May offensive of the Red Army Faction

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Destruction of the officers' mess of the 5th US Corps, May 11, 1972

The May Offensive was a series of six terrorist explosive attacks carried out by the left-wing extremist Red Army Fraction (RAF) between May 11 and 24, 1972 in the Federal Republic of Germany . Two of the attacks were directed against military facilities in the USA , two against police authorities, one attack against judge Wolfgang Buddenberg and one against the Springer publishing house in Hamburg . A total of four people were murdered and 74 injured. The parallel police manhunt led to the arrest of ten founding members of the RAF until July 1972, some of whom were convicted and convicted as the main perpetrators in the Stammheim trial (1975–1976).

preparation

Since the liberation of Baader (May 14, 1970), the RAF had carried out a number of bank robberies, break-ins in registration offices and numerous vehicle thefts for almost two years in order to maintain life as wanted criminals in the illegality. Politically justified terrorist attacks came later. It was therefore exposed to strong criticism from the extreme left. By then, several RAF members had been arrested by the police and Petra Schelm, the first member of the group, had been shot. In addition, three members had left the group and made extensive statements. In the text Urban Guerrilla and Class Struggle (April 1972), mainly written by Meinhof , the RAF announced “popular actions” in the near future.

In January 1972, Thomas Weisbecker rented an apartment in Frankfurt am Main , Inheidener Strasse 69, from a student . Other RAF members rented four other apartments in the vicinity. Gerhard Müller ordered chemicals from Frankfurt over the whole of Germany by telephone, according to him, 500 kg of ammonium nitrate and 250 kg of potassium. In an abandoned basalt plant in Oberaula , RAF members stole 187 detonators and 64 detonators. Andreas Baader , Gudrun Ensslin , Holger Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe used this material to make various bombs in the Inheidener Strasse apartment. The targets of the attack were jointly selected on a case-by-case basis, with Baader making the final decisions.

course

Headquarters of the 5th US Corps in Frankfurt am Main

Attack victim Paul A. Bloomquist, 1966

On May 11, 1972 at 6:59 p.m., three bombs with a total of 80 kg of TNT explosive force exploded in the IG-Farben building in Frankfurt am Main. At that time, the headquarters of the V Corps of the US Army , the United States European Command and the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Germany were housed in this building complex. Two bombs exploded in the entrance portal, the third in the officers' mess. Shards of glass killed Lieutenant Colonel Paul A. Bloomquist ; 13 people were injured. The property damage was estimated at 3.1 million D-Marks.

On May 14th, a letter of confession from the " Petra Schelm Command " was received by the dpa in Munich . The letter justified the attack as follows:

"For the extermination strategists of Vietnam, West Germany and West Berlin should no longer be a safe hinterland. They must know that their crimes against the Vietnamese people have created new, bitter enemies for them, that there will no longer be a place in the world where they can be safe from the attacks of revolutionary guerrilla units. "

In the Inheidener Strasse apartment, in addition to bombs, newspaper reports dated May 11, 1972, on the order of US President Richard Nixon to mine and block all ports in North Vietnam and to bomb some of the country's major cities during the ongoing Vietnam War were found . Accordingly, the RAF had been preparing the attack for a long time, but chose the date spontaneously.

The letter of confession called for an end to the bombing of Vietnam and for all US forces to be withdrawn from there. It ended with the appeal “Get two, three, many Vietnam!”. This slogan came from a charter by Che Guevara and had been in use in the APO since 1967 .

Police authorities in Augsburg and Munich

On May 12, 1972 at 12:15 p.m. and 12:18 p.m., two bombs exploded on the third and fourth floors of the Augsburg police department. The second bomb injured six police officers and one worker. A third bomb did not go off. The investigators blamed Baader, Raspe and another man for the crime.

At 2:15 p.m. a caller warned the state salary office in Munich that in seven minutes a bomb would detonate in the neighboring state criminal investigation office and that the office should be vacated. Thereupon the warned fled to the parking lot of the office. There, at 2:20 p.m., a bomb hidden in a car exploded. She injured ten people, including a child, and caused property damage, which was put at 588,000 Deutschmarks. Among other things, around 100 cars were damaged.

A "command of Thomas Weisbecker" declared in a letter of confession on May 16, sent in Switzerland: An "execution command" of the Augsburg and Munich police surprised Weisbecker on March 2, 1972 and murdered him. The investigation authorities could not "liquidate a RAF member [...] without having to expect that we will fight back."

BGH judge in Karlsruhe

Weisbecker's friend Carmen Roll was also arrested on March 2, 1972. She was given general anesthesia to have her fingerprints taken. On March 3, 1972, Manfred Grashof fatally hit a police officer in an exchange of fire and was seriously injured himself. Only days after his emergency operation, Wolfgang Buddenberg , the responsible investigative judge at the Federal Court of Justice (BGH), had Grashof taken to a prison cell, which he had declared “part of the central hospital”. The cell remained lit day and night. She was not allowed to leave Grashof or receive visitors for two months. The cells above and below him were empty. When he was allowed to go to court every day, he was handcuffed so that his wounds would re-open.

Since April 1972, two women had spied on Buddenberg's place of residence and route to work on behalf of the RAF. On May 15, 1972 at 12:30 p.m., a canteen filled with explosives detonated under the passenger seat of his car in front of his house. The bomb was fastened with magnets under the floor pan, a cable connected its detonator to the car's starter. Buddenberg's wife Gerta triggered the explosion when the car was started and was seriously injured. The passenger seat was torn apart, the sunroof of the car was thrown away several meters. A passenger would definitely have been killed. However, Buddenberg had walked to work that morning and hadn't let his wife drive him as usual. That saved his life.

The letter confessing the "Manfred Grashof command" of May 20, 1972 declared the attack in Karlsruhe as a "punitive action": Buddenberg, "the pig", had Grashof moved from the hospital to a cell, "when the transport and the risk of infection in prison were still there were life-threatening for him ”, and thus repeated an attempted murder by the police on a defenseless person. The RAF will continue to commit explosive attacks against judges and public prosecutors until they stop breaking the law against political prisoners. The treatment of Rolls and Grashof shows an "already institutionalized fascism in the judiciary" and the "beginning of torture ."

Axel Springer publishing house in Hamburg (2004)

Springer high-rise Hamburg

On May 19, 1972, the RAF carried out an attack on Axel Springer's publishing house in Hamburg, where four of its newspapers were being printed. Authors on the RAF history sometimes give contradicting information about warning calls and the number of injuries.

According to Stefan Aust , the publisher's switchboard received a first warning call at 3:30 pm, and a few minutes later a second warning call: “You will be bombed in five minutes.” The operator did not take that seriously, but informed the property management about the threat a little later . Then the first bomb exploded in the correction room. Immediately afterwards, a female caller asked whether a bomb had just gone off and hung up after saying yes. A total of 17 workers were injured, two of them seriously. After an anonymous phone call on May 20, the police found another unexploded bomb in addition to the rotation, the management and in a cleaning agent cabinet.

According to Butz Peters , who followed the publisher and the police, the switchboard received the first warning call at 3:35 p.m. and the second at 3:37 p.m. Both had warned of a bomb explosion in fifteen (not five) minutes, the second had added: "Clear the house immediately, you pigs!" After the first explosion at 3:41 p.m. next to (not in) the correction room, a woman at 15 : 43 inquired about it and thanked for the affirmative information (not hung up silently). A second bomb exploded at 3:45 p.m. on the sixth floor in front of the offices of the publishing house management when a conference was taking place there. A total of 38 (not 17) people were injured. Two of the three unexploded bombs were found the next day on the 12th floor in the corridor to Axel Springer's office. The property damage amounted to a million marks.

According to Jutta Ditfurth , a first call at 3:29 pm warned: "Two bombs will go off in 15 minutes, clear them immediately!" The operator did not take that seriously. At 3:31 p.m., a second call warned: Don't be evacuated immediately, something terrible will happen. The operator hung up. At 3:36 p.m. a third call, this time to the police, requested an immediate evacuation. At 3:55 pm (not 3:41 pm and 3:45 pm) three (not two) bombs exploded, one in the correction room, the other in the toilets. 17 people were injured, two of them seriously.

According to Klaus Pflieger , there was only one warning call shortly after 3:30 p.m. without a minute: “A bomb is about to go off.” According to Wolfgang Kraushaar , the warning came too late because the first bomb had already exploded at 3:41 p.m. Detective officers found a third bomb on the second floor of the skyscraper on May 19 and had it defused, then production started again. On the morning of May 20, a fourth explosive device was discovered on the 12th floor by Axel Springer's office and defused after the adjacent floors were cleared immediately. The police found the fifth explosive device only after another house search in a closet for fire extinguishers in the men's room on the twelfth floor. Overall, the attack caused property damage of over DM 300,000.

In a letter of responsibility, a "Kommando June 2nd" expressed its regret that workers and employees had been injured by the attack and accused the Springer company of "preferring to take the risk that its workers and employees would be injured by bombs," than the risk of losing a few hours of working time, i.e. profit, to false alarms. ”The letter ended with the appeal“ Expropriate Springer! ”

In doing so, the RAF tried to tie in with the APO's anti-Springer campaign and regain lost sympathy in the West German left. Since the shooting of the student Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967 (the command name referred to this date), the APO had criticized systematic incitement and defamation of the protest movement in newspapers of Springer Verlag. Since the attempted murder of student leader Rudi Dutschke (April 11, 1968), publishing houses had been attacked and attempts had been made to set up a campaign for the expropriation or democratic control of the group.

During an interrogation in 1976, Gerhard Müller testified that Ulrike Meinhof had the idea for this attack, had received approval from Baader, Ensslin, Raspe and Meins and deposited the explosives in the Springer tower with Siegfried Hausner and another man. After Baader found out about the injured, he instructed Meinhof to explain the RAF's “great regret” in a letter of confession and to give a warning period longer than five minutes. The RAF defendant Brigitte Mohnhaupt, on the other hand, testified that Meinhof did not know anything about the planned attack and only then traveled to Hamburg to convey criticism to the perpetrators of Baader and Ensslin and to discuss it with them. Ensslin emphasized in 1976 in the Stammheim trial that independent sub-groups had carried out this attack without prior agreement; the RAF leadership did not want its course and its result and subsequently rejected it.

Headquarters of the US Army in Europe in Heidelberg

According to Gerhard Müller, Baader, Ensslin, Meins and Raspe were planning another attack on a US Army facility in order to counter the strong criticism from the left of the three previous attacks. An observer commissioned by the RAF found that cars with license plates from the USA were not regularly checked when entering the grounds of the 7th US Army headquarters in Heidelberg. Therefore, the RAF equipped two stolen cars with stolen US license plates.

On May 24, 1972, RAF perpetrators stowed two bombs (95 and 30 kg) in the trunk of the two cars and drove them onto the site. They parked one car in front of the Secret Intelligence Service building , the other by a radio control tower. At 6:10 p.m., the bombs exploded ten seconds apart. They tore the body of Captain Clyde R. Bonner and smashed the skull of Specialist Charles Peck, who were instantly dead. Specialist Ronald A. Woodward died of his serious injuries on the way to the hospital. Five other people were injured.

According to Müller, Baader and Ensslin found out about the fatalities on the radio and welcomed them. Since the dead belonged to an imperialist army, it was right not to give any advance warning this time.

On June 25, 1972, a "July 15th" command (the anniversary of Petra Schelm's death in 1971) declared in a letter of confession: The attack was carried out because US General Daniel James publicly stated on the same day that the US Air Force was not taking a target north and south of the 17th parallel more of the bombing. The US Air Force dropped more bombs on Vietnam in the past seven weeks than in the entire Second World War . This is a genocide analogous to the “Final Solution” . The bombing raids on Vietnam should be stopped. The attacks of May 11th and 24th should be seen as a unit because of this objective.

According to a testimony of the former CIA agent K. Barton Osborne on June 23, 1976, whom the RAF defenders had invited as a witness in the Stammheim trial, the computer system used by the US Army was in the destroyed Secret Service building calculated the supplies for the area bombing in both parts of Vietnam.

consequences

"Water hammer" campaign

On May 29, 1972, the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office, Horst Herold, with the permission of the Interior Minister at the time, Hans-Dietrich Genscher , summoned all the special commission heads of the federal states and federal border police representatives and ordered the nationwide “water hammer action” for May 31: it should serve to “through a Hit the water to really get the fish moving ”, thus causing RAF members to flee and track them down.

The entire protection police of the federal states were subordinated to the BKA for one day in order to enable road blocks at border crossings, motorway entrances and exits, vehicle controls and surveillance flights nationwide. The interior ministers of the federal states were subsequently informed of the plan that had already been decided. The mass media were involved and the population was called on to participate.

This manhunt, unprecedented since 1945, missed its direct goal of tracking down RAF members, but caused traffic chaos. Nevertheless, many citizens carried them with them and greeted them. Herold saw this approval as a lasting success of the action. It set a precedent for further centrally coordinated large-scale searches, for example after the Lorenz kidnapping in 1975. Civil rights were restricted, the powers of the police expanded considerably, and numerous police attacks occurred.

Criticism in the left

With the “Weeks of Fear”, the RAF tried to force the state to take unpopular countermeasures that were supposed to be criticized by society. The aim was to generate solidarity with the RAF within society and to set up a “popular front” against the state. This project failed. Fierce criticism came from those sympathetic to the RAF regarding the execution of the attacks and the choice of targets. In particular, the attack on the Axel Springer Verlag building, in which workers and employees were injured, was condemned by large sections of the left, who soon turned away from the RAF because it no longer only used violence against things, but also with accepted deaths from their attacks.

The attack in Heidelberg against “American imperialism”, with which the RAF tried to calm the left wing, was criticized. In 1971, and especially after the death of Petra Schelm, the RAF enjoyed high levels of sympathy among the population - according to a representative survey, members of the RAF were classified as criminals by only about a fifth of those questioned, and a large number saw them as "political fighters" - After the May offensive, the RAF was now completely isolated from within the political left and became an enemy of the state.

Safety measures

The series of attacks had shaken the Federal Republic and led to heightened security measures in public and private institutions. Parking in front of the Federal Chancellery and the Ministry of Defense was prohibited, and access controls and ID cards were introduced at Axel Springer Verlag and other corporations.

Arrests

Even before May 31, 1972, the police had received information about a possible RAF apartment on Hofeckweg in Frankfurt am Main and had it observed. When searching the associated garage, they found buckets filled with explosive powder, exchanged their contents for a visually similar harmless powder and put them back in their place. On June 1, 1972 around 5:50 a.m., a car stopped in front of the garage, from which Baader, Meins and Raspe got out. Baader and Meins went in, Raspe stood in front of it as a guard. When two police officers under surveillance approached him, he fled, shot at persecutors, was caught and then arrested without resistance. Baader and Meins heard the gunshots and stayed in the locked garage, which the police then surrounded with 150 armed officers for over two hours. Mine only surrendered after an armored car had pushed in the garage door around 8:00 a.m. and a detective colonel hit Baader in the thigh with a long-range shot. Baader lay wounded on the floor, was disarmed, undressed and carried out. TV reporters present filmed the scene.

On June 7th, Gudrun Ensslin was caught in a boutique on Jungfernstieg . The manager had discovered a pistol in her discarded jacket and then called the police. Brigitte Mohnhaupt and a friend were arrested in Berlin on June 9th . After Ensslin's arrest, Ulrike Meinhof and Gerhard Müller drove from Hamburg to Hanover. A friend asked the teacher Fritz Rodewald in Langenhagen on June 14th for an overnight stay for two unnamed people. Rodewald agreed, but suspected RAF members and informed the police on June 15. This observed his apartment and arrested Müller and Meinhof shortly after their arrival there. Several weapons, a bottle bomb, ammunition and a text from Ensslin that she had smuggled out of custody were found in Meinhof's luggage. Siegfried Hausner was arrested in Stuttgart on June 19, and Klaus Jünschke and Irmgard Möller in Offenbach am Main on July 9 . Almost the entire leadership of the RAF was arrested.

literature

  • Klaus Pflieger: The Red Army faction. RAF. May 14, 1970 to April 20, 1998. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2011, ISBN 3-8329-5582-8 .
  • Wolfgang Kraushaar: The RAF. Demythologizing a terrorist organization. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2008, ISBN 3-89331-816-X .
  • Wolfgang Kraushaar: The RAF and left-wing terrorism, Volume I / II. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-936096-65-1 .
  • Butz Peters: Deadly mistake. The history of the RAF. (2004) 3rd edition, Argon, Berlin 2007, ISBN 3-87024-673-1 .
  • Martin Hoffmann (Ed.): Red Army Fraction. Texts and materials on the history of the RAF. ID-Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-89408-065-5 .
  • Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex . (1985) 2nd edition, Goldmann, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-442-46901-7 .

Web links

Commons : Red Army Faction  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Butz Peters: Tödlicher Errtum , Berlin 2007, p. 285.
  2. ↑ Butz Peters: Tödlicher Errtum , Berlin 2007, p. 285.
  3. ↑ Butz Peters: Tödlicher Errtum , Berlin 2007, p. 286.
  4. ↑ Ingo Juchler: The student movements in the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany in the sixties: an investigation into how they were influenced by liberation movements and theories from the Third World. Duncker & Humblot, 1996, ISBN 3-428-08556-6 , p. 237, fn. 152.
  5. ↑ Butz Peters: Tödlicher Errtum , Berlin 2007, p. 286 f. According to Jutta Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof , Berlin 2009, p. 339, five police officers were injured.
  6. ↑ Butz Peters: Tödlicher Errtum , Berlin 2007, p. 287.
  7. ↑ Butz Peters: Tödlicher Errtum , Berlin 2007, p. 288.
  8. ↑ Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , Berlin 2009, p. 326.
  9. ↑ Butz Peters: Tödlicher Errtum , Berlin 2007, p. 288 f.
  10. ↑ Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , Berlin 2009, p. 340.
  11. ^ Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex , Munich 2008, pp. 246–248.
  12. ↑ Butz Peters: Tödlicher Errtum , Berlin 2007, pp. 288, 289 and 765, fn. 77.
  13. ↑ Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof. The biography. (2007) Ullstein, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-548-37249-5 , p. 340 f.
  14. ^ Klaus Pflieger: The Red Army Fraction , Baden-Baden 2011, p. 37.
  15. ^ Wolfgang Kraushaar: The RAF. Demythologizing a terrorist organization. Bonn 2008, p. 292.
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar: The RAF and left terrorism , Hamburg 2006, p. 1076 f.
  17. ↑ Martin Hoffmann (Ed.): Red Army Fraction , Berlin 1997, p. 147.
  18. ↑ Jochen Staadt, Tobias Voigt, Stefan wool: Feind-Bild Springer: A publishing house and his opponents. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 3-525-36381-8 , p. 107 , p. 135 f.
  19. ↑ Butz Peters: Tödlicher Errtum , Berlin 2007, pp. 289 and 765, fn. 75.
  20. ↑ Mario Krebs: Ulrike Meinhof , 1995, pp. 233-235.
  21. ↑ Butz Peters: Tödlicher Errtum , p. 291 f.
  22. ^ Klaus Pflieger: The Red Army Fraction , Baden-Baden 2011, p. 35.
  23. ^ Pieter H. Bakker Schut: Stammheim: the trial against the Red Army faction; the necessary correction of the prevailing opinion. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-89144-247-5 , p. 35.
  24. ^ Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex. Hamburg 2008, p. 250f.
  25. ↑ Ursula Nelles: Competencies and exceptional competencies in the criminal procedure code. On the organizational function of the term “imminent danger” in criminal procedure law. Duncker & Humblot, Hamburg 1980, ISBN 3-428-04600-5 , p. 180
  26. ↑ Klaus Weinhauer: Terrorism in the Federal Republic of the 1970s. Aspects of a social and cultural history of internal security, in: Archive for Social History, Vol. 44, JHW ​​Dietz, 2004, p. 226.
  27. ^ Hans Mathias Kepplinger: Die Sympathisanten der Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe, in: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (26) 1974, pp. 770-800.
  28. ↑ Der Spiegel, Issue 23, 1972, (May 29, 1972): The guerrillas fight from ambush
  29. ↑ Article on welt.de: The day on which the RAF attacked Axel Springer, Axel Springer: “Our publishing house was an open house from the start. Everyone should be able to come to us, visit us, talk to us. You will understand ... that now that the anarchists argue with bombs, we have to orientate ourselves differently. "
  30. ^ Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex , Munich 2008, pp. 251-254.
  31. ^ Butz Peters: Tödlicher Errtum , Frankfurt am Main 2007, pp. 294-300.