Post-War West Germany and the Generation of ’68

The Baader-Meinhof Group — more formally known as the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), the Red Army Faction — emerged from the specific conditions of West Germany in the late 1960s. West Germany had been rebuilt with extraordinary speed after 1945 into one of the world’s most successful capitalist economies. But beneath the economic miracle lay deep unresolved tensions. The generation born after the war grew up in a country where former Nazis held positions in government, the judiciary, industry, and academia. The Nuremberg trialsNuremberg Trials nuremberg-trials The series of military tribunals held in Nuremberg between 1945 and 1949, in which the Allied powers prosecuted leading Nazis for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the new category of crimes against peace. They established the principle that individuals could be held criminally responsible for state-ordered atrocities. The International Military Tribunal, which tried 24 major war criminals between November 1945 and October 1946, was established by the four Allied powers under the London Charter of August 1945. The charges were unprecedented: crimes against peace (planning and waging aggressive war), war crimes (violations of the laws and customs of war), and crimes against humanity (murder, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts against any civilian population). The novelty of the proceedings was matched by their scale: 24 defendants including Göring, Ribbentrop, Hess, Speer, and others; 403 open sessions; testimony from hundreds of witnesses and thousands of documents. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death, including Göring (who evaded execution by suicide), Ribbentrop, and the military commanders Keitel and Jodl. The subsequent Nuremberg trials of 1946–49 tried members of the Einsatzgruppen, doctors who conducted medical experiments, lawyers who implemented racial law, and industrialists who used slave labour. The trials established the principle of individual criminal responsibility for state crimes, the illegality of aggressive war as an instrument of national policy, and the principle that following superior orders does not absolve individuals of criminal responsibility for atrocities. The Nuremberg trials have been criticised on both procedural and substantive grounds — as ‘victors’ justice’ applying ex post facto law to crimes that were not internationally prohibited when committed, and for excluding Allied conduct (the firebombing of German cities, the atomic bombings, the Soviet mass atrocities) from the tribunal’s jurisdiction. These criticisms have substance: the tribunal was not impartial and the selection of defendants reflected the political requirements of the victors. But the alternative — allowing those responsible for the Holocaust and the war of aggression to walk free or be tried by national courts with limited jurisdiction — would have entrenched impunity rather than established accountability. The trials’ most enduring contribution is not the specific verdicts but the legal architecture they created: the principles of international criminal responsibility, the definition of crimes against humanity, and the template for subsequent international tribunals from the ICTY to the ICC all build on Nuremberg. Whether the precedent has been consistently applied — clearly it has not — is a different question from whether it constitutes progress that individual criminal responsibility for mass atrocity is now a recognised principle of international law. had punished a small number of the most prominent perpetrators, but the process of de-Nazification had been superficial and the continuities with the Third Reich were real and visible.

The student movement of the late 1960s confronted these continuities with a ferocity that shocked the West German establishment. The protest against the Shah of Iran’s state visit in 1967, during which student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by a plainclothes policeman — a man later revealed to have been a Stasi informant — radicalised a generation. The attempted assassination of student leader Rudi Dutschke in 1968 by a right-wing gunman, followed by mass protests against the Springer press empire (which had run a campaign of vilification against Dutschke), convinced some in the movement that peaceful protest was futile.

Formation and Ideology

Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof were the central figures of the group’s founding generation. Baader was a charismatic criminal with no coherent political theory; Ensslin, a pastor’s daughter radicalised by the student movement, provided much of the ideological energy; Meinhof was a respected left-wing journalist who crossed the line into violent action in 1970 by helping to free Baader from custody. Together they articulated a version of Third Worldist Marxism — the idea that Western capitalism was sustained by imperialist exploitation of the developing world, and that armed struggle in the metropolis was a necessary complement to liberation movements abroad.

Their targets were accordingly chosen to symbolise American imperialism and West German complicity with it: US military bases in West Germany, German industrialists who represented the capitalist order, judges and prosecutors involved in the RAF’s trials, and politicians associated with the state. They believed — wrongly — that their actions would expose the “fascist” nature of the West German state and radicalise the working class.

The German Autumn: 1977

The “German Autumn” of 1977 was the RAF’s most dramatic and ultimately most self-destructive phase. In April 1977, RAF members shot and killed the Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback. In July, they murdered the banker Jürgen Ponto. In September, they kidnapped Hans Martin Schleyer — president of the Confederation of German Employers and, as it happened, a former SS officer — demanding the release of imprisoned RAF members including Baader and Ensslin. Simultaneously, Palestinian allies hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181, diverting it to Mogadishu in support of the same demands.

Chancellor Helmut Schmidt refused to negotiate. The GSG 9, West Germany’s elite counter-terrorism unit, stormed the plane in Mogadishu and freed all hostages with only one fatality. The same night, Baader, Ensslin, and a third RAF prisoner were found dead in their cells at Stammheim — officially suicides. Schleyer was murdered by his captors the following day. The German Autumn broke the RAF’s first generation and demonstrated that the democratic state was capable of defeating terrorism without capitulating to it.

Why It Matters Now

The RAF’s history raises enduring questions about the relationship between political violence and its stated goals. The RAF’s diagnosis of West German society was not entirely wrong — there were real continuities with the Nazi period, real injustices, real complicity with American imperialism. But the conclusion they drew — that armed struggle would radicalise the working class — was completely mistaken. Instead of exposing the state’s repressive nature, their violence provided the justification for the state’s most repressive measures, alienated the left-wing milieu on which any revolutionary movement depended, and produced a reaction that entrenched rather than challenged the political order they opposed.

Key Figures

Andreas Baader — Co-founder and charismatic figurehead of the RAF; found dead in his cell at Stammheim in October 1977.

Ulrike Meinhof — Journalist and intellectual who gave the group its public name; found dead in her cell in 1976 before the German Autumn.

Gudrun Ensslin — The ideological centre of the founding RAF; found dead at Stammheim in October 1977.

Helmut Schmidt — West German Chancellor who refused to negotiate and authorised the Mogadishu rescue; his handling of the German Autumn defined his chancellorship.

Timeline

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