The Baader-Meinhof gang

What kind of gang was it?

A violent, leftist collective consisting of some 60 people with roots in the revolutionary student movement that swept Europe and the US in 1967-8. Its legacy of self-styled "armed resistance" - assassinations, kidnaps and bombings of the German establishment - has been argued over ever since. The Red Army Faction (RAF), as it formally called itself, was founded in 1970 by Andreas Baader, his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin (pictured) and Ulrike Meinhof, a left-wing journalist. It started by burning down department stores, then moved on to full-scale terrorism. In ever more brutal attacks, the group killed a total of 34 people, mainly bankers, government officials, their chauffeurs and bodyguards. Thirteen gang members also died. Baader, Meinhof and Ensslin, were arrested in 1972 and prosecuted in 1975. Meinhof killed herself during the gang's three-year, chaotic trial.

And did that put an end to the violence?

No. With the leaders locked in a specially-built prison wing, a second wave of RAF militants launched a campaign of violence to force their release. For a few months in 1977, in what is known as the 'German Autumn', the gang posed the most serious internal threat to Germany since WWII. They murdered the chief federal prosecutor, kidnapped the country's leading industrialist, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, and, with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, hijacked a Lufthansa airliner, flying the plane to Somalia and demanding the release of their comrades. When news broke that German commandos had stormed the jet, killing three hijackers and freeing the hostages, Baader, Ensslin and another gang member committed suicide. The next day, Schleyer was shot in a forest on the Dutch border - his body was found in the boot of a car in Mulhouse - and a letter was sent to the French paper, Liberation: "After 43 days we have ended Hanns-Martin Schleyer's pitiful and corrupt existence... His death is meaningless to our pain and our rage."

And what were they so enraged about?

Like Italy's Red Brigades and other 'revolutionary' groups of the late 1960s, Baader-Meinhof railed against what it saw as capitalist authoritarianism, best exemplified by the US government and its invasion of Vietnam. In Germany, that rage was mainly directed against the country's failure to exorcise its Nazi past: in 1966, for instance, Kurt Kiesinger, an ex-Nazi Party member, became West German chancellor. By contrast, left-wing radicalism was suppressed and the Communist Party banned. The RAF's founding myth was the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg, a bystander killed by police in 1967 at a mass student protest against the Shah of Iran, who was visiting Berlin. "They'll kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're up against. This is the Auschwitz generation," said Ensslin. "We must arm ourselves!" In 1970, several members of the group went to the Middle East to be trained by the PFLP.

What does the film aim to do?

Like two previous German films, The Lives of Others and Downfall, The Baader Meinhof Complex, which opens in the UK on 14 November, is an attempt to demystify a traumatic period in