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Baader was escorted under guard to meet her at the Institute for Social Issues Library in the West Berlin suburbs.
    This provided the necessary opportunity. Once Baader and Meinhof were in the library, two young women entered the building: Irene Goergens, a teenager who Meinhof had recruited from her work with reform school kids, and Ingrid Schubert, a radical doctor from the West Berlin scene. They were followed by a masked and armed Gudrun Ensslin, and an armed man. Drawing their weapons, these rescuers moved to free Baader. When an elderly librarian, Georg Linke, attempted to intervene, he was shot in his liver. 1 The guards drew their weapons and opened fire, missing everyone, and all six jumped out of the library window and into the getaway car waiting on the street below. 2
    Barely a month after his arrest, Baader was once again free.
    The library breakout made headlines around the world, both Meinhof and Ensslin being identified as likely participants. Journalists tried to outdo each other in their sensationalist tripe, describing the one as a middle class poseur and the other as a former porn actress. 3 Headlines continued to be made when a neofascist arms dealer, Günther Voigt, was arrested and charged with selling the guerilla their guns. 4 Then, French journalist Michele Ray declared that she had met with Mahler, Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader in West Berlin—she promptly sold the extensive interviews she had taped to
Spiegel
. 5
    The group had made an impression. Its first action had struck a chord. Yet this was very much a mixed blessing, as Astrid Proll, who had driven the getaway car during the jailbreak, 6 would later explain:
    I think we were all very nervous; I remember some people throwing up. Because we weren’t so wonderful criminals, we weren’t so wonderful with the guns, we sort of involved a socalled criminal who could do it so much better than we, and… he was so nervous that he shot somebody. He didn’t kill him, but he shot him very very badly, and that was really really very bad for the whole start of it. 7
    As she elaborated elsewhere:
    After a man had been severely hurt… we found ourselves on wanted lists. It was an accident that accelerated the development of the underground life of the group. Ulrike Meinhof, who had so far been at the fringes of the group, was all of a sudden wanted on every single billpost for attempted murder against a reward of DM 10,000… When we were underground there were no more discussions, there was only action. 8
    In what would be a recurrent phenomenon, the state made use of the media frenzy around the prison-break to help push through new repressive legislation—in this case the so-called “Hand Grenade Law,” by which West Berlin police were equipped with hand grenades, semiautomatic revolvers, and submachine guns. 9
    This was all hotly debated on the left, prompting the fugitives to send a letter to the radical newspaper
883
, in which they explained (somewhat defensively) the action and their future plans. At the insistence of the radical former film student Holger Meins who was working at
883
at the time and who would later himself become a leading figure in the RAF, the newspaper published the statement, making it the first public document from the guerilla. (Even without Meins’ support, it would have been odd for
883
to not publish the text: Baader, Meinhof, Mahler, and Ensslin had all formerly served in the editorialcollective, as had several other individuals who would go on to join the guerilla.) 1
    The Red Army Faction had been born.
    The next year was spent acquiring technical skills, including a trip to Jordan where more than a dozen of the aspiring German guerillas received training from the PLO. While this first trip may not have had great significance for the group, given the subsequent importance of its connection with certain Palestinian organizations, it may be useful to examine the context in which it occurred.
    At the time, Jordan