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of an entirely legitimate double of the car they were driving. The group’s preference was for powerful BMWs, so much so that colloquially these were known as Baader-Meinhof Wagen. They also burgled a provincial town hall to steal blank identity documents and the seals and stamps needed to authenticate them, necessary in a country where ‘if it isn’t stamped it isn’t Prussian’. This burglary had to be executed twice because Meinhof managed to get the postcode wrong when she posted a packet of such documents to Baader and Ensslin. She had more success in purchasing twenty-three Firebird 9 mm pistols on the black market in Frankfurt. These were intended for the new recruits to the group, who included Holger Meins, a film student with pronounced depressive tendencies, his nineteen-year-old girlfriend Beate Sturm, and Ulrich Scholze, a twenty-three-year-old physics student. It did not take Baader long to recruit them. In addition to being of a similar political frame of mind, some of the new recruits were attracted by the romantic-rebel, criminal aspect of the terrorist enterprise. The youngest recruit was a sixteen-year-old girl, whom they nicknamed ‘Teeny’, the human mascot of the group. Scholze had more sophisticated reasons for becoming a terrorist, speaking of a ‘particular psychological disposition’. One had to be emotionally convinced that reforms merely stabilised the existing system. Reason and emotion thereby became one. ‘Persecution’ by the authorities confirmed one’s new worldview, while sensational press reports about ‘Public Enemy Number 1’ and the like could be construed as marks of success. Induction was gradual, beginning with arranging secure apartments, followed by stealing cars and robbing banks.35

While a hugely expanded federal criminal police service - whose manpower grew from 934 in 1970 to 1,779 in 1972 with corresponding budget increases - slowly picked off individual members of the group as they drove around the country, the leadership held gloomy discussions about names and strategy. Ulrike Meinhof coined the name Red Army Faction in a pamphlet she was invited to write called The Urban Guerrilla Concept. A graphic artist in the group devised the logo of a Kalashnikov AK-47, with ‘RAF’ emblazoned beneath. The name was unfortunate since it reminded people of the depredations of the Red Army, while the acronym conjured up Lancasters destroying German cities. Adoption of the grandiose name of ‘army’ also reflected the rapid militarisation of life in the group. Although opposition to the supposed militarisation of West German society was one of their key platforms, they did not seem to be aware that the armed struggle had ceased to liberate the new man, along the lines imagined by Frantz Fanon, but rather was reducing his humanity in the way that a boot camp or barracks does to recruits. They began to use deprecatory phrases like ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy’ that would have been worthy of the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS.

With their numbers by now reduced to about a dozen people, the group was desperate for new recruits. Salvation came from an unlikely quarter. The mad. A radical psychiatrist at Heidelberg university, influenced by the anti-psychiatry of R. D. Laing and the anti-institutionalisation theories of Franco Basaglia, had formed a socialist collective among the mainly student clientele he was treating for various mental disturbances common to that age cohort, including depression, paranoia and mild schizophrenia. In early 1971 Baader and Ensslin visited Heidelberg where they met some of the radicalised patients. In the following years about twelve of the latter, including Gerhard Müller, Siegfried Hausner, Sieglinde Hofmann, Lutz Taufer and others became the second generation of RAF terrorists, initially under the slogan ‘Crazies to Arms’.

The first death came in July 1971 when police chased a car that had gone through a random checkpoint in Hamburg. After the BMW was forced to stop, a couple alighted, firing Belgian handguns at their pursuers. The police returned fire, killing twenty-year-old