Bruce Allen Scharlau PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

84
a stand collapes, be little surprised. Just as little
as when the [Americans] transgress the demarcation
line, or bomb the city centre of Hanoi, or send marines
marching into China. Burn, department store, burn!32
The same firebombing, and the trial of the Korrmune I authors, was
also the inspiration for a firebombing by later members of the RAP in
April 1968,33· whose identification with Vietnam was so strong for the
founder Red Army Faction members that it was a central point of the
courtroom defence strategy for Baader, Ennslin, Meinhof and Raspe. On 4
May 1976 they asked a number of people to be called as witnesses to give
evidence that
... the US goverrunent, by military intervention in
Vietnam and Cambodia, had committed violations of
international law, that West German soil had been among
the places from which they operated, and that
accordingly it might be a relevant legal issue to
consider whether, in its own turn, 'the use of force
against certain mili tary establishments of the USA on
West German territory, such as bomb attacks on US bases
in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, was justified' .34
By the time the 'second generation' RAP, and the Second of June were
organised and operational in the Stockhofln embassy and elsewhere, other
concerns were paramount, and the issue of Vietnam itself was decided.
However, the targets need not change, only the object of identification
and the message.
Contacts between the pre-terrorist groups and Palestinians, which
continued during the terrorists' early formation, led to identification
wi th the Palestinians. The RAP founders were trained in an Al Fatah camp
in Jordan in 1970 which was under the command of Hassan Salameh, who
later organised the Black September attack on the Munich Olympics in
1972. In the hostage taking Salameh required the release of Baader and
Meinhof along with the release of Palestinians held by the Israelis in
exchange for the Israeli Olympic team. 35
Possibly in return, the RAP wrote a long essay about Black September
and the Munich Massacre, in which the RAP praised the group and
discussed its anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and international
32 Langhans, Teufel, (no pagination) Flugblatt 8, 24.5.67. The
original ended with the English phrase: ffburn, warehouse, burn! ff
33 Aust (1987), 49-50.
34 ibid., 343-4; see also: Red Army Faction, "Protokoll- -Ausschnitt
Stamrnheim 22. Juni 1976", in: texte: der RAP (West Berlin: no publisher
given, ueberarbeitete und aktualisierte Ausgabe, 1983), 491-5[ 491. The
applications for these persons to appear[ and the testimony of those who
came nonetheless, is provided in: texte: der RAF, 476-516.
35 Aust (1987), 234; George Jonas, Vengeance: A True Story (London:
Pan Books Ltd., 1985), 23.