In 1975, West Germany was often under varying degrees of lockdown. Roadblocks were set up at autobahn exits and identification was checked; groups of heavily armed police were seen in city centers holding machine guns and looking menacing; and airports were under armed guard. The reason given for this military-like presence was the existence of a leftist terror group known as the Rote Armee Fraktion. While the State response was disproportionate to the actual strength of the group, one would never know this given the governmental response. Besides the ever-growing presence of police in the citizens’ daily lives, there was also the creation of the Bundeskriminalamt, which was something like the 1970s German equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and today’s Department of Homeland Security in the US. A powerful agency at its inception, its strength grew even more after the passage of the Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Decree) in 1972, which forbade civil employment for anyone the State considered to be linked to several primarily leftwing political organizations. The law, which reminded Germans of the Berufsverbot laws under Hitler, was opposed by a substantial percentage of the nation’s residents and was the target of a concerted campaign by writers, artists and intellectuals to end it.