Petra

From Athens Indymedia
April 5, 2025

[…]  Anyone who was lucky enough to meet these comrades directly or indirectly, anyone who was able and wanted to read, discuss and embrace this profound humanity of those who dedicated their thoughts and bodies to social justice and freedom, anyone who understood what was and what continues to be at stake today, knows well that these comrades are part of the overall heritage of the revolutionary movement, the adhesive substance of the pieces of class memory. Their wounds, wrinkles and words have transmitted to us another History, “unofficial”, illegal and silenced. They have shown us that there are no slaves if they themselves do not want to live as such. They have taught us the beauty of dignity and rebellion. They touched our hearts directly and told us clearly and unequivocally that despite our contradictions, our smallness and our fears, in the face of a historical enemy that is currently very powerful, what we must do is continue to fight, to dream, to rejoice in life […]

Simone (Haute-Savoie, February 2021)

On 2/4/2025, the German-Jewish activist Petra Krause died. An international revolutionary who dedicated her life to the liberation movements of the 1970s and the fight against dictatorships and imperialism. A woman who lived through the history of the 20th century through fire and iron, paying the price for this struggling choice of hers, with persecutions and extradition requests, arrests and imprisonments in Switzerland and Italy. After her many years of targeting and during her fugitive status, in order to avoid extradition to Germany, she will find refuge first in France and then for a while in Greece. She passed away in Milan, with the care and love of her son Marco and his wife Flor.

As a small tribute to her memory, we publish the following translated excerpt from Davide Steccanella's book, Le indomabili [ The Untamed ], published in 2017 in Italy by Paginauno.

Have a nice trip, comrade.

Proletarian Initiative
Athens, April 2025

Petra Krause

Petra Krause was born in Berlin in 1939. The daughter of a family that was sent to Auschwitz. At the age of 11, she was adopted by a family from East Berlin. “When we were children, no one talked to us about our past. Because for the generation of Nazism, recent history was a taboo that had to be exorcised silently. If I have to describe my first political impulse, I have to look for it in the spontaneous need to learn and react to the fear I carried within me. But, even now I can't talk about all this in a detached way,” she said in an interview published in Panorama magazine on November 8, 1977.

In 1957 she came to Italy, to Taranto, to work in a house as a domestic helper. Here, she began to hang out with some young communists and married the doctor Giorgio Ognissanti. In 1960 her son Marco was born. After divorcing her husband, she returned to Germany and enrolled in journalism school. She wrote articles for Ulrike Meinhof's radical left-wing magazine Konkret . In 1964 she returned to Italy and worked as a translator for a plastics company. This job offered her the opportunity to travel frequently to Asia, Africa and America, where she collected material and documents that she provided to the Frantz Fanon Center in Milan. In 1969 he came into contact with Ugo Lemke and told him that he had seen the fascist Giancarlo Cartocci walking away - on the day of the bombings - from the Monument to the Fatherland in Rome.

In Germany he distributes magazines of the Italian extra-parliamentary left in underground bookstores. “I understood that to fight the bourgeois State we need other tools, those that we can find in the communist revolution,” from the same interview in Panorama magazine .

In the early 1970s in Milan, she came into contact with the Workers' Autonomy movement and met Carlo Fioroni, a professor in Varese and member of Potere Operaio [ Workers' Power ], convicted of the murder of Carlo Saronio [ed., son of a family of industrialists who was also a member of Workers' Power ] on April 14, 1975. He told the interrogators that “Krause was interested above all in the fight against imperialism on an international level .” Based on the confessions of two arrested anarchists, Daniel von Arb and Urs Stadeli, who were arrested in Dumemza in Varese, Petra was arrested in Zurich on March 19, 1975. A warrant was immediately issued in Italy, as the owner of a Simca 1000 car that had been used in the action against the Face Standard facilities in October 1974. Inside the vehicle was found a fine for Anna Maria Grenzi, a name she used illegally.

In prison she will go on 3 hunger strikes to avoid ending up in the Rheina psychiatric hospital of Dr. Knab. In '77 she will be the face of a major solidarity campaign in the press promoted by Franca Rame, the Red Aid [ Soccorso Rosso ] and the newspaper Lotta Continua [ Continuous Struggle ], for the inhuman conditions of her detention in complete isolation, waiting for years for her trial. “Between the methods of torture of the Nazis and those of the Swiss prison guards there is a significant difference, the former often knew that they were committing crimes while the latter never did”, she wrote in a letter to Dario Fo and Franca Rame published in the newspaper La Repubblica on 28 July 1977, in an article by the two artists entitled “The Terrible Case of Petra Krause” .

On 28 July 1977, a committee of Italian parliamentarians went to Zurich but the authorities did not accept them. They were Susanna Agnelli, Giancarla Codrigoni, Vera Squarcialupi, Luciana Castellina and Maria Magnani Noja, who held a public press conference that created a stir. After two years and four months of pre-trial detention without trial, the Swiss authorities extradited her to Italy and on 5 August 1977 she landed at Milan airport and was taken to the women's prison in Pozzuoli, from where she was released - due to the rapid deterioration of her health - on 28 August. During her interrogation, she will declare to the interrogator: "I will reveal to you the names of those responsible for the attack and arson on Face only when all the partisans who acted during World War II are released and the bloody repression of the just struggles of the prisoners ceases."

In 1978, Switzerland requested her extradition from Italy, which was rejected, since the specific events were already being dealt with by the Italian justice system. In April of the same year, Petra Krause signed a text published in the newspaper Lotta Continua, against the threats received by some brigade leaders against the secretary of the Partito Radicale [ Radical Party ] Adelaide Aglietta, who had been called as a juror in the trial of the historic core of the Brigate Rosse (BR) [ Red Brigades ] that was taking place in Turin.

On November 14, 1978, he was acquitted of the attempt on Fizzonasco's Face, while subsequently Carlo Fioroni, who during his stay in Matera prison became the first repentant of the investigations concerning left-wing subversive organizations, would declare to the judges that Petra had lent him the car "without herself having any idea of ​​what would follow" .

On June 2, 1980, she was convicted, along with lawyer Sergio Spazzali - who died on January 24, 1994 in Miramas, France - and some local anarchists, for importing explosives stolen from the Swiss army into Italy. At this point, while her extradition request to Germany was pending, she fled and was never seen again. All the media would describe her as an “international red phantom of subversion”.

After many years, Krause would be unfairly targeted for her alleged collaboration with the new BR, which took responsibility for D'Antona's execution on May 20, 1999.

In the report of the “Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into Terrorism in Italy” established by a bill on December 23, 1999, we read: “Due to her special weight, her historical role, even during the time of her anarcho-insurrectionary mobilization, and above all because of the breadth and influence of the international contacts she has maintained over the years, Petra Krause can objectively and soberly be characterized as the -most important and at the same time inconceivable- connecting official link of the contacts of continental and intercontinental terrorism. We find her at the epicenter of European, South American and Middle Eastern, subversive and insurgent networks. We find her in strategic positions within the key front of the struggle against colonialism and the imperialism, with anti-Americanism and anti-militarism. Her -for decades- subversive action was characterized by her unwavering conviction (which results from obsessive behaviors and positions) for the need to attack and destroy the nodes of the North American system of domination throughout the world. The targets on which she focused her efforts were those that the revolutionary-subversive fantasy propagated and targeted, under the sadly familiar term of imperialism. As we have seen, even from the first American targets hit in Germany, the targeting of NATO structures constituted a common front of struggle at the international level. By identifying and selecting such targets, Krause managed to build tactical and strategic alliances with the most dangerous terrorist organizations that operated since the 1990s. '70 and onwards, mainly at the European level.

Her story is described by Ida Farè in her book “Mara and the Others” (published by Felitrinelli, 1979). In 2009, a book by Mara Fortuna entitled “The Interview with Petra Krause” was published by Tullio Pironti.

Translated from Italian: Toni Nuri.
Edited by: L.B.

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