RAF Recordings
July 31, 2007
The tapes, thought to have been destroyed, were discovered by two documentary filmmakers and posted on national broadcaster ARD's Web site on Monday.
The recordings were made between October 1975 and May 1976 during the trial against notorious members of the first RAF generation, Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe.
It involves 21 tapes with some 12 hours of recordings from the courtroom in the high security Stammheim prison near Stuttgart. The tapes were initially supposed to be erased after they were transcribed, but were forgotten.
The RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, conducted a reign of teror in Germany in the 1970s- and 80s for kidnapping and killing prominent establishment figures in the name of class struggle and left-wing idealism. The group was most active in 1977, when it was responsible for a spate of murders including German Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback and Jürgen Ponto, chief executive of Dresdner Bank AG.
Baader criticizes prison conditions
The recordings include Ensslin stating that the RAF was responsible for attacks on the CIA headquarters as well as the Fifth US Division in Frankfurt, and the US headquarters in Heidelberg.
"What embodies the policies of the RAF is the obligation to resistance in the Federal Republic of Germany," Ensslin said in the recording. A responsibility towards imperialistic policies could only be met with resistance, she said.
Baader talked about suffering under solitary confinement. He criticized that the prisoners were not allowed to walk in the prison yard during the three days of trial per week, although this had been promised. Baader said the accused were forced to spend several hours per day in soundproof and windowless solitary cells.
The tapes also include Meinhof's last testimony prior to her suicide in May 1976.
"It is, of course, a police tactic in counter-insurgency conflicts, in guerilla warfare, to take out the leaders," Meinhof, a journalist-turned-terrorist says on the tape.
Film to air in September
The group unleashed a wave of terror across the country in the 1970s and 1980s, which climaxed in the so-called "German Autumn" of 1977. It ended with the suicides of the RAF's core leadership and the brutal kidnapping and murder of the president of the German Employers' Association, Hanns Martin Schleyer.
According to Gemran state network NDR, which is co-producing the documentary film, the authors came across parts of the tapes in secondary rooms at the higher regional court in Stuttgart during their research.
Lengthy negotiations between the authors Stefan Aust und Helmar Büchel and the court, as well as the federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe followed. The prosecutor initially wanted the documents destroyed. But copies of the tapes were then handed over to the journalists via the public records office in Ludwigsburg.
The RAF film by Aust and Büchel will air on German public television in September.