Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [156]
Two thousand demonstrators bayed for ‘revenge’ at Meins’s funeral. Rudi Dutschke put in a celebrity appearance to bid farewell to his comrade and friend, raising his fist and shouting ‘Holger, the struggle continues!’ He also took his son to visit Jan-Carl Raspe in prison. These actions, together with his involvement with bombs, were apparently compatible with his refusal to join the RAF, not on grounds of morality, but because the revolutionary constellations were inopportune.
In political terms, the imprisoned RAF terrorists managed to acquire more sympathisers than they had had while on the loose. Inflated rhetoric about the tortures they were supposed to be undergoing led to the formation of protest groups called torture committees, many of whose members - including Ralf Baptist Friedrich and Stefan Wisniewski, and the three ‘Hamburg aunts’, Susanne Albrecht, Silke Maier-Witt and Sigrid Sternebeck - became second-generation RAF terrorists after basking on the moral high ground as human rights activists. The police estimated that the three hundred people they were currently hunting enjoyed the active protective support of ten thousand sympathisers. Jean-Paul Sartre, the veteran armchair revolutionary, hastened from afar, with one of the later OPEC hostage-takers, Hansjoachim Klein, at the wheel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a fellow traveller. He spent half an hour with Baader, who gave his visitor a lecture on his cod philosophy. Afterwards Sartre’s only private comment was ‘What an arsehole, this Baader.’
At a televised press conference attended by a hundred reporters later that evening, he struck other tones: ‘Baader had the face of a tortured man. It is not like the torture of the Nazis. It is another kind of torture. A torture designed to induce psychiatric disturbance. Baader and the others are living in white cells. In these cells they hear nothing except the steps of guards three times a day as they bring food. The lights burn for twenty-four hours a day.’ The lies of this aged useful idiot were broadcast on prime-time German television. He had met Baader in the visitors’ room, whose minimalist furnishings bore no relation to the cells in which the prisoners lived. The cell lights actually always went out at 10 p.m. when the power was shut off. Baader complained to the prison doctor that he had a bad back. So did his comrades. The doctor insisted they needed electric blankets, even in summer; the power stayed on through the night, enabling them to read in bed. Nor was Baader isolated; he received five or six visitors a day.
Left-liberal defence lawyers, whose cynical occupation of the moral high ground spared them from press scrutiny, played a major role in facilitating communications between their imprisoned clients and the next generation of RAF terrorists. Volker Speitel, for example, graduated from working in Klaus Croissant’s law firm to a terrorist group. Croissant himself would serve a two-year jail sentence. The usual relationship between lawyers and their clients was reversed, as Baader graded them for their radicality. He received some fifty-eight visits from eight different lawyers in a single month, and over five hundred in the course of three years. He even wrote down the rules of the game, beginning by insisting that the prisoners themselves would collectively establish the overall defence strategy. Terrorists struck on 27 February 1975 when fifty-two-year-old Peter Lorenz, the Christian Democratic Union’s candidate