4 Baumann, 50.

1 Ibid., 59.

2 Tilman Fichter, interview by Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “The anti-Semitism of the 68ers,” die tageszeitung, October 25, 2005. The action was intended to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. See Baumann, 60-61 and 67-68.

3 Baumann, 76.

1 Aust, 51, 58.

2 Ibid., 58.

3 Ibid., 58.

4 Ibid., 62.

5 Astrid Proll, Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67-77 (Zurich: Scalo, 1998), 8.

6 Aust, 60.

7 Andreas Elter “Die RAF und die Medien: Ein Fallbeispiel für terroristische Kommunikation,” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung [online], August 20, 2007. Brecht, the famous communist playwright, had stated that “Small timers rob banks, professionals own them.”

8 Aust, 51-2.

9 A law student at the University of Frankfurt, “Danny the Red” had been barred from France in 1968 for his symbolic leadership role in the May events of that year (it was his expulsion which had provoked students to occupy Nanterre University). Today, a respectable politician in the German Green Party, in 1969, he was (in) famous around the world, the very personification of anarchist student revolt. As we shall see in Section 11, (Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Left…), he would play an important role in deradicalizing a section of the movement in the mid-seventies.

10 Associated Press, “Cohn-Bendit Jailed; Court Brawl Follows,” European Stars and Stripes, November 1, 1968.

11 European Stars and Stripes, “New Violence Hits Frankfurt,” November 2, 1968.

1 Proll, 8.

2 Aust, 73.

3 Associated Press, “West Berlin Publisher is Sentenced,” Danville Bee, February 16, 1970.

4 Aust, 77.

5 Ibid.

6 Baumann, 77-78.

7 Herzog, 425.

8 Baumann, 75.

9 Eileen MacDonald, Shoot the Women First (London: Arrow Books Ltd., 1991), 209-210.

1 Ralf Reinders, Klaus Viehmann, and Ronald Fritzsch, “Zu der angeblichen Auflösung der Bewegung 2. Juni im Juni 1980,” http://www.bewegung.in/mate_nichtaufloesung.html. This is an excerpt from a much longer document which, along with the 2JM’s declaration of the merger, will appear (translated) in our second volume, The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Vol. II: Dancing with Imperialism: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

2 Jutta Ditfurth, interview by Arno Luik, “Sie war die große Schwester der 68er,” Stern 46 (2007).

3 Aust, 81.

4 Ibid., 47.

1 According to several accounts, Linke was accidentally shot by the man at the scene. Apparently, he had two weapons, an air gun and a real gun, and he intended to scare him with the former, but got confused as to which was which. (MacDonald, 213.)

2 Aust, 6-9.

3 Neil Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed by Violence of Berlin Gunmen,” Winnipeg Free Press, July 4, 1970.

4 Ibid., Becker, 125.

5 Aust, 15-16.

6 Ben Lewis and Richard Klein, Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror (United Kingdom: a Mentorn production for BBC FOUR, 2002).

7 Ibid.

8 Proll, 10.

9 Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed.”

1 Datenbank des deutschsprachigen Anarchismus: Periodika, “Agit 883,” http://projekte.free.de/dada/dada-p/P0000921.HTM.

2 Helen Chapin Metz, Library of Congress Federal Research Division, Israel, a Country Study (Whitefish, Montana: Keesinger publishing 2004), 110.

3 Cengiz Candar, “A Turk in the Palestinian Resistance,” Journal of Palestine Studies 30, no. 1. (Autumn, 2000): 68-82.

4 Baumann, 59: “There was a split when people got back from Palestine. The Palestinian faction said, ‘things don’t make sense the way they’re going now. We have to really start with the armed struggle.’ That meant giving up the Blues, the whole broad open scene.”

5 Ascherson, “Leftists Disturbed.”

6 Butch Lee, Jailbreak Out Of History: The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman (Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2000), 25.

1 Aust, 99-100. Bäcker would claim that based on their questions, it was clear the East Germans were already well informed about the group’s activities. In November 1972, Bommi Baumann was similarly detained at the East German border while in possession of false identification papers; he was similarly questioned, and provided information on almost one hundred people in the West German underground before being released. Jan-Hendrik Schulz “Zur Geschichte der Roten Armee Fraktion (RAF) und ihrer Kontexte: Eine Chronik,” Zeitgeschichte Online, May 2007.

2 Ditfurth, 290. See Appendix V—Strange Stories: Peter Homann and Stefan Aust, pages 557-558.

3 Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “Stasi soll RAF über Razzien informiert haben,” September 29, 2007.

4 Aust, 99, 101.

5 Kommune 2 was another West Berlin commune, one with a more “serious” and “intellectual” reputation than the yippiesque K.1.

6 Reinders, Viehmann, and Fritzsch.

7 Aust, 108.

8 Baader Meinhof: In Love With Terror.

1 Aust, 111-112.

2 Ibid., 140.

3 Associated Press, “Paper reports plot to kidnap Willy Brandt,” European Stars and Stripes, February 13, 1971.

4 See page 84.

5 Associated Press, “Terrorists Take Child as Hostage,” Troy Record, February 25, 1971.

6 Associated Press,“Wrong Boy Kidnaped, Released; Ransom Paid,” Panama City News Herald, February 27, 1971.

7 Ibid.

8 Associated Press, “Kidnaped German Boy, 7, Freed After Ransom,” European Stars and Stripes, February 29, 1971.

9 Associated Press, “Police Hunting SS Member’s Son in Kidnapings,” European Stars and Stripes, March 2, 1971.

1 United Press International, “Professor Endangered by Kidnapper’s Threat,” Dominion Post, April 25, 1971.

2 United Press International, “West German Professor Admits Kidnaping Hoax,” European Stars and Stripes, April 27, 1971.

3 Jürgen Rieger is a lawyer whose career has been devoted to defending those charged under Germany’s anti-Nazi laws. Ironically, in 2006, both Rieger and Mahler, the latter by this time a Holocaust denier himself, would end up working on the legal defense team of neo-nazi publisher Ernst Zundel, who was charged in connection with the publication of Holocaust denial literature.

4 Aust, 144.

5 Associated Press, “Berlin Cops, Leftists Clash for 2nd Night,” European Stars and Stripes, May 17, 1971.

1 Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader Meinhof Gang (London: Panther Granada Publishing, 1978), 307.

2 When Goergens was finally released in May 1977, she did not return to the guerilla. Schubert, as we shall see, never made it out of prison alive.

3 Becker, 307

4 Baumann, 63.

5 Macdonald, 214-215.

6 Aust, 142.

7 Cobler, 113.

8 tageszeitung “30 Jahre Deutscher Herbst ‘Die RAF war nicht ganz so schlicht,’” Deutschlandradio, October 17, 2007.

1 Earlier that summer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit had received an eight-month suspended sentence for getting through security at a protest against the German Book Trade’s “Peace Prize” being bestowed upon President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal.

2 An oath of fealty to Hitler and the NSDAP that all people working in the public sector were obliged to swear. Millions of people swore this oath for no other reason than to retain their employment.

3 Ernst Niekisch, briefly involved in the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919, went on to become a leader of German chauvinist “National Bolshevism”—it is unclear why Proll singles him out as an example of the Weimar regime persecuting leftists, although under the Nazis he would be sentenced to life imprisonment for “literary high treason” in 1937.

4 Ernst Toller was a Bavarian Jew and an anarchist who was imprisoned for his role on the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. (He subsequently went into exile, eventually committing suicide in his hotel room in New York City in 1939.)

5 On April 1, 1924, Hitler was sentenced to five years for his November 8, 1923, attempted fascist coup, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. He was pardoned and released in December of 1924, having served less than a year of his sentence.

6 Luxemburg and Liebknecht were leading figures in the failed 1918 German communist uprising. They were both captured, tortured, and murdered by rightwing militias, the Freikorps.

1 Franz von Liszt (not to be confused with his cousin, the composer Franz Liszt) was a Prussian law professor whose work heavily influenced the 1882 Marburger Program, a conservative document that influenced the 1933 Nazi German Prevention of Crime Act.

1 Gerhard Zoebe was the judge in this case.

2 A judge in Frankfurt who often presided over trials against left-wing defendants.

3 In 1964, seven year-old Timo Rinnelt of Wiesbaden was kidnapped and murdered. Some years later, his neighbour, a twenty-seven year-old man, was arrested for the crime. In 1968, he received a life sentence.

4 Jürgen Bartsch, a German serial killer, who as a child suffered both emotional and sexual abuse, was responsible for four brutal child murders in the 60s.

5 Walter Griebel was the prosecutor in the case at hand.

6 In German “unter vier Augen”; this is an obvious reference to the Nazi term for a meetings involving only Hitler and one of his close associates. The content of these discussions was meant to stay between the two men.

1 Hammelsgasse, a street in an upper class neighbourhood in Frankfurt, could be translated literally as Mutton Alley; a play on words referencing sheeps being led to the slaughter is intended.

1 Roughly forty cents.

2 Roughly $11.20.

3 Steal Me.

1 German has two forms of the singular you; du, which is used with social inferiors, younger people, and very close friends, and Sie, which is the polite form of address. What the writer is saying is that patronizing behaviour should be answered with patronizing behaviour.

2 Roughly thirty cents.

3 Max Güde, a former Nazi, and at the time a member of parliament for the CDU.

4 A reference to a poem by Soviet poet Samuel Marschak about a woman bringing her valued possessions with her to the train station, the title of which in German is Die Sieben Sachen (which would translate as “Seven Suitcases” in English).

1 A neologism combining the author Thorwald Proll’s last name and solidarisch, the German word for solidarity.

2 The version of this text on Ronald Augustin’s website is dated March 1968, however we believe this is an error, as the arson in question was only committed in April 1968.

3 Places where disenfranchised youth could be found. RAF members had previously worked with such young marginalized youth in the “apprentices collectives.” Some of these young people became members of the RAF and were involved in the action to free Baader.

1 A reference to Georg Linke, the sixty-four-year-old librarian at the Institute for Social Studies who was shot during the action to free Baader. This shooting led to substantial criticism, even from otherwise sympathetic leftists.

2 A reference to the Hand Grenade Law passed shortly after Baader’s prison break, whereby police in West Berlin were equipped with hand grenades, semi-automatic revolvers, and submachine guns.

3 Kurt Neubauer was a member of the SPD and the Berlin Senator for Youth and Sports.

4 General William Westmoreland was Commander of the U.S. troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 and army Chief-of-Staff from 1968 to 1972.

5 A neighborhood in West Berlin.

6 A working-class suburb of West Berlin.

7 The women’s prison at Plötzensee.

1 This version is close to that in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 15. Please note, however, that in keeping with the German translation, the ending here differs slightly from the standard English translation, which reads simply “achieved a great deal in our work.”

2 Ibid., 230.

1 The Freikorps were right-wing paramilitary groups that sprang up in the period following World War I; many were later integrated into the Nazi rise to power. The Feme was a secret medieval court which meted out the death sentence, the bodies of its victims generally being left hanging in the streets.

2 Eduard Zimmermann was TV moderator for the German equivalent of Crimewatch. This program was used in the search for RAF members.

3 Günther Voigt was a West Berlin arms dealer. A pistol that could be linked to him was dropped during the Baader liberation. Voigt fled to Switzerland where he gave an interview that led to his arrest, claiming he was involved in the liberation of Baader.

4 Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss playwright and essayist.

1 Berlin refers to the Knesebeckstr. arrest mentioned above. On December 21, 1971, RAF member Ali Jansen was arrested following a shootout at a police roadblock in Nuremberg. On February 10, 1971, police in Frankfurt opened fire on Astrid Proll and Manfred Grashof, who escaped unharmed.

2 Friedrich Zimmermann (CDU) was, at this time, the Chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary faction.

3 Expelled from the Italian Communist Party in 1969, Il Manifesto was an influential group in the Italian autonomist movement, having 6,000 members in 1972. They advocated council communism, whereby decisions would be made by workers’ councils, not by a vanguard party or state. Il Manifesto was extremely influential for the entire European New Left. The quote comes from a manifesto of 200 theses issued by the group in 1971.

1 Rainer Barzel was, at this time, the party Chairman of the CDU.

1 An SDS campaign encouraging soldiers to desert from the Bundeswehr, the West German Army.

1 Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967). The first of these two paragraphs comes from pages 299-300, the second from page 304.

2 Marxists Internet Archive “Lenin’s What is to be Done? Trade-Unionist Politics and Social Democratic Politics,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm.

1 George Lukacs was an influential Hungarian Marxist philosopher and art critic. His work greatly influenced the New Left of the 60s and 70s.

2 Mao Tse-Tung “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_1.htm.

3 Regis Debray was a French Marxist intellectual and a proponent of foco theory, the theory that a small group of guerillas could act as an inspiration to revolutionary activity. He joined Che Guevara on his ill-fated Bolivian adventure.

1 Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 74.

2 A campaign to stop the building of a massive dam in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. The right-wing Portuguese government had plans to settle over one million European colonists in the African country. By 1969, five German companies were implicated in the project. There were protests in the FRG, particularly in Heidelberg, against the project when the U.S. Minister of Defense Robert McNamara visited the country.

1 Stokely Carmichael was a prominent militant in the Black Liberation Movement in the United States, playing a leading role in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and then the Black Panther Party.

2 Westdeutscher Rundfunk, West German Radio.

1 The Red Cells were an independent university-based Marxist organization.

2 Willy Weyer (SPD) was, at this time, the Minister of the Interior for North Rhine Westphalia and a key proponent of the militarization of the police force.

3 At the time a member of Gruppe 47, Günter Grass is one on the most significant German post-World War II authors and a noted liberal.

1 Unlike North America, suburbs in Northern Europe are generally occupied by the subproletariat and poorly paid immigrant workers.

2 Gauche Prolétarienne was a French Maoist organization that, in 1968, began attempts to build a factory-based guerilla group. They were banned in 1970.

3 Eldridge Cleaver was the Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party. When the party splintered into warring factions, he went into self-imposed exile in Algeria. He is the author of several books, including Soul on Ice, from which this quote is drawn.