2002 3AM Magazine interview with Richard Huffman

3AM/Andrew Stevens I suppose I should begin by asking: why Baader-Meinhof? What inspired you to put together this site and sit down to write a book on the subject?

Richard Huffman Until about 1996 I was completely unaware of the Baader-Meinhof Gang or left-wing European terrorism for that matter. I was having lunch with my dad and he disparaged in a passing comment the bomb squad efforts of the FBI. I was surprised to say the least; what would my dad know about effective bomb disposal? He told me that when our family was stationed in Berlin in the early 70s he was the head of the US Army’s Berlin Brigade bomb disposal unit and he had defused about six or seven bombs of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

I wasn’t sure what to make of my dad’s story; so I checked out some books from my university library. Slowly I began to realise that it was all true; the US Army picked the right guy when they hired my dad, he had never really told me or anyone in his family about what he had done in Berlin. My mom knew, but she never realized what a big deal it was or how dangerous it was until I talked to her about it in 1997. So this revelation got me interested in the subject. I think the fact that my dad seems to completely not care that some of these bombs were directly targeted at him was influential in my attempts to cover this subject as fairly and objectively as possible. After a few months of research I began to realise that the bombs he defused were almost certainly from the Movement 2 June, who were somewhat friendly with the Baader Meinhof Gang, but the bombs weren’t actually Baader-Meinhof Gang bombs.

Quickly my research became my senior project at the University of Washington-Bothell. While working on my research, I bemoaned the lack of information about the Baader-Meinhof Gang on the Internet and the general inaccuracies of the information. The unfortunate reality of the information available was that it only seemed to come in two flavors:
1) Baader-Meinhof and the other revolutionary groups were glorious martyrs for a good cause, and 2) Baader-Meinhof and the other terrorist groups were pure evil, probably controlled from Moscow. I felt that the net would benefit from a site that tried to be as factual as possible, and refrain from too much editorialising.

3AM/Andrew Stevens On that note, why do you think there was a dearth of objective journalistic or academic information sources on Baader-Meinhof?

Richard Huffman At the time I originally created the site there wasn’t a single comprehensive source of information about the Baader-Meinhof Gang and what WAS out there was almost uniformly, somewhat comically, slanted. A good bellwether for me was seeing how a site treated the deaths of Ulrike Meinhof in 1976 and the deaths of Jan-Carl Raspe, Andreas Baader, and Gudrun Ensslin in 1977. Pretty much it’s a given that if you’re leftist or radical you believe that they were murdered by the state in their prison cells. It’s also pretty much a given if you are mainstream or conservative you believe that they committed suicide. I personally believe that the facts demonstrate that it is an almost certainty that the deaths were suicide; the greatest achievement of Stefan Aust’s Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex was his demonstration that the deaths were likely suicides. (Aust was a friend of Meinhof’s who followed her as editor of the lefty political journal Konkret and later became the editor of Der Spiegel.)

What frustrated me was sites that seemed to use these ‘murders’ as the centerpiece for their arguments about the ‘fascist state’ etc. Generally, they wouldn’t even acknowledge the possibility of other explanations because, it seemed, they didn’t fit into their overall thesis. The same applied to more conservative sites that would dismissively refer to the suicides without even acknowledging why the suicides seemed so unlikely to so many people (the German government had spent years emphasizing how Stammheim prison was the most secure prison in the world and then people were asked to believe that the terrorists had managed to smuggle not one but TWO guns into the prison, with which they committed suicide.)

It seemed to me that the controversy surrounding the deaths was as important to discuss, or at least acknowledge, as the deaths themselves. And in fact to NOT acknowledge the centrality of the controversy is an indicator of the bias of the source. I’m not trying to say I’m not biased; everybody is biased. I have just tried to explore the German terrorist era from a sociological perspective and not from my own political perspective.

But ultimately the major reason I put the site up was because like a lot of subjects in the early years of the Internet, it was woefully unexplored on-line and I felt I had the chance to create the definite source. Nowadays if you type “Andreas Baader” into a Google search, you will get 49,000 pages returned to you. I can still remember my very first Alta Vista web search in 1996 which turned up just 14 references!

3AM/Andrew Stevens Of late, there has been a resurgence of interest in Baader-Meinhof — some of it through the whole ‘Prada Meinhof’/terror chic exploitation by the fashion industry, others through nostalgia — what do you make of this as an author dealing with the historical and sociological context of the gang itself? Is there anything you’ve come across in your research to explain this fascination and retreat into nostalgia?

Richard Huffman Prada-Meinhof and other manifestations of the recent resurgence in “coolness” of the Baader-Meinhof Gang troubles me somewhat, but it also offers a sort of odd proof that Germany has clearly moved beyond that era.

Baader-Meinhof was always a cool and hip reference point. The ‘Wanted’ poster with Meinhof in her Ray Ban Wayfarers; the crushed velvet pants that Baader wore; the group was in many ways hip personified. I argue on my web site (with admittedly little proof!) that the Baader-Meinhof Gang’s supposed preference for the BWM 2002 models (thus earning them the common nickname “Baader-Meinhof Wagen”) was a significant reason that BMW emerged from the their late 60s doldrums as an almost bankrupt, dowdy car maker, into the hip carmaker of the 70s and 80s. The cars didn’t change that much, but the perception of them did; helped to a certain degree by the association with the notorious yet hip outlaws.

The recent wave of nostalgia began about five years ago in conjunction with several anniversaries of events from that era. June 2 1997 marked the 30th anniversary of the killing of Benno Ohnesorg, whose death at the hands of Berlin police created a martyr for the movement. September and October of 1997 marked the 20th anniversary of the “German Autumn” which saw the kidnapping of a prominent German industrialist, the hijacking of a German plane (and eventual rescue of all the passengers), and the suicides of the imprisoned leadership of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. There were TV specials, magazine covers, and whole reams of books printed. Then, in early 1998, the last lingering remnants of the Red Army Faction (the true name of the Baader-Meinhof Gang), issued a communiqué officially dissolving themselves.

All of these demonstrated pretty clearly that the era was over. That’s when a lot of the pop culture references began to crop up. In many ways I find them extremely sick. I think of the four-year old American boy who watched as authorities piled up parts of his dad’s body into pillowcases at the Heidelberg Army base where the Baader-Meinhof Gang had set off two car bombs. I’ve spoken with family members of victims and it is hard for me to put that out of my mind when presented with a hip Baader-Meinhof reference.

I’ve had many, MANY people ask for me to sell on my site copies of the famous Wanted posters, bumper stickers, etc. It seems to me inappropriate, but then again I have a big copy of the poster right on the wall in my office; who am I to judge myself better than others? I recently e-mailed a copy of the poster to a guy in the UK who is silk-screening the image onto his motorcycle. It seemed relatively harmless…

Ultimately the whole “Prada-Meinhof” phenomenon is probably a good thing, because it shows that people are so far removed from the era that the iconography has become just a hip commodity. I seriously doubt that any woman buying a “Prada-Meinhof” shirt thinks terrorism is cool; in fact I seriously doubt that this woman has done much thinking about the issue at all. That couldn’t have happened in the 70s, 80s, or very early 90s, when Germany was still very much terrorised.

3AM/Andrew Stevens There is, of course, a school of thought that Baader-Meinhof, in comparison to the deaths incurred at the hands of the West during that period of the Cold War, killed few people, and some of those they did kill had in fact committed war crimes. How do you respond to this? Similarly, some have argued that it was an essential cathartic process for the German psyche for it to come to terms with its role in WW2, partition as East and West, and the continued presence of NATO in West Germany.

Richard Huffman When the RAF disbanded in April of 1998, their communiqué ended by listing the 26 members who had been killed since 1970. Left out of that communiqué were the 25 or so victims. Mostly their victims were either individuals carefully selected for their ties to the state, or they were US Army personnel, who were not typically selected individually, but happened to be in the radius of a bomb explosion.

For the Red Army Faction, these victims were all combatants in their war. Cops that were killed were representatives of the state. Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the industrialist they kidnapped and later killed in 1977, was a former Nazi; an important distinction to the group. In comparison to the level of suffering brought at the hands of America in Vietnam, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, and other places during the cold war, the suffering caused by the Baader-Meinhof Gang was relatively slight. I think putting the actions of the gang members in the context of the Cold War is the ONLY way to understand their actions. It doesn’t excuse murder though, just as the brinksmanship of the Cold War doesn’t excuse the deaths of 50,000 Guatemalans or 1,000,000 Vietnamese at the hands of the United States.

Immediately prior to serving in Berlin, my dad ran the largest ammunition dump in the world, just outside of Saigon. 95% of all ordnance and ammunition used in Vietnam in the year from around March of 1969 to March of 1970 passed through my Dad’s hands. You could argue that the blood of around 150,000 Vietnamese is on my father’s hands. Had the bomb that was set to kill him in Berlin’s Templehof airport been successful, you could argue that he was a victim of the Vietnam War. And I probably wouldn’t have argued with that. It doesn’t justify their actions, but it goes a long way to explaining them. It’s interesting to note that the group received a lot of flak from leftists and even other European terror groups for an early 80s incident in which one of the female members of the group enticed an American servicemen with promises of companionship, only to kill him for his ID card (which was used to enter his base and plant bombs). The major argument of the leftists and other groups was that they shouldn’t have killed him; he could have been tied up and released; it was an unnecessary killing which was bad for the movement. I personally think you could have made a similar argument for all of their attacks though. I also find it baffling that some methods of killing were considered good and some evil, and somehow this particular killing had crossed the line.

Unfortunately for the Baader-Meinhof Gang, their war on the United States, capitalism, and the fascist underbelly of the West German state had absolutely no favourable impact in the way that they had hoped. They didn’t usher in a revolution. But they did fundamentally change German society and, for better or for worse, helped West Germany shake off the remnants of World War II and mature as a nation. One of the reasons that the Baader-Meinhof Gang was so successful in eluding the police in the early 1970s was that Germany was essentially structured as a very loose confederation of states, with no real national police force and little cooperation between the states. It was very much akin to the United States in the 1920s, prior to the advent of the FBI. The Baader-Meinhof Gang was the driving force behind the rapid expansion of the BKA, which until then had only served as essentially border patrol for Germany. Afterwards they had broad powers throughout the states. Germany also passed broad new anti-terrorist laws, which just like in the United States now, were mostly used against left-leaning undesirables and not terrorists.

3AM/Andrew Stevens The experiences and role played by your father clearly brought about your interest in Baader-Meinhof, do you think the possibility of his fatality could have had any effect on your stated desire to be objective and balanced in your writing?

Richard Huffman Totally. I would have been a completely different person. Of the families of victims that I’ve talked to, many of these people’s lives have become defined by the deaths of their parents; I doubt that I would have been any different. But the fact that my father doesn’t seem to particularly care about these people that tried to kill him — or more accurately the fact that he doesn’t spend any time thinking about — it helps me to not get particularly riled up about it. On the complete flipside, I am a pretty left-leaning guy and am fairly horrified by what George W.Bush is doing; I consider it to be as big of a challenge to be objective in regards to the general political bent of the Baader-Meinhof Gang — politics that I tend to share or sympathize with — as it is a challenge for me to be objective about their killings.

3AM/Andrew Stevens Regardless of one’s stance on the gang’s activities, the German state didn’t react in a judicious manner to the prosecution of those involved. Do you think the role of the showtrial has had an enduring effect on the group’s historical and cultural legacy? The only thing in England that came close to an Anglo Baader-Meinhof was the Angry Brigade and its showtrial in 1972, this being grossly disproportionate to either the group’s crimes or the threat they posed. By the same token, people now look back at the Symbionese Liberation Army as a joke — why do you think Baader-Meinhof/Red Army Faction carried on so long in comparison?

Richard Huffman The German state’s response to the Baader-Meinhof Gang served to greatly legitimize them and in many ways it was, as you suggest, a disproportionate response. Germans who might have thought of the Baader-Meinhof Gang as an annoying subtext to their society learned from the Stammheim trial and the Lex Baader-Meinhof (revisions to the “Basic Law” of West Germany that limited civil liberties) that their Government felt the group to be the country’s biggest threat. With 25-30 years hindsight, it is remarkable how little relative death and destruction was wrought by the group during the 1970s and how massive the German response was. How could one be dismissive of the group when the German government was putting so much energy into stopping them? We have this habit in America of calling certain trials “the Trial of the Century” from the Scopes Monkey trial to the OJ Simpson trial. But none of them hold a candle to the Baader-Meinhof trial. The thing stretched out for over a year. Dozens of judges and lawyers. The government secretly, illegally taping the prisoners. Extraordinary (yet completely ineffectual) searches of defense lawyers. The presiding judge filtering information illegally to other judges (who passed it along to the press). A specially-built courtroom right on the grounds of the prison. To call the trial a spectacle doesn’t do it justice!

The reasons that the Baader-Meinhof Gang/Red Army Faction continued on for so long are diverse; they had as much to do with inertia as with anything. The reason that they are a more “legitimate” group than the SLA is because, I believe, they were more representative of a legitimate, though extremely radical line of thought in their society. There were many groups like the SLA active in America (George Jackson Brigade, Weather Underground, etc.) The Weather Underground was the most effective (and the closest in thought and action to the Baader-Meinhof Gang), but they are all relegated to footnotes in our history because they were not representative enough of a larger line of thought in American society, and they were more effectively and quickly shut down by US Federal Agents and local law enforcement.

3AM/Andrew Stevens Much of what came out of the 60s and into the 70s was either people getting carried away with their own rhetoric (Up Against The Wall in New York) or people just having a laugh (Mick Farren and the White Panthers). Obviously Baader-Meinhof put their politics into action, but do you feel they were inept in many ways and were just repeating worn-out cod radical cliches?

Richard Huffman I’m not so sure I would call them inept… The German police forces were fairly inept early on, which gave the group the freedom to explore the limits of their radicalism. I suspect that had the group robbed a couple of banks in early 1970 and then got caught; the entire escalation of violence wouldn’t have necessarily happened. In many respects these folks were very similar to other groups, like the ones that you mentioned, who clearly got caught up in their own rhetoric.

But looking at the Baader-Meinhof era in the context of the German student movement of the 60s paints their activities in a more generous light. As is typical for Germans, students in the 60s had spent much of their energies endlessly debating turning their radical Marcusian arguments into “praxis”; the Baader-Meinhof Gang became important because they were living the reality of a radical vanguard that so many students had argued for. I think one of the main reasons that the Red Army Faction seems so much more effective and prominent, than say, Italy’s Red Brigades (which had approximately 100 times the number of actions than the RAF undertook) was that they were putting into action exactly what a generation of students had argued was necessary for the Revolution in their society, in that uniquely German student way. In other words, a significant percentage of the population had been well prepped for a Baader-Meinhof Gang to come into existence; to be ready to accept a group like them as a legitimate vanguard. Even to middle-of-the-road Germans, the politics that they were espousing, while disagreeable, was legitimate.

3AM/Andrew Stevens The group received tactical support from the (East German) authorities in the GDR, that is well-known, but doesn’t this strike you as ironic in some ways?

Richard Huffman What’s interesting about the Baader-Meinhof era was that so many cold-warrior analysts assumed that all left-wing terrorism was a grand Communist conspiracy orchestrated directly from Moscow. In reality, Moscow wanted absolutely nothing to do with these movements. But what shocked everyone was the revelations after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the GDR had housed about 10 Red Army Faction members, and in some cases provided training and weapons for further attacks back in West Germany. The GDR kept this a secret from Moscow and everyone else; and in many ways seems to have been a pet project of a select few in the corrupt GDR leadership.

One of the great ironies of the creation of the Berlin Wall in 1961 was that it effectively shut off daily interaction with East Germany for young westerners (especially West Berliners). Fuelled by frustration over the cold war and the Coca-Cola society that they lived in, many West German students began to view East Germany as a bit of a paradise, or at least a more perfectly-realised German society. Because the Berlin Wall prevented them from being exposed to the oppressive Government, the shortages, and the corruption, many of these young West Germans looked happily towards the East. Reports to the contrary were pretty much always dismissed as Western propaganda. When those members fled to the East, in many ways they felt they were fleeing into a better society. For an absolutely first rate accounting of this I highly recommend Volker Schloendorff’s film The Legend of Rita.

3AM/Andrew Stevens Anyhow, what correspondence have you received in relation to the site over the years? Any hate mail or legal action?

Richard Huffman I haven’t gotten much hate mail. I have received some very thoughtful letters though. Early on, as I was researching the subject, I began to feel like a metaphorical ‘prisoner’ of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. So for fun I had a photo taken of myself somewhat mimicking the famous photo of an imprisoned, kidnapped Hanns-Martin Schleyer. A woman wrote me a fairly angry letter, indicating that she found the image to be in very poor taste and extremely disrespectful. I thought about it and realized that she was exactly right. I took the photo down.

I received a letter from a lawyer in Germany who apparently represented the interests of the remnants of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK). Briefly, the SPK is this amazing sub-thread of the whole Baader-Meinhof story: a psychiatrist in Heidelberg believed that mental illnesses were caused by the excesses of capitalism, and the only real cure was glorious Revolutionary Socialism — this could ONLY have happened in Germany in the 60s and 70s!. They planned many low-level actions to “help” their illnesses. After the initial leadership of the Baader-Meinhof Gang was imprisoned in 1972, many former members of the SPK formed the nucleus of the next generation of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Mental patients becoming terrorists to cure their mental disorders: you really cannot make something like that up. Anyway, this lawyer took offence to many parts of my web site. She was wrong, I didn’t change anything on my web site, and three years later I received another note from her thanking me for changing the web site. Perhaps she was one of the patients as well!

About half the comments I get from the site are from younger folks who think the Baader-Meinhof Gang are ‘cool’ and seem to assume that because I made a visually appealing site I find them and their actions ‘cool’ as well. I usually respond by trying to help them understand the difference between ‘cool’ and ‘fascinating’ and encourage them to go beyond the surface.

Interview with Richard Huffman in the Eye Magazine in 1999

Sam Gaines/ Eye Magazine In the late-’60s and ’70s an underground revolutionary group existed in Germany known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Decades later, on September 16, 1999, Austrian police killed Baader-Meinhof member Horst Ludwig Meyer in a Vienna shoot-out that started when he and his wife, Andrea Martina Klump, disarmed a Viennese policewoman. His wife was taken into custody. Were these the last two remaining members of the gang? Both were fugitives in hiding believed to be involved in assassinations and bombings-Klump herself is linked to the 1989 murder of Deutsche Bank executive Alfred Herrhausen.The shoot-out that led to Horst Ludwig Meyer’s demise transpired a year and a half AFTER the Baader-Meinhof Gang announced, via fax to Reuters, the formal dissolution of the organization and its mission. But whether Left Wing or Right Wing, terrorism never really goes away.

Soon, author Richard Huffman will publish The Gun Speaks, the first definitive history of the Baader-Meinhof Gang written in English. Huffman’s research is exhaustive, but his first encounter with the group was as a boy in Berlin, where his father headed the U.S. Army’s very busy Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit.

The story of Horst Meyer’s death and the capture of his wife, both 43 at the time, received worldwide media coverage since both were reputed members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), one of the most notorious terrorist organizations of the 20th century. But the German press pegged a misnomer onto the organization back in the early ’70s-the Baader-Meinhof Gang (BMG)-and the name still sticks today.

For three decades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang stood at the vanguard of a war of terror against the powers that be. Industrialists, corporate heads, and government officials were their primary targets, but many of their victims were ordinary citizens and American soldiers. More than 30 people were killed by Baader-Meinhof bombs and bullets, with millions of dollars’ worth of property destroyed.

Author Richard Huffman’s strange engagement with Baader-Meinhof began long before the group’s last official statement in April 1998. His father, U.S. Army Col. Chuck Huffman, headed up the Berlin Brigade’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit at a time when explosive ordnance detonation was a regular occurrence in Germany. The pending publication of Richard Huffman’s book, The Gun Speaks: the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Postwar German Decade of Terror, will tell the story of the organization’s reign of terror, and one man’s remarkable intersection with one of this century’s most fascinating-and violent-underground organizations.

In the spring of 1972, 3-year-old Richard Huffman was whiling away his morning in Berlin’s Kinder Keller (“Children’s Cellar”) as his mother attended an officer’s club social at Harnack House. Mrs. Huffman and approximately 50 other officers’ wives were in the midst of their meals when a man approached the ranking officer’s wife and whispered into her ear: a bomb threat. Within moments, the women coolly filed out of the club. On her way out, Mrs. Huffman passed her husband, who was leading his bomb disposal unit in. Huffman’s unit was among the elite; only the British bomb disposal units, then very busy in Northern Ireland, ranked alongside.

Chuck Huffman’s unit defused the bomb-later attributed to Fritz Teufel’s radical Movement 2 June faction-with just 15 minutes remaining on the egg timer. All in a day’s work for the ordnance expert, to be sure, but it was the germinating seed for his son’s obsession with a tumultuous period of German history.

The roots of that interest took hold many years later, however, when Richard was an adult. What awaited his discovery-and in some ways, rediscovery-was a tormented period in German and European sociopolitical history. It was a time when “revolution” was more than a slogan and a bandwagon-it was a commitment, a gun, a bomb, and an all-too-real war against society. And it all started with the accidental 1967 death of Benno Ohnesorg, a very unfortunate young student.

In early 2000, Huffman will revisit Germany with his father with an eye toward continuing his research. I spoke with Richard about his research, his obsessions, and his impressions of the radical organization that continues to wield influence over his life.

Interview with Richard Huffman

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
Do you remember when your fascination with RAF/Baader Meinhof began?

Richard Huffman
I remember the exact instant. I happened to visit my father on his lunch break at work. He was having a conversation with a coworker about FBI efforts to catch the Unabomber. He made some disparaging remarks about the FBI bomb squad; I felt I had to take him to task. Who was he to call the FBI poorly trained? So he tells me and his friend about defusing Baader-Meinhof bombs in Berlin. I was only vaguely aware of Baader-Meinhof, but I looked into it, delving deeper and deeper, and I haven’t seen light for going on four years now.

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
The detail of your research is remarkable. How long has it taken you to gather all this together?

Richard Huffman
The vast majority of my research was conducted over a two-year period beginning about three and a half years ago. Here’s something that surprises many people: My German is pretty weak. I had the odd fortune of falling in love with a subject that was just narrow enough to allow me to read ALL of the English language documentation. It’s a lot of reading, but entirely doable in, say, two years. Two things conspire to make source documents from that era very tough to read. One is that the German language is very formal and patrician. Every noun is capitalized. One semi-ridiculous by-product of the German student movement of the ’60s was a movement against the patrician German punctuation. Students, and later terrorists, would write their tracts without capital letters anywhere. Ulrike Meinhof’s famous magazine konkret is the most obvious example. Anyway, this abhorrence of capital letters, coupled with stilted self-analysis “dialogue”-style communiqués, made reading the work of the terrorists tough for Germans. Imagine how tough it is for me while I am just learning the language.

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
The gang’s leader, Andreas Baader, was a violent, yet strangely compelling figure-a petty criminal, yet an opportunist who became a charismatic leader. Is there any analogy to be made from a “cult of personality” standpoint-say, similar to the role Charles Manson developed with his “Family”? Also, continuing with this probably unwieldy analogy-Manson and his Family are rightly reviled for their brutal deeds. Is the BMG similarly held in contempt in their native land, or has a certain romanticized notion of revolution colored perceptions of their legacy?

Richard Huffman
I wouldn’t compare him to Charlie Manson other than in very broad ways. Baader was unquestionably the leader of the group, but there were other strong leaders as well, particularly his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin. What attracted people to the BMG was partially based on a true interest in some form of revolution based on real thinking. The only people in Germany who have romanticized notions of revolution were born after 1965. Most of the people who lived through the times and were old enough to understand them have not changed their tune about the BMG. If they were conservative, they hated them and continue to do so. If they were moderate to mildly liberal, they hated them because they were counterproductive. If they were radical, they probably supported them, and today still find ways to excuse their murders.

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
At your site, you mention that your father holds an “it-was-my-job” attitude toward his extraordinary presence-and courage-in Berlin at the time as head of bomb disposal for the army. How did he react when you brought up the idea of visiting Berlin together next year?

Richard Huffman
My dad is an interesting guy. The Army definitely picked the right guy when they gave him the super-security clearance that they gave him; my dad just did his job and didn’t seem interested in talking about it. He would laugh if I described his job as “courageous.” He is very interested in going back to Berlin with me, mostly to see his old haunts. I told him that I fully plan to introduce him to the guys who tried to kill him (and tried to kill my mom and me, too). His reaction was basically a shrug. I suspect that he thinks, “OK, that’ll take an afternoon, leaving me enough time to visit the Brandenburg Gate.”
My mom and brother both seem to love what I am doing. My mom will be joining me in Berlin as well next year; she’s more talkative and I suspect that she’ll fill me in on more background detail than my dad.

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
Let’s talk about the BMW success story you discuss on your site that could be linked to Baader-Meinhof. Supposedly, when the Gang started hot-wiring BMW 2002s, the “BMW” acronym became known as the Baader-Meinhof Wagen, and sales for the cars exploded. Eventually, the gang became so widely known for their 2002 hijacks, that they had to move on to different auto makes. Has the BMW company ever made any mention of it?

Richard Huffman
Well, no. I have looked into it carefully and think I make a good case. The company WAS faltering through the late-’60s. It’s cars WERE considered staid. After the Baader-Meinhof Wagen connection came about, the company DID acquire a new cachet. To be fair, no one else seems to make this connection and the numerous BMW 2002 fanatics who e-mail me seem to believe that it was their own personal faith in the Bayerische Motoren Werke that rescued the company and made BMWs cool. Who am I to argue with them? When I am in Munich next I plan to take the obligatory tour of the BMW factory, and I intend on cornering at least one official and hammering on him until he tells me that I am in fact correct, or begs for mercy, or both.

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
Regarding the June 1970 training of Red Army Faction members in a Palestinian military camp: was the inevitable culture clash a culprit in cutting the camp short, or were RAF’ers behaving badly?

Richard Huffman
Both. The Palestinians weren’t really into “training” Germans or any of the other visitors to their Jordan camps. They basically would give their visitors the summer camp version of the training regimen-let them shoot some Kalis, throw some grenades, crawl under some barbed wire-and then send them home. It was hoped that the visitors would go home and get their friends to support the Palestinian cause both financially and emotionally. Well, Baader and his cadre would have none of this. They had “proven” themselves by burning down a department store, escaping from jail, injuring an elderly man-there was no way they were going to settle for the summer camp version. The exasperated Palestinians reluctantly agreed to give them real training. It is ironic that the Israelis were so frightened of the Palestinian terrorists; had they followed Baader’s lead and set about to annoy the Palestinians into submission, the entire Palestinian people would have probably packed up and moved to South America. Anyway, Baader and his cohort had absolutely no respect for their hosts. When the Palestinians grew tired of the group firing hundreds of rounds into the desert each day, they put the German proto-terrorists on ammo rations. The Germans retaliated by going on “strike.” Which was fine with the Palestinians, except the German women would then sunbathe naked on the roofs of their living quarters in full sight of shocked Palestinians. You can imagine how this went over. Much of the history of the Baader-Meinhof Gang describes a very lucky group of Germans. They managed to escape from situations through sheer bald luck and blind stupidity, and Jordan was no exception. Had the Germans not behaved so badly, they probably would have not been forced to leave by the Palestinians. Had they stayed, they certainly would have been killed the following month when King Hussein mowed over the training camps in what came to be know as Black September (the Black September terrorists of Munich 1972 were named after this).

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
Was there a quality of personal obsession to Horst Herold’s hunt for RAF and other terrorist groups? Was he something of a J. Edgar Hoover for the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA)?

Richard Huffman
Horst Herold could be compared to J. Edgar Hoover in that he was the driving force behind the BKA becoming a centralized police force similar to the FBI. He certainly developed an odd obsession with Baader, going so far as to claim that “Baader is the only man who has ever really understood me, and I am the only man who has ever really understood him.” In retirement, Herold lived in a heavily guarded house as he was assumed to be the No. 1 target of terrorists. He would often compare his “imprisonment” to the imprisonment of the BMG terrorists in Stammheim-Stuttgart prison. No reports of him wearing women’s clothing though.

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
The relationship between the RAF and the media is fascinating. The conservative Springer Press seems at least partly responsible for spreading misinformation about Baader-Meinhof’s involvement in some violent incidents. Do you think this may have ironically enhanced the group’s image? Conversely, might coverage of Baader-Meinhof and other radical terrorist groups have aided the Springer Press’ publishing prominence (and, of course, their sales)?

Richard Huffman
They absolutely, unequivocally fed on each other. The Springer papers were already prominent before the decade of terror, but Baader et al provided a perfect bogeyman to continue to stir up the public. The whole Springer coverage looks a lot different in hindsight than it must have looked in the early ’70s. Looking back, it is clear that it was actually quite accurate, if over zealous. In fact, the Springer papers did themselves a tremendous disservice often by taking their stories one step further than necessary, because it made them easy target of influential liberal critics. The most famous instance occurred just before Christmas 1971 when the Köln edition of Bild ran the headline “Baader-Meinhof Murders On.” Bild assumed that a recent murder of a cop during a bank raid was done by Baader-Meinhof Gang members, and ran the headline as such. It was clearly a wrong thing to do, as Heinrich Böll pointed out two weeks later in Der Spiegel, because all of the evidence had not been gathered yet. But forgotten in this story is that Bild was later proven correct: the death WAS at the hands of Baader-Meinhof members. Because of the Springer Press’s own zeal, intellectuals like Böll were able to turn terrorists like the Baader-Meinhof Gang into martyrs for civil rights abuses.

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
Was the 1998 announcement from Germany’s FBI, BKA, via Reuters that the RAF was finally disbanding considered an inevitability, the culmination of an organization in decline, or was there an element of surprise in reactions to the announcement?

Richard Huffman
I think the only surprise on anyone’s part was that the RAF actually went to the trouble of making an announcement. Save for one very large bombing in 1994, the group had essentially been defunct for almost a decade. But for a group who followed up everything, EVERYTHING, with a communiqué, should we have been surprised to see an 8-page single-spaced self-serving fax float across Reuters’ fax machine?

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
I want to talk about the dynamic by which the peaceful student protests of 1967-8 became the violent terrorist organizations of a year later. Did that transformation occur because opportunists like Andreas Baader seized upon the frustrations of disillusioned student leftists? What role did the martyrdom of Benno Ohnesorg play? And do some combination of those and other factors explain that evolution of peaceful student organizations into well-armed terrorists?

Richard Huffman
You are bringing up one of the most common misconceptions of the narrative. Though the student protest movement and the terrorist groups are inexorably linked, it is a little unfair to say that the terror groups were directly transformed from the student groups. If you look at the makeup of the Baader-Meinhof Group you’ll see a diverse group of people: Baader never completed high school, Meinhof was out of school for 10 years, Ensign was sometimes a student, and then there were a bunch of followers who were more often than not NOT students. Their attraction to the Group was probably equal parts sexual intrigue, a desire to defy social norms, a desire to party, and a vague commitment to radical causes. Benno Ohnesorg’s death was quite simply the catalyst of the terrorist movement. It was as important as the Kent State massacre, but with more insidious effects. You could actually tie the entire terrorist movement to that fateful night on June 2, 1967, when the Berlin police decided that the Shah of Iran didn’t need to see German kids protest his presence. A young German girl, Gudrun Ensslin, witnessed the killing. She wandered into the SDS (a German student union unrelated to the American SDS) headquarters the following night. She screamed that the people who killed Ohnesorg-her parents’ generation-“were the Auschwitz generation! You cannot argue with them! Violence must be met with violence!” It was Gudrun’s passion that would later inspire a talented German journalist named Ulrike Meinhof to give up the bourgeois trappings that she felt so guilty about and become a terrorist (Meinhof was out shopping for furniture for her fashionable Hamburg home while Ohnesorg was lying in a street, blood pooled around his head). It was Gudrun’s passion that would prompt the big-talking Andreas Baader to actually turn his talk into action; it was either put up or shut up.

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
A few innocent persons were killed by police in pursuit of Baader-Meinhof. Were there any legal, legislative, or political repercussions to these accidents?

Richard Huffman
Generally, no. One notorious case involved, I believe, a young Scottish businessman. The police burst into his apartment, acting on a tip, and ended up shooting and killing him. They later claimed that he was somehow connected to the BMG, but they never actually said in what way. And since he was dead, he never had a trial to prove his innocence. In legislative terms, the German government progressively clamped down on what Americans would consider basic civil rights. It is important to note that most Germans were quite comfortable with these efforts. After all, they were “stopping the terrorists.”

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
Some of the penalties meted out to some members of Movement 2 June and RAF for violent crimes seem rather light, given the gravity of their crimes and their stated commitment to violent revolution. Was German criminal law fairly liberal in its sentencing at the time?

Richard Huffman
Yes and no. Generally German sentences were light compared to American sentences, but then America has the most stringent sentencing laws of any Western nation. What’s more intriguing is how so many prisoners were given early releases in exchange for vague statements “renouncing” terrorism. To me what this actually did was constantly put the limelight on the terrorists, well beyond the time when they would have otherwise been forgotten. When Irmgard Möller, who killed three American servicemen in Heidelberg, was let out of prison in 1994 after 22 years in prison, she was the longest-serving German woman in any German prison. To many Americans, 22 years seemed awfully brief for three lives. For many Germans, it seemed about right. Go figure.

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
What was the relationship between the cultural radical Left and the political/militant radical Left?

Richard Huffman
So many of the bourgeois left-derisively called the Schikeria [Chic Left] or the “Raspberry Reich”-lived vicariously through the actions of the terrorists. They simply could not turn down requests for help from the terrorists, and after fulfilling a seemingly innocent request, found themselves forced to fulfill more and more dangerous and illegal requests, or be turned in to the police for consorting with terrorists-in other words, blackmail.

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
You note on the web site the Spiegel article about bringing the children of key German Leftists back to the site of the June 2, 1967, Benno Ohnesorg killing for the 30th anniversary of that event. Do you know what became of the children of Ensslin, Meinhof, or any of the other RAF, 2 June, or RZ members?

Richard Huffman
Ensslin had one son with the semi-famous writer Bernward Vesper (who committed suicide in the early ’70s). Felix Vesper, or a fictional representation of him, was a major character in the Von Trotta film Die Blierne Zeit, which was the lightly fictionalized account of Gudrun Ensslin and her sister. At the end of the film someone horribly burns Vesper, presumably because of his terrorist lineage. The film never makes clear if this was a true event or not. If it was, it is truly a despicable act. Someone e-mailed me claiming that Felix Vesper was running for some form of a government post last year on the Greens’ ticket. But he never e-mailed me back with supporting info. One of Meinhof’s twin daughters wrote a book about her mother five years ago. They’re around and I hope to interview them next year (hopefully their English is better than my German!) Most of the other RAF, M2J and RZ members have faded into ordinariness.

Fritz Teufel is probably the saddest to me. Here was this guy who was a prominent student leader at Berlin’s Free University, which was ground zero of the German student movement. He was a leader of Kommune I, the notorious commune that was constantly in the press in 1967-1969. He later became a terrorist with Movement 2 June (and tried to kill my dad!), and would have probably been the most famous terrorist in Germany had Meinhof not lent her famous name to the BM cause (Teufel’s name, which means “Devil” would have helped too). So what is 55-year-old Teufel doing now? Riding around as a bike messenger. It’s kind of sad.

Sam Gaines/Eye Magazine
Recently there’s been news of renewed terrorism by the Red Brigade in Italy (the murder of a governmental labor advisor, if memory serves), and possibly similar violent actions in Greece. Is radical terrorism of one form or another “here to stay” in Europe? Why hasn’t it taken hold in the United States to the same extent-or do you think it might?

Richard Huffman
I assume that you are referring to radical left-wing terrorism. Yes, I think that some form of radical terrorism will always exist; it is the last bastion of political discourse and it can make six people seem as powerful as six million. That said, terrorism clearly comes on a pendulum. It swings back and forth between right-wing and left-wing. It seems we are now seeing the tail end of the right-wing terrorism in some European countries, and with the rise of globalization of corporations, a whole new evil has arisen for unempowered young people to hate. So maybe we are about to see a new era of left-wing terrorism. But I might be wrong. I was pretty certain that the Seattle Mariners were going all the way last year. As for why terrorism like the European flavor hasn’t taken hold in America, well, I think a lot of it boils down to effective police forces, and a political and economic system that is more open than in these other countries. I am basically a true Lefty, so I always feel weird saying this, but America is just plain freer.