A few months ago, a former member of West (when the country was divided) Germany’s Red Army Faction, popularly known as the Baader Meinhof Gang, was released from prison. Eva Haule had served 21 years for the 1985 murder of an American soldier and a bombing at an American air base.
This story got me thinking of the article I wrote for Court TV’s Crime Library about the this left-wing terrorist band. Baader Meinhof Gang was a somewhat misleading nickname for the group. While Andreas Baader was indisputably the group’s leader, Ulrike Meinhof was neither second in command nor was she Baader’s girlfriend. Her name got attached to his because she had some fame as a journalist before joining up with the terrorist group.
I found Andreas Baader an interesting, sad, and somewhat baffling character in and of himself. He had been raised in a permissive household in which he had rarely, if ever, been disciplined. In this respect, he was somewhat like 1930s American desperado Clyde Barrow who was reported to have grown up without being disciplined. As youngsters neither Barrow nor Baader had learned to delay gratification and, as a result, were completely unprepared for the adult world. In another parallel with Barrow, Baader had been a common criminal prior to his conversion to Marxism at which point he became a criminal with a cause.
Perhaps the greatest puzzle was why the Red Army Faction originated in what was then West Germany. The post-war country was a prosperous one although, as I noted in my story, the rewards of capitalism can be frustratingly uneven and, by some standards, unfair. However, the West Germany of the RAF was not a nation of widespread starvation, homelessness, or extreme want and would not, at first glance, seem like a fertile soil for Marxist terrorism.
There were other peculiarities about these extremists. Like others of their generation, they grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust and the guilt that so many of the generation of their parents bore for that extraordinary historical horror. However, the radicals of the RAF and other, similar groups often seemed like they were trying to prove, a couple of decades too late, that they WOULD have fought against Nazism if they could have. They also seemed to want to somehow demonstrate their psychological freedom from the guilt of their forebears by opposing the existence of Israel.
Another peculiarity of the Baader Meinhof Gang/Red Army Faction was that they were robbing, bombing, and killing to create a communist society when there was one right next door to them — East Germany – to which the members of this group could easily have emigrated. The Berlin Wall was erected to keep people from the East from traveling West not to keep West Germans from defecting to East Germany. Yet these dedicated communists never seemed to have considered moving to the Marxist land so close to them so they could enjoy the fruits of the “workers’ paradise†and help build it up. Maybe they just liked the excitement of robbing, bombing, and murdering for a communist revolution a lot better than they would have enjoyed living under the gray regimentation and restriction that constitutes communism in the real world.
When re-reading my article on the Baader Meinhof Gang, I noted a sentence that could rankle some Men’s News Daily readers. In it I refer to 1966 as a period in which the women’s liberation movement was beginning and “many political programs wanted a woman to leaven up the traditional monotony of male talking heads.†I would not have write this sentence today as it could be read as displaying anti-male prejudice. However, I have to admit that I prefer a diverse group of commentators and I do believe that we are more likely to see women political commentators on programs today than in 1966 and previous years. (No, I don’t prefer programs with ONLY women political commentators).
At any rate, I’ve told you my speculations as to the making of the Baader Meinhof Gang/Red Army Faction. My article is at http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/terrorists/meinhof/1.html. Readers, what are your thoughts on this group? On any of its participants? On the way I dealt with them in my article?
Thanks to those who reply – even if you are critical.
