The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (28 page)

Andreas Baader was the leader of the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction terror group with which the SPK aligned itself. He committed suicide in prison in 1977.

But perhaps Meinhof would never have become involved in such extreme activities if she hadn't come in to contact with the charismatic, incorrigibly rebellious Andreas Baader and his girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin. The latter, like Ulrike Meinhof, had enjoyed a comfortable middle-class upbringing. Born on August 15, 1940, she was the fourth of seven children. Ensslin's father, Helmut, was a pastor of the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD), a group that was set up in 1945, the year Hitler was defeated. The EKD's beliefs ran counter to those of the Nazis. More than this, the EKD actively encouraged its members to question authority rather than simply going along with the majority view and to oppose the Federal Republic's plans to rearm. Helmut Ensslin, along with his wife, Ilse, also liked to encourage their children to discuss politics and social issues round the kitchen table and Ensslin was instilled with a good appreciation of world affairs. When she was eighteen years old, Ensslin was given the opportunity to study in America, in Pennsylvania, on a student exchange programme, a time she enjoyed even while harboring a certain disdain for the country's obvious inequalities. Jillian Becker observed that:

She found much fault with America, its social injustice, its material inequality. But she had not arrived innocent of all prejudgment of the country, so this was not a case of any eye-opener or an education in social realities. She found what she was looking for, and what was certainly there to find.
⁴

On her return, Ensslin enrolled in the University of Tübingen and afterwards in the University of West Berlin, there to study a combination of Philosophy and Germanics. The author Günter Grass, who knew her while she was studying at the latter institution later recalled, ‘she was idealistic, with an inborn loathing of any compromise. She had a yearning for the Absolute, the perfect solution.'
⁵

Again it is easy to draw parallels between Gudrun Ensslin's background and that of her SPK comrades and it is also easy to see why, when Ulrike Meinhof gave shelter to Baader and Ensslin, how the three of them immediately gelled and formed a strong bond. However, the two fugitives' sojourn at Meinhof's apartment was to be short-lived for, on April 3,1970, Baader was rearrested by the police, after which Meinhof's fate was sealed.

No sooner had the courts despatched Andreas back to prison then his comrades began plotting ways to get him out. For Meinhof, this was to be her first foray into terrorist activity.

On May 14, Andreas Baader – who had been given leave to attend a state library (inside the German Central Institute for Social Issues) for the day – was set free by his friends, but only after two security guards were shot at and one elderly library staff member, George Linke, was so badly injured that he almost died from his wounds. Fleeing from the scene Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and friends immediately went underground. Triumphant at what they regarded as a major coup (but regardless of the fact that they had nearly killed an innocent civilian) the group subsequently issued a statement which was printed in the May 22 edition of the far-left magazine,
833
, under the logo of a black panther – a direct reference to the American terrorist organization of the same name.

Did the pigs really believe that we would let comrade Baader sit in jail for two to three years? Did the pigs really believe that we would forever fight with paintballs against bullets…? Did any pig really believe we would talk about the development of class struggle…without arming ourselves at the same time? Did the pigs who shot first believe that we would allow ourselves to be gunned down like slaughter-cattle? Gandhi and Martin Luther King are dead. The bullets that killed them, the bullets that hit Rudi [Dutschke]
⁵
…have ended the dream of nonviolence. Whoever does not defend himself will die. Whoever does not die will be buried alive: in prisons, in reformatories, in the hovels of Kreuzberg, Wedding, Neuköln, in the stony wastelands of the new housing developments, in the overcrowded kindergartens and schools, in the perfectly furnished, newly built kitchens, in the mortgaged bedroom palaces…START THE ARMED STRUGGLE! BUILD UP THE RED ARMY!
⁶

Although this was the first mention of the Red Army Faction or, as it quickly became known, the ‘Baader-Meinhof Gang,' it was to be another full year before they issued their full manifesto, ‘Concept of the Urban Guerrilla' (
Das Konzept Stadtguerilla
) by which time RAF members had taken themselves off to Jordan where they trained at a PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) camp. Here they learned the tactics of terrorism, how to use firearms, throw hand grenades and build bombs, after which they returned to Germany to begin stockpiling arms.

At this point the SPK were just beginning to commit their own acts of random violence. In mid-February 1971, Siegfried Hausner and Carmen Roll attempted to bomb a train on which the Federal Republic's president was traveling. Their plans went completely awry, however, when Carmen Roll turned up late at the station, thus missing the opportunity of placing the bomb (a small, homemade device) on the train.

In June 1971, Doctor Huber, who had moved his offices to his home in Wiesenbach, became aware that the police had begun monitoring the comings and goings of his patients. Two of these, Ralf Reinders and Alfred Mahrländer, were of particular interest to the authorities, so when they were stopped by officers on their way to Huber's home, it wasn't surprising that one of them, Reinders, pulled out a pistol and shot one of the policemen in the shoulder. Reinders and Mahrländer both escaped, but were arrested shortly afterwards.

Following this incident, seven members of the SPK, including Doctor Huber and his wife, were placed under arrest on suspicion of forming an illegal organization as well as for buying weapons and explosives. Although present at the time of the police raid, Carmen Roll and Klaus Jünschke both managed to evade capture.

It was as this point that Jünschke, along with several other SPK members, staged a bank robbery during which a policeman was shot and killed. Then, on September 25, 1971, two police officers, Helmut Ruf and Friedrich Ruf (not related), approached an improperly parked car on the Freiburg-Basel autobahn. Inside sat Holger Meins and Margrit Schiller, both SPK members and both in possession of firearms. Knowing they would be arrested if the police searched them, both terrorists took the decision to fight and opened fire on the policemen. Friedrich Ruf was wounded in the hand, while Helmut Ruf was far more seriously injured. Schiller and Meins then made their escape, leaving the authorities to search their abandoned car – a search that uncovered two underground publications of some significance. The first was entitled, ‘Concept of the Urban Guerrilla,' while the second had the seemingly innocuous title of ‘Road Traffic Ordinances,' although its undercover title was, ‘Concerning the Armed Struggle in Western Europe.' The former, of course, had been written by Ulrike Meinhof, a fact which led officers to believe that SPK members were now beginning to affiliate themselves to the RAF.

Shortly after the Freiburg-Basel autobahn shooting, on October 22,1971, Margrit Schiller was captured by the police in Hamburg, but not before she had spent some time in an RAF safe house which she described as being more than a little exciting. Here, all the higher echelons of the Baader-Meinhof group met up, talked politics, argued, laughed and rested amongst a general mayhem of guerrilla-style equipment, such as a radio that could monitor police frequencies as well as bomb-making equipment and guns.

Schiller's arrest was itself by no means uneventful. She had been staying in Hamburg for a few days, trying to lie low but, on exiting a subway station one night, she noticed a police patrol car was following her. Schiller ducked into the basement garage of a nearby shopping complex, waited a while, then came out from an exit on the far side of the building, only to realize she was being followed once again by the police. Trying to avoid them she took shelter in an abandoned house, but later had to come out in order to meet up with two other SPK members, Irmgard Möller and Gerhard Müller. Naturally, the police were waiting and no sooner had Schiller begun to walk away from the house than two officers – Schmid and Lemke – drove their car onto the pavement in front of her. Schiller, who by this time had been joined by Möller and Müller, fled to a nearby park with the officers in pursuit. Schmid then grabbed Schiller by the arm at which point she pulled out a gun. Möller and Müller, seeing their comrade in distress, opened fire, hitting Schmid who fell unconscious to the ground. Lemke meanwhile had been wounded in the foot, but limped back to the patrol car to alert his colleagues, only to find that someone had stolen it. The delay cost Schmid his life, for by the time the two officers were taken to hospital, he was already dead.

Hamburg's entire police force was put on full alert, a move that paid dividends for not long after two plainclothes officers soon spotted a woman in a phone box whom they suspected to be one of the fugitives. The officers waited outside the box for the woman to exit, at which point she was placed under arrest. Her name, according to her identity papers, was Dörte Gerlach, but what really gave the game away was the discovery of a fully loaded gun in her handbag. Gerlach/Schiller was taken to a police station, where she was formally identified and charged with murder.

Less than a week later, police raided an apartment in the same residential district as the phone box. What they found inside was a fully operational terrorist cell with approximately 2,600 rounds of ammunition, detonators, explosives, wiring, walkietalkies and even police uniforms. Yet despite the confiscation of all this equipment, the violence continued.

On December 22, 1971, SPK members (many of whom were now working for the RAF) were involved in one of the bloodiest actions taken by their organization when they robbed the Bavarian Mortgage and Exchange Bank, seizing DM 133,987. On that morning, a man entered the bank, placed a tape recorder on a desk and switched it on so that loud pop music blared out. Seconds later, three people dressed in anoraks with balaclavas covering their faces burst in. Two of them carried submachine guns, while the third carried a pistol. The three terrorists threatened bank staff and customers alike while ordering them to remain calm. Directly outside the building, a red Volkswagen minibus had parked illegally, something which drew the attention of a police officer called Herbert Schoner. Schoner approached the vehicle to talk to the driver, only to be met by a hail of gunfire. He was shot several times, one bullet blasting into his back, yet he still managed to crawl towards what he thought would be a safe haven, the Bavarian Mortgage and Exchange Bank. On entering the building, instead of finding sanctuary, Schoner was met by one of the robbers who shot him in the chest. He died at the scene.

The robbers, realizing they had just killed a police officer, took off in the red minibus along with their spoils. They had succeeded in pulling off a major bank robbery and, even though one of their number, Klaus Jünschke, had been identified by a witness to the robbery, all of the terrorists appeared to have got away with, quite literally, murder.

Ulrike Meinhof (left) and Gudrun Ensslin (right) had both enjoyed comfortable, middle-class upbringings, although Meinhof had suffered the trauma of losing both her parents at a very young age. Their privileged lives, however, were something that they certainly had in common with most of their SPK terrorist comrades.

At this point, though it was abundantly clear that the SPK were still operative, it was also apparent that many of their number had begun aligning themselves with the RAF, which was a much larger, more high-profile outfit. In 1972, the RAF decided to mount a ‘May Offensive', which included the staging of not one but a string of major terrorist events over a two-week period. Two US military bases were attacked, as were police stations in two of Germany's biggest cities and the offices of Axel Springer, who owned most of Germany's conservative tabloids. The first bombing (carried out by, among others, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin) took place at the Headquarters of the US Fifth Army in Frankfurt and killed one soldier while injuring thirteen other American servicemen. The next day, a second bomb exploded, this time outside the Augsburg police station. Fortunately, no one was killed, but the bombing spree was not finished. Later that day yet another bomb exploded next to the Bavarian Federal Police Headquarters in Munich, demolishing at least twenty-five vehicles. Shortly afterwards, the RAF placed a bomb under the car of Wolfgang Buddenberg, a judge who had signed numerous arrest warrants against members of the group. Buddenberg did not get into the car on that day, but his unfortunate wife did, suffering extremely serious injuries in the blast. On May 19 the RAF bombed the Springer corporation offices, an attack that left seventeen workers injured. Finally, on May 24, a car loaded with 400 pounds of TNT was driven into the Headquarters of the US Army Supreme European Command site in Heidelberg, killing three American soldiers and injuring five others.