Guerrillas on Trial

When police seized three top leaders .and more than 20 alleged followers of the celebrated Baader-Meinhof gang in the summer of 1972, many West Germans felt a sense of relief. During a two-year reign of anarchist-inspired violence, the group, which styled itself the "Red Army Faction," was accused of dozens of bombings, bank robberies and cops-and-robbers shootouts. Since then, all of the defendants have remained locked up awaiting trial, but the authorities fear that the group's sympathizers have reorganized for another outbreak of terror.

Last week, in the biggest dragnet since the 1972 raids, West German police swept through scores of homes in search of members of suspected terrorist organizations. At least 14 people were arrested, including Wolf-Dieter Reinhard, 35, a Hamburg lawyer who represented some of the Baader-Meinhof defendants. Reinhard was held on suspicion of belonging to an anarchist group that murdered one of its members when he talked to police.

Tension has been building ever since three members of the gang--Ulrike Meinhof, 40, a former journalist, Hans Jurgen Baecker, 36, a garage mechanic, and Horst Mahler, 39, a lawyer who rose to fame by defending student demonstrators--went on trial in September on charges of having helped Ringleader Andreas Baader escape from a previous imprisonment in 1970 (he was recaptured in 1972). As the trial began, 17 Baader-Meinhof prisoners across the country went on hunger strikes to protest their incarceration in solitary confinement. Their lawyers charged that they were held for months in "sensory-deprivation" cubicles lacking light, sound or other stimulation.

Last month one of the defendants, Holger Meins, a West Berlin film student, died as a result of his hunger strike.

Next day, apparently in retaliation, two gunmen went to the home of the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court, Gunter von Drenkmann, and shot him down when he opened the door. A bomb went off (harmlessly) in the garden of another judge in Hamburg, and eight firebombings occurred in Gottingen. So far, there have been no arrests.

The trial itself proceeded under the tightest security precautions in West Berlin's history. As 200 policemen guarded the courthouse against student demonstrators, security men with machine guns and Alsatian dogs patrolled the corridors. The defendants themselves sat in bullet-proof-glass enclosures--popping up occasionally to denounce the authorities as "swine" and "fascists." After Ulrike Meinhof took the witness stand and praised the freeing of Baader as "an outstanding example of urban guerrilla activity," few expected an acquittal.

Disturbing Parallels. Last week the court sentenced Meinhof (who is also reported near death from starvation) to eight years on charges of attempted murder and illegal possession of firearms.

Mahler, who is serving time for bank robbery, was convicted of abetting Baa-der's escape and had two years added to his prison term. Baecker was acquitted but remained in prison, also on an earlier conviction for bank robbery.

Attending Judge Drenkmann's state funeral in West Berlin last week, West German President Walter Scheel cited disturbing parallels with the "carrousel of terror and murder, hatred and violence" between extremists of right and left that finally helped bring down the Weimar Republic in 1933. He appealed to Berliners to put aside "thoughts of revenge." Nonetheless, anxiety over the violence was apparently prompting West Germans to sacrifice at least one traditional civil liberty: the right of lawyers and clients to discuss their case in private. Last week, amid charges that lawyers for the Baader-Meinhof prisoners had spirited messages out of prison, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt sent a draft bill to the Bundestag that could monitor lawyer-client meetings whenever the accused was charged with a "grave crime." The bill also provides for trial even if a defendant is too weak, presumably from hunger strikes, to attend.

It is expected to pass easily.

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