from Markus Langemann
Some of you probably remember the so-called German Autumn from the days of your youth. Often described with the metaphor "hot autumn". It was essentially the months of September and October in 1977, the time of the RAF murders. The time of terror in the country. In every bakery, butcher's shop and school there were wanted posters with black and white photos of the terrorists who were trying to destabilize the state through attacks, kidnappings and assassinations of politicians and business leaders. A small group. They got pretty far.
The social climate in those days was oppressive. Even as a child, I sensed an underlying threat. If I met untidy-looking men with tousled hair in the twilight hours, I thought they were potential terrorists. And even women who didn't fit the Otto catalog cliché were suspected of being killer brides in my juvenile imagination. The ubiquitous wanted posters with the outlaws were responsible for this. They stood in irritating contrast to the cheerful Prilblumen-und-Bud-Spencer-Bundesrepublik with Rudi Carrell as the Dutch cheese hedgehog break clown.
Hanns Martin Schleyer, the hijacking of the Lufthansa plane "Landshut" and the names Baader, Meinhof and Ensslin have been etched into the collective memory of my generation since that time. Likewise Stammheim, the site of the suicides of the imprisoned members of the first generation of the so-called Red Army Faction. Irmgard Möller, the only survivor of the suicide night on October 18, 77, speaks today of state-ordered murders.
On Maundy Thursday 1977, Attorney General Siegfried Buback was executed by two members of the second RAF generation from a motorcycle in his official car in Karlsruhe. His driver Wolfgang Göbel and judicial officer Georg Wurster died with him.
Exactly 30 years later, his son Michael Buback is told that the real assassins were not convicted. The son of the murdered federal prosecutor general begins to investigate, together with his wife.
Michael Buback, a university lecturer in Göttingen and professor of chemistry, finally writes his first book based on the results of his research.
The second, entitled "The general must go!" (referring to the Attorney General, his father), was published in 2020. "It is the harrowing record of the negotiations", the blurb says. Anyone reading the work cannot avoid the oppressive question: "How far does the state go in defending its interests?" Mind you, its interests, not those of its citizens.
A question of great topicality.
Who Buback reads todaycannot avoid readjusting our view of the events of that autumn and at least questioning the image of the events of that time disseminated by the media.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic at the latest, questioning has been a new compass through the current times for the awakened (perhaps better: awakened) contemporaries.
On the very first pages, Michael Buback writes about his father and the duties of a federal prosecutor general:
"The intentions that my father would have liked to follow in the office of Attorney General were certainly not feasible for a political civil servant bound by instructions. Nevertheless, he accepted the task. The scope for action was then smaller and the extent of the opposing forces acting on him from directions that were often difficult to locate and threatening him was greater than he had probably suspected."
This passage is an example of many other remarkable sentences that you should be familiar with to classify the fall of 2020; I think they have an impact that goes beyond the RAF Buback case.
What he explains about the "truth" and the "media truth" of that hot autumn of 77 is echoed in this politically hot autumn of 2022. An autumn in which people also feel terrorized. Quite a few of them by their own state, its institutions or its elected representatives.
Buback classifies in the work:
"With the knowledge that my wife and I have acquired during the trial about the judiciary, the investigators, the influence of government agencies and the media, I cannot accept without contradiction what is being spread as the 'truth' about the Karlsruhe crime and the assassins. We hear the truth from politicians in official statements and we read the legal truth in legally binding judgments. The truth disseminated in the media usually lies somewhere between these 'truths'. As a victim, but also as a scientist, I am only interested in the truth, which does not depend on the particular point of view and the respective interests and which takes into account all reliable observations and factual evidence."
And further:
"However, ingenuity and dedication, courage, prudence, steadfastness and idealism on the part of the men and women at all levels of this sector, who must also have the strength to endure hostility and threats of all kinds and not allow themselves to be paralyzed by the lack of public recognition for their activities, which are vital for us all, remain crucial to successfully combating crime."
A few weeks ago I met Dr. Hans-Georg Maaßen, also a senior former political official, in an interview on his assessment of the investigation procedure following the terrorist attacks on the Nordstream pipelines. The former President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution believes that the Federal Public Prosecutor General has a responsibility to initiate a criminal investigation. A criminal investigation.
In my opinion, we read, hear and see less about the investigations following the terrorist attacks on our "economic aorta" than we do about Dieter Bohlen's return to DSDS. This is not only stupid, it is also shocking and reveals the intellectual deformation of media professionals.
Furthermore, Michael Buback's sentences give us an idea of the possible political pressure under which a Federal Prosecutor General or even heads of departments are under. What was true at the time and is described by Buback today seems even greater (or perhaps better: more inevitable) under the current media and political conditions and the almost physically perceptible erosion of substance and competence.
Listening to Buback today means learning to see from yesterday for today. We learn from history for our future - (?) Presumably the Stuttgart philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is right: "But what experience and history teach us is that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history and have never acted according to lessons that could have been drawn from it."
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14 Responses
I forgot to mention that the event took place in 1978 - a few days or a week - after Willi Peter Stoll was shot (near Düsseldorf Central Station).
What does my comment today (actually) have to do with the article?
A lot. I wondered whether I should even describe my experience so openly and in such detail. I'll do it:
Farewell to two young lovers.
Young woman (19 yrs) , young man (22 yrs).
The young woman was me.
The scene of the incident was my parents' house, in front of which my boyfriend at the time had parked his car, a small Fiat.
We, my boyfriend at the time and I, had seen the police car parked about 100 meters away from us and had also wondered why two police officers were 'just standing around' in an unlit police car for a quarter of an hour, or twenty minutes, but now:
far too much in love and far too focused on our own, our 'bad feeling' kept receding into the background.
Suddenly, everything happens very quickly:
The police car races towards us unlit, pulls up in front of the Fiat, the two (young!) policemen jump out. One of them is armed with a submachine gun.
Unsecured. He asks me to get out of the car: 'A bit dalli. He also asks me to show my ID. Also 'a little dalli.
I get out of the car, look in my handbag for my ID, and the young policeman slams the MP into my back:
'Get a move on, you filthy bastard'.
I had and still have no idea about such things, but my friend shouts: 'Make sure you get the MP, you monkey. That's my girlfriend, she lives right in the house we're standing in front of. And turning to me: 'Stay calm. Take it easy. Please stay calm, will you?
Somehow I realize that my friend is now also being held at bay, hands behind his back and that a gun is pointed at him.
I think: 'What's going on here?' And maybe because I'm really a bit stupid and naive, I don't even cry, because I'm completely unaware of the danger of the whole thing.
I try to explain that my ID card is in my handbag, but that I can't get to it if I'm more or less pinned to the roof of the car with my arms.
'Shut the fuck up, you bastard. The perso ...'
I don't even know what to do, I'm between laughing and crying ... and immeasurable amazement, I can't categorize anything at all.
In the background, I can hear clanging and drumming against the large windows - the second floor of my parents' house was glazed all around:
My siblings. They cry and scream.
Now I'm crying too, but somehow I realize that the young policeman is finally securing his MP.
After that I have no memory of it. Did I hand over the ID card or not? How, why were we able to 'leave' and I was able to go to my parents' house?
All I remember is entering the house and my older brother's eyes are red, the others have horror written all over their faces.
Many years later, my brother still talked to me about this event.
I wondered about that.
Decades later, I learn 'more' about the background to the action.
To describe this, however, would really be going too far.
Therefore:
I'm going to buy Buback's book.
It was the time that shaped me; I wasn't even aware of it until a few years ago.
Thanks for reading.
I was 24 at the time and could already or still think for myself with a certain amount of logic. It was like the pandemic back then. The mainstream contradicted itself. Example: If the disease is so dangerous, why am I probably bringing infected people to Germany (early 2020)? - If the number of infections is falling, why are we making masks compulsory? I would have hated to have been in a bank that the RAF was raiding at the time, but I have been wondering for some time whether these people had any idea how this country would once again become the number one warmonger.
Dear Mr. Langemann, your comments on the subject of "Learning from Buback" are frightening. If we put aside our repression mechanism, which often comes into its own after four years when we literally cast our vote, uncomfortable questions should be asked as soon as possible. There are certainly a number of more commentaries and explanations on Mr. Buback's books. In this matter, just a note for those interested. There are two longer interviews with Mr. Buback about his books on YouTube (surprisingly, they have not yet fallen victim to censorship). The website "Apolut" also provides access to this. I do not want to and do not wish to make any kind of judgment here about the author Buback or the presenter Ken Jebsen. Everyone can form their own judgment. However, in the context of alternative media, it is, in my opinion, a testimony to the times, just like some of the contributions on the "Club der klaren Worte" website.
MfG
Yes, repression: That is the human way of living on. Without repression and forgetting by us humans, everyone here would be walking around with a to-do list of all the people who still have a score to settle. Repression could easily be described as a gift from God. Repression also seems to me to be a cultural, civilizing stage in human development. Politicians of all parties, however, see the purpose of their existence in not forgetting. The swastika and the Hitler salute, with all their horrors, have been consigned to oblivion. How many generations are to suffer from this, while beyond our borders all this happens again and again in miniature. I have no intention of white-washing or comparing National Socialist deeds here. But what use is the eternal memory of biblical proportions if our politicians pull every petitesse out of their pockets as a comparison? They trivialize what is still almost normal with such crimes. The RAF deeds are by no means comparable with all the deeds we have had to accept since politicians started pushing through Open Borders. How many murders can be attributed to the RAF? And how many deaths have we suffered at the hands of migrants? What took the RAF and the national resistance years to achieve is a daily reality. The only difference is that politicians no longer die today - only the Michel, and that is exactly what we should never forget.
I was still too young and apolitical. Only seven years old. But I can remember the cut-out wanted flyer above. "Anarchist violent criminals" was written in red letters above the mugshots. You can see the whole picture in the newsletter. It was terror. That's right. But in parts of society, terror was also romanticized. After all, it was against the powerful and the rich, against politicians, bankers and presidents. It was against the supposedly still fascist state. Anarchy also always has something of the rebellious in the self-perception. You are not a terrorist in your own bubble. You're just fighting back.
Now for the bitter part. Those who despised and a priori rejected the state when they were young are now the ones who run the state. Those who have always despised the state are now inventing word creations such as "disparagement of the state" for critics of their policies. Claudia Roth? Managed an anarchist band with "Ton Steine Scherben". "No power to anyone" or "Break what breaks you" were the names of the anarchist songs. Federal President Steinmeier? Called Gudrun Ensslin (photo above) an important woman in world history in a speech in March of this year. Madness! Saskia Esken? Confesses to being an Antifa sympathizer like many others in the government. Dear Ms. Esken, Antifa is more than just an acronym for people who are against fascism. I am too, that should go without saying. Antifa is also an avowedly violent mob. There are dozens of other politicians who have always glorified anarchy and for whom the state/they themselves cannot be powerful enough. According to Habeck's own children's book, a blackout has something romantic about it. No, Mr. Habeck. It means anarchy. It means looting, murder and manslaughter.
What about today's punks/young people/antifa/left-wing students? They walk through the countryside with a circled A, the symbol for anarchy, for rebellion, for a society without state and rule. And at the same time, they are the ones who proudly wear masks in obedience to the state and - as prescribed by the state - even use genders in spoken German to the point that the rind cracks. As required by the state.
I fear that Hegel was right.
How true.
As someone who started studying in 1968 and experienced the atmosphere in the neighboring social sciences and humanities, I can confirm that these people, who later made careers in universities, journalism and politics, were all sympathizers of the murderers. Even back then, dissenters were threatened and bullied out of the faculties. The followers of that time overthrew our state to the point where it is recognizable today; their educational products are today's Fasers, Habecks, Eskens etc.
In her book "Die RAF hat euch lieb" (The RAF loves you), Bettina Röhl reported in passing on the role of the GDR and SU secret services in financing the terror and organizing the environment (- VVN, Easter marchers, anti-nuclear movement, all precursor organizations of the Greens). Ulrike Meinhof's foster mother, Renate Riemeck, regularly traveled to East Berlin for talks with those in power and was an icon of the anti-nuclear movement; like Meinhof in the early phase, she was represented by the lawyer Gustav Heinemann, who later switched to the SPD. SPD politician Johannes Rau gave Riemack a chair in Wuppertal.
It gets more and more dubious the further you dig. Although the West German SPD also had an anti-communist section (until around 1980), it was also heavily infiltrated by the SED.
Today, the Greens and other up-and-coming politicians are traveling to the USA and Davos to get their bearings.
Why is the state only "supposedly" fascist in your eyes?
Weren't former NS figures already sitting on the new chessboard back then?
Well, Ms. Schaeffer. What is fascist? You can argue about that. I maintain that many people still think 2-dimensionally in an acquired, internalized political right-left map. In this map, fascism is on the far right, anti-fascism on the far left. So many people want to be on the far left. I don't think that primitively (anymore). I no longer think in right-left pigeonholes. I'm impressed by two women right now. Wagenknecht and Weidel. They are defamed as "extreme". In my eyes, these two women are clever, courageous and deeply democratic. Hats off to them!
You are right. Until the 1980s, many former Nazi bigwigs and followers were in the highest offices. In politics, in business, in the judiciary. For some, their brown past was hidden; for others, the past was washed away by the "denazification" indulgence. And yet I found this period to be very democratic and liberal. Even if the phenomenon of "reality vs. media reality" already existed in the seventies. This is the subject of Mr. Langemann's commentary and Buback's book, among other things.
Fascism always begins when a government empowers itself and a parliament voluntarily disempowers itself. Fascism always begins when the fourth power of the state, the media, fails. When solidarity, alias obedience, is called for and dissenters are marginalized, criminalized, persecuted and pathologized ... that is fascist. This has all been happening since March 16, 2020. The irony? It's fascism in the name of anti-fascists. Those who courageously rebel are defamed as fascists.
How Dr. Maaßen, for example, is defamed. He found a great picture in an interview with ML. Germany in a nosedive. There are clueless pilots in the cockpit telling the 83 million citizens in the cheap seats to "Enjoy the view!". At some point, the plane crashes. Then a kind of denazification begins again. It will be called something else. My "modeling"? Politics, science and the media will all point the finger at each other. Then there will be an arduous new beginning. Many perpetrators will come out and admit that they were "actually" always in the resistance.
Kurt said it's time for the truth! For the whole truth and not just what we like.
I was 7 in the "hot fall" and didn't notice anything about this alleged threat. I only saw these photos on posters in banks or when shopping with my mother, but when the Stammheim attack happened, where the Verfassungsschutz itself carried out this attack and blamed it on the RAF, it was clear that this state somehow works differently. When state organs use violence against citizens and then use this violence as a reason to persecute these people with all severity instead of protecting and defending civil rights, then something is going wrong in this state structure. As we saw in March 2020, and for me, my wife and our daughter, this was a shock to this day. What the Merkle regime unleashed in March 2020 was like what happened in 1933 after the Nazis seized power. The "rulers" again (1933 Epidemics Act which was renamed the IfSG in 2001) labeled people as an epidemic and therefore classified them as a danger. In 1933 it was Jews, gypsies and whoever else wanted to destroy them and in 2020 it was the "troublemakers", healthy people were labeled as such and at the latest a functioning media landscape should have made an outcry, which has not happened to this day. Since 1999 when a "peace party", the Greens, took part in a war of aggression and justified it with Auschwitz and the war propaganda in the ÖRR and the corporate media began against Serbia, I slowly woke up. When 911 happened and I saw the reports of the first hours with Niki Lauda because of the pilots who had to be very good to do this and many other things that were not compatible with the physics on our planet happened, I woke up and questioned all the events that happened politically and historically. With Dirk Pohlmann, Patrik Baab, Matthias Bröckers, Wolfgang Effenberger, Thomas Röper and many others, a picture slowly came to light that robbed me of the illusion of truth in the mainstream press. But what has been going on in the press and politics since Maidan and then from March 2020 was yet another escalation of the events of 911. When they tried to stop asking everything that could be asked because this was already an act of crime, as we were clearly made to feel. When we, my wife, my daughter and I saw for the first time in the livestream how in Berlin on Rosa Luxemburg Square peaceful citizens who stood up for their civil rights and vehemently demanded them with the GG in their hands and then brutally beat them up by subjects in police uniforms or treated them like cattle being led to the slaughter. This post-war matrix of a GG broke with us and when I heard Carlo Schmid's speech from September 8, 1948 about the GG and the time back then, everything was clear. Blechley Park put Germany under a bell and they wanted to destroy Germany and Germanness, it was never the intention to destroy Hitler or the Nazis who were clearly supported as Anglo-Americans (Klanestine) so that they could march against the Soviet Union and thus kill two birds with one stone - destroy the Germans and damage the Russians to such an extent that they could be manipulated and directed and exploited for Anglo-American interests. By the way, Churchill (and Morgenthau, MacKinder, Huxley and many others), the evil criminal who is no less evil than Hitler, says this without hesitation. It is time to end the occupation of Germany (all of Germany) and finally put an end to this evil act of breaking international law (listen to Carlo Schmid's speech). The USA broke the armistice treaty of May 8, 1945 on September 26, 2022 when they blew up the Piplines. In doing so, they lost all rights that no longer apply under international law after 75 years anyway. Finally give Germany and the Germans their freedom. For many who have been in the resistance since March 2020, there is no going back to a GG of the occupying power that was only supposed to enslave Germany and has done so to this day. The entire political leadership and the entire mainstream press must go. They must no longer be allowed to hold office in a new Germany and censorship must never again take place. In addition, we will have to radically change the judicial system so that parties or their cadres can never again lay hands on our judges and public prosecutors and legal training must be changed so that civil rights are undermined more than necessary just because a sham parliament makes a decree or even changes laws. The Internet companies must be broken up and their owners must answer to a tribunal that should meet internationally in The Hague, the surveillance of citizens must end immediately and the transparency of the necessary leaders must be all-encompassing. It is not the citizen who must be controlled but the powerful and the media as well as the judiciary and medical associations who proved to be stooges in 1933 and 2020. Yes, I am comparing these times, because in both cases the trail points, as always, to the USA/GB and this trail is so big that only complete morons and elephant deniers in the room do not want/are not allowed to see this trail.
The speech by Carlo Schmid, a constitutional lawyer and participant in Herren Chiemsee, also sheds a different light on the defamatory term "Reichsbürger". Much of what Carlo Schmid says there would be described by our BfV or the BND as "Reichsbürgertum", which is deliberately wrong. International law is not what the fake media have been presenting to us for a long time, if I'm not mistaken then the Potsdam Agreement still applies and if this is the case then the Russians don't need a war against Germany. It's enough if they say oh we'll come with a few generals and lead you to freedom and then you'll be sovereign and the nUSA/GB will leave because you can only occupy a country for a maximum of 75 years. You can read all this in international law when the ÖRR does its job for which we have been paying it for decades and not for propaganda against the people and the citizens.
Sorry that I'm not writing here under my real name, but I was involved both during the hot RAF period in the area of "internal security" and later in 1989 in what I believe was the alleged RAF assassination attempt on Alfred Herrhausen in Bad Homburg. Of course, I can't claim to know, but I still think it's very unlikely that the RAF was the sole perpetrator in Bad Homburg. Perhaps they were a kind of "subcontractor" for other forces. Especially as there is a very revealing book by Dieter Balkhausen, in which you can read that Herrhausen had already made himself unpopular, to put it mildly, relatively shortly before the crime in Bad Homburg with his push for debt relief, which he brought up after a visit to Mexico in the USA. At the time, he had already been advised to leave the USA, as "the air here could become leaden" for him.
But be that as it may, someone always knows how it really was. What we all learn is smoke and mirrors. And if something like 1989 hasn't been cleared up 33 years later, at least for the public, you can draw your own conclusions.
I don't know why, but I always think of this comparison when I see the poor people on the buses wearing these idiotic masks for years and wonder what or who is really behind them. Je ne sais pas.
Andreas Baader had secured the pistol after he had shot himself, one hears from time to time. It's amazing. My father was sitting stunned at the wheel of his Mercedes in the hot fall, I was in the passenger seat, when machine guns were held under our noses and everyone else's in a police roadblock. "I hope the safety's on," I heard quietly, as he had dealt extensively with these devices a good thirty years earlier. As he kept saying, accidents were not uncommon back then. Gradually, almost all members of the RAF were taken out of circulation. Whether the criminal trials that followed were fair, I had my doubts at the time. All the defendants were equally demonized in the media. I had the impression that the verdicts had perhaps already been decided at the start of the trial. Nevertheless, the members of the RAF were terrorists, committed murders, bomb attacks and who knows what else. Violent protest is not a last resort, it is not a means at all. Not even today. Fortunately, further escalation was recently avoided by the government's rejection of compulsory vaccination. The wave of protests that is now coming in response to the looming economic crisis and its causes will hopefully lead to the urgently needed learning processes that would make compromises possible.
I was twenty years old in 1977. I wasn't afraid at the time of the terror. After all, this terror was directed at the leaders of the republic. But I didn't understand the RAF. What impressed me a lot, however, was the Federal Constitutional Court, which, regardless or at least not recognizably for me, pronounced justice without any apparent political influence. At the time, it was about the hunger strike of imprisoned terrorists. I was deeply impressed by the fact that human dignity and the right to self-determination were not undermined. Forced feeding against the will of those affected was strictly rejected and could only be used in cases of unconsciousness on the basis of the
Management without mandate, as the presumed will could have changed.
I often think about that in times of corona. The Federal Constitutional Court didn't make it easy for itself. Today, I miss that painfully and can no longer see that fundamental rights still have the same value as rights of defense against state action. Especially when cynical sentences like: ,, .... get their basic rights back.