The Assassination of Attorney General Siegfried Buback
For “protagonists of the system” like Buback, history always finds a way.
On April7, 1977, the Ulrike Meinhof Commando executed Attorney General Siegfried Buback.
Buback was directly responsible for the murders of Holger Meins, Siegfried Hausner, and Ulrike Meinhof. In his function as Attorney General—as the central figure connecting and coordinating matters between the justice system and the West German news services, in close cooperation with the cia and the nato Security Committee—he stage-managed and directed their murders.
Under Buback’s regime, Holger was intentionally murdered on November9, 1974, by systematic undernourishment and the conscious manipulation of the transportation schedules from Wittlich to Stammheim. The baw calculated that they could use the execution of a cadre to break the prisoners’ collective hunger strike against exterminationist prison conditions, after the attempt to kill Andreas through the manipulation of force-feeding failed due to the mobilization of public pressure.
Under Buback’s regime, Siegfried, who had led the Holger Meins Commando, was murdered on May5, 1975, as the mek (Mobiles Einsatzkommandos) detonated the explosives at the German Embassy in Stockholm. While he was under the exclusive jurisdiction of the baw and the bka, he was delivered to the frg and his life was put in danger as he was transported to Stuttgart-Stammheim, thereby assuring his death.
Under Buback’s regime, Ulrike was executed in a state security action on May9, 1976. Her death was staged as a suicide to make the politics that Ulrike had struggled for seem senseless.
The murder was an execution; it followed the baw’s attempt to render Ulrike a cretin through a forced neuro-surgical operation, after which she was to be presented—destroyed—at the Stammheim trial, so as to condemn armed resistance as an illness. This project was prevented by international protests.
The timing of her murder was precisely calculated:
- before the decisive initiative in the trial, the defense motion that would have explained the 1972raf attacks against the U.S. Headquarters in Frankfurt and Heidelberg in light of the frg’s participation in the U.S.A.’s aggressive human rights violations in Vietnam;
- before Ulrike could be called as a witness in the Holger Meins Commando’s Düsseldorf trial, where she would have testified about the very extreme form of torture that they used against her for 8 months in the dead wings;
- before her sentencing—at which point critical international public opinion, which had developed as a result of the Stammheim show trial and the cynical use of imperialist violence, would have been informed of the role of the federal government and its executive organs. This would have caused all of this to rebound against them.
Ulrike’s history, in a way that is clearer than that of many combatants, is a history of resistance. For the revolutionary movement, she embodied an ideological vanguard function, which was the target of Buback’s showpiece, the simulated suicide: her death—which the baw used in propaganda to show the “failure” of armed struggle—was meant to destroy the group’s moral stature, its struggle, and its impact. The baw’s approach, which they have followed since 71 with manhunts and operations conducted against the raf, follows the counterinsurgency strategy of the nato Security Committee: criminalization of revolutionary resistance—for which the tactical steps are infiltration, disrupting solidarity, isolating the guerilla, and eliminating its leadership.
Within the imperialist frg’s anti-guerilla counterstrategy, the justice system is a weapon of war—used to pursue the guerilla operating underground and to exterminate the prisoners of war. Buback—whom Schmidt called “an energetic combatant” for this state—understood the conflict with us as a war and engaged in it as such: “I have lived through the war. This is a war using different means.”
We will prevent the baw from murdering our fighters in West German prisons, which it intends to do simply because the prisoners will not stop struggling and the baw sees no solution except their liquidation.
We will prevent the baw and the state security organs from retaliating against the imprisoned fighters for the actions of the guerilla outside.
We will prevent the baw from using the prisoners’ fourth collective hunger strike for minimum human rights as an opportunity to murder Andreas, Gudrun, and Jan, which psychological warfare since Ulrike’s death has been openly promoting.
Organize the armed resistance and the
anti-imperialist front in Western Europe.
Wage war in the metropole as part of the international war of liberation.