Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [155]
Leftist lawyers ensured that their terrorist defendants were able to communicate with each other, using code-names taken from Melville’s Moby Dick. Naturally, Baader was ‘Ahab’. The lawyers photocopied the group’s letters and smuggled them in amid their legal documents. The detainees claimed they were being held in conditions resembling Auschwitz, with Meinhof writing that ‘the political concept behind the “dead tract” - silent corridors - in Cologne’s prison is: gas. My inner fantasies that this was Auschwitz were realistic.’ In fact, she received regular visits from her ex-husband and ten-year-old twins, who in Auschwitz would have been handed over to Josef Mengele. Gudrun Ensslin was allowed to have a violin. The remand prisoners were permitted radios and record players, so that Baader was soon rocking to the sounds of Santana and Ten Years After. They received any reading matter they wished, which enabled Baader to study the theories he had spouted as slogans for years. In this fashion they built up extensive libraries (Baader some 974 books, Raspe a further 550) with materials on bomb making, alarm systems and police investigation techniques, as well as works entitled German Weapons Journal, Amateur Radio, What We Can Learn from the Tupamaros, Urban Guerrilla Warfare, The Special Forces Handbook, The Master Bomber: Contemporary Explosives Technology and the like. Insofar as the RAF prisoners had a strategy, it was to dramatise and publicise their predicament, making it seem as if the democratic German state had finally let slip its mask to reveal its Fascist inner heart. There were attempts to co-ordinate hunger strikes among the forty or so terrorist detainees. Two were called off after a short time, without achieving any improvement in the conditions of their custody. Visiting lawyers enabled Baader to gobble the occasional sandwich covertly.
In April 1974 Ensslin and Meinhof were moved to a new high-security wing at Stuttgart’s Stammheim prison. They were allowed considerable periods of association with one another, but were kept apart from other inmates. Meinhof was then taken to Berlin as one of the defendants in the trial of those who in 1970 had freed Andreas Baader. She would receive an eight-year jail sentence in this trial. Her fellow accused, Horst Mahler, indicated that he had unilaterally left the RAF, part of his long journey to becoming a neo-Nazi.
In October 1974 Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, Meins and Raspe were indicted on five counts of murder, with the trial scheduled to take place in Stammheim the following year. Baader and Raspe were also moved to Stammheim prison. They enjoyed single occupation of cells in which six prisoners were usually held. Almost immediately, Baader complained that his cell was too small. The wall to the next cell was knocked through to create a suite. When this did not suffice, the next wall into Raspe’s cell was given a connecting door. After three weeks of being treated as a manservant by Baader, Raspe had the door bricked up again. All were already on hunger strike, with Holger Meins too ill to be moved. Forced feeding of the prisoners commenced. This did not avail Holger Meins, who by the time he died weighed little over six stone despite being six feet tall. Long before he had even embarked on the hunger strike, Meins wrote: ‘In the event that I die in prison, it will have been murder. Regardless of what the swine maintain… don’t believe the lies of these murderers.’ That would eventually become the group strategy. In reality, the only people being murdered