THE LOST SOUL OF ULRIKE MEINHOF

Today in Berlin: May 9, 1976

On this day in 1976 shortly before 8 AM prison guards at the high-security prison Stuttgart-Stammhein found a lifeless body of one of the leading members of Germany’s most feared and most infamous post-war terrorist groups, RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion). On Mother’s Day in 1976 Ulrike Meinhof, sentenced to eight years imprisonment, committed suicide.

Meinhof, a very intelligent, well-educated journalist, came from what in the 1930s (she was born in 1934 in Oldenrbug) was considered a “good family”. Solid middle-class background. Her eventual total metamorphosis from intellectual to criminal, and participation in straightforward terrorism puzzled many and ended up in her facing charges of murder (4) and attempted murder (54). Together with her closest “camrades”: Andreas Baader, Gudrun Enslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe (the fifth prisoner, Holger Meins, never made it to Stuttgart - he starved himself to death in another jail in 1974) she was locked up in the brand-new prison in Stammheim.