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
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