Although the Badder Meinhoff Complex is a film it makes an important contribution into understanding the mind set of the international terrorist in the days before the arrival of the self sacrificing fanatic of the past decade. Ulrike Meinhoff and Andreas Badder were two principals in the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigade who carried out some 30 Terrorist atrocities, mainly in Germany but also Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium as well as Hijacking a plane in Majorca. It was odd seeing the initials R.A.F which in the UK continues to mean so much for those of us who experienced the Battle of Britain, albeit as children.
In its broadest terms the group was anti Fascist and pro socialist revolutionary activity from supporting the North Vietnamese, Chez Guevara and against all forms of “imperialism” taking the sides of the Arabs and Muslims against the Israeli State, receiving their training and weapons support in Jordan. The hierarchy opposed attacks which killed “workers” although most of the 34 deaths were “secondary” targets, chauffeurs and body guards. The lesser known Revolutionary Cells conducted 296 bomb attacks over the same period.
I am opposed to the use of violence as a way of settling differences and the worst kind is often that based on ideology, religion and racism because it is indiscriminate and merciless. Having said there are degrees of justification for violence by states when in the interests of the majority of people and by the people when they are enslaved by others. I like to believe that there are only exceptional circumstances when I would attempt to use violence against another human being and then only to protect the lives of others, rather than myself. However it is always difficult to predict how one will behave in a situation of which one has no or little experience.
In 1961 I was picked up and thrown into the air three times by the police when sitting peacefully with other on a landing stage close a Polaris Submarine supply ship moored in Holy Loch. This was the situation where I had resigned my position as a field officer of the Direct Action Committee and where the Principal Organisers had been arrested and I stepped in first to quell the changing mood of demonstrators against the actions of the police and when the service men were ordered to force their way through the demonstrators, and the following a message from Pat Arrowsmith to end the sit downs and for everyone to form into a march to the Police station in the nearest town Dunoon to protest at the arrests.
It is a standard tactic of authorities to find ways to remove the leadership of demonstration and protects movement or undermine their credibility and this then enables the demonstrations to be broken up, often by creating the very violence which then authorities then argue was the justification for them to use force to end. This was the approach adopted by the police, no doubt also communicated in advance or with some understanding of their political masters in central and local government. It is more difficult to do in a democracy than in a dictatorship but is nevertheless a standard tactic. As I shall explain it can also be used by those behind demonstrations to radicalise participants and this can include secret organisations within a country and as will be mentioned by other countries with different or their own agendas. That I had advised the authorities in advance of the action being within the spirit of Satyagraha, the Gandhian approach to non violent action and resistance, and took the action to stop a situation becoming negative with the demonstrators turning to violence was a major factor in which I was approved to hold a top local government office within local government a decade later.
Had I not be there that day the outcome could have been very different. Had someone intent on creating violence been present the situation could have changed dramatically and would have had longer term consequence. This is what happened before the decade ended when violence became a creature of the anti Vietnam war demonstrations. In the early sixties it was evident that while the Communist countries and their supporters world wide were supporting and funding the anti nuclear movements in Western democracies, they made a distinction between the worker’s and the capitalist bomb.
The event when I was given the insight to this was a conference of the Socialist Labour League then under the control of Gerry Healey. Pat Arrowsmith the field organiser for the Director Action Committee Against Nuclear war was invited to address the gathering held in central London. I was invited to manage a bookstall provide by Houseman’s the book and stationery provider which helped to fund Peace News, a weekly paper promoting non violent action and this provided the opportunity to first listen to what Pat had to say and then stay to hear the address by Gerry Healey which followed. He first explained why it was important to support the efforts undermine the British defence deterrent and that held by other capitalist states. However it was important for socialist countries to retain and develop their weapons without which the capitalist would seek to destroy communism. He then went on to explain the political tactic of enterism in which one entered industries and work places, fermented unrest and strikes which in turn would force employers to retaliate and help radicalise the workers. Their next object was to enter the machine tool industry and through this they would be able to exert greater influence on industry and manufacturing in general.
It was some two decades later that we experience a version of this approach by the Militant Tendency and their influence and to some extent control over NALGO the main managerial, administrative and Clerical workers Union in Local government, who along with the National Union of Public Employees represented the majority of staff in Social Services Departments.
Andreas Baader was a young man who appears to have enjoyed the excitement of being a violent criminal as he also gained from stealing and driving fast cars. A school drop he was the only one of the original leadership who did not go to university and appears to have had no intellectual basis for his subsequent terrorists activities. He appears to have been a psychopath.
The brains of the group was his lover, Gudrun Ensslin. and daughter of a German religious Pastor who it is claimed was a descendent of Hegel. She, like Andreas, were born in 1940 and her father was a conventional conservative who had written poetry approved by the Nazi Party. In 1958 she studied for a year in the United States and became at first socially minded and then drawn to the left wing causes of the 1960‘s, particularly the possession and potential use of nuclear weapons and the operation of American bases in Germany. She had a child by a lover.
A specific event tipped her into becoming a terrorist against the German state and its institution, During the visit of the Shah of Persia the Police and undercover security forces initiated violence in order to break up demonstrations by those opposed to the visit. Excessive forces was used and one demonstrator was shot by an undercover policeman in the back of the head. Although charged with manslaughter, the man was acquitted and Gudrun started to denounce West Germany as a Fascist State. In this there was considerable truth as under the American and British control former Nazis were given positions of political and administrative power at every level of government , in he police and armed services. However it was revealed after the fall of East Germany and unification with West Germany that the man was an East German agent who worked for the Stasi, the East Germany secret service.
Gudrun then met and became the lover of Andreas Baader and together with two others detonated two bombs in a departmental store in 1968. The were arrested within a few days, subsequently convicted and given three years in prison but released on bail under Appeal. When this was turned down they attempted to flee but Andreas was apprehended and taken back to prison. It is not unusual for some conventionally brought up upper and middle class young girls to be attracted to DH Lawrence types, which can include the violent criminal psychopath. I observed direct experience of this during the period of my involvement in the peace movement 1959 1961 and during my period at Ruskin College and the Department of Extra Mural Studies at Oxford University. I have written about this period separately and in the future from different perspectives and contexts. Sexual liberation is often the precipitating factor.
Gudrun became determined to break her lover out of prison and the opportunity came when he was allowed to study at a research institute outside the prison and without handcuffs.
According to the film Urika Meinhof arranged to interview him at the institute and once inside arranged for Gudrun and another girl to enter and release Andreas together with masked and unknown individual who had a gun with bullets. The intention was for Urike to remain and express surprise and shock at what happened, However the masked individual used the gun severely wounding the Librarian. Ulrike fled with the rest and became the most wanted individuals in West Germany and became known as the Baader, Meinhoff gang. Her father was an established art historian and ran the Oldenburg Museum who died early on in the war when she was six and her mother also died when she was a teenager. She nevertheless went to university and studied philosophy and sociology and pedagogy and German studies becoming involved in reform movements in the later 1950’s and then was significantly influenced by a Spanish Marxist who later translated some of her writings. She then married the founder of the Marxist left monthly journal Konkret, having become a secret member of the banned German Communist party and in a situation where the journal was financed by the East German Government. She became the writer for the group as well as participating in its activities, bearing twin children who became part of a tussle with her husband when she left the country and went underground and they divorced. She made one attempt to kidnap the children so they could educated in Palestine but this failed and they were returned to the care of their father.
After establishing links with Palestinian and Middle east revolutionaries and terrorists, the group attended a Fatah training camp in Jordan but were asked to leave in part because of their attitude to sex and nudity but also according to the film because they wanted to be trained to rob banks while Fatah was concerned with operations in desert conditions. They however retained links and the group obtained weapons and other assistance.
It was after their return to Germany they engaged in banks robberies and bombings of buildings with several leading to deaths. The three were arrested separately in 1972 and their trial took several year to commence and also lasted a long time with refusals to appear, with exclusions because of their behaviour from the court and various activities of other members of the group who became known as the second generation of the R.A.F. They went on hunger strike over being kept in isolation and because their confinement conditions. Concessions were made and they were able to communicate with each other in terms of the trial.
The film follows the activities of the second generation of the RAF activists. The members along with other revolutionary groups in Germany and in various countries of Europe were trained on the West Bank and Gaza with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and they operated cell structures applying the revolutionary ideas of Che Guevara to city and urban areas. They attacked US Military Facilities, German Police Stations and buildings belonging to the Axel Springer media empire.
It was while the Principals were in prison that the second generation commenced to kidnap in order to try and secure the release of those inside. In 1975 a candidate for a mayor was kidnapped and the authorities did agree to release those not accused of murder in exchange. Then later that year the German Embassy in Stockholm was raised and hostage taken, two of whom were killed but this time the demands were not met. A Federal prosecutor was gunned down. The Head of the Dresdner Bank was murdered in a failed kidnap attempt. The President of German Employers Association was kidnapped in another raid and subsequently executed after over a month as a prisoner. Then supporters of the Palestinian cause kidnapped a German holiday jet from Majorca to Frankfurt demanding the release of the Principals who had now been convicted and sentenced. The three Principals were said to have committed suicide following a pact after the hostages were released from the plane. There are those who believe that the three were executed by the state to prevent further attempts to free them and according to the Wikipedia there are legitimate questions about the deaths. This would not be surprising
The R.A.F continued its terrorist activities into the 1990’s despite the collapse of the soviet union but these are not covered in the film, The group stated that it was disbanded on 20th April 199 and since then the German government has accepted requests for pardons by some of those still in prison.
The Wikipedia article is excellent because it attempts to set the socio political scene in which the Red Brigade and other similar groups flourished in Germany in particular. Those involved were born during or immediately after World War 2 and the defeat of Nazism and the exposure of its genocide against the Jews, the disabled, other ethnic minorities such as gypsies and Nazi dissenters. They lived in a divided country with the Communists police state in one half and a right wing government full of former Nazi’s on the other. Berlin was full of spies and double agents for half the countries in the world.
Britain had initiated mass protests with the Suez debacle in 1956 and hen with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Direction Action Committee against Nuclear War in the early 1960’s. There was the student revolts in Paris and France and in the USA and hen the anti Vietnam War protests. There were hundreds of thousands of idealistic young people who rejected the mass army and weaponry development of both sides in the cold and not so cold war and saw both camps engaged in imperialist activities to harm of the poor and the worker classes across the globe. There was a belief that things would only change through world wide revolution and a violent one. There was a philosophic school in Germany with Habernas, Marcuse and Negt with Marxian philosophers and political theorists. They made the mistake of forgetting that in general people are not prepared to volunteer their lives in mortal combat unless they are starving, the bread riots before the French Revolution or the effects of invasion and war losses as with the success of Communism in Germany and Fascism in post First World War Germany. People do not revolt for secular ideologies as they will do not in defence of their religion.
In its broadest terms the group was anti Fascist and pro socialist revolutionary activity from supporting the North Vietnamese, Chez Guevara and against all forms of “imperialism” taking the sides of the Arabs and Muslims against the Israeli State, receiving their training and weapons support in Jordan. The hierarchy opposed attacks which killed “workers” although most of the 34 deaths were “secondary” targets, chauffeurs and body guards. The lesser known Revolutionary Cells conducted 296 bomb attacks over the same period.
I am opposed to the use of violence as a way of settling differences and the worst kind is often that based on ideology, religion and racism because it is indiscriminate and merciless. Having said there are degrees of justification for violence by states when in the interests of the majority of people and by the people when they are enslaved by others. I like to believe that there are only exceptional circumstances when I would attempt to use violence against another human being and then only to protect the lives of others, rather than myself. However it is always difficult to predict how one will behave in a situation of which one has no or little experience.
In 1961 I was picked up and thrown into the air three times by the police when sitting peacefully with other on a landing stage close a Polaris Submarine supply ship moored in Holy Loch. This was the situation where I had resigned my position as a field officer of the Direct Action Committee and where the Principal Organisers had been arrested and I stepped in first to quell the changing mood of demonstrators against the actions of the police and when the service men were ordered to force their way through the demonstrators, and the following a message from Pat Arrowsmith to end the sit downs and for everyone to form into a march to the Police station in the nearest town Dunoon to protest at the arrests.
It is a standard tactic of authorities to find ways to remove the leadership of demonstration and protects movement or undermine their credibility and this then enables the demonstrations to be broken up, often by creating the very violence which then authorities then argue was the justification for them to use force to end. This was the approach adopted by the police, no doubt also communicated in advance or with some understanding of their political masters in central and local government. It is more difficult to do in a democracy than in a dictatorship but is nevertheless a standard tactic. As I shall explain it can also be used by those behind demonstrations to radicalise participants and this can include secret organisations within a country and as will be mentioned by other countries with different or their own agendas. That I had advised the authorities in advance of the action being within the spirit of Satyagraha, the Gandhian approach to non violent action and resistance, and took the action to stop a situation becoming negative with the demonstrators turning to violence was a major factor in which I was approved to hold a top local government office within local government a decade later.
Had I not be there that day the outcome could have been very different. Had someone intent on creating violence been present the situation could have changed dramatically and would have had longer term consequence. This is what happened before the decade ended when violence became a creature of the anti Vietnam war demonstrations. In the early sixties it was evident that while the Communist countries and their supporters world wide were supporting and funding the anti nuclear movements in Western democracies, they made a distinction between the worker’s and the capitalist bomb.
The event when I was given the insight to this was a conference of the Socialist Labour League then under the control of Gerry Healey. Pat Arrowsmith the field organiser for the Director Action Committee Against Nuclear war was invited to address the gathering held in central London. I was invited to manage a bookstall provide by Houseman’s the book and stationery provider which helped to fund Peace News, a weekly paper promoting non violent action and this provided the opportunity to first listen to what Pat had to say and then stay to hear the address by Gerry Healey which followed. He first explained why it was important to support the efforts undermine the British defence deterrent and that held by other capitalist states. However it was important for socialist countries to retain and develop their weapons without which the capitalist would seek to destroy communism. He then went on to explain the political tactic of enterism in which one entered industries and work places, fermented unrest and strikes which in turn would force employers to retaliate and help radicalise the workers. Their next object was to enter the machine tool industry and through this they would be able to exert greater influence on industry and manufacturing in general.
It was some two decades later that we experience a version of this approach by the Militant Tendency and their influence and to some extent control over NALGO the main managerial, administrative and Clerical workers Union in Local government, who along with the National Union of Public Employees represented the majority of staff in Social Services Departments.
Andreas Baader was a young man who appears to have enjoyed the excitement of being a violent criminal as he also gained from stealing and driving fast cars. A school drop he was the only one of the original leadership who did not go to university and appears to have had no intellectual basis for his subsequent terrorists activities. He appears to have been a psychopath.
The brains of the group was his lover, Gudrun Ensslin. and daughter of a German religious Pastor who it is claimed was a descendent of Hegel. She, like Andreas, were born in 1940 and her father was a conventional conservative who had written poetry approved by the Nazi Party. In 1958 she studied for a year in the United States and became at first socially minded and then drawn to the left wing causes of the 1960‘s, particularly the possession and potential use of nuclear weapons and the operation of American bases in Germany. She had a child by a lover.
A specific event tipped her into becoming a terrorist against the German state and its institution, During the visit of the Shah of Persia the Police and undercover security forces initiated violence in order to break up demonstrations by those opposed to the visit. Excessive forces was used and one demonstrator was shot by an undercover policeman in the back of the head. Although charged with manslaughter, the man was acquitted and Gudrun started to denounce West Germany as a Fascist State. In this there was considerable truth as under the American and British control former Nazis were given positions of political and administrative power at every level of government , in he police and armed services. However it was revealed after the fall of East Germany and unification with West Germany that the man was an East German agent who worked for the Stasi, the East Germany secret service.
Gudrun then met and became the lover of Andreas Baader and together with two others detonated two bombs in a departmental store in 1968. The were arrested within a few days, subsequently convicted and given three years in prison but released on bail under Appeal. When this was turned down they attempted to flee but Andreas was apprehended and taken back to prison. It is not unusual for some conventionally brought up upper and middle class young girls to be attracted to DH Lawrence types, which can include the violent criminal psychopath. I observed direct experience of this during the period of my involvement in the peace movement 1959 1961 and during my period at Ruskin College and the Department of Extra Mural Studies at Oxford University. I have written about this period separately and in the future from different perspectives and contexts. Sexual liberation is often the precipitating factor.
Gudrun became determined to break her lover out of prison and the opportunity came when he was allowed to study at a research institute outside the prison and without handcuffs.
According to the film Urika Meinhof arranged to interview him at the institute and once inside arranged for Gudrun and another girl to enter and release Andreas together with masked and unknown individual who had a gun with bullets. The intention was for Urike to remain and express surprise and shock at what happened, However the masked individual used the gun severely wounding the Librarian. Ulrike fled with the rest and became the most wanted individuals in West Germany and became known as the Baader, Meinhoff gang. Her father was an established art historian and ran the Oldenburg Museum who died early on in the war when she was six and her mother also died when she was a teenager. She nevertheless went to university and studied philosophy and sociology and pedagogy and German studies becoming involved in reform movements in the later 1950’s and then was significantly influenced by a Spanish Marxist who later translated some of her writings. She then married the founder of the Marxist left monthly journal Konkret, having become a secret member of the banned German Communist party and in a situation where the journal was financed by the East German Government. She became the writer for the group as well as participating in its activities, bearing twin children who became part of a tussle with her husband when she left the country and went underground and they divorced. She made one attempt to kidnap the children so they could educated in Palestine but this failed and they were returned to the care of their father.
After establishing links with Palestinian and Middle east revolutionaries and terrorists, the group attended a Fatah training camp in Jordan but were asked to leave in part because of their attitude to sex and nudity but also according to the film because they wanted to be trained to rob banks while Fatah was concerned with operations in desert conditions. They however retained links and the group obtained weapons and other assistance.
It was after their return to Germany they engaged in banks robberies and bombings of buildings with several leading to deaths. The three were arrested separately in 1972 and their trial took several year to commence and also lasted a long time with refusals to appear, with exclusions because of their behaviour from the court and various activities of other members of the group who became known as the second generation of the R.A.F. They went on hunger strike over being kept in isolation and because their confinement conditions. Concessions were made and they were able to communicate with each other in terms of the trial.
The film follows the activities of the second generation of the RAF activists. The members along with other revolutionary groups in Germany and in various countries of Europe were trained on the West Bank and Gaza with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and they operated cell structures applying the revolutionary ideas of Che Guevara to city and urban areas. They attacked US Military Facilities, German Police Stations and buildings belonging to the Axel Springer media empire.
It was while the Principals were in prison that the second generation commenced to kidnap in order to try and secure the release of those inside. In 1975 a candidate for a mayor was kidnapped and the authorities did agree to release those not accused of murder in exchange. Then later that year the German Embassy in Stockholm was raised and hostage taken, two of whom were killed but this time the demands were not met. A Federal prosecutor was gunned down. The Head of the Dresdner Bank was murdered in a failed kidnap attempt. The President of German Employers Association was kidnapped in another raid and subsequently executed after over a month as a prisoner. Then supporters of the Palestinian cause kidnapped a German holiday jet from Majorca to Frankfurt demanding the release of the Principals who had now been convicted and sentenced. The three Principals were said to have committed suicide following a pact after the hostages were released from the plane. There are those who believe that the three were executed by the state to prevent further attempts to free them and according to the Wikipedia there are legitimate questions about the deaths. This would not be surprising
The R.A.F continued its terrorist activities into the 1990’s despite the collapse of the soviet union but these are not covered in the film, The group stated that it was disbanded on 20th April 199 and since then the German government has accepted requests for pardons by some of those still in prison.
The Wikipedia article is excellent because it attempts to set the socio political scene in which the Red Brigade and other similar groups flourished in Germany in particular. Those involved were born during or immediately after World War 2 and the defeat of Nazism and the exposure of its genocide against the Jews, the disabled, other ethnic minorities such as gypsies and Nazi dissenters. They lived in a divided country with the Communists police state in one half and a right wing government full of former Nazi’s on the other. Berlin was full of spies and double agents for half the countries in the world.
Britain had initiated mass protests with the Suez debacle in 1956 and hen with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Direction Action Committee against Nuclear War in the early 1960’s. There was the student revolts in Paris and France and in the USA and hen the anti Vietnam War protests. There were hundreds of thousands of idealistic young people who rejected the mass army and weaponry development of both sides in the cold and not so cold war and saw both camps engaged in imperialist activities to harm of the poor and the worker classes across the globe. There was a belief that things would only change through world wide revolution and a violent one. There was a philosophic school in Germany with Habernas, Marcuse and Negt with Marxian philosophers and political theorists. They made the mistake of forgetting that in general people are not prepared to volunteer their lives in mortal combat unless they are starving, the bread riots before the French Revolution or the effects of invasion and war losses as with the success of Communism in Germany and Fascism in post First World War Germany. People do not revolt for secular ideologies as they will do not in defence of their religion.
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