Preface

U LRIKE MARIE MEINHOF (1934–76) cofounded the organization that

would later call itself the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion)
in 1970, after helping Andreas Baader (1943–77) to escape from a Berlin
prison where he was serving a sentence for arson. Baader’s girlfriend Gud-
run Ensslin (1940–77), their lawyer Horst Mahler (b. 1936), medical stu-
dent Ingrid Schubert (1944–77), and an inmate from a corrective home
for girls whom Meinhof had befriended, called Irene Goergens (b. 1951),
were among those involved in the founding “operation.”
Initial attempts by press and police to name the group led first to
“Baader-Mahler-Meinhof,” then to “Baader-Meinhof” (Ensslin never
got a mention); in 1971 the group christened itself the RAF collective,
apparently oblivious to the overlap with the acronym used by the British
air force. Its intention — following Bolivian revolutionary Che Guevara’s
(1928–67) “focus theory,” which said the preconditions for a revolution
can be created by an armed avantgarde — was to provoke the West Ger-
man state, through acts of terrorism, into a vicious response that would
lead the German people to revolt against capitalism, globalization, and
the war in Vietnam.
For the group’s so-called first generation, who are the subject of this
book, it was a short-lived endeavor. Following a brutal bombing cam-
paign in which four American soldiers were killed and soldiers and civilians
injured, all the core members were arrested during the summer of 1972.
Efforts by a “second generation” to secure their release via hijacks and
kidnappings led to further deaths, including that of the prominent Frank-
furt banker Jürgen Ponto in July 1977, and of the driver and three body-
guards of industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, who was abducted by the
RAF in September of the same year. In custody, group member Holger
Meins (1941–74) died from malnutrition during a hunger strike. Mein-
hof was found hanged in her cell in Stuttgart-Stammheim’s high-security
prison on the morning of 9 May 1976. Following a failed hijack by Pal-
estinian terrorists (intended, like the Schleyer kidnap, to force the release
of the prisoners), Baader, Ensslin, and their associate Jan-Carl Raspe
(1944–77) were found dead in their cells on 18 October 1977 — Ensslin
by hanging, and the two men shot in the head. The autopsy verdict was
suicide; RAF member Irmgard Möller (b. 1947), who survived the night
of 17–18 October with knife wounds to her chest and heart area, told a
tale of execution by a ruthless state.

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 xii ΠPREFACE

Schleyer was killed by his captors the following day, his body left in
the boot of a car. Less than a month later, Ingrid Schubert (who had been
part of the original operation to free Baader) was discovered hanged at
the window of her cell in Stadelheim prison. Further generations of anti-
capitalist radicals continued the terrorist project in Germany. The RAF
finally disbanded with an official statement to the press in 1998.

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