The Baader-Meinhof Group

⇒ A left-wing German terror group operative from the late 1960s until 1998
⇒ Sent a fax in German to the Reuters agency in 1998 declaring the dissolution of the
group
⇒ Known later as the Red Army Faction
⇒ They rebelled against perceived failures in the de-Nazification of Germany after
World War Two: politics were still quite right-wing and had many ex-Nazi or pro-Nazi
politicians in high places.
⇒ They were influenced by Marxism and Mao Tse-Tung, as well as Antonio Gramsci’s
writings on cultural and ideological conflict, and Herbert Marcuse’s writings on the
idea that cultural manipulation and ideological indoctrination legitimised the need for
brute force.
⇒ Perceptions of state and police brutality, as well as opposition to the Vietnam War,
also galvanised protestors.
⇒ Key figures: Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, Thorwald Proll, Horst Söhnlein, Horst
Mahler, Ulrike Meinhof
⇒ Meinhof: “If one sets a car on fire, that is a criminal offence. If one sets hundreds of
cars on fire, that is political action.”
⇒ The group and its members were already associated with other revolutionary groups
such as the Revolutionary Cells, the Movement 2 June, Kommune 1, and the
Situationists.
⇒ The group was anti-imperialist and stood for class struggle; their actions included
arson, bank robberies, and bomb attacks against US military facilities. Many young
Germans were sympathetic towards the group and did not want to be associated with
their country’s association with the Vietnam War.
⇒ Many members of the group were eventually caught and arrested; the trial of the
group, known as the Stammheim trial, took place in 1975. Some members of the
group committed suicide while in jail due to hangings and hunger strikes. The
remaining members were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
⇒ In 1977 Germany entered the period now known as the German Autumn, during
which a series of violent murders, kidnappings and hijackings took place (including
the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181), aimed mainly at capitalist targets. The
demands issued by the kidnappers and hijackers included the release of various
detainees, including the members of the RAF who were imprisoned as a result of the
Stammheim trial. Nobody aboard the hijacked plane was injured and following the
broadcast of the rescue on the radio several of the RAF inmates committed suicide in
what was deemed to be a collective suicide pact. The masked assailants who had
kidnapped Hanns-Martin Schleyer (the president of the German Employers’
Association) in July killed him in October of that year, and sent a letter containing the
following words to French newspaper Libération: “After 43 days we have ended
Hanns-Martin Schleyer's pitiful and corrupt existence... His death is meaningless to
our pain and our rage... The struggle has only begun. Freedom through armed, anti-
imperialist struggle.”
⇒ In spite of the deaths of original group members, attacks were still being committed in
the name of RAF into the 1990s, although the dissolution of the Soviet Union had
somewhat weakened their cause. These attacks affected various high-profile
companies including Siemens and Deutsche Bank. It was confirmed after German
reunification in 1990 that RAF had received financial and logistic support from Stasi, a
security and intelligence organisation based in East Germany.
⇒ Following the 1998 dissolution of RAF, Horst Mahler now participates in far-right
activities and is a Holocaust denier. An anti-Semite, he was sentenced to six years in
prison in 2005 for inciting racial hatred. Formerly imprisoned RAF member Christian
Klar was granted parole in 2008. Two other female RAF members were paroled in
2007.