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Life underground is always exhausting.
Those who are wanted by the police need money, good nerves - and support.
But by the spring of 1971, almost a year after the violent liberation of department store arsonist Andreas Baader in West Berlin, he and his accomplices were lacking in all three.
Money was the least of the problem.
If the loot from a bank robbery was used up, Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof and other supporters of the as yet nameless group committed the next one.
On January 15, 1971, they had stolen DM 114,715 from two savings banks in Frankfurt and Kassel at the same time - that would be enough for a while.
The first improvised profile for members of the RAF from 1971
Source: picture alliance / dpa
What was worse was that Baader, always a self-centered narcissist, tried to dominate the other illegals.
He swept criticism of his often erratic, contradicting decisions "with a few snippets of words", as the temporary group member Beate Sturm said: "Everyone in the group would have to be tough enough to endure the pressure of illegality."
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Meinhof, the former flagship journalist of left circles, complained that “things couldn't go on in such a chaotic way”.
This made no impression on Baader and his almost submissive girlfriend Ensslin, Sturm recalled: "If the political discussion should start, Baader immediately stalled everything."
This also meant that the group had now largely used up the sympathy advance that the left wing of the educated middle class had granted them in the summer of 1970.
Less than a year after Baader's liberation, the group had committed many crimes, but not a single one of the rudimentary “political” actions implemented.
The cover of the first issue of "Concept Urban Guerilla" from April 1971
Source: Kellerhoff Collection
It was time for a new programmatic statement, Meinhof thought, because: "Many comrades want to know what we think about it." So in the second half of April 1971 a 16-page paper with the title "Urban Guerilla Concept" landed in the mailboxes more well known Linker and several editorial offices.
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The text began obviously offended: “Some comrades have already finished their judgment on us.
For them it is a 'demagoguery of the bourgeois press' to bring this 'anarchist group' into connection with the socialist movement in general ”, it was said on the fourth page, after the title page, a vacant page and a long, oversized Mao - Quote from 1939.
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Subsequently, the text distanced itself from Ulrike Meinhof's self-discussed tape, from which the magazine “Der Spiegel” printed excerpts on June 14, 1970, including the remark “Bulls are pigs, and of course you can shoot”, the scene on the left had caused discomfort.
In the “Urban Guerrilla Concept” it was now stated that this tape was “not authentic anyway and came from the context of private discussion”.
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Therefore, the concept now issued a different, apparently more cautious motto: “We shoot when someone shoots us.
The bull that lets us go, we let go. ”That should probably dampen the displeasure of many potential supporters about the phrase“ bulls are pigs ”.
But in essence, the “urban guerrilla concept” confirmed Meinhof's threat.
Because the text claimed that on May 14, 1970, when Baader was liberated from a library in West Berlin, “the cops shot first”.
In reality, the four-man commando under Ensslin's direction had seriously injured the completely uninvolved (and of course unarmed) employee Georg Linke with a shot in the stomach before the doors to the reading room were even opened, in which Baader and Meinhof and two judicial officers sat as guards.
The text continued with insulting previous accomplices: “Many comrades also spread untruths about us.
They make themselves fat that we lived with them, that they organized our trip to the Middle East, that they were informed about contacts, about apartments, that they were doing something for us even though they were not doing anything. ”The verdict was reached clearly stated: "We have nothing to do with these gossips, for whom the anti-imperialist struggle takes place at the coffee party." This was a strange tactic for an advertisement for support in the left milieu.
Wanted poster of the Federal Criminal Police Office from May 1972
Source: picture alliance / akg-images
After all, the “urban guerrilla concept” now came to the main point - the reasons for their struggle against the state: “We claim that without a revolutionary initiative, without the practical revolutionary intervention of the avant-garde, the socialist workers and intellectuals, without the concrete anti-imperialist struggle, there would be no unification process indicates that the alliance is only established in joint struggles or not, in which the conscious part of the workers and intellectuals does not direct but has to lead the way. "
The decisive word was "avant-garde".
Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, had already described the supporters of his party as "avant-garde".
In the same way, Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin & Co. wanted to “lead” the revolution and the masses of the people who are supposed to support it.
This had the advantage that they could completely decouple themselves from the actual reaction of the population: If (as was already apparent since 1967/68) there was no support from workers and small employees, then it was supposedly not due to the wrong analysis of the “avant-garde” ", But the lack of awareness of the" masses ".
A circular argument.
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Nevertheless, the paper offered something suitable for most types of left: The alleged achievements of the student movement were invoked, the acquittal of the Ohnesorg murderer Karl-Heinz Kurras was attacked as an example of "class justice", the Vietnam War criticized and of course the "Springer press" ( belonged to the WELT then and still today) insulted.
Ulrike Meinhof in a photo before she went into hiding and in a picture from a forged ID that was seized on December 21, 1970
Source: Getty Images
Obviously, the “urban guerrilla concept” should appeal to as many potential supporters as possible in order to create a basis for the self-proclaimed avant-garde.
The insults to the same clientele were naturally counterproductive.
The paper was drawn for the first time with a self-description of the group and a logo: “Red Army Fraction” and the letters “RAF” on or under a submachine gun, once in a five-pointed star and once without. This name should classify the "avant-garde" in the worldwide revolutionary movement, a fantasized "world civil war troop" - hence "faction". The name had nothing to do with the Soviet armed forces, which had not officially been called the “Red Army” since 1946.
As misleading as the self-chosen name was, the mistake made by the designer of the logo was embarrassing. Apparently it was a young acquaintance of Ulrike Meinhof, who was probably also the main author of the “Urban Guerrilla Concept”. As a template for the weapon, he had chosen a photo of the Heckler & Koch MPi-5 and not, as presumably intended, the Kalashnikov AK-47. The forward-curved magazine clearly distinguished the Soviet weapon from the German.
Why was that embarrassing?
The MPi-5 has been gradually introduced as the standard by the West German security authorities since 1966.
A police weapon, of all things, "adorned" almost all of the RAF's self-denunciations from then on.
It would be strange if more than 30 people had not fallen victim to the rampage of German left-wing terrorists in the next 22 years.
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