While Dutschke was being operated on in the hospital, his followers in the SDS, assuming that he was dead, held an emergency meeting to determine how to respond. Although they knew nothing about his assailant, they were unanimous in concluding that the true guilty party was the Springer Verlag. “Murderer! Springer—Murderer! Springer out of West Berlin! Bildzeitung also pulled the trigger!” shouted the students. After a short discussion they decided to lay siege to the Springer press building in the Kochstrasse in order to prevent any newspapers from being distributed. That evening over 1,000 students set off down the Strasse des 17. Juni in the direction of the Springer complex. On the way they smashed windows in the Amerika Haus, since in their eyes Washington had also helped to point Bachmann’s pistol at Rudi. Upon reaching the press house they found it ringed with police and barbed wire. At first the students did nothing but chant slogans and throw rocks at the gold-tinted windows. Suddenly, a young man named Peter Urbach proposed torching the Springer garage with Molotov cocktails, a supply of which he happened to have with him. The students readily agreed, and soon several delivery trucks were burning. Rudi was revenged! What the firebombers did not know was that their cocktail-supplier was an agent provocateur employed by the BfV.
In the 1970s West Berlin also made headlines as the birthplace and nerve center of political terrorism in the Federal Republic. Newspapers across the country called it the “Hochburg der K-Gruppen”—capital of the Marxist-Leninist fringe groups. Klaus Hübner, West Berlin’s new chief of police, warned in 1969 that the city was about to be inundated by “a wave of terrorism” resulting from the “failed revolution” of the 1960s.
West Berlin’s terrorist scene did in fact grow out of the failures of the student protest movement. A number of figures associated with the antiwar demonstrations of the late 1960s decided to declare their own private war on a society they considered hopelessly corrupt. Ulrike Meinhof, a pastor’s daughter who covered West Berlin for the Hamburg-based radical journal Konkret, described her transition from “protester” to “resister” as follows: “Protest is when I say that I don’t like a certain state of affairs; resistance is when I say that said state of affairs can no longer be allowed to exist.” In 1970 Meinhof came in contact with two other self-appointed “resisters,” Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, who had gone underground in West Berlin after setting fire to a department store in Frankfurt. Baader, born in 1944 in Munich, moved to Berlin at the age of twenty to evade the draft. His mother supported him while he studied art and dabbled in journalism. Although a fixture in Berlin’s bohemian scene, he dressed like a high-priced gigolo, favoring silk shirts, Italian shoes, and close-fitting pants. In 1965 he had a child with the wife of his best friend. He seems to have drifted into the radical protest movement less out of conviction than out of a desire for adventure and self-dramatization. Ensslin, like Meinhof a pastor’s daughter, had studied German and English at the Free University. For her the epiphany that started her down the road to radical violence was the death of Benno Ohnesorg in 1967. She proclaimed on that occasion: “They’ll kill us all—you know what kind of pigs we are up against—that is the generation of Auschwitz we’ve got against us—you can’t argue with people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we don’t. We must arm ourselves.” She fell in love with the dashing Baader, abandoned a son she had had with a previous lover, and joined Baader and Meinhof in their neoromantic quest to right the world of its capitalist wrongs.
Baader was captured in West Berlin in April 1970 and jailed at Tegel Prison. Claiming that he needed to conduct research for a book on the “organization of young people on the fringes of society,” he received permission to visit a library in Dahlem under guard. Soon after he arrived at the library, Meinhof and three accomplices freed him under a hail of gunfire, seriously injuring an elderly librarian. The date, May 14, 1970, is generally considered the birthday of the so-called Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), which, with various related and successor criminal bands, managed to hold the entire country in terror for almost two decades.
