Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 273 - The Red Army Faction Part 2: Bring Me My Chicken

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

It's part 2 of our 4-part series on the Red Army Faction, in which Tom takes the lead to explain to Joe the story of 1960s German left-wing militants, their eventual downfall, and--in this episode--something you might describe as 'the world's least enthusiastic hunger striker.' Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: The Red Army Faction. A Documentary History. Volume I: Projectiles for the People. Margrit Schiller. Remembering The Armed Struggle. My Time With the Red Army Faction. Stefan Aust. The Baader Meinhof Complex

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lionsledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audiobook, read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. Once again, it's not Joe, it's Tom hosting another episode and with me is Joe.

That's right. What? No, Sprechen Sie Deutsch this time? What happened? Yeah, no, I'm going to save. I do have like a small German monologue for the last episode that I have to read out at the start in German. Sprechen Sie der Podcast?

Ja. Ja, willkommen. Will willkommen to my podcast um joe how are you uh i'm tired uh i have just discovered that a bug has crawled into my vape and died um it is almost 100 degrees here i'm dying uh good good stuff all around you know uh just stewing in my own juices you're getting into the andreas batter mindset you know um and if you aren't uh if you're kind of listening to this and like what's going on this is part two of our series on the red army faction so if you haven't heard part one go back and listen to part one tentative title wet and sticky so when we last left off the wonderful batter meinhof group aka the red army faction aka the most annoying people on the planet andreas batter gudrun essling and two others had

been sent down for the arson in a department store but at the same time as we open up this episode so on april 11th 1968 a man named joseph bachman arrived in west berlin from munich carrying a hold all underneath his jacket he had a pistol holster just below his shoulder and in the bag a second gun ammunition and several clippings from the right-wing newsletter deutsch national seitung this clipping uh the cutting under the date 2nd of march 1968 read as follows stop duschkin now otherwise there will be a civil war the order of the day is stop the radical left revolution now if we don't, Germany will become a place of pilgrimage for malcontents from all over the world.

Underneath the headlines were five photographs of Rudi Deutsch lined up like pictures on a wanted poster. So this guy's just like a 4chan poster. Yeah, this has no parallels to anything political that's happening right now. Rudi Deutsch was the head of the SDS. parallels to anything political that's happening right now. Rudy Doisk was the head of the SDS.

At 4.25pm Bachmann saw Rudy Doisk come out of number 140 Kur 4 Stendham on a bicycle. He approached Doisk who was on his way to the pharmacy to get some medicine for his three month old son.

Bachmann stood in his way and asked Are you you Rudi Doishki, he asked. Yes, Doishki replied. Filthy communist swine, said Bachmann. Then he drew his pistol. Rudi Doish took a couple of steps towards him, and the first shot rang out, hitting Rudi in the right cheek. I mean, credit where credit's due. Like, he had a guy confront him and pull a gun out. He's like, all right, motherfucker, let's do this. Yeah, bring this heat. I bet you won't fucking shoot me, famous words of a guy who's about to be shot. He fell off his bicycle into the road, losing his shoes and wristwatch.

Bachmann shot him twice more, hitting him in the head and shoulder. Deutsch stumbled forward a few steps and collapsed while Bachmann ran away. Doisk stumbled forward a few steps and collapsed while Bachmann ran away. Bachmann hid in a construction site a few hundred meters away and took 20 sleeping tablets to complete his martyrdom but was later saved in hospital. By 6.25pm, when the news announced Rudy had survived after having a 50-50 chance, students had already gathered around the SDS building. Jesus Christ, this guy got shot in the fucking face and head and is still alive. Yeah, this is left-wing power. You know, you can get shot in the head and still survive.

Meanwhile, the other guy brought two fucking guns to an assassination and still had to rely on sleeping pills to attempt to kill himself. Yeah, I know. You know, you have the solution right there in your jacket and he also brought all this extra these extra bullets as well yeah i mean clearly i mean

he tried to shoot fucking german socialist rasputin it didn't work out um when the news broke talk of action had already begun. The assassination attempt was seen as a direct attack on them and the entire left-wing movement. Among them was Ulrike Meinhof. As the tone became more vicious, a rumor spread that, as they spoke, barbed wire was being placed around the Springer building this is the Axel Springer Publishing Group

which we spoke about in the last episode and this news was met with laughter. The protesters saw the barbed wire as an invitation to see what secrets it was protecting that is a you know a good point yeah why are you surrounding your publishing house with fucking razor wire so and someone is quoted as saying the springer building is now surrounded by barbed wire so springer expects us to attack what shall we find when we get there we shall come up against police cordons but the police will hold back today because their conscience is very uneasy they don't know cops very well they arrived at the

springer building former forming a blockade of cars to stop the newspaper vans from leaving the premises the police standing by watching they parked their cars along the road and maneuvered them into a blockade, but upon the appearance of the first Springer van, the police shot forward and began flipping cars manually by hand to clear the way. What are they, fucking angry Canadian hockey fans protesting yet another Stanley Cup loss? No, it was like 11 to 12 police officers to each car one car belonging to

larika meinhof and like bear in mind it's the 60s the cars are you know they're built out of sheet metal and they're just like they're quite small yeah they're little volkswagen bugs you know and they go and flip the cars over out of the way that's overkill i mean i'm not surprised but like at the same time it's like which police commanders like fellas i got an idea deadlift these motherfuckers into orbit yeah you're really testing your spd in the most kind of most dangerous of manners you may have maxed out your deadlift at the gym but but have you ever thrown a German car out of the way of your Nazi publishing house, man? So by the late evening, there was a strong police presence and protesters began throwing stones, bricks and Molotov cocktails.

A note on those Molotov cocktails, they were handed out by one Peter Erbach. Now, we didn't speak about Peter in our last episode, but right now is the perfect point to introduce him. He was, on all accounts, an important figure within the protest movement, a plumber by trade and a handyman as well. He helped supply protesters with drugs, weapons, and the materials to make bombs. He would know how, I suppose. If anybody can build a solid pipe bomb, it'd be a plumber. Yeah, exactly. He was an aggrieved former railway

worker in his mid-60s who would do handyman and repair work on many of the Berlin apartments where key figures lived and as Batter would later recount, was always going on about something in a kind of a weird way. He would deliver hour-long monologues on his past and future

ventures, which were all to do with terror i mean bit rich bit rich coming from andreas batter yeah i was about to say like andreas batter saying someone goes is weird because they go on things on length it's like this is a spider-man pointing at spider-man moment yeah there's only one catch here joe peter urbach was a counterintelligence officer from the very beginning oh peter i had faith in you man yeah so what the fuck what the fuck could west german intelligence agents get away with this guy's giving out guns and and bombs and shit i mean this is like the the fbi of like the 70s yeah yeah so like he was put in place because obviously the German state at this time and particularly, you know, the West Berlin government was very kind of protective or very kind of concerned over the growing protest movement. You know, they had throwing, you know, flour at the Shah, throwing custard, throwing custard, this sort of thing.

And they saw that there was a slow escalation in the amount of force that they were using. So they decided to just pour gasoline on the fire. Yeah. It also helps as well that a lot of the German government and the state at this time was made up by former Nazis as well. So who does counterintelligence best but the Nazis? That's why that they all got jobs in the West

German Intelligence Service and the Stasi. Like, you know who does this really well? The Nazis. Oh, we should probably call them something else now. Yeah. So, by October, the arsonist trial began. All four of the defendants bother ensling pro and show show nine um showed constant contempt for the court consistently disrupting the proceedings

and were defended by nine lawyers including otto shilly horse mauler and professor ernst heinitz i was really hoping for a representing themselves moment because Botter seems like a guy that's like calm down guys, I got this. Joe, wait for part four. God damn it. So the trial was long and drawn out and would come to be a predecessor

to a common RAF tactic that would be used going forward, which I have named tactical bullshit. This included extensive monologuing, deep political speech, and at one stage Horst Mahler invoking Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf to summarize the group's motivations as benign. Steppenwolf and Bertolt Brecht formed quite a lot of the weird, steppenwolf and bertolt brecht formed quite a lot of the weird not necessarily political but like internal philosophy of the red army faction going forward i'm going to choose to believe it's

steppenwolf the dad rock band born to be wild hardly ever did a member of the red army faction pin down the psychopathology of of the group as precisely as Horst Mahler in the plea that he never delivered. At the end, he comes to the conclusion crossed out in the manuscript from the bourgeois humanist position the individual can preserve himself as a human being only in the abstract negation of the bourgeois world

that is by destroying himself. The defendants were like Hesse's wolf of the steppes. Okay. I mean't i don't know what kind of defense this is i'm not a lawyer but this seems bad someone called shocks like this is a very bad argument if your hope is to be found anything other than guilty yeah so during the trial alerika meinhof would visit gudrun ensling and was quickly impressed by gudrun's commitment to her beliefs and formed a friendship with the arsonist in the end on the 31st of october 1968 the four will be

sentenced to three years in prison that's it yeah shit that's like a life sentence now yeah well maybe not in germany but like i mean they had molotov cocktails, bombs, weapons. Well, no, this is for the arson in the department store. I mean, but they still did that with a bomb. Yeah. Not that, like, other kinds of arson are better, but generally you get some kind of tacked-on sentence. The fact, like, oh, no, this is a terrorist firebombing. Yeah, exactly. and it's like the

sentencing is kind of like strange in the summary judgment there's like reference to them being young that they're students and impressionable all the sort of things so it is a quite generally lenient sentence that is that is true they're all i mean all of those things are true and i'm sure maybe if they had decent attorneys they'd be like your honor all of those things are true, and I'm sure maybe if they had decent attorneys, they'd be like, your honor, all of my defendants here, my clients, they live in a weird sex cult compound. Sex really hasn't happened yet. Okay. Well, of course, there's always leading to that. But, you know, the German state compassion and leniency is something they will soon come to regret in a

little bit i mean i'm not saying that they're wrong like you should have you know there should be circumstances that lead to some people not getting long sentences for crimes even if those crimes are setting a bomb like you know they purposefully did at a time where they figured that it'd be empty so they weren't trying to kill anybody they're young they're college students yeah if this happened in the united states like yeah so we should so we just shoot them now or should we shoot them later i think you know the answer to that question that's true that's true so around this time ulrika meinhof divorced her husband klausohl, relocating her and her children to Berlin.

She maintained her column in Konkret but soon became disillusioned with the editorial direction, accusing it of essentially going soft and compromising on important issues. In May 1969, she organized a sit-in of the Konkret offices in Hamburg and planned

to issue demands made by uncompromising left-wing journalists. Always a good idea. But when they arrived, Roll had already been informed two days earlier and had cleared the offices. When the occupiers arrived, they found an empty office guarded by police

which had not been called in by Conkret. After this, Ulrika left the publication. Have you ever pissed off your place of work so hard they literally ghost you not like don't answer your calls they ghost your entire office it's kind of impressive so a month later and this is in june 1969 um the foreign arsonists had been released from prison after serving only 14 months of their three-year sentence after an appeal.

Hell yeah, kings. They were to remain free until a decision was made in November about whether or not they would be re-remanded to return to custody. In the meantime, Bader and Ensling began to set up apprentice collectives. These groups were intended to help young people who were in the care of state institutions

and effect some societal change upon those who were deemed as the most disenfranchised by the state. The barter group, said one of them later, appeals to the apprentices because there's adventure, wild, exciting, driving. You're going into action in a minor way against anything that comes along. Getting the better of a waiter in a cafe getting the better of this or that liberal shit there's always something going on with the batter group that's why all the young people were drawn to them it's exciting it makes them feel like they're bigger than something like part of something bigger than themselves you know yeah disenfranchised youth yeah i mean prime for recruitment yeah and like you think of the

context in the time like we talked about in the last episode generally most young people were dissatisfied with the state of germany and you know the quote-unquote state as the government on both sides of the political spectrum right wing and left wing and there was such a high level of like youth institutionalization as well. Institutionalized youths are obviously going to be like much easier to radicalize. Are these institutionalized in so far as like prison or like just various aspects of the state? Because like conscription, prison, state violence. It's a mix of, you know, state care state care homes orphanages youth facilities for detention but like it's kind of generally reaching out to like all young people who are in some way

institutionalized by the state okay interesting how are there so many orphans a war happened yeah there's a long time ago though i mean well i suppose they would be of the same age give or take their parents maybe died in the very end of the war yeah or they might be like young people who were abandoned by their families like we're now almost kind of 23 years on from the war so like the majority of these like young people are you know in their teens they were born like after the war but you know they might have gone into you know apprenticeships or like jobs and just kind of been waylaid and gone like a little bit wild and being detained i'm gonna talk about someone who is the perfect example of this in a second soon they would have

a youth revolution within their grasp and batter had already seen himself as the general of the Red Army. Of course he did. And here were his soldiers. I mean, 18-year-olds, that's the age at which the Bolsheviks started the Russian Revolution. He was playing with fantasies like that. Ensling made all the arrangements. Badr simply tried to convey the spirit of the revolution. And he didn't just try

he really succeeded with these young macho characters. That's another quote from someone that interacted with them. So someone who is one of these young people is a guy called Peter Jürgen Buch. He was one such young person and encountered the pair.

Bader and Ensling would bring stuff like books coca-cola tobacco and hand them out to kids in in care you know pretty freely you know they some people argue that they did this like very manipulatively i do think and you'll kind of understand in a second that like they did do this genuinely out of like a kind of compassion sure they were trying to recruit people but i i think this is actually them trying to be compassionate to young people who've been institutionalized i can see how it could go either way book had gone to the netherlands as a teenager where he was subsequently expelled

from the country after catching some drug charges and was deported back to germany and when he was 17 he was handed over by his parents into the care of the state. So he left Germany, went to the Netherlands because it was like this kind of like hippie utopia. People were already setting up communes. They were like living outside of

like the normal way that people live. And he found out that unfortunately he was full of the Dutch. Yes. He was involved in riots and was constantly disobedient. and when he was moved to he encountered the newly freed arsonists unimpressed by the coca-cola and tobacco he was instead taken in by andreas bother's leather jacket which true to his nature upon book commenting

on its quality took it off his own back and gave it to the young man and said here you keep it so you know that goes back to that very first incident in the last episode where we talked about andreas badder will literally give someone the shirt off his back yeah i mean he also probably stole that jacket yeah but you know i'll give him credit where credit's due you know given someone and i haven't i'm wearing my nice leather jacket today i'm not giving that to anyone i mean giving away something that you stole it's kind of a wash right like it's not you're not robin hood exactly like you're not stealing from banks and showering these poor orphans with money you're like no i shoplift this jc penny man you want it i mean jc penny is still a big corporation yeah fair enough also

it's really weird that guy's parents gave him up when he was 17 yeah but like this like at this time not just particularly in germany but like around the world it was like super common particularly like in europe that like even if your kid's a teenager you'll just like send them to do an apprenticeship or something just to kind of wash your hands of them yeah fair enough i mean i don't blame them i don't have children but i was a child once and i wouldn't have blamed my mom for like get the fuck out of here yeah instead your parents gave you to the army yeah it's kind of the same thing yeah in another life you could have joined the red army faction hey we're both really good at losing wars, aren't we? Buk immediately knew these were his people, and would

soon run away from the institution to join them. By the time he arrived, Badr, Ensling, and the others had all contracted jaundice from sharing the same needles while doing heroin. Ah, yes, a tale as old as time. Hey, at least they only got jaundice. Yeah, true. Yeah, all old as time. Hey, at least they only got jaundice. Yeah, true.

Yeah, all the other diseases didn't exist at this stage. Yeah, me and my friend, you know, we care so much about sharing with one another. We shared our hep C. Yeah, sharing is caring. What can I say? Now we all share the same glowing yellow hue.

Soon, the barter group had ballooned to 30 members so this is you know people from varying paths a lot of kids coming from institutions a lot of people who are runaways are just like seeking an outside life so it's like most of uh the batter group now like all heroin addicts i i don't really know if they're if they're sharing enough needles where everybody is riddled with jaundice like well no it's not it's not everybody it's just like a few of them okay because like the idea of a heroin addled terror group is like the least scariest thing on earth because it's like they're not gonna set a bomb they're gonna get sleepy yeah a sleepy gang but in november the courts rejected the arsonist's appeals

and they were remanded back into custody. Instead, they went on the run, eventually reaching Paris, where they stayed with the French writer Regis Dubré, who had at one point been Che Guevara's comrade-in-arms. They had sent for Astrid Prohl,

Thorwald's sister, to bring them books, papers, and a Mercedes left in the garage in Frankfurt. They discussed what to do next in their revolutionary struggle there was talk of contacting Fata all the while some of their followers from the care homes would sporadically show up in

Paris and tell them we need you to come back to Germany there's stuff to be doing and we need you. Like these like ensling and batter had like essentially sprung these kids and encouraged them to leave these care homes and like for better or worse these kids like relied on them and they just disappeared yeah that's it's kind of dirty i will create this this ecosystem that you need to survive and then

we're gonna go have a nice parisian vacation yeah so instead all of their visitors were told to go home as there was important work being done in paris instead all the while the two of them you know dined in cafes went on nice walks to andreas bader took a lot of like quite cool pictures um and just like engaged intellectually with the revolution he'd turn into a photography guy um thorwald pro and horse the sun line turned themselves in to serve the rest of their sentences and would never be in contact with their co-conspirators again probably a good call in retrospect yeah so the other two instead went to italy where they heard that their appeal for clemency had been denied while in italy a tourist from germany would happen to cross their paths mr horse maller

encouraging them to return and to join the now burgeoning movement that had become quite militant as you know it had now progressed past simply a protest movement and now there is some militancy involved. In 1970, while filming Bamboo, Ulrike Meinhof at this point feeling the strained relationship between her familial life and political life happened to be visited by Andreas Bader, who showed up at her apartment with Gudrun Ensling. Her apartment by this stage had become a sort of hub for left-wing activists, and the two needed somewhere to stay temporarily. During their two-week stay, they took some

acid, chilled out, talked about the revolution, and Ulrika saw the two as good comrades, while, on the other hand, her two twin daughters hated Andreas Batter. I mean, two things. For one, you know it smelled crazy in there.

Yeah. And two, no shit they fucking hated. This strange dude just showed up at their house and now their mom is just getting ripped out of her mind on acid instead of taking care of them. Yeah. So, one story about why her daughters hated Andreas Batter. At one stage, Bettina fell and hurt her knee

and instead of helping the child andreas pointed at her and started laughing okay i mean yeah of course he did he's a fucking man child yeah so at this time neither of the pair had any concrete plans for building a body of urban gorillas they entertained some very vague notions of strategic activities carried out by fringe groups, which would certainly be outside the law and militant, but by no means paramilitary. Their priorities

were just to find accommodation, get hold of money, and make contacts at this time. To get money, they needed arms. This is leading to a bank robbery, isn't it? No, it's funnier first. so after a failed attempt at stealing arms from officers patrolling the berlin wall bold bold move cotton so this isn't necessarily in the script but this is such a funny story so essentially what they did was

they made cudgels out of sacks with shit in them, and they planned on, like, rocking up, because usually there was only, like, a handful of officers patrolling the Berlin Wall and they were quite spaced apart. They were planning on jumping ones that were on their own and stealing their pistols. It's such a stupid plan. I mean, like, I suppose if there is no other way

to get firearms, which I'm sure there is, they still have the contacts yet. You don't want to attack the guys with sacks of, I don't know, sacks of Deutschmark coins. But sacks that are remarked to have looked like big, heavy sausages. I'm going to hit you with my meat sack and steal your fucking walther yeah so when they when they showed up at the berlin wall and it was kind of you know a dim foggy night instead of a lone so lone officer they just saw shit loads of cops yeah i uh well how did they expect this is gonna get andreas i have a i have a foolproof plan we're gonna ambush these men at the berlin wall that's like i really need an ak like i really need an assault rifle i'm going to assault fort

knox yeah yeah but luckily their new friend horse mauler said that he had a possible contact for getting some pistols he said he knew someone who had stored a box of World War II pistols in a nearby graveyard and who was a comrade of their collective struggle. The group eventually met with Mahler's contact to discuss the arms and were led to a nearby graveyard in Bucco where

they were then led to a mound where the pistols were buried. But unfortunately the graveyard, there's people in the graveyard walking by, so they were prevented from digging and they decided to try in a couple of days. All these plans are great.

These people are great strategists. So the following afternoon, Badr had been driving through Kreuzberg and had noticed a police car was following him. So what did he do? Immediately tried to speed away. Now he did

manage to shake the police tail but his license plate had been the number had been taken. God these people are so stupid. After a few days later after discussing whether or not Mahler's lead was bullshit they went to the graveyard again.

After digging up the mound for about 30 minutes and not finding any guns, Mahler's contact argued that someone might have found the cache before they had the chance to retrieve it. Oh no, somebody found my corpse weapons cache. Now, there was one problem with this entire plan. Were they digging in the wrong grave? No that would have been dumb do you want to know who um mahler's contact for the guns was oh it was the fucking intel agent wasn't it yeah it was peter urbach man but like this is something that like were the cops waiting for them or is he just playing a fucking prank on them just wait so when they returned to their cars they were immediately approached by police and asked for their paper and uh they provided their papers um andreas

batter was immediately caught out lying about falsified papers that he had stolen and was promptly arrested. It says here your name is not, you says your name is not Andreas Badr? Yes, that is correct. Like, the thing is, is that in the, like, very specific details of this incident, it's very clear that he stole

this ID but never looked at it. So he knew the person's name but like the information of like how many kids he had he couldn't get right and like the picture is like a turkish man with a long mustache yeah no you don't understand officer i wasn't trying to find guns i was simply grave robbing yeah so obviously Urbach had sold them out to the police, but nobody was suspicious of Urbach afterwards? How could they not be?

They're either the most trusting people on Earth or the dumbest people who have ever called themselves a terrorist group. Where did you learn the location of these guns? Oh, my friend. And he's the only one who talked to you about this yes he dropped horst mahler like back into town after this happened he comes off taking off his like officer's peaked cap like oh no what happened why did you not find the pistols why do you have a police radio in your car oh no reason i am a i am an am fm enthusiast oh those are the worst why do you have this pull why do you have this police badge

i really like uniforms so bother was taken to tegel prison where he was due to serve out the rest of his sentence in the aftermath his friends began to formulate a plan to where he was due to serve out the rest of his sentence. In the aftermath, his friends began to formulate a plan. They didn't even add any extra time to his sentence. No, they were just like, okay,

we'll just bring you back because the crime wasn't trying to dig up the guns or whatever. It was literally, they just wanted to get him back into prison. So they didn't even charge him with the crime he was obviously committing. They just threw him back in prison for his previously established crime. Yeah, because some people argued that Peter Urbach hadn't actually told the police, and it's because father's plates were taken the day before, and the police just happened to notice that, oh, that's the same that was like speeding yesterday that we were tailing yeah but speeding is gonna get your parole revoked after he was arrested he was brought to

the police station where his identity was confirmed that oh this is andreas baller and he stole paperwork and misrepresented misrepresented himself they're like you know what you're so stupid. We're not even going to tack on more time. We're just going to put you in prison for the remainder, like, six weeks of your terror charge

or whatever. They began formulating a plan of how to spring him from custody. They eventually settled on this idea. Ulrike Meinhof was going to pose as if she was writing a book with Baader, one which would require him to be moved from the

prison to access research materials in the social studies building in Thalheim. Also, I'm sorry to any German that's listened to this. You know, I'm doing my best. Of the three of us, one of us speaks German and he's not here. This was the exact plan that they went with. On one of her

visits, Ulrike Meinhof asked if it was possible for Andreas Bader to be allowed out of the prison to look at literature on the subject. They were writing a book about, you know, social issues facing young people. Andreas Bader isn't, you know, the intellectual titan that a lot of people think he is, but whatever.

Yeah, der social issues. Yeah. Okay, not only is Bader and his group dumber than hell so are the police everybody here is so stupid there is so many incidents of the police being stupid as shit throughout this entire series history uh wait until i get to the ham sandwiches in part four i like the fact that you that he's doing a prison term of a couple months. They're like, this clearly can't

wait. This book must be written now. Yeah. So she argued that he should be allowed out of prison to look at books and literature on the subject. There were journals of the 20s at the Academic Institute in Berlin which he absolutely must read for the book they were planning.

Governor Glaubrecht refused and he said, we just don't have the staff to escort him out several times. Badr's lawyer, Horst Mahler, happened to be in Tegel at the time and he was not standing for this and insisted on speaking

to the governor at once. He then pulled out all the stops. Nobody else, he said, And he was not standing for this and insisted on speaking to the governor at once. He then pulled out all the stops. Nobody else, he said, could pick relevant material from the card index of authors on Badr's behalf. Badr had to do it himself. Yeah, he's just, his brain is so big, nobody can compare, you see. I mean, if you look at pictures, that dude had a fucking massive head. Research assistants, what are they?

So, Glauberg seemed to take this point and agreed to a single outing lasting two to three hours. Mahler told Baader, who had just had a visit from Ulrike Meinhof, of the success of his efforts. When the lawyer had left, Glauberg asked for Barter's file. On the same day, one of the prison governor's staff called the Institute of Social Studies and made the appointment for the prisoner to go there in two days' time, on Thursday the 14th of May, 1970, at 9am. Oh, we get a time and a date. That's not a good sign. And, on the 14th of May, 1970, at 9am, when the time came, And on the 14th of May, 1970, at 9am, when the time came, Andreas Brader was sprung for custody. A shooter armed with two silenced pistols that they had bought in the previous weeks.

Oh, sick. So were they wielding guns at Kimbo because they have no idea what they're doing? Literally, literally. So, unfortunately, I don't have the to like go into the specifics of this but if you buy stefan aust's uh batter mine half complex which i've used extensively in addition with other materials for this series you can like the first like three chapters is about him being sprung from prison at this time it's really really good he was sprung from custody with armed violence at the institute of social issues in west ber Berlin, District of Dallheim. George Linko, one of the staff of the Institute, had been severely wounded in the course of the operation

having been shot in the leg, chest and shoulder. Father and his rescuers got away. Where do you think they're going to go next? They're not very bright, so I'm going to assume to the intelligence agent's house. No, but on the 8th of june 1970 a group of west berlin travelers

flew to beirut from east berlin schoenfeld airport oh they'll do it yeah later the police found the pseudonyms of the baderminehoff group on the plane what year is this so this is 1970 okay great time to be in lebanon so the names included bacher grassov schlemmahler dudin and ray and there was others on the passenger list the french journalist michelle ray had obviously left her passport in berlin saeed dudin acting as an intermediary between the group and the plos Al-Fata organization had bought their air tickets at the Kareem travel agency in West Berlin. The first group

landed in Beirut at half three in the afternoon. That's 3.30 for all you Americans. Thank you. From there, they were supposed

to continue to Amman in Jordan. Their journey ended in a training camp a few kilometers outside of Amman on the road to Jerusalem. The camp lay on a plateau surrounded by carcified hills in the middle of a mountainous desert.

It consisted of two stone buildings, an open space for military exercises, a concrete indoor shooting range, some tents. That was all. The group began their training. I'm going to assume these nice, cushy, soft German college students are not going to like PLO training camp. Oh, Joe. Ten days after the first group arrived, Said Dunin returned to Berlin with a clutch of United Arab Republic passports bearing photographs of Badrers rescuers in his baggage and on the 12th of june the second group which included andreas bader gudrun edsling and olriga meinhof were driven to nekolan i can't pronounce that by friends where they took the underground to friedrichstrasse

station and east berlin and flew on from there you know, the way you said that the police seem really stupid. Yeah, they, the East German police literally made no trouble at all. And it pretty much seemed like they didn't know who was, who was being transported. I mean, I don't think they would have cared.

The PLO is a pretty big ally of, uh, of East Germany. Uh, and I i mean so a union uh i i don't think they would have stopped like oh you have an arrest warrant in west germany let us go let us stop you they're like no you have an arrest warrant in in west germany please go on ahead yeah so uh they arrived but there was problems in the airport but the palestinians intervened the group was held at the airport for only a few hours and saeed dunan who alone was allowed to leave came back with a piece of paper and four armed palestinians the travelers were then allowed to leave the airport that is just as good as a visa

if you're stopped at customs there's a good chance you get left let through if a large gang full of armed men come up to let you through yeah i don't travel anywhere without my armed palestinians i mean i got them right here yeah it's the new range from samsonite yeah i i like am i gonna apply for a visa or i'm gonna get eight to ten flat-nosed geezers if any case so with the group now fully in training mode they said about about learning the basics of marksmanship tactics and conditioning training so you know they're doing their they're doing the kipping pull-ups you know they're doing burpees they're you'd invent desert crossfit now one thing that they they did train with conditioning you know to keep your physical fitness included like stuff like like running, stuff like pushups, just like very basic stuff.

Cardio is very important to the revolution. But it became immediately apparent that Badr was unhappy with the arrangements that had been made for them. He bemoaned the living quarters being gender segregated, the meager rations given to them, this is according to him, and the intense physical training that was asked of them. Dude, you went to a PLO training camp. It's not a fucking timeshare. The revolution is not based on treats. So he would spend hours

ranting about these issues. And when, I'm going to get you to explain to people listening the importance of this person. When Palestinian leader Abu Hassan arrived. Oh no. And was cooked a freshly killed chicken.

He called his hosts authoritarian for providing the commander meat, but none for them. So Joe, can you explain to the people why Abu Hassan is such an important person? So Abu Hassan is a nom de guerre of Ali Hassan Salameh. He is one of the, I believe, one of, if not the chief architects of the Black September group of the, you know, Olympic attack inich fame um he's a big fucking deal uh i mean those attacks i don't believe have happened yet he he's a he's a big fucking deal um he is oh man it's uh that's like being if you're if you're a terrorist and like timothy mcveigh hangs out with you like why does timothy get the tv controller also you know his father was like you know part of the you know world war ii kingdom of iraq the palestinian war of 47 and 48 yeah no yeah he comes from a long

line of important dudes in palestine yeah so he's a he's a big fucking deal and this german guy is really mad because he got a cooked chicken before he did yeah i like you know it's also a kind of important that yeah you could vaguely call ali hassan salame and even the plo vaguely left wing at this point but they're palestinian nationalists like that's the whole point you know they don't give a fuck about his like uh what's his name uh botters puritan politics of the desert they're like shut the fuck up man you fucking nerd in response to his demands not being met, the collective group went on strike from training.

This included not showing up for shooting, conditioning, sunbathing nude out in the open. This literally only affects themselves. Bear in mind, this is the PLO in the 70s. They had never had women in their training camps before yeah it's you know thankfully um you know the middle east the 1970s uh very into uh like nude sunbathing yeah so not only did barter set his sights on the members of the plo and fata and you know his hosts he also set his sights on ulrika meinhof berating her as a useless intellectual for messing up a grenade practice so

they were doing you know grenade training she pulled the pin and smoke started to come out and kind of panicked and held on to it oh outstanding and then threw it away like at the last minute so like no one was hurt they all had to dive behind like rocks and stuff yeah i'm sure the safety conditions of a plo training camp is you either get the grenade training right or you're no longer training because you have you've been blown to pieces yeah so like badder you know tore strips off meinhof over this he also targeted peter homan at one stage physically assaulting him when homan fought back and knocked badger to the ground ensling and the other women screamed at him

calling him a bastard and saying that he had knocked him out it turns out uh badger should have gone to the fucking physical training more often yeah exactly um after this homan was considered a traitor to the cause youan was considered a traitor to the cause you're you're a traitor to the cause because you hurt my feelings yeah the group subsequently turned on him and as tensions rose to a head homan overheard them one evening discussing how they could shoot him and make it look like an accident i mean they're probably right um i'm going i'm gonna go on a limb here and assume that these guys are not the best at handling weapons seeing how they've been striking weapons training

for a while yeah so a few days after the nocturnal conversation on the terrorist abu hassan spoke briefly with homan once more about the berliners and their journey he said to homan you came as friends and will certainly be conducted out as friends, according to the laws of Arab hospitality. He would, he said, arrange another meeting between Hohmann and the main group so that they could discuss

the procedure for traveling together. The discussions in a small Oman hotel were brief. Hohmann wanted to go his own way. They essentially conducted like a struggle session on him. That's the least surprising thing you've told me so far.

So the group flew back to Schoenfeld Airport in East Berlin and traveled over to West Berlin Underground by train. The police never noticed anything.

Great. Guys, I tried to go train at a terror camp and I got washed out for it. Like they they the police hadn't even figured out the apartments that they were using as hideouts before they left for jordan so these apartments could be used again i mean the west german and west berlin like west german federal police in general were kind of notoriously incompetent i mean for more information this

read about the munich massacre um so none of this surprises me they're not good they it seemed like the vast majority of their you know crime fighting or invested give ability as much as any cop cops do this was based mostly on the the hope that people would just follow the law they wouldn't have to do anything yeah so then the palestinians provided holman with an arab passport in the name omar sharif and they gave him his forged german passport back 200 us dollars for the journey and an air ticket from beirut to rome A week after the others arrived in Berlin, he went through passport control at Rome Airport. He bought a ticket and boarded a train back home to Hamburg that evening.

See, they actually sent him to Rome as a punishment. You failed out of PLO camp, and the way that you will suffer for this is for sending you to Italy. Yeah, no, no. What they really did to make him suffer is they bought him an airfare from uh beirut to rome on whiz air it's like oh thank you for buying me my ticket he shows up to the

terminal it's like no no i mean to be fair the plo definitely don't have uh air miles with luftanza anyway well certainly not anymore so now we need to talk about something that's really sad so in the summer of 1970 stefan oust brighter of the bader meinhof complex got a phone call from hamburg prior to this he had tried to get hold of peter holman to make contact with ulrika meinhof and he knew ulrika from his times working at Concrete. Over the phone he was told to go to Himmelsstrasse in Hamburg where he would find Hohmann dyeing his hair in the bathroom. There he was told of a plan to send Meinhof's twin daughters to a Palestinian orphanage in Jordan. You see shortly after Badr had been freed from prison Ulrike had arranged for her children to

be smuggled out of the country to Italy, where they would remain until sent for. The plan was then to send them to be trained by the PLO and eventually become revolutionary fighters for the cause. Oh my god, she's going to turn her children into child soldiers? Yep. Also, since their mother was now on the run, it was believed that they would be safe from state retaliation from their mother's crimes. Aust immediately travelled to Palermo under the recommendations of Holman

that time was of the utmost importance, and when he arrived, the children's handlers noticed his baggage labels were from Hamburg Airport and not Berlin, like they were expecting. He told them he used to work at Concrete with Ulrika and was brought to the children soon he was stood outside a dilapidated Volkswagen minibus on a deserted beach and found Bettina and Regine sitting inside the two girls recognized him from the concrete days and seeing

him around the office and he returned them to their father Klaus Roll who just so happened to be on holiday in Italy at the time. A few days later a call from Berlin arrived in Sicily. We'll be fetching for the children in a few days. What you already did they're gone, was the response. Back in Berlin, preparations for the underground struggle began.

Apartments were rented, cars stolen and sympathisers contacted. Ulrike Meinhof was experiencing bouts of guilt over her children. Do you want to know what Andreas Badr's response was? I'm going to assume something like shut up. He called her a bourgeois cunt.

Of course he did. What happened to her kids? They just stayed with their father. Well, that's a better alternative. Yeah. Then, you know, becoming literal child soldiers. Yeah. Than, you know, becoming literal child soldiers. Yeah. And everybody knows having children is a sign of being a privileged individual, privileged class, class traitor.

Having human emotions is counter-revolutionary. I can't imagine how horrible it would, it sounds to be called a bourgeois cunt in German. I have a feeling someone will tell us. If you know, tell us. After this, she mentioned it no more. Wait, she just like abandoned her children? Yep, pretty

much. Wow, what a winner. The most pressing issue was money. They planned bank robberies and contacted a mechanic called Karl Heinz Ruhland, who was deep in debt at the time and was sympathetic to their cause. He retrofitted stolen cars with more powerful engines, resprayed them and gave them new bodywork numbers in order to make them untraceable. Zero hour for the planned raids was the morning of the 29th of September.

for the planned raids was the morning of the 29th of september three berlin banks were raided between 9 48 a.m and 9 58 a.m this was one of the rare cases between the red army faction and the june second movement or the second june movement depending which way you want to work it um i'm i'm not going to go into the details of the bank robberies because there's one that we have to talk about quite a lot in the next episode. So you'll understand their tactics in the next episode. For his work, Heinz received a thousand Deutschmarks. A week after the triple coup, as the group called it, they all met in an apartment in Kufenstrasse for a post-mortem of the operation. Over coffee and beer, they discussed the course of the bank raids. Mahler and Badr thought they could improve on

their techniques of entering and getting away from the bank. Mahler, wearing his toupee as usual. Oh, I forgot to say that Horst Mahler wore a toupee. Alright. Offered moral justification for the raids. It's the capitalist money we take. It doesn't harm the little man.

And no need to worry about the trauma you cause all the people involved by pointing guns at them. Yeah. So, Badr thought the group should grow. Then he said that Bakr and Ali Jensen, a member of the group since return from Jordan, had to go to Munson Lager

to find out about the chances of breaking into an army arsenal in order to secure more weapons. Obviously, they're not going to go digging in graveyards anymore. First raiding the Berlin Wall, now breaking into an army base. Dream big. Over the course of the next few months, they recruited more members to the cause,

as well as organizing raids on town halls. You see, one of the biggest logistical issues were papers. If you were stopped by the police, you would be summarily asked to show identification and would be queried about it, like what happened with Badr during the Peter Urbach graveyard incident. So the plan was to hit as many town halls as possible in order to secure blank passports, identity papers, along with stamps, official seals and headed paper. With these, they could easily forge realistic enough documents to fool any police officer, even for a few minutes, which would be enough for anyone caught on the back foot to escape.

It was during the winter when people like Jan-Karl Rasp, Holder Mines, Bette Schrum and Ulrich Schultz, among others, would be recruited into the group. The later political manifestos of the group harped on about the primacy of praxis. Whether it is right to organise armed resistance now depends on whether it is possible. That could be ascertained only in practice.

In their life outside of the law, the primacy of praxis became a commonplace reality. Apartments would be requisitioned, cars stolen, sources of money found, i.e. banks raided, and the organisation of daily life underground was increasingly replacing political discussions. They were on the run, a fact which determined the group's life more than any strategic notion of their aims. Obviously, if you're on the run from the police, the most important thing you can do is figure out, okay, one, how are we not going to get caught? How are we going to fund everything?

We got to feed people. We got to pay rent on apartments, which we falsified documents to rent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. During this time, do you want to know what they used as their kind of central operations base? I'm going to swing for the fences here. Like a college library. An abandoned sanatorium. Hell yeah, that's way cooler. They used an abandoned sanatorium

outside of Bad Kissingen as their base. On the afternoon of the 14th of December, Ruland and Astrid Prohl drove to Bad Kissingen where they stole oil stoves, lamps and electric cable. The next day, Badr and Sink, Janssen, Rasp and his former girlfriend Marianne arrived at the sanatorium. Meinhof, Mainz and Strom joined them later that evening. They discussed future operations

and it all struck Betty Sturm as nonsense. She had never known the group except on the run. Its members felt they were constantly under observation being pursued and generally just having like the most paranoia cloud living above them were the police even onto them kind of like like they were looking for people like badder and meinhof and ensling but like the rest of them no one really knew they were even involved she thought it absurd to be talking at this point of such grandiose projects such as kidnapping but badr in demanded action perhaps they could kidnap the newspaper publisher axel

springer and thus bring pressure to bear to get the prisoners in berlin freed they went back and forth on potential targets. CDU politicians, Social Democrat Chancellor Franz Josef Strauss, maybe more bank grades. They couldn't really settle on anything. The meetings in the old sanatorium were unplanned and disorganized. The building was neglected, and furniture was almost completely missing.

Ruland had installed some oil stoves in three of the rooms. The rest remained uninhabitable because, bear in mind, it's December in Germany. And they're living in an abandoned sanatorium. It's nice and warm, you know. Well insulated. Certainly

not a giant refrigerator full of smelly revolutionaries. So, after a few days, they had all had enough of each other's company in this absolute shithole and they set out again to prepare for bank raids in the roar i mean this is a group that kind of failed in like the austere training environment of a plo training camp at least it's warm in jordan i mean it's nothing but warm in jordan right yeah and now they're like oh we have set up our revolutionary headquarters it's this crust punk shithole oh i don't know i don't i

don't know why anybody thought they were actually going to be able to stuff this out yeah exactly but um homesickness and quite frankly sickness for each other began to set in when they were planning the next round of raids carl hines was arrested on suspicion of helping the group and infighting began with shoals accusing batter of irresponsibly encouraging members to break the law batter reacted as expected you can't half-heartedly take part in a group's illegal life and then go back within the law again do you want to know when he made this criticism of Badr? I'm going to guess when he did just

that. No, when Badr was showing him how to use an AK-47. No, it was a Kalashnikov submachine gun. Sorry, I don't want the gun people to get mad at me. So, Badr is there with a Kalashnikov submachine gun showing you how to shoot and you decide to criticize him.

Not really a good idea. How is Bader? No, he's kind of a dick. If anybody was going to go out of the pocket and just shoot you in the back, it'd be him. So, they all met again in Nuremberg late at night. Ulrich Scholz and Astrid Prohl had driven to Walsmannstrasse, where Ulrike Meinhof and ali yanson were waiting they had picked out a mercedes that they're planning to break into because cars at this stage pretty easy

to steal like you know maybe like an electronic fob yeah you could probably break into those back then with a coat hanger and then like hot wire them in five seconds yeah like you used to be able to do the screwdriver trick. Whereas if you got a flathead screwdriver and put it in the ignition and then hit it with a hammer hard enough, it would break all of the actual lock on the ignition and you could just turn the screwdriver. Hell yeah. So they managed to break into it and hotwire the car, but the car refuses to start backfiring. And the sudden noise

He stole a piece of shit. The backfire woke its owner who was asleep who called the police. He opened his window and shouted for help. They were all like oh shit, what are we going to do? They all jumped out of the car and ran into their own car.

Ulrika ran to her car, a BMW which Astro Pro the best driver out of all of them as it happened, and they both raced away. The two women turned into the car park of an Esso hotel. The men drove straight on. They stopped just before they reached the Meister Singer Hall and got out. Ulrik Schultz was about to lock the car down when a volkswagen drew up beside them two police officers in plain clothes asked for their papers schultz do you want to know what he did i'm gonna assume he just tried to run away he gave them his actual driver's license oh my god these guys are running away is a better option here somehow these

guys are so stupid did he like mix them up Cause he obviously had fake papers on him at any given time. Like bear in mind, it was, they weren't really under suspicion of like trying to break into the car. It was probably, they got pulled over because they were speeding. There's one thing you learn from a heist film. It's that when you commit a crime,

you always get away in the most obvious fashion. So everybody like, Hey, look, a criminal. The fact that they were speeding probably made the police more suspicious of them. And they said, you know, someone's after trying to break into a car in Watsmanstrasse. And they said, can you get in the back of the police car? Just come with us and let the car owner have a look at you. That reminds me, like, going back to Timothy McVeigh somehow, he was pulled over because

he had no license plate on his car. Because he was a sovereign citizen, he didn't think he needed one. He's a fucking moron. Yeah, sometimes you gotta stop telling on yourself. Yeah, when you're committing crimes and using a car for a getaway vehicle, you have to be... It's very easy to just

be normal. Go the speed limit have a driver's license uh have a have a fucking license plate on your car yeah like how easy is it to get away with crimes you've already stolen so many cars like how are you missing the like the minute detail you've robbed banks and you can't think like, hey, maybe we should have the speed limit and we get away from her so we can blend in. Ali and Uli were told to get into the two police cars each separately. Uli got into

the Volkswagen with the plainclothes police and drove off. The uniform men took Ali Janssen who had produced a forged identity car to the patrol car standing a little way off. He was, you know, they were going to check his license, they were going to bring him back to the station,

and they were going to frisk him. Unfortunately, Ali opened his coat, flicked it backwards, and swiftly pulled out a pistol. The officer grabbed his wrist and tried to get the gun away from him. Jansen struggled, shouting, get away, let go of me or I'll shoot.

He had his index finger on the trigger and was swinging the barrel to point first at one policeman, then the other, you know, swinging back and forth, fighting with them. And eventually, one of the police officers just said, okay, we need to run. They both ran and Ali just started shooting randomly, then tried to steal the police car. Great idea. No way they'll catch you in that. But when he tried to start the car, great idea no way they'll catch you in that but when he tried to start the car the police started shooting at him and like telling him to stop he was like stop stop and

he got himself you know across the passenger seat and out of the patrol car putting up his hand but the pistol was still in his right hand he was told to throw the gun away he threw the gun away and the policemen tackled him,

but they slipped because the ground was slippery with snow. He deployed so many bananas like it was Mario Kart. Ali was taken into police custody. He was strip searched. His clothes were searched. They fucked up his nose

when he fell over on the ice. I'm sure that was an accident. But the others went on. Life in the underground was hard. It was, you know, Astrid Prohl at one stage said, it was always like this. You were somewhere or other than something or other happened and you had to move everything, go somewhere completely different.

Once when she had been arrested in Frankfurt, she lapsed into a deep psychological low i'd done everything wrong again or maybe we'd all done something wrong to get us into this situation in the first place as usual on the german left the members of the red army faction were always always criticizing each other instead of support i quote instead of supporting people when they need help they slag you worse than ever. That's how it always is in the group. Wow. What a great environment for team building.

They really need to hire one of those HR professionals to pass the ball around the group and everybody says something like two things positive and two things that you can improve upon. Give them a good compliment sandwich. Do some team building exercises, maybe a trust fall or two so with one member in custody and the morale at an all time low that is where we end part

two, join us again in part three when everyone argues even more who would have thought I am amazed when everyone argues even more. Who would have thought? Yeah. I am amazed at how bad these people are at terrorism. They get better at it.

I'll give them that. They get better at it. Only because the cops are so stupid, they give them the opportunity to continuously get better at it. The only reason those other guys are even arrested is because one of them decided to start fucking shooting like he's Yosemite Sam. But, Joe, are you excited for part three when we get more bombs more bank raids more arguing and more shootouts i mean i know a little bit about some uh better meinhof attacks so i know things get

depressing um but it's you know these people just sound fucking insufferable to me also one small detail that i i left out when they sprung andreas batter from prison he was still suffering from jaundice uh we will we'll lead the revolution tomorrow i have to take a small nap like oh our our comrade has knotted off again alright yeah I mean it is true you know involve invoking the spirit of the Bolsheviks your heart is red with communism and your skin

is yellow with jaundice yeah I don't think it's heroin as a revolutionary drug you know uppers because you know you live you you live in a shithole and you're running constantly and trying to get away from the police you know you're going to be banging lines of coke or i mean they're german the meth and pervadin or whatever right like no we're just gonna take a nice heroin nap. Well, thank you very much for me.

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