West Germany's Urban Guerillas: Overview
by André Moncourt and J. Smith
The radical left in West Germany
engaged in a particularly violent and militant form of struggle from
the late
60s through to the mid-90s. While there were countless one-off actions
carried
out by ad hoc groups, and innumerable demonstrations where organized
violence
blurred the line between protest and resistance, no description of the
movement
in the Federal Republic of Germany can afford to ignore the four
clandestine organizations
which held aloft the banner of armed struggle during this period.
The Red Army Faction
The RAF is certainly the best
known and was the most enduring of the left-wing guerilla organizations
to grow
out of the 60s revolutionary movement in West Germany. The group’s
formation
can be traced to the iconic moment on May 14, 1970, when several armed
revolutionaries, including the well-known left-wing journalist Ulrike
Meinhof,
broke Andreas Baader, who was serving a sentence for a politically
motivated
arson, out of prison.
After receiving training in an Al
Fatah camp in Jordan, the core of what would come to be known as the
First
Generation of the Red Army Faction returned to West Germany to begin
the
painstaking work of building a guerilla infrastructure – robbing banks,
acquiring arms, explosives and phony IDs, establishing safehouses and
shaping
the largely Marxist-Leninist ideology they would eventually present to
the
world in April 1971 in a document entitled The
Urban Guerilla Concept.
The RAF lost several members in
armed clashes with the police before their first offensive, a wave of
bombings in
May of 1972 primarily targeting US military installations in West
Germany.
Within a month of this first foray, the majority of the individuals
seen as the
RAF’s leadership were behind bars, and the organization was presumed
dead.
Against the odds, there followed
an impressive dynamic, whereby RAF prisoners’ struggle for survival
behind bars
– resisting isolation torture, sensory deprivation, and legal attacks
on their lawyers
– would repeatedly succeed in rallying support on the outside, even
inspiring
new waves of activists to cross into the underground, and renew the
organization.
In 1975, a group made up
primarily of members of the radical therapy group the Sozialistisches
Patienten Kollektiv (Socialist Patients Collective – SPK) would
take up
the RAF
flag and fail in their efforts to gain their imprisoned comrades’
freedom
through an audacious and ultimately bloody hostage-taking at the West
German
Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden.
Against all odds,
the RAF would rise yet again, when in the autumn of 1977, they launched
yet
another campaign for the freedom of the prisoners – assassinating a
prominent
banker and the Attorney General, before kidnapping Germany’s most
powerful
capitalist, Hanns Martin Schleyer, demanding the release of the
prisoners in
exchange for his release. 43 tense days later, a supportive PFLP(EO)
skyjacking
had ended in disaster, leading RAF prisoners were dead, allegedly
having
committed suicide in despair (although most evidence makes this seem
improbable) and Schleyer’s body was found in the trunk of a car in the
French
border town of Mullhausen.
The RAF would
struggle on for 20 more increasingly violent years, through a series of
ups and
downs, until April 1998, with several waves of militants picking up the
flag,
and with varying degrees of support, but never again would it capture
the
imagination of the left as it had in its early days.
2nd of
June Movement
The West
Berlin-based 2nd of June movement, with its roots in the
communes of
the counterculture, was formed by members of several pre-existing
groups in
January 1972. Where the RAF had presented
a Marxist-Leninist and largely vanguardist rationale for its politics
in a
series of lengthy manifesto-style documents, the 2JM’s brief program,
issued
shortly after its formation, offered an approach that was more
anarchist,
anti-authoritarian, and populist in nature.
The populism and humor that the 2JM brought to its politics, in
comparison to the overbearing earnestness that often marked the RAF’s
approach,
was perhaps best expressed in a 1975 bank robbery, during which 2JM
members
distributed pastries to customers and employees being held while the
bank’s registers
were being emptied.
While there was
certainly an awareness of the 2JM and its antecedent organizations in
West
Berlin, and while the police killing of Georg von Rauch, a key activist
from
this scene, on December 4, 1971, had drawn an angry response from
people
throughout West Germany, it was the assassination of Supreme Court
Judge Günter
von Drenkmann during a kidnapping gone wrong on November 10, 1974, a
action
carried out in response to the death of RAF prisoner Holger Meins on
hunger
strike, that drew the attention of people throughout West Germany and
around
the world.
Von Drenkmann would
be one of only three people to be killed by the 2JM, the others being a
boat builder
killed in a bomb attack on the British Yacht Club in West Berlin, an
action
carried out in response to Bloody Sunday in 1972, and a guerilla member
executed in 1974 for cooperating with the police.
Where the RAF had met only with disaster
in its efforts to carry out kidnappings and hostage-takings, the 2JM
was to
have remarkable success. On February 27, 1975, the 2JM kidnapped the
conservative CDU candidate for mayor of West Berlin, Peter Lorenz,
releasing
him on March 4 in exchange for five imprisoned comrades, three members
of their
own organization, a RAF member and an activist with ties to several
armed
organizations, including their own. These five were flown to South
Yemen, from
whence they returned to the underground.
Perhaps even more remarkably, in
November 1977, with Germany under effective martial law while Hanns
Martin Schleyer
was being held by the RAF, a 2JM cell kidnapped the Viennese
businessman Walter
Palmers, exchanging him for 31 million Austrian shillings five days
later;
money that was allegedly divvied between the 2JM, the RAF and an
unnamed
Palestinian organization.
A series of arrests in 1975
removed a goodly part of the 2JM from the streets, with more arrests
following
in 1976 and 1977.
On the highly symbolic date of
June 2, 1980, a majority of 2JM members, including some of those in
prison,
released a communiqué announcing their fusion with the RAF.
Three key imprisoned
members, Klaus Viehmann, Ralf Reinders, and Ronald Fritzsch, issued an
eloquent
criticism, rejecting this decision, but the reality is that the 2JM was
never
to carry out another action.
Revolutionary Cells
In 1973, a new guerilla group
announced its existence with two bombings in response to Pinochet’s
coup d’etat
in Chile, which had occurred on September 11 of that year (the original
9/11).
The Revolutionary Cells (RZ), a group best described as autonomist,
would go on
to become the most prolific and complex of the major West German
guerilla organizations,
spawning a controversial international wing, an extremely popular and
successful domestic wing and an autonomous, but ideologically and
structurally
linked, women’s guerilla group, the Rote Zora. Each deserves its own
treatment.
The international wing, made up
of relatively few members, but counting in its ranks most of the RZ’s
founding
members, would have a troubling history. Closely tied to the
quasi-mythical
Carlos and Waddi Haddad’s PFLP (EO), the international wing would be
linked to
the December 1975 OPEC raid in Vienna. An Austrian police officer, an
Iraqi
bodyguard, and a Libyan Oil Ministry representative were killed, and RZ
member
Hans Joachim Klein was seriously injured before the guerillas received
their
ransom of five million dollars and safe passage to Algeria. (Klein
would later
leave the guerilla, publicly denouncing the international wing and the
entire
armed experience; he survived underground for decades before being
arrested in
France in 2000.)
The RZ’s international wing would
soon be in the headlines again, when two members, Wilfried Böse
and Brigitte
Kuhlmann, together with fighters from the PFLP (EO), skyjacked an
Airbus plane
en route from Tel Aviv to Athens, on June 27, 1976. The guerillas
diverted the
plane to the airport at Entebbe, Uganda, where Jewish passengers were
segregated from the rest, who were then released. On July 3, an Israeli
military
commando stormed the airport, killing all of the guerillas as well as
forty-seven Ugandan soldiers who were guarding the area. Given
Germany’s Nazi
past, the segregation of Jewish passengers and the bloody outcome, the
word
disaster may be too weak.
The international wing of the RZ
would nonetheless continue its ill-fated relationship with Carlos and
marginal
elements in the Palestinian resistance until 1987. In that year, RZ
founding
member Gerd Albartus visited Carlos and RZ co-founder Johannes Weinrich
in
Syria. From Syria, the three travelled
with other associates to Lebanon, where Carlos accused Albartus of
cooperating
with the East German Stasi
before torturing and executing him and then
burning
his body. Four years later, on December
1991, the RZ would issue a document announcing Albartus’ death and
presenting
some of the details. The document would mark the beginning a debate
that would
fracture the RZ and, over the next several years, lead to its
dissolution.
While the international wing
seemed to move from one tragic debacle to another, its domestic wing
seemed to
redeem the organization, arguably making the RZ the most successful
guerilla
group active in West Germany. Made up of individuals who lived
aboveground and
who were rooted in the popular movements of the day, the domestic wing
functioned to give armed expression to the broad campaigns of the left.
It is
virtually impossible to state exactly how many actions were carried out
by
these militants over the course of some twenty years, but something in
the
ballpark of one hundred seems a reasonable estimate.
Because of the number of actions
claimed, and the fact that these were integrated within broader
movements, the
RZ’s domestic wing very much defined the organization in the eyes of
the left.
It is important to note that even amongst those who carried out actions
under
the RZ’s banner, it is unclear whether or not there was any real
connection or
understanding of the questionable activities being engaged in at the
same time by
the organization’s international wing.
The domestic wing’s actions
addressed various issues: refugee rights, South African apartheid, West
German
militarism, unpopular transit fare hikes, the rights of the homeless,
Latin
America, in short, anything being addressed by the left. And
miraculously, all
of this occurred with almost no arrests and only one victim who died,
Hessen
Finance Minister Heinz Herbert Karry, who bled out after being shot in
the
legs.
However, over the years several
members of the RZ’s domestic wing were injured or killed planting bombs
that detonated
prematurely.
Rote Zora
Like the RZ’s domestic wing, Rote
Zora was both extremely successful and very popular.
The group, which took its name
from the heroine of a popular children’s book, grew directly out of the
RZ. In
fact, to all intents and purposes, its first three actions, all of
which were
directed at West Germany’s then retrograde abortion law, were carried
out in
March and April 1975 under the rubric of the Women of the Revolutionary
Cells.
The Revolutionary Cells and Rote Zora would carry out the occasional
action
together and would issue common theoretical documents, but for the most
part
Rote Zora would act autonomously, addressing issues important to the
women’s
movement: abortion rights, trafficking women for sexual purposes,
pornography,
the exploitation of women in Third World sweatshops, etc.
However, it would be in its campaign
against gene and biotechnology that Rote Zora would really establish
itself as
leading force in West German politics. From the mid-80s onward, the
group
carried out a series of bombings of companies, research centers and
institutions active in these two areas, which Rote Zora felt was laying
the
basis for a modern form of eugenics. It
was a campaign that would develop a deep resonance in the women’s
movement at
large.
In 1987, Ingrid Strobl, an editor
at the influential feminist magazine Emma,
and Ulla Pensellin were arrested and charged with membership in both
the
Revolutionary Cells and Rote Zora, and with planning and preparation of
a bomb
attack against the Cologne office of Germany’s Lufthansa airlines, in
response
to its role in the extradition of refugees. Pensellin was released in
1988,
while Strobl was sentence to five years in 1989, a sentence that was
overturned
in 1990, leading to her release.
Like the rest of the RZ
structure, Rote Zora would fall into inactivity as a result of the
divisive
debates that tore through the scene in the early 90s following the
revelations
about the murder of Albartus.
With the dissolution of the RAF
in April 1998, the last of the major armed groups that grew out the
student and
youth upheaval of the late 60s faded into history. Nonetheless, all of
these
organizations leave behind a rich legacy from which valuable lessons,
both
positive and negative, can be drawn.
