Klaus Croissant
Contemporary Crises 4 (1980) 341-348 341 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands THE CRIME OF KLAUS CROISSANT SEBASTIAN SCHEERER 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 Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitt~'t, Frankfurt, Federal Republic of Germany. 0378-1100[80/0000-0000]$ 02.25 © 1980 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company