Books: Like Father

HITLER'S CHILDREN by JULIAN BECKER. Illustrated. 322 pages. Lippincott. $12.50.

Shooting, bombing, kidnaping, they blazed through West Germany like a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde—and evoked much the same combination of fear and morbid fascination. Ulrike Meinhof was a skilled but emotionally insecure Hamburg writer; Andreas Baader was a pampered Mama's boy. Together, this unlikely couple, she 34 and he 25 when they first teamed up to do violence, became leaders of Western Europe's bloodiest terrorist outfit, dubbed by journalists the Baader-Meinhof gang.

As Novelist Becker (The Keep, The Union) indicates in her first documentary book, the Baader-Meinhof group sprouted from the roots of German student protest against archaic regulations and extreme overcrowding in the universities. But after West Berlin police shot a student demonstrating against a visit by the Shah of Iran, protest graduated to violence. Baader had come to West Berlin to escape the draft, Meinhof to be nearer the "revolution." There, they recruited colleagues who shared some basic zealotries: West Germany's "performance society" induced mental illness in its citizens; the struggle against U.S. involvement in Viet Nam must be waged everywhere; all authority is fascist and hence worthy of destruction.

Even at its zenith in the early 1970s, the Baader-Meinhof gang never numbered more than about 25. Yet they frightened West Germany into a state of paranoia. Financing operations through frequent bank robberies, the gang set up bomb factories and, through their contacts with international terrorist groups, bought arsenals of weapons and ammunition. Suitably armed, the German terrorists embarked on a killing and bombing spree. They vented their rage on "consumer capitalism" by placing bombs in Frankfurt department stores. They struck at the hated Ami (unflattering German slang for "American") by setting bombs in U.S. Army headquarters in Heidelberg and an officers' club in Frankfurt; they shocked German legal authorities with their cold-blooded killings of judges and police.

All the while, Meinhof cranked out ideological justifications for the mayhem. For those with memories of the Third Reich, the incidents and propaganda had a chilling familiarity. Substantial segments of the European left began to praise the gang's actions as justified retaliations against the excesses of capitalism. The praise increased the gang's arrogance—and may have contributed to its fatal carelessness. Once the West German federal police set up special squads to cope with the terrorists. they found their quarries easy prey. In 1972 Baader blundered into police hands by racing up to a clandestine bomb factory in a flashy purple Porsche (the gang had a capitalist weakness for luxurious cars). Meinhof naively fell into a police trap in a village near Hannover.

Within a year most of the gang were rounded up. Andreas Baader is serving a life term in a West German prison. Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself in her cell with a noose fashioned from a torn sheet.