Inside Germany’s far-left terrorism

Posted by Thomas Klikauer

Overall, Germany’s history has been defined by right-wing terrorism with left-wing terrorism only playing a minor role. 

One of the more horrific forms of German far-right terrorism emerged in the immediate aftermath of World War I – during the earlier 1920s.

Around that time, returning soldiers that were dehumanized through relentless trench warfare of World War I, created killer squads. They formed the infamous “Free Corps”.

Aided by an anti-democratic justice system and an even more authoritarian police regime during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), these Free Corps (O.C.) mutated into Hitler’s SA flanking the most murderous organisation the world has ever seen: the SS. It ended in Auschwitz.

Yet, right-wing and Neo-Nazi terrorism (after Hitler) continued in the newly formed post-1945 Germany. Almost unabated, Neo-Nazi terrorism persisted. 

It culiminated in the October Festival Bombing of 1980 that killed thirteen people and the anti-Semitic murder of Shlomo Lewin.

After Germany’s reunification (1990), Neo-Nazi terrorism metamorphosed into what became known as The Baseball Bat Years of the 1990s. It arose during a wave of renewed right-wing and Neo-Nazi killings resulting in over 220 deaths.

Meanwhile, Germany also developed a small group of far-left terrorists. They started as the Baader-Meinhof group. It was followed by the Red Army Faction or RAF. One of the RAF’s last known associates is Burkhard Garweg.

Since 1990, Burkhard Garweg has been accused of being an RAF terrorist. As Germany’s most wanted terrorist, Garweg lingers in Germany’s underground. 

For the first time since the 1990s, the 56-year-old terrorist is speaking out via a letter sent to one of Germany’s main daily newspapers.

Garweg’s last known act was to disappear in Hamburg in 1990. By that time, Garweg was 21 years old. Typically for German left-wing terrorists, Garweg has no working class background.

Instead, he is the son of a middle-class medical professor. Garweg had dropped out of school and got involved in the radical anarcho-squatters in Hamburg’s famous Hafenstraße. 

Germany’s federal prosecutors claim that Garweg went underground and joined the RAF’s so-called Last Generation.

Even after the RAF’s dissolution in 1998, he is said to have commited robberies with two RAF companions – Daniela Klette and the enigmatic and the “Houdini-style” vanisher Ernst-Volker Staub. 

These misdeeds were done to finance their impoverished life in Germany’s underground.

Since then, a police search has been underway to find Garweg. He still is one of the most wanted people in Germany. To the annoyance of Germany’s police, Garweg remains out of reach – for 34 years!

A few weeks ago, Garweg reported from the underground with an eight-page letter. Garweg’s letter was checked and found to be authentic. Garweg’s lawyers also assured its validity. 

In his letter, Garweg still describes himself as a political activist.

For obvious reasons, Garweg isn’t revealing where he is currently located and who is supporting him. Yet, there is also no disassociation from the RAF – the mythology lives on.

Any form of regrets are sought in vain in his letter. Tellingly, Garweg isn’t even talking about known RAF assasinations, such as those of:

• Gerold von Braunmühl in 1986, 
• Deutsche Bank boss Alfred Herrhausen three years later, and 
• Detlev Rohwedder. 

Rohwedder was the boss of the euphemistically called Treuhandanstalt. His outfit converted – often rather brutally – the former state-socialist East-Germany to West-Germany’s neoliberal capitalist system. 

It was done in Anschlus-style. It was no less than a complete takeover by neoliberal capitalism with all the associated pathologies.

In the eastern German state, it caused misery, mass-unemployment, destitution, the abrupt disintegration of a once thriving welfare state, and rise in persistent poverty. 

Viewing him as a representative of the hated capitalist system, Rohwedder was the last person of whom the RAF assassinated. For the RAF, Rohwedder symbolized the capitalist system.

In his letter, Garweg is correcting the twisted image that police investigators and Germany’s conservative mass-media had created of him. 

In their minds, he is still dangerous. Garweg continues to describe himself as being one of Germany’s “revolutionary left” – perhaps a delusion.

Meanwhile, for Germany’s police, Burkhard Garweg remains a rather illusive phantom. The police still knows almost nothing about his role inside the RAF. 

In 2016, police investigators were able to assign DNA traces and images from surveillance cameras to Garweg. These were found on cash transports in Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia. 

More recently, Garweg lived in a car in Berlin – at the latest since 2008. Firstly in Berlin’s Neukölln and in a builder’s truck in Friedrichshain thereafter. His code-name is Martin. 

He was a “carer” and a “photographer” having attended a school of photography in Berlin. All this makes a mockery of Germany’s self-proclaimed super-efficient police.

Worse for the police, shortly before they arrived at his hideout in the middle of Berlin, Garweg disappeared again – ridiculing the police. 

Having duped and outwitted Germany’s “very serious” police so many times, today, Garweg feels safe enough to engage with the public via his letter.

Greetings from illegality, his letter begins. He addresses it to his family, to former acquaintances, and to his comrades. He fundamentally critiques capitalism, Germany’s shift towards the right-wing populism, and – most obviously – Germany’s state and the police that has being hunting him for decades.

Garweg also appeals to the left to become active again. He believes that the RAF is unfairly persecuted. Yet, he does not mention Ernst-Volker Staub at all.

Instead, Garweg defends his group’s stuggles and fights. He says, he was a part of a revolutionary counter-movement fighthing against the structural violence of the capitalist system.

Originally, they had set out to help end exploitation, militarism, and war. His letter is reminiscent of other RAF declarations outlining the core idea as, 

fighting the violent conditions of 

capitalism with the violence of the revolt.

Unsurprisingly, Garweg rejects the accusation of being a terrorist. He writes, it has nothing to do with us, but a lot to do with the capitalist system. 

He notes that their revolutionary counter-violence was directed exclusively and specifically against the master and rulers of capitalism.

Conveniently, Garweg seems to ignore the fact that the RAF also shot ordinary policemen and the limousine drivers of those they targeted. Never mind a police killing known as the death on track 4.

Garweg places RAF’s co-founder Ulrike Meinhof and Sigurd Debus among those who have also been persecuted as terrorists – just like Thomas Müntzer, Georg Elser, Nelson Mandela, and Che Guevara. 

Remarkably, German police does not accuse Garweg of any involvement in the recent RAF assassinations. To this day, police simply doesn’t know who committed them. Mere RAF membership is no longer a crime in Germany.

However, there is no statute of limitations on other attacks for which Germany’s police is prosecuting Garweg. One of them occurred in the early 1990s.

In March 1993, the RAF blew up the Weiterstadt prison in Hesse with 200 kilos of explosives. It was the last RAF attack. The RAF had blocked the road with a sign and security guards were driven away so as not to endanger them. 

The damage to the building was estimated to be in the vincinity of 123 million Deutschmark or about €60,000,000 ($62 million).

At that time, the police claimed to have found Garweg’s DNA traces on a rope. As a consequence, the police is still searching for Garweg.

The police also accuses Garweg of 13 robberies, committed during 1999 to 2016. More than €2.7 million are said to have been taken and one man was killed. German prosecution considers this act as attempted murder.

Garweg says, it was out of the question for us to use violence against ordinary people … nobody should be killed or physically injured. 

Yet, the carefully crafted police-&-media image of a violently marauding gang of robbers has the pre-designed goal of depoliticizing the RAF, says Garweg.

Garweg also believes, the RAF’s activities were set to protest against NATO combat bombers in the Yugoslav and the Afghan war. The RAF also supported the global warming protests of the last generation and the Kurdish PKK.

In his letter, Garweg also criticizes Germany’s bourgeois-fascist-capitalist political parties. At the same time, Garweg admits that the RAF’s revolutionary concepts of history have not been able to show the answer to overcoming capitalism.

Much of this led to the dissolution of the RAF in 1998. It acknowledged the RAF’s failure and the lack of anchoring their actions in wider society. In short, the RAF failed to point out a path to liberation.

Yet, Garweg also emphasizes that we continue to face the same questions. Capitalism is in crisis and we are heading for a 3^rd World War. He wrote this “before” Donald Trump re-entered the White House. Garweg also claims, we still need a revolutionary counter-movement.

For Garweg, it’s time to be on the move. Meanwhile, Germany’s police are extremely unlikely to be reassured by his “interceptions”. Worse, they have increased the pressure on him, significantly. 

The police seized and meticulously searched Garweg’s shabby and dilapidated van. 

A kind of counterfeiting workshop is said to have been found in the van wherein RAF-pensioner Garweg is said to have manipulated ID-cards. 

Also found were recent photos showing him with his dog on a sofa with a plate of pasta in his hand.

And there is a short video in which Garweg smiles. The video was also broadcasted on Germany’s prime manhunt TV-show known as Aktenzeichen XY…ungelöst. 

Up to today, a reward of €125,000 ($128,000) is still being offered for information on Garweg – without success. German police also made repeated arrests of people who were mistaken by eyewitnesses. Even one of Germany’s prestigious ICE-trains was stopped, so was a city bus in Berlin and a tourist boat. All without success.

Meanwhile, German police believes that Garweg might be back in Hamburg, where they imagine, he has a considerable circle of supporters. In fact, there are also letters and notes of solidarity and support for him. 

“Burkhard, hold out!”, they say. In Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, 600 people demonstrated for his freedom in March 2024.

A German-wide organisation called Red Aid also expressed solidarity with Garweg. It accuses police of staging absurd hunt for Garweg while depicting state’s vindictiveness. 

According to the 14,000 members’ strong Rote Hilfe, police has summoned dozens of people and questioned them about the whereabouts of Garweg. Despite police threats of fines and imprisonment, it was all without success – again.

In some cases, just having been a former residence in Hamburg’s Hafenstraße was sufficient for the police to go after you. Interstingly, the responsible public prosecutor’s office did not want to comment on all this. 

More recently, Germany’s Supreme Court issued a ban on a supporter to visit a prison in which former RAF members are kept. 

The concern is that such a visitor could help them to escape or transmit messages. Garweg claims that the picture the state and adjacent media are trying to create is that of a violent gang of ruthless criminals who are dangerous to the general public. When the police insinuates, they are willing to kill for money, Garweg says, it is propaganda.

For Garweg, it is implausible to use violence against ordinary people. The RAF seeks to avoid killing or physically injuring them, says Garweg. It contradicts their ideal of attacking capitalism – not those who suffer from capitalism.

Thus, for Garweg, there is no reason to believe in Germany’s police-judicial apparatus because both are guided by a zealous quest to delegitimize any opposition to the capitalist regime. 

Garweg argues that violence is the foundation of bourgeois society. From slavery to poor houses, the misery of its (now privatized $200bn) prison systems, the daily suffering in the ghettos that exists below the bourgeois everyday life, in the militarization of so-called “security”, and in its everyday exploitative relationships at work.

Garweg contends that state violence affects many – the poor, the exploited, and the marginalized. Garweg also argues that violence is directed, 

• against those who protest and 
• against those who defend themselves against the state, and 
• against those who do not accept this as natural.

They are the ones who have the “wrong opionions” and who occupy places and are beaten down by police violence. They are also the ones who are being driven out of their villages because energy companies want to make profits with fossil fuels below their homes.

It is those who oppose the overexploitation of capitalism and the associated global destruction of our climate. And those who oppose the corporate excavators are exposed to the violence of the police. 

Moreover, they are the ones who – as a result – are forced to flee from the Global South because the capitalist system relentlessly enforces the profit-making of corporations while the entire regions in the world are devastated and made uninhabitable. 

For Garweg, these are the ones…

• who are fighting against fascism and Neo-Nazis and therefore are threatened by the police and the judiciary;
• who have stood up against militarism and the racist the EU-wide asylum-seeker deportation regime; 
• who have been persecuted and forced into exile by the judiciary for almost 30 years.
• who can no longer afford the rent on their apartments and are being evicted by the police for it. They are the ones who are driven out every day. They have to live in tents or under bridges in the midst of wealth.
• who know that they have every moral right in the world, in times when the masses can no longer afford rents, or to simply own houses by occupation. They no longer accept the law of property. Yet, they end up in the meat-grinder of the police and the judiciary;
• who work in precarious working conditions forced to sell their labor – cheaply;
• who are squeezed into horrible work regimes from morning to evening and whose wages are barely enough to live on.
• who are locked up in isolation in prisons or closed psychiatric hospitals, even though isolation is internationally outlawed as white torture; 
• who are threatened every day by the racism of the German police;
• who are forced to migrate by wars, by the destruction of the climate and by poverty, drowning in the Mediterranean by the thousands, being turned away at German and EU borders or ending up in deportation prisons; 
• who were murdered by the NSU – just because they came from migrant families. For years, Germany’s Neo-Nazi NSU killers operated undisturbed by Germany’s state and its police force. The NSU was free to kill. There was no state persecution and – as has been proven – the NSU had connection with German intelligence services.

Then there is the case of Oury Jalloh who was black and was in the Dessau police station “alive”. He was tied up and burned alive without the slightest possibility of being able to move.

It is the escaped and the not escaped like the desperate teenager Mouhamed Dramé who died sifted through by a submachine gun in the hail of bullets from the Dortmund police. He did not pose any danger to his killers. 

There is also the 16-year-old, unarmed teenager Halim Dener, who was murdered by a policeman with a bullet in his back while he put up a poster of the Kurdish liberation movement. 

And it is the thousands in the former Yugoslavia whose lives were wiped out by NATO combat bombers, commanded by the German federal government while claiming “Never again Auschwitz!”

Then, there are the 58 people killed in cold blood and the 141 people who were injured in Afghanistan. They were hit by NATO bombs. It was on the orders of the German army Bundeswehroberst Georg Klein. 

He ordered the attack even though he had previously been informed by the US military that the 58 and the 141 people were civilians. 

Not much later and as a little “thank you”, Klein was promoted to a general by Germany’s federal government. On resitance to all this, Garweg comments, 

it is all those who oppose the war, who oppose the fascization and militarization of the capitalist state. Those who do not want to accept all this. The ones who fight back. 

To him, it is about those who do not resign, but work for a world free from the being ruled by those above. To be free of the structural violence of capitalism and the police. For Garweg, it is the function  of the state apparatus to protect the above from those below.

It is the countless and the sidelined who see the true conditions of violence in the capitalist system. Yet, it is also about the apologists of capitalism who have a common interest in making us believe that there should be no alternative to capitalism.

It is about those who like to talk about the alleged violence of those who rebel no matter where in the world, whose grief and anger has become collective resistance. 

On the other hand, there is the almost never talked about violence – the structural and brutal violence of the capitalist system. Yet, this is the violence that is almost never mentioned.

As part of the revolutionary left, we “were” – Garweg also notes we “are” – convinced that a system based on violence has no legitimacy and that emancipatory overcoming can be achieved. 

He declares, we detest any form of violent relations and long for a world whose basis is not violence, death, and misery. And Garweg notes, 

we once set out to help end the violence of capitalism, the domination of man over man, exploitation, militarism and war, and to transform them into a different social reality. 

Garweg suggest that they were part of all those who rebelled in the history of the struggles of human emancipation, freedom, and self-determination. He continues with, 

we assumed that anyone who asks the question of a nonviolent and peaceful society that is not committed to the profit of the few, the division of people into black and white, rich and poor or male and female, will inevitably have to deal with the question of structural violence of the system, revolutionary countermovement and revolutionary self-defense at some point.

He also asserts that, the militaristic outfit of the state security apparatus against us occured in the context of crisis. To him, every story of a fundamental opposition against the capitalist and imperialist system has been discredited by the state and the media. Beyond all that, Garweg argues that the capitalist system has entered a multifaceted crisis.

In economic terms, the illusion of eternal growth, which is existential for capitalism, is increasingly reaching its limits. The consequences are increasing:

• poverty, 
• environmental destruction, 
• mass layoffs and 
• the reduction of welfare state programs.

Garweg says, the costs of the crisis of capitalism is not being paid by the top ten-thousand of the population, but by those who are below: 

• the elderly whose pension is not enough to live on;
• those dependent on state social benefits, for whom rising food prices are becoming an existential problem; 
• those who will no longer be able to afford housing; 
• those who need ever more precarious jobs in order to be able to survive; 
• the unemployed, who are to be disciplined with every new “tightening of the belt” ideologies suffering inside the harsh and punishing job center system; 
• the junkies, the young people (especially in poorer districts) and those affected by violence; and
• many others whose safety houses, escape rooms, and women’s community shelters are being closed. 

Politicians as well as the police like to talk about migrants as if they are the problem of a capitalist society. However, they never talked about the stratospheric wealth of the Hohenzollerns and Quants. 

Yet, their immense wealth signifies the madness of capitalism. They are – at least partly – responsible for this madness.

Today, the richest 85 people (forbes.com) in the world have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion of the poorest – combined. 

This is flanked by fear, pressure, and discipline. In the course of the authoritarian state crisis, the judiciary is condemning more and more people. In the prevailing mythology, poor slackers “like” to end up in prison.

Those who allegedly or actually received a handful of Euros “unjustifiably” from the job center or those shouting the “wrong” slogan – in the understanding of the ruling elite – will be taken to court and get convicted.

Meanwhile, the rich and powerful, such as the capitalist, billionaires and politicians involved – for example, in Germany’s cum-ex affair and who have “made” (read: scammed off) millions – are not condemned by the corporate press. 

Instead, the authoritarian state places primacy on the militarization of the police and what is euphemistically called “intelligence services”.

As a result, money flows in huge sums into the police, the military, the arms industry, and wars. On the other hand, less and less is being received by those affected by poverty.

This marks a gigantic redistribution process from the bottom to the top. According to the rather conservative Rand Corporation, this reached $50 trillion (1975-2018) or $50,000,000,000,000 – an unimaginable sum.

In 2022, the GDP of Germany was $4,072,190,000,000. In other words, the wealth that has been shifted out of the American middle-class and towards the rich between 1975 and 2018 – the early years of neoliberalism  – was enough to buy 12 Germanies.

Meanwhile, the prevailing crisis management of the ruling elite includes a right-wing revitalization of the imagined white-power-race-based-community. 

This is spiced up with the “tightening the belt” propaganda for the poor. The neoliberal demagogue Ayn Rand calls them – derogatively – the inferior masses.

The strengthening of right-wing and neo-fascist parties means that they are integrated into the ruling elites. This is occurring in more and more EU countries: Austria, Italy, Holland, Austria, France, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and more. 

European elites and right-wing parties have long had the same crisis solution: 

• an authoritarian state set against the disobedient; 
• a reduction in the welfare state; and 
• massive armament of police and the military.

We have arrived at the age of the increasingly authoritarian state – now camouflaging as democracy. 

Garweg closes with, a new age of barbarism is lurking with a worsening of inequality, mass poverty, and the global environmental destruction of life on earth. He ends by saying, 

only the abolition of capitalism, 

achieved in the process of transformation from below, 

will be able to put an end to this development.

Born on the foothills of Germany’s Castle Frankenstein, Thomas Klikauer is the author of over 1,000 publications, is a leading authority on the theory of managerialism and also wrote on media capitalism.

Photo: (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RAF-Logo.svg)

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