http://www.tkb.org/Group.jsp?groupID=164 (Accessed 1 March 2008) 

Baader-Meinhof Group

Mothertongue Name:
Baader-Meinhof Bande

Aliases: Baader-Meinhof Gang, Red Army Faction

Base of Operation: Federal Republic of Germany; Germany

Founding Philosophy: Founded in the late 1960s, the Baader-Meinhof Group was a violent leftist organization responsible for several decades of urban terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany. The group attacked symbols of capitalist authority, including American targets, public buildings in West Germany, and notable German industrialists, charging that West Germany’s post-war government was as repressive as Hilter’s Nazi regime. Members embraced a blend of anti-capitalist and anarchist beliefs, protesting the Vietnam War and the occupation of Palestine and supporting other prominent leftist causes at the time.

The group referred to themselves as the Rote Armee Fraktion, or Red Army Faction (RAF), after the Japanese Red Army (JRA). The media, wishing not to legitimize the organization, used the name “Baader-Meinhoff Group” to refer to the RAF.

The Baader-Meinhof Group’s founder, Andreas Baader, his girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, and two others were the sole members of the group at its inception, bombing a pair of Frankfurt department stores in 1968. The four were imprisoned but released on an appeal which was later overturned, forcing them to go into hiding. Baader was re-arrested in April 1970, though he was able to escape in May with the help of Ensslin and a sympathetic left-wing journalist, Ulrike Meinhof.

Following the escape, Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and others trained in terrorist camps in Jordan operated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). They returned to Germany, where Baader, Ensslin, and a loyal following were responsible for several bombings, which would be sensationalized in the leftist press by Meinhof. The trio was captured in the summer of 1972, leading to the ascension of the RAF’s “second generation”, zealots dedicated solely to securing the release of the group’s former figureheads.

The rise of the second generation marked not only a change in motivation but a change in tactics as well. For the next five years, the RAF went on an assassination and kidnapping spree, successfully targeting prominent executives and public officials. In 1976, Meinhof appeared to have hung herself in her prison cell, prompting a series of rumors regarding her possible extrajudicial execution.

The second generation’s campaign culminated in the Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn) of 1977, when the group hijacked a Lufthansa plane with the help of the PFLP as a desperate attempt to free their leaders. Several days after the GSG-9, Germany’s elite counter-terrorism unit, successfully stormed the plane, Baader and Ensslin were found dead in their maximum security prison cells. Official sources reported that they had committed suicide when it became apparent that the RAF’s plot to free them had failed, though their deaths remain shrouded in controversy.

Current Goals: After the 1977 hijacking, the RAF’s popular appeal dwindled steadily, though sporadic assassinations and bombings continued through the 1980s and early 1990s. Finally, in 1998, the group formally disbanded after five years of virtual inactivity.

Despite popular misconception it was Gudrun Ensslin who was the female leader of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF). Ensslin was the girlfriend of Andreas Baader and influenced the violent thuggish Baader with her left wing views in many ways she was the intellectual head of the RAF.

She was born in 1940 in Baden-Wurttemberg, one of the seven children of Pastor Helmut Ensslin. She grew up in a religious household and was well versed in the bible and the family often discussed social problems.

In 1958 Gudrun spent a year in an American high school and due to excellent exam results she received a Scholarship and studied English and German studies as well as philosophy. After study Ensslin tried to become a teacher. In 1965 Gudrun and her right wing boyfriend Bernward moved to West Berlin while she worked towards her PhD at the free university, here they were politically active taking part in protests against nuclear weapons and the presence of US military bases in Germany. Her relationship started to break down by 1967 after the birth of her son. Ensslin was becoming heavily involved in the left wing activist movement and surprisingly considering her background took part in a semi pornographic film ‘Das Abonnement’.

Following violent clashes over a visit by the Shah of Iran to Germany Gudrun claimed West Germany was a fascist state during a political meeting, saying “This Fascist state means to kill us all. Violence is the only answer to violence” Tensions were running high after a protester was shot and the police officer responsible was acquitted of his manslaughter.  During this period she met and formed a relationship with Andreas Baader, leaving her partner Bernward Vesper and her young son at the start of 1968. At this point she made the decision to go from political activist to terrorist. In April 1968 following an arson attack on two large department stores in Frankfurt, four members of the gang including Ensslin and Baader were arrested and sentenced later the same year to three years in prison. They gained parole while awaiting an appeal hearing in June 1969 but fled once the appeal was rejected with Baader being re arrested in April 1970.  Gudrun , Ulrike Meinhof and two other women helped free Baader in 1970, a rescue which resulted in a shooting and the press naming them the Baader-Meinhof gang. For the next two years Gudrun participated in various terrorist activities and became one of Germany’s most wanted until she was arrested in Hamburg in 1972. Her trial and those of the other captured members of the gang was the longest and most expensive in German history. While in Stammheim Prison RAF members tried various ways to free her including hijacking and kidnapping.  On October 18 1977 she was found hanging in her cell while other members of the gang were found shot dead in their cells.  During her time in prison she was instrumental in the other gang members ostracising Ulrike Meinhof who she thought was weak.  Great suspicion surrounds her death along with the deaths of the other gang members on that October night with many claiming the gang was murdered by the German authorities. She is often forgotton by history with many wrongly assuming that Ulrike was the female gang leader. Gudrun Ensslin’s life was fictionalised in the 1981 film ‘Marianne and Juliane ‘known as “The German sisters” in the UK

Dugdale-Pointon, T. (29 August 2007), Gudrun Ensslin (1940-1977), http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/people_ensslin.html

Astrid Proll’s journey to Terror Chic

She used to be one of Europe’s most wanted terrorists. Now she is returning to London for a season of talks and films on the Baader-Meinhof era. Kate Connolly met her in her new home, BerlinThirty years ago she was one of the most feared terrorists in Europe, joining her Red Army Faction (RAF) comrades in bombing raids and murderous attacks on establishment figures, terrorising Germany throughout the Seventies.

Her face on ‘Wanted’ posters throughout Britain, where she was in hiding for years, Astrid Proll would like to think her life has moved on. But now she is engaged in another struggle – to meet the growing demand for the memories of her generation of activists.

‘I haven’t put it behind me, it will keep coming up – but it’s not me who finds it difficult to forget, it’s other people,’ she says. ‘Of course, I have fond memories, or I couldn’t exist. But they’re unrecountable. That’s not where I’m at because – thank God – life goes on.’

Not for Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carle Raspe, who are all dead. Many more of Proll’s former comrades committed suicide or are still in prison. But others on the periphery of those tumultuous times – the lawyers who defended them and those who contributed to the cause as street fighters, including the Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer – sit in the German cabinet, while other so-called 68ers form the backbone of the judicial system and the media.

Which leaves Proll, 55, feeling isolated. Despite repeatedly insisting she escaped from the Baader-Meinhof Gang ‘before it got really cruel’, she has never been allowed to forget her past, or what she calls the ‘hole I got myself into’.

The group she belonged to and for whom she drove the getaway car – be it an Alfa-Romeo or a Mercedes, all part of the group’s fashion appeal – killed no fewer than 90 people, many of them former Nazi officials. Proll describes the RAF as ‘the knife-edge of the general reaction of the young’, who were furious at their parents for unquestioningly supporting Hitler.

‘Of course it wasn’t healthy,’ she says. ‘The RAF wasn’t healthy for anybody – neither the participants, nor their children, nor the State, but it happened and you have to deal with it. But you have also to remember that it was a group of no more than 30 people, yet it did something unheard -of – it took up a concept and followed it through in a very German-determined way.’ She remarks that this is not dissimilar to the 11 September terrorists, though insists she does not mean to take the comparison any further.

Proll first went to London in 1974 after her trial for robbery and attempted murder was adjourned due to fears for her health. She worked under various guises and in jobs from park attendant to car mechanic before being arrested in 1978. A year in Brixton prison fighting extradition followed before she was returned to Germany, where she agreed to face trial again. ‘London was my refuge. It remains very important to me,’ she says.

She – and a group of her friends in London – spent years fighting for her return, while Britain tried desperately to keep her out. Finally she was granted permission and drove across Europe, arriving by ferry in 1999. By the autumn she was working as a picture editor on the Independent newspaper

This month is the 25th anniversary of an event that stunned Europe: the discovery on 18 October, 1977, of the bodies of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe in their cells at Stammheim high-security prison in Stuttgart. Meinhof had hanged herself in prison the previous year.

To mark the event, the Institute of Contemporary Arts has invited Proll to return to London to take part in a season of films and talks reflecting on the era. Proll, who has just moved to Berlin after three years living in London, is extremely evasive about her involvement in what she describes as ‘some sort of profession, or life-call’. But she knows when it is useful to bring her past into play.

Asked what the anniversary means to her, she says: ‘I don’t know, nothing. It’s a media event, really,’ she adds over scrambled eggs in a bar in the bourgeois Berlin district of Charlottenburg. ‘[But] I at least want to get some money out of it, you know what I mean, and it’ll help my profile.’

Referring to a coffee-table-style book of pictures of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, including a few of herself, called Pictures on the Run ’67-’77, which she published two years ago to wide critical acclaim, she says: ‘I earn my money from the RAF, so why not keep it up?’

The statement seems ironic from a former revolutionary and fervent anti-capitalist. But even more so does her throwaway remark that Germany is in grave need of modernisation – with its trade unions too strong and civil servants underworked – and ‘could do with a Margaret Thatcher’. It is a comment she later retracts, somewhat embarrassed: ‘I don’t want to be associated with this woman, but you know what I mean.’

Times have changed and so – evidently – has Astrid Proll. But the market demand for her and others with her past has increased of late, with an extraordinary revival in Germany of ‘Terror Chic’. The catwalks are full of the crushed velvet flares and Ray-Bans favoured by Baader, the red RAF star adorns T-shirts, and one fashion designer has even adopted the provocative slogan ‘Prada-Meinhof’. Collectors pay large sums for original RAF ‘wanted’ posters, sales of Moby Dick, an important novel for those held in Stammheim, are unusually healthy, and a fictionalised account of the Baader-Ensslin romance is a best seller.

In one breath, Proll dismisses the current craze. ‘They’re arseholes, just into marketing and making money.’ But a second later she hints at her delight at young people – as she sees it – trying to understand the era. ‘This is their entry and access, and if they choose to be interested in fashion I cannot help it.

‘ Wir sind alle den Moden unterworfen ,’ she whispers. (We’re all slaves of fashion).

On a positive note, she says, this period of youth revolt produced the Green party. ‘Look at Joschka Fischer – he is Germany’s most popular politician and has just won the election for Gerhard Schröder.’

She believes the class struggle need not have turned out the way it did – with Meinhof’s suicide and the bloody deaths, almost certainly also suicide, of the others.

‘Helmut Schmidt, the Social Democrat Chancellor at the time, still says he’s proud his government never negotiated. But even the Conservatives negotiated with the IRA. Yet Schmidt’s generation, if not Nazis, were militaristic. There was no room for manoeuvre, which is why the end was so harsh.’

Proll escaped the same fate as Baader et al largely because of her years hiding in London under assumed identities. She worked as a park attendant, toy car factory worker and car mechanic. When she was finally extradited to Germany in 1978, she escaped going to jail following a bank robbery conviction because of time already served – four years in the early Seventies during which she suffered sensory deprivation which led to temporary madness.

There are those from the RAF milieu, she says, who resent her for the leniency she has been shown and for her ability for self-publicity.

‘Some people claim others have stolen their stories, but obviously with me they can’t, because I’m authentic. It’s a bit of a shame, but I think a lot of people, as far as they survived, had a very hard time because they spent a long time in prison – even longer than me, so I suppose I’m lucky.’

Not least among those who appear to resent her is her elder brother, Thorwald, whom she followed from Kassel to Berlin as a 20-year-old, lured by the promise of an exciting, underground life and the family security she had failed to find at home.

‘Our relationship is not in a good shape’ is all she will say of the brother who renounced his involvement with the group much earlier than his sister. At the heart of their dispute, however, is said to be not the revolution but an argument about family inheritance.

But she has befriended the children of several of her former comrades, particularly Felix Ensslin, the son of Gudrun, whose mother abandoned him for the cause. ‘I’m not trying to be a goody-goody, but he came to see me, I helped him get a job with the Greens, and he wanted to know all about his mum.’

While at the Independent, Proll was outed by a freebie newspaper, which ran stories on a ‘terrorist working in Canary Wharf tower’.

‘There was no consideration that I might have changed, that I hadn’t held a gun for 30 years,’ she says. ‘The British tabloids were one of the most terrifying things I have experienced.’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/oct/06/germany.kateconnolly accessed 16 February 2008

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction, accessed: 13.02.08