Guilty As Charged

They began their partnership of terror in 1970 in a quiet research library in West Berlin. By prearrangement, Ulrike Meinhof, then 35 and a leftist journalist, sat at a table pretending to read. Studying near by, under armed guard, was a notorious anarchist she had interviewed in prison and deeply admired, Andreas Baader, then 27 and serving time for the 1968 fire-bombing of two Frankfurt department stores. Baader had won permission from prison authorities to study at the library. Suddenly three people burst into the library and sprayed the room with bullets and tear gas. The escape plan worked. Baader and Meinhof, now his accomplice in rebellion, leaped out a window.

From then until their capture in 1972, Baader and Meinhof led their terrorist gang, the "Red Army Faction," in a series of daring crimes across West Germany: holding up banks, stealing fast, expensive cars and shooting it out with police. Spawned amid the student protests of the 1960s, the gang went underground to carry out a string of "anti-imperialist" crimes. In the spring of 1972 they set off bombs in Frankfurt and Heidelberg that killed four U.S. servicemen. After nearly three years in prison, Baader, Meinhof and two others finally went to trial in 1975.

Overkill. Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself in her prison cell in 1976. Holger Meins, another defendant, had died before the trial began following a hunger strike. But Andreas Baader and his two remaining confederates, after a nearly two-year trial, finally heard judgment pronounced last week in Stuttgart. Baader, now 33, Gudrun Ensslin, 36, and Jan-Carl Raspe, 32, were found guilty of murder and were sentenced to life imprisonment plus 15 years--a judicial tactic to minimize the possibility of parole.

The trial cost an estimated $15 million, including nearly $7 million for the heavily guarded fortress that was specially built in Stuttgart to hold the defendants and conduct their trial. The building--girded by high steel fences, roofed with bombproof metal mesh and patrolled by policemen and attack dogs --was just one example of judicial overkill. Because of flagrantly injudicious behavior by the main trial judge (who was removed in January) and highly questionable bugging of the defendants and their lawyers during the trial, the verdict is sure to be appealed to higher courts.

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