German Terrorist's Brain Will Join Her Body

The brain of Germany’s most well-known postwar urban guerrilla will be laid to rest in the same Berlin cemetery her body was buried in 26 years ago.

The announcement on Thursday by Ulrike Meinhof’s daughter Bettina Röhl avoided a brewing controversy over the custody of the brain, prompted by an article by Röhl herself on Nov. 8. Meinhof was fund hanged in her jail cell where she was awaiting trial in 1976.

Meinhof, an accomplished journalist before she turned to violence, was buried in May 1976 in a Berlin cemetery. Her brain didn’t join her body, a fact that only came to light following Röhl’s article in the Magdeburg Volksstimme last week.

She wrote that a scientist at the University of Tübingen removed her brain from her body to find out why Meinhof, a crusading leftist journalist could turn into one of Germany’s most notorious urban guerrillas.

The brain behind Baader-Meinhof

Meinhof, 41 when she died, provided the ideological framework behind the most controversial terrorism movement in Germany. The Baader-Meinhof group, led by Meinhof, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, had its roots in the famous 1968 student movement, which sought to radically alter Germany’s conservative society and government.

It was also the first generation to confront the country’s Nazi past and sought to weed out the Nazis that had take positions in Germany’s postwar governments.

The Baader group, later called the Red Army Faction, was the radicalized form of that movement. It terrorized law enforcement with killings and robberies in the early 1970s while working towards their political goals. In June 1972, Meinhof was captured and arrested by the police and charged with murder in five cases.

An unusual journey of the mind

Four years later, she was found dead in her jail cell. Her brain, Röhl wrote, was given to Professor Jürgen Peiffer, a neurologist at the university. After study, he found that the portion of her brain responsible for emotion was weakened, most likely the result of a brain tumor operation she underwent in 1962.

Röhl wrote that her grandmother and father confirmed that Meinhof had changed following the operation. Peiffer’s revelation was an important one. It proved, that “Ulrike Meinhof was because of pathological reasons unfit to stand trial and as a result should have been let free before the Baader-Meinhof trial.”

But the brain wasn’t returned following Peiffer’s analysis. He kept it in a plastic container filled with formaldehyde on a shelf until 1997, when he brought it to a colleague at the University of Magdeburg for analysis. The colleague came to a similar conclusion.

Since then, wrote Röhl, it’s been on a shelf in the university. Now, with help from prosecutors, she’s getting it back.

"You can only say there has been a proper funeral if the brain is buried with the body,” she wrote last Friday. “A dead terrorist has a right to be treated fairly and the right to a decent burial."