The RAF Phantom

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The RAF Phantom - Why Politics and Business Need Terrorists is a book published by Droemer Knaur in 1992 about the third generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF). The author Gerhard Wisnewski , Wolfgang Landgraeber and Ekkehard Sieker deny the existence of the RAF from the mid-1980s, claiming the terrorist attacks in 1985, to which the RAF has known and which are attributed to it by the contemporary historical research, are actions of Western intelligence agencies under false flag . After the hypothesis initially enjoyed popularity, it is now widely recognized as a disproved speculation and conspiracy theory .

background

The creation of the book is to be seen against the background of the complete lack of traces with which the RAF operated in its third generation for a long time. In the 1980s, for example, some scientists and journalists questioned the continued existence of the RAF; the Süddeutsche Zeitung once wrote of a "ghost army".

The RAF's murder of Alfred Herrhausen on November 30, 1989 was the starting point of the book. Wisnewski, Landgraeber and Sieker wrote an article for the WDR television magazine Monitor in 1992 , in which the chief witness of the Federal Prosecutor's Office , Siegfried Nonne, revoked his testimony with which he had incriminated several alleged RAF members in the Herrhausen case. The journalists continued their research into this murder case; they collected testimony and official investigation results and, in their opinion, encountered serious inconsistencies. They then undertook further research into previous murders by the RAF and saw similar discrepancies as in the Herrhausen case. Because they apparently had access to secret official documents, they were subsequently the target of public prosecution investigations and house searches.

content

The theses of the authors can be summarized as follows:

  • The members of the first and second generation of the RAF had z. B. leave clear marks in bank robberies and confrontations with the police, each of which led to their arrest after a few years at the latest. The authorities had previously observed them for a long time . According to the authors, on the other hand, the members of the third generation left practically no traces and, according to the authorities, lived as a kind of phantom within society for several years, with the investigators for a long time almost completely in the dark. This is a striking discrepancy, especially since the investigative apparatus had become more and more effective in the course of the fight against the RAF.
  • Hardly any members of the third generation of the RAF were taken alive. Two terrorists died in attempted arrests, Wolfgang Grams and Horst Ludwig Meyer . Specific allegations against suspects caught alive later turned out to be partly untenable and were dropped, for example in the Andrea Klump and Christoph Seidler cases . According to the authors, this stands in strikingly stark contrast to the history of the previous generations of the RAF, the majority of whose members were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms after extensive procedures. In contrast, only one member of the third generation was convicted of murders attributed to the RAF, Birgit Hogefeld - an assertion that does not apply, see the arrest, trials and imprisonment of Eva Haule . The verdict in Hogefeld's case is based on a number of circumstantial evidence , for example a written report , which the authors of the RAF Phantom consider to be questionable.
  • In contrast to the earlier RAF terrorists, the third generation left practically no usable traces on the crime scenes. This claim is no longer tenable because of criminalistic procedures that were later technically possible, see for example the DNA analysis in the Rohwedder case . According to the authors of the RAF Phantom, the only indications of the RAF's perpetration are the letters of confession . In their opinion, these letters do not have any characteristics that any third party could not have produced and that they identified as authentic. Rather, there are allegedly several indications in the letters to a manufacture by third parties. In addition, the authenticity of the letters of claim was confirmed by the authorities in a remarkably short time, without forensic investigations having been carried out beforehand .
  • The investigation results in the murder cases are characterized by so many inconsistencies that this suggests targeted manipulation by third parties.
  • The attacks of the third generation would also have required a very high level of precision and extensive planning, which is said to have exceeded the capabilities of the terrorist group.
  • Most of the murder victims had professional backgrounds that made a murder by a third party seem plausible. According to the authors, these alleged motives are similar in several of the murder cases and allegedly point to foreign secret services as the real perpetrators. They claim a responsibility of the CIA .

reception

The journalist Ivo Bozic declared in 2002 that the book "immediately became a bestseller" and is "still often quoted today". The authors had received "a lot of applause", "especially from the left"; the book was "glorified by some as a 'standard work' on the RAF". According to Michael Schmidt-Salomon , the book achieved “cult status” in parts of the left-wing scene, which he explains by the fact that the RAF has increasingly disconnected itself from this scene and that the actions of its third generation have met with incomprehension.

RAF

The current and former members of the RAF publicly opposed the theses. The active command level wrote in a statement dated November 29, 1996 that the phantom thesis came from journalists “fed with false information”. When the journalist and RAF expert Gerd Rosenkranz asked the meanwhile imprisoned RAF leader Birgit Hogefeld in a Spiegel interview in 1997 whether the book had been seriously discussed in circles close to the RAF, she said:

“Not in the RAF environment. In the left-wing extremist contexts that I know, this nonsense never had any meaning. But of course the fact that anyone took this seriously had to do with the fact that the RAF was very isolated from the legal left in the 1980s. This was also discussed: as a result of our own mistakes. "

Another former member of the third generation of the RAF, Eva Haule , described the thesis of a secret service conspiracy in 2007 - in response to a pickup by Jürgen Elsässer - as “idiotic”: “Great, dear Jürgen Elsässer - who or what am I for then you? So I was never in the RAF and not even 21 years in jail for it? ”She added:“ Why Jürgen Elsässer jumped on this train is a mystery to me. Why the jw (Young World) prints that, inexplicable. "

Experts |

The Regensburg political scientist and expert on the third generation of the RAF, Alexander Straßner , classifies the statements in the book as a conspiracy theory , "whose absurdity is now undisputed", namely since the GSG 9 mission in Bad Kleinen , where Birgit Hogefeld as Member was arrested. The extremism researcher Eckhard Jesse calls the theses in the book “bizarre conspiracy theories”, which are written in “jargon”, the media scientist Andreas Dörner sees a “quite adventurous conspiracy theory”. Rainer Fromm , who works as a television journalist on terrorism, describes the book as a "piece of work" that goes into the "nonsense of the LaRouche group ". In his taz review in 1993, Gerd Rosenkranz complained about a number of factual errors: facts were twisted and presented one-sidedly so that they fit the author's thesis. He came to an extremely negative overall judgment. The co-editor of the Jungle World newspaper , Ivo Bozic, considered the phantom thesis in 2001 to be "pulled by the hair"; it lacks "any basis". The authors “could never have proven” their outrageous theses; the phantom idea “has been refuted a dozen times. The authors' convictions, however, could not be shaken. "The book, which Bozic describes as a" conspiracy classic ", is" completely absurd and devastating for the historical assessment of the "armed struggle". The contemporary historian Petra Terhoeven summed up in 2017 that there was no reason to assume that the third RAF generation was a "phantom", even if the behavior of the security authorities had played into the hands of the conspiracy theorists.

Movie

Based on the book, the award-winning political thriller The Phantom was created in 2000 .

output

The book was first published in 1992 and 1997 in a revised second edition. In 2008 a significantly expanded, completely updated and revised new edition appeared.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andreas Elter : Propaganda de fact. The RAF and the media. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, p. 206.
  2. ↑ Klaus Ott , Doris Metz: caught up by the RAF phantom. Protests against searches of Monitor employees. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 3, 1994.
  3. ↑ a b Ivo Bozic: Too little imagination for reality. In: Jungle World , June 19, 2002.
  4. ↑ a b Ivo Bozic: Anti-Semite? I where! In: Jungle World , July 30, 2003.
  5. ↑ Michael Schmidt-Salomon: "I only know this, that I am not a Marxist ...". Karl Marx and the Marxisms. In: Enlightenment and Criticism . Special issue 10/2005, pp. 53–70, here p. 66 (PDF) .
  6. ↑ Quoted from Alexander Straßner : Perceived World Civil War. "Red Army Fraction" in Germany. In: ders. (Ed.): Social revolutionary terrorism. Theory, ideology, case studies, future scenarios. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15578-4 , pp. 209-236, here p. 227, fn. 87.
  7. ↑ Gerd Rosenkranz: We were very German . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1997, pp. 169 ( online - Hogefeld via the Red Army Faction).
  8. ^ Eva Haule: To the article by Jürgen Elsässer in the jw from 22./23. 9. 2007 ( memento of September 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). Letter to the editor. In: Junge Welt . October 4, 2007. Online in: Political-Prisoners.net.
  9. ↑ Alexander Straßner: Perceived world civil war. "Red Army Fraction" in Germany. In: ders. (Ed.): Social revolutionary terrorism. Theory, ideology, case studies, future scenarios. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15578-4 , pp. 209–236, here p. 226.
  10. ↑ Eckhard Jesse: The causes of the RAF terrorism and its failure. In: From Politics and Contemporary History . Issue 40/41, September 24, 2007.
  11. ^ Andreas Dörner: Politainment. Politics in the media adventure society. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 210.
  12. ^ Rainer Fromm, Barbara Kernbach: Europe's brown seeds. The international interdependence of the radical right-wing scene. Current, 1994, p. 125.
  13. ↑ Gerd Rosenkranz: In the fog of the "Third RAF Generation". In: the daily newspaper , January 23, 1993.
  14. ↑ Ivo Bozic: pulled by the hair. In: Jungle World , May 23, 2001.
  15. ^ Petra Terhoeven: The Red Army faction. A history of terrorist violence. CH Beck, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-406-71235-7 , p. 105. Terhoeven is referring to Haule's 2007 letter to the editor, see the section above.