Letter Addressing Police Fabrications

Even if it’s not really our thing to issue rebuttals to police fabrications, we want to make a few things clear, because they are trying to make an example out of some public political figures to show that they can use whatever scare tactics they want—to spread terror.

The cops don’t know anything about how we move about, how we plan our actions, or the practical details of how we work with the legal left. It is no surprise that they shamelessly resort to lying about the growing anti-imperialist resistance. Here they are:

The most outlandish story is the one about the “first arrest in the Kroesen case.” Of course, Helga Roos has been a thorn in the cops’ side for some years now. She has struggled politically in the anti-imperialist movement and on behalf of the prisoners from the guerilla. She had nothing to do with the action of the Gudrun Ensslin Commando. It wasn’t her, but two of our men who bought the tent from the Kaufhof at the Paradeplatz in Mannheim early in the afternoon on September 14 (the day before the action). Their books can verify this. It’s true that we were on the hill for several days before the action, but we didn’t use the tent there. Nor did she ever bring us any cocoa. If there was a bottle with her fingerprints on it there, then the cops planted it or put her fingerprints on it afterwards, as has already happened in Ireland. This is also meant to create the impression that we get in position and then “sympathizers” come to serve us.
Gabriele Gebhard was arrested, because Gisela Dutzi is said to have lived with her while she was underground. Anyone who knows anything about the Heidelberg-Mannheim scene knows that the police know that address. It seems obvious that nobody from the underground would live there. Another fascinating detail is that Gabriele is supposed to have worked on the Sigurd Debus Commando’s statement. Really.
During the last hunger strike, two guys were arrested in Heidelberg. After our action against Kroesen, the cops looked at two men they said they had seen driving a motorcycle behind Kroesen. They claimed a success in their manhunt when they conveniently found the license plate number in the notebook of one of the two. The fact of the matter is that no motorcycle was ever used in preparing for this action. In the case of one of the two men, Karl Grosser, who at the time of the attack had already spent five months in prison, an order to detain him was issued due to his “updated status,” with the fabrication: “participation in the Kroesen attack.” He had as little to do with the action against Kroesen as he did with the Ramstein action.

All these fabrications are absurd. Obviously, apart from those of us who actually carry out the actions, nobody knows when, where, or what we are planning.

In the case of both actions, from beginning to end, only RAF people were involved in surveillance, planning, and execution. There are many ways we can cooperate with people living aboveground, but working as closely and as intensely on a concrete action as the police allege in this case isn’t one of them. If we have such a relationship with someone, it is because he is one of us.

The “threat of a manhunt” that they are subjecting us to would be funny, except for the fact that it means the extermination machinery is going to be directed against people who aren’t prepared to deal with it. What we have here is an attack against a structure that they know nothing about.

What began with the arrests of Sabine Schmitz and Johannes Thimme in 1976 and continued with the arrests Christine and Harald Biehal a little later, and the over fifty arrests during the hunger strike, the “black bloc,” all of that, has now taken on a new dimension. This indicates a new repressive line, with which they hope to destroy that which they cannot control, this is why they’ve started using the formulation “the aboveground RAF.” No such thing exists or could exist. What has sprung up is the beginning of an anti-imperialist movement in the FRG—isolated circles, “antifascist groups,” Third World groups, women’s groups, prison groups, antimilitary groups, etc.—this movement sees itself existing in the context of the strategy of the guerilla in the metropole. It is understood that fundamental resistance—every political step that is meant to be serious—must stay outside of the state’s control. It has been obvious to everyone for years now that when people who live aboveground want to meet, they must outmaneuver state surveillance if they don’t want the Verfassungsschutz and the political police to see who meets who where and about what. Of course they have no choice, faced with the preventive state security strategy that intends to destroy these developments before they have taken shape.

Naturally, that is intolerable for state security. So now their starting point is the criminalization of comrades who have nothing to do with our actions—by connecting them to the actions if they disappear for a few weeks, cut their hair, shake off surveillance—in short, if they engage in “conspiratorial behavior.” But if they criminalize these things, then they are in the process of laying the political groundwork for a police state: it is meant to become normal in this state for everyone to be under control and registered at all times and to accept it—and to be criminalized if they try to avoid it.

Red Army Faction
November 7, 1981