The Baader-Meinhof gang, the first underground urban guerrilla movement in West Germany, has achieved phenomenal notoriety throughout Europe and has been cited for complicity in acts of international terrorism by governments throughout the world. The sensational trial of its leaders for crimes including murder, bank robbery, bombing, and criminal conspiracy has become a continental cause célèbre. Much of the liberal and leftist press has been sympathetic to the Baader-Meinhof claims of exclusively political motivation. And no less a personage than Jean-Paul Sartre has made a highly publicized visit to Andreas Baader in prison. Since they banded together in 1970, members of the Baader-Meinhof gang have participated in the bombing of the West German embassy in Stockholm, the kidnapping of political leader Peter Lorenz, and the skyjacking that led to the Israeli commando raid on Entebbe airport. Baader-Meinhof member Wilfried Bose, one of the two young German hijackers, claimed that he was holding nearly one hundred innocent Israelis hostage to advance the Marxist revolution. "I am not a Nazi. I am an idealist," he reportedly told a concentration-camp survivor at Entebbe. Under the circumstances, it was difficult for his critic to discern the distinction. From its earliest days, when it e·merged as an extremist outgrowth of the student protest movement, the Baader-Meinhof gang has been savaged by the conservative press, venerated by the radical young, and coddled by the Radical Chic. Many have viewed Ulrike Meinhof s prison suicide as martyrdom. Fewer, it may be- hoped, viewed Wilfried Bose's subsequent death at Entebbe in the same light.
In this scrupulously researched book, Jillian Becker reveals the full story of the Baader-Meinhof urban guerrillas. Hitler's Children is at once a history of a contemporary underground movement, an analysis of the actual and probable ramifications of that movement, and a psychobiography of three urban revolutionaries.
While the reader is left to draw his own conclusions about the macho nihilist Andreas Baader, his fanatical lover Gudrun Ensslin, and the talented, earnest, but insecure and attention-seeking Ulrike Meinhof, the considerable evidence Becker amasses makes it clear that in the final analysis these glamorized outlaws and their followers have done more to stigmatize radical politics than to advance its causes.
Jillian Becker grew up in South Africa and now lives in London, where she is considered the leading authority on the BaaderMeinhof Gang. Her three novels have been well received in England. Hitler's Children is her first work of nonfiction.