SEVEN YEARS OF STRUGGLE AGAINST THE STATE

The Red Army Faction (RAF) had first announced itself in 1970, when a small group of radicals broke a young man out of jail.

Andreas Baader was serving a three-year sentence for having set a fire to a department store to protest the war in Vietnam. One of his rescuers, Gudrun Ensslin, had also participated in this political arson, and, as such, was also living underground at the time. Another rescuer, Ulrike Meinhof, was a well known left-wing social critic, a magazine journalist who had been finishing up a docudrama about girls in reform school. She was recognized and forced to go underground with the others.

The RAF made international headlines with this jailbreak, and the operation was hotly debated on the left.

Shortly thereafter, guerilla members travelled to Jordan, in the Middle East, where they received weapons training from the Palestinian group Al Fatah, part of the PLO. The RAF would make extensive use of various Arab countries as rear base areas throughout their existence, places where one could go not only for training, but also to hide when Europe got too "hot". As we shall see, this friendly relationship with Palestinian revolutionary organizations would have other consequences as well.

Upon their return to the FRG, the guerilla once again grabbed the public's attention, carrying out a series of bank robberies and preparing for campaigns to come.

Successfully evading police, the RAF began to take on the aura of folk heroes for many students and leftists who were glad to see someone taking things to the next level. Thousands of people secretly carried photographs of RAF members in their wallets. Time and time again, as the cops stepped up their search, members of the young guerilla group would find doors open to them as they were welcomed into people's homes, including those of not a few middle class sympathisers academics, doctors, even a clergyman. Newspapers at the time carried stories under headlines like "Celebrities Protect Baader Gang" and "Sympathizers Hamper Hunt for Baader Group."

An opinion poll revealed that "40 percent of respondents described the RAF's violence as political, not criminal, in motive; 20 percent indicated that they could understand efforts to protect fugitives from capture; and 6 percent confessed that they were themselves willing to conceal a fugitive."

Then, in May 1972, the group turned things up a notch, carrying out a series of bombings. Targets included police stations and U.S. army headquarters, to protest killer cops and the ongoing war in Vietnam. Four American soldiers were killed, and dozens of other people, including civilians, were injured. West Germany had never seen anything like it, and while many people may have been turned off by this escalation, others saw in these attacks an inspiring example of what could be done.

There followed a wave of repression as one hundred and thirty thousand cops, supported by both West German and U.S. intelligence units, set up checkpoints and carried out raids across the country.

Within a few weeks the leading members of the RAF — Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe and Ulrike Meinhof had all been captured. (It should be stressed: others were arrested too, and the RAF would always insist it had a non-hierarchical structure. Nevertheless, the focus on these five is warranted for the purposes of this pamphlet, for these were the individuals the state considered key to the organization, and all five would die in prison, as will be detailed below.)

The state was not content to simply remove the perceived guerilla leadership from the field. Instead, it hoped to render them ineffective not only as combatants, but also as spokespeople for anti-imperialist resistance. To this end, it set up special "dead wings" in which political prisoners were subjected to severe isolation and sensory deprivation, with the clear hope that if this did not induce them recant, it might at least drive them insane.

Yet, captured and isolated, the guerilla managed not only to survive, but in a sense even turned things around. There were dozens of RAF members in prison, and dozens more political prisoners from other groups. Through the strategic use of hunger strikes these captured combatants called attention not only to their conditions of incarceration, but also to their ideology of anti-imperialist armed struggle.

Prisoner support groups sprang up, and when Holger Meins died during a 1974 hunger strike, there were protests in cities across West Germany. The next day the 2nd of June Movement, a Berlin-based anarchist guerilla group, shot and killed the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court to avenge Meins and support the demands of the prisoners. Another judge had a bomb go off (harmlessly) outside his Hamburg residence, and there were eight firebombings in the university town of Gottingen.

Thousands met in university auditoriums in West Berlin to discuss possible responses, while thousands more braved the ban on demonstrations and took to the streets, battling police with stones and bottles. Protesters in Frankfurt and Mannheim smashed the windows of court buildings; even the Communist Party joined in, handing out fliers stating the obvious: "Holger Meins Murdered."

Three thousand people attended Meins' funeral in Mannheim a week later, including Rudi Dutschke. The former sixties leader, standing over the grave as Meins' casket was lowered, famously gave the clenched fist salute, crying, "Holger, the fight goes on!"

The prisoners' struggle would serve to gain the RAF more than just supporters. It would also win new recruits, as in the eyes of many German leftists the RAF came to symbolize resistance to the imperialist state, to the "new fascism."

Following the death of Meins, the prisoners would continue their hunger strike until the regenerated RAF issued a communiqué addressed to them, in which it ordered them to start eating again. The guerilla promised that they would carry out the necessary actions on behalf of the prisoners, explaining that it would be "our weapons which will decide it.

This would soon come to pass: on April 25, the RAF's "Holger Meins Commando" seized the top floor of the West German embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, taking twelve hostages. They demanded the release of twenty-six West German political prisoners, including Ensslin, Meinhof, Raspe, and Baader.

Swedish police rushed in, occupying the embassy's ground floor. They were repeatedly told to get out of the building, and the guerilla threatened to execute the FRG's Military Attaché if they did not do so. When the police failed to heed these warnings, Lieutenant Colonel Baron Andreas von Mirbach was shot through the head.

Seeing that the guerillas meant business, the police quickly vacated the premises, setting up their perimeter outside. A special intervention team was flown in from Hamburg, telephone lines to the embassy were cut, and the surrounding area was...