"I will do such things - What they are I know not - but they shall be The terrors of the earth" -- William Shakespeare, King Lear Part 1 In the 1960s and 1970s left-wing political groups formed in the U.S., Germany, Japan, and Italy in revolt against what they perceived as societies that were imperialistic, racist, and based in spiritless consumerism. One of the most bizarre and destructive terrorist groups in Europe was the German assemblage of disenchanted students and young Communist activists that eventually became known in the German press as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, though the group of revolutionaries eventually preferred the moniker Rote Armee Fraktion, Red Army Faction (RAF).[1] The Baader-Meinhof Gang, also known as the first generation of the RAF, spread terror through West Germany from 1967 to 1977, growing to a number of 60 members, causing havoc through kidnapping, assassinations, plane hijackings, bank robbery, and bombings. Like the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), [2] the Baader-Meinhof Gang called themselves "urban guerillas" not "terrorists."[3] The Baader-Meinhof Gang rationalized their violence by considering it war against the Federal Republic of Germany's oppressive social system.
Eventually they expanded their targets against what they viewed as "international imperialism" and the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. Though the main members of the Gang met their demise by 1977, the madness continued in their name in various forms of terror with extended generations of terrorists. Along the trail of tears and blood there was, as author Jillian Becker put it, "a romantic, aesthetic, and even erotic fascination . . ." by the German public for the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The Baader-Meinhof Gang became involved in three objectives: to destroy Western capitalism, to fragment West German solidarity, and to force the release of imprisoned comrades. "We wanted to be radical, brave pioneers: we considered ourselves to be a vanguard," wrote member Astrid Proll in a book that documented the most notorious members of the group in picture form, Baader-Meinhof - Pictures on the Run, 66-67. For many of the world's youth the sixties were a decade that questioned bourgeois culture and status quo government. In many countries young people embraced alternative life styles and the ultra-idealist anthem "all you need is love," but for some Germans there was a different beat. Ulrike Meinhof, a chief orator for the group, claimed that " . . . love for human beings is possible today only in the death-dealing, hate-filled attack on imperialism-fascism."[4] In the summer of 1962 a riot occurred in Munich's Leopoldstrasse when young people clashed with a hundred policemen. Thousands of rioters took to the streets for four days in what became known as the Schwabing riots. The riot started over two guitarists who were arrested for making noise and disturbing the peace. One of the rioters was a teenager named Andreas Baader, who would later become part of a group that would cause far more damage to Germany and shake the world with its cruelty. The starting point for the Baader-Meinhof Gang - the first West German group to organize itself into an underground band of terrorists - came from an unlikely source: the 1967 visit of the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlevi, to Berlin. The Shah of Iran and Benno Ohnesorg - A Meeting of the Middle East and Middle Europe In 1967, Ulrike Meinhof, a thirty-two-year old German woman, wrote for a Hamburg magazine devoted to sex and leftist ideology, Konkret, which was edited by her husband, Klaus Rainer Roehl, and secretly funded via funds through Prague by Communists in East Berlin. Born in 1934, Ulrike was an orphan raised by two art historians with leftist philosophies. Her father, an art historian and museum director, was anti-Nazi and came from a family of theologians. While studying psychology as a university student, she became interested in the opposition movement against West German nuclear rearmament. She became known as the "ideological high priestess of the RAF," and the "Gloria Steinem of the German media." Strangely her ambition, intelligence, and academic success are virtues she shares with numerous other internationally known terrorists like Carlos the Jackal, Osama bin Laden, Ted Kaczynski, Ramzi Yousef, and Nazi leaders.[5] On May 28, 1967, she wrote "An Open Letter to Farah Diba." Diba was the wife of the Shah of Iran. In the letter Meinhof derided the Iranian government's lack of interest in its own country's poverty ("peasants with an annual income of less than a $100"), child labor, censorship, and the government torture of political prisoners. Along with Meinhof's diatribe against the Shah's rule, a Vienna group called International Freedom Front stirred up German emotions by distributing posters with the picture of the Shah labeled "Wanted for Murder." Only one month earlier American Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was to be met with custard pies but the press reported the threats as possible bombs to be thrown, which led Meinhof to write that it was rude to throw pies at politicians but correct to welcome "politicians who have wiped villages out . . . napalm yes, custard no."[6] On June 2, 1967, the Shah of Iran visited Berlin at the request of the West German government. The Shah's motorcade came under assault by student protesters who pelted the vehicles with rotten fruit and rocks. The Shah and his wife drove to Schoneberg City Hall where they were to greet the well-wishers of Berlin. However, there were no well-wishers at the square in front of the Hall, only screaming demonstrators and a group of Iranian secret service officers, the Savak, armed with wooden clubs. The crowd screamed "murderer" at the Shah and threw bags of paint in his direction. The Savak attacked the German demonstrators with clubs. The German police joined the Savak in their attack of the demonstrators, which undoubtedly looked bizarre: Germans and Iranians attacking Germans. The German police created a "liver-sausage" tactic that squeezed the protesters from two sides and then attacked them with nightsticks as they escaped from the ends. In the melee, a twenty-six year-old man, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot and killed by a police sergeant, Heinz Kurras. Ohnesorg, whose wife was pregnant, joined the demonstration telling friends that he thought it would be fun. In a country with no shortage of political strife during the previous six and half decades of the twentieth century, Germany was set to write a new chapter in its history of political horror. The Savak of the Middle East was about to awaken a sleeping nest of European hornets. A shaken Mayor Albertz attended a Mozart opera, The Magic Flute, with the Shah. When the opera finished, the streets had been cleared and the mayor and the Shah left without incident. The next morning a shaken Mayor Albertz asked the Shah if he had heard about the death of Ohnesorg. He replied that he had but the mayor shouldn't make much of it for that kind of thing happened every day in Iran.[7] The Shah would eventually be overthrown in 1979 by the Marxist and Shiite-based Islamic fundamentalist group known as the Mujahedeen, guerilla fighters who would be instrumental in fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 and Serbs in Bosnia in the 1990s. Ohnesorg's death served as a rallying point against the perceived ills of the West German government. Nobel Prize winning author Gunther Grass recognized the importance of the event calling it "the first political murder in the Federal government." The next day in the offices of the Socialist Student Union, an organization of 2500 devoted to pacificism and against the atom bomb and the rearmament of Germany, heard the shrieking voice of one of the demonstrators: twenty-seven-year old Gudrun Ensslin. She railed against the fascist state that was out to kill them all, blaming the "generation of Auschwitz. You cannot argue with them."[8] Meinhof wrote that Ohnesorg was a "victim of SS mentality and practice."[9] Baader and Ensslin - The Playboy and the Blonde Marxist During the anti-Shah demonstration Andreas Baader met Gudrun Ensslin. This key relationship created what would eventually become known as the Baader-Meinhof Bande (Gang) in the German press. On occasion they would be called the Baader-Meinhof Gruppe (Group) but the use of the word "group" lent too much credibility to what most journalists and German citizens considered an outlaw "gang." The name Baader-Meinhof Group would not come into fashion until May 1970 with the escape of Baader from prison, aided by the Marxist writer, Ulrike Meinhof. Baader and Ensslin abandoned their previous lives, which included Ensslin's husband and infant son and Baader's lover and infant daughter, and focused on their hatred of the West German government. Ensslin, a tall twenty-seven-year old blonde, came from a family that espoused the need to reject the capitalist world of materialism. Though her father was a pastor, she was a domineering and aggressive person who preached Communist doctrine and was, by one account, an actor in a pornographic movie that she proudly took her relatives and friends to view.[10] She spent a year in Pennsylvania as an exchange student but was unimpressed with the American way of life. At one time she hoped to train as a teacher and had shown some promise in her university studies. Gudrun made an impression wherever she went. As a student she dressed with an eccentric, bohemian flair; her pale face framing deep-set eyes lined with dark mascara. Berlin Professor Dr. Ernst Heinitz declared that he had never made the acquaintance of such an "extraordinary girl" in his 52 years of teaching.[11] Gunther Grass, who knew Ensslin in Berlin, described her as idealistic, uncompromising, and with a yearning for the perfect solution. Bernd Andreas Baader was raised by his mother; his father, who had wanted to join the Scholl's White Rose organization that opposed Nazism in 1942, was killed at the Russian Front in 1945. Andreas had lived in a world of petty crimes, bars, and coffee houses where he had met Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who would later become internationally famouse as a filmmaker best known for [12]The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978). Fassbinder would help produce a 1977 film related to the Gang's activities, Deutschland in Herbst. Baader had a taste for hedonism: alcohol, drugs, and seducing wealthy young women with fast cars. He fathered a child, Suse, in 1967 with painter Elly Michel. After meeting Ensslin, he abandoned both Suse and Elly for the wild kindred spirit and political revolutionary Ensslin, but only after Elly kicked both of them out of her apartment. When first posed with the political question of the day by the intriguing blonde, what to do about the capitalistic West German government, Andreas told Gudrun: "Do anything, it doesn't matter . . ." Gudrun introduced Andreas to the leftist politics of Mao, Marx, and Marcuse,[13] ; Andreas taught her how to hot-wire cars. Three years younger than Ensslin, Baader seemed fascinated with her aggressive character and interest in actively pursuing some kind of violent revolution against authority. No doubt Baader was entranced with her striking looks and wild behavior. She would rise from her chair in German cafes and scream against the current political environment in Germany and its ties with the imperialism of the United States. German intelligence gatherers described her as a noisy, drug-addled crank whose pro-Communist ravings could be ignored and dismissed.[14] Fire Bombs in the Department Store On April 2, 1968 Baader, Ensslin, and their new compatriots Thorwald Proll and Horst Sohnlein, placed fire bombs in a Frankfurt department store. Stoned on hashish, the arsonists stumbled around the department store before they planted the bombs. They were easily identified later. Ensslin had notes on how to create incendiary bombs in her purse, which were later found by authorities and used against at trial. The radicals awaited the ignition of the bombs from the Club Voltaire, which was frequented by numerous disaffected revolutionaries such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit (aka Danny the Red) and America's most famous Marxist and Marcuse protégé, Angela Davis. Ensslin had called a police station stating that the bombing was revenge for Ohnesorg's death, a man none of the four new personally. Around midnight the bombs exploded in the furniture and women's fashion departments of the Kaufhof department store. Ohnesorg's death also inspired another terrorist, Michael Baumann, who would become a major leader in the Movement 2 June group from 1969-72. Baumann wrote in his book Terror or Love, "Benno Ohnesorg. It did a crazy thing to me. When his casket went by, it just went ding, something got started there."[15] Baumann engaged in a variety of violent acts that included bombings, which provided him the moniker of "Bommi." Eventually Baumann renounced his violent past, writing, "Today, I can see that - for myself - it was only the fear of love from which one flees into absolute violence."[16] Baumann's book, written in the mid-seventies, was initially banned in many countries but eventually came to print again with an introduction by Nobel Prize winning writer Heinrich Boll. In October 1968 Baader, Ensslin, Proll, and Sohnlein went on trial declaring their act a strike against the "capitalistic terror of consumerism."[17] They made a mockery of the court and the trial claiming that Proll was Baader; and that Proll was born in 1789. After being convicted and serving fourteen months' jail time, the four were released on appeal of their conviction but not before Ulrike Meinhof interviewed Baader and became interested in the group's political activism and wrote that Baader as another Lenin and the department store bombings were heroic acts of the New Left. The four fled Germany funded by Proll's sister Astrid. At one time the group of fugitives stayed in the Paris apartment of Regis Debray, a comrade of Che Guevara and a fugitive himself. Debray had served three years of a 30 year sentence but was finally released with the help of President Charles de Gaulle, Andre Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Astrid Proll photographed the group of fugitives in Parisian coffee bars, smoking, drinking, and clowning for the camera. These photos and others related to the Gang were assembled in the book entitled Baader Meinhof, Pictures on the Run, 67-77, not published until 1998.[18] In May 1971, still grieving over the capture of his unfaithful wife, Bernard Vesper committed suicide by a drug overdose. Both parents had abandoned their son Felix. In Italy they met one of their arson trial attorneys, Horst Mahler, who encouraged Baader and Ensslin to return to Germany. Some have considered Mahler the real creator of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. He has been characterized as a brilliant lawyer and architect who fell in love with Marxism and wanted to spread the philosophy by using urban guerillas. While in Berlin Baader and Ensslin visited Ulrike Meinhof and stayed a few days at her apartment exchanging philosophies and establishing a bond. Ensslin and Baader refused to return for the appeal hearing. Proll and Sohnlein eventually served their remaining time and never were engaged in the Gang again. Ensslin and Baader became fugitives. Baader was eventually arrested again trying to procure weapons. Revolution as Avant-Garde - Guerilla Warrior as Artist In Paris during May and June of 1968 student demonstrations rocked the streets followed by worker strikes throughout France. Student unrest in Paris was fuelled by numerous factors. The baby boom of post-World War II created a population of students in the 1960s that was ten times larger than the eve of World War II. If you have any questions concerning where and how to use Best Camera Backpack, you can get in touch with us at the internet site. American and European protests against the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War coupled with a romantic interest in Latin American revolutionaries, like Castro and Guevara, created an explosive atmosphere at the Sorbonne in Paris. A meeting on May 3, 1968 to protest the closure of Nanterre University started a riot that had national repercussions. Nanterre, a four-year college with 11,000 students situated on the edge of Paris, had been rocked with various demonstrations from the beginning of 1968. One set of demonstrations focused on sex: student dissatisfaction with the lack of co-ed dorms.[19] America's involvement in Vietnam was another issue students brought into the city, which helped start the unrest at the Sorbonne. The Rector of the Sorbonne feared confrontations between left-wing and right-wing students but the students only confronted the authorities. After suspending classes the police were called to preserve order but the presence of authority turned the students against the police, which was called at that time a revival of anarchism. The violence and concern wasn't limited to students; ten million workers went on strike throughout France. The unrest led to the closing of the Sorbonne, the first such occurrence in the 700-year history of the university. The Paris riots also led to the rise of the artistic-political movement known as the Situationists. A group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals influenced by Dadaists, Surrealists, and Lettrists[20] began to preach a non-violent revolution based on using the imagination to seize power and change everyday life through the imagination. This idyllic philosophy sought the transformation of the world through a constant state of revolution and newness created by individuals freely creating products based on his or her own creativity, philosophy that ironically sounds like free-market capitalism. The Situationists condemned the conveyor-belt life style of the capitalist worker and proposed "a communistic society bereft of money, commodity production, wage labor, classes, private property and the State," where the capitalistic-produced needs of man would be reinstated with real desires and the capitalist economy of profit would be replaced by one of pleasure. The Situationists rejected revolution and proclaimed their want for everyday life to change through vandalism, strikes, and sabotage, actions that were curiously claimed as a creative way to destroy "the manufactured spectacle and commodity economy." The brief life of the Situationists allegedly inspired contemporary anarchists, feminism, and punk rock. Though the Situationists' philosophy was closer to anarchism, their ideology was similar to the communist-based ideas that would eventually spring from the Baader-Meinhof Gang, who would think of themselves as avant-garde artists similar to the off-beat philosophies of artistic groups like the Situationists. Ulrike Meinhof would eventually forge a philosophy that aimed to change society by action and not useless intellectual inactivity. However, where the Situationists died out in 1972 after bitter disagreements over tactics, the Baader-Meinhof Gang would use violence instead of the imagination to profess the need for a non-capitalist Germany.[21] Meinhof Springs Baader In May 1970, Ensslin and Meinhof planned a jailbreak for Baader. The break would occur at a library where Baader would be escorted by prison authorities under the auspices of researching a book with Meinhof on the subject in which he was well versed: juvenile delinquency. Of course, no book was ever planned; the trip to the library was a ruse set up by Baader's arson trial attorney, Horst Mahler. Ensslin had contacted Meinhof knowing of her interest in Marxism and their arson trial. Meinhof, through her press connections, was able to find where Baader was taken from the Tegel Prison to research the book: a small library in Dahlem, Germany. This was Meinhof's first brush with the law and it was an unlikely one. She was an established journalist in a field where men had ruled. Her work had established her as a German celebrity. She was married with young twin daughters. During the delivery of her children Meinhof was found to have a condition that required brain surgery. The surgery left a metal clip implanted in her head and subsequently she suffered from severe headaches, a malady that some writers and neuropathologist have proposed as a reason for her future violent and erratic behavior.[22] On May 14, 1970, Meinhof sat with Baader in the library. Ensslin and her companions entered and riddled the library with submachine gun fire. Several library patrons as well as two guards were injured. Baader, Meinhof, and the gunners escaped in a stolen Alpha Romeo coupe. The use of stylish, expensive automobiles would become a trademark of Baader and his associates. Three weeks after the escape of Baader and exactly three years after Benno Ohnesorg was fatally shot, Ulrike Meinhof distributed the following message to the German Press Agency. "Did the pigs really believe that we would let Comrade Baader sit in jail for two to three years? Build up the Red Army!"[23] The German press began calling Baader and his confederates the Baader-Meinhof Gang. A week after the break out, Carlos Marighella's book The Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla was published in Berlin. Marighella's tactics inspired the group and supposedly aided Uruguayan rebels, the Tupamoros, in a revolution in Montevideo in the mid-1960s. Marighella, a member of the Brazilian Communist Party and writer of essays and articles on revolutionary methods, theorized that a corrupt state could be toppled by having activists attack the state with violence and allow the state to respond in what he called a "fascist manner." An outraged public would then overthrow fascism; the urban guerilla would be the heroic spark. Marighella, who had met Mao Tse Tung in China in 1953, disagreed with the Brazilian Communist Party and was ousted from it when he attended a Latin American solidarity conference. He went underground and was killed in a police ambush in November 1969. In June 1969, he wrote the mini-manual, which became the official training manual of the Italian Red Brigades, Provisional Irish Republican Army, Baader-Meinhof Gang. Marighella inspired the Venezuelan terrorists, Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, to employ Marighella's name "Carlos" for Sanchez' nom de guerre, "Carlos the Jackal." Marighella's book was inspired by Che Guevara's 1961 book Guerilla Warfare, called by author Townshend, "probably the most inspirational revolutionary tract of the century."[24] However, the Baader-Meinhof Gang violence was never perceived as heroic by the German masses. See Terrorist Training and Left Wing Alliances, Baader-Meinhof to Al Qaeda, Part 2 - Terrorist Training and Left Wing Alliances, Madmen to Arms, Radical Islamists and Nazi Fraternity, Hashashins and Black September [1] Terrorism, author Noam Chomsky writes, is term that came into use at the end of the eighteenth century, "primarily to refer to violent acts of governments designed to ensure popular submission." However, times have changed and now the term is no longer equated with emperors molesting their subjects but it is "thieves who molest the powerful" often with the death of innocents justifying the ends. Chomsky, Noam. Pirates and Emperors Old and New: International terrorism in the Real World, South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002, p. vii. [2] For a serious study of the numerous relations and connections between the Irish Republican Army and the Red Army Faction's "first generation," see Wright, Joanne. Terrorist Propaganda, The Red Army Faction and the Provisional IRA, 1968-86, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1990. [3] The Baader-Meinhof Gang and the subsequent "generations" of the Red Army Faction, as well as the ultra-violent Japanese Red Army, had numerous women in high positions of authority. Women terrorists rarely describe themselves as "terrorists" but prefer terms like urban guerillas, freedom fighters, nationalists, and political revolutionaries. For a study of women in terrorist organizations see De Pauw, Linda Grant. Battle Cries and Lullabies, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1998. [4]Der Spiegel, June 2, 1975, p. 2. [5] Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, attended Lamumba University in Moscow, bin Laden has a degree in ecomomics and business administration, Kaczynski a Ph.D. in mathematics, Lenin was an exceptional linguist who graduated at the top of his class and won a top grade in a bar exam. Yousef mastered four languages and obtained a degree in electrical engineering and computer-aided electronics. IQ tests given to the leaders of the Nazi elite (including Goering, Hess, and Rosenberg) at the Nuremberg trials found them to be in the 90th percentile. See Chae, Alston. Harvard and the Unabomber-The Education of an American Terrorist, W.W. Norton, New York, 2003. [6] Vague, Tom. Televisionaries - The Red Army Faction Story, 1963-1993, AK Press, Edinburgh, 1994, p. 8. [7] Aust, Stephen. (Trans. by Anthea Bell) The Baader-Meinhof Group, Hoffman und Campe Verlag, Hamburg, 1985, p. 44. [8] Becker, Jillian. Hitler's Children - The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang, J.P. Lippincott, Co., Philadelphia and New York, 1977, p. 23. [9] Ibid. , p. 153. [10] Nash, Jay. Terrorism in the Twentieth Century, M. Evans and Co. 1998, New York, p. 189. [11] Becker, Jillian. Hitler's Children - The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang, J.P. Lippincott, Co., Philadelphia and New York, 1977, p. 71. [12] Rainer Werner Fassbinder made 41 movies in 14 years. He died in 1982 of a drug overdose. His death has been considered the end of New German cinema. [13] Herbert Marcuse was a favorite of many German students in the 1960s, especially Meinhof and Ensslin. His prolific writings attacked "consumption fascism," and related oppression with materialism, which he perceived as creating a social system of the working class being manipulated by the "power elite." One-Dimensional Man, 1964; Counterrevolution and Revolt, 1972; Revolution or Reform? A Confrontation, 1976. [14] Nash, Jay. Terrorism in the Twentieth Century, M. Evans and Co. 1998, New York, p. 191. [15] Baumann, Michael. Terror or Love? Bommi Baumann's Own Story of His Life as a west German Urban Guerilla, Grove Press, New York, 1977, p. 40. [16] Ibid. , p. 115. [17] Parry, Albert. Terrorism from Robespierre to Arafat, Vanguard Press, New York, 1976. p. 395. [18] Proll also wrote a biographical sketch of Ensslin and Baader in 1998, Hans and Grete Proll, Astrid. Hans and Grete, Gottingen, Steidl, 1998. (German) [19] Kulansky, Mark. 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, Ballantine, New York, 2004, p. 218. [20] The Lettrists were a post-WWII group of mainly French artists and intellectuals that professed a change in the urban lifestyle by means of fusing poetry and music together. Like the Situationists they were against work. [21] Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible - A History of Anarchism, Fontana Press, London, 1992, pp.551-53. [22] Bernhard Bogerts, a brain researcher at the University of Magdeburg along with Jurgen Peiffer, a neuropathologist reported in 2002 that Meinhof's surgery damaged a part of the brain that controlled emotion. [23] Communique attributed to Ulrike Meinhof. Excerpt. http://www.baader-meinhof.com/students/resources/communique/engbuild.html. [24] Townshend, Charles. Terrorism - A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, New York, 2002, p. 63.