In the summer of 1970, a group of would-be revolutionaries from West Germany arrived in Jordan. They had little experience with weapons but hoped to receive military training. Their goal was to bring guerrilla warfare to the streets of Europe, though their previous actions had been limited to minor acts like setting a fire in an empty department store. They were drawn by the perceived glamour of associating with a Palestinian armed group, and above all, they wanted a secure place to hide and plan their next moves.
Some members of the group had flown directly from communist East Berlin to Beirut. The more well-known figures—Ulrike Meinhof, a well-known left-wing journalist, and two convicted arsonists, Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader—had a more complicated journey. They first crossed into East Germany, then took a train to Prague, where they caught a flight to Lebanon. From Beirut, a taxi drove them east across the mountains into Syria, and finally, they traveled south from Damascus into Jordan.
They were not the first Westerners to make such a trip. Within the broad coalition of activists and protest movements known as the New Left, supporting the Palestinian cause had become a way to prove one’s ideological commitment. Israel was no longer seen as a vulnerable bastion of progressive values surrounded by hostile regimes. After its victory in the 1967 war and the subsequent occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, many on the left began to describe Israel as an aggressive outpost of imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism. At the same time, many leftist intellectuals had come to believe that the radical change they desired would not start in Europe, where the working class seemed more interested in vacations and consumer goods than in revolution. Instead, they thought the coming uprising would begin in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, where people were ready to fight.
The question was where to go. Unlike Vietnam or Latin America, the Palestinian cause offered a way to get directly involved with relatively little risk. The Middle East was just a short flight or an inexpensive bus and boat ride away. Until the autumn of 1970, the worst that awaited returning volunteers was some questioning at border control.
So they came, in growing numbers. A single camp north of Amman, run by Fatah—the largest Palestinian armed faction at the time—hosted between 150 and 200 young volunteers in 1969 and 1970. The largest group was British, but most Western European countries were represented, along with some Eastern Europeans and several Indians. They came from a mix of ideological backgrounds. In February 1970, when the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine—one of the smaller armed groups—offered training to any “revolutionary and progressive forces” wanting to join a “world front against imperialism, Zionism, and reaction,” around 50 “militant Maoists, Trotskyists, and members of an extreme left-wing group in France” responded, according to the FBI. Most just visited refugee camps, worked on farms, helped dig trenches, or assisted in clinics. A few fired a Kalashnikov. Then, as one foreign correspondent put it, “they picked up their keffiyeh, several volumes of Palestinian poetry, and went home with souvenirs and a tan.”
The group that arrived in Amman from West Berlin in June 1970 was a strange mix of violent activists, polemicists, self-promoters, adventurers, and intellectuals. Their leader, though not the most outspoken or famous, was Gudrun Ensslin, the 30-year-old daughter of a Protestant pastor. Tall, fair, and serious, she had grown up in a small village in a strict moral environment. There was no sign of rebellion in her youth—only a sharp intelligence. She earned a scholarship to study for a doctorate at Berlin’s Free University.Gudrun Ensslin was a literature student who campaigned for the moderately left-wing Social Democrat Party (SPD) in the 1965 elections. Like many others, she felt deeply betrayed when the party formed a coalition government with conservatives the following year.
A turning point came in June 1967, when the Shah of Iran, a staunch US ally, visited West Germany, sparking major protests. In West Berlin, the Shah’s security forces attacked demonstrators, and a local policeman shot and killed a student. Immediately afterward, Ensslin told fellow activists that it was impossible to reason with “the generation that made Auschwitz” and that only violence could stop a government intent on establishing a new authoritarian regime.
As protests intensified across West Germany, Ensslin reached a personal crisis. She left her infant son and his father, a fellow literature student, and immersed herself in radical activism in West Berlin. There, among drifters, pranksters, runaways, petty criminals, draft dodgers, potheads, avant-garde artists, and occasional ideologues—the mix that made the city an exciting, anarchic place—she met Andreas Baader and fell in love with him.
Baader was 24. His father had disappeared on the Russian front during World War II, and he grew up surrounded by grieving women. After a first brush with the police at age nine, he was expelled from several schools and briefly attended art school. Formal study bored him; he dabbled in experimental “action-theatre.” A friend described him as “a Marlon Brando type.”
Spoiled, arrogant, and lazy, Baader had a brooding, scruffy charm that appealed to women and some men. He dressed fashionably and expensively, posed for erotic photos in a gay men’s magazine, and occasionally wore makeup. He loved fast cars but had little interest in getting a driver’s license, resulting in multiple traffic convictions. Baader was not politically engaged and had no strong feelings about progressive causes. He was drawn to Berlin mainly because living there exempted him from military service.
Many Berlin activists found Baader irritating. One described him as “impossible to talk to,” prone to sulking, bullying, and bragging. In April 1968, an accidental fire in a Brussels department store killed over 250 people. Baader boasted about wanting to start a similar blaze, but it was Ensslin who organized the car, gathered the equipment, and chose a Frankfurt department store as their target. After the arson attack, which caused significant damage but no deaths, they went to a well-known leftist bar to celebrate loudly. This was a mistake, as was leaving bomb components in their car and a list of ingredients in a coat pocket.
These errors led to their arrest within 36 hours. After six months in custody, they stood trial in October 1968. In court, Ensslin—wearing a red leather jacket—waved Mao’s Little Red Book and claimed the arson was a protest against the German public’s indifference to the horrors of the Vietnam War. Baader, in dark glasses, a T-shirt, and a Mao jacket, smoked a Cuban cigar in the dock and compared German students to oppressed Black Americans. Each received a three-year prison sentence but was released after eight months pending appeal.
As a condition of their provisional release, they were required to engage in social work. They spent the following months working with teenagers at institutions in Frankfurt. Ensslin organized discussions about Mao, while Baader took the youths’ allowance money, brought them to bars, drank, and took advantage of the situation.When they learned their appeal had been denied, Baader and Ensslin chose to flee rather than go back to prison. They drove west to Paris, staying in the luxurious apartment of a radical French writer, dining at expensive restaurants, and taking photos of each other in cafes. After a few weeks, they grew tired of the city and drove to Italy. In Milan, they were welcomed by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a wealthy left-wing publisher, who showed them his collection of guns. They spent long hours discussing the coming armed struggle. When their car was stolen, Baader broke into an Alfa Romeo, which they drove back to Berlin. Needing a place to stay, they sought out the journalist Ulrike Meinhof, whom they had met during their trial.
Meinhof was nearly ten years older than both of them. She grew up in a small, conservative town in northwest Germany—a serious, mature, religious, and idealistic young woman who earned a scholarship for gifted students to study education and psychology at university. She protested against the placement of nuclear weapons in West Germany, joined the youth wing of the Social Democratic Party, listened to jazz, and smoked a pipe.
Around this time, she began writing articles for student magazines. Her views were radical but not extreme, and her arguments were well-structured and thoroughly researched. She soon became a regular contributor to Konkret, a left-wing culture and politics magazine based in Hamburg. In 1961, she married the magazine’s publisher and gave birth to twin girls a year later. Over the following years, Meinhof’s journalism earned her respect, a good income, several lawsuits, and a reputation as an unofficial voice for West Germany’s growing protest movement. She appeared frequently on television and radio. A somewhat infatuated British correspondent interviewed her at home in Hamburg, describing “a nervous, pretty woman with two blond little girls rolling around her feet” who sadly admitted that more militant activists dismissed her as a “peace-loving pancake.”
But Meinhof was unhappy. For years, she and her publisher husband had been part of the local liberal social elite, attending dances and dinner parties and spending weekends at the fashionable coastal resort of Kampen on the North Sea island of Sylt. This lifestyle left her uneasy. “Our house, the parties, Kampen—all of that is only partly enjoyable … TV appearances, contacts, the attention I get … I find it pleasant, but it doesn’t satisfy my need for warmth, solidarity, belonging to a group,” she wrote in her diary.
Fortunately for Ensslin and Baader, Meinhof eventually resolved the conflict between her deepening political beliefs and her lifestyle. In late 1967, she divorced her unapologetically unfaithful husband and moved with her daughters to Berlin. Her apartment became a gathering place for activists, writers, students, and young people on the run. When the two fugitive arsonists showed up at her door after returning from Italy, she agreed to let them stay.
By 1969, Meinhof’s once moderate views had grown more extreme. Her language became harsher, and her arguments more direct. She was very busy—lecturing, working on an investigation into young female runaways in state institutions, and writing late into the night. Interviewers found her tense and angry, her already deep voice made rough by chain-smoking.
“Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this any more. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too,” she wrote in one of her final columns for Konkret in April 1969.
Ensslin and Baader lived with Meinhof for several intense weeks.For everyone involved, Meinhof’s daughters liked Ensslin, who played with them, but disliked Baader, who laughed when they got hurt. After a few months, the guests moved on, but Meinhof remained unhappy. When her new partner suggested getting a Christmas tree, she accused him of bourgeois sentimentality and banned presents or any celebrations. Her daughters often missed school. Meinhof told colleagues she no longer saw the point of journalism and also complained about the restrictions of motherhood.
When Baader was rearrested driving a stolen car with fake documents and sent back to prison to finish his sentence, Ensslin asked Meinhof to help free her lover. The journalist agreed to write letters to the prison governor, claiming she and Baader were working on a book together, and got permission for him to join her for research at a Berlin library. Around 10 a.m. on May 14, 1970, shortly after Meinhof and the prisoner had settled in with cigarettes and instant coffee in the reading room of the Institute of Social Issues, two women entered, followed by a man armed with a Beretta pistol, and then Ensslin. Together, they overpowered the two armed prison guards using tear gas and shot an elderly staff member. Baader jumped from a first-floor window onto the institute’s well-kept lawn and ran. Meinhof faced a split-second choice: stay where she was, pretend she had been tricked by Ensslin, and return to her writing, activism, and children—or follow Baader and the others, trading it all for an uncertain, dangerous life as a wanted fugitive.
A stolen Alfa Romeo sports car had been prepared for their escape—later found by police with a tear gas gun and a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital inside—but the violence during the breakout forced a change of plan. They now needed to go farther than a single tank of gas would take them. To make matters worse, Meinhof had chosen to jump out the window after Baader, and they now had a well-known public figure with them. Meinhof had no support network or fake papers and was held back by family responsibilities. One of her first acts as a fugitive was to call a friend to arrange for her daughters to be picked up from school.
The obvious solution was to leave West Germany, and ideally Europe. Ensslin was in touch with a Fatah representative in West Berlin who arranged a hasty departure. Clutching forged passports and clumsily disguised with wigs and makeup, they met at Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse station just over three weeks after Baader’s escape and set off for the Middle East.
After the chaotic excitement of the journey from West Berlin, Amman was initially a letdown. Their Fatah hosts had arranged a standard tour for visitors, but Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and the half-dozen others with them weren’t interested in seeing clinics, villages, and refugee camps. They told their hosts they hadn’t come as tourists—they wanted training in guerrilla warfare.
Despite some hesitation, a senior Fatah official named Abu Hassan agreed and sent the group to a training camp in the hills outside the Jordanian capital. The camp had two stone buildings, a shooting range, a dirt exercise yard, and worn-out tents, guarded by Palestinian fighters and surrounded by barbed wire. The trainees were issued Kalashnikovs, a rare honor.
The following weeks were not a complete success. Fatah instructors taught the Germans how to build firebombs and other explosives, as well as how to rob a bank. But none of the volunteers was physically fit or knew anything about guns or explosives. When they launched…During the operation to free their leader a month earlier, the group had to hire a professional criminal to handle their only deadly weapon, and at least one member was so nervous they vomited. Now in training, Baader refused to swap his tight velvet trousers even for assault exercises, while Meinhof struggled with the physical demands.
Almost immediately, tensions flared between the Germans and the middle-aged Algerian camp commander, a veteran of the fight for independence from France. The first disagreement arose when Ensslin and Baader insisted on sharing a room—something unheard of in Fatah’s conservative training camps. The visitors also complained about the food. Then the women began sunbathing topless or nude, causing further outrage.
Ammunition limits were imposed after the group recklessly fired off hundreds of precious rounds. Baader, who often disobeyed orders, led the trainees in protest. Abu Hassan stepped in to calm things down, but just as peace was restored—and a chicken slaughtered and cooked in his honor—Baader complained it was unfair and “unrevolutionary” for a leader to get better food than the ordinary fighters.
Such friction was hardly surprising. Almost none of the Europeans spoke Arabic, and few had ever traveled to the Middle East or even abroad before. Despite their sympathy for the Palestinian cause, they knew very little about the local society, history, or culture. A Fatah official later recalled that their interest in Palestine seemed “very recent indeed.”
Other foreign volunteers also caused problems. A group of British International Socialists smuggled alcohol into camp, got drunk, started singing, and ended up fighting first with British Maoists and then with guards trying to take their bottles. Another set of volunteers refused to help dig trenches, only to jump into those same holes when an Israeli jet flew low overhead.
But the group led by Baader, Ensslin, and Meinhof proved especially difficult. In early August, after seven weeks in Jordan, Baader demanded to be treated as a militant commander on equal footing with Abu Hassan—a senior intelligence official and protégé of Yasser Arafat. Not long after, Ensslin insisted the Palestinians execute one of her own members, suspecting him of being an Israeli spy simply because he listened to a Hebrew radio broadcast. When Abu Hassan politely refused, another confrontation broke out. This time, he arranged for their swift return home.
Three days before leaving Berlin, the half-dozen young people involved in Baader’s jailbreak had published a communiqué in a leftist magazine. It promised a campaign of violence to bring Germany’s hidden conflicts into the open, vowing to “start here what has already begun in Vietnam, Palestine, Guatemala, Oakland and Watts, Cuba and China, Angola and New York.” The statement made no attempt to explain itself to “intellectual windbags,” “know-it-alls,” or “petit bourgeois intellectuals.” Instead, it was aimed at the “potentially revolutionary part of the population”: underpaid workers, teenage girls in institutions, boys in care homes, factory workers, and families in housing projects.The workers, laborers, and apprentices—all those who were exploited but saw no improvement in their quality of life, consumption, access to loans, or cars—were the focus of a statement likely written by Meinhof, though signed by Ensslin. It appeared beneath an image of a leaping black panther, clearly inspired by the U.S. activists they admired. The text ended with a series of sharp calls to action: “Don’t go meekly off to slaughter… The end of the pigs’ rule is in sight!… Develop the class struggle. Organize the proletariat. Start the armed resistance.” The statement was titled: “It is time to build up the Red Army Faction.”
However, launching an armed struggle in Germany turned out to be harder than Ensslin, Baader, and Meinhof expected. The name they chose reflected their belief that their group was just one part of a global movement to overthrow capitalist, imperialist states like the U.S. and West Germany. But the truth was, some parts of the world were far more open to revolution than others. By late spring 1971, the group had been back in Germany for eight months, with little to show for it beyond a dozen or so bank robberies.
Life for Red Army Faction (RAF) members was mostly dull, stressful, and frustrating, broken up only by rare moments of fear or excitement. As one later recalled, “You join the urban guerrillas and then find yourself spending a month fixing up an apartment, always shopping for supplies. That’s 99% of what goes on.” Another described long, tedious hours encoding and decoding messages. Mistakes could be costly: Meinhof once wrote down a wrong address after a break-in to steal identity cards, and all the documents were sent to the wrong place and lost. Money was often tight. Though Meinhof’s wealthy left-wing friends donated funds and offered weekend homes as hideouts, food was sometimes scarce, and safe houses could be cold and uncomfortable.
Their camaraderie helped ease the hardship. Margrit Schiller, a young recruit, wrote: “They debated, laughed, and joked with one another… They all loved Donald Duck comics and read them together, laughing like children. Andreas and Gudrun often fooled around, giggling like teenagers. If four or five of them were together with time to spare, they cooked together.” She had never met people like Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin before. “Their political discussions, the way they handled weapons, their jokes, how they spoke to and treated each other—they seemed connected, almost as if they shared one mind.”
Music and film offered distractions. Meinhof was embarrassed by her liking for Rod Stewart’s music. Baader had no such reservations about his film tastes; he modeled himself on anti-heroes from gangster movies, wearing a trench coat and hat like the stars of the French New Wave. In Jordan, when Ensslin suspected a group member of being a spy, Baader initially suggested that he, she, and Meinhof shoot the suspect from different angles so no one would know who fired the fatal shot—an idea he took from a spaghetti western. A triple bank robbery was inspired by Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers.
The RAF stole many cars, but the small, fast BMW 2002 was such a favorite that owners across Germany put stickers on their windshields reading, “I am not a member of the RAF,” joking that BMW stood for “Baader Meinhof Wagen.” Baader preferred high-end sports cars. In the fall of 1971, he crashed a stolen Porsche 911 at over 100 mph on the autobahn, walking away from the wreck without a scratch.
Police check a car after the gang’s bomb attempts in 1972.Ensslin put up with her lover’s actions, but she was deeply annoyed by her male comrades’ focus on sex rather than overthrowing capitalism. During a 1971 visit to the well-known Kommune 2 in Berlin, she scolded a leading local activist for “chasing around apartments, sleeping with young girls, and smoking hashish,” angrily telling him these activities were a distraction from the serious work of armed struggle.
In October 1971, the RAF committed its first murder when two members in Hamburg shot a police officer trying to arrest a third. The killing was hardly discussed within the group, but it marked the start of a more violent phase. A second and then a third officer were killed during bank robberies. Authorities responded with large-scale manhunts that, while mostly unsuccessful, limited the group’s freedom of movement.
By April 1972, the RAF’s leaders decided it was time to strike a blow that would, by provoking harsh government repression and revealing the “fascist” nature of the German state, shatter the “false consciousness” of the working class and create conditions for revolution. Exactly how to do this was unclear. When news broke that the U.S. Air Force had mined North Vietnam’s main port during heavy bombing, Ensslin suggested bombing U.S. military bases in West Germany in response. Baader’s reply was characteristically impulsive: “Let’s go then.”
Their first target was a large U.S. base near Frankfurt. A bomb they planted destroyed part of the officers’ mess, killing one officer. They released a statement written by Meinhof, ending with Che Guevara’s call for revolutionaries to create “two, three, many Vietnams.” Next, the RAF wounded five people at a police headquarters in Augsburg, followed by a failed attempt to kill a federal judge. After a short pause, they planted a bomb at the headquarters of the conservative Springer press group, long disliked by the German left. Their warning was ignored, and the explosion injured dozens.
Surprised by public outrage, Baader called Meinhof, who had overseen the attack, to criticize her “stupidity” and ordered a return to military targets. On May 24, the group stole two cars, placed timed bombs in each, and drove them into the headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe in Heidelberg, killing three soldiers. Meinhof issued another statement, comparing the U.S. bombing of Vietnam to Allied bombings in World War II and warning that further escalation would be “genocide, the final solution, Auschwitz.” With their supply of bombs and energy for violence temporarily spent, the RAF paused.
Days after the Heidelberg attack, a resident in Frankfurt reported a garage on the city’s outskirts where men came at odd hours to work with powder stored in large sacks. Early on June 1, police hiding nearby watched a Porsche Targa drive the wrong way up a one-way street and stop. Baader and Holger Meins, a former art student and filmmaker close to the RAF’s leaders, got out and entered the garage. Police moved in.
Meins surrendered when an armored vehicle arrived, but Baader kept shouting and shooting until a police sniper hit him in the thigh. TV footage showed him being carried on a stretcher to a police van.Andreas Baader grimaced in pain, his dark hair now a lurid shade of orange. In the garage, police discovered explosives and a silver-grey ISO Rivolta—one of Europe’s most expensive and rare sports cars, stolen by Baader weeks earlier.
Authorities began rounding up the rest of the group. The next RAF leader to be caught was Gudrun Ensslin, arrested in a Hamburg department store after she left a coat containing a revolver outside a fitting room while trying on sweaters. A shop assistant noticed the coat’s weight, checked the pockets, found the gun, and called the police. “I’m glad the hunt is over,” her father told reporters.
That left Ulrike Meinhof still at large. But the violence of recent weeks had alienated—or at least frightened—many former sympathizers. Twelve days after Baader’s arrest, a young teacher in Hanover was approached by an intermediary asking if two strangers could stay the night. He hesitated, spoke with his girlfriend, and made a phone call. When police arrived, they found a Che Guevara poster on the wall, bags containing guns and a bomb, and Meinhof—underweight and exhausted—who offered no resistance. The revolutionary campaign of the RAF’s first generation was over.
With the founders in jail, a new generation of RAF members took over. Though they still claimed to support global revolution, their real goal was to free their leaders. They failed. In 1976, after weeks of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation, Meinhof killed herself in her cell at Stammheim high-security prison. In the months before her death, the former journalist had been harshly and repeatedly criticized by Ensslin and Baader in statements circulated among RAF prisoners and supporters.
A year later, after the two remaining leaders gave their followers an ultimatum to free them or face a desperate breakout attempt, the group launched a wave of spectacular violence. It culminated in the kidnapping of a prominent industrialist and, when Helmut Schmidt’s government refused to negotiate, the hijacking of a Lufthansa passenger jet from Mallorca, which was eventually flown to Somalia. The standoff ended when West German commandos stormed the plane, killing three of the four hijackers and freeing all hostages unharmed. Upon hearing the news over a makeshift radio in their cells, Ensslin and Baader took their own lives.
In Baghdad, a dozen or so stunned RAF members gathered at the offices of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which had carried out the hijacking on their behalf. Many wept; others made wild, unrealistic plans for revenge. Brigitte Mohnhaupt, the uncompromising 28-year-old former philosophy student who now led the RAF, did neither. She insisted the suicides were “eine Aktion”—an operation. “They were not victims and never were,” Mohnhaupt told the others. “You don’t get made a victim—you make yourself one. They were in control until the very end. Stop crying, assholes.”
Adapted from The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists who Hijacked the 1970s, published on 2 October by Bodley Head and available to order at guardianbookshop.com. Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. This article was amended on 18 September 2025. An earlier version stated that all four hijackers of Lufthansa Flight 181 were killed; in fact, one survived.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about Jason Burkes Resistance means stopping what I oppose The story of the BaaderMeinhof gangs rise and fall written in a clear and natural tone
General Beginner Questions
Q What is this book about
A Its a historical account of the BaaderMeinhof Gang a farleft militant group that operated in West Germany from the late 1960s to the 1990s
Q Who were the BaaderMeinhof Gangs main members
A The key founding figures were Andreas Baader Ulrike Meinhof Gudrun Ensslin and Horst Mahler
Q What does the title Resistance means stopping what I oppose mean
A This phrase captures the groups core ideology that violent action was a legitimate and necessary form of political resistance against what they saw as a fascist state system
Q What were they fighting against
A They were primarily fighting against what they perceived as the revival of fascism in West Germany American imperialism and the capitalist system
Q Was this a large movement
A No The core active membership was very small but they had a larger circle of sympathizers and garnered significant media attention which made them seem more influential than they were
Advanced Historical Context Questions
Q How does Jason Burkes account differ from other books on the subject
A Burke a journalist and historian focuses on placing the group within the wider global context of 1960s70s radicalism and meticulously tracing their strategic failures and internal dynamics rather than glorifying them as romantic revolutionaries
Q What were some of their most notorious actions
A Their activities escalated from arson attacks on department stores to bank robberies bombings of US military bases and government buildings kidnappings and assassinations of prominent figures
Q Why is the story of their fall so significant
A Their decline was marked by internal paranoia ideological purges and the deaths of their leaders in prison It serves as a stark case study in how revolutionary movements can collapse from within
