Bomb for Mental Health and Kill for Inner Peace:

Claire Sterling's The Terror Network...

"Operation Leo"


The scene:

The German Embassy in Stockholm.

The date:

April 24, 1975.

Adapted and paraphrased from Pages 97 - 98:

"Directing operations from Germany was the Heidelberg lawyer Siegfried Haag.

"He had gone to Zurich himself himself to pick up weapons for the Stockholm raid, from Petra Krause's takeout service.

"He also handpicked the Stockholm raiders, whose behavior was at least medically understandable.

"All six were members of the Heidelberg Socialist Patients' Collectives -- former inmates of a psychiatric ward turned terrorist for therapeutic reasons.

"Known in the trade as the Crazy Brigade and later described in Jillian Becker's valuable study, Hitler's Children, they were persuaded to Bomb for Mental Health and Kill for Inner Peace."

Finally, their first Group Therapy Session!

"They stormed the Stockholm [German] embassy at eleven in the morning and left the blazing building in stark panic around midnight.

"During those thirteen hours, they held the German economics attaché up at a window so as to shoot him within range of the TV cameras; put three bullets into the military attaché and dumped his dying body over the stairwell from the third - floor landing.

"And [they] mined the upper floor with thirty - five pounds of dynamite, some of it packed into tins in the ambassador's refrigerator.

"Faulty wiring trailing from the refrigerator caused a shattering explosion that ripped off the embassy's roof.

"Gigantic flames then drove captors and captives screaming into the night and devoured the mutilated corpse of a terrorist who had blown himself by dropping a hand grenade in his fright.

"Another of the raiders, running straight into the arms of the police, died of burns and a fractured skull in the Stammheim prison hospital ten days later.

"He was Siegfried Hausner, explosives specialist of the Heidelberg Socialist Patients' Collective, whose clumsy wiring had brought the affair to its shrieking end.

"It was all for nothing..."