A former Spiegel journalist, Peter Homann was amongst those who traveled to Jordan for training in 1970. According to his friend Stefan Aust, also a friend of Ulrike Meinhof when she worked at konkret, Homann had become estranged from the RAF at this time, and the group had even threatened to execute him.
Even more outrageously, upon his return Homann claimed to have learned of a harebrained plan to send Ulrike Meinhof’s seven-year-old twin daughters to be raised as orphans in Al Fatah’s Children’s Home in Amman.
Homann apparently informed Aust of this bizarre plan, and the two men set about tracking down the Meinhof twins, eventually finding them in the care of some Italian hippies. The twins were rescued and sent back to live with their father Klaus Rainer Röhl in the FRG. According to Aust, the RAF subsequently tried to kill Homann as revenge for this intervention.
This story became quite well known following the publication of Aust’s book Der Baader-Meinhof Komplexe in 1985, a massive tome that quickly became the standard reference for the RAF’s history up to 1977.1 By that time, many of those who could either confirm or deny these allegations were no longer alive.
As such, and with some consternation, even sympathizers were left with no choice but to believe this version of events. Whether one supported the RAF or not, it seemed clear that the group had embarked upon a very bad childcare strategy to say the least. Even those who did not like Aust’s politics could nevertheless be glad that he and Homann had acted when they did.
Indeed, one of Meinhof’s daughters, Bettina Röhl, clearly accepts this story as true. Her own anger at what her mother allegedly planned for her has fueled a vendetta she wages to this day against all those she suspects of having colluded with the guerilla struggle.
However, in 2007, new information was brought to light by historian Jutta Ditfurth. In a sympathetic biography of Meinhof, Ditfurth claims that Homann and Aust’s entire story was nothing but an elaborate lie.1
According to Ditfurth, the fate of the Meinhof-Röhl children was still before the family courts at the time of this alleged rescue, and there was a strong chance custody would be granted to Meinhof’s older sister Inge Wienke Zitzlaff, a school principal in Hessen who had two daughters of her own.
Ditfurth claims this plan had been made before Ulrike Meinhof ever went underground in 1970, and that as a backup, were the family court to rule in Röhl’s favor, some thought had been given to sending the twins to East Germany.
As Ditfurth points out, at the time of this alleged plot to send the children to Jordan, it was clear to all concerned that that country was on the brink of civil war. Indeed, within a month of the guerillas’ return to the FRG, war did break out, leading to the slaughter of between 4,000 and 10,000 Palestinians. The Children’s Home—where Homann and Aust claim the girls would have been sent—was one of the targets bombed by the Jordanian air force, leaving no survivors.
Obviously, Ditfurth’s research does more than simply show Ulrike Meinhof in a very different and far more human light. It also provides a far more credible explanation as to why, in early 1972, the RAF would castigate Homann for turning against them: if Meinhof was not in fact planning to abandon her children, then Homann’s intervention amounted to an actual kidnapping, one which wrecked Meinhof’s carefully laid plans for her daughters.
We do not know the truth of this matter. We have always been aghast at this story of the RAF planning to exile two young children to dangerous and unfamiliar surroundings. We have no desire to whitewash such a plan if it did in fact exist. That said, Ditfurth’s recent research makes a lot more sense than the previous Aust-Homann story, and while this does not itself prove its accuracy, it certainly gives us occasion for pause and consideration.
As with so much in this story, readers will have to make up their own minds.