(The Appendix to this article is here<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n In the late 1970s, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) faced a crucial moment in the worst period of domestic terrorism the country had experienced since its founding. Following a five-year period of bombings, robberies, and kidnappings perpetrated by an urban guerilla group called the Red Army Faction (RAF) and other violent leftist groups, the country entered an especially violent phase that was to become known as the \u201cGerman Autumn\u201d:<\/p>\n The successful liberation of the Landshut in Mogadishu on October 18, 1977 marked the end of the \u201cGerman Autumn.\u201d The very next morning, the imprisoned RAF members were found dead in their cells; hours later, Schleyer\u2019s corpse was found in the trunk of a car.<\/p>\n In 1978, some of the events of the \u201cGerman Autumn\u201d and its aftermath received great coverage in Jim Jones\u2019 news broadcasts in Jonestown, Guyana, as did Jones\u2019 detailed reporting of the kidnapping and subsequent assassination of Italy\u2019s former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Italian group \u201cRed Brigade\u201d (March to May 1978). This latter action had resembled so much the pattern of \u201cGerman kidnappings\u201d that in a first moment, it was assumed the Red Brigade had acted with the support of RAF. As had occurred with the Schleyer kidnapping, several persons were killed in the assault, and Moro was taken as a hostage. The Red Brigade demanded the release of several prisoners, and when the demands were not met, assassinated Moro, who was found dead in the trunk of a car. With this, a fear of \u201cGermanization\u201d arose in Italy: a fear of \u201ca state behind barbed wire\u201d whose \u201canti-terrorism\u201d measures would pervert its democratic structures and turn it into a police state. Karrin Hanshew, author of \u201cTerror and Democracy in West Germany,\u201d recalls<\/p>\n government buildings walled in by sandbags and patrolled by SWAT teams. For some, it illustrated the German state in crisis: battered down and seemingly helpless in the face of a handful of terrorists. For others, it revealed what they suspected had been there all along: the face of authoritarian or fascist power. Viewed alongside the heavily circulated mugshots of suspected terrorists, this image, with its two divergent interpretations, captures the competing fears that defined West Germany\u2019s experience of terrorism: the violent anarchy of a state too weak to defend itself or a police state at war with its own population.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It is with the background of that divergence \u2013 or rather division of interpretations \u2013 that Jim Jones constructs his narrative of West German revolutionary groups, a divergence that has its roots in an earlier and most sinister part of the country\u2019s history: Hitler\u2019s Germany, and the division of Germany after World War II.<\/p>\n Two Germanys<\/strong><\/p>\n Always differentiate the two Germanys. Germany was artificially divided at Yalta by U.S. imperialists: East Germany to the communists, and West Germany, a puppet regime of the U.S. imperialists that now prides itself openly in being the inheritor of Hitler\u2019s Nazi fascist Third Reich\u2026 and East Germany, which is a communist modern state. (Jim Jones, 1978)[5]<\/strong><\/sup><\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n Meeting at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed to demand Nazi Germany\u2019s unconditional surrender and set out conditions and a framework for restoring the invaded countries. Stalin insisted upon a Soviet sphere of influence in the Eastern European region, Churchill pressed for free elections and democracy in all countries (including those of Eastern Europe), and Roosevelt, in order to set the basis for lasting peace, found it paramount that the Soviet Union join the United Nations. Agreement was reached on most points; Roosevelt \u2013 who would not live to see the consequences \u2013 considered the conference to be a success. However, because Stalin\u2019s commitment to allow democratic systems in the Soviet-dominated countries was soon set aside, Yalta is often seen as laying the foundation for the \u201cIron Curtain\u201d that would soon divide Europe in two strictly separated parts and herald the dawn of the Cold War.<\/p>\n At the time, though, the common goal of the war allies regarding Nazi Germany was clear: Never again would this country \u2013 whose murderous racial ideology and violent expansion policies had caused the deaths of so many millions and plunged the world into unprecedented disaster \u2013 ever become strong enough for similar aggressive actions. In the terms of surrender for Hitler\u2019s Third Reich, it was fixed that<\/p>\n The UK, US and Soviet Union shall possess supreme authority with\u00a0respect to Germany. In the exercise of such authority they will take such steps, including the complete dismemberment of Germany, as they deem requisite for future peace and security.[6]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n As a first step, Germany was divided into four zones of occupation \u2013 French, British, American, and Soviet \u2013 with respective zone sectors in Berlin, and an Allied Control Council to decide on questions regarding the whole region (including the formerly-occupied countries). Its division into two separate states happened four years later, in 1949, and was a result of the breakdown of the alliance: the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) was established in the Soviet zone, and the British, French, and US occupational zones merged to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany).[7]<\/sup><\/a> Berlin, located in the Eastern zone, was divided into Western and Eastern sectors.<\/p>\n Exorcising Hitler<\/strong>[8]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n In the first months following Nazi Germany\u2019s surrender of May 1945, however, the Allies were still united in the process of dismantling the 12-year history of Hitler\u2019s Third Reich. In the Potsdam Agreement of July 1945, and as an obvious first step, they agreed on the dissolution of the Nazi party \u2013 known as the NSDAP[9]<\/sup><\/a> \u2013 and other Nazi organizations, on the demilitarization of former Wehrmacht forces, and on the political decentralization of the country. Most importantly, it was agreed that these measurements had to be accompanied by a thorough process of so-called \u201cdenazification.\u201d Trials against German war criminals, and criminals against humanity, such as members of concentration camp staff, were held almost immediately after internees were freed in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Mauthausen. The trials in Nuremberg of Hermann G\u00f6ring, Rudolf Hess, and other leading figures of Hitler\u2019s National Socialist regime brought to light the whole extent of the shocking atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, both in Germany and on an international scale.<\/p>\n \u201cDenazification,\u201d however, was meant to go beyond the sentencing of war criminals. Its aim was to \u201cdeprogram\u201d the German people as a whole. As a precondition for a new and democratic start, National Socialists not only had to be thoroughly removed from society, but National Socialist convictions were to be eradicated from public opinion and people\u2019s minds.<\/p>\n The means by which this goal was to be reached differed, depending on the political interests of the occupational forces. While the Soviets opted for a kind of \u201csocialization for communism,\u201d \u201cre-education classes\u201d in the American sector aimed at teaching non-authoritarian methods of conduct and speech, in order to set the grounds for new democratic structures. Except in the Soviet zone, a sense of collective<\/em> responsibility for the atrocities of the Nazi regime in German people was considered essential. To that end, films and posters depicted photographs of concentration camps, of gas chambers and corpses, with texts like, \u201cThis town is guilty! You are guilty!\u201d The main \u201cdenazification\u201d measurement, however \u2013 one that all four forces had agreed upon \u2013 consisted in banning all those persons who had contributed to National Socialist crimes in one way or the other (so also former members of the NSDAP) from work in the country\u2019s public sector. Accordingly, lawyers, policemen, functionaries, and teachers were immediately removed from their posts, with about 400,000 eventually interned in \u201cdenazification camps.\u201d<\/p>\n It was an ambitious project, started with enormous zeal. Until 1949, about four million denazification proceedings were carried out in the Western sectors alone, with individuals being classified as major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, followers, and persons exonerated. Consequences ranged from death sentences to restrictions in professional life and civil rights. By 1951, about 500 Nazi criminals had been executed in West Germany, sometimes against the protests of the population.<\/p>\n In the end, these executions, probably more than anything else, made it clear to Germans that a Fourth Reich<\/em> would not be tolerated. In any other area, especially as regards the personnel changes in the public sector, the initial zeal for \u201cdenazification\u201d was soon replaced by pragmatism. During the Third Reich, people outside of Hitler\u2019s NSDAP had been excluded from certain key positions, so the percentage of party members was especially high in the area of public service. This led to the postwar realization that the country could not be run without them. In the newly-founded government of chancellor Konrad Adenauer[10]<\/sup><\/a> \u2013 and against the initial aims of the Allied Forces \u2013 the very same people who\u2019d been removed from their often-highly influential posts were rehired; and amnesty laws were adopted to absolve even many who were guilty of Nazi crimes. Through these actions, Adenauer was clearly responding to the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Germans who felt they\u2019d been treated unjustly by the Allied Forces; they preferred to \u201cmove forward\u201d and forget everything that had to do with their Nazi past. In addition, as the Cold War began and new enemies appeared, interest in denazification decreased considerably among Western forces. This was especially true for the U.S., which came to consider West Germany as an important strategic ally against Stalin\u2019s sphere of influence. Though reluctantly, the occupational forces accepted Adenauer\u2019s demands. The official end of denazification procedures was fixed in an agreement, and subsequent German law in 1951.[11]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n The real numbers of former Nazis in public positions of postwar West Germany have been disclosed only recently,[12]<\/sup><\/a> and the results are shocking: In the 1950s, more than two-thirds of the leading posts of West Germany\u2019s Federal Criminal Police Office were still held by former SS members; 80% percent of Hitler\u2019s lawyers and public prosecutors continued to work as such in the FRG; likewise, the number of government members who\u2019d been members of the NSDAP was considerable.<\/p>\n But the most thorough denazification had taken place in the Soviet zone, with its very different political goal.<\/p>\n The \u201cbetter Germany\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n As Catherine Abbott writes, through the establishment of Jonestown, \u201cJones hoped to create a socialist utopian commune that would rival the United States\u2019 capitalist society.\u201d[13]<\/a> She quotes David Chidester:<\/p>\n The Jonestown utopia \u2026 became a new center, an axis mundi, in the geographical imagination of the Peoples Temple. Jonestown was the new \u2018city upon a hill,\u2019 a utopian model for a socialist community.[14]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n To many \u2013 among them a number of American leftists and Jewish refugees, disillusioned by racism and segregation in American postwar society \u2013 the newly-founded East German state became an equally attractive center: a promised land where the utopia of a socialist society, based on equality, would finally become real. And indeed, while it became more and more obvious that in West Germany, not even a former SS membership was a serious obstacle for people to return to their posts, the DRG\u2019s founding principle was an explicit antifascism: the country claimed to be the direct successor of the communist resistance against Hitler, determined to build up \u201cthe better Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n Individuals who shared that dream came from all sides: The Harvard-educated American communist Stephen Wechsler, who served in the U.S. occupational forces in Germany, daringly jumped into the river Danube in order to reach the Soviet zone, where he went to live (and still lives) as Victor Grossmann.[15]<\/sup><\/a> Political and\/or Jewish emigrants, among them some real heroes of the resistance (like the writer Anna Seghers) returned and soon occupied high political posts in the newly founded DRG. \u201cEvery place you went, there were Jews in leadership positions!\u201d Grossmann describes his very first impressions. Salomea Genin[16]<\/sup><\/a> was one of those who returned: born in Berlin to Jewish parents, she had to flee Nazi Germany as a seven-year-old. The family went to Australia, where the girl grew up to become a dedicated communist. The vision of her native Germany, transformed into an antifascist utopia, free of antisemitism, could not but attract her.<\/p>\n However, there were some obvious flaws in East Germany\u2019s founding principle. Even with former resistance fighters in leading positions, the alleged \u201cdirect succession of the communist resistance\u201d hardly applied to the larger mass of Germans. Members of former resistance groups were rare, in both<\/em> East and West Germany, and their \u201csuccession\u201d could hardly be drawn upon the base of historical facts. Ideology would solve the dilemma. A new theory of fascism, propagated by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), served as a founding myth for the new state and redefined the country\u2019s coming to terms with its past.<\/p>\n In the East German (i.e., Soviet) version, Hitler\u2019s rise in Germany had been a mere result of the struggle between working class and bourgeoisie, between socialism and capitalism. A small group of monopoly capitalists, so the tale went, had helped Hitler to come into power. The real<\/em> victims of the Nazi regime were thus their traditional antagonists, that is, the working class. It was on these grounds that the leaders of the GDF could decline to take a share in West Germany\u2019s payments of reparation to Jewish emigrants. In their view, to pay such reparations would have meant to take money from German workers, that is, from the main victims of Hitler\u2019s fascism. Thorough expropriations had taken place in East Germany, not only of Nazis, but of everyone who\u2019d owned land or houses. With this, the cause of fascism \u2013 namely capitalism \u2013 had been eradicated, and socialism was victorious, which, as the SED phrased it, made of East Germans, \u201cvictors of history.\u201d<\/p>\n This version not only disregards the role Western forces had played in the defeat of Nazi Germany, but it shapes the image of the new<\/em> enemy countries in the nascent Cold War. Wartime events received a new interpretation: e.g., the destruction of Dresden in East Germany by British and U.S. air forces in February 1945 \u2013 which had resulted in the deaths of about 25,000 civilians \u2013 could now easily be viewed as perpetrated by imperialists, capitalists, and fascists, which were all one and the same. This interpretation offered East Germans the possibility of feeling as victims of capitalism, instead of perpetrators in the criminal regime whose violent expansion policies triggered World War II. As the guilty parties in Hitler\u2019s rise had also<\/em> been capitalists \u2013 an extinct species in the GDR \u2013 ordinary people were exonerated. Unlike in the Western zones, \u201ccollective guilt\u201d of East German people was never a topic. According to the SED, the victory of socialism in the \u201cbetter Germany\u201d had overcome any remnant of fascism, so the country\u2019s Nazi past was simply no longer their business.<\/p>\n The coming to terms with that past \u2013 as it had to take place somewhere<\/em> \u2013 was externalized,[17]<\/sup><\/a> and that externalization was to the West. \u201cIt was as if Hitler himself had become a West German,\u201d[18]<\/sup><\/a> the historian Bernd Faulenbach remembers. The East German writer Stephan Hermlin relates that the majority of the people willingly accepted this \u201cexoneration by externalization,\u201d probably as willingly as their West German neighbors had accepted Adenauer\u2019s offer to \u201cmove forward\u201d and just forget about it.<\/p>\n The GDR also maintained that antisemitism had been overcome. It was true, as Jones reports, that<\/p>\n There is not a Jew in that country that still does not get at least 600 dollars monthly, just because of them being Jews and treated horribly under the hard, dreaded brutal regime of Adolf Hitler\u2019s Nazi Germany.[19]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n But at the same time, SED ideology had converted Jewish people into \u201csecond class victims.\u201d Salomea Genin reports:<\/p>\n [M]ost of the Jews weren\u2019t resistance fighters. They were only \u2013 and I say this, of course, in quotation marks \u2013 \u2018Jews.\u2019 They actually differentiated between the Jews who had been resistance fighters and those who hadn\u2019t, by paying out two different pensions. The resistance fighters were paid 1800 marks, which was a hell of a lot of money in the GDR, and the Jews, if they hadn\u2019t been resistance fighters, got 1400.[20]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It wasn\u2019t that the six million murdered Jews were forgotten:<\/p>\n [A]ll 14-year-olds were taken to a former concentration camp. There were excellent books and excellent films.\u2026 But at the same time, it didn\u2019t teach those kids that it had anything to do with them.[21]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Rather than one of the causes that had led to Hitler\u2019s rise, then, antisemitism became in the SED\u2019s ideology a mere means of veiling its \u201creal\u201d cause: again, capitalism. With this understood, antisemitism was no longer a problem, with the consequence that many former stereotypes (like \u201cAll Jews are rich,\u201d etc.) survived in East German society. Genin relates that insisting on one\u2019s Jewish<\/em> identity (in apparent opposition to Marxist identity) was easily viewed as counterrevolutionary.<\/p>\n In the early 1950s, when Stalin started spotting the imperialist enemy among the supposed friends of Israel \u2013 for example, in the show trial of Rudolph Slansky in Czechoslovakia in 1952, in which Jewish communist party members were tortured into confessing to be agents of a Zionist conspiracy \u2013 East Germany\u2019s Jewish citizens, if suspected of counterrevolutionary activities, risked being executed after trials in Russia, or simply murdered, and many fled back to the West. Following Stalin\u2019s death in 1953, the GDR released its Jewish political prisoners and made an effort to improve their situation. However, the daily reality of life in a Soviet-dominated, economically-lagging country had shattered the hopes of many, and the numbers of those seeking emigration to Western Europe increased to the dimension of a mass exodus. Ideology alone would no longer suffice in protecting the \u201cvictors.\u201d An \u201cantifascist barrier\u201d had to be erected. In the Western part of the world, it came to be better known as the Berlin Wall.<\/p>\n In 1978, Jones presented East Germany as \u201cone of the most prosperous nations on earth, even according to capitalist opinion.\u201d[22]<\/sup><\/a> Although it is true that conditions had improved in those years, the GDR\u2019s general economic situation was still deplorable. Unlike in West Germany, no foreign support had been granted to help build up the country; quite the contrary, postwar payments of reparation to the Soviet Union, totaling 130 times per person higher in reparation payments than in West Germany, had almost starved the country. The \u201cPeople\u2019s Uprising\u201d of 1953, in which more than a million East German citizens organized strikes and demonstrations to protest disastrous living conditions, put an end to those payments. Their anger and frustration had been such that not even Soviet tanks and troops could bring the protests under control. As a consequence, the new Soviet leadership decided to loosen some of the policies Stalin had established with East Germany. Substantial recovery, however, was never reached.[23]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n The eventual reunification of the two Germanys after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was met with enormous enthusiasm on both sides. Since it was not a unification on equal parts, but rather an inclusion of the GDR into West German structures, many Eastern citizens found it hard to adapt to the new conditions and felt their own experiences to be disvalued. A few, like Grossmann, see the breakdown of the GDR and the subsequent reunification as another challenge to build a progressive and better society.[24]<\/a><\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n The image Jim Jones creates of the two Germanys in 1978 mirrors the rhetoric of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Among his assertions: East Germany is \u201cnext to most modern state in the world,\u201d[25]<\/sup><\/a> \u201cwhere there\u2019s no prejudice and people have all socialist benefits,\u201d[26]<\/sup><\/a> the country is \u201cone of the most prosperous nations on earth, even according to capitalist opinion.\u201d[27]<\/sup><\/a> At the same time, Jones hardly ever mentions West Germany without using the words \u201cfascist,\u201d \u201cneo-fascist,\u201d \u201ccapitalist,\u201d \u201crepressive,\u201d and sometimes, all of them. Rivalled only by South Korea,[28]<\/sup><\/a> with its allegedly prospering neighbor in the North, Jones\u2019 West Germany of the late 1970s is said to be one of \u201cthe most cruel, brutal, fascist tyrann[ies] in the world.\u201d[29]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n However, one may assume that some of Jones\u2019 rather lengthy insertions are not the words of Radio Moscow or similar sources from which he takes his news, but his own. Time and again, the citizens of Jonestown are exhorted never to confuse the GDR with \u201cThird Reich capitalist West<\/em> Germany\u201d[30]<\/sup><\/a>; \u201cthey say they\u2019re the true inheritors of the Third Reich, \u2026 Jews have all fled West Germany \u2026.\u201d[31]<\/sup><\/a> \u201cwhere every tombstone of every Jewish grave bears a swastika mark.\u201d[32]<\/sup><\/a> Consistently, Jones\u2019 West Germany keeps its political prisoners, not just in \u201cfortress prisons,\u201d but in \u201cconcentration camps.\u201d[33]<\/sup><\/a> In the picture he paints, the atrocities of the Third Reich are not at all a matter of the past, but either are happening right now or may happen again any minute. That the country is allegedly a \u201cpuppet regime\u201d of the U.S. \u2013 quintessentially imperialist, capitalist, and fascist \u2013 evokes the idea that in this, the U.S. might even pull the strings.<\/p>\n Abbott relates[34]<\/sup><\/a> that by 1972 Jones had already evoked the idea of an imminent \u201cThird Reich\u201d in the U.S. According to Jones, the U.S. government planned to eliminate all African Americans from society within only a few months. Exactly like Jewish people in Hitler\u2019s Germany, they were to be brought to concentration camps and murdered in gas chambers[35]<\/sup><\/a>. And like the Wannsee protocols of 1942, in which the details of the \u201cEndl\u00f6sung der Judenfrage\u201d (\u201cFinal solution of the Jewish question,\u201d that is, their extermination) had been stipulated, the U.S. government\u2019s alleged plan \u2013 called the \u201cKing Alfred Plan\u201d \u2013 was one of utmost secrecy.[36]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n The existence of concentration camps in the S.S. was a familiar subject in Jones\u2019 talks (or threats) regarding the U.S.: they are the places where people are going to rot if they ever leave Jonestown (amazingly, even if they intend to leave for Russia[37]<\/sup><\/a>); they seem to be a symbol of what Jonestown saves them from. By stressing the close alliance between \u201cHitler\u2019s\u201d West Germany and the \u201cfascist\u201d U.S. whenever possible, Jones\u2019 image of the \u201cpuppet state\u2019s\u201d horrendous and supposedly perpetuated-NS past certainly adds weight to the threat. Pictures of U.S. concentration camps, dedicated to all but Caucasians, need first to be imagined, and in a second step, believed, whereas the pictures of those in Germany are known, and they are very real.<\/p>\n West Germany: 1968 and the rise of leftist violent groups<\/strong><\/p>\n While the DRG was still struggling to solve its economic problems and redefine relations with their Russian \u201cfriends\u201d (as the SED called them), West Germany had overcome the hardship and material shortages of early postwar years. Supported by America\u2019s European Recovery Program, and having adopted the system of a Social Market Economy, it blossomed in what was to become known as the German Economic Miracle. Full employment was reached, and a consumerist lifestyle dominated everyday life. Only ten to fifteen years after the Nuremberg trials, West Germany was a conservative democracy following in many regards the U.S. model. It had become a trusted partner again and enjoyed a renewed approval on an international scale. The plan to \u201cmove forward\u201d and leave behind the memories of \u201cdifferent and difficult times\u201d \u2013 a frequently used euphemism \u2013 had apparently worked out. However, that would change when the next generation inside and outside the lecture halls of German universities began to talk politics \u2026 and to ask questions.<\/p>\n Violent leftist groups in West Germany \u2013 \u201cRed Army Faction\u201d (RAF), \u201cMovement June 2,\u201d and \u201cRevolutionary Cells\u201d \u2013 developed not from fringe groups, but right from the center of the 1960s students\u2019 movement. Several of the later members had been politically active in the German Socialist Students\u2019 League (SDS), whose various international contacts \u2013 mainly with U.S. activists and groups, like the Black Panther Party and Angela Davis \u2013 would become an important influence for the conception and goals of their political activities.[38]<\/sup><\/a> Poor conditions for studying, outdated curricula, a lack of democracy in the very authoritarian academic structures, and, like in other Western countries, the war in Vietnam had triggered the first student protests in West Berlin. These early protests followed the models of \u201csit-ins\u201d at Berkeley and were influenced by Martin Luther King\u2019s non-violent resistance before 1967. Due to a massive overreaction of the police and the denunciation of the students by the influential rightwing Springer press (which owned the most widely-read newspapers and magazines in West Germany), the movement soon swept the whole country. As in other countries, the protests were encouraged by similar movements on an international scale: conditions in the Third World and black Americans\u2019 struggle against racism became more and more touchstones of political interest and solidarity. In the case of German students, however, all these topics were fueled by \u2013 and, in a way, merged with \u2013 an issue of no less importance for the young generation: the country\u2019s response to its NS past. That the generation responsible for that past more often than not blocked massively any<\/em> form of dealing with it, sparked a decisive shift to the left in large parts of the students\u2019 movement, and caused many to suspect far more than just \u201cauthoritarianism\u201d in the country\u2019s attitude toward the movement.<\/p>\n Some authors have found it difficult to understand how so many young West Germans could mistake their country\u2019s reaction to protest movements, and \u2013 later on \u2013 to leftist terrorism as \u201cfascism.\u201d \u201cGermany was doing its best,\u201d Sarah Colvin says in an interview;[39]<\/a> Jillian Becker, author of Hitler\u2019s Childre<\/em>n, points out that a country where improvements of imprisonment conditions for \u201cpublic enemies\u201d are heatedly debated in parliament, can hardly be called \u201cfascist.\u201d She certainly has a point.<\/p>\n However, some understanding of the implications at stake might be provided by the more accurate statement that, rather than confronting a \u201cNazi past,\u201d the generation of \u201868 was dealing with a \u201cpost-Nazi present.\u201d While it is true that people\u2019s individual NS past was mostly silenced, it was all but silent: Still in the present author\u2019s youth (20 years after \u201868), elderly bystanders used to yell at demonstrators and demanded that they be sent to the gas chambers. As to NS beliefs, prejudices, or views, there was no real need for young West Germans to rely on history books alone. Such views were frequently uttered, and loudly enough. And the violence with which the West German police reacted to demonstrations and other forms of behavior that seemed to defy their authority was not just a reminder of Hitler\u2019s SS. It was at least in part ordered and executed by former SS members. The fact that students might be put on trial in a court with the lawyers, public prosecutors, and judges who were likely to be the same court officers who\u2019d sentenced people during the Third Reich, was not apt to fortify their trust in the system.<\/p>\n In 1978, after the kidnapping and murder of the former SS man and Chair of the Employer\u2019s Association Hanns Martin Schleyer, the German publisher Walter B\u00f6hlich wrote on the RAF:<\/p>\n [I]t isn\u2019t what happened under Hitler that motivates them, but what the Schleyers of this world do today\u2026; that they represent a democratically organized society just as easily as they did a fascistic society; that they remained in the new Germany where they were, namely, on top; that they are implicated in a continuity, which wouldn\u2019t be the case if fascism had been apprehended as the horrendous crime that it was.[40]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Moreover, while the FRG was a democracy, it was young, and its bureaucracy still had authoritarian aspects, so could it be a democracy one could rely on? A majority of its citizens had not been socialized to appreciate the democratic values of criticism or freedom of opinion that the young generation desperately tried to impose. Many of those in leading positions found these values even wrong<\/em>. West German students of the 1960s had witnessed cases of severe censorship of the press ( e.g. when the publisher and entire staff of a magazine were arrested after printing a critical article). Many of them feared that fascism might rise again. In their protests, they were often decried, sometimes criminalized, and mostly not heard. The feeling of frustration and powerlessness gave some of them the idea that demonstrating in the streets might not be enough.<\/p>\n The conflict wasn\u2019t softened by the fact that, in sharp contrast, \u201cthe other side\u201d \u2013 the government and large parts of the elder generation \u2013 also<\/em> feared for the young democracy, haunted by a different aspect of the very same ghosts. For them, the growing aggressiveness of student activists, and even more so the surge of violent armed groups, were reminiscent of the militarism of the SA-youth of the early 1930s who\u2019d perpetrated massive street violence against Jews and NS critics, thus shattering the democracy of the Weimar Republic and promoting Hitler\u2019s rise. The state was thus battling against the RAF as against \u201cHitler\u2019s children\u201d (\u201cred fascists\u201d) and introduced new anti-terrorism legislation that made representatives of both sides fear that West Germany would end up as a police state.<\/p>\n These fears, however, were the fears of the 1970s. Prior to 1967, nonviolence had been a principle of most West German student organizations; the rare exceptions were instances of violence against objects.<\/p>\n * * * * * *<\/p>\n It is a terrible thing to kill. A series of books, films, and documentaries have traced the biographies of Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, and Andreas Baader, the founding and leading figures of the RAF. Most make for good reading and provide enlightening information on a whole generation\u2019s dilemmas. As to the personal reasons for the RAF leaders to cross the line from political activism to armed struggle, however, no conclusive answer has so far been found.<\/p>\n Gudrun Ensslin, born in 1940 to a family with a Protestant background \u2013 her father was a pastor \u2013 was, by all accounts, a brilliant student, an open-minded young woman, and a passionate reader. At university, she chose literary studies with the intention to become a teacher. Together with her fianc\u00e9, writer Bernward Vesper, she founded a publishing house and edited an anthology of texts against the atomic bomb. In the electoral campaign of 1965, she became an activist for the Social Democrats. Like many young Germans, however, her hopes were frustrated by the party\u2019s decision in 1966 to enter into coalition with the conservative Christian Democrats. With this coalition, in the view of Ensslin and many like her, the possibility of political opposition within Parliament had been shattered. She engaged in the \u201cextraparlamentary opposition\u201d \u2013 commonly known as APO \u2013 a political protest movement within the West German student movement.<\/p>\n Like Rudi Dutschke, one of the APO\u2019s most prominent spokesmen, Vesper and Ensslin were deeply interested in the Black Power movement in the U.S. They worked on German translations of relevant texts, and engaged in the desertion campaigns for black GIs.[44]<\/sup><\/a> In 1967, they had a baby, Felix. Shortly after this, Gudrun Ensslin met Andreas Baader at an APO event, and they became a couple.<\/p>\n Unlike Ensslin\u2019s involvement in politics, Baader\u2019s conversion had been a more recent one, and it focused on activism rather than theoretical foundation. Baader was said to be a bohemian: he didn\u2019t work; he lived with \u2013 and depended upon the financial largesse of \u2013 an artist some years older than himself with whom he had a daughter. He had a history of carjacking and posed as an occasional model for gay magazines. He was said to be charming, very charismatic, and often frightening. Reports on him do not present an overly favorable picture: He was said to be physically violent with women, to whom he generally referred as \u201ccunts.\u201d The liaison with the very intellectual Ensslin raised eyebrows among her peers. However, it was said that there was a kind of genuine freedom in his behavior that attracted her in more than just a personal way. Ensslin was shaken by the murder of Ohnesorg; the powerlessness and frustration of her efforts to make a political change by discussion, writing, and demonstrating had triggered her desire to transition from theory to action. Baader came along at just the right time, and they\u2019d be a couple for life.<\/p>\n Ulrike Meinhof, married to the publisher Klaus R\u00f6hl and the mother of two daughters, was a real celebrity in West Germany when the three of them met. In the words of Karin Bauer:<\/p>\n an established journalist, who wrote for magazines, radio, and television, [she] was one of the most important and well-known figures of the German Left. She had sought to expose, advocate, and fight for political freedom and social justice. Her writings spoke to many, not just to social and political activists from the Left, but also to the liberal establishment that supported progressive reforms. She was an important supporter of the emerging feminist movement and an advocate of disadvantaged social groups.[45]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Meinhof first met Ensslin for an interview, when the latter was in prison. Not too long after their first meeting, she and Baader had set fire to two warehouses in Frankfurt as a protest against capitalism, consumerism, and, as they explained, people\u2019s indifference regarding the war in Vietnam. The arsonists had taken care that no one got hurt. Nevertheless, they were each sentenced to three years in prison.<\/p>\n Ensslin\u2019s way of explaining the motives, her intellectuality and sincerity impressed many. What she told Meinhof, however, will never be known. Allegedly, Meinhof said to a colleague that, if she published the interview, the two of them would never get out of prison again. Instead, she wrote an article about the arson attack, which disclosed a certain confusion (unusual in her). It seemed as if, whatever Ensslin had told her, she hadn\u2019t yet drawn her conclusions.[46]<\/sup><\/a>.<\/p>\n In the course of the procedure of revision \u2013 similar to parole in the U.S. \u2013 Ensslin and Baader were temporarily released from prison. They \u201cfled\u201d the country \u2013 in that no one searched for them \u2013 travelled to France and Italy, and made contact with, among others, the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who was in close touch with Red Brigade and other leftist groups he supported. At about the same time, Horst Mahler, a German lawyer who\u2019d defended several APO activists, suggested that they found a similar group. Upon their return to West Germany, Baader and Ensslin learned that their sentence had been denied revision, and they decided to go underground. They hid for some time in Meinhof\u2019s house, used false names, and changed their hairstyles. Nevertheless, Baader got caught in a traffic control, mostly because he was unfamiliar with the details of his false driving licence. Ensslin persuaded Meinhof to help her organize a jailbreak: Pretending to write a book together with Baader, Meinhof succeeded in getting him permission for temporary leave, in order to do research in a library. A group of two women and one man were to show up under a pretext and free Baader, while Meinhof was going to stay and explain their motives to the police and press. The plan turned sour when there was a shooting which severely injured a library worker.[47]<\/a> Baader fled, and Meinhof followed him. Within hours, the celebrated journalist would turn into \u201cGermany\u2019s most wanted terrorist,\u201d hunted for attempted murder. The group had not yet given itself a name, so the press did the baptizing: They became the \u201cBaader-Meinhof gang.\u201d<\/p>\n Their decision to found an urban guerrilla group, however, had already been made long before. In a founding manifesto of 1970, \u201cRed Army Faction\u201d described its motives, already in strong words:<\/p>\n Did the pigs really believe we would leave comrade Baader in the lurch for 2 or 3 years? Did the pigs really believe we would eternally fight with colored eggs against push sticks, with stones against pistols, with Molotovs against MG`s? Did anyone of the pigs really believe we would talk about the development of the class struggle, the re-organization of the Proletariat, without arming ourselves at the same time? [\u2026] Berlin is an outpost of American Imperialism. Our enemy and the enemy of South America, the enemy of the Japanese and Vietnamese people, the enemy of all blacks in the U. S., the enemy of the workers in Berlin \u2013 the enemy is American Imperialism.\u201d[48]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n After a stay in Jordan in the training camp of the Palestinian group Al Fatah \u2013 where they were trained, among other things, in the use of fire weapons \u2013 they returned to Germany, robbed three banks to raise funds, and recruited members. Finally, in May 1972, RAF left the stage of preparation.<\/p>\n The May Offensive<\/strong><\/p>\n The series of attacks the RAF launched in several German towns in May 1972 kept the country holding its collective breath for almost two weeks:<\/p>\n A widely-published poll suggested that sympathies for the RAF\u2019s \u201carmed struggle\u201d were amazingly high among West Germans under the age of 40: Forty percent of respondents described the group\u2019s violence as political, not criminal; twenty percent \u201ccould understand\u201d efforts to protect RAF fugitives from capture; and six percent indicated that they themselves were willing to hide a fugitive. This poll, however, had been taken in 1971, before<\/em> the \u201cMay Offensive,\u201d when Meinhof, Baader and Ensslin still had the image of some Bonnie & Clyde-like underdogs hunted by an overbearing state. This situation was one that many people who\u2019d engaged in any kind of political activism could relate to. Interpreting the data of 1971, Sebastian Scheerer explained that:<\/p>\n the RAF became less a symbol of popular aspirations than of victimization by the state\u2019s security apparatus and by authoritarian measures that were felt to be highly problematic.[49]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Goals<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWe will not talk about armed propaganda, we will do it.\u201d Although vague, the description which Jim Jones gave to his Jonestown audience on the RAF\u2019s political goals was not inaccurate:<\/p>\n The leading leader of the Baader-Meinhof group\u2026 believes that there\u2019s only one way to bring down capitalist institutions, and that is by violent acts of demonstration wherever possible.[51]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel<\/em> in June 1986, Valerio Morucci, one of the kidnappers of Italian Prime Minster Aldo Moro, spoke about \u201ca difficult relationship\u201d between the Red Brigades and RAF, since, unlike the Red Brigades\u2019 goals, those of the Germans were \u201chighly abstract.\u201d Far from focusing on political situations or developments in their own country, Morucci said, the RAF viewed their actions as part of an international \u201canti-imperialistic struggle,\u201d with the aim of nothing less than \u201cbringing down capitalism.\u201d Accordingly, their main enemy had always been the U.S.[52]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n A statement following the \u201cMay offensive\u201d of 1972 seems to confirm this:<\/p>\n We demand an immediate end to the bomb blockade against North Vietnam. Another student described the bombing campaign as just one step in<\/p>\n the long and weary battle for freedom from fascism, from capitalist exploitation, and the oppression of the people.[54]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It had been the conviction of RAF members that the only way to really help the people in Vietnam was to weaken the U.S. With their attacks \u2013 they hoped \u2013 West Germany would no longer be a safe haven for the U.S. military. Contrary to what Morucci said, however, the RAF addressed the \u201csituation\u201d in their home country as well, and encouraged the German public to \u201c[f]ight the SS style practices of the police! Fight the exploiters and the enemies of the people!\u201d \u201cThe institutionalized fascism in the criminal justice system\u201d was again addressed in the statement regarding the bomb attack on Buddenberg.[55]<\/sup><\/a> As to the Heidelberg U.S. Army quarters, the war in Vietnam again served as justification, only this time, the two situations merged: Vietnam was referred to as \u201cgenocide\u201d and \u201cEndl\u00f6sung<\/em>\u201d (\u201cfinal solution of the Jewish question\u201d, as the Nazis put it). The two perceived enemies \u2013 U.S. and Nazi Germany \u2013 blurred into one, and the targets of imperialism<\/em>, capitalism<\/em>, fascism<\/em> became more and more abstract.<\/p>\n The RAF\u2019S consciousness of being part of an international revolutionary movement also became clear in their second manifesto, \u201cThe Concept of the Urban Guerilla.\u201d As Martin Klimke writes:<\/p>\n The \u201ccombination of national issues with international ones, of traditional forms of struggle with internationalist ones\u201d in the tradition of the student movement\u2026 formed the basis for the urban guerilla and the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropolis. The previous, mainly rhetorically declared solidarity with international groups now translated itself into the concrete \u201cacquisition of weapons and money.\u201d[56]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n For the time being, however, neither weapons nor money would be acquired, because Ensslin, Baader, and Meinhof were captured shortly after the May bombings. For the rest of their lives, they would remain in prison awaiting their trials under conditions that were \u2013 at least in the beginning \u2013 dreadful. Considered as extraordinarily dangerous, RAF members were held in complete isolation, separated from other prisoners, in cells where not even the distant sound of another human being could be heard.[57]<\/a><\/p>\n Sympathies for the RAF had substantially faded after the bombings, with a great majority of former supporters regarding their violence now as criminal. While the goal to end the war in Vietnam was shared, the murder of U.S. army personnel who bore no direct responsibility for America\u2019s aggression was viewed as cruel and politically meaningless. Almost unanimously, the West German Left had condemned the \u201cMay Offensive.\u201d RAF had been mistaken in their assumption that \u201cthe people\u201d (however defined) would applaud these actions:<\/p>\n \u201c[They] erroneously interpreted the limited and largely fleeting public sympathy for RAF fugitives in prior police hunts as an endorsement of its violence. Overwhelmingly, the May bombings produced outrage and fear among the public\u2026. The RAF, in addition, remained evasive on the issue of the human toll of its violence. Its communiqu\u00e9s, which scarcely even acknowledged the victims, failed to specify the political value of injuries and deaths or define precisely whom it considered a legitimate target. Did the group consider any American serviceman or official in West Germany fair game by virtue of the war in Vietnam or \u201cU.S. imperialism\u201d in general? Did anyone associated with West Germany\u2019s security forces or judicial system bear criminal guilt, punishable by injury or death, for the state\u2019s pursuit of the RAF? And who or what empowered the RAF to make such judgments, especially in the absence of any popular mandate?[58]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The RAF\u2019s story might as well have ended at that point. That it didn\u2019t, was in large part \u2013 if not entirely \u2013 due to the state\u2019s reaction. The captives\u2019 harsh conditions of imprisonment led to a massive resurgence of support. In prison,<\/p>\n The group developed a political stature they had previously lacked. The larger than life security precautions endowed the prisoners with a political significance they had never come near achieving with their writings and actions.[59]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cAnti-torture committees,\u201d formed to protest the RAF\u2019s conditions of imprisonment, attracted whole series of new supporters. The group\u2019s hunger strikes \u2013 especially when Holger Meins died in 1974 \u2013 gave it another boost. The police had hunted some 40 people in 1972; two years later, they were looking for 300. As the former RAF member Klaus J\u00fcnschke says in an interview,[60]<\/a> there wouldn\u2019t have been a RAF without the war in Vietnam, and there would have been no \u201cGerman Autumn\u201d without these hard conditions of imprisonment.<\/p>\n With the group\u2019s leadership behind bars, both the goals and the tactics of the RAF changed. Its actions \u2013 a bloody siege of the German Embassy in Stockholm in 1975; and the murders of Buback, Ponto, and Schleyer during the \u201cGerman Autumn\u201d \u2013 were aimed exclusively at the release of prisoners. No more political demands would be uttered for years; the \u201canti-imperialist struggle\u201d of the RAF had become one of a group that would circle around itself for nearly a decade.<\/p>\n However, the RAF would recreate itself in several more \u201cgenerations\u201d until its official dissolution in 1998. In the 1980s, the group refocused on attacking NATO and U.S. military bases; its last political murder was that of Detlev Rohwedder, who\u2019d been in charge of restructuring and privatizing East Germany\u2019s publicly-owned businesses in the course of the re-unification of the two Germanys in 1990.<\/p>\n Over the intervening decades, all RAF prisoners have been released. Whereas some of them continue to defend their choices, others have distanced themselves from the violent methods of the group. \u201cThere\u2019s no justification for murder,\u201d J\u00fcnschke, who served 16 years in prison, said.[61]<\/a> Nevertheless, he insists that the actions of RAF ought to be seen in the context of the economic and political conditions that triggered them: conditions of global economic injustice that \u2013 according to J\u00fcnschke \u2013 also fuel today\u2019s Islamic terrorism.[62]<\/a><\/p>\n The body as a weapon<\/strong><\/p>\n Suicide is the last act of rebellion.<\/em> During the whole year of 1978, the RAF and the Red Brigade played a prominent role in Jonestown\u2019s news broadcasts. The Red Brigade\u2019s kidnapping and execution of Italy\u2019s Prime Minister Aldo Moro in the spring of 1978 was covered in great detail, as was news about the German group\u2019s focus on the aftermath of the \u201cGerman Autumn,\u201d the trials, the jailbreaks, and the successful escapes of RAF and Movement June 2 members.[63]<\/a><\/p>\n As David Chidester writes:<\/p>\n Toward the end of Jonestown, Jones referred to the body as a weapon in the revolutionary struggle. Each individual body, as well as the body of the community as a whole, was regarded as a weapon that could be used to strike a blow against the enemies of the revolution. \u2026 Only a revolutionary death could transform the body into a strategic weapon against the forces of fascism in America.[64]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In an August 1978 report on a jailbreak which had been carried out by two female members of Movement June 2, Jones explicitly referred to the issue:<\/p>\n One guard, taken in by a lady who knew how to direct her body for revolution<\/em>, ended up dead with a fingernail file.\u2026 These women were trained not to be passive females.[65]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Framed by the narratives of a common enemy \u2013 fascism, as exemplified by the U.S. and West Germany \u2013 and of the David-against-Goliath, us-against-them choice that many Jonestown people were confronted with, the radical political groups in Germany and Italy could indeed serve as a model in a struggle yet to come. Apparently, they were meant to. \u201cResponses to What One Would Do with Their Body,\u201d[66]<\/a> a report to Jim Jones compiled by Rita (Lenin) Tupper, summarized the answers that Jonestown citizens gave to the question of how they plan to make use of their body as a weapon for revolution. Several statements explicitly mention the Red Brigade:[67]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n I would be willing to participate in some tactics like the Red Brigade is doing, like kidnapping or killing a fascist or any of our enemies.<\/p>\n I would like to help a group like the Red Brigade get money for the people\u2019s revolution or free political prisoners wherever they may be.<\/p>\n I believe we as a group or individuals are being readied to put the final touch to the fascists with situations like the Red Brigade are doing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Most other statements described similar plans: attacks on fascists, the participation in a revolutionary movement in order to free oppressed people, the fighting and dying for socialism. Although almost everyone confirmed their willingness to die, there was a clear preference for dying in a fight, \u201cdefend[ing] socialism till the breath left my body\u201d; to \u201cdie fighting on the frontlines,\u201d to \u201ctake as many enemies with me as possible.\u201d One person even wrote: \u201cTo die without taking as many as possible along with me would be a waste.\u201d<\/p>\n What had triggered these martial ideas in the first place? Jonestown had been conceived as a peaceful place. Even if the ideological framework set by Jones \u2013 socialism versus capitalism \u2013 was much alike, the aims of the settlers couldn\u2019t be further from those of violent revolutionary groups. The RAF\u2019s disillusionment with their country had led them to declare open war to the West German state and to \u201cimperialism\u201d embodied by the U.S. The disillusionment in Peoples Temple with the U.S. had caused its members to leave it. The RAF fought by means of war and destruction, crossing legal and moral lines, and from within their country; Jonestown\u2019s answer to the injustices of U.S. society was constructive and optimistic, to create a better society, a community free of racism, sexism, ageism. RAF members went underground and placed themselves outside society, leaving their children behind; death for the cause was in the plan from the very start. In contrast, Jonestown was meant to be the model of a new and inclusive society; it was full of children, and they\u2019d been brought there to live. Jonestown people were settlers and builders, not warriors. To die as violent revolutionaries had certainly not been in their plans.<\/p>\n With Jones\u2019 and the Temple\u2019s commitment to the civil rights movement, protest against America\u2019s war, racism, and social injustice, had \u2013 as in West Germany \u2013 always been a major topic in Peoples Temple. As Jones said in 1974, three years before the migration to Guyana, \u201cUntil America stops dropping bombs on the colored people of the world, there\u2019ll be violence in our streets.\u201d[68]<\/a><\/p>\n But as to the methods of such protests, his position had been moderate. In remarks on the Black Panther movement of the same year, he criticized their attitude and language, and encouraged his followersrs to use nonviolent speech:<\/p>\n These people want to look cocky, and swagger down the street, and smart off to \u201cpigs\u201d and that sort of thing, using those languages, which we never use. I don\u2019t believe in labeling anybody, including policemen. We don\u2019t like to be called niggers, except when we do it to each other friendly, so we should not call anybody a name. We should not be name-callers.[69]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The tone has changed in Jonestown. In late 1977, Jones said:<\/p>\n There [is] no use for a socialist to try to communicate with people who\u2019ve turned over to fascism. And I<\/em> don\u2019t think that anybody that can go<\/em> from socialism to deal with racist pigs deserve<\/em> our conversation, and I goddamn well refuse to talk<\/em> to them.[70]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n After the move to Guyana in 1977, the image of the U.S. Jones presented to people became more and more sinister, and his was the only voice the people of Jonestown heard. The accusations and bad press against Peoples Temple that had caused him to leave the U.S., fueled his paranoia and may have sharpened this image. At the same time, the living conditions in Jonestown became more and more repressive: any communication with the outside was censored, newcomers\u2019 belongings were searched and confiscated at their entry, infractions \u2013 or what Jones declared as such \u2013 were severely, often cruelly, punished; evening sessions \u2013 often used to single out and berate individuals who\u2019d sinned against one of the community\u2019s rules on \u201cstolen\u201d food or falling asleep during Jones\u2019 speeches \u2013 were endless; armed guards patrolled the settlement. Pioneers who\u2019d built the encampment had definitely seen better times. The introduction of harsh rules of \u201cdiscipline\u201d was often justified as responding to a situation of serious dangers from outside. And suddenly, there was such a situation: the agricultural project at Jonestown became a town under siege.<\/p>\n A custody suit over John Victor Stoen, a 6-year old who lived in Jonestown as Jones\u2019 son, had triggered the events. The boy\u2019s mother and legal father, Grace and Tim Stoen, had defected. In the fall of 1977, they prevailed in a California court hearing to regain custody of John-John and sent a lawyer to Guyana to persuade local authorities to intervene in the case. A Guyanese court issued an order compelling Jones\u2019 appearance, but he refused to accept it. When the order was posted in Jonestown, it was ripped down. Not only Jones, but the community considered John-John as one of them. An arrest warrant was issued. Shortly after this, Jones was shot at, supposedly by mercenaries who were hiding in the jungle.<\/p>\n Further attacks were expected any minute. The inhabitants of Jonestown, on high alert, assembled to defend all that was dear to them. Rebecca Moore writes:<\/p>\n Men, women, and children armed themselves with farm implements and stood on the perimeter of Jonestown for days, expecting an armed assault.[71]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In Deborah Layton\u2019s Seductive Poison<\/em>, a young woman remembers:<\/p>\n\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/heidi-1-300x226.jpeg\")
<\/a>![\"\"](\"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/heidi-2-300x213.jpeg\")
<\/a>On June 2, 1967, during protests against the Iranian Shah\u2019s visit to West Berlin, an event occurred that is often seen as the watershed moment, when protests would lose their nonviolent character. In the midst of police beating up demonstrators, a student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the head and died on the way to the hospital. The details remained unclear until after 2009, when it became known that Karl-Heinz Kurras, the police officer who shot Ohnesorg, had been spying for the East German Secret Security Service (STASI)[41]<\/sup><\/a>. At the time, though, the West German police still considered Kurras to be \u201cone of them,\u201d and there had been no interest to reveal those details: eyewitnesses were not heard, evidence was destroyed, and Kurras was acquitted.[42]<\/sup><\/a> That a German policeman could murder a student before eyewitnesses and get away with it, plus<\/em> the knowledge that the responsible people were part of the \u201cthe Auschwitz-generation,\u201d radicalized the West Germany student movement. It became the focus around which the Red Army Faction and Movement June 2 would be built up.<\/p>\n
\nBut not only others would we kill,
\nBut ourselves too if need be.
\nSince only force can alter this
\nMurderous world, as
\nEvery living creature knows.
\n\u2013 Bertold Brecht[43]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/heidi-3-265x300.jpeg\")
<\/a>\n
\nRAF[50]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n
\nWe demand an immediate halt on the bomb attacks on North Vietnam.
\nWe demand the withdrawal of American troops from Indochina.[53]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nUlrike Meinhof<\/p>\n