Correspondents' Correspondence West German Terror

...Public opinion samples, taken in the wake of the Schleyer kidnapping by the BILD chain of newspapers, show that a majority of Germans would back the death penalty for terrorists...

...And that, of course, is precisely what the terrorists want.-Juris Kaza...

...They have also generated growing distrust of even ordinary dissent in German society...

...If a climate of intolerance continues to grow in West Germany, the moderates further argue, then more and more hitherto nonviolent advocates of political and economic change may indeed rethink their positions...

...Rather, the Anarchos proclaim themselves the armed vanguard of the Third World's struggle against economic oppression by West German and American capitalism...

...They are, as a prominent politician in the Bundestag put it, "technocrats of violence": Most of them vanish with relative ease into the thus far impenetrable undergound, traveling with forged or stolen papers through a chain of sanctuaries remote from known radical hangouts...

...The revolutionaries maintain that the apparent democracy in capitalist West Germany is actually a facade for fascism, which must be fought with armed force...

...Ironically, this kind of public rage and political polarization is a major objective of the urban guerillas, according to some analysts of the Anar-choszene (terrorist scene...

...Consequently, the axe would probably fall not on the guilty killers and kidnappers, but on a spectrum of Left-wing sympathizers who share the terrorists' ideals without necessarily supporting their methods...

...Specifically, the attacks have already resulted in the passage of a law early this month that prevents detained terrorists from seeing their lawyers or any other visitors...

...Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS West German Terror Munich-If West Germany were a banana republic, some observers might say it was being "destabilized...

...The voices of reason here, therefore, are urging that less attention be paid to new punishments and greater energy be devoted to capturing the guerrillas, who until now have been taken into custody by chance or because of their own rare blunders...

...Acts of violence, they say, will either expose the weakness of the state or provoke it into harsh retaliation, thus confirming their charges of fascism...

...Unfortunately, some of the rhetoric feeding their flames since the latest kidnapping has come not merely from the excited German on the street: Walter Becker, a Right-wing spokesman for West Germany's second conservative party, the Christian Social Union, was quoted in a news magazine as saying the government should consider shooting imprisoned anarchists...

...Even Communist splinter groups here admit that the time is far from ripe for a revolution of the prosperous masses...

...Nor is it as bad off as its neighbor Italy, where (except for the cold-blooded machine-gun killing of his guards and driver) the kidnapping of Schleyer would not be at all out of the ordinary...

...For those who confine their activities to organizing, leafletting and rallying and generally remain within the legal framework-if not always the spirit-of democracy, are easy targets for the rage awakened by their less law-abiding comrades...

...and cooler heads, too, in the other major opposition parties, have said they will take steps to legalize the currently unconstitutional death penalty...

...But the terrorists, it should be noted, are not fighting to improve social conditions in West Germany...

...Hit in less than six months with three brutal acts of terrorism against public figures-the assassinations of Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback and banker Jurgen Ponto, and the bloody kidnapping in September of industrialist Hans-Martin Schleyer the Federal Republic is starting to reel from the shock in a way that could damage democracy here for years to come...

...Yet that something has happened to this country was brought home to me when my normally kindly laundry lady suggested that the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof gang terrorists "should be put to the wall and shot...

...To be sure, West Germany has not approached the condition of a terrorist-besieged South American dictatorship...

...The real villains, though, are unlikely to be upset by such a move...