The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (29 page)

The RAF presented various ‘justifications' for these attacks, but the main cause, so they said, was retaliation for the increased bombing of Vietnam by the United States. They maintained that West Germany should no longer be a safe place from which the American military could operate; indeed, the only way the violence would stop would be if the US withdrew from Vietnam altogether. Ultimately, however, the only people who found themselves unable to operate within Germany were the terrorists, for after the ‘May Offensive' the police mounted a massive hunt for all RAF and SPK members. Over 130,000 officers were involved, patrolling the streets, checking border crossings and sifting through the mass of evidence that was coming in from the general public. The pay-off was enormous. In late May in Frankfurt, a resident alerted police, having grown suspicious of three of his neighbors whom he saw mixing an unidentified substance at the back of their house. On June 1, 1972 all three suspects were arrested; Andreas Baader, Holger Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe. The substance they had been mixing was an explosive. On June 7, a shop assistant in Hamburg noticed a young female customer acting suspiciously with what appeared to be a heavy object secreted in her handbag. Again, the police were alerted and the woman, Gudrun Ensslin, was placed under arrest. The object in her bag turned out to be a gun. Finally, on June 15, the authorities captured yet another major Red Army Faction player. The previous evening, a left-wing teacher had received a visit from a friend asking if he could accommodate two acquaintances for a short period. The teacher, though suspicious, agreed, and let the two stay, but later decided to call the police who immediately placed the apartment under surveillance. The next day one of the two guests, Gerhard Müller, left the apartment to use a telephone booth outside on the street, only to be pounced on by several officers, who then also placed the second fugitive, Ulrike Meinhof, under arrest. At first the police were unaware of the identity of either of their captives, and although they soon worked out who Müller was, it took a little longer to establish Meinhof's identity.

There were no previous fingerprints from Meinhof to match up with those of their new captive but the police found an old copy of
Stern
magazine in which an article on Meinhof had appeared, accompanied by a photograph. The photograph was of an X-ray of her skull taken after an operation she had undergone back in 1962, when a metal clip was placed over an engorged blood vessel. The police now took an X-ray of their captive's skull and, on comparing the two, found they were identical. The authorities were ecstatic. They had captured one of Germany's most wanted terrorists. To cap it all, three weeks later they arrested Irmgard Möller and Klaus Jünschke.

It was at this time that a subtle change occurred within the RAF, SPK and even the ‘2 June Movement' in that, rather than using their aggression as a protest against the Federal Republic and the United States governments, their terrorist activities were instead increasingly tied to the release of their comrades and to their hatred of the judicial system. With practically all of the RAF's main players in prison, those left behind became known as second-generation terrorists – men and women who weren't active during the late 1960s, but who were nonetheless determined to carry on the fight. And one subject exercised their minds more than any other – what they saw as the systematic mistreatment of their imprisoned colleagues.

For much of the time the detainees were kept in solitary confinement – a policy that took its toll on many prisoners, including Astrid Proll, who had been arrested in May 1971. Proll spent nearly five months in almost complete isolation in the Women's Psychiatric Section of the prison. Starved of any kind of mental stimulation, confined to a bare white room with no pictures on the walls, with no one to talk to and with barely any outside noise to listen to, her treatment was likened to shock therapy.

Meinhof was also kept under similar conditions, for a period of eight long months, during which she wrote a poem, ‘From the Dead Tract' (‘Aus dem Toten Trakt') that put into words the extreme torture such a punishment exacted. ‘You can no longer identify the meaning of words,' she wrote. ‘Visits leave behind no trace.'

Margrit Schiller, who was serving out a long stretch in Lübeck prison, believed she too was in the ‘dead tract' and if there was any doubt as to how severe this punishment truly was, one only has to refer to an account by Heinz Brandt, (a survivor of Auschwitz) who in addition to his time in a concentration camp had also suffered long periods of solitary confinement in East Germany where he was imprisoned over a period of some years.

As crass and paradoxical as it may sound, my experiences with strict, radical isolation were worse than my time…in a Nazi concentration camp … [in] the camp, I still had the basis for human life, namely communication with my fellow inmates … We were able in the camps to see, not only outrageously fascistic and sadistic mistreatment, but also the possibilities for resistance and collective life among the prisoners, and, with this, for the fulfillment of the fundamental need of a human being: social existence.
⁷

So severe was the treatment that the inmates' only recourse was to stage a series of hunger strikes, starting in January 1973. These were extremely tough times for the detainees, but in respect of their mistreatment and their fight to improve prison conditions they were at least supported by their respective attorneys, and by legal organizations such as the ‘Committees Against Isolation Torture in the Prisons of the FRG.'

Now a new fight began – trying to forcefeed those prisoners who were refusing to eat. Doctors strapped inmates to their beds, clamped their mouths open and pushed tubes down their throats and nostrils into their stomachs. Again, SPK member Margrit Schiller was subjected to this institutionalized violence, stating that some doctors and prison guards were deliberately brutal in their technique, often leaving her and her fellow protestors bruised and bloodied.

Meanwhile, outside the prisons, ex-SPK members who had now fully integrated with the Red Army Faction mounted further guerrilla activities, most of which were designed to bring about the release of their comrades.

On November 10, 1974, the Federal Republic's Supreme Court President, Günter von Drenkmann, was killed in a botched kidnap attempt. Then, on April 24, 1975, several former SPK members stormed the West German Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, taking twelve hostages. Among the terrorists were: Siegfried Hauser, Hanne-Elise Krabbe, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, Bernhard-Maria Rossner and Ullrich Wessel. They ushered their hostages – who included the Ambassador and the economics, military, cultural and press attachés to the embassy – into the library, then searched the rest of the building for remaining staff members, completely missing one of the secretaries who had hidden in a cupboard inside Room 306.

While all this was occurring, Swedish police, having been alerted to the situation, immediately moved into the ground floor of the embassy where they set up an operational center. This angered the terrorists to the point that they demanded the police withdraw otherwise they would shoot one of the hostages – the military attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Baron Andreas von Mirbach. The police refused and the terrorists bound Mirbach's hands before leading him towards the top of the upper-floor stairwell, where they shot him, first in the leg, then in the head and chest, throwing him towards the police who dragged the dying man away. The authorities quickly evacuated the ground floor and took up a less antagonistic position outside the building.

With the police out of the way, the terrorists decided to place massive amounts of TNT explosive in the embassy's basement. They then made contact with a German press agency and informed them of their demands. First and foremost, they wanted twenty-six of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists (including Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof) released. Back in Germany, however, the government, led by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, was not prepared to be blackmailed by the terrorists and made it clear that they would not negotiate. This attitude prompted the terrorists to state that they would begin to execute one hostage every hour until the government started to release their friends. One hour passed by and nothing happened, but then Doctor Heinz Hillegart, the embassy's economic attaché, was taken to a window and shot in the back. The attaché's body was left hanging out of the window, a sign for everyone watching not to take the terrorists' threats lightly.

What happened next was a freak accident. A short-circuit in the electrical wiring of the detonators caused some of the TNT in the basement to explode and two of the terrorists died. The others survived the explosion but in the ensuing mayhem were swiftly captured by the police. Terrorist Siegfried Hausner, who had suffered terrible burns after the TNT explosion, was flown directly to Stammheim Prison's hospital wing, but died a few days later from his injuries.

In total the siege had lasted ten days, during which time two hostages had been killed and three terrorists had died. Some of the hostages later claimed that they had formed ‘friendships' with their captors and even felt a certain sympathy for their cause. This was not an emotion shared by the majority of people living in Germany where, on May 21, 1975, the trial of Baader, Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe began.

Spelling the beginning of the end of the Baader-Meinhof SPK movement, this trial ran for nearly two years, ending in April 1977 when the defendants were collectively found guilty of four murders and twenty-seven attempted murders, and of establishing an illegal criminal organization – for which they were each given life sentences. Shortly afterwards, Baader, Raspe and Ensslin all committed suicide in their cells in Stammheim prison, although controversy continues to surround the exact circumstances of their deaths, with some preferring to believe that the suicides were somehow ‘staged' to cover up the unlawful killing of the prisoners. Ulrike Meinhof, who had been tried in 1974 for her part in the freeing of Baader and who had received an eight-year sentence, hadn't fared much better, for on May 9, 1976 she was found hanging in her cell, also the apparent victim of suicide.

Although terrorist activities continued for several years after their deaths, the heart had been ripped out of the beast. Support for the movement gradually petered out. Ironically, given both the SPK and the RAF's left-wing agendas, the effect their actions had on West Germany as a whole was quite the opposite to that which they had intended, with the electorate taking an increasingly conservative stance. Today, with East and West Germany reunited, for many the idea of following any kind of left-wing or communist philosophy would be simply unthinkable.

I have never heard of such atrocities, or presided over such trials, such cold-blooded murders, such heart-rending scenes of distress, and misery; such base ingratitude; such a total abandonment of the very principle which binds man to man; which softens the heart and elevates mankind above the brute creation … mercy to such wretches would be the extreme of cruelty to mankind … blood for blood.

F. C. S
MITH
, Agent to the Governor-General of India, Calcutta, 1832

I
n the year 1839, Queen Victoria, who had always been fascinated by the more Oriental reaches of her empire, received information that a novel was to be published, the main subject of which concerned an horrific account of an Indian secret society whose aim was the ritual murder and robbery of unwitting travelers. Summoning the publisher, Richard Bentley, to the palace, Queen Victoria demanded that page proofs be sent her immediately. Bentley acquiesced and the first few chapters of what would later become known as
Confessions of a Thug
by Colonel Philip Meadows Taylor – a colonial officer stationed in Hyderabad at the time of the Thuggee killings – were dispatched.

The story revolved around a character called Ameer Ali (said to be based upon a real-life criminal called Feringheea) who strangles his way to fame and fortune by killing a large number of women, a few of whom he falls in love with, a few of whom he doesn't, but all of whom end up dead. Naturally, given the sensational subject matter and the exotic cruelty, from the moment the book was published it became a bestseller, enthralling the British reading public within the first few lurid pages. The book also catapulted the word ‘thug' – from the Hindi word
t'ag
meaning deceiver – into the English language.

Although Queen Victoria might not have been aware of this group prior to publication of the novel, the Thugs, or Thuggee, had been mentioned in literature before, the earliest authenticated case being around 1356 in a passage from Ziya'ud-Din Baran's
History of Firuz Shah
:

In the reign of that sultan, some Thugs were taken in Delhi, and a man belonging to that fraternity was the means of about a thousand being captured. But not one of these did the sultan have killed. He gave orders for them to be put into boats and to be conveyed into the lower country, to the neighborhood of Lakhnauti, where they were to be set free. The Thugs would thus have to dwell about Lakhnauti and would not trouble the neighborhood of Delhi any more.
¹

Before 1839 several mentions of the Thugs had also been made in England. John Fryer wrote of their existence towards the end of the seventeenth century and in 1833 George Swinton, the Chief Secretary to the Government of India, sent seven severed heads to Edinburgh for forensic examination. It was thought the heads all belonged to Thug members and after extensive tests were carried out the examiners concluded that each of the skulls revealed remarkable characteristics usually seen only in criminals. ‘The mass of the posterior and basilar regions is large,' stated the report, ‘the coronal region is too small to enable the moral faculties to exercise sufficient restraint over the propensities; and hence the natural tendencies of the individuals were to selfish and immoral courses of action.'
²
All of this guaranteed that the Thugs continued to fascinate Victorian England, particularly with stories of human sacrifices being made to the Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali. Popular publications such as
Blackwood's Magazine
and the
Quarterly Review
printed stories outlining everything then known about the cult of the Thugs, while the author Jules Verne mentioned the Thugs in his book
Around the World in Eighty Days,
²
but if anyone was in any doubt as to how far-reaching the news of this notorious sect was, the following account by Mark Twain should set the record straight: