A university where research was carried out on the brain of Red Army Faction leader Ulrike Meinhof has complied with an order to hand over the organ to Stuttgart prosecutors, officials said Tuesday. The brain will be handed over to Meinhof's daughters once authorities have established whether any further samples were kept, said Eckard Maak, a spokesman for the prosecutors. The daughters plan to bury it along with the rest of her body in Berlin. One of Meinhof's twin daughters, Bettina Roehl, published an article earlier this month demanding that her mother's brain be properly buried, making public that it had been secretly preserved after Meinhof hanged herself in prison in 1976. On Tuesday, Roehl told the Bild daily that she and her sister, Regine, planned "a very quiet burial, with only the closest relatives."
Gosh. I feel so... so... apathetic.
Meinhof was considered the intellectual head of the Red Army Faction, a leftist revolutionary group that spread fear across West Germany in the 1970s and into the '80s after her death. The group was originally known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, after Meinhof and co-founder Andreas Baader. Last week, a professor in Magdeburg acknowledged that he had been studying the brain since 1997 brain to examine whether tumor surgery that Meinhof had in the 1960s may have influenced her slide into terrorism.
He was trying to determine whether she was a natural-born nutbag, or a surgically-created nutbag. Noble work, indeed... |