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By Root 977 0

for mayor of Berlin, was abducted as he drove to work. He had been kidnapped by the 2 June Movement. A communique demanded the release of six prisoners, including Horst Mahler, the only (former) member of the RAF mentioned because there was not much love lost between the rival groups. Since none of the prisoners had been charged with murder, the government’s crisis team capitulated to these demands, especially as Mahler declined to be freed. Five prisoners were flown to Aden, with former mayor Heinrich Albertz bravely accompanying them as a guarantee. Peter Lorenz was found the same night wandering confused in a Berlin park.

On the eve of the Baader-Meinhof trial in Stammheim, six terrorists calling themselves Commando Holger Meins took over the German embassy in Stockholm, armed with guns and bombs. They included three former members of the Heidelberg psychiatric collective, and Ulrich Wessel, the son of a prominent Hamburg millionaire. They took eleven hostages, including ambassador Dietrich Stoecker, Heinz Hillegaart, responsible for economic affairs, and baron von Mirbach, the military attache, and locked themselves into offices on the third floor, wiring the room with explosives. They demanded the release of twenty-six prisoners, including Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and Raspe. After urgent meetings, chancellor Helmut Schmidt informed the Swedish minister of justice that his government rejected these demands. When this message was conveyed to the terrorists, they took Hillegaart to a window and shot him three times. Shortly before midnight, the embassy was rocked by a series of explosions. Both Mirbach and the terrorist Wessel died. A second terrorist was gravely injured, which did not prevent him being flown to Germany where he died in intensive care at Stammheim a few days later. Three terrorists were arrested as they escaped the burning embassy. Two weeks later defence lawyer Siegfried Haag went underground after police searched his offices for proof that he had supplied the Stockholm embassy attackers with their weapons.

The trial of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and Raspe commenced in a purpose-built courtroom at Stuttgart-Stammheim on 21 May 1975. Security was intense, but, as it transpired, not tight enough. From the start, the four defendants resolved to disrupt the proceedings, beginning by rejecting the defence lawyers appointed by the court after three of their previous team were disbarred under new legislation designed to frustrate the collusive machinations of radical lawyers, the least of whose sins were calling their clients ‘comrade’. In their concerted efforts to convert a criminal trial into a political spectacle, the defendants subjected the judge and prosecutor to prolonged verbal abuse, calling the former a ‘Fascist arsehole’ and the latter a ‘terrorist’, while their defence lawyer, Otto Schily, pleaded that they were unfit to stand trial. He and the other defence lawyers then walked out. Other farcical tricks included wishing to call Richard Nixon, Melvin Laird, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt as witnesses. On another occasion they called five former US servicemen in order to defame the NATO alliance. When the hearings resumed, Baader claimed that his conditions of detention were worse than those in the Third Reich. In fact, the four defendants, by now joined in Stammheim by Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Ingrid Schubert, enjoyed daily baths, extensive periods of communal association, radios and record players, and various exercise machines. Baader kept hashish in a tea tin to supplement the prodigious quantities of aspirins and anti-depressants the guards handed out each night. They also intimidated their guards, with Baader warning: ‘I’ll send a couple of people over. For a couple of thousand Marks I can find a killer to bump off your wife as well.’ Eventually the courtroom disruptions reached such levels that Prinzing the judge availed himself of new legislation enabling hearings to proceed without the defendants. In a concession to the accused, the judge subsequently allowed them to participate in their