The Baader Meinhof Gang's 'Revolution' of Murders, Bank Robberies, & Blowing Themselves Up
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I'm Lola Blanc. And I'm Megan Elizabeth. And we're the hosts of Trust Me, the podcast about cults, extreme belief, and the abuse of power. Now on Podcast One. We're real-life cult survivors. And we're here to tell you anyone can join a cult. If you've ever dived headfirst into a new self-help

or believed wholeheartedly in a spiritual practice, or even just trusted someone with your life, guess what? You're just as susceptible as everyone else. No one is safe, especially not Megan. I'm the most susceptible. We want to debunk the myth that people who join cults are uneducated or naive or broken because anyone can be manipulated by a narcissist or feel good in a new group they've joined. And we should know we both have been. Join us every week as we explore the world of extreme belief,

Talk to survivors and experts. And share our own experiences with cults and the abuse of power. Don't be fooled, you might be next. Get new episodes of Trust Me every Wednesday on Podcast One, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you get your podcasts. December 22nd, 1971. Almost exactly half a century ago, in the southwestern German city of Kaiserslautern. A sleepy place best known for its garden shows. But not this day.

Around 8am, a red VW van parks up outside the local branch of a Bavarian bank. Music by the Rolling Stones blaring out its windows. The doors slide open and three men leap out, unmasked, and heading for the bank. While they're inside, a 32-year-old policeman, Herbert Schöner, is on patrol. He notices the illegally parked van and steps closer for a chat. The driver shoots him in the back. Schöner drops.

The trio flee the bank, having robbed 134,000 Deutsche Marks, around 3.2 million bucks today. One of them shoots Shona again, killing him, and the gang speeds away.

Days later, as Germans prepare for Christmas, the nation's biggest newspaper splashes the deadly rage all over its front page. Baader-Meinhof gang continues to murder, it writes, noting the death of a Hamburg cop just weeks before. This is no lone act, the paper says. It's the murderous rampage of a leftist terrorist group that's gripped the nation for over a year. At first it was firebombing stores. Now it's robbing banks and shooting cops dead in the street.

Is Germany slipping back into the lawlessness of the Second World War, its leaders ask? Chaos engulfs the country. The Kaiserslautern killers won't get far. They're rounded up and convicted of Shona's death soon after. Officials hope it'll put an end to the gang, but it's only just beginning. Kaiserslautern is just the tip of a slew of bombings, sieges and murders. It'll push post-war Germany to its absolute limits, at the hands of a group that's gone down since then as much in folklore as fact.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hey guys, and welcome to another episode of the Underworld Podcast. This is the show that tells you how not to sunbathe naked in the Jordanian desert so you don't piss off your local militant's hosts. I'm your host, Sean Williams, and I'm here with my man Danny Gold for another slice of organised crime by two seasoned, talented, level-headed reporters, this time with a little political twist. Yeah, I guess this is a little bit off of our wheelhouse. Yeah, the Baader-Meinhof gang, Red Army faction...

whether they're a gang, whether they're a terror group. I mean, it's kind of up for grabs. They robbed banks. They set fire to stuff. They committed loads of crimes. It's pretty organized. I don't know. I think it's within. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's cool. It's something I've been pretty obsessed with ever since I learned about it. And I think you're pretty into it, right? Yeah, I mean, that whole sort of...

era was a fascinating time period when you have these Western quote unquote revolutionary groups that were violent and whether it was like the Weathermen or the SLA and obviously the Red Army Faction. It was just a, it was a crazy time, man. There was a lot of absurd political

political violence and organized crime violence that intertwined with it in the 70s. Oh, yeah. All those hostage takings on planes. And it was just like a weekly occurrence. So it's always kind of fascinated me as well. Before we get into all of that stuff, I guess we should do some housekeeping. There's the Patreon. I think when this is going out, I think we're going to have something up tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow.

and we're going to have loads and loads up there soon. Please like us, subscribe, share, tell everyone you know. It really helps us out, guys. Yeah, we've been on some other shows lately as well, so welcome if you're joining us from those. Patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast is where you can give us, you know, a small amount of money per month, and there's bonus episodes and all sorts of good stuff up there. We have the merch too, which is doing well. Underworldpod.com, you can click on merch. Like, we have the Don't Instagram Your Crime t-shirts, and as much as, like,

We're selling it so we can make money. It's also like an important PSA. If we can really get this out there and get it popular, think about how many rappers will avoid going to jail if they really take the message to heart. Yeah, we're just doing the world a favor, really, with this. We're going to save Kodak Black if you guys buy enough of those t-shirts. By the way, I've been watching a lot of YouTube this week, doing a load of research, of course. I want to know if any of our listeners are getting this weird...

weird ad for like Slavic wives. I don't know if it's because that's your searches, dude. I'm like exuding some patheticness or because we've done loads of shows on the Albania mafia, but moving on. It's not right. It's not. No, no, it is. Okay. And yeah, we have a correction by the way, guys, remember the episode on the macro mafia in the Netherlands? I told you guys, we didn't know who Nabil B is. That's the star witness at the heart of the Marengo trials helped Nabil

by Peter DeVries who was killed well I screwed that up

We actually do. So cheers to our boy Bada for the heads up. It turns out Nabil was a sicario for Ridwan Taghi's mafia until he botched a hit in Utrecht and killed the wrong guy. And then he fessed up to the cops and then turned against them, which is pretty crazy. All of that is to say that we want to be fact-checked, guys. We're reporters. We need editors. We love editors. Any call out, send them our way. The Underworld podcast at gmail.com.

So, RAF. I actually got a chance to report on the group years back when I first rocked up in Berlin. I did a couple of stories. I even spoke to a couple of the former RAF members, which was really, really cool. And we'll get into that a bit further down. But we can actually split this one into two very different parts, which I think one of yours in the middle, right? There's just so much of these guys to dive into. Yeah, I think I'm working on a multi-part story about Afghanistan, opium, Taliban, heroin, all that fun stuff. Hopefully I'll get it done.

But first off, do you know what the Baader-Meinhof effect is? I do not. Well, it's basically about the illusion of frequency or this thing where you focus on something you're interested in and then you see it everywhere, a kind of confirmation bias where you block out stuff that doesn't fit your worldview. I mean, I guess that's just the whole of social media. And we do it every day, right? We see a bunch of buses go past at once or red cars and we start seeing red cars everywhere.

Apparently, some guy started reading about the Baader-Meinhof gang in the 90s and saw it everywhere. Like, I don't know where you're living, my man, but if you're getting flashbacks to a Cold War terror group, you might want to see a doctor, maybe erase your browser history. What does that mean? Is that like one guy got it and just kept seeing potential attacks? Or I don't understand. I think it's just the phrase Baader-Meinhof. So you just get intensely obsessed with one idea and then you just see it everywhere. It's like faces in the clouds kind of thing.

But on to the show. The Bartominov Gang. Been around for over 50 years. Carried on a shockingly long time. And I mean shockingly. And while its notoriety really rockets in the 1970s...

The story starts a while before then, back to the dying years of the Second World War. Hitler's getting stuffed on the Eastern Front and the Allies are winning the Pacific, Europe, Africa, all over. And yeah, I know that's a pretty insanely brief rundown of like the biggest thing that's ever happened, but you can go to Dan Carlin for a five-hour show on the Battle of Bruges or whatever. Wow, the Dan Carlin animosity continues. I mean, I think...

Yeah, you're just jealous that he only has to do three episodes a year, even if each of them is like nine hours long. I am actually, yeah. Yeah, we're going to get a lot more of that. And...

Around this time, at the end of the war, a bunch of U.S. intelligence officials are planning what in 1945 is going to become Operation Paperclip. That's the nabbing of Nazi scientists to help America with the Cold War effort against the Soviets, building bombs, spaceships, satellites, power stations, you name it. I mean, Nazis are bad, got it. But if they're on your side, all good. I mean, the Soviets had an Operation 2 that I forget the name of, but it was almost like a race operation.

To get these guys. You know the old saying. My hated enemy is actually my friend. If you can help me build big ass rockets. To be my new enemy. I've always been into that phrase. And.

Two great resources for this episode that get into this culture really, really well, by the way, guys, a BBC doco called In Love With Terror, which is on YouTube. Actually, you can see it for free. I've put it on the reading list that's on the Patreon. And the Baader-Meinhof Complex, which is a 2008 drama movie, started out as a book by German author Stefan Aust. Aust, who wound up being this big time publisher and editor in Germany, was actually...

So close to the Baader-Meinhof gang that they actually had him marked down for death at one point. So at the war's end, officially there's a policy of so-called denazification. That's trying to rout Nazis from positions of power in post-war Germany. But after the trials at Nuremberg and the Berlin blockade and the beginnings of East Germany and the Cold War, well, the Allies just sort of lose interest in it.

And then you have the Marshall Plan, when the US pumped $15 billion then in that money, which is almost like a trillion dollars today, into reviving Europe's battered economies. And Washington doesn't care too much if Germany's economy becomes more equitable or if it should perhaps shut out the Bayer factories that made Cyclone B, the Porsche ones that built tanks, or even Hugo Boss. So at this time, a lot of young Germans are thinking, hold up, did anything actually change after we started this campaign?

thing that was basically the worst thing in human history, because it seems like nothing actually did. And in fact, a bunch of the Nazis are still running stuff. I mean, as someone who both sides of my family are Eastern European Jews, like I want to assure the young Germans of 1960s that some very big things did actually change, you know? But the industry thing is interesting, right? Because it's kind of like...

I mean, the Marshall plant was wildly successful too. But the industry thing is kind of, you know, my dad still won't buy German cars and things like that. But it's kind of like when you have all these industries, like do you decimate them and then like shatter the economy even more? You know, it's kind of like the Iraqi military being completely disbanded. I don't know. I just kind of view it that way. Like what is the right answer in this situation? But I think there were some of the heads of industry at that time. They just carried on.

And like, even though they made all these...

horrific stuff. No, they should be dealt with. But you know what I mean, like shuttering the entire the entire companies that provided the economy. But anyway, the 60s rolled on and Berlin's divided. Wars are kicking off from Cuba to Congo. China's in the great leap forward. Khrushchev's crushing Stalinism. It's a great time for communists. And the US is just carpet bombing the shit out of Vietnam, trying to route the Viet Cong there. And Western peaceniks and radicals and hippies, they're protesting all over the world in a gigantic counterculture movement.

And in Germany, all this is happening too, of course, but it's gone into hyperdrive. I mean, there's an actual communist country carved out of its arse in the east. There's cities laying in ruin everywhere, secret police kidnapping folk, and actual real-life Nazis are still sitting at the top of industry in the west. And there are huge, I mean massive, demos against NATO and the war in Vietnam, which leftists, they see as killing in the name of capital.

And out of it, all of this chaos, that's when the Baader-Meinhof gang first emerges out of an apartment in Berlin. In 1966, these radicals experienced two huge defeats. Firstly, England beats Germany at Wembley in the World Cup final. Like, I can't tell if that's just your dry British wit or was that actually a big deal? Ah, no.

I like the idea that I've got tri-British wit. Let's just stick with that. But I... No, they don't give a shit. That year, actually, there's another thing that does matter to them, and that's that the Social Democratic Party, that's the leftist main political party, it fails to win a parliamentary majority and goes into a shock coalition with its arch-rival, the Christian Democratic Union, which is Angela Merkel's party centre-right. And I don't want to go too deep into German politics, especially with an election going on here right now that's doing my heading.

But this is like Labour getting into bed with the Tories in the UK, or, I don't know, like the squad running America with the Tea Party. I don't think there's a US equivalent. But for fleets of young Germans, this coalition, it just shows the parties don't really stand for anything, that they're all meaningless. It's tough to describe how much the Nazi period has blown up everything about German culture. I mean, of course, it should.

But you really need to be here to see it. Absolutely every single ounce of the national psyche. Says Astrid Pohl, a former RAF member to that BBC doco that I mentioned, quote, I think we despise what our parents have created. We were angry that we had to live with the past like that. Our generation was in love with the revolution.

I mean, everyone thinks their mum and dad are Nazis when they're a kid, right? So imagine your parents are the actual Nazis. Like your mum is telling you to do your homework and you're like, screw you, Hitler. And she's like, yeah, oh, I kind of like Hitler, actually. Fair enough. So, of course, the epicenter of all of these movements is Berlin. And in 1967, you get a place called Kommune 1, a radical, some say Maoist,

Though I'd say more anarcho-communist, as if those distinctions really matter much. It's a commune in Friedenau, which is this sprawling green, really lovely part of West Berlin. You better make those distinctions, otherwise you're going to piss off a lot of very angry teens with anime avatars on Twitter. I'm welcoming it. It's anything for the engagement. And this commune, it's really rocking the down-with-the-West vibe. It believes post-war consumerism is blinding Germans to the terror of their fascist pasts,

which, yeah, I can see their thinking for sure. But these guys are up for more than book clubs and debating. When a Brussels department store burns down that year, killing 300 people...

K1, as it's known, issues a statement that goes, quote, When will the department stores in Berlin burn? The guys at K1 believe the nuclear family, the white picket fence, that's the root of all fascism. Which again, I can kind of see that too, to some extent. Starting to worry about you, bud. And they believe that by making men and women dependent on each other, these guys, not me, the state is left free to act out all its horrors. Out of this flat in West Berlin, you get a few really important figures in this movement.

One of them is a young woman named Gudrun Ensign. Tall, blonde, beautiful, extremely political, artistic. She's even the great, great, great, great granddaughter of the philosopher Georg Hegel, which is one of the most important German thinkers ever. So remember her.

She's about to become very important. And she meets a guy called Andreas Bader, which, yeah, I mean, you've read the title of the show, so you know he's going to be a big deal. Anyway, Bader, he's different.

His own dad had died on the Eastern Front in the war, and he's brought up by three female relatives who had seen dote on him and let him get away with all kinds of stuff when he's young. Being a bit of a tow rag, committing a bunch of petty crimes, and treating women pretty awfully. According to one writer, he's a quote, bohemian bully, who even pretends he has cancer as a young man to get sympathy out of his friends. That...

That is a red flag. Yeah, I feel like that's an almost typical psychopath move, even these days, right? Like a fake GoFundMe. Taking the legs off spiders and pretending you've got cancer? Yeah, that's not a good sign. Anyway, Barda is straggly, rough-tongued, kind of ruggedly good-looking. He loves fast cars, racetracks.

women and acid i mean as you can imagine everybody at k1 is tripping balls and bard is known for doing four tabs at a time and going on these long and winding political rants which just sounds i mean that just sounds awful yeah annoying i took acid once for a festival and i was going for like 12 hours and i thought the killers were actually called that because they were actually murderers and i was carrying at the back of the crowd like that was really cool never again

So you've got this protest movement, these hard case lefties at K1 in Berlin, and in 1967 it's all going to come crashing together in the middle of the city. On June 2nd that year, the Shah of Iran visits Berlin on a safe visit. There are massive protests. The Shah is a West-backed dictator, accused of all kinds of atrocities, and former leftist leader Mohamed Mossadegh has just died after spending 10 years under Tehran house arrest.

I'll spare our this is the Iranian history lesson. But basically, on this Berlin visit, the police protect the Shah. On one of them, an officer named Kouros, he shoots dead a student named Benno Ornazog. Great name, by the way, Ornazog basically means no worries. But it's obviously a bit grimly comical, too. And while Ornazog is laying on the street dead, for the revolutionaries, this is a massive boiling point.

They realise the German state is happy to kill its own people to protect a foreign despot. And, by the way, the chief of German police then goes to the opera with the Shah. Great optic, guys. Also, little aside, or maybe not that little, Kuras, the cop who pulls the trigger?

In 2009, investigators discover he was on the payroll of the East German Stasi that whole time. So when you consider what we're about to discuss, just let that sink in. That's unreal. Did they know if that, like, was he supposed to do that? Or, you know, the shooting? Yeah, good question. It's unclear, but he was definitely on the payroll. That's unbelievable. Yeah.

And either way, the leftists, they are on the war path after this killing. Says Ensling, quote, you can't argue with people who made Auschwitz. They've got weapons and we haven't. We must arm ourselves. I mean, it's not a bad line of reasoning. That makes some sense.

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Oh, yeah, I've been getting deep into this mystery, being really enjoying kind of how beautiful the scenes are. And also been enjoying building my house because, yeah, in the game, you get to build loads of stuff around your house. And it's pretty much the only time I've ever got a sniff of the property ladder. So that's pretty good for me. It's testing your powers of observation, your memory, logic skills, all of that. And it's a good time.

Make sure you download June's Journey for free today on the Apple App Store or Google Play. After the killing of Onizog, a young radical journalist by the name of Ulrike Meinhof makes a TV show about it all. She says, quote, the protests against the chief of a police state unmask our state as a police state. Terror by police and the press reached its high point on June 2nd in Berlin. We have come to understand that freedom in this state means the freedom of the police truncheon.

And Meinhof, her star's rising at this time. She's a mother of two, really outspoken. And spoiler alert, guys, yes, she is the Meinhof from the gang's name.

So, Ornazog's death is the spark that ignites the radicals into direct action. A year later, they burn down two shopping malls in Frankfurt, and of course the media's all over it. Germans do love a shopping mall, after all. And these guys, they're just basically walking into the stores and setting fire to stuff. They're not master criminals, nor do they want to be. The police pick them up, including Bader and Ensling, and put them on trial. That's exactly what they want.

At the courthouse, Bader and Ensling compare the outrage over the fires with the bombs dropping on Vietnam, questioning the humanity of Germans if they give more of a toss about some dresses than families in Southeast Asia. Which, yeah, I know it's a straw man, but you can kind of see their point.

They refused to issue a defence and even smoked Cuban cigars in court, which is kind of like shitposting well ahead of their time. You can imagine this kind of thing in a country so bent on its rules and regs. This captures the imagination of tons of young Germans who are thinking along similar lines.

And again, I don't think it can be overdone that while the war was a shattering moment for societies all over the world, in Germany it went so much deeper. There are millions of Germans at this point wondering whether their country and culture should even exist at all. Some wonder if it even does. And that's pretty weird, but I'll explain why in a minute. And this kind of thinking, yeah, like it's survived all the way up to today.

There's a whole movement, though it's pretty niche, called Anti-Deutsch. Again, I've thrown some stuff up on the reading list about that one because it's pretty interesting. Very, very online. I think it's more online than people say. I spent a few months last year actually covering QAnon in Germany for GQ. German is the second biggest language for QAnon content, which is pretty nuts. And there's a massive conspiracy today saying

And this thing has tens of thousands of followers, by the way, which also says that Germany isn't actually a real country at all. It's just a Zionist corporation founded by the Allies after the war. Because, of course, this shit is anti-Semitic. Wait, I'm confused. Are they anti-Nazi and anti-Semites? Like, how does this, like some sort of new neo-Nazi, neo-neo-Nazi? Yeah.

Yeah, it's Nazi adjacent. I would say that it's all couched in kind of like the overarching conspiracy anti-Semitic stuff, but...

they would claim that they're trying to fight the real Nazis and you can guess who they are. They're just the people in control of the countries. I don't know. It's all like a horseshoe, that stuff, right? It all ends up with anti-Semitism at the end of the day. By the way, I want to shout out to American media. Stop saying that Germany is dealing with its past really well. It isn't. And I'm looking at you, NPR. So this first phase of the group is a bit of a shop window kind of thing. They're hardly a terror cell just yet, the Baader-Meinhof gang.

But all that's going to change in 1970. Meinhof, the journalist, she joins Bader and Ensling and a few other guys who came out of the K1 scene. And she's a really, really interesting character, brought up by the guy who was boarding at her late mum's house. And as a young woman, she joins this German Communist Party. And she writes for a well-known leftist magazine called Concrete, which is secretly funded by East German authorities, although...

I'm not sure how good niche magazine sales were in 60s Germany, so maybe that should have been pretty obvious. I don't know. She's probably got better rates than we do now. I actually wrote about Meinhof and her legacy for a cool magazine called Latterly Ages Ago. I've stuck that on the reading list too, guys. But basically, she's worth knowing well. A mix of all kinds of folks wrapped up in one person. Really fascinating stuff. And the way she joins the group, Meinhof...

It's pretty full on. Andreas Bader is sent to prison for trying to buy guns and he's at a state facility up in northwest Berlin near the old airport. Meinhof goes up to visit him. They're apparently reading through some documents together and boom, two guys burst into the building. One with a tear gas gun, the other a revolver

He shoots the guards. Then they all run outside to another member who's waiting on the street in an Alfa Romeo Sprinter, this boxy, really cool old car. And they just fly off into the sea. Why do I feel like in, you know, like almost every other episode we do, somebody busts out of a European prison. It's a revolving door, those places. We're deep enough into these episodes that we're starting to like find our own data.

It's quite interesting. Common themes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. European prisons are not up to scratch, especially in like Cold War 1970s. They're just rubbish. And that driver of the Alfa Romeo, that's Astrid Pohl, who I quoted earlier in the show. And I'm trying to get her on for a special bonus episode about all this stuff. Yes, I'm plugging the Patreon again, guys. And if you know any former terrorists, we're always up for some different chats. The Underworld Podcast at gmail.com.

So again, the whole of Germany is shocked by this daring escape. Meinhof then writes an editorial in an underground Berlin paper where she calls for the formation of a so-called Red Army. Quote,

And she goes on, quote, the liberation of Bada is just the beginning. The end of the rule of the pigs is in sight. I mean, you weren't lying. That is some solid shit posting right there. Yeah, that is deep hammer and sickle posting. And this moment, combined with the tomfoolery at court before, this is going to throw up the bat signal for a whole generation of Germans disaffected with their country.

One of them is this guy called Horst Mahler, big guy, jaw like a grindstone. We'll dive deeper into his crazy life in the next part of this doubleheader. But remember his name, guys. In some way, he winds up personifying this whole radical era more than anyone else. This, by the way, this is the point where the group actually calls itself the Rote Armefraktion, the Red Army Faction or RAF.

It creates a logo which consists of a red five-pointed star, because communism, with the letters RAF over the front in a kind of hip 2005 Williamsburg font. And then, strangely, instead of an AK-47, which is the gun of choice for all respectable terror organisations around the world, the RAF goes for a German Heckler & Koch submachine gun. And actually, Alst, the guy who wrote the Baader-Meinhof complex, he thinks this was a cock-up.

or like by the gang or whoever they did doing their graphic design. But the name most definitely is not. It's supposed to mimic the Royal Air Force of the Brits, flipping the bird at them, the Americans, NATO. Actually, it's the German politicians who have refused to call these guys the RAF. They call them the Baader-Meinhof Banda or gang. And this distinction actually becomes really important in our second episode.

but meinhof she's dead set on the raf and she pens a manifesto in which she quotes black panther leader eldridge cleaver saying quote either you're part of the problem or you're part of the solution that is a really cool quote this area is really the high tide for leftist guerrilla groups worldwide i mean if you've got the beliefs and the gumption there's always a soviet or a chinese or an eastern european sugar daddy willing to throw you a few backs to cause mayhem

And rebel groups are going off everywhere from Cuba and Congo to Palestine, Portugal, Pakistan. See what I did there? And even in the States, you've got the student movement off the back of the disastrous Vietnam War, Kent State, the Black Panthers. And I don't want to say here that all these movements are equivalent because they're not, but...

You know, it's going down, basically. And that summer, in 1970, the RAF actually flies out to Jordan and goes on a training camp with the PLO. Kind of like Fat Camp for Terrorists, where they're doing high knees, squats, AK shooting and bomb making. It's probably just the same as any southern camp in Waziristan or Pensacola. And this is kind of funny. The two groups get into a fight because the Germans want a naked sunbathe and Ensling and Bader want to go at it in the barracks in their spare time. And for the Palestinians, this is a no-no.

And this difference escalates enough that the Palestinians throw them out and refuse to speak to them again. The left really does eat itself, eh? Yeah, I mean, that's just a culture clash right there that probably could have been avoided. Yeah, I feel like the Germans could have probably backed down on a couple of those things.

Either way, at this point the RAF has some numbers, knows how to make bombs, fire a gun, and is ready to roll. But before we launch into the real meaty stuff, it's worth pointing out that a lot of critics have claimed the RAF were just white bourgeois Europeans LARPing as brown-skinned revolutionaries, when really they were just a bunch of gangsters who liked doing naughty shit. I mean, it's pretty tough to level that with Meinhof and Ensling, to be honest. They really did seem like they were in it for the ideology. But I do think there are questions over Bade himself.

If you look at him a different way, you could easily just paint him as an egomaniac crook who loved the limelight. Yeah, that's maybe something to think about, I guess. And the RAF isn't the only leftist crew in town either. In 1970, there were a couple of other groups that get pretty big too. There's the 2nd of July movement, named after the day of Benno Ornazog's death.

And that comes out of K1 too, but it calls itself anarchist rather than Marxist. There's the so-called Spontes, that's for spontaneous, I can't even say the English, which spawns a bunch of future German leaders actually. And then there's something called the Socialist Patience Collective. That's founded over in southwestern Germany by Stuttgart and

And maybe we'll do like episode 2,974 on these guys, but it really is crazy. It says that people are getting ill directly because of capitalism, which, yeah, I guess there's a kernel of truth there.

Their whole thing is about turning, quote, illness into a weapon. Another gem from their manifesto, quote, the kidney stone that makes you suffer is the same as the stone thrown into the control room of capitalism. Are you supposed to, like, crap out the kidney stone and then throw it into the control room? I don't know. Mic drop on that.

And, I mean, I could easily disappear down a rabbit hole here, but I've put loads of resources on the reading list if you want to know more about these groups. And a lot of their members wind up joining the RAF, which seems like it was the Yankees or the German hard left back then. And now it gets to work. It firebombs more stores, police stations, publishing houses, and even a US Army Corps that's stationed in Frankfurt.

On October 22nd, 1971, the RAF kills for the first time, shooting dead Hamburg cop Norbert Schmidt during an attempt to break a member out of jail. Then there's the attack in Kaiserslautern, and Herbert Schonner is the group's second fatality. By now, these guys are putting their PLO connects to good use. They set off two bombs with a combined load of 2,000 kilos, which, by the way, is over a fifth of the giant Moab bomb the US dropped on Afghanistan in 2017. That's serious stuff.

This one kills four American servicemen, and suddenly the RAF is an international crime group. And here's a letter written by the RAF right after the US-based bombing. Quote, The people of the Federal Republic will not support the security forces in their hunt for the bombers because they want nothing to do with the crimes of American imperialism and their condemnation by the ruling class here, because they have not forgotten Auschwitz, Dresden and Hamburg.

Wow. I mean, we beat the Nazis and then prop up their entire economy. And this is the thanks we get. Just typical whiny Europeans. We don't even have washing machines and dryers and stuff.

And actually, they've got a point. I mean, the RAF is really dividing German opinion in its early years, despite the deaths, amazingly. One in 10 people tells a 1971 poll they'd shelter the group if needed. Others, of course, are flooding the cops with tips. And actually, in the BBC doco, the chief of German police says the RAF was single-handedly responsible for him getting all kinds of big-budget gadgets and manpower. So yeah, I guess there's all kind of outcome to this stuff.

But like I said before, these guys aren't exactly the Pink Panthers, and the cops don't need supercomputers to pick up their trail. In 1972, the police arrest five key members of the group, including Bader, Meinhof and Ensling. Four of them go quietly. Not our man Bader. When cops arrive at his Frankfurt hideaway and they roll up an armoured wagon outside...

He fires five shots from a 9mm pistol and knocks out his front and rear tyres. So I guess the Palestinians have taught him something between all the balls-out sunbathing. This persuades the cops to call for a sharpshooter who tags Bader in the leg. And before long, he's kited off in a panda car. That summer is a particularly bloody one for Lestis Terror 2. There's the Japanese Red Army bombing and killing, Carlos the Jackal assassinating his way around the world, and Black October, the militant Palestinian group.

which murders 11 members of the Israeli Olympics team in Munich. To be fair, Carlos the Jackal was actually not that good at assassinating people. I think he's more known, if you look into it, for actually not being that successful and being overrated as far as...

global terrorist all-stars go yeah screw you carlos the jackal doesn't get doesn't get our proof we're anti carlos the jackal it's a tough start yeah all of that bloodshed at this time does little to stymie support for the raf though and while its leading figures are locked away behind bars membership on the outside swells to an alleged 300 with another 10 000 reckoned to be sympathizers

And inside the group is doing its best to keep the flame going. They're getting smuggled books about urban warfare and somehow speaking to each lover through letters and they decide to go on a hunger strike. In 1974 West Germany moves them to a special built high security wing of Stammheim prison near Stuttgart and it keeps them in isolation but they carry on refusing to eat. In November that year one of the group, a guy named Holger Mainz, he starves to death and

His emaciated, bearded corpse is yet another battle cry for young leftists around Germany, who can see echoes of the concentration camps in him. So as you can imagine, having these high-profile terrorists martyring themselves and spitting out polemic through their lawyers, it's not really helping much. It's a bit of a pain in the arse of the authorities, to be honest. But at least the Baader-Meinhof gang is behind bars, they think. Well, whoopsie, that ain't the end of it, guys.

And in fact, a whole new era of violence is about to begin. In the summer of 1975, a group of six second-generation RAF terrorists calling themselves Kommando Halgemanns, they laid siege to the West German embassy in Stockholm, Sweden. There's actually some old newsreel footage I've put on the reading list, but this whole thing is pretty mad. They take 11 people hostage, including the German ambassador, and they demand the original RAF members be let out of jail.

Obviously, nothing happens. So 12 hours later, the terrorists set off a load of dynamite, engulfing the building in flames. They then shoot dead two hostages. And it turns out, the explosions are a deadly mistake.

One of the guerrillas had accidentally dropped his grenade, blowing himself and the dynamite up in the process. Yeah, I mean, these groups blowing themselves up is kind of like, by accident, seems like a consistent theme across nations. Like the Weathermen did that too, right? They blew up that townhouse and killed only themselves in the process. Yeah, it's pretty clown show, a lot of their early stuff, the RAF. And another terrorist at this attack, he's shot and he dies later in hospital. Back in Stamheim, the founding RAF members turn against Ulrike Meinhof.

She's been having some second thoughts about killing all those innocent people and it doesn't go down well with her pals. Barda is particularly barbed, calling her and other women, by the way, fotzer, which in loads of stuff I've seen is translated as bitch, but it's not. It's the C word. Eventually it becomes too much and on May 8th, 1976, which is Mother's Day, Meinhof throws together some towels in her Stamheim cell, ties them to the window bars and hangs herself.

The image of Meinhof's lifeless face, her throat bruised, is plastered all over the German press. Another martyr for the terrorist cause. She might be dead, but her words echo round the world. Quote,

from prison cells, from the asylums and special units, from media brainwashing, from consumerism, from corporal punishment, from the ideology of non-violence, from depression, from illness, from degradation, from humiliation, from the debasement of human beings, from all the people exploited by imperialism. And yeah, the authorities are hoping at this point that things die down, and they don't.

And now we're into 1977, and a second generation of RAF terrorists is waiting in the wings, ready to kill for their incarcerated heroes. At 9am on April 7th, 1977, West German Attorney General Siegfried Budback, a fierce critic of the group, is heading to work in his chauffeur Mercedes in Karlsruhe, when a motorcycle pulls up beside him.

Somebody riding pillion fires 15 bullets into the window, killing Buback, his driver, and a minder. This is revenge. And it's only just beginning. In northwest Germany, an RAF cell is staking its target in a Cologne high-rise. He'll walk straight into their crosshairs. Halfway across the world, another ally will pull off something even bigger that will send the RAF's bloodthirsty message across the world.

A summer of bloodshed is coming to a close. The German autumn is about to begin. And yeah, that's the end of part one of our Bader Beinhof show. As always, let us know what you think, guys. Like, subscribe, leave us glowing reviews everywhere. It really does help. Yeah, and we have, I think next week we'll be having something a bit more current. We'll have, if I can finish it, something about Afghanistan, opium, the Taliban, heroin, and all that stuff.

Which should be good. I just want to thank, too, the people on our $25 tier. We were supposed to be doing this, and I always forget. But Morgan Love, Trey Nance, Chris Cusimano, Doug Prindiville, Jared Levy, Jeremy Rich, Leanne Singer,

Matthew Cutler, I think. Ross Clark. Thank you guys very much for contributing. Yeah, thanks, guys. It's awesome. We'll see you next week, guys, with something pretty insane, as always. But for now, thanks for downloading this, and we'll be with you soon.