Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang

by Jillian Becker

Overview

First published in 1977 in the US and Britain to universal critical acclaim, Hitler's Children quickly became a world-wide best seller, translated into many other languages, including Japanese.

It tells the story of the West German terrorists who emerged out of the 'New Left' student protest movement of the late 1960s. With bombs and bullets they started killing in the name of 'peace'. Almost all of them came from prosperous, educated families. They were 'Hitler's children' not only in that they had been born in or immediately after the Nazi period - some of their parents having been members of the Nazi party - but also because they were as fiercely against individual freedom as the Nazis were. Their declared ideology was Communism. They were beneficiaries of both American aid and the West German economic miracle. Despising their immeasurable gifts of prosperity and freedom, they 'identified' themselves with Third World victims of wars, poverty and oppression, whose plight they blamed on 'Western imperialism'. In reality, their terrorist activity was for no better cause than self-expression.

Their dreams of leading a revolution were ended when one after another of them died in shoot-outs with the police, or was blown up with his own bomb, or was arrested, tried, and condemned to long terms of imprisonment. All four leaders of the Red Army Faction (dubbed 'the Baader-Meinhof gang' by journalists) committed suicide in prison.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491844380
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	02/18/2014
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.94(d)

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HITLER'S CHILDREN

The Story of the Baader -Meinhof Terrorist Gang

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By Jillian Becker

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2014 Jillian Becker
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4918-4438-0

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CHAPTER 1

Play The Devil

During the 1960s student politics in West Germany moved from pacifism through 'passive provocation' to violence. West Berlin was where the most significant events marking this development took place. There, in the middle of the decade, a group of 'happenings' satirists formed a commune and launched a campaign of provocative, leftist, but non-violent anti-Establishment criticism. They won supporters, but enemies too.

They had first gathered together in the southern town of Kochel, on the shores of the lake called the Kochelsee. There nine men and five women, with a couple of small communal children, had met in a country house for a week's discussion of the prospects for a revolutionary movement in western Europe and of the merits of living collectively. They named themselves the ' Viva Maria group', after the film by Louis Malle in which Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau became beautifully involved in a revolution of fun and style in Mexico, with all the rulers rich and cruel and all the rebels poor and lovable.

Among them was one Rudi Dutschke, who had come from West Berlin, where he had taken refuge from the communist East because as an ardent pacifist he had refused to join the National Army of the People for which it was then compulsory to 'volunteer'. Dutschke was a young man with black straight hair, a gaunt-boned Slavic face, and amber, infl ammable eyes.

Another of them was Fritz Teufel (his surname means 'devil'). He was twenty-four and said to be shy when he came with the group to live communally in West Berlin, where they tried to put their political and social ideas into practice, sharing all with all.

Rudi Dutschke did not remain long with the group, as he was unwilling to share his girlfriend, an American theology student who in time became his wife. But one Rainer Langhans joined them. He had just been released from national service, and he used his new freedom to grow a wide mop of thick curly hair.

The group studied at, or at least became involved in the student affairs of, the Free University. Now they called themselves Kommune I and soon became notorious as a troupe of political jesters, trend setters, student leaders, convention defiers.

It was not long before they had their imitators, though it was more their communal life-style than their methods of political criticism that became fashionable. To make authority look absurd by staging satirical 'happenings' required a special talent, but to make a commune, all that was needed was a consenting circle and a large enough apartment. A Kommune II had in fact been started earlier than Kommune I, but was named later. This Kommune II further described itself as a ' Psychoanalytic-Amateur-Dramatic Society', which gave fair warning of its deeper earnestness.

But sometimes the satirical methods were imitated too, especially in the service of the cause which was nearest to students all over the country, the cause in which they genuinely believed because it genuinely affected them: university reform.

After the war the universities had been purged of professors tainted with a Nazi past, but many had to be re-instated because of the dearth of teachers and administrators which resulted. Students protested not just because such men were back in power, but against the way they used their power, and many younger teachers, inspired less with reverence than frustration by the all-too-traditional hierarchies of authority, supported the students' quite reasonable demands for reform. The post-war baby-boom had grown up to become a student boom in the second half of the sixties, but for all its predictability, no forethought had been given to it. Buildings and facilities were inadequate, courses were antiquated, and academic administration was traditional to the point of petrification. The universities had emerged from the war with their pre-Nazi independence strengthened, and the authorities were more concerned with preserving their powers than with making their institutions viable. It was hard enough to get them even to listen to the complaints of the students, let alone to allow students to have some say in the making of decisions which vitally affected their careers. Only at the Free University of Berlin, which was built after the war, was there a constitution which allowed two students to sit on the council. The students believed it was an inadequate provision. And it was in that anomalous, nervous city that the German student movement became most turbulent.

To the generation born after the war and raised in the re-education policies of the conquering powers to respect and uphold the values of democracy it seemed obviously unjust that they should be denied a say in the making of the rules that governed them, and freedom to express their ideas on certain important issues. They did have university student councils (Allgemeiner Studenten Ausschuss, AStA), representing all students, and the national Union of Student Associations (Verband Deutscher Studentenschaften, VDS). But though these organizations promoted democracy in a general way after the war, they were not supposed to take sides over distinctly political issues. They did try to prevent the re-formation of the old Korps, the duelling fraternities which had been in their time a breeding ground of Prussian militarism, and, though officially forbidden by the power-monopolizing Nazis, of Nazi-type élitist ideals; but they did not succeed, and young men with the dueller's beribboned cap and rapier are still to be seen about the university towns.

There were also the student political parties: most notably as a force in the student movement, the Socialist Student Union — Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or SDS (coincidentally, the same as the initials of Students for a Democratic Society in America, but having no connection with it). Certainly the SDS made itself heard, though its membership reached only about twenty-five hundred, and at the Free University where it was strongest it seldom, even with the co-operation of liberal and other left groups, rallied more than about 5 per cent of the students to the active support of any cause. It was a most significant force all over the country in the agitation for university reform. But it concerned itself with wider issues, too, and hoped and tried to politicize students generally.

In 1959 an SDS congress had declared itself against the atom bomb, militarism, and the rearmament of Germany. The pacifism of the young delegates at that time was vehement, but not threatening. By holding opinions against violence they may have felt they had achieved pacifism, but of course these pacifists had not yet been subjected to much temptation to be anything else. Such political action as they took was peaceful enough, however loud with challenging conviction. 'Protest' was the first key word of the student movement — protest written on placards, demonstrated by crowds marching through city streets, shouted in chorus, and sung.

The year 1961 was a time of crisis in Berlin. It was the year the Berlin Wall was built by the German Democratic Republic, to keep its citizens from voting against communism with their feet. A hundred days after it was erected, about forty thousand protestors, many of them students, marched silently through the streets of West Berlin, in mourning for a student who had leaped from a high window to escape from the East, missed the blanket held for him, and died. Then, after the quiet official march, about a thousand students tried to storm the Wall. 'Away with Ulbricht and the Wall!' they shouted. And the West Berlin police moved in with tear gas and rubber truncheons to keep them back. To the students this was an outrage.

By way of justification, the Berlin Senate issued a confusing statement approving the demonstrators' motives while reproving their action. While the Senate was able to plead that the demonstrators trying to storm the wall had been kept back for their own safety, the students nevertheless insisted indignantly that the official reaction was in every respect undemocratic. They were hurt and angry. And while remaining for peace in principle, students over the next few years became more militant in mood. The 'economic miracle' brought new students into the universities who could not remember hardship, want, the horrors of violence, real fascism, or intimidation, and whose collective cocksureness was founded on material security taken for granted. And they were aggressively determined to be heard.

In 1965 the Free University of Berlin planned to commemorate the capitulation of Germany twenty years before, and the students, through the committee of their student council, asked that the journalist Erich Kuby be invited to give an address.

Years before, in 1958, Kuby had expressed a point of view on the naming of the Free University which at the time had offended not only the authorities but also the students, who had received his opinion with hisses and jeers. He had said that the name Free University expressed 'an extreme degree of unfreedom' in that it was given to the new university deliberately to imply that the old Humboldt University, now in communist East Berlin, was not free. He said the name was therefore a 'polemical reference to other state structures', which West Germany had avoided when it named itself the German Federal Republic (but which East Germany had not avoided when it called itself the German Democratic Republic). In other words, he was saying that the namers of the Free University were not only suggesting that their university allowed its students free access to ideas while the Humboldt no longer did so since falling into communist hands, but that the communist state which controlled the Humboldt was also not free. And further, that to believe such a fallacy was to have one's mind in some sort of propaganda vice.

Perhaps Kuby was only objecting that the naming of the new university was in deliberate aggravation of the Cold War, rather than saying that the communist states were free, and West Berlin unfree if it thought otherwise. But to his audience — most of whom seemed to have formed the firm opinion, on evidence which could not have been too difficult to unearth, that the Eastern bloc countries were indeed unfree and that the Humboldt University by no means allowed free access to ideas — Kuby's view was not merely exaggerated, or simply absurd, but offensive.

Yet now, in 1965, the students of the Free University wanted to hear Kuby say it all again. Clearly student opinion in West Berlin had swung leftwards — perhaps because very few refugees from East Germany now swelled their numbers as they had done before the Wall was built. No longer did students cry 'Away with Ulbricht and the Wall' on the western side of the Brandenburg Gate. Perhaps the Wall itself was responsible for their softened feelings towards communism — cutting off their view so that they could begin to suspect that the grass might really be greener on the other side.

Certainly more students were leftist now, or sympathetic to the Left. And they may have reckoned that by simply asking for the man who had challenged the Free University with that view, they would force a confrontation with the university authorities. They did. The Rector — the head of the university—refused to entertain the suggestion that Kuby be invited. Indignation among the students flared.

The 'Kuby affair' became a cause célèbre beyond the walls of the university, through the press and television. And the strikes, sit-ins, teach-ins, and other assorted forms of protest over this 'free speech' issue were amplified to take in the Vietnam War, which was rapidly becoming the most popular cause for the New Left to champion all over the Western world, in this year of the United States' military 'escalation' in that small tragic country. Students felt themselves to be not only fellow sufferers with the victims of hardhearted and heavy-handed powers, but also their champions. 'Amis [Americans, contemptuous] get out of Vietnam', and get out of the Dominican Republic too — and give us the right of self-determination. Down with the authoritarianism of the university — and of America.

A new Rector was routinely appointed, but changes in the administration were not significant enough to diminish the students' discontent. Through the rest of 1965 and all through 1966 the conflict between students and university authorities smouldered on.

The press in Berlin, dominated by the Axel Springer organization, irritated the students by its steady opposition to their political activities. Typical headlines and comments which annoyed them were such as Die Welt's 'The Dream Dancers of West Berlin — Why Always Strikes at the Free University?'; or the Berliner Morgenpost's 'The Clowns of West Berlin', the headline for an editorial on an anti-Vietnam demonstration by the student groups; or, in the Berliner Zeitung, on the same subject:

Inspector says: A disgrace for our Berlin. Since last Saturday there has been a new situation in our city: a numerically small group of leftist radicals ... have for some time now nursed fantasies of bringing about a 'revolutionary situation'. At the weekend they gave us a first taste: With communist slogans they went onto the streets ... Students who formerly no doubt put forward moving complaints against the abolition of milk subsidies, shied eggs at America House. Students who have the Americans to thank for their being able to study in peace in this city violated the American flag! Pfui Teufel!

Pfui Teufel! — 'Fie devil!' — is a common enough expression and was not aimed at any particular person. No one of that name had yet made himself conspicuous about the Free University. But, spoken of, he was bound to appear.

Early in 1966 police permission was obtained for a demonstration against the 'dirty war in Vietnam', yet it brought students and police into angry clashes. The students sat down in front of America House. Eggs — but only five, the students claimed, from a pack of six bought at the Zoo Underground Station — were thrown (what happened to the sixth, one wonders: did someone keep it for his supper?) at the two rows of windows in the neat, modern, quite small cube-block building, with wide horizontal lines of blue and just a few thin strips of red and a very few tiny white stars, and with a flag on a not very high pole in the grass of the kerb outside its front door, easy for the students to get at and tear down — which they did. And the facade was further insulted with the name of the North Vietnam leader Ho Chi Minh, chanted as a war cry, and the singing of 'The International'.

It was to be a year of important developments. On the national scene the two biggest political parties, the Social Democrats ( SPD) and the Christian Democrats ( CDU), formed the Grand Coalition, and many ardent leftists deserted the SPD. The world had seemed to them ready for radical change, the SPD had seemed the sort of party which might bring it about, and this compromise for the sake of power was 'a sellout'. There were others, including some left-wing professors, who offered a different criticism: they claimed to see in such a coalition, involving as it must the making of concessions by each party, a dangerous tendency towards 'one-party rule'.

And Fritz Teufel appeared.

He and Kommune I erupted on to the Berlin scene. They did not entirely change the mood or style of student politics, but they added their own, and in the early days were appreciated even where they were not imitated. The leftist SDS was enchanted with them at first, and before long twelve of its members decided to start a commune of their own. At the eleventh hour, however, the courage of five of them failed and only the remaining seven moved into a large apartment in the full risk of one another.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from HITLER'S CHILDREN by Jillian Becker. Copyright © 2014 Jillian Becker. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii,
Abbreviations, xiii,
Author's Preface To This Edition, xv,
Prologue, 1,
Part 1: A Game With Terror, 11,
Chapter 1: Play The Devil, 13,
Chapter 2: A Night At The Opera, 30,
Chapter 3: Martyrs And Scapegoats, 37,
Chapter 4: For Theoretical Consideration Only, 49,
Part 2: Burn, Warehouse, Burn, 63,
Chapter 1: Momma's Boy And The Parson's Daughter, 65,
Chapter 2: A Little Night Arson, 80,
Chapter 3: Fugitives, 93,
Part 3: The Peacemongers, 113,
Chapter 1: A Game Of Sorrow And Despair, 115,
Chapter 2: Becoming Engaged, 132,
Chapter 3: A Lefter Shade Of Chic, 151,
Chapter 4: Nothing Personal, 171,
Part 4: Bandits, 197,
Chapter 1: Going Places And Doing Things, 199,
Chapter 2: For Pity's Sake, 229,
Chapter 3: Killing, 235,
Part 5: The Devil To Pay, 267,
Chapter 1: The Game Is Up, The Games Go On, 269,
Chapter 2: Crocodile Tears, 277,
Chapter 3: Judgements, 299,
Chapter 4: The Last Act, 314,
Appendix: Another Final Battle On The Stage Of History, 337,
Notes, 353,
A Note on Sources, 379,
Bibliography, 381,
Index, 393,