Melanie Phillips in her radical days in a selection by Robert Taylor from the New Statesman archive from July 1975

Taken from the New Statesman archive, 29 July 1976

Phillips is now the Daily Mail's Mother Superior, scourge of our decadent modern world and self-righteous defender of traditional moral values. Thirty years ago she was a progressive, radical journalist.

In this article, published in New Society, she warns of the dangers of an increasingly repressive West German state in what she regards as its overreaction to threats to its existence coming from urban terrorists such as the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Selected by Robert Taylor

Perhaps Germans have a traditional tendency to over-react against rebels. The money Bonn spends looking for alleged terrorist could be better used.

"Repression works in strange ways," remarked the Frankfurt professor of sociology. "Either it's necessary, in which case it's usually impossible; or it's possible, in which case it's unnecessary. The latter is the situation in Germany." He was talking after a seminar in Frankfurt University, held in a room dominated by a huge message scrawled on one wall: Justizmord an Holger Meins-"The law killed Holger Meins." Meins, one of the Baader-Meinhof group accused of terrorist offences, died in prison after a hunger strike.

One of the most serious developments in West Germany has been the action taken against lawyers defending those accused of terrorist crime. Last year, new laws came into effect which placed various restrictions on the work of such lawyers; for example, where the prosecution holds the defendant to be dangerous, the defence lawyer is not allowed to speak to his client without the presence of a judge. Similarly, any correspondence between the lawyer and his client may be read.

A number of defence lawyers have been excluded from the various trials of the Baader-Meinhof and Second of June groups and one, Kurt Groenewold, has been disbarred completely- even though none of the offences with which they have been charged has been proved in a court of law. Groenewold, a Baader-Meinhof lawyer, was accused of contravening lawyers’ ethics by helping is clients more than he was legally allowed to by exchanging information among them to keep up their collective consciousness. A "court of honour," a local professional disciplinary committee, disbarred Groenewold. He maintained he had circulated information among the defendants because they were jointly charged, and so he was conducting a joint defence. In the middle of the trial, however, a new law had been passed forbidding such joint defences.

Groenewold is now awaiting trial, and his is seen as a test case. "If they succeed in sending him to prison or fining him, other lawyers will be similarly tried," I was told. Other affected lawyers include Croissant and Stroebele, excluded by courts of honour from the Baader-Meinhof trial. They were accused, for example, of complaining to newspapers that conditions of imprisonment were threatening the health and lives of their clients. Croissant was accused of holding public meetings and issuing press-releases, in and out of Germany, which tried to create interest in members of a criminal organisation. The Ministry of Justice defends the action taken against the lawyers. Heinrich Laufhütte, in charge of criminal law reform at the ministry, told me: "The court which excludes them has to have proof that the lawyer was an accomplice of these men. He must be seen to have committed a crime or endangered the security of the prison."

There are other disquieting features of the Baader-Meinhof trial. The defence called four former CIA agents to testify that buildings allegedly attacked by the gang in Frankfurt and Heidelberg were centres of the American intelligence work. Their evidence was refused. Two of them, Gary Thomas and Kenneth Osborn, told me they would have provided evidence of a computer in Heidelberg which contained information on German radicals, and of equipment in Frankfurt used in the recruiting of agents for an assassination programme in Vietnam. "The judge at Stammheim refused to hear any of it," said Thomas. "He just said, ‘The bombings speak for themselves’."

New laws have also been enacted to prevent anything being printed or spoken which incites or approves of violent acts. Laufhütte maintains that these are aimed at specific acts of violence such as murder, bombings, taking hostages (The Ministry of Justice claims that terrorism accounts for one crime in every 1,000 in West Germany.) "Our law previously didn’t cover attacks on the legal order. A lot of books were being were being written on how to construct bombs and kill people, and the new laws are to stop this. I don’t see it as censorship; the last thing we want is to prevent free speech."

Others do not share this interpretation. Erich Fried, a writer and poet, says: "Violence is defined as anything that interferes with the free movement of people or objects. So a strike could be called a crime of violence." Wolfgang Bock, a law student and speaker of the Frankfurt students’ union, agrees: "If students register disapproval of, say, an academic course by walking in and insisting on speaking to the authorities, they could well be punished. Any writing which advocates the overthrow of the existing order could be seized. It is political censorship." Apart from various pamphlets which have been confiscated, the memoirs of Bommi Baumann, a Second of June member, were seized. Ironically, the book concluded that violence was pointless; Baumann’s offence, however, was to praise the kidnapping of Berlin politician peter Lorenz as "a masterpiece of illegal work."

Much has been made of "unconstitutional acts. Bock told me of a recent incident when he asked the police for permission to hold a demonstration in support of an imprisoned student who, it was thought, had been wrongfully accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail. "The police said the demonstration was forbidden because it implied the police had acted unconstitutionally; and as the police were agents of the constitution, this in itself would be unconstitutional. They said we were people who would not shrink from bringing unrest to the population and so were acting against the state." As it happened, the local court disagreed and the demonstration went ahead.

On a larger scale, charges of unconstitutional activities have resulted in the Berufsverbote, the ban on political extremists in the civil service (outlined by Professor Hobsbawm last week). A young Bonn social worker told me that this was preventing free political expression. "People are now very frightened, even if they only signed a petition years ago about Vietnam. They are tending to keep away from demonstrations and not put their names to resolutions. You see police at demonstrations taking photographs that are used for research. Friends of mine are saying to me, ‘Keep quiet about it, but I’ve just got a letter saying I’m being investigated.’"

The research is being carried out by the Verfassungsschutz, the bureau for the protection of the constitution, often said to be a type of secret service distinct from the police. Whether "political police" exist is a matter of controversy. Gregor Streicher, head of police affairs in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, is adamant political police do not exist in Germany, and any special police units are aimed at countering all serious crime. However, last year the Bundeskriminalamt, the federal bureau of crime suppression, formed a special Terrorismus division with 210 new posts in addition to its Staatschutz, or Special Branch. The bureau’s official booklet describes the Terrorismus division as being set up to fight against "particular forms of criminality," such as the "so-called Baader-Meinhof gang."

Since 1969, the Bundeskriminalamt budget ahs been increased from 22.4 million to 136.7 million deutschmark. According to Gerhard Mitschke, the bureau’s director of information, this massive increase was made necessary by public opinion. The money has gone towards increasing staff by more than 1,000 and also towards developing highly sophisticated electronic data processing and telecommunications equipment. A small number of police cars are already fitted with computer terminals connected to headquarters at Wiesbaden, and it is planned to provide policemen with pocket computer terminals so they can obtain information in a fraction of a second. The official booklet is frank about the possible implications of these developments. "One may find the outsider either fascinated by this modern technology or preoccupied with the possible danger to the freedom of the individual which may flow therefrom."

Rather more danger will flow from proposed new laws which will increase the power of the police. It is not uncommon for the West German police to shoot a suspected criminal and even to kill him, but the policeman usually has to account for his behaviour in court. The new laws allow police to shoot to kill, according to Streicher, when "other innocent lives are in danger," and when there is no alternative. "I do not think this will bring about any improvement in law enforcement; it simply means that responsibility for such actions shifts to a political level."

Erich Fried condemns this development. "It means police will be entitled to shoot to kill demonstrators, for example, and will be free from all retribution." Yet Streicher admits that violent crimes in Germany, though they increased by 6.7 percent between 1974 and 1975, form only a very small proportion of all crime. "They attract a lot of publicity, however, and as a result the population is extremely frightened." Recent surveys, he says, show that 68 per cent of the population accept the need for these new laws, and 79 per cent think of the police as being on their side.

What are the police and the legal system doing when they’re not looking for alleged terrorists and subversives?

Community treatment of offenders is now being encouraged to take the place of imprisonment, although in the last five years the prison population has been slowly increasing. On 1 January this year, there were 50,677 people in prison (out of a population of about 60 million), compared with about 46,000 in 1971. This is despite the fact that all sentences of less than six months’ imprisonment must be suspended, and the judge can also suspend other short sentences. This, said the Federal Ministry of Justice, was because it realised that rehabilitation could not take place in prison. An explanation for the increase in the prison population was that serious crimes were increasing.

About 60,000 people are now estimated to be on probation in Germany. Dr. Alfons Wahl, a former judge and until recently president of the Society for Probation Assistance, says that the increasing trend towards rehabilitation has led to a number of projects. A judge may order an offender to pay a fine to a specified charity or to the probation association, which can then afford to run these projects. Probation officers may draw money to help a newly released prisoner on his way, for example. Wives and the close family of prisoners soon to be released have been sent on educational holidays to help them adjust and prepare for the prisoner’s return. Private homes have also been built for families who take in a released prisoner t try to bring him back to a family group; the families are paid, and a social worker in fact lives in on the premises.

Yet "detention," whereby a prisoner is locked up after his prison sentence for a specific crime has expired, remains. This occurs when a judge finds proof that the man is still a danger to society and so he is sent to a detention centre for a maximum of ten years. Dr. Wahl agrees that this hardly helps rehabilitate the offender: "These people need to get back to normal life. The longer they are segregated away from home the more difficult this is."

Juvenile crime is not seen as a large problem. In Frankfurt, where last year about 70,000 offences were committed among a population of 600,000, roughly one third were committed by people under 21 years old. No child under 14 can be prosecuted for an offence and quite often, of the police think the problem lies in the family background, the parents may be taken to court and fined. If a child of 14-plus is brought to court, the judge will often order him to do some charity or other good work. For those serious or persistent offenders, however, the sanction of prison looms as soon as they reach the age of 14.

I visited a "youth prison" in Frankfurt for 250 boys aged between 18 and 21. It is considered one of the most progressive in the country, built in a number of two-storey blocks to seem less oppressive and far more modern and spacious than other prisons. It has an "open" section acting as a halfway house for boys scheduled for release. In the closed part, the boys are locked in their cells at night but during the day they are encourage to participate in group recreation. Every boy is expected to learn a trade in the prison. Most of them find jobs when they leave. Yet even here there is an average reconviction rate of about 60 per cent. The prison director, Karl Haus, says most boys in the prison had run the gamut of other institutions: "More money should be spent on these and on educating the family."

Perhaps some of the millions of marks being spent on attempts to stop terrorism might be more profitably spent here. Yet it is hard to envisage this happening when so many people in Germany feel that on law and order, and on the protection of the state, the government still isn’t doing enough.

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