DELIMITACION DEL SECTOR

As the RAF operated mostly underground, the group had to spend a considerable part of its time, energy and financial resources on logistics. To maintain the group’s complex infrastructure, members had to rob banks, obtain forged documents, rent secret flats and organise cars and weapons. In addition to these basic activities, each generation of the RAF set its own priorities. Attacks by the first generation focused on the West German state and its representatives. Prior to their arrest in 1972, members of the first generation killed seven and hurt dozens of people with bombs and firearms. Even in prison, they were involved in the planning of attacks, although they had to leave it to others to execute them. As mentioned previously, the primary aim of the second generation was the liberation of their detained comrades. To achieve this aim, the group killed more people than any other generation of the RAF. Their successors focused on the assassination of national and international policy-makers and businessmen. The third generation of the RAF killed ten people and hurt many more (Trinius 2007). In the course of its armed struggle, the RAF killed 34 people – more than any other militant leftist group in West Germany.

The RAF drew on a range of tactics to prepare and execute attacks. The group did not shy away from direct confrontations. On a number of occasions, masked and heavily armed group members robbed banks and carried out targeted assassinations. The group used a range of weaponry, including pistols, rifles, hand grenades, car bombs and other explosives. Like Carlos Marighella’s ‘urban guerrilla’, the members of the RAF sought

to blend in with the material and social environment in which they operated, in order to prepare attacks without being discovered. Ulrike Edschmid describes this camouflage in her account of Astrid Proll’s life as follows:

When she arrived in Berlin, it was important to stick out. They wanted to provoke and expressed with clothes where they belonged. Now their clothes had to again express where they had come from without showing where they wanted to be. The bourgeois milieu, with which they were familiar, became a protective sphere.99 _{(Edschmid 2001: 130)}

It seems that some group members enjoyed this bourgeois camouflage more than others. Apparently Baader gloried in presenting himself as a bourgeois dandy (Wieland 2005: 83), while Astrid Proll remained a ‘difficult case’ (Edschmid 2001: 131). Proll was a lesbian who had rebelled against conventional gender norms from an early age and was reluctant to embrace her new role.

Throughout its history, the RAF used femininity as camouflage. The case study in the following section discusses the first tactical recourse to femininity in the history of the RAF during the liberation of Andreas Baader in 1970. While the case study reveals that the gendered performances of Baader’s liberators were above all the result of situational dynamics and unconscious acts, there is evidence that the RAF soon began to use feminine traits and accessories in a more systematic

99 _{‘Als sie […] nach Berlin gekommen war, war es wichtig gewesen, aufzufallen. Sie} wollten provozieren und drückten durch Kleidung aus, wohin sie gehörten. Jetzt musste […] ihre Kleidung […] wieder ausdrücken, woher sie kamen, ohne das sichtbar wurde, wohin sie wollten. Das bürgerliche Milieu, das sie kannten, sollte ihr Schutz werden’

manner. In 1977, the use of femininity as camouflage generated huge media interest. As highlighted previously, few attacks in the history of the RAF have terrified and fascinated people in Germany as much as the killing of Jürgen Ponto in July 1977 by members of the second generation of the RAF with ‘guns and roses’. In a cover story about women and violence in early August, the news magazine Der Spiegel used the Ponto murder as an opportunity to report on – and speculate about – female participation in the RAF and other militant leftist groups (‘Frauen im Untergrund – “Etwas Irrationales”’ 1977). Like other newspapers and magazines in the 1960s and 1970s, Der Spiegel contrasted images of women in Ponto’s mourning family and other victims with photographs of ‘terrorist girls’ in the RAF and other militant groups (for a detailed discussion of this aspect, see Bielby 2012). The article highlighted not only that women played leading roles in the RAF and in concrete manifestations of political violence; it also included a number of pictures to illustrate how they used feminine accessories and features to prepare and execute attacks. One photograph displayed the contents of a handbag that the police had confiscated during the arrest of the RAF-member Monika Berberich: a wallet, a pair of sunglasses, a revolver and ammunition.

Another image on the same page featured a weapon that became known as the RAF ‘baby bomb’. Designed by an artist associated with the RAF, the police found the baby bomb in 1972 in an arms depot and confiscated it before the RAF got a chance to use it. Among photographs of other confiscated weapons, the annual report by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution about the year 1972 included several

photographs of the weapon, which they presented as the ‘baby bomb’ of the RAF (Verfassungschutz 1972 1973). For demonstration purposes, one image showed a female police officer who had strapped the bomb around her waist. Due to its design, the bomb allowed fighters to pass as pregnant women when smuggling explosives into buildings. Once they had placed the bomb at the target site, they could replace their ‘pregnancy belly’ with an air cushion (see Image 4). When first released, the images of the baby bomb received hardly any attention. The Ponto murder, however, created a huge stir that revived interest in the baby bomb and other (ab)uses of feminine features and accessories by women in the RAF. Women – mothers and mothers-to-be in particular – are traditionally understood as caring, nurturing and life-giving. With the baby bomb, the RAF wanted to use these associations to carry out fatal attacks.

Image 4: RAF Baby Bomb.

Source: Der Bundesminister des Innern (ed.), betrifft: Verfassungsschutz 72’ (Bonn 1973), p. 105.

While the RAF used femininity as camouflage throughout its history, this tactic is particularly strongly associated with the second generation of fighters. One month after Susanne Albrecht, Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar had killed Jürgen Ponto, a similar incident made national headlines. On 5 September 1977, group members ambushed the president of the German Employer’s Federation, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, on his way from his office to his flat in Cologne. The group blocked the road with a car, forcing Schleyer’s driver Heinz Marcisz to stop. Marcisz, Schleyer’s bodyguard and two police officers died in a hail of more than 130 bullets that hit their cars in the following two minutes (Winkler 2007: 313). The RAF members involved left with Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the only survivor of the attack. At the crime scene the kidnappers left behind a pram, which they had used to store weapons. On 11 September, ‘image of the week’ in the newspaper Die Welt featured this pram. The corresponding article referred to the perpetrators as diabolic and fascist ‘masters of cold-blooded heartlessness’ (quoted in Bielby 2012: 29). Clare Bielby convincingly argues that the ‘pram carrying weapons and the woman terrorist who bears a bomb are visual demonstrations of the supposed paradox of women taking rather than giving life’ (ibid.).

The use of femininity as camouflage by women in the RAF, however, was not limited to the roles of mother or mother-to-be. On 7 August 1985, the 21-year old American soldier Edward Pimental was found dead in a piece of woodland on the outskirts of Wiesbaden. The young man was last seen shortly before his death. According to eye witnesses, he left a bar with a young German woman, who had promised him ‘drugs or love or both’ (‘Der P-Man’ 1985). The woman was later

identified as RAF member Birgit Elisabeth Hogefeld. She and Pimental went to a small forest, where other group members were waiting. The group killed Pimental and stole his ID card. On the following day, 8 August 1985, the RAF used the card to access the grounds of the US-air base in Frankfurt, where they parked a car containing explosives. The car bomb killed two people and wounded 23 (Trinius 2007). The bombing in general and the Pimental murder in particular were the subjects of extensive criticism from the radical Left and also from detained RAF members (Kraushaar 2008: 363). In the 1990s, Hogefeld distanced herself from the RAF and condemned the shooting of Pimental (Hogefeld 1996).

To shed more light on the use of femininity as camouflage by women in the RAF, the case study analyses the first event of this kind in the history of the group.

2.6 Case Study: The Liberation of Andreas Baader in