Gudrun Ensslin was indignant. In any case, the co-founder and actual mastermind of the Red Army Faction terror group cursed: “These assholes! It’s a good thing that this thing was foisted on the neo-Nazis!” This is how star witness Gerhard Müller, one of only a very few terrorists who have ever made relevant statements, described a conversation between Ensslin and Irmgard Möller on April 13, 1976, in which it was about a attack several months before the RAF was founded.
On February 13, 1970, unidentified perpetrators set fire to the old people’s home of the Jewish Cultural Community in Munich with a petrol canister. Seven older people, mostly survivors of the Holocaust, died in the house at Reichenbachstrasse 27. In view of the openly anti-Semitic propaganda of the NPD and its like-minded people, the public quickly got the impression that right-wing extremists must be responsible for the most serious anti-Semitic attack in the Federal Republic up to that point.
At the time, the public did not learn anything about the contradicting statements made by the key witness Müller; unlike other statements he made about the interior of the first RAF generation, it remained secret. Terrorism expert Wolfgang Kraushaar first came across this when he was researching the roots of German left-wing terrorism. To this end, he investigated a series of four attacks on Israeli or Jewish targets in or from Munich, which took place within eleven days in February 1970 in Munich. Although this wave of attacks claimed 55 lives, it has been almost completely forgotten by the general public.
The first publisher refused
For his 2013 book “When will you finally start fighting the sacred cow Israel?” the historian, who works at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, dug through the anti-Semitic morass on which left-wing terrorism has thrived since 1967. But the publication of Kraushaar’s book was postponed because his house publisher Hamburger Edition rejected the manuscript at the last moment. The Rowohlt publishing house finally published the extensive volume.
It is not new that hatred of Israel was one of the main drivers of German left-wing terrorism. Many members of the first two generations of the RAF were trained in camps run by various Palestinian groups in Jordan or Yemen. The cooperation between anti-Semitic terrorists such as the PLO, the PFLP and other groups with their German “comrades” was obvious even during their illegal “struggle”.
Attempted assassination on Memorial Day
The first potentially major attack by German left-wing terrorists, which luckily did not happen, was aimed at the Jewish community center in West Berlin on November 9, 1969, the 31st anniversary of “Reichskristallnacht”. Wolfgang Kraushaar explained this long-forgotten assassination in a sensational book in 2005 and was able to assign the murder plan to the “Tuparamros West Berlin”, a militant group led by the “Communard” Dieter Kunzelmann.
However, the facet of left-wing anti-Semitism plays only a minor role in today’s prevailing narrative about the RAF. In Stefan Aust’s bestseller “Baader-Meinhof-Complex” there are examples of this, but they seem marginalized compared to his central thesis. Aust sees, from his perspective no doubt correctly, in the RAF above all an uprising of ideologized middle-class children. But that’s just one side.
The importance that other authors attach to hatred of Jews as a motive for left-wing terrorism is even lower. The journalist Willi Winkler, for example, who in all seriousness calls the rampage of the RAF against democracy and the rule of law a “great German passion story”, titles a central chapter of his book “Never Again Auschwitz”. This borders on active deception. Because anti-Zionism in particular is one of the consistent motives of radical parts of the student movement and of “anti-imperialist” terrorism, incidentally among the West German left sometimes to this day.
Ulrike Meinhof’s hatred of Jews
After the Palestinian attack on Olympia in 1972, Ulrike Meinhof wrote a paper while in prison “on the strategy of the anti-imperialist struggle”. In it, she praised the kidnapping of Jewish athletes as exemplary and attacked the Federal Republic for having paid Israel “its reparation capital” and delivered weapons.
According to Meinhof, the terrorists “took hostages from a people who pursued a policy of extermination against them” – a legitimate means in their understanding. The attack on the “merry games” in Munich, which were organized as a contrast to the 1936 Olympic Games, would have revealed the parallelism of the two major events.
At the time, this line of argument did not even convince Gudrun Ensslin, who recognized that the RAF could only further isolate itself with such a manifesto. In any case, she polemicized against the Meinhof paper in the internal “information system”, which she mistakenly attributed to Holger Meins, who was also imprisoned. Apparently hatred of Israel was omnipresent in the RAF leadership.
Bavarian nucleus of the RAF
Wolfgang Kraushaar’s book now sheds light on the ideological character of the RAF’s Bavarian germ cell for the first time. Under the name “Tupamaros Munich” under the leadership of the supposed “hash rebel” Fritz Teufel, this militant group had formed at the beginning of 1970, from which Irmgard Möller, Rolf Heissler and Brigitte Mohnhaupt later rose to become the innermost core of the RAF. This group was responsible for at least two dozen fire and bomb attacks in 1970/71, and it was only fortunate that no one was seriously injured.
What is new about Kraushaar’s thesis is that he places this wave of violence, which largely took place parallel to the preparation phase of the first RAF generation, in the context of the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic attacks by Palestinian groups in Munich and from Munich, and establishes a connection to the murderous attack that has not yet been clarified linked to Reichenbachstrasse.
However, he cannot present any convincing evidence for his thesis. Kraushaar cites eleven reasons why it could have been German left-wing extremists associated with the “Tupamaros Munich” who set the devastating fire in the Jewish retirement home. But none of this is more than intelligent speculation.
There is no evidence
The detailed and very readable description of the other three attacks in those February days gives the impression that there is a connection. But there are no indications of this. Very vague connections via the contact woman of the “Tupamaros” in the Middle East, Ina Siepmann, do not replace solid evidence. It is conceivable, sometimes even probable, that Kraushaar’s assumptions are correct – he cannot prove this connection.
Just as little, by the way, as his insinuation that the police and politicians responsible for the 1972 Olympic Games had not drawn sufficient conclusions from the experience of the series of attacks two and a half years earlier and were therefore partly to blame for the catastrophe of the attack on Israeli athletes. However, in an internal description of the task, which is in the files on the Olympic attack in the main state archive in Munich, the series from 1970 is of course referred to. In view of the catastrophic outcome, there are good reasons to doubt whether the right conclusions were drawn. In any case, the anti-Israel wave of violence was not suppressed.
Kraushaar’s previous book drew very similar criticism Verena Becker and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. “Verena Becker and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution” (Hamburg Edition) in 2010, which speculated about possible connections between the RAF terrorist Verena Becker and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. It is quite possible that Fritz Teufel, who died in 2010, was the mastermind behind the attack, which has remained unsolved to this day. You could have trusted him. But that’s nothing more than a suspicion. Since Wolfgang Kraushaar, despite his extensive research in archives and numerous discussions with contemporary witnesses, cannot present anything concrete, the question of the perpetrator must remain open.
Kraushaar’s merit, however, is that he pointed to the often repressed birth of German left-wing terrorism from the spirit of anti-Semitism. Because the Baader-Meinhof group and all its sympathizers and successors were actually, as the British author Jillian Becker put it in 1977, “Hitler’s children”.
This article was first published in 2013.