Bettina Röhl
[9] In May 1970, after the violent liberation of Andreas Baader from a rehabilitation programme he was attending as preparation for his release from jail, Ulrike Meinhof, who had played a central part in the "operation", was obliged to "disappear underground".
She had not fired the "fatal shot", but of those sought by the police in connection with the affair it was Ulrike Meinhof rather than her male comrades who most caught the imagination of the press reporters: her picture was widely circulated.
The twins had been sent to Bremen to spend the two week spring holiday with Meinhof's friend, the writer Jürgen Holtkamp, and were totally unaware of the Baader jail break.
[10] Berberich then drove with the children through France and Italy to a "barracks camp" on the side of Mount Etna which had originally been constructed as emergency accommodation for people made homeless by a volcanic eruption,[10] and where now Andreas Baader and other comrades were hiding.
In September 1970, the children were found by Stefan Aust, then a young investigative journalist from Hamburg, and returned to West Germany in time to spend their eighth birthday with their father.
[10] More recently Röhl herself has asserted with increasing conviction, in several interviews, that Meinhof would have had absolutely no reason to keep the girls away from their father at this time: there are hints that taking them to Sicily may have been part of a longer-term plan to escape with them to the relative safety (for a wanted terrorist suspect and her children) of a "Palestinian camp in Jordan".
[12][5] Röhl has also hinted strongly that the backwash from the bitterness of divorce had left her mother mentally damaged: "Ulrike Meinhof war eine wahnsinnig gekränkte Frau".
[2] Between 1970 and 1982, Regine and Bettina Röhl lived with their father in Hamburg where they had a relatively conventional upbringing, though not unmarked by the fate of their mother who was arrested in 1972 and spent the final four years of her life in prison awaiting the conclusion of a complex series of well publicised trials.
At school, when asked about her parents, Röhl was able to respond with a well rehearsed one-line explanation designed to conclude the discussion: "My mother's dead, and my father was the editor-in-chief of the left-wing magazine konkret.
[15] During the first part of the 21st century, Röhl has used her journalistic experience to concentrate more intensively on a relatively small number of themes: sometimes she has stirred controversy, drawing attention to uncomfortable aspects of recent history.
[16] The pictures appeared to show Fischer with Hans-Joachim Klein and other political activists savagely assaulting Rainer Marx, a policeman, during a street fight on 7 April 1973.
The pictures came from a series produced by a photographer called Lutz Kleinhans in 1973 for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, but no one had identified Fischer and Klein in them till 2000 when Röhl undertook the necessary research and spotted the men.
[17] Shortly afterwards, Röhl unearthed a film sequence of the same assault in television archives of the Tagesschau, showing Fischer and the point at which the policeman was knocked to the ground.
This was based on witness statements, including three that she had on tape, which she had obtained while researching an incident in 1976 involving a life-threatening attack with a Molotov cocktail on a Frankfurt policeman called Jürgen Weber.
[16] During the summer, with Fischer on several occasions coming top in polls designed to identify the nation's most popular individual politician, it did indeed appear that his reputation had not been damaged by Röhl's revelations.
[34] After that there was a very public altercation with the Thalia Theater in Hamburg in connection with the international premier of Elfriede Jelinek's stage farce "Ulrike Maria Stuart".
[38] She revealed herself to be a resolute critic of what she called "gender mainstreaming" and of 1970s-style radical feminism of the kind advocated by Alice Schwarzer in her book "Der kleine Unterschied und seine großen Folgen" ("The small difference and its big consequences").
