Ulrike Meinhof, who helped the terrorists with their language, committed suicide 25 years ago

She killed herself, says Hans-Ludwig Zachert, the former President of the Federal Criminal Office (BKA), "because she saw that she was no longer in control". My farm "simply did not have the standing qualities of Andreas Baader". She was a soft woman after all. Former RAF man and current NPD lawyer Horst Mahler, 65, describes Kombattantin Meinhof as "hypersensitive". With her, the renegade Mahler explains, "everything came from a vulnerability of the soul".

The five smooth words. I'm sorry. and, of course, can be shot"for Mahler are the expression of a"superstition that turns into a cynical contempt for life". Zachert recognizes the "shoot order" in Meinhof's tape text, which should legitimise all subsequent RAF attacks.

Meinhof's former husband, the Hamburg journalist and writer Klaus Rainer Rohhl, 72, still does not want to believe that his wife, the mother of his two daughters, the once celebrated columnist, the high priestess of the student movement, who spoke pure, white soul with the big, sad eyes, that half-sentence. Rohl: "Only when I hear her voice on the tape do I believe it."

In fact, one month before her infamous statement, Ulrike Meinhof had recaptured herself from her previous life. I got 14. In May 1970, she and Gudrun Ensslin, Ingrid Schubert and others helped the prisoner Andreas Baader, who had visited the Berlin Institute for Social Affairs under guard, escape. In the course of the action, Georg Linke, an institute employee, was injured by a life-threatening bullet. After the shooting, Meinhof must have panicked. She escaped with Baader. If she had stayed in the institute, Horst Herold, the head of BKA who led the RAF search in the 70s, remembers "we could not have proved anything to her". At the crime scene, the gun, Meinhof's purse and her past remained.

For more than ten years Meinhof had been polemical in her columns for the magazine "concretely", against rearmament, emergency laws, the Great Coalition, the Chechen visit and the Vietnam War. She was the left-wing journalist of the Republic, she fought with the established and begged them. For her villa in Blankenese, she sought Tiffany lamps, wrote features about children and women on the treadmill, loved designer dresses, visited horse races and later condemned herself as a "hypocritical pig of the ruling class". She demanded "outrage", demanded "protest" from her readers, mocked with "counter-violence" and, if there really was "bamboo", withheld herself nobly. In the world of "party republics", the writer and "concrete" colleague Peter Raumkorf noted, Meinhof was "a pleasantly circulated exotic, as the crowning achievement of a pluralist establishment: implacable from the point of view of the matter, but not reluctant to attend in private".

For Herold, the Baader liberation, the shots and the severely wounded are the forces that drive the "cogwheel" in Meinhof's fragile clockwork the decisive "click forward".

The violence with which she had been shaking for so long and with which she had been flirting so violently had to justify it somehow in her tape statement, and she did so with that vocabulary, those arguments that became the basis of the RAF theory: "This is a problem, and of course we say that the cops are pigs, we say, The guy in the uniform is a pig, he's not human, and that's how we deal with him. That means we don't have to talk to him, and it's wrong to talk to these people at all, and of course you can get shot."

It no longer mattered that the shots were accidentally fired, it no longer mattered that the injured officer was not a policeman at all; the language of the RAF now dictated the truth. Ulrike Meinhof had declared the total enemy, the state of emergency. BKA-Mann Herold recognizes the "driving force" of this text and the RAF constitution, also recently written by Meinhof, "The concept of urban guerrilla", in a "very brisk mixture of Marxist and anarchist thinking". In this form, the 78-year-old says that it has been "unique" until now, who once spent years analyzing the writings and thinking of the RAF in order to identify and highlight the "opponent". From Marxism Meinhof borrowed the technique of dialectics, the concrete of contradiction, in order to advance the revolutionary conflict. Anarchist, on the other hand, had been the "propaganda of action".

It was probably Gudrun Ensslin and in particular Andreas Baader who forced Meinhof's thinking under the "primacy of practice". Baader, Mahler recalls, drove Meinhof into the "action". Again and again he provoked her: "You're just talking. You're passionate about the chicory."

The criminal Meinhof must have given a pathetic figure at first. When she lit a hand grenade in a Jordanian training camp, according to her biographer Mario Krebs, she was "helpless with the sharpened weapon in her hand until someone called to her to throw the grenades away". Meinhof regularly got sick on her underground job. She screwed up the handing over of fake passports, and when it came to cracking a car lock, she suddenly held a disconnected steering wheel in her hand.

Meinhof Metier was writing, and with her lyrics she forged the most dangerous weapon of the RAF, the degradation of human life to mere function. If the opponent is a pig, killing is no longer murder. The killers of the third, last and most perfect RAF generation also called their attacks, in which people were executed with neck shots or shredded with shrapnel bombs, always "actions". When the alleged repentant terrorist Birgit Hogefeld 1996 was on trial, she spoke of "terrible mistakes" by the RAF, but never of "murder". This word had been edited by the former journalist Meinhof from the minds of her students.

Already in her 70s pamphlet, Ulrike Meinhof hid in the crucial passages the "revolutionary" perpetrators, those who were called to act and kill. (b) and of course can be shot"is a passive construction without the actual subject. The voiceless It is the first trace of that amorphous RAF collective that will later take responsibility for all attacks, be they so cruel. The "longing for the collective", according to Herold, was also Meinhof's desire for a "new way of life", for "closeness and security".

As a six-year-old, she loses her father, as a 14-year-old, her mother. My court's foster mother Renate Riemeck may have been many things: a woman's advocate, a peace fighter; she was never a mother. My husband, Klaus Rainer Rohhl, was the Zampano of the scene at the time, an adventurer and party player who allegedly cheated on his wife so many times until she could no longer sustain the image of the healed intellectual nidyle and left him.

It was the RAF Collective, Zachert, that pushed Meinhof to make a particularly harsh and inhumane decision. Her seven-year-old twin daughters Regine and Bettina had her mother 1970 kidnapped from Germany to "comrades" in Sicily. Later, the RAF managers Baader, Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, who dived to Jordan, decided that the children should grow up as orphans in a Palestinian camp. It is said that the mother even agreed to separate the twins in order to deprive them of their bourgeois identity. This fate was spared the children. Stefan Aust, the "concrete" Meinhof confidant, abducted the children to Germany and returned them to their father in September 1970's.

Later, the children visited their mother in a family home. She wrote, "Hey, mice! And bite your teeth together. And don't think about how sad you must be to have a mommy who's in jail. It's better to be angry than sad at all. Oh, wait, I'll be glad to have you. "Damn right." 1973 Meinhof breaks off contact with Regine and Bettina.

Mahler recalls that one of the main exercises of the RAF was "overcoming moral scruples". Herold recognizes an overwhelming focus on the future in all of the terrorist troops'texts. What matters is the revolutionary vision, the verbal agreement to the next act. The attack just carried out, the real situation in the Federal Republic, the history of the country do not matter. The past is being liquidated, including its own biography.

According to Hans-Ludwig Zachert, their texts from the 60s should be "taken seriously". Meinhof's columns were a "facet of the contemporary spirit" and quite suitable as "school reading". Horst Herold also advocates that the youth should read Meinhof's writings. "They are part of history."

A story with which the woman in the family home cell, who made out on the night of the 8th. May 1976 had long broken the noose around his neck. It had been murder, the terrorists Jan-Carl Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin played in the following days. In particular, as evidence of a conspiracy by the state, the RAF cited an indication: Ulrike Meinhof had not left a suicide note.

But this can also be interpreted differently: no more thoughts and no more talk. No more texts. It had to be done.

The terrorists of the Red Army Group have so far murdered 34 people. Until 1998, 21 members of the RAF died. During the attacks, many people were injured in part at risk of death. The property damage goes into billions

SUMMARY OF THE TOTAL FINANCE

The RAF declared their victims "pigs" of the hated system. They are not to be considered as human, but only as opponents

Norbert Schmid, murdered 1971

SOLDIER Ronald Woodward, murdered 1972

GSG-9-MAN Michael Newrzella, murdered 1993