanging in a noose that was so wide that if she had not fallen, it was only because she was held firmly with her left heel on a chair. A chair that for its part was kept balanced only by the stiffness of the dead body, because it had been lifted off the ground by a mattress and blankets. The arrangement of the chair as well as the angle of the foot placed normally, contradict the most fundamental criminological criteria for a leap in suicide. The typical characteristics for a death by strangulation by hanging, such as the displacement of the cervical vertebrae or, in the absence of a broken neck, haemorrhages in the conjunctiva, could not be found either. On the other hand, there were bruises and effusions on the legs and hips that could not have come from the chair. The international commission, which examined all the documents concerning Ulrike’s death, concluded that she must have been dead when she was hanged, and that the evidence pointed rather to suffocation or strangulation by third parties.[10]

The rope with which Ulrike allegedly hanged herself was a 4 cm wide strip of prison towel. Later experiments showed that a rope of this material and width breaks immediately with any sudden load. In the report of the first investigation, the rope was 68 cm long, with a double knot under the chin – too long for a credible hanging. As a result, the length of the rope was arbitrarily set at 51 cm at the autopsy. In addition, the forensic pathologist, Professor Rauschke, was forbidden by the then Attorney General Siegfried Buback to provide information to the forensic pathologist cited by the family.

It should be noted that Professor Rauschke, who led all the autopsies at Stammheim Prison, was always involved where there was something to hide. In May 1975, he had ‘not noticed’ the skull fractures caused by rifle butts that led to the death of Siegfried Hausner. In October 1979, he was found in Mobutu’s Zaire, where he apparently made himself useful with the autopsy of seven bodies in the cover-up of a rocket accident by the German firm OTRAG.[11]

Neither Ulrike Meinhof nor Ingrid Schubert had any dermatological samples taken for histamine tests, with which it could have been established whether the hanging had taken place before or after death. The toxicological tests were limited to only a few substances, as one of the reports confirmed: “With the methods used, the following substances are not included: inorganic compounds, toxic substances of animal or plant origin, most insecticides and plant protection products, as well as several organic compounds that are not used as pharmaceuticals.”

If in all this there is “no indication” for foreign intervention, I wonder what in this speaks for suicide. But what is more important to me, however, is that we have always rejected suicide as a decision in our struggle. There was never a “discussion about suicide” in the group, because with us politics and personal identity were identical things, defined in relation to political goals, in prison as well as in hiding. In the slammer, this is only more exacerbated: there, you don’t let yourself be done so easily, you try to jam the machine as much as possible. To stand up, to fight, to continue, to live, to resist – “the weapon that is the human being”. Or as Gudrun wrote, “We cannot stop putting the conditions on their feet at all, we have only just begun. This is not death, this is life.”[12]

It was no secret from the State Security that since the beginning of the RAF, “the gang” had to “disappear” and that for this its “key figures” had to be “liquidated”.[13] Here, precisely those who constituted our most important orientation would have killed themselves, would have left the group without cadres, would have done the work of the cops in their place. The constructions and interpretations that exist in the meantime on this subject do not fit into any political determination. People like Ulrike and Andreas would not have tolerated that the State Security got rid of them so easily. For me, suicide is only conceivable as an individual decision, of no longer being able to continue, as despair, the end of will and politics. So in the worst moments, I did not try it, did not even consider it. Whether it was a staged strategy of assassination, an act of ‘liberation’ or desperation, it would have been an admission that all was lost.

Yet there was no reason. Apart from the military defeat in the quagmire of hostage-taking, the situation in 1977 still had an effect on the RAF politically. At that time, everything indicated continuity. The prisoners were still busy with the procedures, with the texts that should be published, with international contexts of discussion in which we still had a responsibility. No matter what the perspective of getting out or not was, our struggle simply continued. Everyone wanted that too. We saw ourselves in a process in which the struggle in prison had created an effect that was still multiplying – an effect that could, through suicide, only tip over into disorientation.

The vehemence with which, from State Security to the Federal Government, every doubt raised about the suicide of the prisoners was confronted, made many people think. That is why the most adventurous constructions were broadcast to make the origin of the weapons credible a posteriori. Explosives in the underwear. Weapons in the files, passed through controls known to be very meticulous. Caches in ten different cells, dug with screwdrivers in concrete classified B-600. A weapon in a record player checked and removed several times, which was moved from cell to cell. A fantastic communication system made of cables, welds, loudspeakers, microphones and radios.

Equally poor was the argumentation with which the ‘key witness’ Volker Speitel and his colleagues were presented to make the weapons transports to the high-security wing in Stammheim plausible. Speitel, who according to his own words was “terribly afraid” when he was arrested, was put under pressure by measures taken by the Juvenile Office against his eight-year-old son. Since the first testimonies against us (Ruhland, Brockmann, Müller), we know how witnesses are dictated and helped to learn passages by heart. Only in the few trials where they were obliged to appear in person were their authorisations to give evidence restricted by the prosecution. As soon as they deviated from the pre-prepared schemata (like Boock, who makes a living from this), they contradicted each other and got lost in interpretations of “hearsay”.

I experienced the strip searches, the surprise raids and cell changes for six months in Stammheim. In the trial against the lawyers Arndt Müller and Armin Newerla, who were accused of having transported weapons partly “without knowing it”, there were testimonies from around thirty officials who questioned these transports.

And anyone who has known Irmgard Möller for a long time knows that she does not lie. For 30 years, her statements have been consistent, without contradictions.

We still do not know what really happened on the night of the death in Stammheim. There are reports from the RAND Corporation and the CIA from 1977 that rated the RAF as one of the most dangerous groups in the world, and the secret services were unanimous in stating that the guerrilla problem could only be solved by liquidating their “symbolic figures.” Officials from the German secret service BND had free access to the high-security wing of Stammheim. There was a direct entrance from the outside to the upper floor of the high-security wing through a separate, armoured stairwell. Things that one might imagine bear the signature of the Israeli secret service Mossad, whose section chief Gideon Mahanaimi claimed in 1986 that he had helped “friendly services” by “killing terrorist leaders.” It is also known that the BND provided the Mossad with access to Palestinian prisoners in German jails, that Mossad-trained counterinsurgency experts in Africa and Latin America have killed prisoners, and that the Mossad, as a smaller service, is better able to keep secrets than others.[14]

Of course, we do not know how the coordination took place in practice, who in the state apparatus really knew something or who had enough suspicions to want to cover things up only. The countdown to the night of death could be traced exactly, since the psychological warfare had been intensified against the prisoners of Stammheim – after the first attempts to free them in Stockholm in 1975 and in Entebbe in 1976. The actions of the RAF were supposedly “directed from the prison”, the RAF supposedly considered attacks on nuclear power plants and playgrounds, one could only get rid of these “ghosts” by “using new methods”. Legal and illegal measures have intensified in the escalation of the last three months: a provoked attack on the group of prisoners in Stammheim, the referral of the application to the European Commission of Human Rights, the arrest of lawyers and committee members, a bomb against the law firm in Stuttgart. At each event outside, the prisoners were treated as hostages and punished by deprivation of contacts and information, up to the aggravation constituted by the “freezing of communications” which took away the last vestiges of protection. It is known that, on the night of death, even the video installation in the corridor of the high-security wing of Stammheim did not work.

Thirty years ago, the magazine Pflasterstrand still wrote quite clearly: “We recoil from the thesis of murder, which – regardless of the details – would have very serious consequences.” And again: “A murder: that would mean that in Germany there would be, at least in relation to certain groups, a

open fascism, and that would mean that, in a definitive and absolute way, we can no longer live as before.”[15]

Today, there is hardly any questioning when the “garbage producers” of the state (as Peter Chotjewitz calls them) or some people from our old contexts try to “get recognized by society” by relying on the verbiage of key witnesses. For them, the question “suicide or murder” has effectively become a “question of faith”, because their relationship with history has become peace with the existing conditions. They still try to resolve the contradictions of suicide by the stupid construction of a complicity of the authorities – with suicide, of course. In the big concert, just in time for the umpteenth anniversary, they thus try to transform everything known about the prisoners into “legends of the left”, to turn lies into “repentances”, and to denounce as “hardliners” those who hold on to their history.

Apparently, in this way the prisoners of Stammheim are to be murdered a second time, since the “second death” in the biblical sense is the definitive return to hell for the damned who have refused to repent. For Dante, it was the most honorable death.

What remains a fact is that the last word on our history has not yet been said. Even if there are those who do not want to admit it.

Communiqué from the Petra Schelm Command

May 14, 1972

On Thursday, May 11, 1972 — the very day the US imperialists began the mine blockade of North Vietnam — Commando Petra Schelm detonated three bombs with a charge of 80 kg of TNT at the headquarters of the 5^th Corps of the US Army in West Germany based in Frankfurt. West Germany and West Berlin will no longer serve as a safe haven for the extermination strategists. They must now know that their crimes against the Vietnamese people have created new enemies who will fight them relentlessly, that there is no longer a place for them in the world where they can be safe from the attacks of revolutionary guerrilla units.

We demand an immediate end to the blockade of mines in North Vietnam.

We demand an immediate cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam.

We demand the immediate withdrawal of all US troops from Indochina.

For the victory of the Vietcong!

Build the revolutionary guerrilla!

Let us have the courage to fight – let us have the courage to win! Let us create two, three, many Vietnams!

Red Army Faction – May 14, 1972

Commando Press Release July 15

May 25, 1972

“ALL KINDS OF MONSTERS WILL BE DEFEATED!”

Last night, Wednesday, May 24, 1972, two bombs with a charge of 200 kg of TNT exploded at the headquarters of the American armed forces in Europe in Heidelberg. This attack was carried out after General Daniel James, head of unit at the Pentagon, had declared that same Wednesday in Washington: “From now on, for the bombings in Vietnam the American Air Force no longer excludes any target north or south of the 17^th parallel.” On Monday, the foreign minister of Hanoi had once again accused the United States of having bombed very densely populated areas in North Vietnam.

The US Air Force has dropped more bombs on Vietnam in the last seven weeks than on Japan and Germany during World War II. The Pentagon is talking about millions of tons more explosives that are planned to be dropped to stop the Vietnamese offensive. This is genocide, it would be the “final solution” for the Vietnamese people.

The people in Germany do not support the intelligence services against the commandos, because they want nothing to do with the crimes of American imperialism and their justification by the ruling class here; because they have not forgotten Auschwitz, Dresden and Hamburg; because they know that against the murderers in Vietnam bombings are justified; because they have experienced that demonstrations and protests against the crimes of imperialism are useless.

We demand an end to the bombing of Vietnam.

We demand an end to mining in North Vietnam.

We demand the withdrawal of American troops from Indochina.

We will continue our attacks against the exterminators of Vietnam until the Vietcong is victorious.

We call on activists in West Germany and West Berlin to target all American installations in their political struggle against American imperialism.

Solidarity with the Vietnamese people!

Let us disperse and break the forces of American imperialism!

Victory in the people’s war!

July 15 Commando – Red Army Faction

Press release from Commando Ulrike Meinhof

April 13, 1977

For “actors of the system itself” like Buback, history always finds a way.

On April 7, 1977, Commando Ulrike Meinhof executed Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback.

Buback was directly responsible for the murder of Holger Meins, Siegfried Hausner and Ulrike Meinhof. In his role as head of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office – as the central point of decision and coordination between the West German judiciary and intelligence services, in close cooperation with the CIA and the NATO Security Committee – he staged and directed their assassinations.

Under Buback’s direction, Holger was premeditatedly murdered on November 9, 1974 through systematic starvation and conscious manipulation of the transfer time from Wittlich to Stammheim.

The calculation of the federal prosecutor’s office was to break, by executing a cadre, the collective hunger strike of the prisoners against the extermination detention, and this after the attempt to kill Andreas by stopping the force-feeding had failed thanks to the mobilization of public opinion.

Under Buback’s leadership, Siegfried, who had led the Holger commando

Meins and who could prove that the explosion at the German embassy in

Stockholm was the work of German MEK units, was assassinated on April 4

1977. While he was at the exclusive disposal of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the BKA, he was extradited to Germany and transferred to Stuttgart-Stammheim prison at great risk to his life: this was tantamount to signing his death warrant.

Under Buback’s direction, Ulrike was executed on 9 May 1976, in a State Security action. Her death was disguised as suicide to suggest “the failure of her policy”.

This murder was the end of an escalation that had already seen the federal prosecutor’s attempt to make Ulrike a cretin by forcible neurosurgery, in order to present her destroyed at the Stammheim trial and thus be able to denounce the armed resistance as a mental illness. The realization of this project was prevented thanks to international protests.

The time of Ulrike’s murder was calculated precisely:

— before the decisive initiative at trial, during the defence motions, which were to interpret, from the RAF attacks on US Army headquarters in Frankfurt and Heidelberg in 1972, Germany’s role in US aggression in Vietnam in defiance of international law;

— before Ulrike’s hearing as a witness at the Holger Meins Commando trial in Düsseldorf, where she could have made irrefutable statements about the extreme form of torture she was subjected to for eight months in a dead wing; — before her trial, when international public opinion, which was beginning to develop critically about the parody of a trial offered by Stammheim and its cynical exhibition of all imperialist violence, was understood by the government and its executive, since it was falling on its feet.

The story of Ulrike, more than that of other fighters, is the story of the continuity of the resistance. For the revolutionary movement, she had an avant-garde ideological function that Buback attacked by staging a fake suicide: to take advantage of her death for the propaganda of the federal prosecutor as a “confession of the failure of armed policy” and thus morally annihilate the group, its fight, its trace. The conception of the federal prosecutor, who has centralized, since 1971, all the prosecutions and procedures against the RAF, follows the line of the anti-subversive strategy conceived by the NATO Security Committee: criminalization of the revolutionary resistance – with as tactical stages the infiltration, the dissociation and the isolation of the guerrillas as well as the elimination of its leaders.

In the framework of German imperialism’s counter-strategy against the guerrillas, justice is an instrument of war – by pursuing the guerrillas who operate underground and by proceeding to the destruction of prisoners of war.

Buback — as Schmidt says, “an energetic fighter” for this state — understood the confrontation with us as a war and waged it as such: “I survived the war. This is a war with other means.”

We will prevent our fighters from being murdered in German prisons, because the prosecution cannot solve the problem, which for it is the refusal of the prisoners to stop fighting, other than by liquidating them.

We will prevent the federal prosecutor’s office and state security organs from taking revenge on the fighters in prison for the guerrilla actions abroad.

We will prevent the federal prosecutor’s office from using the fourth collective hunger strike of prisoners for their minimum human rights to murder Andreas, Gudrun and Jan, as the psychological warfare has already been openly spreading since Ulrike’s death.

Commando Ulrike Meinhof – Red Army Faction

Organize armed resistance and the anti-imperialist front in Western Europe.

Waging war in the metropolises as part of international liberation struggles.

Chronological markers

October 7, 1934

Birth

February 7, 1940

Death of his father

March 1, 1949

Death of his mother

September 1953

First articles for the student magazine Spektrum

1955–1957

Studies in philosophy and pedagogy, courses in psychology, German literature, English literature, art history and historical science at the University of Marburg

August 17, 1956

German Communist Party KPD banned

1957–1959

Studied pedagogy, philosophy, psychology and art history at the University of Münster. Spokesperson for the Anti-Atomtod-Ausschuss (committee against nuclear death)

1958

Becomes a member of the federation of socialist students SDS. Demonstrations against nuclear weapons. Articles for several magazines including Das Argument

January 3–4, 1959

He stands with the SDS against the SPD faction at the Congress against nuclear weapons in West Berlin

October 1959

Moves to Hamburg and becomes editor-in-chief of the monthly Konkret

October 1959 — June 1964

Underground member of the KPD

December 27, 1961

Marriage to Konkret editor Klaus Rainer Röhl

September 21, 1962

Birth of twins Bettina and Régine

August 1964

Retires from the editorial staff of Konkret but continues to work for the magazine and other media as a freelance journalist

January 1968

Divorce. Moves to West Berlin. Participates in the organization of the International Congress on Vietnam held in Berlin on February 17–18, 1968.

1968–1969

Works on several documentaries for television, including Bambule

(Mutiny) on the situation in juvenile homes

April 1969

End of collaboration with Konkret

1969–1970

Involved in a neighborhood committee at the Märkisches Viertel, a suburban housing complex. Lecturer in journalism at the Free University (FU) of Berlin

May 14, 1970

Andreas Baader released from prison. Clandestinity and founding of the RAF

May 1, 1971

The Urban Guerrilla Concept is published. For the first time, the group calls itself RAF, Rote Armee Fraktion.

July 15, 1971

Petra Schelm dies in shooting

June 1, 1972

Ulrike arrested

June 1, 1972 — February 9, 1973

Isolation in the dead wing of Cologne-Ossendorf prison. Same from December 21, 1973 to January 3, 1974 and, with Gudrun Ensslin, from February 5 to April 28, 1974

April 28, 1974

Transfer with Gudrun Ensslin to Stuttgart-Stammheim Prison

September 13, 1974

Announces third mass hunger strike during Andreas Baader’s prison release trial

early November 1974

Transfer of Andreas Baader and Jan Raspe from other prisons to Stammheim

November 9, 1974

Holger Meins dies after 58 days of hunger strike

November 29, 1974

Eight-year prison sentence in Andreas’ release trial

May 21, 1975

Stammheim trial begins against Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan

Raspe and Andreas Baader

May 9, 1976

Ulrike dies in a cell in Stammheim prison

May 16, 1976

Procession of 10,000 people at Ulrike’s funeral in Berlin

Bibliography

All RAF texts, with mostly French translations, are in the RAF archives at the International Institute of Social History IISG in Amsterdam, and are available online, downloadable as PDFs at socialhistoryportal.org/raf. There is also a selection of prisoners’ texts and a collection of documents from internal discussions, discussions with other activists, the prison struggle, and struggles considered relevant to the context, including several documents in French.

The books mentioned above are also available in PDF at socialhistoryportal.org/raf.

[1] Thomas Giefer, Une mort de style colonial, Assassinats politiques, L’Harmattan, Paris 2008

[2] la mort d’ulrike meinhof, report from the international commission d’enquête, Maspero, Paris 1979

[3] Jutta Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof. The Biography, Ullstein, Berlin 2007

[4] Ulrike Meinhof, Concernant les effets de l’aile morte, cf page 43.

[5] Ulrike Marie Meinhof, Essays and Polemics, Wagenbach, Berlin 1980

[6] Ulrike Meinhof, piece on Röhl, www.socialhistoryportal.org/raf/5510

[7] Karl-Heinz Weidenhammer, Selbstmord oder Mord? Todesermittlungsverfahren Baader Ensslin Raspe, Neuer Malik Verlag, Kiel 1988

[8] Chief Commissioner Günter Textor in the Frankfurter Rundschau of 27/10/1977 and 14/12/1977

[9] Cf. Oliver Tolmein, “RAF – Das war für uns Befreiung”; Ein Gespräch mit Irmgard Möller über bewaffneten Kampf, Knast und die Linke, Konkret Literatur Verlag, Hamburg 2002

[10] rapport de la commission internationale d’enquête, la mort d’Ulrike Meinhof, Maspero, Paris 1979

[11] ID (Service d’information à Francfort) du 7/11/1979

[12] Gudrun Ensslin, Imperialism forms a unity, socialhistoryportal.org/raf/5348

[13] Reinhard Rauball, The Baader-Meinhof Group, Verlag Walter De Gruyter, Berlin 1973

[14] Le Soir du 13/1/1986; Der Spiegel du 29/10/1979

[15] Paved beach (revue de la gauche autour de Cohn-Bendit), December 1977