Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [158]
As the court sessions dragged on into the new year of 1976, relations between the accused deteriorated. Baader and Ensslin sharply criticised Meinhof’s maundering revolutionary writings in her capacity as ‘Voice of the RAF’. There was something sado-masochistic about the delight they (and she) took in ripping her writings to shreds. They suspected that her resolve was weakening. It was, largely under the pressure of their incessant bullying, and her depressive tendencies. Early on Sunday morning, 8 May, guards opened the door of Cell 719 and found Meinhof hanging from a rope made of torn hand towels tied round the bars of the window. Extensive investigations found no sign of foul play. On the 109th day of the trial, her name was neatly crossed off the list of defendants. Four thousand people, some masked, hooded or wearing white face paint, attended her Berlin funeral. In Frankfurt a policeman was badly burned when someone threw a Molotov cocktail into his van; decades later, Meinhof’s journalist daughter, whose hatred of the entire ‘68 generation had become strenuous, accused a minister in Schroder’s government of having thrown that bomb.
Meanwhile, the former lawyer Siegfried Haag and the former psychiatric collective member Elizabeth van Dyck were in the Middle East seeking external partners for the second-generation RAF terrorists. Yasser Arafat turned them down, on the ground that the PLO currently favoured negotiation. Haag was referred to George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Rebuffed there too he made contact with Wadi Haddad, leader of a PFLP breakaway faction called PFLP-Special Commando. Two German terrorists later participated in PFLP-SC’s January 1976 hijacking of the Air France jet, during which, Nazi style, they ‘selected’ out the Jewish passengers, an episode that ended in the famous Israeli special forces raid on Entebbe in which ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu’s brother was killed. Haddad also ran a secret training camp for foreign terrorists at Yaal, a village in southern Yemen. Haag, by now disguised with a toupee and a pirate beard, was on hand when several RAF terrorists, including Peter Jürgen Boock, Verena Becker, Rolf Clemens Wagner, Sieglinde Hofmann and Stefan Wisniewski, flew to Aden for advanced training. They were welcomed like VIPs by the Yemeni authorities, behind whom were men with Saxon accents from the East German Stasi which trained the Yemeni secret service. After a hard day’s close-quarter combat, running and shooting, the group settled down to ponder strategy, in particular two operations called Big Money and Big Breakout.
In Stuttgart the defendants’ lawyers had in the interim taken collusion with terrorists to an unprecedented level. They all came from practices increasingly specialising in human rights; not only did they sympathise with the terrorists, in some cases they actively assisted or joined them. Security at Stammheim was so stringent that even lawyers had to open their trousers for closer inspection, although guards refrained from poking around in their underpants. Gudrun Ensslin’s lawyer, Arndt Müller, was the first to be prevailed on to smuggle things into his client, using the simple technique of hollowing out one of the many files of legal documents. These were searched too, but provided the lawyer gripped the edge of the file tight with one hand while flicking the outer pages with the other, the guards did not bother to open the file fully. Beginning with a Minox camera, thanks to which we have photos of the group in prison, the lawyer graduated to smuggling in earphones, cables, an electric iron and a cooking ring, followed by three pistols - a chrome-plated .38, a Heckler & Koch 9 mm and a Hungarian FEK 7.65 mm - and five strips of plastic explosive which probably arrived in his underpants. The weapons were incorporated into the structure of empty cells when the high-security block at