WEST GERMANY: Disciple of Despair

If Ulrike Meinhof had ever read Lenin's diatribes against "the tactics of despair"—meaning violent anarchism, which he saw as the self-defeating actions of "a petty bourgeois driven to frenzy"—she gave little sign of it. As co-leader and theoretician of West Germany's notorious Baader-Meinhof gang of far-left terrorists, she and her henchmen blasted a gory path of bombings, bank robberies and shootouts that continued even after her capture in 1972. Last week Meinhof used desperation's last resort against herself. Guards at Stuttgart's Stammheim prison, where she, along with three fellow terrorists, had...

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