The Context

On 14 May 1970, a group of women and one man liberated at gunpoint the prisoner Andreas Baader from the German Central Institute for Social Issues in Berlin. Retrospectively, Astrid Proll – who drove the getaway car – noted that the ‘action on 14 May 1970 in West Berlin marked the birth of the RAF’ (Proll 2004: 11). A number of scholarly publications (see, e.g. Langguth 1983, Della Porta 1995: 98, Varon 2004, Wieland 2005: 80-82, Bressan and Jander 2006: 415, Jander 2006, Diewald-Kerkmann 2009: 3) and journalistic accounts (Aust 2008, Conzen 2005, Winkler 2007,

Peters 1991, Sontheimer 2010) have also claimed that Baader’s rescue constituted a watershed in the history of the armed struggle in Germany, yet they offer only anecdotal accounts of this event.

This case study seeks to offer a comprehensive analysis of the events that took place on 14 May and of public reactions to Baader’s rescue. The discussion draws on unpublished testimonies (provided by the Institute for Social Issues, Berlin), a bill of indictment against some of the actors involved by the Public Prosecutor Hans-Dieter Nagel (found at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam), and personal files from the Federal Archives, Koblenz. In addition to these sources, the case study draws on autobiographical accounts by former group members Astrid Proll and Monika Berberich, press coverage collected at the newspaper department of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin and secondary literatue.

The focus of the discussion is on the gendered performances of the actors involved and how these were perceived in the media and in court. While legal authorities have depicted the appearance of the female perpetrators as a form of ‘poor disguise’, the data examined in this case study suggests that it constituted the first use of femininity as camouflage in the history of the RAF.

‘The birth of the Red Army Faction’, as Jeremy Varon emphasises, ‘was both slow and sudden’ (Varon 2004: 62). It was slow, because the founding members of the RAF did not radicalise overnight. Before participating in Baader’s rescue, most of the perpetrators had been actively involved in the student and protest movement in West Germany. As highlighted in Chapter 1, discussions about violence in these

movements intensified in the late 1960s as a response to police repression during demonstrations and polemical attacks in the media. Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader100_{, two key figures in the first ‘generation’ of} the RAF, were among the first people in the radical Left in West Germany to carry out a politically motivated arson attack.

Together with two acquaintances, Horst Söhnlein and Thorwald Proll, the 28-year-old student Ensslin and her 25-year-old lover Baader started fires in two department stores in Frankfurt am Main in the night of 2 April 1968. Shortly after the arson attack, the police arrested all four perpetrators. After a few months in jail and a spectacular court case, they were sentenced to three years in prison in October 1968 (Winkler 2007: 127). One of the lawyers defending the arsonists was the 32-year-old Horst Mahler, who – after playing an active role in violent protests in Berlin – was charged with different crimes himself (Jander 2006: 379). In detention, Ensslin gave an interview to the 34-year-old journalist Ulrike Meinhof.101 _{Apparently, the writer was impressed by Ensslin and} considered her a ‘partner in thought’ [Partnerin im Denken] (Seifert 2006: 366). Due to an appeal on points of law, Baader, Ensslin, Söhnlein and Proll were temporarily released in June 1969. Restored to freedom, the couple started to work in a social project with young people in Frankfurt am Main. However, in November of the same year the Federal Court of Justice refused the appeal, which meant that the four

100 _{For a detailed discussion of Baader’s and Ensslin’s biographies and their intimate} relationship, see Koenen 2004.

101 _{Compared to other group members, Ulrike Meinhof has certainly attracted the most} attention from journalists and scholars. An in-depth discussion of her life and work goes beyond the scope of this chapter but can be found elsewhere (see e.g.: Krebs 1988, Prinz 2003, Ditfurth 2007, Colvin 2009).

perpetrators had to spend up to 22 months more in prison (Bressan and Jander 2006: 413).

Söhnlein and Proll followed the demand note by the Federal Court of Justice and surrendered themselves to the police. Ensslin and Baader, however, refused to serve the rest of their sentence and went underground. This choice implied for both a radical break with their previous lives but also with legality and society as a whole (Bressan and Jander 2006: 414). After travelling for several weeks in France and Italy, Baader and Ensslin returned – accompanied by Thorwald Proll’s sister Astrid – to Germany. In March 1970, they moved into Ulrike Meinhof’s flat in Berlin. There, the couple joined forces with Mahler, who was as keen as Baader and Ensslin to found a militant underground organisation. According to Proll, then a 20-year-old student, the group consisted in spring 1970 of six or seven people and was dominated by women (Edschmid 2001: 123-125). Their first efforts to form an organisation based on the model of the Latin American urban guerrilla in Berlin, however, ended abruptly when Baader was arrested on 4 April 1970 (Jander 2006: 381).102

Soon after Baader’s arrest, Ensslin and Mahler began to make plans for his liberation. In Proll, Meinhof, the medical student Ingrid Schubert, Mahler’s apprentice Monika Berberich, and Irene Goergens, they found five women who were willing to assist in Baader’s rescue. In an

102 _{Baader was arrested when he and Mahler tried to find a secret weapons dump in a} cemetery in Berlin-Buckow that Peter Urbach, an undercover agent for the Federal Office for the Constitution, had mentioned to them. According to Martin Jander and other authors, the police had not yet confirmed Baader’s identity when Mahler made the naïve mistake of calling to ask for the whereabouts of Andreas Baader (Jander 2006: 382; see also: Peters 1991: 74; Koenen 2004: 273). However, it should be added that Urbach’s own account as quoted in a BKA-report does not confirm this anecdote (Der Baader-Meinhof-Report. Dokumente, Analysen, Zusammenhänge 1972: 26-28).

autobiographical note, Proll noted: ‘[a]fter Baader was arrested while trying to procure arms, I had no doubts whatsoever that I would be part of an action to free him’ (Proll 2004: 11). While they were willing to assist in Baader’s rescue, Proll, Meinhof and others in the loosely connected group around Ensslin and Mahler were not ready to burn all bridges and to go underground. As we shall see, the liberation of the prisoner developed a momentum of its own; one participant shot a civilian, and the entire group had to go into hiding.

Due to the unexpected turn of events during the attack, Baader’s rescue changed the life of the participants once and for all. More than 30 years after the attack, Proll described this turn of events as follows: ‘After a man had been severely injured during the liberation of Baader (we had hired a so-called expert, a criminal who started shooting at once) we found ourselves on wanted-lists with arrest warrants out on all of us’ (Proll 2004: 11). Before the founding members of the Red Army Faction had agreed on a joint approach to violence, even before they had come up with a name for their group, they found themselves in the difficult situation of having to justify the shooting of a civilian. This development confirms two claims about the complex relationship between theory and practice in the history of the RAF that I have mentioned earlier: 1) theoretical reflections did not precede but followed actions; 2) from the first moment in the history of the RAF, the group used theory and ideology selectively to justify deliberate and unanticipated developments during attacks.