Bonnie und Clyde

WEST GERMANY

Police toting submachine guns patrolled around Duesseldorfs courthouse last week, while a sharpshooter kept watch from a fourth-floor balcony and guards frisked everyone going inside the courtroom. The curtains were drawn to foil the aim of any potential sniper; in the dock, the defendant sat behind a bulletproof glass shield. Ordinarily, the charges would not have justified such stringent precautions, even though Karl-Heinz Ruhland, 33, had confessed to bank robbery, car theft, breaking into city halls and stealing passports. Authorities feared, however, that he might be rubbed out by his former associates before he could testify--and he had played roughly the role of C.W. Moss in the notorious gang of anarchist cutthroats organized by West Germany's Bonnie und Clyde.

"Bonnie" is Ulrike Meinhof, 37, a slim, tough-faced divorcee who was once the editor of the leftist monthly magazine Konkret. "Clyde" is Andreas Baader, 28, a personable art-school dropout, Lothario of sorts, and sometime student revolutionary. Accompanied by a fluctuating number of associates (as many as 23 at times), the Baader-Meinhof gang during the past two years has pulled a string of bank robberies and car thefts, and has had shootouts with police in half a dozen cities. The toll so far: one policeman killed and another seriously injured, two gang members killed.

Unlike the real Bonnie and Clyde, who robbed banks mostly for the hell of it, Baader and Meinhof are far-left political revolutionaries who turned to crime as a way of waging war against bourgeois society. As Meinhof put it in a clandestine interview published by Der Spiegel, "What we want to do and show is that armed confrontation is feasible--that it is possible to carry out actions where we win, and not the other side. Cops have to be fought as representatives of the system. Cops are pigs, not human beings."

Masked Figures. The origins of the gang go back to the student riots that swept West Germany and France in 1968. Then a member of "Red" Rudi Dutschke's S.D.S., Baader was caught throwing bombs into two Frankfurt department stores, causing nearly $700,000 in damages. Meinhof interviewed him in jail for Konkret and wrote approvingly of his "progressive" act. Two years later, Baader received permission from prison authorities to travel under guard to a Berlin library to do research. There Meinhof was seated at a table, pretending to read. Suddenly, two masked figures burst into the room, overpowered the guards and freed Baader. Under cover of tear-gas grenades and gunfire, they got away, leaving behind two wounded guards and a critically injured librarian.

Modeling themselves on Uruguay's Tupamaro guerrillas, Bonnie und Clyde set about fighting society by assembling an arsenal of guns, robbing banks and stealing fast cars (they preferred BMWs). According to Ruhland's testimony, the gang lacked neither ideas nor ambition. At one point, they planned to break into a Bundeswehr arms depot at Munsterlager; another time, they hoped to free captured members of their group either by staging a prison raid with a tiny homemade helicopter or by kidnaping Chancellor Willy Brandt and using him in a prisoner exchange.

So far, the cops have captured eleven alleged members of the gang. Only Ruhland has been willing to talk, reasoning that "it is better that the group is caught before more shootings take place." He revealed what authorities have suspected all along: Baader and Meinhof have had the moral and physical support of several respectable left-wing sympathizers. Ruhland accused a Hannover psychology professor of renting a bungalow for the gang (he was suspended from teaching when he refused to comment on the charge), a priest of giving the gang the key to his apartment, and a wire-service reporter of helping them buy guns. Before Ruh-land's trial began, a number of West German intellectuals were inclined to look upon the Meinhof-Baader gang as romantic if misguided idealists. Novelist Heinrich Boll openly condemned the hysteria that surrounded the hunt for them, comparing their situation with that of the anti-Hitler underground of the Nazi era.

Last week Baader sent the West German wire service a letter bravely insisting that "the fight has only begun. We are not on the run." In fact, it looks as if the fight is nearing the end. Ruhland's courtroom revelations have eroded popular support for the gang even among leftists, who are now disowning the guerrilla tactics of Bonnie und Clyde as naive and meaningless. Meanwhile police are carrying out the most extensive manhunt in West German history in their effort to track down the six hard-core members of the gang still at large. In Hamburg recently, more than 2,000 cops, using helicopters and dogs, sealed off all roads leading out of the city and conducted a twelve-hour search. Baader and Meinhof got away--if they were there in the first place--but the odds are obviously high that the chase will soon end in a final bloodbath on the street of some West German city.

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