Researchers return brain of German terrorist to prosecutors
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 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. She alerted prosecutors.
Yesterday, Roehl told the Bild daily that she and her sister, Regine, planned "a very quiet burial, with only the closest relatives." No date has been set.
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.
It killed more than 30 people in a string of shootings, bombings and kidnappings in the 1970s.
The group was also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, after Meinhof and fellow member Andreas Baader.
Last week, a professor in Magdeburg acknowledged that he had been studying the brain since 1997 to examine whether tumor surgery that Meinhof had in the 1960s may have influenced her slide into terrorism.
Bernhard Bogerts said he had been given the organ by a now-retired pathologist from the southwestern city of Tuebingen, Juergen Peiffer.
Regine Roehl has filed a criminal complaint against Peiffer, accusing him of disturbing the peace of the dead.
The Stuttgart prosecutors' office also is trying to establish whether any other terrorists' brains are still preserved, following a weekend report that the brains of Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe have vanished without trace from the Tuebingen lab where they were taken for autopsy.
Baader, Ensslin and Raspe killed themselves in prison in October 1977.
Their deaths came immediately after a failed attempt by comrades to free them by hijacking a Lufthansa airliner and demanding their release in return for 86 hostages.
German commandos successfully stormed the plane.
All the guerrillas were quickly buried and their families were apparently not told that their brains had been held back following autopsies.
Der Spiegel, a longtime critic of Roehl, said Monday that she was trying to conjure up a Frankenstein medical profession when the real scandal was the lack of regulation governing organ removal, including whether the permission of relatives is necessary.
The German officials' desire to decipher intellectual qualities or propensities by studying physical remains of the brain is not unique. Albert Einstein's brain, for example, was sliced into 240 pieces after his death in 1955.
Examination of Einstein's brain has revealed distinctions that may account for greater neuron activity and better connections between neurons, according to scientists at the University of California at Berkeley. Physical qualities that might increase mathematical or spatial reasoning have also been found.
Peiffer, the pathologist who examined the three brains, told Der Spiegel he was first asked to examine the brains by the prosecutor's office in Stuttgart.
The three brains "are no longer here," Richard Meyermann, the current director of the university's Institute for Brain Research, told Der Spiegel.
Meyermann said the organs may have been cremated to make room for other organs, but he could find no documentation as to their disposition.
Meinhof's brain, however, was passed along to a doctor at the University of Magdeburg in 1997. And university officials said at a news conference that they still have it. They summarized some of their findings, but declined to release the full report on the brain.
"The organ displays characteristics of neurological abnormalities which bring into question the whole issue of whether Frau Meinhof was competent to stand trial," said Bogerts of the University of Magdeburg. "However, her behavior in the terrorist scene cannot wholly be attributed to the condition of her brain. For that, there are too many highly complex reasons."
In 1962, Meinhof had an operation for a suspected brain tumor, and Bogerts speculated that damage to her limbic system, which controls emotions such as aggression, may have changed her personality.
Information from The Washington Post is included in this report.