matthew carr on the Baader- Meinhof gang’s declaration of revolutionary war in the 1970s |
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On October 19, 1977, Hans Martin Schleyer, a former SS official and one of West Germany's top industrialists, was found shot dead in a green Audi. The killing was the culmination of a vicious cycle of murder, suicide and revenge which began with his kidnapping 43 days before by members of a terrorist group calling itself the Red Army Faction (RAF), more commonly known as the 'Baader-Meinhof gang'.
Yesterday this bitter episode resurfaced when a German court ruled that Brigitte Mohnhaupt, one of the last imprisoned gang members accused of the Schleyer kidnapping, would be released from prison in March after serving 24 years of her life sentence. Her early release has reawakened memories of the terrorist emergency which convulsed West German society during the 1970s.
A product of the anti-Vietnam war |
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| The gang was named after its founder members Andreas Baader (above) and Ulrike Meinhof
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movement and anarcho-leftist subculture, the gang was named after its founder members Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the country's most famous leftist journalist.
Between 1970 and 1971, the group stunned a complacent society still enjoying the drowsy pleasures of the post-war economic miracle, by carrying out a string of bank robberies, murders and bombings of US military bases. All this, the group informed the public in a series of strident communiques, was the prelude to a revolutionary war against the 'fascist' West German state.
The involvement of privileged middle-class youth in terrorist violence fascinated and appalled German society, and converted the group into the media's first celebrity terrorists. In 1971, millions of wanted posters bearing the moody, truculent faces of Baader, Meinhof and other 'anarchist violent criminals' appeared across the country and the group became the subject of regular columns in Der Spiegel.
The gang's reputation spread beyond West Germany, as Western 'terrorism experts'  |
