Cleaning group

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Putzgruppe (also: Putztruppe ) was a left-wing radical group of young men who, armed with helmets and clubs , led street fights with police officers in Frankfurt am Main from around 1971 to 1976 . The group was the militant part of the Revolutionary Struggle group and became known nationwide from 2000 , when its former leader Joschka Fischer was German Foreign Minister .

Actions of the group

A typical area of ​​application of the group was the forcible defense of occupied houses against police evictions as part of the so-called Frankfurt house warfare . In preparation for their inner-city operations against the police, group members often drove into rural areas in the Frankfurt area to complete unrecognized training units there, in which police equipment such as shields and batons were also used in street fighting . The attack on the Spanish Consulate General in September 1975 in which around 200 masked demonstrators except paint bombs at the building and stones and Molotov cocktails tossed at police, the cleaning group said to have been instrumental in to fishermen. The cleaning group is said to have been responsible, among other things, for the use of Molotov cocktails at a demonstration in May 1976 in which the policeman Jürgen Weber suffered severe burns of 60 percent . After Fischer, under the impression of the escalated violence of this demonstration, changed his stance and publicly advocated a departure from the armed struggle at a congress at Whitsun in 1976, the cleaning group's activities also ended.

Suspected members

The group had up to 40 members, the head of the later Federal Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. In addition, Hans-Joachim Klein , Johnny Klinke , Matthias Beltz , Ralf Scheffler , Raoul Kopania , Georg Clemens Dick and Tom Koenigs are said to have been members. Kopania, Dick and Koenigs supported Fischer from the 1980s as close collaborators in his political rise and received various positions in the civil service, including in the Hessian Ministry of the Environment and the Foreign Office . In a Frankfurt court case in 2006, Fischer stated as a witness that the “cleaning group” had neither a fixed core of members nor was it a firmly established organization.

Terminus

There are different theories about the origin of the name. On the one hand, “Putz” stands for rampage, but it can also be read as an abbreviation for “Proletarian Union for Terror and Destruction” or “Proletarian Union for Theory and Destruction”. According to Arno Luik, the term “cleaning group” was coined by the former SDS federal executive committee and member of the “revolutionary struggle” Udo Riechmann .

reception

The cleaning group, and thus in particular Joschka Fischer's role in the violent left-wing radical scene in Frankfurt in the 1970s, became a topic of broad public perception in connection with the criminal proceedings against Hans-Joachim Klein and Rudolf Schindler . Klein was a former member of the group who joined the terrorist revolutionary cells in 1974 . In an interview with Stern in January 2001 in view of the republication of a photo from April 1973 in which Klein and Fischer hit a police officer who was lying on the ground, and shortly before his planned testimony in the Klein trial, Fischer said at the time: "Yes, I was militant […] We threw stones. ” A polemical biography of Fischer published in 1998, in which the cleaning group and the politician's violent past life had been discussed, had already attracted attention. In January 2001, the journalist Klaus Rainer Röhl suggested that Federal Foreign Minister Fischer resign in an article in the Neue Revue because of his role in what he believed to be an anti-Semitic group. According to Daniel Cohn-Bendit's testimony from 2005, this group of people “ wanted to protect themselves with helmets against the state power that was looking for the conflict” .

See also

literature

  • Christian Schmidt: We are the madmen. Joschka Fischer and his Frankfurter gang. Updated paperback edition, Econ-und-List-Taschenbuchverlag 1999, ISBN 3-612-26628-4

Web links

Wikiquote: Joschka Fischer  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Red-green cleaning force neue-deutschland.de
  2. ^ Cleaning group against “Focus”: Fischer testifies. In: n-tv of March 21, 2006, accessed October 29, 2013
  3. ↑ a b c d e Dirk Kurbjuweit and Gunther Latsch: I fought. In: Der Spiegel of January 8, 2001, accessed October 30, 2013
  4. ↑ Klaus Schroeder : Review: Non-fiction book: Blood tackle among comrades. In: FAZ of September 30, 1998, accessed on October 29, 2013
  5. ↑ Thomas Zorn et al. a .: Friends: "Good wishes from 'Janie'". In: Focus from February 12, 2001, pp. 30–33
  6. ↑ Christian Schmidt: "We are the madmen ...": Joschka Fischer and his Frankfurter gang. P. 82
  7. ↑ a b c Inconsistent information about Fischer's “cleaning group” In: FAZ from June 1, 2005, accessed on October 29, 2013
  8. ↑ Reinhard Mohr: Die Turnschuh-Revolution, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung from February 2, 2014, p. 6
  9. ↑ a b Lexicon: Putzgruppe berliner-zeitung.de, accessed on September 17, 2014
  10. ↑ Organized like a chip shop, in: Spiegel from March 17, 1986, accessed on September 17, 2014
  11. ^ Paul Hockenos: Joschka Fischer and the Berlin Republic: An alternative history of postwar Germany. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008, p. 176 and a.
  12. ↑ Thomas Kirn: Fischer as a witness in court: Reunion with the cleaning group, in: FAZ.net of March 21, 2006, accessed on September 17, 2014
  13. ↑ a b Arno Luik: Joschka Fischer and the great silence, in: Stern.de from April 11, 2013, accessed on September 17, 2014
  14. ↑ Gerd Langguth : Myth '68. Rudi Dutschke's philosophy of violence - causes and consequences of the student movement. Munich 2001, p. 163.
  15. ↑ Holger Stark: Joschka Fischer: The Foreign Minister confesses: We have thrown stones , in Der Tagesspiegel , January 3, 2001
  16. ↑ Hans Riebsamen: Lese majesty at a green monument: Why a book about Joseph Fischer's past excites the alternative scene, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of July 22, 1998, p. 41
  17. ↑ Greens: Joschka and his cleaning group, in: Spiegel from July 13, 1998, accessed on September 17, 2014
  18. ↑ Susanne Gaschke: Settlement with a lot of malice, in: Die Zeit from August 20, 1998, accessed on September 17, 2014
  19. ↑ Press release: “Publicist Dr. Klaus Rainer Röhl in NEUE REVUE: Fischer's 'cleaning crew' was anti-Semitic ” ( Memento from May 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive )