Breaking History - Luigi Mangione & The History of Rich Kid Terrorism

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Luigi Mangioni appears in court this week. He stands accused of murdering a healthcare CEO in cold blood. It’s not the first time a well heeled winner has been celebrated for his embrace of political violence. Today we look at the West German woman who paved the way. We dive into the phenomenon of breaking rad. Eli Lake tells the story of Ulrike Meinhof and the infamous Red Army Faction.  ******* And a note from our sponsors: Go to groundnews.com/BreakingHistory to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and stay fully informed on today’s biggest news stories. Listen to Unpacking Israeli History here: https://link.chtbl.com/VdmA8PCO For more info about ChairFlicks visit: https://welcome.chaiflicks.com/lake/  ******* Credits:  Our interview with Bettina Rohl was translated into English and read by Anna-Carolin Augustin. Our voice actors were Constantine Gregory and Priscilla Hagen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode contains some descriptions of suicide, including method. Take care when listening. The trial of a celebrity starts this week in New York City. TMZ will fight the New York Times for space inside the courthouse. And guards will be on hand to stop fans from breaking up the proceedings. But it's not your regular celebrity trial. Because the defendant is being accused of a political assassination of sorts. In the doc is Luigi Mangione.

He's being tried for the murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson. Before Thompson died, no one had heard of Mangione, but now the man is an icon. How did this happen? Well, there's another figure in history who can help us understand it. She was a journalist who quit her magazine and went underground to rob banks and sow terror. She bombed, killed, stole, and was worshipped for doing so. Her name was Ulrika Meinhof. And we'll be digging into what Meinhof's story can tell us about the Mangione trial, right after the break.

Just a heads up, some voices are portrayed by actors and have been translated into English from German. It was the most captivating crime in recent memory. At this very moment there is a manhunt for the person who shot and killed the CEO of a leading health insurer. Brian Thompson was the head of United Healthcare for the past three and a half years. Police are still searching for the shooter who had on a mask and was last seen eastbound on 6th Avenue. The grainy footage of the murder looked like something out of a spy thriller. It was strange.

In America's largest city, teeming with surveillance cameras, the assailant just slipped away. The police were stumped, but the assassin left clues. On the bullet casings etched in magic marker were the words, deny, defend, depose, words that refer to the common tactics agents use when rejecting claims from policyholders. This wasn't a random street crime. It appeared to be what an earlier generation of radicals would call the propaganda of the deed, what today we know as terrorism. The whole case is bizarre.

The man accused of the crime, Luigi Mangione, was the valedictorian of his prep school, Hillman Academy. He graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in computer engineering. He seemed to have it all. Connections, smarts, generational wealth, and adoring friends and family. On top of all that, he had killer abs. This is how one person who knew Luigi described him.

Friendly, articulate, humble, open-minded, curious. And yet this former counselor at Stanford University's prestigious summer camp for science nerds allegedly fashioned a handgun from a 3D printer, stalked his prey at dawn, killed Thompson, and then evaded the cops for six days. The feds finally arrested him at a McDonald's, eating a hash brown in the middle of Pennsylvania.

If the court finds Mangione guilty, we'll have to ask, why did he do it? If he was the one to pull the trigger, then something inside of him snapped. But the killer wasn't the only one to snap. Something also snapped in us, because for millions of people, the victim of this murder, a father, a husband, and a fellow high school valedictorian,

Brian Thompson, became the villain. Mangione was recast as a hero, a hero who shot a man in the back. Since the murder, Mangione's face has been projected on skyscrapers in New York and London and plastered across the internet. One of the most common memes portrayed him as a medieval saint. At the same time, wanted posters popped up in New York City with the names and photos of health insurance executives. Many Americans seem to have chosen a side.

We, the people, want Luigi Free! We support Luigi Mandione for unaliving CEO Brian Thompson. He's kind of cute though. I mean, I'm a married mom with three kids, but he's kind of cute. Random YouTubers recorded original songs. Ryan Thompson was a violent man, condemning people to death for no other reason than a percentage point of profit. And violence against violence, against violence.

Even a US Senator seemed to have some sympathy. We'll say it over and over. Violence is never the answer. This guy gets a trial who's allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealth. But you can only push people so far. And then they start to take matters into their own hands. Since he's been locked up in a Brooklyn jail, the same one that houses Sean Puffy Combs and Sam Bankman Freed, he has been inundated with fan mail.

Last month, he released this statement to the public through his lawyer. I am overwhelmed by and grateful for everyone who has written me to share their stories and express their support. While it is impossible for me to reply to most letters, please know that I read everyone that I receive. This is the sort of humble brag you expect from Sabrina Carpenter, not a man accused of being the TikTok Unabomber. But Luigi Mangione is not the first alleged terrorist to be feted as a rock star.

Nor is he the first example of the phenomenon of breaking rad when a well-off winner throws their life away for the thrill of political violence. More than 50 years ago a West German columnist Ulrika Meinhof abandoned her family and her social status to pursue socialist revolution. Just like Luigi Mangione, Meinhof was celebrated. She too became a celebrity. Marian Ann Faithfull. We are now listening to Mary Ann Faithfull, a 60s icon who famously ran away from a convent school to follow the Rolling Stones on tour, date Mick Jagger, and embrace sex, drugs,

and rock and roll. Here she is on Saturday Night Live, singing a song she had dedicated to Marika Meinhof. And this is far from Meinhof's only artistic tribute. Her portrait hangs in the permanent collection at the New York Museum of Modern Art. The Clash's frontman, Joe Strummer, often wore a t-shirt with the insignia of Meinhoff's terrorist group, the Red Army faction. At one point, a celebrated fashion label even released a collection under the title Prada Meinhoff.

Meinhoff was a leader of the Red Army faction. The terror cell was young, radical, and famous, everything that the modern rock star was desperate to be. But Meinhoff was no marginalized destitute victim of the system. In fact, like many of the pop radicals of the punk era, she was bourgeois, intellectual, and fashionable. Unlike Marian Faithful,

Meinhof's radicalism went further than heroin and synthesizers. Instead, the young German was bombing army bases, breaking psychopaths out of jail, and plotting murders. Before breaking Rad, Ulrika Meinhoff was a powerful journalist. She was part of a respectable left, writing significant columns and debating politics on television news.

But at some point, she flipped, turning into the most notorious terrorist in West German history. And the impact of this transformation can still be felt. Meinhoff's own daughter, Bettina Roll, has spent decades struggling with the legacy of her mother's terrorist group, the Red Army faction. And she spoke to us. They infiltrated entire generations with these ideas. At the time, they were actually only circulating in small groups. But these ideas that the state is bad, that capitalism is bad, that the rich are bad in general, and that we should be allowed to murder in order to turn society upside down have actually become incredibly strong today. These very radical ideas from back then have actually reappeared time and again in the decades since then.

I'm Eli Lake and you're listening to Breaking History. After the break, what drives a glamorous intellectual with all the right connections to put down her pen and pick up a gun? The Mangione-Meinhof syndrome coming up next Red Star over Germany, we take the country back. Workers in the Rhineland refuse to pay your tax. Spit on pigs who say that they're cups. Bust up all the windows in the shop. With tons of free reality shows, you are totally free to watch what you love on Pluto TV. And for me, that's

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For details, visit your Toronto Area Ford store or ford.ca. For details, visit your Toronto area Ford store or ford.ca. Ulrika Meinhof's story begins in Oldenburg. She was born in 1934 into a world of trauma and doom, Nazi Germany. Her aunt was forced to wear the yellow star that marked her out as a Jew. Persecution, madness, and total war engulfed Meinhoff's childhood. She was 11 years old when Hitler killed himself in the bunker. Life inside the family home was no more secure. Her father died when she was six,

her mother when she was 16, leaving Meinhoff and her sister in the care of a friend who rented a room in the family house. Before she graduated from high school, Meinhoff's home was a tomb and her country a crime scene. She spent her adolescence orphaned not only from her dead parents, but also a generation of Germans who had chosen to support or stay silent as the death machine of the

Third Reich engulfed Europe. She was clever and intellectually ambitious. At university, she made a name for herself as a left-wing firebrand involved with the anti-nuclear movement. Meinhof's country was divided. West Germany, where she lived, was economically reborn by American money, pumped into the devastated nation to protect against the spread of communism. East Germany was trapped behind the Iron Curtain, a colony of the evil Soviet Empire. When she was 24, Weinhof met Klaus Reiner-Roll, who became her editor and publisher.

They fell in love and became a glamorous couple in Hamburg. They had twin daughters, owned a lavish villa, and hosted great parties with leading artists, writers, and thinkers. A frequent guest of theirs was Martin Niemöller, the author of a totemic poem about solidarity in the face of fascism. In Germany, they came first for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Jews. And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists. And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics. And I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me. And by that time, nobody was left to speak up. Meinhoff and Rohl agreed with this sentiment. They would never again allow fascism to creep into Germany. Together the couple ran a cutting edge journal called Concrete. It blended high-end cultural coverage with left-wing politics.

And at least it was initially funded by the East German Stasi. It ran nude photos and refused to capitalize proper names and places. You see, everything in Concrete was radical, including its grammar. It was a scene of intellectuals. She was around a lot of publishers. This is Karen Bauer, a German studies professor at McGill University and the editor of a collection of Meinhoff's writings. Everybody talks about the weather.

We don't. They had this place where they stayed, spent the summer in Sylt. So there was a lot of connections, a lot of journalists. Most of them were middle class bourgeois. Some of them, they were intellectuals, they were professionals. So that was her life and that was her family. The scene was known locally as the Homburg Party Republic. The crowd embraced a radical chic. And Meinhof was a figurehead in this world as Konkret's star columnist. In the

1960s, German progressives would see themselves reflected in her righteous and strident columns. She wanted reconciliation between America and the Soviet Union. She pressed for disarmament and nuclear nonproliferation. She wrote early and often about senior Nazi officials that had managed to get important positions in the West German government. And she despised the Vietnam War and her country's tacit support of it. To Meinhoff and many of her readers, America's war in Indochina was no better than the Nazi conquest of Europe. At the same

time, Meinhoff was never really happy. She suffered from debilitating headaches so severe that she underwent brain surgery to have a benign tumor removed. And then, in 1967, her life began to unravel. Meinhof discovered her husband Klaus was having an affair. After catching them in the act, she packed up the twins, Regina and Bettina, and moved to an apartment in Berlin. Her life in Hamburg was over. I don't think that played a role necessarily on her radicalization per se. This is Karen Bauer again.

But it certainly played a role in me to leave that scene and go to Berlin. And that was a definite change. But she had been unhappy with the whole scene, finding kind of hypocrisy in that scene of liberals. Alrika was isolated in her new city. Her personal letters expressed despair and solitude. One correspondent remembered how she was depressed and blamed everything on capitalism. And now this feeling was reflected by her surroundings. Her new city was on the verge of rebellion. 1967 was a time of upheaval across the West. There was anger in the air. The energy of Berlin transformed Meinhof forever.

She was a 33-year-old mother of two, but the new friends she made in the capital were younger and wilder. There was Gudrun Enzlin, an attractive PhD student who had briefly studied in the States and appeared in experimental political films. And there was also her lover, Andras Badr. Badr was a charismatic sociopath. He had moved from Munich to escape the law and had a fondness for drugs and guns. Not necessarily in that order. Enslen and Badr were part of a radical collective called Commune One. They squatted in abandoned buildings and protested for socialist causes. They were younger than Meinhoff and didn't care much for the intellectual nuance of proper Marxist dialectic. No, they were in love with the idea of praxis, the act of putting theories of revolution

into practice. Compared to them, Meinhoff felt like a poser. Perhaps she felt a little like Marion Faithfull or Joe Strummer did when they looked at Meinhoff's own direct political action a decade later. In 1967, the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, came to Berlin on a state visit. Meinhoff, Commune One, and the student movement all saw him as a brutal tyrant who starved his subjects while his court lived in lavish style. Huge protests were staged. During one of these, a terrible error was made by the Berlin police, allowing pro-Shah demonstrators to clash with the protesters.

When the Shah goes to watch Mozart's magic flute at the Deutsche Oper that evening, he's once again welcomed by protesters. The police are ordered to disperse the protesters, giving their truncheons free reign. Around 8.30 p.m. a shot is fired. Detective Sergeant Karl Heinz Kurras shoots a student at close range. The young man's name is Benno Ohnesorg. All attempts to save him fail and Ohnesorg dies the same night. The slain demonstrator, Benno Ohnussorg, became a martyr for the new left and radicalized the demonstrators of West Germany. Meinhoff herself was inspired to produce a short documentary that claimed that, like its political ally Iran, West Germany was itself a police state.

Her friend Gudrun Enslin agreed, telling fellow activists at a meeting after Oner Zerg's death, They're going to kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're dealing with. It's the Auschwitz generation we're dealing with. And you can't discuss anything with people who created the Auschwitz. They're armed and we're not. We have to get armed too.

They're going to kill us all. In 1968, Berlin was beset by mass demonstrations like many of the major cities in Europe and America were. On April 2nd that year, Anders Potter and Gudrun Eyslin turned up the volume, claiming responsibility for setting a department store ablaze in Frankfurt. They turned their subsequent trial into a spectacle, smoking cigars, hurling vulgar epithets at the judge.

They were courting public attention, arguing that the department store fires were a political act intended to stir the people out of their apathy and see the horror of the Vietnam War for what it was. If you're talking about protest or terrorism, the goal is the same. It's to create drama and by creating drama to attract attention to the cause and perhaps the organization behind it to build an even more expansive support base. This is Bruce Hoffman, one of the world's foremost experts on terrorism and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

So historically, especially in the late 1960s, 1970s, this is exactly what happened in many Western European countries, particularly in West Germany, Italy, to a lesser extent France and Belgium, but also in the United States with student protest movements that provided the seedbed for more radical and indeed more violent offshoots. It's all about Vietnam and it was the fact that the United States maintained army and air bases in West Germany that the B-52s that were bombing North Vietnam often stopped in Wiesbaden at a U.S. Air Force base that was part of NATO, the NATO deployment, for refueling before heading to Southeast Asia.

By 1970, Meinhof's life was being swallowed by her politics. Her friends, Einzelin and Badr, were now fugitives, on the run following the Arsene attacks. Meinhof allowed them to hide in the apartment she shared with her two daughters. It became a hub for revolutionary political action. Imagine the scene. A radical journalist living with her twins and two hardened criminals as their associates set up a safe house to forge documents and plot heists. Here is how Dbatina Rohl, the daughter of Meinhoff, described living in an apartment taken over by terrorists. When Enslin and Badia lived with us, they were already taking heroin and LSD trips.

Of course I didn't know that at the time, but that was a different orbit, you know. And I was there as I described it in my book, because our apartment was a conspiratorial apartment where the group talked about the revolution all night long. So I didn't understand anything at that time but I think I was the only one in that group, the only one of those 20 or 30 people who didn't later become a terrorist of course. I was like a little

eyewitness and observed it. Eventually Andra Spotter was busted, pulled over for driving without a license, and sent back to jail. This was the first domino in a chain of events that would lead to the reign of Marxist terror in Germany. Badr's old comrades in Meinhoff's apartment began planning the first operation of what would become the Red Army faction. It was May 14th, 1970.

The plan to free Andras Bodder relied on Ulrika Meinhoff's national reputation as a political journalist. But it would be the last time she would be able to play this card. Meinhoff applied to meet with Bodder to interview him for a book. Permission was granted and Bodder was transported to the Central Institute for Social Questions at Berlin's Free University. There was no book project. The meeting was a ruse. When Bader arrived, he sat beside Meinhoff at a desk as a pair of guards watched from

a distance. Suddenly, two commandos burst in, dressed in wigs and ski masks, armed with handguns and tear gas. This wasn't an interview. It was a jailbreak. The getaway driver that day, Astrid Prohl, explains here what happened next. I think we were all very nervous. I remember some people throwing up because we weren't so wonderful criminals or we weren't

so wonderful with guns, we sort of involved the so-called criminal who could do it so much better than we, and who was, you know, and he was so nervous that he shot somebody. He didn't kill him, but he shot him very, very badly, and that was really, really bad for the whole start of it. him very, very badly. And that was really, really bad for the whole start of it. In this moment of unexpected violence, Meinhoff made the most important decision of her life. The original plan had been for her to sit still and act surprised, as though she was only there to do the interview. That way she could have held on to her life, looked after her children,

and enjoyed the best of both worlds—, radical politics with a bourgeois salary. But something had snapped, and she wasn't going back to a normal life. So as Badr and the other terrorists climbed out of a first-floor window, Meinhof decided to follow. They all sprinted to an Alfa Romeo parked across the street. At that moment, Meinhof chose to abandon society

and go underground. In 1968, in one of her more enduring essays, Arrika Meinhof wrote, – Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. That day at the Institute, Arrika Meinhof was through with protest and was on a doomed path to try to put an end to all that she disliked. This is the first official communication from the Red Army faction. Did the pigs really believe that we would let comrade Boris sit in jail for two or three

years? Did any pig believe that we would talk about the development of class struggle, the reorganization of the proletariat without arming ourselves at the same time? Did the pigs who shot first believe that we would allow ourselves without violence to be shot off like slaughter cattle? Whoever does not defend himself will die. Start the armed resistance. Build up the Red Army. The terrorist group was born and Ulrika Meinhoff was at its heart. She entered a world of stolen identity papers, safe houses and shootouts. Her face was plastered on wanted posters throughout

the country. The army was sent to the border crossings. She died and cut her hair, picked up her daughters in West Berlin and escaped to the East where she left the twins in the care of her comrades. So on the day of the so-called Bader Liberation, which is actually a prison break, liberation was always sounds like, well, on the same day, my sister and I were taken to Bremen by the people in the group and then to Sicily. Here is Ulrika Meinhoff's daughter, Bettina Roll, again, on what it was like to be vanished. And we were already wanted by Interpol, by my father. That's why we had to cross the Green border, but we didn't know that this was a kidnapping or abduction.

We didn't know that. And we were full of confidence that my mother would come and pick us up. So, of course, we had no idea that we wouldn't see her again until two or three years later. Eventually, Bettina and her sister Regina were taken to a hippie commune in Sicily, where they lived in deprivation. We spent four months in Sicily, which is a very long time for children. Would someone else come? My father or my mother? What would happen next? And a barrack camp like that isn't by the sea either, so it's not like

you go to the beach every day and go on vacation. But it's a dreary thing because there were no windows, there was no running water, there were no kitchens. In other words, there was no Italian happy life. Mayenhof was a fugitive, just like Badr and Ensling. The newly formed Red Army Faction had to get out of West Germany. So they traveled to a training camp for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, in the Jordanian desert. In 1970, the PFLP plotted bombings and assassinations against Israel and its allies abroad.

The Red Army faction wanted to learn from these Palestinians how to be urban guerrillas, but perhaps predictably, there was a culture clash. The PFLP was a seriously organized squadron of Arab Muslim men. While the Red Army faction was a fruit salad of drug-using artist radicals, it was like the premise of an ambitious sitcom. The RAF demanded barracks for both the men and women to share. At one point, the Red Army Faction trainees decided to sunbathe on the roof of their living quarters, scandalizing the pious terrorists who shared the facility.

According to Stefan Aust, a former colleague of Meinhoff's at Concrete and the author of one of the best histories of the Red Army faction, Meinhoff asked the PFLP if she could send her daughters to a Palestinian camp for girls where they would be trained as urban guerrillas as well. They told her that they would be happy to take them in, but that she would never get to see them again.

Her twins were only seven years old, but Ulrika agreed to the terms. But Bettina and her sister Regina were saved by Meinhof's former colleague, Stefan Ausk. Here's an excerpt from his book, The Bader-Meinhof Complex. We found out where the children were, made contact with the people looking after them,

gave the password, and I then flew to Sicily to receive them there, claiming to be the group's accredited emissary. Our operation was successful, and when Bada's real envoy and his women companions turned up near Mount Etna to take the girls away to the Jordanian camp, the birds had flown. For this act of kindness, Aus was marked for assassination by his former comrades. Thankfully, the attempt on his life failed. When Meinhoff, Badr, and Insulin returned to Germany, they began robbing banks and placing

bombs. Meinhoff was never very good at this sort of thing, though. During one robbery, she left stacks of cash behind. Her real talent wasn't robbery. It was in writing. And she drafted the first Red Army faction communiques. These include a long essay on the principles of urban guerrilla warfare and a tribute to Black September, the terrorist cell responsible for the massacre of Israeli wrestlers at the 1972 Munich Olympics. In this period, the terrorists were treated by some as folk heroes. Journalists couldn't get

enough of this story, one of their own, Ulrika Meinhoff going underground, and her fame would grow. A 1971 poll found that one in four Germans under 30 years old expressed sympathy for the Red Army faction. Five percent of all Germans said they would harbor an RAF fugitive. The apex mountain for the Red Army faction was May 1972. In a few short weeks, they pulled off a series of bombings at a US military base in Frankfurt, an Axel Springer publishing house in Hamburg, and a US military intelligence station in Heidelberg. Four US soldiers were killed. Scores more were injured.

The public, who had previously been sympathetic to the cause of the RAF, began to turn. It was one thing to rob banks and get into shootouts with the cops, but now it was clear that these revolutionaries were murderous. In one botched plan, they injured the wife of a federal judge who was driving the car they had rigged with a bomb. In June 1972, the West German National Police received a tip from a teacher who had agreed to harbor Meinhoff, unaware of who she was. And when the police arrived, she was gaunt, ill, and had little luggage.

Meinhof was taken straight to prison. More raids that month nabbed Badr and Insulin. The entire leadership of the Red Army faction were imprisoned. For the next nine months, Ulrika Meinhof would be confined to an isolated cell in Osenberg Prison. Everything in the room was white except for the pale green door. A neon light in the ceiling was kept on 24 hours a day. And she was the only prisoner in the building. It was torture. Here is how Meinhalve described it. should really tear apart, burst, wide open. The feeling your spinal column is

pressing into your brain. The feeling your brain is gradually shriveling up like baked fruit. The feeling you're completely and surreptitiously wired under remote control. The feeling the associations you make are being hacked away. The feeling you are pissing the soul out of your body, as though you can't hold water. Eventually she got to see visitors, including her twins. Their first visit was in October of 1972. Elrika wrote to Bettina and Regina, who were now 10. You were here. I think the whole prison was clad.

That's how it seemed to me. Would you visit me again? She kept up this correspondence for another year. She would discuss politics, advise her children on how to treat the weaker students at school, lecture them on the conditions of the working class in West Germany. But Meinhoff was losing touch with reality. As Stefan O Aus wrote, Shortly before Christmas 1973, Eureka Meinhoff suddenly broke off contact with her children. An advent calendar they had made her was returned. She refused to accept it.

She stopped answering their letters. The girls never saw their mother again. The girls never saw their mother again. Meinhoff and the other RAF members, including Badr and Einselin, were then transferred to Stamheim Prison and were allowed to share a floor. They worked on their legal strategy, wrote various communiqués, but mainly they fought with one another. And Meinhoff was soon the odd one out. Badr and Einselne had turned on her. As their trial progressed, Meinhoff became despondent. On Saturday, May 8th, 1976, she ripped apart pieces of the prison's blue and white towels

and twisted them together to make a rope. She moved her bed underneath a small grate covering a window, tied the rope to the grate and made a noose for her neck. The guards found her dangling corpse the following morning. It was May 9th, Mother's Day. Ulrika Meinhoff was dead. Well, I mean, every death is probably terrible when a child is 13, but there was still a lot of unresolved issues. And then two camps formed at that time. Most leftists, like for example the Minister of the Interior Otto Schilli, said that Ulrike

Meinhof had been murdered by the state, the Federal Republic of Germany had murdered Meinhof. And the others, like Stefan Auerst or my father, said it was suicide. And I think it's more likely that she was actually murdered, but not by the state, but by her own people, with whom she was in a corridor. They were together, Baader, Ensling, Jan Kahl, and since they also had pistols and radios and drugs, it's quite possible that they also had the key. After all, they were together all day. But I only dare to say that for the first time a few years ago. Of course, you don't say anything about it when you are 13 years old.

After Meinhoff's death, Europe's radicals erupted in protests. Bombs went off in Paris and Rome. Meinhoff did not leave a suicide note, and her supporters insisted that she had been murdered by the state. At her funeral, a procession marched with red banners displaying the RAF logo, a machine gun framed by a pentagram. The other Red Army faction leaders were still waiting for trial in Stamheim Prison, but their comrades were still in the wild. After Badr and Enslin and others were convicted of murder and domestic terrorism, a gang of RAF operatives stormed the West German embassy in Stockholm in an attempt to take hostages to trade for Badr, Enslin, and the others.

The plot failed. Soon after the group kidnapped the head of Germany's Employers Association, again demanding a trade for Badr and Aislinn. That plot failed as well. Finally, on October 13, 1977, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked a Lufthansa flight and demanded the Red Army faction prisoners be released. But West Germany did not give in to their demands. The hijackers killed the pilot and flew the hostages to Mogadishu, Somalia. There,

a West German SWAT team stormed the plane, killed the terrorists, and freed the passengers. When Badr and Enslin got word that the hijackers had failed, they committed group suicide with a pistol likely smuggled in by their lawyers. It was October 17, 1977. The first generation of the Red Army faction was finished. Now the story takes a bizarre and menacing turn. After Ulrika Meinhoff's death, instead of sending her body to be buried, the West German authorities removed her brain during the autopsy, placed it in formaldehyde and sent it for close examination and didn't really tell anyone. Dr. Bernhard Bogarts told a press conference in 2002 that Meinhoff's brain displayed neurological

abnormalities, which he attributed to that operation she received in 1962 to remove a brain tumor. He said at the time that his findings challenged whether Meinhoff was ever mentally fit to stand trial. All of this raises a question. Was it really the Vietnam War, the writings of Che Guevara and Herbert Marcuse that turned Meinhoff into a terrorist? Or was it scar tissue left over from that operation to cure her incessant headaches?

For what it's worth, Bettina Roll rejects this theory. Suddenly in 2002, someone called and told me if I knew that my mother's brain had not been buried. But of course, I didn't know that. So someone called and told me if I knew that my mother's brain had not been buried. But of course I didn't know that. And it's a pretty scary story when you suddenly realize that there are journalists and researchers all talking about this brain that's in some kind of solution. And they wanted to do research on this brain.

Then my husband and I got together to do the research and we published the story in a newspaper and triggered a huge debate about the ethical background, firstly, whether this is allowed at all. But secondly, whether it isn't also charlatan-y because if you want to find terror in Mino's brain, then you would have to find it in all terrorist brains, which is really absurd. For scientists, it's very tempting to blame radicalism on a chemical imbalance, an errant brain cell, or a chronic malady. It's perhaps more satisfying to point to a smoking neurological gun rather than a Rubik's Cube of personal ideological and sociological motives. In fact, just as Meinhof's head was carved open by inquisitive doctors,

there are many thirsty experts looking to pathologize Luigi Mangione. Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, appears to have some major health issues. Now that it's come out that Luigi Mangione had a back problem, we're going to talk about what went wrong with his spine as an educational opportunity to better understand back pain. We're going to be analyzing the behavior and body language of Luigi Mangione.

He pictures himself, I think, as a savior, uh, as a folk hero for the people that he's a superhero like Batman, you know, going to conquer evil and seek good. That really points to some real mental health issues. So as when Ulrika Meinhoff, so goes Luigi. It's worth noting that Mangione is pleading not guilty. And Meinhoff would have never done that. But there are similarities. They are both cult heroes. Both have been reimagined through the prevalent youth culture language of their day. 70s rebellion for Meinhoff, 21st century shitposting for

Mangione. But the biggest difference between Mangione and Meinhoff are the ages in which they live. For Meinhoff, revolution was a process of socialization. In order to go from journalist to terrorist, she needed a set of almost impossible circumstances. The early trauma of losing her parents and the collective trauma of Nazism in Germany, the cultural typhoon of 1968 radicalism, divorce, betrayal, the existence of the Soviet Union, the misfortune of meeting dangerous lunatics like Andras Botter. It is a cocktail of triggers and motives. If Mangione is found guilty, though, it would be clear that he did

this alone as a revolutionary of the internet era. Podcasts, blogs, a 3D printed gun. While many of Ulrika Meinhoff's fans would never have been able to track down a terror cell to join, in 2025 there's no need for such comrades. The barrier for entry for joining Mangione's revolution is merely the stomach to become a lone wolf. We're in a different world of terrorism now. This is Bruce Hoffman again. A lot of the descriptions of terrorism in the United States and elsewhere over the past

decade or more, it hasn't been organization or groups. It's been radicalized individuals who on their own, who have never joined a group who may not have any contact with any organization, who themselves have become frustrated and take it upon themselves to carry out individual acts of violence in service to a broader ideology. That's become much more the pattern of terrorism in the 21st century. We will learn a lot more about Luigi Mangione during his trial. But people will probably never be satisfied. He will loom as a cultural figure, the subject of academic papers, Netflix documentaries, and t-shirt iconography. It seems likely that, found guilty or not, Mangione's

name will be etched into incoherent manifestos for years to come. In fact, there have already been a series of copycats. Brianna Boston, 42 years old, was arrested at her Lakeland, Florida home on Tuesday after allegedly making threats on a call to Blue Cross Blue Shield regarding the denial of a recent medical insurance claim. Boston, that's her name, ended the recorded conversation with the company rep by saying, quote, delay, deny, depose. You people are next. Meinhoff would call this process of self-radicalization the journey from protest to resistance.

And the temptation to embrace violence in the name of writing and injustice is strong, especially in our era of populist rage. But it's almost always a mirage, and it never leads anywhere good. Just consider Meinhof's cautionary tale. Ponder her fate in Stamheim Prison, as she dangled from a window grate, cut off from her friends, isolated from her daughters, and despised by her comrades, this once celebrated journalist learned from experience, resistance is brutal. Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you liked this episode, if you learned something,

if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And remember, if you want to support Breaking History, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And leave us a 5-star rating and a nice comment too. Also, if you loved this episode, there's more great content at TheFP.com. Please become a subscriber today, and until then, I'll see you next time. I'm sorry. Resist the won't live forever, resist the fear of ending arrest, resist the pigs you know I would never Rat out brothers in the RAF, all my brothers in the RAF