Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 274 - The Red Army Faction Part 3: Andreas Peterson Tells You To Clean Your Room

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

In this episode, we cover the early- to mid-1970s bombing campaigns of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, and some of the... interesting personalities of the group members. 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. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Lions Led by Donkeyskeys podcast if you are shocked to hear me doing the intro it's tom uh hosting the red army faction series for part three and with me is joe

hello uh tom is just me putting on an elaborate irish accent uh because everybody knows how good i am at accents and i almost cut in and did the intro before you because I forgot I'm not supposed to do that for the next couple weeks. Look, we've talked about this. I am uncomfortable. Little peek behind the scenes here that Tom and Nate know all too well. I am a control freak when it comes to the topics and the show in general. Production, all you guys, everything everything else i pick over the fine tooth comb like a crazy person so handing over the steering wheel to someone else i think it

causes my heart to shudder it's okay joe it's okay at least i didn't do the intro at least i didn't do the intro in german this time oh no that's only for special occasions unless it's nate and we talk about literally anything to do with germany and he he does the german version of a david baddiel accent which i love so how are you joe i'm good actually it's not i'm not burning to death today uh which is you know a nice change of pace it's the last several times we've uh recorded i have my water back um uh it's for for people who aren't a part of our group chat and hear me complain all the time i did not have water for two days uh which led to a cross city trek to uh for me to find so like you know i don't know how toilets look in the uk uh you know like american toilets can just wait how do you not how do you not know what you've been in the uk did you just

hotel toilets are a different breed my man um true like in the u.s you run out of water you know it's easy to find jugs of water at like your corner store whatever you take the reservoir top off of it you dump water in the back you get, you get a working toilet until you can use it so you can shit at home. You're not just making a layer cake of shit while you wait for water to come back on. We do not have that here. We have those weird

toilets where the plunger is directly in the middle and you have to kind of take apart your toilet to get the top off, which I learned in my last apartment, which I think I've talked about before. I do not know how to do. And I broke my toilet. This is the time you broke the toilet.

So this time I'm like, ah, fuck. I, it was right after we got done recording the part two of this series. I'm like, Ooh boy, I got to run to the bathroom.

No water. I'm like, ah, fuck. Right. And you can't. You were running. You're running to the closest toilet at a 45 degree angle.

And it wasn't just my apartment. It was half of the city. I live in the capital. So like that is a catastrophic water failure. Right. And I live in the city center. So the entire ring of Kentronentron district no water right i'm frantically running to all the cafes in the area looking for a functioning bathroom nothing there's

no real public bathrooms here and knowing how government services here you would not want to use them um it would look like the bathroom out of fucking train spotting and uh so i just i end up walking like several kilometers looking i go on you know the arduous the arduous march but for taking a shit and i finally find my friend's bar who i'm good friends with who he's like yeah whenever the city loses water and power for some reason i still have it so i i look him dead of the eye i'm like man i didn't come here for a beer i just need to take a shit he's like no it's fine did he give you a beer to have while you're on the toilet i did afterwards buy like two pints and then i went home because i'm like i just i i feel bad everyone goes on about you know shower beers what about toilet beers look i would be fine with

that if it was like a bottle of beer not like an open topped pint you don't want your pint basking in the shit vapors of like a panic shit that's been brewing for three hours yeah we have we have talked uh privately about you know the signs of when you walk into a bathroom that someone has just obliterated and it's just that strange humidity in the air it's awful it's so bad especially when it's like 100 degrees that's like i don't know how many uh how many degrees celsius that is because i refuse to learn even though i live in a country that uses celsius uh like my friends i'm like oh man it's like 30 out i'm like the back of my head i'm like wow that's cold uh but you know it's not um i what what i'm trying to say here is i am i'm a stupid man tom

but like i i had the exact same experience uh was it last year or this year so i used to live in an absolute shithole place uh we moved there when i had moved over to the uk had a month in like a place like an air Airbnb that we rented for super cheap and was like, you know, like, okay, we have to find somewhere by the end of the month or otherwise we have to sleep on the street. Found somewhere the Friday before we had to move. We had to move out on the

Sunday. Place was sharing it with like eight other people. It was terrible. And one day the shower completely broke and i was like oh fuck i have to have to ring the property manager who's like a massive dickhead and say shower's broke can you fix it he was like yeah and then he came and because this was like i actually looked up the model of unit that was in this shower it's like an electrical shower it cost 50 pounds for the

entire unit so you know it's just complete dog shit right and it had like one of those shower heads on it that like strips your skin off that like it's like okay there's like 16 outlets on this head and like the water is coming out at like a million psi so it feels like you're being shot okay compared to my current shower head, I prefer that. No water pressure to speak of. If I had hair, I would be upset.

But actually, well, actually no, you probably can't get it delivered to Armenia, but there was, there is a model of shower head that I found online. Cause on TikTok, there's all like,

Oh, these, you know, shower heads that like fit, have like these beads in it, that filter hard water and increase pressure it's all bullshit you need a water softener yeah it's a unique but i found i found one that actually helped with low pressure water and like work and isn't like this

bullshitty one so i keep buying that same one again um i found it like years ago but this guy comes over and is like trying to figure out what's wrong with the shower and says oh it's the shower head that you put on it broke and i'm like no it fucking didn't shut up anything that makes it so it's not his fault and you know what the worst thing is he he like took the shower head and the hose that i put on and took it with him and i'm like boy bro have you got a license for that shower head and like he was like he took it with him and he was like oh it broke the shower so i have to take with me he's like that's my property like fuck off look as as an armenian sitting in armenia this has happened to us many times like so the shower first your shower heads then your children uh first the shower heads then you

know genocide came for the shower heads and i said nothing because i did not need a shower then they came for our toilets and i said nothing because i didn't need to shit my friend's bar so uh we didn't have a shower for like two weeks or something. And I had to like share in the gym, share in the studio. And like, it was hot as well. So I was like having to share every day. And there was like days where it's like, I just, I'm going to work from home because I can't, I can't face having to walk for like 20 minutes to the gym, just a shower and then walk back.

See, I'm a daily shower guy. I blame the army for that for making me live i'm a daily shower person for like living weeks and months sometimes without a shower and when i was out of water i'm like ah i have a gym membership i will go to my gym and take a shower and i walk in there's a big sign with like this is an armenian with like a frowny face under like sorry no sorry, no water. I'm just like, fuck. But most importantly, are you a night shower or a morning shower? Depends. Depends. I'm a shower as soon as I get done with the gym guy.

And it depends on when I go to the gym. On days where I don't work out, I'm a night shower guy. Freak. I got to get into my fucking clean sheets, man. No. Nobody wants to crawl into bed with someone who just fucking reeks like the day. That's up to you. I shower in the morning

and then I shower after the gym. For anyone who's gonna try and get at me saying you shouldn't shower twice a day, I do not care. On hot days, I'll take a five second cold shower. I will probably do not care no it's totally like on hot days i'll take a five second cold shower like i will probably do it after we finish this podcast because my office is starting to cook oh no don't worry like the studio is like hermetically sealed yeah i remember more than

one person in here it gets so hot when i recorded the one time in the tf studios uh back in december uh with nate we were sitting exactly where you're sitting right now and uh even though it was cold as fuck in london by the end of it i was cooking yeah yeah it's like hermetically sealed there's no ventilation and it's like you can just slowly feel it pick up and they didn't say a single thing but i definitely farted like several times while we were recording and your fart was lingering it there and saying like i'm not locked in here with you you're locked in here with me i i'm used to working by myself man like every once in a while i forget there's someone else in the room with me he he's just like Paul Atreides but rather than recycling his sweat

your respiratory system is recycling the same farts. Huffing my shit gas for an hour and a half. So, talking about people who don't shower and probably smelled. I knew it! We are on

part three of our series on the Red Army Faction. faction you haven't listened to the past two episodes go listen to them nothing in this episode will make sense if you haven't i don't know why you would listen to part three of a four-part series i always say that as well like hey this is part four if you if you're just joining us today go back and listen to the three parts i don't know who would do that but some people just like to watch the world fucking burn man yeah they you know this isn't house of leaves this is a sequential series i'm gonna do a house of leaves-esque series and just uh not tell anybody what order i'm recording them in and you'll have to listen to them like the guy from memento

this is the dune of podcasting you can listen to them in any order you like but no there's a proper order you should but when we last left you off the red army faction batter meinhof group were holed up in a senate in a cold sanatorium and were slowly getting at each other's throats but by the new year there was a crisis in the group more members were now in custody than were actually living on the run tensions were running at an all-time high and soon the first effector better stern would leave the group and by january 1971 there were they were once again running low on funds by the 15th of january 1971 two banks in Kassel were raided, both branches of the local savings bank, and at 9.30am, five group members drove up to the Akademischstrasse branch in a Mercedes they had stolen in Göttingen, and one man stayed in the car, the rest of them entered the bank. They were all dressed in identical black clothing and had balaclava showing only their eyes down over their

faces german isis so german ira more like hey this is the guy in all black with balaclava and a kalashnikov uh a loop okay you all end up looking the same but the funny thing is is that like if anyone had paid attention they would have immediately known it was, you know, they would have spotted Andreas Batter because he would have inevitably had cut a hole in his back lava for a cigarette. Like, I cannot tell you how many, like, you know, reference documents I looked at where they mentioned Andreas Batter was smoking at the very specific time that they're talking about him. Like, he was just constantly rolling and smoking cigarettes that's the that reminds me like there's a certain kind of guy like i know people that will only chain smoke when they're drinking right and it reminds me yeah myself included and then i feel awful the next day because i don't even smoke anymore um and it reminds me of this uh there's a story of like an

italian politician who had to be hospitalized for nicotine toxicity because he smoked several hundred cigarettes in a single day and someone did the math and there was like a cigarette every two minutes jesus christ like to be fair when we were in dublin i think we smoked six packs of cigarettes in the space of three days hey we had we had Robert Evans help us with that. Yeah, true. So the group, this is a raid, one of them shouted

and told everyone to keep their hands up, keep still, and you won't be harmed. They fired two warning shots into the ceiling and overall, they took 54,185 Deutschmarks.

The second team, also disguised in the same way, rushed into the second bank, said the same thing again. One of them jumped on the counter and stuffed 60,530 Deutschmarks into his pocket, and Gudrun Essling

sent two parcels of money to the group's Stuttgart department headquarters the same day, and a third parcel arrived the following week later. Just mailing a giant sack of cash? I just want to know how big their pockets were if they could fit 60,000 Deutschmarks in them. That's a whole new level of dad cargo pants.

That's like all the Zoomers bringing back JNCO jeans. JNCO cargo pants. Now that's a cursed combination. You got the ridiculous flair at the bottom that's just everyone in Blink-182 in like circa 2001 wearing the big dicky shorts oh god what if Blink-182

was German and robbed a bank they would have to sing the entire like say all their commands but only nasally as fuck oh mein god it is Blink-182 work sucks I know work sucks I know put the money in the fucking bag nasally as fuck. Oh my God, it is Blink-182. Work sucks, I know. Work sucks,

I know. Put the money in the fucking bag. By February, Astrid Prohl and Manfred Grashoff, two members of the group, would be involved

in a shootout with police with a police officer who had recognized him in a Frankfurt cafe while he was having his lunch. Although nobody was harmed this would begin the first real

hunt for the Badr-Meinhof group. The apartments Ruland had named were searched and people who had sheltered the terrorists were arrested and questioned. The press got in on the act and details from the interrogation of Karls Heinz Ruland were

going around torn out of context distorted and exaggerated the hamburger morgan post news wrote by now i'm sorry i know that just means like a newspaper from hamburg but i'm american i can't laugh it's by when something's called hamburger uh they wrote by now the hunt for the members of the gang seems to be developing They wrote, huge hysteria around you know the badder meinhof group which we're going to talk about right now they were beginning to be recognized more frequently by shop owners hotel staff and people on the street at one stage a woman who was suspected of being ulrika meinhof was arrested by police after receiving a tip-off the woman was dragged out of a hotel fingerprinted but subsequently released once they figured out she wasn't rica meinhof i love the idea if

there's like a because whenever i think of hysteria any kind of hysteria especially in the era that i grew up in i think of that stupid shit like oh is your teen wearing too many bracelets that means they suck dick at high school or something like that so it's like is your teen not showering could they be part of a left-wing militia group oh everyone is gonna be just very angry at us for calling a left-wing paramilitary group smelly like every paramilitary group is smelly they're paramilitaries they have other important things to do that's because everyone talks about bedtime being authoritarian but in reality it's actually showers showering is bourgeoisie the real proletariat smell like ball sweat all the time so carl heinz ruling statements about those middle

class people who are sheltering the group provided the popular press with headlines day after day and really at this time there's a huge media storm building around the group and like you know you have the right-wing press like bill saying batter gang blackmails the prominent the welt uh or developed uh sympathizers hamper hunt for batter group the hamburger adenblatt Celebrities protect batter gang. Build, once again, pastor hid batter gang's loot. Talking about Essling's father. I tried really hard not to make an Adderblatt hamburger joke. And look, I'm a simple man.

I hear hamburger, I laugh. I texted you last night to say that there is a name in this script that you are going to lose your mind at and i'm just gonna it's gonna be in a while and for anyone listening you will know immediately because joe is going to fucking freak out but you might be thinking to yourself why are the papers still referring to them as the batter meinhof group well it wasn't until now that the group got its official title as the red army factionaction. Horst Mahler, who is once again in prison, also for anyone who is familiar with this history, you're going to have fun in part four with Horst Mahler,

while he was in prison for his role of freeing Badr from prison, wrote the group's first manifesto on urban guerrilla warfare. The paper was met with indignation by those on the run as intellectually insufficient sick burn instead ulrika meilhoff was chosen to write the official first declaration of the group's philosophy it was called the urban guerrilla concept and i actually recommend you go read it because it is like it's really interesting the kind of because the political and psychological viewpoint of the group, it's really compelling, and I have some bits pulled out on it at the moment that I'm going to read in a second.

So it contained the first use of the phrase Red Army Faction. The title page bore the emblem of a submachine gun with the abbreviation RAF above it. The name and the emblem soon became the group's trademarks. But it was not a Kalashnikov, the Russian submachine gun, the weapon of all liberation movements in the world at this time and, you know, subsequently going forward. Before gun

nerds get on us, yes, we are aware that the AK-47 is not a submachine gun. Yes, it's the AK-74, blah, blah, blah. AK-74 is a blah blah blah it was a carbine why did call of duty categorize it as a submachine gun go to the next room and get my 74 do it instead of the ak serving as the raf's revolutionary symbol. It was the German Heckler & Koch MP5. Kind of a mistake using the symbol

of German state power as your revolutionary symbol. It would be like an American left-wing group using, I don't know, a bald eagle or a police badge. Joe, I think it's called patriotic socialism. You're fired. You're fired.

I love to see how many times in a single episode I can make you say that. So, page one of the urban guerrilla concept quoted Chairman Mao, If the enemy fights us, that is good, not bad. And further said, if the enemy opposes us vigorously, paints us in the blackest of colours, and will allow us no good points, that is even better. It shows that not only have we drawn a clear dividing line between ourselves and the enemy,

our work has also proved brilliantly successful. Many comrades, mine off-road, are spreading lies about us. They make capital out of the fact that we stayed in their homes. They organized our journey to the Middle East. They knew about contacts and apartments. They said they did something for us, although they're doing nothing. Some of them just want to show that they are in. Some are trying to prove that we are foolish, unreliable, incautious, burnt out. Thereby, they prejudice others against us. In reality, they are only judging us by themselves.

They are consumers. We have nothing to do with these chatterers from whom anti-imperialist fight is conducted at coffee parties. There are plenty who do not gossip, who have some idea of resistance, who are sick enough of it all to wish

us well, because they know that none of it is worth lifelong integration and adaptation. We do not make reckless use of guns. The cop who finds himself in the contradictory situation of being a little man and a capitalist slackie, a low-wage earner and a police officer of monopoly capitalism is not under absolute compulsion to act when we shoot when we are shot at we spare the cop who spares us all right with two things bold of them to be like yeah we went to an illegal uh plo training camp um in two yeah let her cook yeah like this but

this is just like milo from trash futures like brendan o'neill speech at the start of every live show like you know the chattering classes like you know they're really taking aim at a pimp's cup petty bourgeoisie the pips she goes on to say people are right when they claim that all the resources expended on hunting us down are really intended for the whole socialist left in the federal republic and west berlin the small sums of money we are said to have stolen the occasional thefts of cars and documents which we are charged and the attempted murder they are trying to pin on us are their justification for it all yeah but they did try

to kill a guy they're really she was really cooking in this though you know this this is the one thing that i will say um ulrika meinhof is a fantastic writer and you can really tell anything of their like you know their press releases or whatever you can really tell when it wasn't written by her yeah i can imagine whenever botter writes something it's like yeah this was written by andrea like this is written by the other guy this is not written by elric and mine off hold on to that thought at the very end of this episode i'm going to come back to that so on the 6th of may 1971 astrid Prohl was recognised by a petrol pump

attendant in Hamburg and arrested by the police the detective officers wanted to keep her arrest secret. They had found a key ring in her bag and were looking for the apartment it belonged to expecting to find more members of the group there. The police drew a circle with a radius of 500

metres around the spot where she had been arrested the officers then fanned out to try and find the lock which fitted the front door key. They would spend three days putting three different keys in 2,164 locks, unbeknownst to people living in the

buildings. Who's at the door? Oh, it's just the federal police. I don't know. It looks like they're trying to break in. door oh it's just the federal police i don't know what they're looks like they're trying to break in yeah it's like that joke is like how many people does it take to screw in a light bulb how many police officers does it take to put a key in a lock i can imagine they deployed hundreds of officers to do this and they succeeded in doing nothing well on the third day they found the right lock it belonged to an apartment on the third floor of number 139 Lübecker Straße. However all they found were the fingerprints of Gudrun Ensling, Andreas Bader and

no one else and papers showing that the group were planning to attack vans carrying money from the Hamburg Savings Bank to the Armoured Car Service. By June 15th, 3,000 police officers were mobilised all over North Germany in order to hunt down the group. This would officially mark the 425th day of the search for the group. They've done

slightly more than nothing at this point. Yeah, this will all change. Because on the 15th of June, 1971 at 2 15 p.m that day petra schlem was stopped at a checkpoint driving a bmw which was already synonymous with the group and was jokingly referred to as the baller meinhof wagon why the fuck were they still using it no they were just stealing different bmws But this one particular kind of BMW is like their calling card. So they were the police were told to look out for BMWs with powerful engines because they were stealing BMWs with powerful engines so they could get away quicker.

They could maneuver better. So they were targeting specific models of BMW. they could you know maneuver better so they were targeting specific models of bmw so the police were just like okay look out for these handful of bmw models and anyone you see stop them still you're trying to be like urban gorillas and you know that the federal government has deployed what is effectively like a division of infantry to go find you like now we should probably keep doing the same thing um so she attempted to speed away from the checkpoint but was chased by the police but abandoned the car and attempted to run away on foot yeah good job you're definitely faster than a car petra ran into a building site and verner hopper schlems companion hid under a crane when surrounded hoppe surrendered

surrendered you know putting his hands above his head and walking towards the police but schlemm chose to draw her pistol and fire at the police who told her not to who told her not to be a fool and surrender she fired again and they returned hitting her in the head making petra schlemm the first member of the red army faction to be killed by the police i mean in reality what kind of prison time are they even looking at this point i mean like you could burn down a fucking department you could burn down a department store with people inside and get like a couple years realistically i'd say they probably want they probably would have gotten between about five

to ten years at this stage because you know the the amount of charges that they're after collecting because like the department store fire was just one incident at this age they've been stealing cars doing bank robberies you know shooting at police yeah i mean it seems like the german criminal justice system at the time was quite lax these things up until you probably kill someone which they haven't done yet i would take five to ten years in prison before uh you know between that and getting my head canoed by a guy named fritz with a service revolver after the death of petra schlemm a poll showed that one in four west germans under the age of 30 felt sympathy for the group

in what would come to be known as their war of six versus 60 million. I like those odds. I'm sure this ends with the Federal Socialist Republic of West Germany. So over the course of the summer, the preparations for more decisive actions were to be made. The Socialist Patients Collective, a group founded out of a sort of political and philosophical therapy group that sought to reframe illness as the contradictions created by capitalism, which...

Fucking what? Yeah, anyone who's read Mark Fisher knows kind of what they're talking about. It's about stuff like mental health. A lot of mental health is created by the pressures that are created by capitalism i think i'm gonna have a fucking stroke i mean that's to be fair that is effectively what the soviet union believed as well was like mental health uh mental illness doesn't exist um in our society just like you know like deeply depraved serial murderers don't uh so they just

tried to brush under the rug ignore it or throw you in prison uh for being mentally ill which thankfully nobody in the world does anymore um yeah that's that's deeply fucked uh the political ideology has nothing to do with your mental or physical health now i will say as a counterpoint they weren't necessarily saying that mental health and stuff doesn't exist in the way that the soviet union did to some no no i'm not saying that either but i'm saying like uh you know they're of point a to point b to to point c on this on this graph point c being the you know uh mental health or mental illness does not exist in our communist utopia they're solidly in b territory well what their argument was that you know essentially the pressures of living under

capitalism exacerbate any kind of issues that already exist so it's just kind of this is the problem with trying to summarize stuff for a 17 page script well i get it to some extent but it seems terribly reductive mental health very complicated so they wanted to reframe mental illness as a contradiction created by capitalism which could be embraced to bring an end to the system which gave it life and they would be affirmed in their support of the RAF and their willingness to go underground you know by the debt because of the death of Petr Schlem Klaus Junchk would travel to join the group um I have a really funny anecdote about Klaus so he was part of the SPK this socialist pension collective and they you know they weren't as you know radical as the raf because they weren't you know blowing shit up

they sought to do you know small acts of transgression to undermine the state while traveling to meet the raf and this isn't in the script this is just something that's really funny in the book and some of the documents is he got stopped by police because obviously there's police checkpoints everywhere and you were required to show your papers when you're asked for identification so he handed over his papers and you know what he had put over his picture on his papers raf logo no a picture of chairman mao oh god he's just slowly becoming like socialists uh sovereign citizens um he was you know arrested by the police for this for you know presenting falsified documents blah blah blah but when he eventually met the group he was interviewed by olrica meinhof there were political and philosophical questions that he was asked to

determine his dedication he had smartened himself up uh to an unusual degree uh for his first meeting with the outlaws he was wearing a blazer a white shirt a tie gray trousers kind of like he's going for a job interview yeah i was about to say looks like you you know uh your your first warehouse job uh interview you have to try to look slightly better than you are without knowing the situation where you know everybody there's on the run and disgusting because they can't stay in one spot for too long and they're like why did you bring a tie to this event this is business casual you know did you not read the you know google invite we sent you you have to wear uh you have to wear a revolutionary casual which is a a top that

looks vaguely military-esque but you bought at a chain store um a a decent uh pair of boots that you probably stole if especially if you're andreas botter um and a pair of pants with the biggest cargo pockets you've ever seen yeah um so uh well tell us who you are and what you do said alrica meinhof young's uh told life story about which, as he realized from their questions, his interlocutors were already well informed. When they came from the socialist patients collective, Ulrike Meinhof said abruptly, but we don't go for group sex here. Klaus replied, what makes you think I'm interested in group sex?

And I know you've made jokes about, you know, the leftist polycule. These people were decidedly anti-sex. Coming is a bourgeoisie privilege. We practice strict semen retention here. Towards the end of the conversation, the others indicated that Jönsk

could, what he could do for the group. There were various things it's important for us to get done. We can't do them ourselves ourselves without running risks stuff that has to be bought and prepared and such and such uh the principal requirement was car number plates they obviously are stealing cars they need doctored number plates or they need to steal number plates off other cars to put on their stolen cars so you know you only was a conscientious objector and had given his reason, I couldn't kill another human being. It was not just something he had said,

he meant it in all seriousness. And suddenly, here he was, one of the group of people who went about armed and let there be no doubt they would use their weapons. Hmm. He seems to be a bit morally conflicted on this subject. So, in the middle of October 1971,reas batter and

gudrun essling came back to berlin where initial preparations for a major raf operation was about to be made the idea was to kidnap the american british and french city commandants all in one fell swoop the rest of the group stayed in man in hamburg one of their bases was an apartment on the he barg in the poop and bottle area so their hideout was in the poop and butt area all right great fuck it this is the word i what the fuck man i know it means something completely different but they live in the poop and butt district well there's like those two dots over the u so it's probably the poop and boo too not it's pooping but it's pooping but pooping but i'm disregarding the rules of the written language later that month

in Hamburg Ulrike Meinhof Margaret Schiller Hold Your Minds and Gerhard were holed up in one of the safe houses Margaret Schiller lived at the poop and butter we are 40 minutes into this episode and 33% through the script. It was a long one, folks.

So, the apartment they were holed up in, the windows had been blocked and the place was in disarray. There were documents everywhere, cigarette butts, you know. But Ulrika needed to make a phone call and because of their fear of wiretapping, they would need to use a public phone.

They left the apartment that night at 1.30am and the evening was foggy. They had a complicated route that they needed to take in order to shake anyone following them. When Ulrika wandered off Gerhard and Margaret noticed a car idling in the street with dimmed headlights. One of the passengers got out of the car and tried following the pair when they walked away but lost them and returned to his car. The three of them were now aware that they were being watched by police and hid for a few minutes in some bushes and emerged once they thought the coast was clear. Suddenly the car screeched into view and the police shouted at them to stay where they were. They tried to run away but the police gave chase and caught up with them. Ulrika tried to take her pistol out of her purse but had already been

apprehended. She struggled with the police officer and shouted that they were armed. At this point Gerhard Mueller turned, drew his pistol and shot Sergeant Norbert Schmidt dead on the spot. Ulrika and Mueller disappeared and Margaret Schiller

stole the police car and drove away. Notice they finally killed someone. She was apprehended by the police at 2.30am and was promptly arrested and brought to the police station. It became clear that Margaret Schiller herself had not killed the policeman. Technical examination showed that her pistol had not been fired recently and Police Sergeant Lemke, who was with Schmidt, also stated that a man had fired at his colleague.

At first suspicion fell on Holder Mines, who was already on the run. However, Lemke identified Gerhard Müller as the marksman from police photographs. The woman with him was thought to be Imgard Moeller. In fact, it had been Ulrike Meinhof. While the Hamburg police were combing the poop and bottle area, the wanted RAF members were sitting in the Heberg apartment. Poop and bottle. Hiding in the poop and bottle. Gotta hide in that poop and bottle.

Directly after the shooting, some of them said later, Gerhard Müller had rushed in with his revolver practically still smoking, boasting about having done in a cop. In the panic and terror of being discovered, they had all felt Manfred Grashoff, as the most senior person there, took over the organization of security measures, a.k.a. staying in the apartment for three days and three nights, paranoid out of their mind and chain smoking. I mean, yeah, I can kind of see um why they would be doing this other than like this is kind of a shitty security procedure like you're going to want to move but at the same time for i'm sure for a lot of them they went from effectively larping as revolutionaries yeah they're robbing banks and stuff but that's just

basic criminal behavior to like we actually killed a cop holy fuck this is real in the middle of november 1971 ulrika meinhof's foster mother renee remick wrote an open letter and published it in concrete meinhof's previous employer under the title give up ulrika in order to encourage her to give up you know this life on the run and return home to her family, her kids, and, you know, back to normalcy. I think that ship has fucking sailed. When the Red Army faction

shifted its field of operations back to Berlin, Hamburg sympathizers sent certain items of equipment after them by post. The parcels, at least 15 of them, were so badly packed that some of the ammunition fell out and the federal mail officials alerted the police and the entire consignment was confiscated god they've killed a guy and they're still dumber than shit well like this this isn't necessarily

them this is people like regular citizens sending stuff to them yeah but it also it all it also speaks to the incredible unseriousness of some of their supporters like you're sending material support to a terrorist group um you know if this happened nowadays that's almost a life fucking sentence and maybe not in germany i have no idea uh but they're like yeah i'm gonna throw through some loose handgun ammo in this manila envelope and put it in the mail yeah so do you want to know what was in these packages i would say mostly handgun ammunition or did somebody try to say send something significantly more explodey so the packages contained 16 firebird and Parabellum pistols, three automatic rifles, their silencers and telescopic sights. Oh my God!

3,280 cartridges of different calibers, two walkie-talkie radio sets, 10 wigs, any amount of artificial beards, a plastic bag containing car number plates of various lander of the federal republic, ampoules of assorted drugs and narcotics. Okay, imagine you're the guy that's trying to support the RAF with wigs and you go to the local post office and there's another guy with an H&K fucking assault rifle wrapped in paper. Like, oh, you're just sending wigs? No, it's like oh you're sending you're just sending wigs no it's like you know what at Christmas when like someone's dad tries to like wrap up a bike in a way that it doesn't look like a bike but it

still looks like a bike yeah it's just that but he has several guns under his shoulder and then someone comes in like I'm sending them wigs I missed the memo that we were sending them weapons uh i'll send beards too they're gonna do weaponized theater you know they're gonna do their own production of hamlet or othello i mean kind of so uh some other items included uniforms this included the unit the uniform jacket of a Bavarian regional police officer,

the jacket of Bavarian border police, and a first lieutenant's uniform. Honestly, the military uniforms would be really easy to come by since people, I'm 99% sure at the time, men were conscripted into the federal military. So it's like a lot of those lying around. But also in addition to this, there were some explodey bits, including 15 sticks of explosives and 16 detonators. I know mailing rules were a lot looser back then, but goddamn.

Now you can't even buy weed on the darknet anymore. Fuck's sake so in response to these packages being found 3 000 police officers were drafted in by the berlin police to conduct checkpoints searches and identity checks the police enlisted the aid of estate agents property managers filling stations garages key cutting, and manufacturers of car number plates. And the public were requested to, particularly Sharp, look out for any suspect BMWs. Search was on for members of the Red Army faction and the Second of June movement,

another left-wing paramilitary group that is, you know, going concurrently with the RF and has quite a lot of crossover. Nobody thought, like, maybe we should put, like, two or three more guys at the post office. Yeah, no. going concurrently with the rf and has quite a lot of crossover nobody thought that like maybe we should put like two or three more guys at the post office yeah no you need we need to arm the we need to arm the postman fuck it why not oh wait nope in the u.s they already are armed uh there's like a postal service swat team and shit so on the 4th of december 1971 a day after the operation had started two police

officers in an unmarked were following a van that had been reported stolen they stopped the vehicle and another volkswagen van which had also been stolen they had tried to arrest the occupants but one of them tried to run away while the other three were being frisked in the end one was dead shot by bommie bowman a former friend of and Andreas Bader and a leader in the 2nd of June movement. After more than a year and a half underground, and a year and a half mainly spent constructing and reconstructing a logistical system of cars, apartments, forged papers, as well as the necessary bank rates to finance it all, the RAF now planned to draw attention to its political aims with bomb attacks. Well, they certainly got enough stuff in the fucking mail. After the Berlin shooting incident, the BKA, this is the Federal Internal Security Force, stepped up interior security.

Knowing that the Red Army faction's main sources of income were from bank robberies, they instructed branches to reduce the amount of cash on hand that they held. But the RAF had developed a strategy of transforming the fresh new banknotes that they had stolen into quote-unquote used money, because at this point it was simply

too dangerous for them to exchange the fresh notes that they were raiding from banks because they would be too easily recognised. The banknot notes were rolled up, folded, refolded with dirty hands. In one apartment, That was probably easy for them. In one apartment,

members of the group scattered notes on the floor and walked about on them for several days in money boots. Now and then, they overdid it a little bit and tore the notes to pieces or left them scarcely recognizable anymore as valid currency. So just before Christmas 1971, Dirk Hoff, a metal sculptor, had a visitor to his metal workshop, which was well equipped for artistic and craftsman work. And I assume building bombs.

Hold on to that. God damn it. and craftsman work. And I assume building bombs. Hold on to that. God damn it. Three years earlier, in 1968,

he had met Holder Mines, then studying at the Berlin Film Academy in an acquaintance's junk shop and he had almost forgotten him.

But that December day, Holder Mines suddenly turned up in his workshop. He gave Hoff a friendly greeting, you know, gave him a hug,

a slap on the back. As if they were old acquaintances. At first Hoff didn't remember him at all. And asked him you know. Where was it we met? Oh everybody knows you. You're known all over town Hold Your Mind said. Hold Your Mind said.

He was currently working on a film project. Which needed some technical work done on it. If Hoff was interested he could done on it. If Hoff was interested he could have the job and Hoff agreed. Holder Mines came back to the workshop sometime later with another young man, Jan Karl Rasp, who he introduced as Lester. Holder Mines had not given his own name either but from conversations between the pair, Dirk Hoff gathered that he was called quote-unquote Erwin. So Jan Karl Rasp is going to be referred to as Lester, Holger Mines is going to be referred to as Erwin.

The three of them sat down on the upper floor of the two-story workshop and talked about hippies and the subculture. They smoked a little hash and Hoff showed them the pattern book illustrating several examples of his work, making many of these items resembling weapons. His two visitors seemed to think it was all very remarkable and offered Hoff the chance of making the props for their film. The project might be delayed a little bit, but meanwhile, because he could construct a piece of equipment for the extraction of hollow metal pins,

Holder Mines had brought an example with him and Hoff agreed to make six of them. In fact, the item was a device for removing locks and breaking into cars. So, a couple of days later, Holder Mines came back. He was just delighted with this device

and paid him 200 Deutschmarks. We're getting, we're gonna get on with the film now, he told Hoff. We can think about the props, said Erwin. Hoff asked what the film was about. It's kind of a revolutionary fiction,

Holder Mines replied. You couldn't find anything but rather primitive stuff in the usual props catalogs, he showed Hoff the upper part of a hand grenade with its metal frame sprayed sky blue. And Mines explained how

it should function and asked if he could make a version of the thing which would be rather more genuine and pack much more of a punch on screen. Hoff made a couple made, you know, 12 duplicates and was paid 500 Deutschmarks for them. This is the dumbest man on earth you you want me to build

a very convincing and powerful looking uh but fake hand grenade sure hey don't ask him look if you're a freelancer man i get it don't ask too many questions you got to pay your bills but sometimes it so sometimes like this person seems like a criminal. Yeah, don't ask Alec Baldwin to verify them. He'll verify it, alright. He'll verify the shit out of it. Within the group, Hoff would be further referred to as the name Peach. Aww, he's got a thick, juicy ass.

He got a great ass. On the 2nd of December 1971, at least four people raided the Facklestrasse branch of the mortgage and exchange bank in Kaiserlautern. They got away with around 100,000 Deutschmarks and about 35,000 Deutschmarks worth of foreign currency. To ensure the smooth running of the operation, helpers had blocked the entrance of the police station near the bank with cars they had stolen shortly before the raid. It's a powerful skill to steal your own car barricade. So in the last episode, I said, you know, I'm going to talk a little bit more about how they went about these bank raids. So this is how this one went along. Started at 8am, a red Volkswagen minibus

stopped outside the bank and everyone except for the driver in it was wearing a balaclava already pulled down over their face, showing only the eyes, not even the mouth. Oh, it's got a stink. The whole balaclava

just smells like old mouth. They were all uniformly dressed in green parkas. They stormed into the bank with their pistols already drawn immediately shouting this is a raid hands up over by the wall they would do this in every single raid one of them vaulted over the foreign currency counter and cleared it out while another one made for the main counter and stuffed money into his briefcase the bank teller was ordered to open the safe, all going according to plan, like usual. Meanwhile, out in the street, a police

officer just happened to be passing by, had noticed a red Volkswagen minibus parked outside the bank, contrary to traffic regulations. And a guy wearing a fucking baklava while driving! No, the driver wasn't wearing a baklava, it was literally just, oh, he's improperly parked,

I need to go over and say something to him to get him to move the van. Out German of him. Yeah. He went up to the passenger window and a shot was suddenly fired through from inside the vehicle. The policeman, Herbert Schoener, was injured by flying glass from the window on his throat and his face. The man in the driving seat fired a second shot, hit the policeman in the back.

Severely wounded, the officer collapsed, but as he fell, he raised his pistol and returned fire. He dragged himself into the bank and one of the bank robbers was crouching on the counter.

He fired at the policeman. God, that has to suck. Your cop just gets shot and you're like oh i have to crawl to safety and you crawl directly into the bank in the middle of a robbery yeah what are the fucking odds um forensic experts after after this say that it could have been any one of these three shots that killed him or a combination of all three without Without waiting for the safe to be opened, they all fucked off, leaving behind them a lady's handbag that had a cassette recorder in it, which they had placed

on the table, switched on. They jumped into the minibus and raced away. Next morning, 23rd of December, 1971, the Bild Zetung came out with the headline, Badr Meinhof strikes again bank raid, policeman shot so what you're seeing is like a real escalation and everything like things are like really really picking up and by January 1972 the political pressure to do something about the group was now at an all-time high

the prime ministers of West Germany under Willy Brandt the federal chancellor adopted sanctions against the members of the German Communist Party in order to prevent contamination within the government and the hunt for the RAF. It said, quote, If a candidate belongs to an organization which pursues aims that are at odds with the constitution, that membership is grounds for doubting whether he will always support the basic principles of the democracy as a rule these doubts will justify rejection of the application for a post was there any kind of a real connection between the communist party and the raf because the raf seems quite small there there was some like like you know people sending those packages they were receiving support from a lot of

different areas and they're they could have sent some something to them so the state were just kind of no we're not dealing with any of you on the 12th of february 1972 eight red army faction members stormed the ludwig schaffen branch of the mortgage bank and got away with 285 000 deutschmarks and they were disguised with carnival masks well it's good it's good that they're playing with their fashion you know yeah they really said oh this time let's do a silly one you guys are stupid they're gonna be looking like they're gonna be looking for people dressed like revolutionaries at the same time hoff cod codenamed Peach, was given more work to do. He was asked to

create casings that could be fitted into a vest. There was a scene in the film in which a woman was going to plant an explosive device in a lavatory, where she would unfasten it from her belt and place it under her clothing with an inflatable balloon.

Okay. Peach is a fucking moron hoff made the improvised girdle and when he showed it to erwin and lester the two took turns uh putting it on and walking around imitating a pregnant woman laughing so you just have these two dudes walking around like oh my back hurts feet are swollen. All while holding a bomb carrier. Yeah. So, next he was asked to modify a shotgun, which had already been sawed off on both the...

Is it the hilt? That would be a sword. No, what's the thing that goes against your shoulder? Bloodstock. Okay. Next he was asked to modify a shotgun, which had already been sawed off on the barrel and the stock, next he was asked to modify a shotgun, which had already been sawed off on the barrel and the stock, and he turned it essentially into a self-loading machine gun that fired buckshot.

Because they absolutely need this for a movie, right? Yeah. This is just like me filing my taxes, saying like, yeah, I totally need this stuff for my job. Hough was uneasy with his creation you think you know sometimes you know you just don't ask questions you just get on with it look i can kind of get everything up to illegally modifying a very real firearm that one's too obvious it's a prop you know it it's just a prop it's just toy. It's a prop that fires live shotgun ammunition.

We're going to use this for a film in the future called Dust. Yeah, he was uneasy, but he continued to work on everything. Fully believing it was used for props. I would say that too if the cops were asking. Finally, they asked him to

screw detonators onto casings of hand grenades he was a specialist and despite his own objections they convinced him to do it since he had the technical skills and you know the delicate hands to do it and not blow them all to smithereens hoff refused and went into the next room. Then Hold Your Minds undertook the dangerous job himself. And you know, Hoff was surprised when he came back in at how well he could handle the tools. Not a single one of the detonators went off.

Don't worry guys, I got this. So a little later, Hoff had another visitor. He was working and he heard the men's voices in the backyard as they approached the workshop. He thought it could be any of the people who had just visited him, who had Hitherow acted quiet and generally a little bit suspiciously. So when he opened the door to let Irwin and Lester in, they had another man with them. The third man had hair dyed,

and Lester in, they had another man with them. The third man had hair dyed, a pale blonde, and wore a red winter coat. He was not introduced to Deer Cough, and without saying a word, he walked straight past him and into the workshop. He looked at all of the machinery, stopped, nodded, and went into the next room and looked at the lathe. While the strange man inspected his workshop, Deer Cough stood there with a weird, awkward feeling. It was if, you know,

he had his boss checking on him. I think I may have accidentally given my metalworking facility to a terrorist group. After around about half an hour and a few words, the all three of them left. Do you want to know who the strange man was?

Was it Andreas Botter? Yep. Andreas Botter, whose hair was dyed blonde at this stage. Of course. He's a graduate to stealing an entire factory. Yeah. So by April, the group had been busy building up their arsenal for coming operations.

Dirk Hoff was, you know, making a lot of work cutting sections of metal pipes that could be used for casings. Gerhard Mueller had spent the past few weeks in various cities buying several hundred kilos of chemicals such as

red lead, aluminium, ammonium nitrate, potassium nitrate, potassium chloride, sulphur, charcoal, wood meal, glycerin, iron oxide, and different acids.

He was also sourcing timers, batteries, and wires. Totally props. Yeah, you need all these to make a very convincing movie. Yeah. See, this is, you know, CGI has gotten rid of all the hard work that goes into practical effects that is needed, you know, to make something look real on screen. We're talking about Kino, baby.

to make something look real on screen. We're talking about Kino, baby. So the group were planning on making as many different types of bombs as possible in order to confuse authorities. That would work. Do you want to know how they process all of this material? I'm going to assume

in an incredibly dangerous and irresponsible way. Yeah, using coffee grinders. Cool. Well done, boys. So, yeah, they broke down the bigger compounds in an apartment with coffee grinders. The process was slow and really laborious because the mills could only grind small amounts at the time. They tried using a bigger grinder but just found that it wore out even quicker bear in mind when they're grinding the stuff the dust from

it is everywhere covered in explosive compounds at all times yeah so andreas batter put like all of the coffee mills in buckets in order to like stop the dust going everywhere. Everybody's getting the black lung but from constructing bombs in a small apartment. Yeah. So by the end of this process guess how much explosive materials they had? Probably less than they thought they would. 1200 kilos.

Holy fucking shit. And they used household funnels to like, you know, pour it into the bomb casings. And, well, they left the casings because, you know, safety first, you know, you want to be OSHA safe. The RAF OSHA office is going to have their ass.

They left them without the, you know, electric ignition systems just to be safe. Now, in May 1972, the American Air Force began mining and bombing harbours in North Vietnam. This was the catalyzing event for what was to come. On the 11th of May 1972, between 6.59 and 7.02pm, three pipe bombs blew up the entrance and officers' mess of the 5th US Army Corps station in Frankfurt. 13 people were injured and one person died. The RAF's declaration of responsibility was signed, the Petra Schlem Commando, and said,

West Germany and West Berlin will no longer be a safe hinterland for the strategists of extermination in Vietnam. They must know that their crimes against the Vietnamese people have made them new and bitter enemies, that there will be nowhere in the world left where they can be safe from the attacks of the revolutionary guerrilla units. On the 12th of May, soon, a little bit after half 12pm, two explosive devices made from steel piping went off in two office cabinets in the Augsburg police headquarters. Five policemen were injured. Two hours after the Augsburg explosion, a Ford 21M loaded with explosives blew up in the car park of the munich regional criminal investigations office 60 cars were demolished windows were shattered on six floors on the 15th of may 1972 at 20 to 1 that's 12 40 pm a red a red volkswagen exploded in Karlsruhe in the closest Strasse.

It belonged to the federal judge Budenberg, but his wife was at the wheel. And on the 19th of May 1972, at about 3pm, a telephonist in the Springer building in Hamburg, this is the right-wing publishing group, a telephonist took a call. The voice on the other side of the line said, a bomb will go off in the building in five minutes time. Do you want to know what she did? Hung up? Yeah, she ignored it.

The woman didn't, she didn't take it seriously. You know, calls like this were really common at Springer headquarters so it was just like, it's another one of these weirdos. We got another bomb threat over here. Ha ha ha ha ha. You know,

she engaged the caller in conversation and hung up. They rang again. You swine. You never take anything seriously, said the man. She hung up again. The telephonist took a few more calls, you know, and then told the administrative office of the Springer building about the bomb threat.

They were kind of like, it's another bomb threat. Meanwhile, another call had come in and was taken by one of her colleagues. Once again, it was the same man, though in a rather, it was a man's voice, though rather high one saying, so I was like, a bomb will go off in five minutes time so like jordan peterson rang it in bomb will go off in five minutes time you're you guys are not taking me seriously enough imagine how exasperated this fucking terrorist has to be like guys i'm trying to fucking warn you get out of the bill for the love of god jordan peterson batter meinhof you need to throw off your chains the german state is fascist you've invented a new worst form of jordan peterson one who actually does something other

than post online yeah just but like you know jordan peterson probably would have very much enjoyed being a left-wing revolutionary in the 70s because you can take like all of the opiates you want and it's not a big deal and not uh i mean benzos are more his thing but at the same time he'd been a huge fan of raf because they had like a weird no sex policy it's like i'm listening please go on is there milking is there human milking in the RAF your Peterson voice is really good I unfortunately have done it

a lot over the last couple years so Jordan Peterson on the other end of the phone was furious cleared the building at once and then she hung up and uh one of her colleagues asked was it that crazy man again the phone uh rang again was like you bloody you bloody swine you bloody swine then the caller on the other end hung up their patience is wearing thin i've called in so many bomb threats to this fucking building

and they're not listening to me. Nobody ever listens to me. So then the first bomb exploded in the proofreading room. There was 15 proofreaders working there. Most of them suffered injuries. Soon afterwards, two other bombs hidden in the toilets went off and all 17 people were injured, two of them seriously. Okay, I'm not laughing at the people are injured two of them seriously okay i'm not i'm not laughing

at the uh at the people being injured of course it's terrible but the idea that like no we have to sequentially blow up all of their toilets you're really like taking blowing up the bathroom way too seriously it's the the tried and true like 80s teen comedy prank of lighting uh like a firework and dropping it in the toilet at school except you know 17 people are wounded they just fed andreas baller like 1500 deutschmarks of taco bell and somehow snuck him into the bathroom we will always remember you as a as our crunch wrap supreme martyr. Taco Bell Juche. So the next day, another anonymous caller

rang. There were more bombs in the building and the police are all fools. They're looking in the wrong places. And to be fair, the police did find three more bombs in the building. How the fuck did they get so many bombs in this place? One near the printing presses, one in the building. How the fuck did they get so many bombs in this place? One near

the printing presses, one in the management offices, and one in a cupboard containing cleaning materials. The bombs were all disposed of. Two days later, a letter was sent to the German press agency. Springer would rather see his workers and clerical

staff injured by bombs than risk losing a few hours working time which means profit over a false alarm to capitalists profit is everything and the people who create it are dirt we are deeply upset to hear that workers and clerical staff were injured look i'm not saying i disagree with the core tenets of what they're saying here what I'm saying here is this is the fault of a shitty secretary on the 24th of May at 6.10pm

10 past 6, two car bombs went off within 15 seconds of each other outside barracks block 28 and at the mess of the European headquarters of the US Army in Heidelberg three were killed in the attack and like this like this bomb is that's a big fucking deal it's so gruesome as well it

blew like it collapsed you know parts of the building people were like trying to get out but the doors had like essentially been like blown shut and the glass was shattered out and like they had to climb out over the broken glass and the door so they were like completely sliced up there was one soldier who one of the ones who died was crushed to death

by a coca-cola machine god that's fucking horrible way to go it's gotta be pepsi coca-cola blood I can only like that's fucking horrible way to go it's got to be pepsi coca-cola blood i i can only like that's fucking terrible man and like they are once again spilling coca-cola blood imagine like man thank god i'm stationed in germany i didn't get sent to vietnam and your barracks building shakes oh no the the most like gruesome one was a dude who so so a lot of the immediate stuff was reported by a German ambulance driver who was nearby

and saw the bombs go off. He said there was one soldier who had essentially had all the skin on his face peeled off and was essentially scalped by the explosive force of the bomb. Good God. Yeah. So, five days after the

Heidelberg attack, all of the leaders of the Regional Special Commissions Committee Special Commissions Committee Good God. entire police force were placed under the command of the federal criminal investigations office for a single day and they were given the go-ahead yeah on the 31st of may 1972 operation water splash was undertaken and water splash so was someone like using the urinal and accidentally splashed it the wrong way like i have an. You know that all of these operations, 99% of the time, have dumb names. That's true. So, 31st of May, all available helicopters in the public service

in West Germany were all in the air. Each had a group of police officers on board. They flew over the motorways, coming down briefly at junctions to set up roadblocks, stop all vehicles, and check up on their drivers. Then the officers took to their helicopters again, flew a little further, set up another roadblock. This caused absolute traffic chaos.

I can imagine they shut down like every fucking highway in a country. Yep. So, didn't work. They didn't find them but even before operation water splash the bka had received a tip-off from a frankfurt residence on some suspicious activity going on in a garage nearby and the police then went and scoped it out saw there were buckets filled with a lot of like you know gray powder and one evening they snuck in after dark and took samples of it for testing and it confirmed their suspicions that it was explosive material they returned the buckets that they had taken

the following night and set up surveillance for the garage or garage i said fucking garage you're assimilating but only for the podcast on the 1st of june 1972 the day after operation water splash at 5 50 a.m the officers noticed three men driving a purple colored porsche driving the wrong way up a one-way street and they eventually arrived at the garage where they had they where they all left the car and went inside the third man young carasp, stayed outside on guard. Two police officers from the surveillance squad approached in their car, and through their side window,

they told Rasp to stay where he was. Rasp put his hand in his right pocket and drew a pistol. He just rolled down their window and yelled at them? Yeah. So, at this moment, two more policemen came running up from the adjoining street

young carl rasp ran a few meters towards them fired from a distance of about 28 meters one of the officers threw themselves behind a parked car

and the other one dived into into the car for safety rasp ran on past the buildings making for a garden where chief

superintendent eargal cornered him raspass put up no resistance on being arrested and a nine millimeter parabellum was found on him four months later a school boy discovered a smith and wesson revolver in the garden earth that young carl rasp had buried uh just before he was arrested so he was running towards where he had buried the second gun he was going to try and John Wick, Max Payne

himself out of the situation. Little known fact, urban gorillas actually have bullet time. You're just activating dead eye. All the X's just appear on everyone. So when Badr and

Mayans heard the gunshots, they were they went to the door to see what was going on. When Mayans poked his head outside the door, a police officer 15 meters away was pointing a submachine gun directly at his head, telling him to go back inside. The police then pushed a car in

front of the door in order to blockade the pair inside. Badr fired through the closed right hand side of the garage door order to blockade the pair inside father fired through the club through the closed right hand side of the garage door but no one was hit soon reinforcements arrived and began knocking the glass out of the windows and setting up sniper positions this is a building literally just full of explosives we're gonna get there just literal buckets of explosives lying around well this is kind of funny so one officer that could see into the garage had to report what he saw,

and everyone was expecting them to be freaking out, you know, like, oh, shit, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? What he saw was the two of them, surprisingly calm, smoking cigarettes, laughing and joking,

and occasionally pointing their pistols towards the police. What the fuck? Just having a laugh with the boys. Yeah. So tear gas was thrown in through the open windows that had been broken out. And over a loudspeaker, they were told to surrender and they would not be hurt. They threw explosives into a house full of explosives. So throw your pistols and your other weapons out into the yard.

Put your hands up and come out one by one and you won't be hurt. We have more patients than you won't be hurt. We have more patience than you do, much more, and we're in a better situation. We have stronger forces at our disposal. They are on their way. They're so strong that you have no chance left, so come out. What do you think you're doing, skulking

in there? What do you think the two of them did at this point? I imagine they wrote some letter back shit talking to them or something because i don't see how they can get out of this exactly this is the only time i'm gonna be like you know what andreus bother's really cool um bother and mines pushed open one side of the door against the audi the police you know thinking that they're about to surrender pull the car away with a rope uh after that, the garage door was a little bit more open

and open a little bit more wider from the inside so that the tear gas could drift out. Andreas Batter began throwing the tear gas grenades back out. Hey, anybody who's ever been in a protest knows what he's doing. He was standing near the front of the garage on the right, leaning against the metallic sports car parked there. And in one hand, he had his revolver.

And in the right hand, he had a cigarette. This guy is never not smoking. Like, that is just so cool. Like, throwing tear gas grenades back out at the police while smoking at the same time with a gun. The man knows his priorities. It's like the thing, you know, if you break off cigarette filters and shove them up your nose then, you know, and you cover your eyes

tear gas really can't do a whole lot. I mean, it's very unpleasant regardless. I don't recommend anybody does that. So, at 7.45 the order was called out to go in. The police tried to unsuccessfully

ram the doors closed in order to make the tear gas work better. It didn't work. Andreas Batter instead aimed his gun at the police and started shooting and the wind which began to pick up at this time started blowing the tear gas into the police's eyes.

So they were forced to momentarily retreat back a little bit. But then they slowly moved their cordon closer and closer to the garage and some officers moved to a third floor observation post where a sniper took aim and the and batter and mines were given one last warning to which they told them to fuck off and then the sniper obliterated

andreas batter's thigh with a single shot ending the siege that'll do it oh no my legs my doctor told me not to get shot in them yeah now once again they were told you know to get shot in them. Yeah. Now, once again, they were told, you know, to just come out and surrender and throw their guns out.

Holger Malins came out of the garage with his hands up. He was ordered to stay where he was, strip to his underpants, and come out to the exit of the yard. There was already cameras and media waiting, and the pictures of the skinny, almost emaciated, naked figure of Hold Your Minds went around the world instantly.

Red Army faction sympathizers and those close to them were reminded of the pictures of concentration camp inmates. The myth of the pitiless persecution of the Red Army faction warriors was born now batter on the other hand was on the floor of the garage with a shattered thigh still holding his pistol and a cigarette he's i'll have to put a cigarette in this wound that's the only thing i know how to do so um he was stretchered out by the police brought to an ambulance all the while thrashing and screaming at the police, calling them swine. I mean, that's more than I'd be saying at that moment. I would just be mostly screaming in unimaginable pain. With this, two members of the Red Army faction were now in custody. On the 7th of June, exactly a week after Andreas Bader's arrest, the manager of a boutique in Hamburg was standing by

the cash desk when a young woman came into the shop. She was wearing a red sweater, had curly shoulder-length hair and was very very thin. The manager looked hard at the woman who replied with a smile. She didn't really seem that well. The manager was kind of worried about her and she took off her jacket and asked to see several sweaters. Another customer had been trying on 10 or 15 pairs of trousers in the shop and left them scattered on the couch. The manager went to put the trousers

back where they'd come from and in doing so, she noticed the blue-grey leather jacket that was owned by the shopper and was about to clear that away too to hang it up, you know, get it nice and out of the way and tidy.

But the jacket kind of struck her as like unusually heavy. And she felt it. She felt one of the pockets and turned to her colleague in the shop and said, I think there's a gun in there. And they both kind of, you know, chuckled a little bit. But one of them put their hand inside the jacket and pulled out the gun. So they called the police and with that a very very stressed out Gudrun Ensling was arrested by police. He was defeated by shopkeepers. So now there is three of the four main people of the Red Army faction in prison. And this is the end

of our part three, but there's one little thing that I want you to hear. Remember when you said about you could probably tell when something was written by Andreas Bader? Yes. So, on the 7th of August 1972, police officers

searched a hideout in Stuttgart, and the detective superintendent wrote an official report, and it reads as follows. Regarding hunt for violent anarchist criminals, subject conspirators apartment at 71 Seed and Strasser. Attached. Two Mickey Mouse comic books.

The attached Mickey Mouse comic books were found in the above-mentioned apartment. There are good grounds for suspecting that these Mickey Mouse books were read by the gang member Andreas Batter. He was just chilling out reading Mickey Mouse comic books. Yeah. Whom's among us? Bomb the barracks! Ho ho! Ho ho! You need to kill the American Imperials. Ho ho! And with that, we end

part three of the RAF series. They're in prison. There's gonna be a lot of prison talk in the fourth episode. I don't even know where to begin on this one, other than it is exceedingly hilarious that a member

of a revolutionary group is defeated by a clothing shop like cashier yeah like at this stage they were just you know exhausted after a year and a half underground now bear in mind this is 1972 there is probably another six or seven years that we need to cover in part four but But if any of you are familiar with this story, the majority of this concerns a lot of court stuff, which we're going to be, you know, trying to condense in order to not make the episode like four hours long. Joe, what do you think about the Red Army faction now,

since you didn't know anything about them in part one? It's kind of shocking how successful they were you know they they they were incredibly i mean of course defining in your definition of successful there's their goal was to kill agents of the of the state both west german and american and they certainly succeeded at doing that and they managed to do it in the dumbest way possible it's like the kind of thing that could only exist in the 70s yeah it's real failing upwards energy

they get mailed fucking assault rifles and shit they get the world dumbest prop guy to build them bombs yeah it's the kind of like I said it's the kind of stuff that's definitely a product of it's time it's kind of like how Carlos the Jackal couldn't exist today.

But, yep, if you enjoyed this episode and you want to hear more, listen back to our other episodes. A lot of them have me and Joe on it. If you want to hear more of me, listen to Beneath the Skin. It's the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. I don't monologue as much in that show as i do on this one and uh joe plug your books plug your show that i am hosting right now if well if you like what we do here on the

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