In the 1970s, the radical leftwing German terrorist organisation may have spread fear through public acts of violence – but its inner workings were characterised by vanity and incompetence
In the summer of 1970, a group of aspirant revolutionaries arrived in Jordan from West Germany. They sought military training though they had barely handled weapons before. They sought a guerrilla war in the streets of Europe, but had never done anything more than light a fire in a deserted department store. They sought the spurious glamour that spending time with a Palestinian armed group could confer. Above all, they sought a safe place where they could hide and plan.
Some of the group had flown to Beirut on a direct flight from communist-run East Berlin. The better known members – Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent leftwing journalist, and two convicted arsonists called Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader – had faced a more complicated journey. First, they’d had to cross into East Germany, then they took a train to Prague, where they boarded a plane to Lebanon. From Beirut, a taxi took them east across the mountains into Syria. Finally, they drove south from Damascus into Jordan.
