Loading summary
Transcript67 lines
- [00:00]
Eli Lake
This episode contains some descriptions of suicide, including method. Take care when listening the trial of a celebrity starts this week in New York City. TMZ will fight the New York Times for space inside the courthouse, and guards will be on hand to stop fans from breaking up the proceedings. But it's not your regular celebrity trial because the defendant is being accused of a political assassination of sorts. In the dock is Luigi Mangione. He's being tried for the murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson. Before Thompson died, no one had heard of Mangione, but now the man is an icon. How did this happen? Well, there's another figure in history who can help us understand it. She was a journalist who quit her magazine and went underground to rob banks and sow terror. She bombed, killed, stole, and was worshipped for doing so. Her name was Ulrike Meinhof, and we'll be digging into what Meinhof's story can tell us about the Mangione trial right after the break. If you've been following my work on breaking history, you know how important it is to understand the way history shapes today's headlines. But too often that context is distorted by bias or reduced to oversimplified narratives. That's why I partnered with Ground News, an independent app and website that prioritizes showing the full spectrum of perspectives. For every story shaping our world, I get a quick summary alongside every news source covering it from across the spectrum, whether that's corporate media or independent voices like the Free Press. Just just swipe to compare how some outlets frame FBI agents suing the doj, for example, as a defense against political retaliation, while others see it as an attempt to obstruct accountability, mirroring in some ways the conflicting narratives around JFK's assassination, which fueled fears that a deep state government wasn't telling the United States citizens the truth. And if history has taught us anything, it's that the truth is often buried or suppressed. That's why I find Ground News Blindspot Feed indispensable. It surfaces important stories the left and the right aren't talking about giving you a clear picture of the world as it is, not just as Big Tech wants you to believe. With insight on every outlet's biases and financial incentives, Ground News is tackling one of the most urgent issues of our time, restoring trust and transparency in the media. So go to groundnews.com breakinghistory to save 40% on the unlimited vantage plan we use, knocking the price down to just $5 a month. It's an investment in your ability to think critically and stay informed while also supporting platforms like ours. Hi, I'm Eli Lake. I want to tell you about a great podcast that I think you'll appreciate, Unpacking Israeli History, hosted by Noam Weissman. If you read the headlines about Israel, you're only getting a tiny slice of a long and complicated story without depth, context, or sometimes even the basic facts. Much like breaking history, Unpacking Israeli History uncovers the history behind the headlines. Diving into the fascinating and sometimes controversial events and figures that have shaped Israel's past and present, Noam examines each subject from a variety of perspectives, leaning into the complexities and layers around topics like how the state of Israel was founded and debates around the Israeli Palestinian conflict. So if you're looking for a nuanced, thought provoking take on Israel, one that avoids the oversimplifications and political spin, you'll love this show. Find Unpacking Israeli History wherever you listen to your podcasts or watch it on YouTube. Just a heads up. Some voices are portrayed by actors and have been translated into English from German. It was the most captivating crime in recent memory. At this very moment, there is a manhunt for the person who shot and killed the CEO of a leading health insurer. Brian Thompson was the head of United Healthcare for the past three and a half years. Police are still searching for the shooter, who had on a mask and was.
- [04:33]
Bruce Hoffman
Last seen eastbound on 6th Avenue.
- [04:36]
Eli Lake
The grainy footage of the murder looked like something out of a spy thriller. It was strange. In America's largest city teeming with surveillance cameras, the assailant just slipped away. The police were stumped, but the assassin left clues on the bullet casings. Etched in magic marker were the words Deny Defenders, depose words that refer to the common tactics agents use when rejecting claims from policyholders. This wasn't a random street crime. It appeared to be what an earlier generation of radicals would call the propaganda of the deed, what today we know as terrorism. The whole case is bizarre. The man accused of the crime, Luigi Mangione, was the valedictorian of his prep school, Hillman Academy. He graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in computer engineering. He seemed to have it all. Connections, smarts, generational wealth, and adoring friends and family. On top of all that, he had killer abs. This is how one person who knew Luigi described him. Friendly, articulate, humble, open minded, curious. And yet this former counselor at Stanford University's prestigious summer camp for science nerds allegedly fashioned a handgun from a 3D printer, stalked his prey at dawn, killed Thompson and then evaded the cops for six days. The feds finally arrested him at a McDonald's, eating a hash brown in the middle of Pennsylvania. If the court finds Mangione guilty, we'll have to ask, why did he do it? If he was the one to pull the trigger, then something inside of him snapped. But the killer wasn't the only one to snap. Something also snapped in us. Because for millions of people, the victim of this murder, a father, a husband and a fellow high school valedictorian, Brian Thompson, became the villain. Mangione was recast as a hero. A hero who shot a man in the back. Since the murder, Mangioni's face has been projected on skyscrapers in New York and London and plastered across the Internet. One of the most common memes portrayed him as a medieval saint. At the same time, wanted posters popped up in New York City with the names and photos of health insurance executives. Many Americans seem to have chosen aside be the people for Luigi Free.
- [07:06]
Bruce Hoffman
We support Luigi Bandioni for unaliving CEO Brian. Brian Thompson.
- [07:11]
Eli Lake
He's kind of cute, though. I mean, I'm a married mom with three kids, but he's kind of cute. Random YouTubers recorded original songs. Brian Thompson was a violent man, condemning.
- [07:22]
Karen Bauer
People to death for no other reason.
- [07:26]
Eli Lake
Than a percentage point of profit. And violence begins. Violence begins. Violence. Even a US Senator seemed to have some sympathy.
- [07:37]
Bruce Hoffman
We'll say it over and over. Violence is never the answer. This guy gets a trial who's allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealth. But you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands. Yeah.
- [07:52]
Eli Lake
Since he's been locked up in a Brooklyn jail, the same one that houses Sean Puffy Combs and Sam Bankman Fried, he has been inundated with fan mail. Last month he released this statement to the public through his lawyer. I am overwhelmed by and grateful for everyone who has written me to share their stories and express their support. While it is impossible for me to reply to most letters, please know that I read every one that I receive. This is the sort of humble brag you expect from Sabrina Carpenter. Not a man accused of being the TikTok Unabomber. But Luigi Mangione is not the first alleged terrorist to be feted as a rock star. Nor is he the first example of the phenomenon of breaking rad when a well off winner throws their life away for the thrill of political violence. More than 50 years ago, a West German columnist, Ulrike Meinhof, abandoned her family and her social status to pursue socialist revolution. Just like Luigi Mangione, Meinhof was celebrated. She, too became a celebrity. Marianne Faithful. We are now listening to Marianne Faithfull a 60s icon who famously ran away from a convent school to follow the Rolling Stones on tour, date Mick Jagger, and embrace sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Here she is on Saturday Night Live, singing a song she had dedicated to Marika Meinhoff. And this is far from Meinhof's only artistic tribute. Her portrait hangs in the permanent collection at the New York Museum of Modern Art. The Clash's frontman, Joe Strummer, often wore a T shirt with the insignia of Meinhof's terrorist group, the Red Army Faction. At one point, a celebrated fashion label even released a collection under the title Prada Meinhof. Meinhof was a leader of the Red Army Faction. The terror cell was young, radical and famous, everything that the modern rock star was desperate to be. But Meinhof was no marginalized, destitute victim of the system. In fact, like many of the pop radicals of the punk era, she was bourgeois intellectual and fashionable. Unlike Marian Faithfull, Meinhof's radicalism went further than heroin and synthesizers. Instead, the young German was bombing army bases, breaking psychopaths out of jail, and plotting murders before breaking rad. Ulrike Meinhoff was a powerful journalist. She was part of a respectable left, writing significant columns and debating politics on television news. But at some point, she flipped, turning into the most notorious terrorist in West German history. And the impact of this transformation can still be felt. Meinhof's own daughter, Bettina Rolle, has spent decades struggling with the legacy of her mother's terrorist group, the Red Army Faction. And she spoke to us.
- [10:52]
Bruce Hoffman
They infiltrated entire generations with these ideas. At the time, they were actually only circulating in small groups. But these ideas that the state is bad, that capitalism is bad, that the rich are bad in general, and that we should be allowed to murder in order to turn society upside down have actually become incredibly strong today. These very radical ideas from back then have actually reappeared time and again in the decades since then.
- [11:22]
Eli Lake
Red Army. I'm Eli Lake, and you're listening to Breaking History after the break. What drives a glamorous intellectual with all the right connections to put down her pen and pick up a gun? The Mangione Meinhof Syndrome. Coming up next, middle class kings, this is war Red star over Germany we take the country back Workers in the Rhineland refuse to pay your tax Spit on pigs who say that they're hot Bust up all the windows in the shop PayPal lets you pay all your pals like your Graduation gifters. Who's paying for the mattress topper?
- [12:17]
Bettina Rolle
You mean the beanbag chair?
- [12:19]
Eli Lake
Aren't we getting a mini fridge? Can we create a pool on PayPal? It lets us collect the money before we buy.
- [12:25]
Bruce Hoffman
Oh yes, that's smart.
- [12:27]
Eli Lake
Glad we can agree on something easily. Pool split and Send Money with PayPal. Get started in the PayPal app. A PayPal account is required to send and receive money. A balance account is required to create a pool. Ulrike Meinhof's story begins in Oldenburg. She was born in 1934 into a world of trauma and doom Nazi Germany. Her aunt was forced to wear the yellow star that marked her out as a Jew. Persecution, madness and total war engulfed Meinhof's childhood. She was 11 years old when Hitler killed himself in the bunker. Life inside the family home was no more secure. Her father died when she was six, her mother when she was 16, leaving Meinhof and her sister in the care of a friend who rented a room in the family house. Before she graduated from high school, Meinhof's home was a tomb and her country a crime scene. She spent her adolescence orphaned not only from her dead parents, but also a generation of Germans who had chosen to support or stay silent as the death machine of the Third Reich engulfed Europe. She was clever and intellectually ambitious. At university she made a name for herself as a left wing firebrand involved with the anti nuclear movement. Meinhof's country was divided. West Germany, where she lived, was economically reborn by American money pumped into the devastated nation to protect against the spread of communism. East Germany was trapped behind the Iron Curtain, a colony of the evil Soviet Empire. When she was 24, Weinhoff met Klaus Reiner Roll, who became her editor and publisher. They fell in love and became a glamorous couple in Hamburg. They had twin daughters, owned a lavish villa and hosted great parties with leading artists, writers and thinkers. A frequent guest of theirs was Martin Niemoller, the author of a totemic poem about solidarity in the face of fascism in Germany. They came first for the communists and.
- [14:33]
Bruce Hoffman
I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
- [14:35]
Eli Lake
Then they came for the Jews and.
- [14:38]
Bruce Hoffman
I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists.
- [14:43]
Eli Lake
And I didn't speak up because I.
- [14:44]
Bruce Hoffman
Wasn'T a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
- [14:53]
Eli Lake
Then they came for me and by.
- [14:56]
Bruce Hoffman
That time nobody was left to speak up.
- [14:59]
Eli Lake
Meinhof and Rolle agreed with the sentiment they would never again allow fascism to creep into Germany. Together the couple ran a cutting edge journal called Konkret. It blended high end cultural coverage with left wing politics and at least it was initially funded by the East German Stasi. It ran nude photos and refused to capitalize proper names and places. You see everything in concrete was radical, including its grammar.
- [15:24]
Bruce Hoffman
It was a scene of intellectual. She was around a lot of publishers.
- [15:29]
Eli Lake
This is Karen Bauer, a German studies professor at McGill University and the editor of a collection of Meinhof's writings. Everybody talks about the weather, we don't.
- [15:39]
Bruce Hoffman
They had this place where they stayed, spent the summer in Syl. So there was a lot of connections, a lot of journalists. Most of them were middle class bourgeois, some of them they were intellectuals, they were professionals. So that was her life and that was her family.
- [16:01]
Eli Lake
The scene was known locally as the Hamburg Party Republic. The crowd embraced a radical chic and Meinhof was a figurehead in this world. As Konkret's star columnist in the 1960s, German progressives would see themselves reflected in her righteous and strong Dryden columns. She wanted reconciliation between America and the Soviet Union. She pressed for disarmament and nuclear non proliferation. She wrote early and often about senior Nazi officials that had managed to get important positions in the West German government. And she despised the Vietnam War and her country's tacit support of it. To Meinhof and many of her readers, America's war in Indochina was no better than the Nazi conquest of Europe. At the same time, Meinhof was never really happy. She suffered from debilitating headaches so severe that she underwent brain surgery to have a benign tumor removed. And then in 1967 her life began to unravel. Meinhof discovered her husband Klaus was having an affair. After catching them in the act, she packed up the twins, Regina and Bettina, and moved to an apartment in Berlin. Her life in Hamburg was over.
- [17:17]
Bruce Hoffman
I don't think that played a role necessarily on her radicalization per se.
- [17:22]
Eli Lake
This is Karen Bauer again.
- [17:24]
Bruce Hoffman
But it certainly played a role in Maital. Leave that scene and go to Berlin. And that was a definite change. But she had been unhappy with the whole scene, finding kind of hypocrisy in that scene of liberals.
- [17:42]
Eli Lake
Ulrike was isolated in her new city. Her personal letters expressed despair and solitude. One correspondent remembered how she was depressed and blamed everything on capitalism. And now this feeling was reflected by her surroundings. Her new city was on the verge of rebellion. 1967 was a time of upheaval across the West. There was anger in the air, the energy of Berlin transformed Meinhof forever. She was a 33 year old mother of two, but the new friends she made in the capital were younger and wilder. There was Gudrun enslin, an attractive PhD student who had briefly studied in the States and appeared in experimental political films. And there was also her lover, Andrus Botter. Botter was a charismatic sociopath. He had moved from Munich to escape the law and had a fondness for drugs and guns, not necessarily in that order. Einsling and Bader were part of a radical collective called Commune 1. They squatted in abandoned buildings and protested for socialist causes. They were younger than Meinhof and didn't care much for the intellectual nuance of proper Marxist dialectic. No, they were in love with the idea of praxis, the act of putting theories of revolution into practice. Compared to them, Meinhof felt like a punishment. Perhaps she felt a little like Marion Faithfull or Joe Strummer did when they looked at Meinhof's own direct political action. A Decade later, in 1967, the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi came to Berlin on a state visit. Meinhof, Commune I and the student movement all saw him as a brutal tyrant who starved his subjects while his court lived in lavish style. Huge protests were staged. During one of these, a terrible error was made by the Berlin police, allowing pro Shah demonstrators to clash with the protesters. When the Shah goes to watch Mozart's Magic Flute at the Deutsche Ope that evening, he is once again welcomed by protesters. The police are ordered to disperse the protesters, giving their truncheons free rein. Around 8:30pm, a shot is fired. Detective Sergeant Karl Heinz Kouras shoots a student at close range. The young man's name is Benno Ornezorg. All attempts to save him fail and Ornezorch dies. The same night, the slain demonstrator, Benno Onozorg became a martyr for the new left and radicalized the demonstrators of West Germany. Meinhof herself was inspired to produce a short documentary that claimed that, like its political ally Iran, West Germany was itself a police state. Her friend Gudrun Enslin agreed, telling fellow activists at a meeting after one Zurg's.
- [20:24]
Bettina Rolle
Death, they're going to kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're dealing with. It's the Auschwitz generation we're dealing with. And you can't discuss anything with people who created the Auschwitz they're armed and we're not. We have to get armed too. They're going to kill us all.
- [20:45]
Eli Lake
In 1968, Berlin was beset by mass demonstrations like Many of the major cities in Europe and America were. On April 2nd that year, Anders Bader and Gudrun, Iceland turned up the volume, claiming responsibility for setting a department store ablaze in Frankfurt. They turned their subsequent trial into a spectacle, smoking cigars, hurling vulgar epithets at the judge. They were courting public attention, arguing that the department store fires were a political act intended to stir the people out of their apathy and see the horror of the Vietnam War for what it was.
- [21:21]
Karen Bauer
If you're talking about protest or terrorism, the goal is the same. It's to create drama, and by creating drama, to attract attention to the cause and perhaps the organization behind it, to build an even more expansive support base.
- [21:36]
Eli Lake
This is Bruce Hoffman, one of the world's foremost experts on terrorism and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
- [21:43]
Karen Bauer
So historically, especially in the late 1960s, 1970s, this is exactly what happened in many Western European countries, particularly in West Germany, Italy, to a lesser extent France and Belgium, but also in the United States, with student protest movements that provided the seedbed for more radical and indeed more violent offshoots. It was all about Vietnam. And it was the fact that the United States maintained army and air bases in West Germany that the B52s that were bombing North Vietnam often stopped in Wiesbaden, at a US Air Force base that was part of NATO, the NATO deployment for refueling before heading to southeast Asia.
- [22:26]
Eli Lake
By 1970, Meinhof's life was being swallowed by her politics. Her friends Einstein and Bader were now fugitives, on the run following the arson attacks. Meinhof allowed them to hide in the apartment she shared with her two daughters. It became a hub for revolutionary political action. Imagine the scene. A radical journalist living with her twins and two hardened criminals as their associates set up a safe house to forge documents and plot heists. Here is how Bettina Rolle, the daughter of Meinhof, described living in an apartment taken over by terrorists.
- [23:04]
Bruce Hoffman
When Anslin and Badia lived with us, they were already taking heroin and LSD trips. Of course, I didn't know that at the time, but that was a different orbit, you know? And I was there, as I described it in my book, because our apartment was a conspiratorial apartment where the group talked about the revolution all night long. So I didn't understand anything at the time, but I think I was the only one in that group, the only one of those 20 or 30 people who didn't later become a terrorist. Of course, I was like a little eyewitness and observed it.
- [23:38]
Eli Lake
Eventually, Anders Bader was busted, pulled over for driving without a license and sent back to jail. This was the first domino in a chain of events that would lead to the reign of Marxist terror in Germany. Bader's old comrades in Meinhof's apartment began planning the first operation of what would become the Red army faction. It was May 14, 1970. The plan to free Andrus Bader relied on Ulrike Meinhof's national reputation as a political journalist. But it would be the last time she would be able to play this card. Meinhof applied to meet with Boader to interview him for a book. Permission was granted and Boader was transported to the Central Institute for Social Questions at Berlin's Free University. There was no book project. The meeting was a ruse. When Bader arrived, he sat beside Meinhof at a desk as a pair of guards watched from a distance. Suddenly, two commandos burst in, dressed in wigs and ski masks, armed with handguns and tear gas. This wasn't an interview, it was a jailbreak. The getaway DRIVER that day, Astrid Prole explains here what happened next.
- [24:50]
Bruce Hoffman
I think we were all very nervous. I remember some people throwing up because we weren't so wonderful criminals or we weren't so wonderful with the, you know, with guns. We sort of involved the so called criminal who could do it so much better than we and who was, you know, and, and he was so nervous that he shot somebody. He didn't kill him, but he shot him back very badly. And that was really, really, really bad for the whole start of it.
- [25:22]
Eli Lake
In this moment of unexpected violence, Meinhof made the most important decision of her life. The original plan had been for her to sit still and act surprised, as though she was only there to do the interview. That way she could have held on to her life, looked after her children and enjoyed the best of both worlds radical politics with a bourgeois salary. But something had snapped and she wasn't going back to a normal life. So as Botter and the other terrorists climbed out of a first floor window, Meinhof decided to follow. They all sprinted to an Alfa Romeo parked across the street. At that moment, Meinhof chose to abandon society and go underground. In 1968, in one of her more enduring essays, Ulrike Meinhoff wrote, Protest is.
- [26:05]
Bettina Rolle
When I say I don't like. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like.
- [26:12]
Eli Lake
That day at the Institute, Ulrike Meinhoff was through with protest and was on a doomed path to try to put an end to all that she disliked. This is the first official communication from the Red army faction.
- [26:27]
Bettina Rolle
Did the pigs really believe that we would let Comrade Barrist sit in jail for two or three years? Did any pig believe that we would talk about the development of class struggle, the reorganization of the proletariat, without arming ourselves at the same time? Did the pigs who shot first believe that we would allow ourselves, without violence, to be shot off like slaughter cattle? Whoever does not defend himself will die. Start. The Armed resistance built up the Red Army.
- [27:03]
Eli Lake
The terrorist group was born and Ulrike Meinhof was at its heart. She entered a world of stolen identity papers, safe houses and shootouts. Her face was plastered on wanted posters throughout the country. The army was sent to the border crossings. She dyed and cut her hair, picked up her daughters in West Berlin and escaped to the east, where she left the twins in the care of her comrades.
- [27:25]
Bruce Hoffman
We weren't feeling so on the day of the so called Bada liberation, which is actually a prison break, liberation always sounds like. Well, on the same day, my sister and I were taken to Bremen by the people in the group and then to Sicily.
- [27:40]
Eli Lake
Here is Ulrike Meinhof's daughter Bettina. Roll again on what it was like to be vanished.
- [27:46]
Bruce Hoffman
And we were already wanted by Interpol, by my father. That's why we had to cross the Green border. But we didn't know that this was a kidnapping or abduction. We didn't know that. And we were full of confidence that my mother would come and pick us up. So of course we had no idea that we wouldn't see her again until two or three years later.
- [28:07]
Eli Lake
Eventually, Bettina and her sister Regina were taken to a hippie commune in Sicily, where they lived in deprivation.
- [28:13]
Bruce Hoffman
We spent four months in Sicily, which is a very long time for children. Would someone else come, my father or my mother? What would happen next? And a barrack camp like that isn't by the sea either, so it's not like you go to the beach every day and go on vacation. But it's a dreary thing because there were no windows, there was no running water, there were no kitchens. In other words, there was no Italian happy life.
- [28:40]
Eli Lake
Meyenhof was a fugitive, just like Bader and Enslin. The newly formed Red Army Faction had to get out of West Germany, so they traveled to a training camp for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, in the Jordanian desert. In 1970, the PFLP plotted bombings and assassinations against Israel and its allies abroad. The Red Army Faction wanted to learn from these Palestinians how to be urban guerrillas. But perhaps predictably, There was a culture clash. The PFLP was a seriously organized squadron of Arab Muslim men, while the Red Army Faction was a fruit salad of drug using artist radicals. It was like the premise of an ambitious sitcom. The RAF demanded barracks for both the men and women to share. At one point the Red Army Faction trainees decided to sunbathe on the roof of their living quarters, scandalizing the pious terrorists who shared the facility. According to Stefan Oust, who a former colleague of Meinhof's at Konkret and the author of one of the best histories of the Red Army Faction, Meinhof asked the PFLP if she could send her daughters to a Palestinian camp for girls where they would be trained as urban guerrillas as well. They told her that they would be happy to take them in, but that she would never get to see them again. Her twins were only seven years old, but Ulrike agreed to the terms. But Bettina and her sister Regina were saved by Meinhof's former colleague, Stefan Oust. Here's an excerpt from his book the Bader Meinhof Complex. We found out where the children were, made contact with the people looking after them, gave the password, and I then flew to Sicily to receive them there, claiming to be the group's accredited emissary. Our operation was successful and when Barda's real envoy and his women companions turned up near Mount Etna to take the girls away to the Jordanian camp, the birds had flown for this act of kindness. Oust was marked for assassination by his former comrades. Thankfully, the attempt on his life failed. When Meinhof, Bader and Insulin returned to Germany, they began robbing banks and placing bombs. Meinhof was never very good at this sort of thing, though during one robbery she left stacks of cash behind. Her real talent wasn't robbery, it was in writing. And she drafted the first Red Army Faction communiques. These include a long essay on the principles of urban guerrilla warfare and a tribute to Black September, the terrorist cell responsible for the massacre of Israeli wrestlers at the 1972 Munich Olympics. In this period, the terrorists were treated by some as folk heroes. Journalists couldn't get enough of this story. One of their own, Ulrike Meinhof, going underground and her fame would grow. A 1971 poll found that one in four Germans under 30 years old expressed sympathy for the Red Army Faction. Five percent of all Germans said they would harbor an RAF fugitive. The apex mountain for the Red army faction was May 1972. In a few short weeks they pulled off a series of bombings at a US military base in Frankfurt. An Axel Springer publishing house in Hamburg and a US military intelligence station in Heidelberg. Four US soldiers were killed, scores more were injured. The public, who had previously been sympathetic to the cause of the raf began to turn. It was one thing to rob banks and get into shootouts with the cops, but now it was clear that these revolutionaries were murderous. In one botched plan, they injured the wife of a federal judge who was driving the car they had rigged with a bomb. In June 1972, the West German National Police received a tip from a teacher who had agreed to harbor Meinhof, unaware of who she was. And when the police arrived, she was gaunt, ill and had little luggage. Meinhof was taken straight to prison. More raids that month nabbed Bader and Enslin. The entire leadership of the Red army faction was were imprisoned for the next nine months. Ulrike Meinhof would be confined to an isolated cell in Ossenberg Prison. Everything in the room was white except for the pale green door. A neon light in the ceiling was kept on 24 hours a day and she was the only prisoner in the building. It was torture. Here's how Meinhelf described it.
- [33:10]
Bettina Rolle
The feeling your head is exploding. The feeling the top of your skull should really tear apart, burst wide open. The feeling your spinal column is pressing into your brain. The feeling your brain is gradually shriveling up like baked fruit. The feeling you're completely and surreptitiously wired under remote control. The feeling the associations you make are being hacked away. The feeling you are pissing the soul out of your body as though you can't hold water.
- [33:46]
Eli Lake
Eventually she got to see visitors, including her twins. Their first visit was in October of 1972. Ulrike wrote to Bettina and Regina, who were now 10.
- [33:57]
Bettina Rolle
You were here. I think the whole prison was clad. That's how it seemed to me. Would you visit me again?
- [34:05]
Eli Lake
She kept up this correspondence for another year. She would discuss politics, advise her children on how to treat the weaker students at school, lecture them on the conditions of the working class in West Germany. But Meinhof was losing touch with reality. As Stefan Oust wrote, Shortly before Christmas 1973, Ulrike Meinhoff suddenly broke off contact with her children. An Advent calendar they had made her was returned. She refused to accept it. She stopped answering their letters. The girls never saw their mother again. Meinhof and the other RAF members, including Bader and Einslein, were then transferred to Stamheim Prison and were allowed to share a floor. They worked on their legal strategy, wrote various communiques, but mainly they fought with one Another. And Meinhof was soon the odd one out. Bader and Ainslein had turned on her. As their trial progressed, Meinhof became despondent. On Saturday, May 8, 1976, she ripped apart pieces of the prison's blue and white towels and twisted them together to make a rope. She moved her bed underneath a small grate covering a window, tied the rope to the grate and made a noose for her neck. The guards found her dangling corpse the following morning. It was May 9th, Mother's Day. Ulrike Meinhof was dead.
- [35:38]
Bruce Hoffman
Well, I mean, every death is probably terrible when a child is 13. But there was still a lot of unresolved issues. And then two camps formed. @ the time, most leftists, like for example, the Minister of the Interior, Otto Schilli, said that Ulrike Meinhof had been murdered by the state. The Federal Republic of Germany had murdered Meinhof and the others, like Stefan Auerst or my father, said it was suicide. And I think it's more likely that she was actually murdered, but not by the state, but by her own people, with whom she was in a corridor. They were together Bader, Engel and Jankar. And since they also had pistols and radios and racks, it's quite possible that they also had the key. After all, they were together all day. But I only dared to say that for the first time a few years ago. Of course, you don't say anything about it when you are 13 years old.
- [36:30]
Eli Lake
After Meinhof's death, Europe's radicals erupted in protests. Bombs went off in Paris and Rome. Meinhof did not leave a suicide note, and her supporters insisted that she had been murdered by the state. At her funeral, a procession marched with red banners displaying the RAF a machine gun framed by a pentagram. The other Red Army Faction leaders were still waiting for trial in Stamheim Prison, but their comrades were still in the wild. After Bader and Enslin and others were convicted of murder and domestic terrorism, a gang of RAF operatives stormed the West German Embassy in Stockholm in an attempt to take hostages to trade for Bader, Enslin and the others. The plot failed. Soon after, the group kidnapped the head of Germany's employers association, again demanding a trade for Bader and Einstein. That plot failed as well. Finally, on October 13, 1977, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked a Lufthansa flight and demanded the Red Army Faction prisoners be released. But West Germany did not give in to their demands. The hijackers killed the pilot and flew the hostages to Mogadishu, Somalia. There A West German SWAT team stormed the plane, killed the terrorists and freed the passengers. When Badr and Enslin got word that the hijackers had failed, they committed group suicide with a pistol likely smuggled in by their lawyers. It was October 17, 1977. The first generation of the Red army faction was finished. Now the story takes a bizarre and menacing turn. After Ulrike Meinhof's death, instead of sending her body to be buried, the West German authorities removed her brain during the autopsy, placed it in formaldehyde and sent it for close examination and didn't really tell anyone. Dr. Bernard Bogaertz told a press conference in 2002 that Meinhof's brain displayed neurological abnormalities which he attributed to that operation she received in 1962 to remove a brain tumor. He said at the time that his findings challenged whether Meinhof was ever mentally fit to stand trial. All of this raises a question. Was it really the Vietnam War, the writings of Che Guevara and Herbert Marcuse that turned Meinhof into a terrorist? Or was it scar tissue left over from that operation to cure her incessant headaches? For what it's worth, Bettina Rolle rejects this theory.
- [39:14]
Bruce Hoffman
Suddenly in 2002 someone called and told me if I knew that my mother's brain had not been buried. But of course I didn't know that. And it's a pretty scary story when you suddenly realize that there are journalists and researchers all talking about this brain that's in some kind of solution and they want to do research on this brain. Then my husband and I got together to do the research and we published the story in a newspaper and triggered a huge debate about the ethical background. Firstly, whether this is allowed at all, but secondly whether it isn't also Charlotte Journey. Because if you want to find terror in Mino's brain, then you would have to find it in all terrorists brains, which is really absurd.
- [39:57]
Eli Lake
For scientists it's very tempting to blame radicalism on a chemical imbalance, an errant brain cell or a chronic malady. It's perhaps more satisfying to point to to a smoking neurological gun rather than a Rubik's Cube of personal, ideological and sociological motives. In fact, just as Meinhof's head was carved open by inquisitive doctors, there are many thirsty experts looking to pathologize Luigi Mangione. Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering the CEO of United Healthcare, appears to have some major health issues. Now that it's come out that Luigi Mangione had a back problem, we're going to talk about what went wrong with his spine as an educational opportunity to better understand back pain. We're going to be analyzing the behavior and body language of Luigi Mangioni. He pictures himself, I think, as a savior, as a folk hero for the people, that he's a superhero, like Batman, you know, going to conquer evil and seek good. That really points to some real mental health issues. So as went Ulrike Meinhof, so goes Luigi. It's worth noting that Mangioni is pleading not guilty, and Meinhof would have never done that. But there are similarities. They are both cult heroes. Both have been reimagined through the prevalent youth culture language of their day. 70s rebellion for Meinhof, 21st century shitposting for Mangione. But the biggest difference between Mangione and Meinhof are the ages in which they live. For Meinhof, revolution was a process of socialization. In order to go from journalist to terrorist, she needed a set of almost impossible circumstances. The early trauma of losing her parents and the collective trauma of Nazism in Germany. The cultural typhoon of 1968. Radicalism, divorce, betrayal, the existence of the Soviet Union, the misfortune of meeting dangerous lunatics like Andres Bader. And it is a cocktail of triggers and motives. If Mangione is found guilty, though, it would be clear that he did this alone. As a revolutionary of the Internet era. Podcasts, blogs, a 3D printed gun. While many of Ulrike Meinhof's fans would never have been able to track down a terror cell to join in 2025, there's no need for such comrades. The barrier for entry for joining Mangione's revolution and is merely the stomach to become a lone wolf.
- [42:23]
Karen Bauer
We're in a different world of terrorism now.
- [42:26]
Eli Lake
This is Bruce Hoffman again.
- [42:27]
Karen Bauer
A lot of the descriptions of terrorism in the United States and elsewhere over the past decade or more, it hasn't been organization or groups. It's been radicalized individuals who on their own, who don't have never joined a group, who may not have any contact with any organization, who themselves have become frustrated and take it upon themselves to carry out individual acts of violence in certain service to a broader ideology that's become much more the pattern of terrorism in the 21st century.
- [42:58]
Eli Lake
We will learn a lot more about Luigi Mangione during his trial, but people will probably never be satisfied. He will loom as a cultural figure, the subject of academic papers, Netflix documentaries and T shirt iconography. It seems likely that found guilty or not, Mangiano's name will be etched into incoherent manifestos. For years to come. In fact, there have already been a series of copycats. Brianna Boston, 42 years old, was arrested at her Lakeland, Florida home on Tuesday after allegedly making threats on a call to Blue Cross Blue Shield regarding the denial of a recent medical insurance claim. Boston, that's her name, ended the recorded conversation with the company rep by saying, quote, delay, deny, depose. You people are next. Meinhof would call this process of self radicalization the journey from protest to resistance, and the temptation to embrace violence in the name of righting an injustice is strong, especially in our era of populist rage. But it's almost always a mirage, and it never leads anywhere good. Just consider Meinhof's cautionary tale. Ponder her fate in Stamheim Prison as she dangled from a window grate. Cut off from her friends, isolated from her daughters and despised by her comrades, this once celebrated journalist learned from experience. Resistance is brutal. Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And remember, if you want to support Breaking History, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a five star rating and an nice comment too. Also, if you love this episode, there's more great content@thefp.com please become a subscriber today and until then, I'll see you next time.
- [45:29]
Bruce Hoffman
Protesters When I say I don't like this, resist is when I end what I don't like.
- [45:37]
Eli Lake
Resist the won't live forever.
- [45:40]
Bruce Hoffman
Resist the fear of ending arrest. Resist the pigs.
- [45:45]
Eli Lake
You know I would never rat out brothers in the RAF with all my brothers in the RAF AF all my brothers, all my brothers.