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By Root 923 0

to escape. The pair drove between juvenile homes in a Mercedes, stoned out of their minds, occasionally exchanging the driver and passenger seats while speeding along. Baader sometimes drove while patting his face with powder in the mirror. Incredibly, for Baader and Ensslin were only free pending appeal, the regional Hesse authorities allocated them housing for thirty-three youths, while granting them funds to disburse each day. Among those who came into their orbit in this fashion was Peter Jürgen Boock, an impressionable seventeen-year-old from a disturbed background whom Ensslin invited to share a bath on his first night at their place. He and his fellows were formally educated by Baader, standing on a stool reading the thoughts of Chairman Mao, and Baader also catered for their recreational needs by taking his charges on nightly escapades to smash up discotheques and pubs. Among the juveniles Baader and Ensslin collected there was much experimental sex and drugs; useful training since many of them (excepting the few who, like Boock, became leading terrorists or those who got back on the straight and narrow) became heroin addicts and rent boys when the revolutionaries moved on.

In November 1969 the Federal Court of Appeal rejected the four arsonists’ appeals. They were going back inside. Baader and Ensslin decided to flee over the French border; there a contact gave them money and the keys to the vacant Latin Quarter apartment of Regis Debray, who having fought alongside Che Guevara was into the second year of a thirty-year sentence in a Bolivian prison, from which his powerful politician father would get him released the following year. They were joined by Thorwald Proll and his sister Astrid. Despite their disguises, cutting their hair shorter or dyeing blonde Ensslin brunette, the group evidently felt sufficiently at ease in Paris to photograph themselves larking around in a cafe. From Amsterdam they acquired fresh identity papers; their photos were inserted into the reportedly lost passports of sympathetic comrades. The two main protagonists became ‘Hans’ and ‘Gretel’. Baader and Ensslin drove south, dropping off Thorwald Proll in Strasbourg. Considering himself unfit for life in the underground, Proll surrendered to the German authorities, one of several people who resisted Baader’s siren calls to terrorism.

From Zurich the two fugitives went to Milan, visiting Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who received them at his office dressed in camouflage gear, with guns and grenades laid out for inspection on the desk. At a glance they ascertained his seriousness. In Rome they were feted by the left-wing writer Louise Rinser, author of a book about Hitler’s prisons, and the composer Hans Werner Henze. They tried, and failed, to recruit the lawyer and novelist Peter Chotjewitz for the armed struggle. Slipping into Denglish, Baader kept asking ‘Are you ready zu fighten?’ They had intensive discussions with Ulrich Enzensberger, the brother of the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, with whom Baader had taken part in the mock funeral in Berlin. Baader talked incessantly (he had acquired a liking for amphetamine) about the Russian nihilist terrorist Nechaev, Lenin and the Brazilian urban guerrilla theorist Carlos Marighella. On the basis of his experiences with the juvenile delinquents he had abandoned, Baader thought that such marginal elements could bring about a German revolution if they were incentivised by an armed vanguard minority. There was vague talk of military training with Fatah in the Middle East. Hans and Gretel also found time for vacations, visiting Positano where they lounged on a beach, chatting amiably with Tennessee Williams. Their Mercedes was broken into in Palermo, causing a furious outburst from the expert car thief Baader. Back in Rome they were visited by Horst Mahler bearing money from rich sympathisers and suggesting they convert themselves into an armed radical group. The group had no name. On 12 February 1970 they returned to Berlin, looking up a celebrity journalist acquaintance with a view to hiding in