'ULRIKE AND ANDREAS' BY MELVIN J. LASKY. NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, MAY 11, 1975.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79-01194A000100380001-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 6, 1998
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: May 21, 1975
• Content Type: REPORT

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 Approved FUL.RVIUM"AIMIM02
way, and the deer t n was
shared by the leaders of all
the major parties, in and out
of government.
Despite the gang's failure,
suspense continues to build
up. The four principal terror-
ist leaders are to be tried on
charges ranging from forgery
and bank robbery to kidnap-
ping and murder. (A fifth de-
fendant died last November
in a hunger strike.) The
new Stuttgart prison. is the
most secure penitentiary yet
devised, and the court room
has been fortified against sur-
prise raids, yet the most care-
ful precautions are not al-
ways proof against the kind
of resourcefulness and ferv-
or that unite. the terrorists
inside with their comrades
at liberty.
Who are the four leading
actors in the drama, and why
have their exploits proved so
bewildering and unsettling to
a public opinion that had
faced far graver national is-
sues, such as the division of
Germany. with relatively so-
ber equanimity?
Ulrike Meinhof, now 41, is
the daughter of two art his-
torians who died early, leav-
ing her as the foster child
of an idealistic academic who
guided her to leftist causes. A
gifted journalist, an affection-
ate mother and an ebullient
star of West Germany's radi-
cal-chic (or Schickeria, as the
Germans call it), she has trans-
formed herself into a ruthless
urban guerrilla by some pro-
cess that has defied analysis
by police psychologists and
political pundits.
A measure of the revolu-
tionary elixir was doubtless
supplied by Andreas Baader.
Now 32, Baader turned his
back early on the temptations
of middle-class educational
ideals-his father was a his-
torian - and he intoxicated
many of those who ventured
close with -his Promethean
mission of fire and immola-
tion.
His "revolutionary bride"
was the 34-year-old Gudrun
Ensslin, who tempered his
faith in the cult of action with
the theological propensities of
her religious upbringing. (Her
father is a Protestant pastor.)
The picture of a loyal and
gave a romantic tinge to the
gang's steely concern with the
destruction of German capital-
ism. Indeed, to `some on the
far left it seemed that she was
compensating for her earlier
liaison with the son of a fa-.
mous Third Reich Nazi writer.
(She bore his child; he later
committed suicide.)
The fourth in the quartet is
Jan-Carl Raspe, now 31, whose
degree in sociology marked
him so strongly that even in
the gang's inner circle he was
regarded as a "typical intel-
lectual."
I t was hard to say which
the Germans found more
shocking in the kidnap-
ping of last Feb. 27, the
cool efficiency of the opera-
tion or the honorable way
the terrorists kept their prom-
isc, not to harm their hostage
if all their conditions were ful-
filled. Each phase of the spec-
tacle-the negotiations over
the terms, the release of the
kidnapped politician, Peter
Lorenz, and the freeing of
the five prisoners-was fol-
lowed by tens of millions of
Germans on television. If this
could happen, if the authori-
ties were up against an ene-
my as scrupulously profes-
sional as that, how long be-
fore all others in jail for po-
litical terrorism were similar-
ly released?
The Germans
congratulated
themselves on putting one
man's life before the interests
of the state. "And how often,"
one German said to me, "have
we done that in our history?"
Privately, they pitied them-
selves for their helplessness.
How could they, in affluent,
unendangered peacetime, go in
for a hard "Israeli strategy"
at the risk of bloody shoot-
outs in the streets? Wouldn't
going in for toughness move
them precariously toward an-
other police-state?
"Humiliation was the order
of the day," a writer in West
Berlin solemnly recorded.
"Perhaps never in history,
since a medieval Holy Roman
Emperor went penitently to
Canossa, hAs a proud nation
debased itself so abjectly...."
Even the liberal Hamburg
weekly, Die Zeit, in rejecting
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f r o i i c 1d
or police reprisal, could not
help but note the historic na-
ture of the decision. Where
had the old traditions gone?
There was a time, the
paper's chief editor, Coun-
tess Marion Dbnhoff, sadly
recalled in her commentary,
when King Frederick of Prus-
sia left orders that should he
be captured by the enemy, no
concessions whatever should
be made on his behalf to the
blackmailers.
The national TV network
was hijacked, in effect, to
serve the kidnappers' master-
plan. "For 72 hours," one TV
editor told me, "we just lost
control of the medium. We
shifted shows to meet their
timetable. Our cameras had to
be in position to record each
-of the prisoners as they
boarded the plane, and our
news coverage had to include
prepared statements at their
dictation. There is plenty of
underworld crime on our
screens, but up until now Ko-
jak and Columbo were always
in charge. Now it was the real
thing, and it was the gangsters
who wrote the script and pro-
gramed the mass media."
Noteworthy in the political
uproar that followed - it
ranged from angry demands
that all the Baader-Meinhof
prisoners be shot by drumhead
firing-squads to weary sugges-
tions that the whole gang be
dumped on some Saharan air-
strip-was a poll indicating
that German opinion approved
of the exchange as "right" by
a 75 per cent majority. (An-
other 24 per cent thought it
was "wrong.") But a clear
majority also felt that no such
exchanges should be counte-
nanced in the future, and that
a return to capital punish-
ment would help reinforce do-
mestic security and law and
order.
Where did this new German
extremism come from? Why
had it survived. to become
such a formidable issue in a
great nation's politics? How is
it that a few hundred young
revolutionaries, acting in the
name of an outmoded Marxian
ideology and on behalf of the
"oppressed masses" with
whom they had no personal
contact or organizational con- nizaticn Fbhl
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challenge f r -
so long the most prosperous)
self-confident state in Europ .
Once, on a West German
program, I was asked wheth r
I thought that. "Communi t
gold" - covert funding from
East Germany, from the Ru -
sian secret services, etc.
played any role In the efflore -
cence of the German New Le t
in the nineteen-sixties. I
tended to pooh-pooh the ide .
There are those who always
think that an indigenous radi-
calism must be manipulated b
foreign string-pullers--
But sometimes it is tru ,
and occasionally it is decisiv
We know now that Lenin i
exile received millions fro .
the Kaiser's secret politic
fund and that the mono
helped finance a plethora
Bolshevik publications.
In the emergence of th
German New Left in the nin -
teen-sixties, a Hamburg mag -
zine called Konkret, brilliahtl
edited by Klaus Rainer Roh,
played a central part. Its sI
ganeering was ingenious, i
editorial style modern and a -
venturous (it preferred th!
methods of Playboy to tho
of Pravda), and it attracted
wide following of agitators,
students, anarchists, poet,
terrorists and assorted dis-
enchanted spirits longing ft r
a new Utopia. The magazire
was instrumental in the m ' -
itants' achievements- e
capture of West Berlin's F
University, the tens of tho -
sands of student marchers d
scending on Bonn, the prof -
eration of militant factio s
proposing to take pow r
through the barrel of a gu .
Among the latter, the Baad r-
Meinhof group is the most n
torious.
Rohl was married to Ulrie
Meinhof. Both were sec t
members of the German C -
munist party. Their magazi e,
Konkret, was financed by e-
cret Communist funds
tained by Rohl and Meinhof in
East Berlin and filtered in
through Prague. It was, 'l
Rohl confessed it all in is
recently published memo' s,
almost unbelievable. The R s-
sians are known to finar :e
good, reliable Communist d-
res, enrolled in the party or in
some controllable front o a-
f,
 CPYRGHT
despite their ApprqMO Q 4Ste
cards, could only represent for
Moscow what Lenin had de-
nounced as "the infantile left."
Yet they went ahead. For a
couple of million marks, or
less than $1-million-the cost
of a few nuts and bolts in a
sputnik-they helped disrupt
whole areas of West German
society, turn the German youth
movement into a mass force
of anti-Americanism, and re-
habilitate the theory and prac-
tice of Marxian revolution
(though at the price of hereti-
cal anarchist trimmings).
RohI and Meinhof were giv-
en extraordinarily wide lati-
tude. No hard political line
was ever obvious. They often
bit the hand that fed them.
They were free to thrash
about in the subcultures of
West German radicalism-the
nouveaux riches of the Ruhr,
titillated by the idea of capi-
talism dying; the pop and drug
communes; the pill and prom-
iscuity cults; the Brechtian
avant-garde. It became a very
popular front, uniting practi-
cally everyone on the left-
except the proletariat Like
the New Left everywhere in
the West,- it was essentially
a middle-class phenomenon. It
went in for abstract idealism,
fun, excitement and impas-
sioned commitment, until it
wearied of its own excesses
and grew frightened of the
random violence of the hard
core of true believers who be-
gan to practice what they
preached-
The story of Ulrike Meinhof,
not unlike the cases of Patty
Hearst and Bernardino, Dohrn
in the United States, sums up
the extremism of a historic
decade. But the Meinhof case
is more illuminating, for it
sheds light more vividly on
the major institutions of West-
ern Europe's most prosperous
and powerful society.
How did they become
gunmen and gun-
women? The talk
about force and vi-
olence as the essential ele-
ments in the transformation of
an evil society had been, at
first, the same theoretical
chit-chat that had animated
the fantasies of Marxist rev-
fingered a gun or fired a sin-
gle shot?
Soon a real weapon, with a
shiny barrel and a full cylin-
der, had its premiere on the
German New Left. RbhI
bought himself a small=caliber
pistol called a Landmann-
Preetz. (it later became the
favorite handgun of the Baad-
er-Meinhof gang, just as the
B.M.W. automobile became
their favorite getaway car,
partly because it was fast and
elegant, partly because of its
acronymic coincidence.) One
winter evening in 1968, in
Rbhl's villa in Hamburg, he ex-
hibited his gun to his editors
and visiting student revolu-
tionaries. It was marveled at'
and passed from hand to hand
"like some newly forged weap-
on at a gathering of primitive
tribal chieftains." One disciple
fondled it in his lap and
wanted to know, It really
shoots? Real bullets? And they
can really knock somebody
off?" They all had their first
target practice later that eve-
ning, firing wildly in the Ham-
burg garden at bottles and
lamp bulbs until the neighbors
threatened to call the police.
Ulrike, though, still found
horror in the idea-and the
noise-of guns going off. She
was walking in the woods one
day with her brother-in-law,
Wolfgang Rohl, then 16, when,
with youthful bravura, he sud-
denly drew a pistol and fired
a few shots in the air. Ulrike
broke down in a paroxysm of
tears. Her husband ascribes
her reaction partly to the
"Christian pacifism" that had
originally pushed her into cru-
sading politics, partly to her
"constant terrible head pains"
after a brain-tumor operation,
which left her with a "panicky
fear" of even the bang from
a child's toy pistol.
A few years later, the un-
derground arsenals of the
Baader-Meinhof group con-
tained the most formidable
private collection of ordnance
in postwar Germany, deriving
-like the weapons used by
the Japanese "Red Army" in
its hostage-taking action in
The Hague last September-
from a raid on a West German
NATO munitions depot. And
olutionarics for a century, the targets were no longer
from Engels to Bebel and bottles. The list of victims
reading room hit by a bullet:
a night watchman blown up
by a bomb; two policemen in
Hamburg shot down while
walking their night beat: a
detective torn apart by dum-
dum bullets; 17 employes
wounded by bomb fragments
in an explosion in a Hamburg
newspaper office; an American
officer and two sergeants
killed by a bomb in the United
States Army headquarters in
Heidelberg; West Berlin's
Chief Justice, a lifelong So-
cialist, assassinated on his
birthday by gunmen carrying
bouquets of flowers.
Ideology traindd them to
justify "the necessary mur-
der," From the example of
Ho Chi Minh, whose name
they chanted in the streets of
Germany, they drew a sense
of cunning counterattack. In-
fatuated with the Black Power
romanticism of Stokely Car-
michael and Eldridge Cleaver,
they learned the catechism of
"Burn, Baby, Burn," and their
German conversation and
manifestoes were studded with
American slang like "cool"
and "right on" and "off the
pigs." When two innocent by-
standers were killed by rocks
in a Munich radical demon-
stration, Horst Mahler, one of
the members of the gang,
commented, "When I drive
off in my car, I can't know
beforehand if a tire will go
flat."
The bnitalization went on
apace. One memberr, Dieter
Kunzelmann, released from a
Berlin jail a little ahead of
time so he could campaign as
a local Maoist candidate, had
a ready explanation of why he
had planted a bomb in Berlin's
Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, re-
built after the Nazis burned
it down in 1938. lie and his
comrades, he said, had to get
over their Judenknax, their
"thing about the Jews"-i.e.,
their postwar pro-Jewish lib-
eralism. One of his collabora-
tors, Georg von Rauch (later
killed in a street shoot-out
with the police), argued that
in eliminating political ene-
mies "we must, I must, simply
liquidate human feeling."
It took Ulrike a number of
years to learn to take joy in
her unerring marksmanship.
her machine gun in somethin
under 90 days, but in Califo
pia everything develops fast
Ulrike had to be sure tha
Hegel and the True Laws 0
History were on her side; thLate Capitalism with all i
Imperialist Contradictions wa
now in its final stage and th
end was nigh; that the work
ing class, with its reformi
trade-union leaders, was a I
potential, and that a sma I
remnant of the faithful had t
rise up and act on their o
She studied the writings
Herbert Marcuse, she followe
the financial pages on the co
tradictory movements of cap
tat, and, reassured of the trut
of these propositions, she a
cepted them as articles
faith.
Two souls, in Goethe
phrase, dwelt within Ulrike
breast. A struggle was taki
p!ace between Old Left earr
-
estness and New Left libe -
tion- Konkret was a mixtu
of sex and politics. Rohl w
a kind of ideological Hug
Hefner, alternating nude pi -
ups, lightly disguised as "se) -
ual enlightenment" for th
young, with modish left-win
propaganda.
What secret guilt complex
must this mixture of sex an
revolution have induced i
Ulrike! She took her $10,
a year for a dozen brief co -
umns (they were worth it, f
only for their decent gramm
and vocabulary); and s
bought herself boutiq
dresses and fancy jewelry an
was seen at the cocktail pa -
ties, but she longed for
day when she could strike %
pure and uncompromisin
blow . for the oppresse
masses. -
Finally, in 1968, she mar-
aged to make the break. Ta -
ing her twin daughters, the
6, with her, she left her h
band and moved to West'Be -
lin. There she began a new
life, devoting herself to thE!
plight of the underprivileg
from orphans to convicts, r
cruiting for the Revolution
she went along. Although s
missed the old world of te
artists and poets and wit y
millionaires, she was soon n
established figure in the milt u
of shabby, zealous, blue-jean
conspirators.
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PARAt learned to fondl
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Klaus Rohl still ed
back-both as his wrl s
Konkret's star Kolumrtist_ She
wrote a savage attack on the
fortnightly's editorial policies
and forced it to be printed in
the magazine. Rohl wrote a
lame and rather loving reply.
Unappeased, she infiltrated the
paper with- her cronies, who
eventually were to take over
the magazine by a "democrat-
ic vote." The coup barely
failed to come off, and she re-
signed from the paper, de-
nouncing it as an "organ of
the counterrevolution."
The magazine survived, but
another symbol of the shame-
ful past of "sex and politics"
was easier to ravage. A group
of her Berlin friends pro-
ceeded to her old home in a
fashionable section of Ham-
burg. They sacked the prem-
ises, smashing the lamps, fur-
niture and stereo and painting
a phallus on the front door.
Before leaving, they collec-
tively urinated on the double
bed.
U Irike Meinhof had
met Andreas Baader
in 1968, some time
before she left her
husband. Andreas and his girl-
friend Gudrun had been arrest-
ed for setting fire to two
Frankfurt department stores.-
Ulrike interviewed him, and
caused a stir by writing in her
Konkret column that the acts
of arson were politically "pro-
gressive" -not so much be-
cause they destroyed the
shoddy goods of a rotten con-
sumption society but because
they represented audacious
defiance of the law.
Now, in 1970, she joined in
a plot to spring him from jail.
(He and Gudrun had been re-
leased on a technicality after
serving 14 months of their
sentences, but he had been re-
arrested and imprisoned in
West Berlin as a suspect in
new incidents of arson and
bombings.) "We needed Baad-
er," Ulrike later testified, "to
set up the urban guerrillas."
Although the wardens knew
that some kind of escape plan
was afoot, they let Andreas
visit various libraries, under
guard, to pursue his "socio-
logical research." He claimed
to be writing a book on youth
problems for a radical Berlin
publisher, and the authorities
~ S02
seno view o is project.
On May 14, 1970, he was
in a reading room of the
Free University when Ulrike
and - four. accomplices; dis-
guised in wigs, burst in. firing
pistols and discharging tear
gas. There was an exchange
of fire; several .guards and
librarians were wounded, one
of them seriously. The guer-
rillas got away unharmed. An-
dreas and Ulrike escaped by
jumping out of the first-floor
window and racing off in a
stolen silver-gray Alfa Romeo.
Before going into hiding they
picked up Ulrike's twins.
An alarmed Rohl alerted In-
terpol, and after months of
search the girls were found in
Rome.- They had been hidden
away in Sicily, where they
learned to si.,g "Bandiera ros-
so" and other revolutionary
ditties. "Evviva communismo
liherta!" they chanted. But
they had found Italian rice
bitter, and they didn't really
care for the occasional pull on
a joint to which their hash-
smoking guardians would
treat them.
The plan had been to take
them on to Jordan and place'
them in a Palestinian orphan-
age, rot far from the guerrilla
training camp where Ulrike,
Andreas. Gudrun and others of
their group were now in resi-
dence, taking lessons in marks-
manship. The Germans joined
the Palestinians in a little
Jew-hating, but their drinking,
smoking and sexual habits
were found offensive, and
their contingent was expelled
and. returned to Germany. Ul-
rike's children were thus
stranded in mid-passage.
Today, the twins appear to
be relatively well-adjusted to
their middle-class Hamburg
environment- But their father,
who won legal custody of the
children in a divorce action,
told me they came home one
day with cuts and bruises;
when asked what had hap-
pened, they said, "Well, we
were playing 'Baader-Meinhof
Gang' and we hurt ourselves
trying to make a quick get-
away."
Irike joined Andreas
and Gudrun in the
underground, learn-
ing to disguise her
et4 [ P7V T949ft automobiles, breek
through roadblocks, rob banks
and escape to secret hideouts.
Now, starting-in 1970, the
public was jolted by a new
terrorist offensive, attributed
henceforth to the "Baader-
Meinhof gang." Hardly a day
went by without the police re-
cording some new incident.
American installations were
fire-bombed; some 130 police-
men were hospitalized after an
attack, with thousands. - of
bricks and rocks, on a court-
house; judges' chambers were
gutted; Molotov cocktails, af-
fectionately called "Mollies,"
wrecked public offices, and a
substantial treasury for terror
was built up by one bank rob-
bery after another. Was the
Republic ever in danger? Hard-
ly. But the spectacle of young
people ready to shed blood for
a cause reminded too many
Germans of another tragic
generation of fanaticized
youth.
Opinion was polarized;
many liberals despised the cry
for "law-and-order" and of-
fered nothing but kind words
for the disciples of. violence.
How could there be enemies
on the left? The old distinction
between democratic Socialists
and authoritarian Commu-
nists, between meliorists and
militants, between reform and
revolution, had been blurred
in the nineteen-sixties. A sur-
prisingly high percentage of
young Germans indicated in a
poll that they "liked" the
idealism of the guerrilla move-
ment and probably would help
Ulrike and Andreas hide or
get away if asked to.
A campaign to "save Ulrike
Meinhof" before she came to
harm at the hands of the
police arose on the left.
Among the voices raised were
those of Nobel Prize-winning
-novelist Heinrich B611 and
Klaus Rohl, still loyal to the
mother of his children. Kon-
kret ran a long open letter
from Dr. Renate Rierneck, her
foster-mother, pleading with
Ulrike to give herself up. Bblt
demanded an official safe-con-
duct pass for Ulrike to protect
her, as lie put it, from the
vicious hysteria of 60 million
Germans now hunting witches
as they once hunted Jews. The
109t3~'Oe4ay and indigna-
tion at this comparison almost
destroyed B611's reputation as
a crusading liberal intellectual,
Rdhl tried to arrange to get
her out of the country. But
Sweden, troubled enough by
American Army deserters, and
Cuba, doubtful of the ideolog-
ical purity of "infantile an-
archo-terrorists," both turned
her down. A Cabinet Minister
in Bonn was requested secret-
ly to let her cross from West
Berlin into East Germany, but
she was unwelcome there too.
Even ROhl's old contacts in
the Communist apparatus of
the nineteen-fifties cold-shoul-
dered the scheme.
Early in June of 1972, act-
ing on a series of tips, the
police trapped most of the
hard core of the gang. Andreas,
.Jan-Carl Raspe and another
leader, Holger Meins, were
captured in a 5 A.M. raid on
their hiding place, a garage
in a well-appointed Frankfurt
apartment house; Andreas was
wounded in the shoot-out.
Gudrun was picked up shop-
ping in an elegant Hamburg
boutique with her revolver
showing. Ulrike was still at
large.
She had been using "safe
houses" provided by an exten-
sive network of sympathizers.
But now a 33-year-old teacher
in Hanover named Fritz Ro-
dewald began to have doubts.
A number of mysterious guests
had arrived in his apartment,
"warmly recommended by
friends." Rodewald was con-
cerned lest all this terrorism
play into the -hands of the
German right, enabling the re-
actionaries to defame the
genuine New Left. Should he
call the police? For a day and
a night he wrestled with his
dilemma. Then, on June 15, he
dialed 1:0 from a phone booth
and spoke to the inspector in
charge of the special Baader-
Meinhof Kommando. (Such
task forces had been set up
in all major West German
cities.) By the time he capre
home, the police had made
their raid, and the guests had
been removed. The haul in-
cluded weapons, smuggled
messages from comrades in
prison, boxes of cartridges,
false identity papers. In a
bright red-leather cosmetics
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package containing a 10-
pound home-made bomb. The
police promised Rodewald im-
mediate payment of the re-
ward. The conscience-stricken
teacher promised himself to
donate the money to the Ul-
rike Meinhof defense fund.
The underground career of
"the most hunted woman" in
German history was over. In
the pictures taken of her that
day in the Hanover police sta-
tion she was almost unrecog-
nizable. "No one here has
touched her," a detective ex-
plained, but her entire face
is puffed and swollen because,
like some enraged trapped
animal, she has been strug-
gling and screaming and
weeping for hours." They did
hold her firmly by her hair
in the police line-up, a doctor
tried to examine her Caesare-
an scars and a medical assist-
ant wanted an X-ray picture
of the metal clip that had
comp'eted her brain tumor
operation of a decade earlier.
The German police are not
especially bureaucratic these
days, but "an identity must
be established properly." Ul-
rike resisted savagely. She
was afraid of being "brain-
w,-.shed." You want to kill
nie!" she cried. "You're all
next on the list!" She refused
to touch the coffee and cigar-
ettes they offered her, for fear
that they might be poisoned.
Protests began to be or-
ganized. Heinrich Btill suspect-
ed police brutality. The left
fringements of due process.
Rohl raised his voice to warn
against a witch-hunt, declar-
ing that Ulrike was more
Joan of Arc than red-haired
sorceress." Newspaper fea-
ture-writers mused on her
childhood-on the pretty little
girl who liked to read classical
poetry and do the boogie-
woogie. Theologians specu-
lated on the elements of youth-
ful Catholicism in her make-up.
Her foster-mother half-re-
gretted that her ward had
"put aside her Proust and
Kafka to mess about with
politics."
The Baader-Meinhof
guerrillas who were
placed in a dozen
jails of Western Ger-
many- and West Berlin devel-
oped an extraordinary commu-
nications system for keeping
in touch with each other. Ul-
rike continued to write her
manifestos; Andreas wrote de-
tailed memorandums on five
different ways of effecting his
escape, and all these exhorta-
tions and instructions were
distributed regularly among
other incarcerated comrades-
and the accomplices on the
outside. Their strategies were
all coordinated: when to begin
a hunger strike, when to end
it, how to put pressure on
backsliding comrades. One wo-
man prisoner was kept, ficti-
tiously, on the medical "dan-
ger" list by the prison authori-
ties for fear of consequences
if the others found out thatl
p tasting with:
out "official" approval. When
a young militant who was still
at large talked secretly to the
West Berlin police, copies of
the police report on his testi-
mony were found circulating
in the Baader-Meinhof cells.
lie was subsequently found
dead in a Berlin park--"ex-
ecuted" by a bullet in the
head by order of the gang's
1c'aders.
All this was possible be-
cause the gang took brilliant
advantage of the fairly liberal
German prison regulations.
There can be no doubt that
not a few of the Baader-M.ein-
hof lawyers, including some
young law-school graduates,
have been smuggling docu-
ments in and out. Surprise
searches of the cells have
turned up circulars, escape
plans, research assignments,
leaflets and lists of Bonn pol-
iticians to be targeted.
To what avail? Nothing is so
unloved in Germany today as
a lost cause. The urban guer-
rillas, in their mounting fren-
zy, have isolated themselves
completely from German pub-
lic opinion. They have become
nothing but an embarrassment
to the German left. 1s martyr-
dom in limbo all that is left to
them now?
Holger Mcins, a former stu-
dent at the Berlin Film Acad-
emy, who was captured to-
gether with Baader and itaspe,
persisted in f hunger strike
that reduced him after two
months to 84 pounds. He died
ast fall, at the age of JJ, de-
. pite the authorities' efforts to
keep him alive with intraven-
ous feeding, "We will struggle
on, Holger" cried an aging
student .leader at his funeral,
andthe terroristswho stormed
the embassy in Stockholm
identified themselves as the
"Holger Meins Commando."
Yet his death, almost deliber-
ately embraced, dramatized
the self-destructive element in
the terrorists' mystique.
As the triai date approached,
the defendants' lawyers rec-
ommended that they put aside
their agitprop and concentrate
on preparing their cases. But
it would be altogether out of
character for Ulrike Meinhof
and Andreas Baader to confine
themselves to what they hold
in contempt as "juridical cret-
inism." For months, police,
press and public shared the
conviction that another ran-
som-and-rescue operation was
in the offing -and, as last
month's abortive coup in
Stockholm demonstrated, they
were wrong' only in weighing
the probabilities of success.
Other desperate attempts
by the remnant of the net-
work are regarded as prob.
able. After standing firm, it
will be hard for the Bonn Gov-
ernment to do anything but
continue to refuse to negoti-
ate. In that way, the Govern-
ment hopes to withstand what
Chancellor Schmidt calls "the
most serious challenge in the
26-year history of our democ-
racy." ^
Approved For Release 1999/09/02 : CIA-RDP79-01194A000100380001-4