/ 1 January 2002

Dead guerrillas, missing brains and the experiment

The brains of Germany’s most notorious far-left urban guerrillas were taken away to be examined by scientists, secretly preserved in formaldehyde for a quarter of a century — and have now mostly vanished without trace.

The bizarre story of the ‘terrorists’ brains’ is one that could have come from the pen of Mel Brooks or Joe Orton.

But it also carries echoes of some of 19th century Germany’s weirder medical experiments.

Central to the affair is a clandestine attempt to show that anti-social behaviour is caused by physical abnormality.

The news magazine Der Spiegel reported yesterday that the brains of three prominent Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorists who died in 1977 — Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe — had all been stored in jars in the university clinic of Tübingen at the time of their deaths.

But a search of the clinic’s brain deposit, carried out at Der Spiegel’s request, failed to turn up either the organs themselves or any paperwork to show where they had gone.

The magazine quoted the head of the university’s Institute for Brain Research, Richard Meyermann, as saying: ”They are no longer there.”

Andreas Baader, who was found dead in jail in 1977, having apparently committed suicide, was one of two leaders of the RAF, a movement that was responsible for the deaths of more than 30 people in the 1970s and early 1980s. His co-leader, Ulrike Meinhof, had hanged herself a year earlier.

The brains of both terrorists, along with those of Ensslin and Raspe were originally entrusted to a Tübingen pathologist, Jürgen Peiffer, who carried out post mortem examinations on all four.

Der Spiegel reported Peiffer as saying that the brains were in the university clinic’s store when he retired in 1988.

Ulrike Meinhof’s at least was still there nine years later.

Earlier this month, as the result of an article written by her daughter, Bettina Rohl, it emerged that in 1997 the organ had been handed on to a doctor in Magdeburg in eastern Germany for further examination.

The doctor, Bernhard Bogerts, admitted at a press conference last Tuesday that he did indeed have the brain.

He said his examinations, carried out at the request of Peiffer, confirmed the pathologist’s belief that the dead terrorist suffered from ”neurological abnormalities” caused by a 1962 operation for the removal of a brain tumour.

He said his findings brought into question ”the whole issue of whether Meinhof was competent to stand trial”.

The following day he was ordered by prosecutors in Tübingen to hand back the brain for burial.

The prosecutors are considering whether to bring charges in connection with the affair following a complaint from Rohl’s twin sister, Regine.

This is the second time in two years that Bettina Rohl’s research into the German far left has provoked controversy. In January 2001, the foreign minister, Joschka Fischer faced calls to resign after she found photos of him as a street-fighting revolutionary apparently luring a policeman into an ambush in which the officer was attacked. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001