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By Root 1092 0

Petra Schelm, a former hairdresser who had followed her boyfriend, Manfred Hoppe, arrested that day, into terrorism. In October, the police sustained their first fatality when a thirty-two-year-old officer called Norbert Schmid was shot while chasing RAF members in Hamburg. The federal criminal police acquired a new chief called Horst Herold, who introduced an information revolution while creating anti-terrorist departments in each of the federal Lander. The number of employees at his Wiesbaden headquarters rose from 1,113 when he took up his post in 1971 to 3,536 when he left it ten years later. The scale of the information the criminal police collected was so prodigious that people began to fear that Orwell’s imaginings had been realised. There were thirty-seven different databases, containing information on nearly five million people and over three thousand organisations. Specialist databanks registered the names of, for example, everyone who had visited a terrorist suspect in prison. Another system identified homes in a given town where the occupants had not registered themselves or their vehicle with the authorities, who paid for utilities in cash, and who were not in receipt of child support. With considerable reason the police began to take a close interest in the left-liberal lawyers who routinely defended terrorist suspects, notably Klaus Croissant and Otto Schily, some of whom were already on public record talking about how they would hide such a suspect if invited to do so. These lawyers’ phones began to be tapped.

In these desperate encounters neither the terrorists nor their pursuers were slow to squeeze the trigger. Both sides developed a form of psychosis, believing that it was necessary to shoot first to survive. Georg von Rauch, the son of a professor at Kiel, was shot dead as he tried to pull a gun after being arrested. The son of another Kiel professor, Thomas Weisbecker, was shot dead by police in Augsburg. In the course of a police surveillance operation on a flat used as an RAF forgery centre, a detective was fatally shot and terrorist Manfred Grasshof was hit in the head and the chest. In this atmosphere, accidents were bound to happen, as a seventeen-year-old boy racer discovered when a police chase finished with an officer emptying the magazine of a machine gun into him and the car. A Spiegel journalist who happened to resemble Baader twice found himself staring down police gun barrels, while a Hamburg journalist who looked like Meinhof had to equip herself with an official document declaring that she was not the wanted terrorist.

Meanwhile, the nine members of the group still at large had commissioned a metal worker to manufacture several steel tubes measuring 80 cm by 20 cm, with a view to turning them into bombs. They were to be packed with ball-bearings or nails to maximise their destructive effect. The extreme amateurishness of this operation was evident when Baader wore out the motors of the coffee grinders he used to reduce lumps of ammonium nitrate and charcoal into serviceable quantities. Attempts to mix explosives with kitchen mixers were not a success, as the motors packed up, although attaching snow brushes to a drill eventually did the trick. In May 1972 the RAF bombed the US officers’ club in Frankfurt am Main. Three bombs caused carnage. A thirty-nine-year-old lieutenant-colonel died when a glass shard went through his neck. Thirteen others were injured. According to a communique from the commemoratively named Commando Petra Schelm this was payback for the strategy of ‘extermination’ pursued by the US in Vietnam. On 12 May five policemen were injured when two pipe bombs went off in Augsburg’s police headquarters. Two hours later a car blew up in the car park of the criminal police in Frankfurt. On 15 May the wife of a federal judge was badly injured when the car she was using to collect her husband exploded as she turned the ignition key. On 19 May three bombs went off among proofreaders in the Springer building in Hamburg, injuring seventeen of them. Three further bombs were successfully