Klaus Croissant
Klaus Croissant (* 24. Mai 1931 in Kirchheim unter Teck; † 28. März 2002 in Berlin) war ein deutscher Strafverteidiger. Er wurde als Wahlverteidiger des RAF-Protagonisten Andreas Baader in Stuttgart-Stammheim bekannt. In diesem Zusammenhang organisierte er einen Besuch Jean-Paul Sartres bei dem inhaftierten Baader (4.12.1974) und gründete mit Kurt Groenewold das „Internationale Komitee zur Verteidigung politischer Gefangener in Westeuropa“ (IKV). Am 12.3.1975 wurde er vom Verfahren ausgeschlossen, am 23.6.1975 verhaftet und am 8.8.1975 unter Auflagen wieder auf freien Fuß gesetzt. Croissant engagierte sich in der Folge als Testamentsvollstrecker Ulrike Meinhofs und beteiligte sich federführend einer internationalen Kommission zur Untersuchung ihrer Todesumstände. In Frankreich, wohin er auf der Suche nach politischem Asyl am 11.7.1977 geflohen worden war, wurde er nach zwei Monaten Haft (30.9.-17.11.1977) ausgeliefert und am 16.2.1979 zu zweieinhalb Jahren Gefängnis und vier Jahren Berufsverbot verurteilt. Das Gericht sah in der Etablierung des Info-Systems für die Gefangenen durch die Anwälte Croissant, Ströbele und Groenewold eine Unterstützung einer terroristischen Vereinigung jenseits legitimer Verteidigeraufgaben.
Später arbeitete Croissant in Berlin erneut als Strafverteidiger, war aber auch politisch in der Alternativen Liste und ab 1990 dann in der PDS tätig. 1992 kam heraus, dass er auch als inoffizieller Mitarbeiter für die Staatssicherheit der DDR tätig gewesen war. Er folgten U-Haft (1992) und eine Bewährungsstrafe von 21 Monaten wegen geheimdienstlicher Agententätigkeit (1993).
Weblinks und Literatur
- Dokumente zur Verhaftung 1976
- Klaus Croissant, in: de.wikipedia
- Scheerer, Sebastian (1980) The Crime of Klaus Croissant. Contemporary Crises 4: 341-348:
Klaus who? To most people in West Germany, the 1931-born liberal lawyer is the devil in disguise. In their opinion, he and his colleagues, notably Lang, Newerla, Groenewold and Str~Sbele were busy smuggling escape and attack plans from one prisoner's cell to the other or from the incarcerated heads of the Red Army Faction (RAF), popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, to still fugitive soldiers of the urban guerilla while pretending to mind their own business as lawyers of the defense in Germany's most exciting post-war conspiracy trial. Popular emotions were running high: the Baader- Meinhofs, it must be known, had placed a bomb in the headquarters of the Fifth U.S.Army command in Frankfurt, killing three U.S. citizens in an attempt to protest the American Vietnam policy and Germany's tacit support of the logistic operations needed to carry through President Nixon's bombing warfare in Indochina. But other groups had, long after Baader and Meinhof, continued the armed struggle: they had kidnapped a politician and shot a banker, an industrialist and a judge, also killing policemen and bodyguards. A few more bombing and bomb scares had officially been attributed to "the terrorists". Croissant, in the eyes of the masses, in collaboration with his colleagues masterminded the continuing guerilla operations after Baader and Meinhof had been arrested. Others defined him not as the Godfather but as the "mailman" for arsonists and police murderers [ 1]. He had "subordinated himself to the plans and goals of the conspiracy as one of its members" [2]. Notwithstanding this ambiguity in his public image - Godfather or humble servant of terrorists - Croissant and his colleagues had to be stopped at all costs. It was so easy and yet so difficult. Croissant and his colleagues had hardly been accepted by the court as defense lawyers for the five accused, when they were, half a year later, in 1975, excluded. It took only two weeks to pass a law providing for the possibility of the exclusion of lawyers. Information about the defense strategy was collected by periodical cell raids and continuous marl-inspection by the Secret Service. "We're not going to curb the legitimate rights of the defense", a member of Parliament said in the debate preceding this law. "We're solely aiming at lawyers pursuing their revolutionary battle in collaboration with their clients" [3]. Croissant's public image became worse. A campaign was started by the Department of Justice, producing large-scale pretrial publicity. The Minister of Justice leaked accusations about Croissant to a select group of conservative journalists. Back in 1974, the government's press office had published a report on "violent anarchist criminals" insinuating that the Baader-Meinhof lawyers were giving logistic support to terrorist activities [4] - now the insinuations became incriminations. In 1975, Croissant was excluded from the defense, witnessed raids on his office, suffered debarment and apprehension by the police and was finally release on bail. While harassment continued in 1976 - he was arrested again and again released on bail - Croissant made plus to exile himself. In 1977, he went to Paris and applied for political asylum. An infuriated Attorney General sent stacks of official fries to the French government which, Croissant's prosecution believed, would convince France of his dangerousness and assure his extradition. But the French courts, upon skimming through the documents, found little substance to the reproachments so firmly entrenched in West German public opinion. It took the shipment of another bulk of documents to underline the political importance of Croissant's trial - then he was extradited. He was tried in the same custom-made fortress that had witnessed the Baader-Meinhof trial. The sentence was thirty months in prison plus four years of Berufsverbot. (The court building, the construction of which had cost 15,000,000 Deutsche Mark, might in later days be remembered as a perfect expression of the trial atmosphere: the conduct of the day was supervised by machine guns, barbed wire, and all sorts of equipment designed to prevent roof landings by terrorists' helicopters. Jean-Paul Sartre, who showed himself quite impressed by it all, might supply a good reference to future political tourists to Stuttgart-Stammheim.) For a public to whom Croissant had officially been presented as an accomplice of terrorism, the.verdict seemed almost a symbol of permissiveness and leniency. Had not Chancellor Schmidt himself denounced the defense as "international connections of the terrorists and international connections of their fellow-travellers" (some renowned lawyers from France and the U.S. had announced their interest in observing the Baader-Meinhof trial) and as "so-called lawyers" whose sole interest lay in campaigning against the rule of law [ 5 ] ? At a second glance, however, the name of the crime that Klaus Croissant had committed is spelled defense. It was, of course, a political defense, as it was not the defendants' wish to disassociate themselves from their organization, but to explain the strategy and reasons of their actions. Klaus Croissant knew that the defense of the non-repentant political criminal creates difficulties: first for the accused, then for the attorney; that even
learned scholars of jurisprudence are tempted to interpret the legitimate defense of a client as criminal support of his conspiracy or high treason; and that the temptation to criminalize the lawyers of radical defendants increases when the lawyers are known to be sympathetic to the cause of their clients. Klaus Croissant could have known that the showing of terminological similarities with the urban guerillas would make him their associate in crime in the eyes of the public. The Attorney GeneraJ Buback - who was later himself to be shot by politically motivated students - had warned him as early as 1974, that it made him highly suspicious of collaboration with his clients if he continued to use "the terminology of left extremism like isolation torture, annihilation detention, brain-washing wing (of prisons) and the like" [61]. "Overidentification" with the client - it sounds like an infectious disease, something for short people with inferiority complexes (Napoleon) or intellectual funks too afraid to go out and do something themselves. The image of the detached attorney-at-law still pervades the literature, even the critical literature, about the role of the lawyer - also, and even more so, where the lawyer defends a non-repentant political prisoner. "I always believed", says one progressive barrister from Paris, that Croissant never, neither from near nor from fax, participated in the "urban guerilla' of Baader- Meinhof, that the accusations do not hold, that the facts are not of the kind to be followed by penal prosecution, that all this is profoundly ridiculous. But all the rest was done by his way of talking: he assimilated as much as possible to his clients in his language, in his intentions, his imaginations, and only this could give a pretext for the inculpations [7]. In other words, what Croissant had done was technically and legally justified, but not really one hundred percent smart, because it could be used by the prosecution to put him on trial himself. Advocate Revon is not so much interested in the political motives of the State that spared no pains to get Croissant tried and sentenced, but thinks to himself that all things considered, it was the lawyer's own fault, for "Why did he let himself get dragged into that game?" [8]. This is the same interest that is fostered by the liberal press and the psychological defenders of the status quo. The liberal newsmagazine Der Spiegel for example, persists in a perspective that does not judge but wants to understand - by accepting the governmental insinuation that it is the lawyers' "overidentification", and not the strategy of the prosecution, that is rightly to be labelled as criminal. Thus the journal interviews a professor of psychology about the mysteries of "overidentification", and she offers the explanation that, "a mixture of social-romanticism and sentimentality," of "admiration and envy" are at the roots of crimes like that of Klaus Croissant: We may assume that conspiring lawyers have their very own personal problem with their own aggressiveness and their own hunger for power . . . . It is naturally an extremely comfortable and relieving kind of aggressive articulation, ff you can wrap up this urge in an idea, and if you are able to press this idea to such a level of abstraction that it permits any kind of inhumane behavior [9]. After reading Professor Mtiller-Luckmann's statements about "motives of terrorist lawyers," one is understandably curious to know just where this natural "urge," this "instinct" of overidentification had finally led Croissant: to the murder of a guard, of the presiding judge, of himself?. Klaus Croissant was sentenced to thirty months in prison because he established an information service designed to communicate matters relevant for a collective defense of the accused: statements, discussions, decisions, judgements, critiques, books and articles. What is collective defense? Is it something illegal? Collective defense is the answer to collective indictment. Participants of a conspiracy are not accused of individual acts, but each one is charged with the activities of the whole group. To prepare an effective defense the collective charge must be answered by collective defense, i.e. the defendants must be free to agree upon a single strategy of defense, to communally prepare statements to be given before court. It must be possible for each of the defendants to have more than one attorney, and for each attorney to have more than one client. Although collective defense was practiced under the Socialist Law in the 1880s as well as in the Weimar Republic and even in the communist conspiracy trials after the outlawing of the German communist party in 1956 (the defense then rented a complete hotel to collectively prepare motions and declarations, and there was no objection whatsoever), it has now been outlawed in Germany by an act especially designed to smash the defense in the Baader-Meinhof case ("lex RAF"). "For once", says Gerhard Mauz, one of the more critical observers of the judicial scene, for once there is counsel for the defense in penal procedure that merits its name - and instantly it is called 'abuse'. For once the rights accorded to the counsel of the defense by the code of penal procedure are being used - and instantly the code itself must be demolished so it earmot be 'abused' anymore [10]. The lex RAF prohibits collective defense, limits the rights of the defense and their clients to deliver statements of political content in any phase of the trial, declares it legal to proceed against the accused in absentia, enables the court to exclude a lawyer from the defense even before he is found guilty of a breach of law [ 11]. Furthermore, in 1976 and 1978 two more laws were passed to extend the powers of the court to exclude "political lawyers," thus annihilating all progress in penal procedural reform that had been made since the Second World War. Technically, of course, the provisions of the lex RAF could not apply to Croissant, as there was no way to make them retroactive. The juridical way of circumventing this barrier to criminalization was rather elegant. It was said that the passing-on of the information to Bernhard Braun (the only one of the 33 prisoners who received the informations through Croissant) was illegal because the informations contained material not pertaining to lawful defense. As an example the judge cited the communication between one prisoner and another (Ulrike Meinhof) reproaching Ms. Meinhof for her resigning attitude. The answer was a self-critique of Ms. Meinhof which the judge saw as a "frightening testimony of self-humiliation" [ 12]. Supplying the books ordered by another prisoner, Gerhard Mtiller, was seen as a second illegal act. Mi~ller, a onetime RAF-member, at the time of his contacts with Croissant had just secretly passed the lines and worked for the Secret Service. His book orders were mostly of a radical kind: he ordered books on psychological warfare, on weapon systems, weapon catalogues, manuals for electricians, etc. - many of his orders were turned down or simply ignored by the lawyers, others were procured. There is little doubt that the lawyers' support of a hunger-strike aimed at improving the debilitating conditions of imprisonment (and the exchange of notes between the two pre-trial detainees pertaining to the attitude towards the hunger-strike) was perfectly legal. Furthermore the condemnation of Croissant for "tightening group cohesion" by means of the information service was unjustified. Croissant's actions were remote from anything resembling illegal support of a prisoners' conspiracy. Even the book-orders, the second point in the verdict, look more like a trick played upon Croissant by an agent provocateur than like a criminal act which he himself had perpetrated. How was it that all the books delivered to Milller were introduced legally and with the stamp of approval by the prison authorities? How had one book, the delivery of which to Miiller resulted in Croissant being sentenced been perfectly legally borrowed from the official prison library? These questions and others reveal variables other than the "overidentification" of psychopathic lawyers. The simple key to the crime of Klaus Croissant is the intensive dislike with which political lawyers are being met in Germany. As one observer said: "the mentioning of Croissant's name alone has the effect of showing a red bandana to a bull" [13]. One can trace, for instance, an "urge" of government officials and judges to eliminate political trials altogether. They expose the very delicate problems of power, envy, and identification. A typical technique of neutralization was used by the presiding Judge Strohbusch when he insisted that "it would be totally beside the point to believe that the trial against Dr. Croissant be a 'political' trial, whatever that slogan may mean" [14]. The "urge" hypothesis is insufficient, however. There must be more behind the press campaigns, the false informations, the huge pretrial publicity, and the strategic invasion of the defense camp. The "urge" hypothesis cannot explain why a whole bureaucracy collectively arranged for the secret and illegal monitoring of Croissant's conversation with one of his clients in the Stammheim prison building. To uncover the reasons behind the intentions pursued with the criminalization of the defense one may compare the likely outcome of the public discourse on terrorism had these measures not been taken with the outcome gained by the strategy applied. First we consider what would have happened if the State apparatus had done without illegal manoeuvers. In this case, nothing could have prevented the philosophy of the Baader-Meinhof group being explained in the courtroom and distributed by the media. The urban guerilla, to be sure, would have been incarcerated for a long time - be it five, ten or fifteen years. Legally, the prisoners would have had the same kind of trial as "normal" prisoners. Criminalization of the defense per se, on the other hand, transcended the mere juridical sphere in its effects: it functioned as a means to depoliticize the trial. All statements, explanations and moves of the defense were subject to classification not in an attempt to shed light on the motives of the guerilla, but as evidence of preparation and support of conspiratorial activity. This process of neutralizing the potential impact of the defense on public opinion began long before the trial was opened, and after the trial began every activity of the lawyers was examined with only one question in mind: "what crime are they preparing now?" For instance, after the first days of the trial had elapsed without the indictment having been read, the headlines already stated: "Defense tactics in Baader-Meinhof trial may help escape plans" [15]. Criminalization of the defense can also be considered as a type of psychological warfare. It permits or creates the impression that for crimes like the ones of the RAF there is no defense, no explanation even, except for those who are ready to identify with terrorism themselves. It is therefore a concealed warning to all those who believe that it is possible to distinguish between the legitimacy of the guerilla's goals and the illegality/illegitimacy of the means employed. This kind of sympathy was widespread when the trial of the Baader-Meinhof group opened, and it was this radical opposition to the dominant social and political system that was perceived as a threat to government legitimacy. A statement of Dr. Herold, President of theFederal Police Office (BKA), contained in the official files of the Baader- Meinhof trial lends striking evidence to this hypothesis. He, declared in 1972: The last opinion poll by Emnid reflects a growth of sympathies in circles of youths, especially among apprentices and schoolchildren, for the Baader-Meinhof gang. Solidarity has ... spread significantly ... [16]. 17.5 percent of a representative sample had admitted sympathies for the RAF in 1972; every seventh citizen even replied "yes" when asked if he would put up with penal prosecution for actions in support of RAF members like providing food, shelter etc. [ 17]. From this survey Dr. Herold concluded that, "we are dealing with a problem of social policy. We must cut the ground from under the feet of anarchism .... If the revolution doesn't come from above in the near future, then it will certainly come very soon from below" [ 181. The final aim of the terrorist trials as well as the staged trials of the defense was political in nature, not juridical. To assert that this is peculiar to fascism, as Croissant repeatedly did himself [ 19], does not pinpoint the real issue, though. History shows many instances of criminalization of the defense, before and after fascism, when the legitimacy of the rulers was directly and unrepentantly challenged. In most cases, the lawyers knew what to expect and refused counsel. Remember, for instance, the case of Jeronimo Caserio, who, after he had stabbed the French president to death in 1894, found it impossible to obtain a defense attorney. Auguste Vaillant, the anarchist who threw a firebomb into the chambre des Drputrs in Paris in 1893, did not have the same problem: his request for a lawyer was simply delayed long enough by the judiciary so as to effectively deny him a defense. Only very few anarchists or urban guerillas have been as lucky as Emile Henry who rose to fame with his bombing of the caf6 Terminus in Paris, and was accepted by a lawyer. This lawyer, however, (Maftre Hornbostel) was a young man and this was his first case. He never believed he could save his client's life, but he was sure that his speech would leave a mark in history. Consequently he followed the trial only sporadically, concentrating on his rhetoric lessons at the Comrdie Franqaise, carefully preparing his plea. Unluckily, his defense summary was disastrous and made even Henry's worst enemies agree with his friends that he had not deserved such a poor representation [20]. Hanno Ktihnert writes, When it comes to crimes which to many look as ff they could endanger the very existence of the State, even erudite officials may fall prey to the temptation of redefining the lawful defense of a client as an aid to the crimes of which his clients are being accused [21]. The crime of Klaus Croissant, it seems, was his very equanimity in the face of this ever present danger. His boldness was in trying a serious legal defense against the overriding political interests of the dominant powers. Is there a lesson to be drawn out of his case? Perhaps: if you want to defend a regicide and not be hanged yourself, do as the lawyer of Max Hbdel, the would-be assassin of a German Emperor, did in his plea in 1878 - show sincere repentance, admit that you failed in accepting to defend such a heinous criminal, just beg the court's pardon, and say, "Forgive me!" Notes 1 Bild-Zeitung, 21 Aug. 1973. 2 Stroebele, C. (1976). "Verteidiger im Verfahren gegen die RAF. Zu den Vorwfirfen, zur Praxis und zum Selbstverstbhdnis", in Croissant, C., K. Groenewold, U.K. Preuss, O. Schily, Ch. Stroebele (1976). Politische Prozesse ohne Verteidigung? Berlin: Wagenbach, p. 43. This was a statement by The German Supreme Court BGH, 20 Jan. 1975. 3 Croissant, K. (1976). "Verteidigeraussehluss in politisehen Prozessen. Instrument des Neuen Faschismus", in C. Croissant et al., Ibid., p. 24. 4 Dokumentation (1974). Dokumentation der Bundesregierung iiber die A ktivit6"ten anarchistischer Gewaltt~'ter in der Bundesrepublik, Bonn: Bundespresseamt. 5 Croissant, K. (1976), op. cir., p. 29. 6 Buback, in Croissant, Ibid., p. 22. 7 Revon, C. (1978). "Terrorisme et d~fense politique" Ddviance et Soci~t~ 2: 185-192. 8 Ibid. 9 Miiller-Luckmann, E, (1977). "Flucht aus dem ewigen Zwiespalt," 31 Der Spiegel 42 (10 Oct. 1977): 38. 10 Mauz, G. (1976). "Es ist nicht immer Haarmann, der kommt ...," in Croissant et al. (1976), op. eit., p. 8. 11 Cobler, S. (1978). Law & Order in West Germany, Haxmondsworth: Penguin; Scheerer, S. (1978). "Law Making in a State of Siege", unpubl, paper given at the 6th conference of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, Sept. 6-9, 1978, at Bremen. 12 Strohbusch, in Watts, M. (1979). "Warum wurde Croissant eigentlich verurteilt?", Info~mationsdienst zur Verbreitung unterbliebener Nachrichten, 270 (24 Feb. 1979): 5. 13 Birkenmaler, W. (1979). "Ein strenger Spruch", in Stammheim keine Milde ffir den 'Info-Anwalt'. Die Zeit 9 (23 Feb. 1979): 6. 14 Watts, M. op. cit., p. 6. 15 Caption of the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 Aug. 1975. 16 Der Baader-MeinhofReport (1972). Dokumente, Analysen, Zusammenhffnge; aus den Akten des Bundeskriminalamts, d. Sonderkomm. Bonn und des Bundesamts f/Jr Verfassungsschutz. Mainz: v. Hase und KShler. 17 Kepplinger, H.M. (1974). "Statusdevianz und Meinungsdevianz. Die Sympathisanten der Baader- Meinhof-Gruppe", 26 KZfSS 770-800. 18 Herold, in Der Stern, June, 1972. 19 Croissant (1976). op. cit.; Croissant, K. (1978a). "Politische Verteidigung - Nicht Identifikation," Informationsdienst zur Verbreitung unterbliebener Nachrichten 225 (11 Nov. 1978): 12-16. 20 See for example , Ma~ron, J. (1975). Le mouvement anarchiste en France Vol. I, Paris; and references therein. 21 K//hnert, H. (1972). "Strafverteidiger unter Komplizen-Verdacht", Frankfurter Hefte 27: 703- 711.