Baader-Meinhof

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Baader-Meinhof

"Terrorists Are Jailed for Life after Disrupted Trial Lasting 103 Weeks"

Newspaper article

By: Dan Van der Vat

Date: April 29, 1977

Source: The Times, a daily newspaper based in London.

About the Author: Dan Van der Vat, at the time the article was written, lived in Germany. He worked for six years as a journalist and foreign correspondent for the Times (London). He has also worked for the Guardian. In both positions, Van der Vat specialized in political and defense writing. During his journalistic career, Van der Vat, a historian and expert on modern warfare, has written such books as Gentlemen of War: The Amazing Story of Captain Karl von Müller and the S.M.S. Emden (1984), Pacific Campaign: World War II, the U.S.-Japanese Naval War, 1941–1945 (1992), Pearl Harbor: The Day of Infamy—An Illustrated History (2001), and D-Day: The Greatest Invasion—A People's History (2004).

INTRODUCTION

On May 14, 1970, journalist Ulrike Meinhof led armed revolutionaries against a prison in West Berlin. The raid was staged to free Andreas Baader, a prisoner sentenced for politically motivated arson and seriously wounding a person. Due to the dramatic prison breakout, the Springer Press coined the name "Baader-Meinhof Gang." The German media adopted the popular name for the group that earlier had called itself the Red Army Faction.

The leftist revolutionary group carried out a number of shootings, bombings, robberies, and other violent crimes over the next two years while increasing numbers of police unsuccessfully hunted for them. Baader-Meinhof was known to have killed five people and injured fifty-four others during this time. Due to its sensationalistic crime spree, nearly all unsolved violent crimes were credited to the group's exploits. So many police were involved, the media compared the confrontations to warfare.

On June 1, 1972, however, a gunfight between Baader-Meinhof and the police resulted in the arrest of Baader-Meinhof leaders Baader, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe. On June 7, Gudrun Ensslin, another leader, was arrested and, on June 16, Meinhof and Gerhard Müller were arrested when they were over-whelmed by police.

While jailed in Stammheim prison, but before their trial, Meins died (on November 8, 1974) while on a two-month hunger strike. The June 2 Movement, one successor organization to Baader-Meinhof, continued the terrorist movement, including the killing of the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court, the kidnapping of a leader of the West Berlin city parliament, and the killing of two diplomats in the West German embassy at Stockholm, Sweden.

Three years after the members of the Baader-Meinhof were arrested, on May 21, 1975, the trial began in Stuttgart, Germany. The trial would last nearly two years.

PRIMARY SOURCE

The three surviving leaders of the Baader-Meinhof urban terrorist gang were found guilty of four murders and 39 attempted murders here today and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Andreas Baader, aged 34, Gudrun Ensslin, aged 36, and Jan-Carl Raspe, aged 32, were also sentenced to a further 15 years each for other offences, including bombings, using firearms and founding a criminal organization. An appeal is being considered.

Although spectators have often disrupted the court during the 103 weeks of the trial, there was no visible or audible reaction as Judge Eberhard Foth, the court president, and his four colleagues handed down their judgment in the fortified temporary courtroom inside the maximum security block at Stammheim prison.

According to the German tradition, all present stood up as Judge Foth read out the verdict and sentences. He then took two hours and three-quarters to read a summary of the findings. The full text of the judgment, which is likely to be as long as a large book, will be sent to those concerned later.

The accused have one week in which to give notice of appeal and a further month to present their arguments. Under present penal policy, the sentences should mean a minimum of 20 years in prison.

For those who have followed this case from the beginning, the 192nd and last day in court was more notable for absences than for those present. The accused were not in court. They have been on hunger strike for a month in protest against the electronic bugging of conversations between them and their lawyers which the authorities admitted.

There should have been five defendants in the dock, but Holger Meins died after an earlier hunger strike before the trial began, and Ulrike Meinhof, the leader of the gang, committed suicide a year ago.

The defense lawyers chosen by the accused have been boycotting the proceedings since the bugging was disclosed and stayed away today.

Also absent was the original presiding judge, Dr. Theodor Prinzing, whose handling of the case aroused so much controversy that he was discharged in January.

The defendants, who had been declared unfit to endure more than three hours a day in court, were allowed to come and go as they pleased. They stayed away for months.

Thus ended the unhappiest episode in the history of West German justice.

Judge Foth rejected defense demands for the abandonment of the case, made last week by court-appointed defending lawyers. The accused were largely responsible for their own poor physical condition, he said.

SIGNIFICANCE

During the first three months of the Baader-Meinhof trial, both sides argued about various legal procedures. Four defense lawyers were present, but three others were expelled from the courtroom. Several legal procedures were eventually eliminated, while amendments to the criminal code and rules of procedure were enacted either specifically for use in the trial or in response to growing terrorism.

The indictment against the four alleged criminals was read to the accused on August 19, 1975. On January 13, 1976, after months of delays, the trial officially began.

Complicating the trial, Ulrike Meinhof committed suicide while in her prison cell in May 1976. An organization that had adopted her name then assassinated the West German attorney general, along with West Germany's chief prosecutor and two members of his department.

The judge, who had taken over for the original judge who had been dismissed, responded to past difficulties by deciding to rapidly end the trial. The defense lawyers claimed that wiretaps were the climax of a series of grievances that had destroyed their strategy—including questionable procedures, numerous illegalities, deficient laws, and biased and prejudiced judges, politicians, and media. Nevertheless, on April 28, 1977, the three surviving leaders of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. The trial became the longest trial (almost two years with 192 actual days of testimony) and the most expensive trial (over $15 million) in West Germany, up to that point.

On October 17, 1977, the remaining three Baader-Meinhof prisoners committed suicide after learning that Palestinian terrorists had failed in their attempt to free them after hijacking an airplane. Under new leadership, however, members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang continued to commit terrorist acts under the earlier-used name the Red Army Faction. Terrorist activities by Baader-Meinhof and its associated groups from 1970 to the time they disbanded in 1998 led to the death of over twenty-five people, many of them high-profile Germans, and the kidnapping and injury of numerous others.

The Baader-Meinhof Gang was so successful in carrying out its terrorist activities that the West German government assumed itself to be under a national political and societal crisis (called German Autumn) in the fall of 1977. Adding to the country's dilemma was the ineffectual nature of the country's lightly organized confederation of states. As a result of these two significant problems, the German government strengthened its confederation of states, approved new federal laws to provide widespread powers in countering terrorism, and created a national police force.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Austs, Stefan. The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon. London: Bodley-Head, 1987.

Becker, Jillian. Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977.

Varon, Jeremy. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Wright, Joanne. Terrorist Propaganda: The Red Army Faction and the Provisional IRA, 1968–86. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.