The Golden Age of Hijacking, Kidnapping and Radical Cold War Terror
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Hans Martin Schleyer, one of the country's biggest industrialists, is on his way home from work in a chauffeured sedan, flanked by a police escort. Suddenly a stroller veers into the street. Schleyer's car swerves to miss it. The police car slams into its back.

Then, a team of masked attackers surrounds the vehicles and spray them with machine gun fire. Four men die instantly. The gunman drags Schleyer out of his seat, bundle him into a parked van and speed away. Within hours, the killers make their demands: release all Red Army faction prisoners behind bars in Stuttgart, including founders Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, or Schleyer dies.

Later that night, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt tells his people clearly, we will not negotiate with terrorists.

Schleyer is schlepped across town to a crusty high-rise on the city edge. There, he's forced to appear in a series of staged photos and videos, backdropped by the RAF's trademark star and gun logo. His life hangs perilously in the balance. Since the 1976 suicide of Ulrike Meinhof, the RAF's spiritual leader, its followers have gone on a murderous rampage, killing West Germany's Attorney General and the leader of the country's biggest bank.

But Schleyer's kidnapping is something else, calculated and coordinated with folks outside the country, planning something even more grimly spectacular. A bloody period called the German Autumn is just beginning. Will the RAF blackmail the West German state? Weeks later, Schleyer appears in another video, his head hung low, desperate.

It's October 13, and in the Mallorcan city of Palma, Lufthansa flight 181 is about to take off for Frankfurt with 86 passengers on board.

Just minutes later, the RAF's violent campaign will take its latest mad twist. One the entire world will watch play out in horror. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. ♪

Hi guys, welcome to a new episode of the show that tells you all about how to life hack your way to a holiday in Somalia. I'm your host Sean Williams and as always I'm joined by my man Danny Gold for the long-awaited second part of our deep dive into the Red Army Faction or the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Last time we got into the fallout from the Second World War, acid-soaked communards, army-based bombings and getting dirty in Jordanian terror barracks.

Well, this week it's about to get even crazier. But before that, some housekeeping. The Patreon, as always, I was just speaking to our guy, Hugo Carmen, on Swedish gangs. I think we're putting that up today as we're recording this. We've got loads more stuff coming, right, Danny? Yeah, I think I'm going to talk to some folks, some experts on the heroin and opium industry in Afghanistan. Cool. All that good stuff. Patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast. You know, you can give us $3, $5 a month, stuff like that, get bonus episodes, and

and keep us going so that we can keep making these. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, just keep rating us on all the mediums, guys, as well. Like, Podcast Discovery is absolutely screwed, as anyone knows. So any leg up we can get, that would be awesome. Keep climbing up those charts. Yeah, is there anything else that we should be mentioning right now? I have a recommendation for a show. I'm watching The Defeated on Netflix, which is about the immediate post-war Berlin and kind of deals with some of the topics we've talked about. Oh, damn. Part one of this and this one. I mean, it's like, bro, all the ingredients are there for it to be great. Yeah.

It's still worth watching, but it's not as good as like something that would have been based on Naples 44. You know, that's like immediate post-war, even though I guess the war was still going on. But you know what I'm saying? Like the occupation of these countries after they were defeated. It's just, you know, all sorts of criminal banditry and just savagery. And it's really interesting. It's on brand for sure. Yeah, it is. It's definitely on brand. So where were we?

Oh, yeah, complete chaos. The Red Army faction or the Baader-Meinhof gang, whatever you want to call them, they grew out of the Berlin Commune movement and they really got a break, I guess, when one of these leftist supporters was gunned down during a visit by the Shah of Iran. And that really just sent the ball tumbling on a bunch of high level arson, bombing attacks,

And then they kind of took it up a notch and started bombing US army bases, killing people. They even besieged a West German embassy in Sweden. And then they went on trial and then they went to prison in a special built place at Stamheim near Stuttgart. One of their leaders, Ulrike Meinhof, she's dead. And by this point, the others have found us locked up. And these guys, they really wanted to take down the system. They believed in Marxist anarchists.

ideology. They really wanted to tear down the German system they thought hadn't cleaned up house since the Nazi times.

And they had a point. There were loads of Nazis in high-level positions all over the country, and they really wanted to tear that all down. They didn't think that Germany was kind of recognizing its role in the world and the horrible things that it had done. Come 1977, Ulrike Meinhof, she's been dead for several months. And the founders, they're actually locked up behind bars in Stammheim, this place near Stuttgart. And there's a new generation of RAF terrorists now, though. And they're about to go global.

Schleyer, the guy we mentioned at the top of the show, he's hidden away in a crappy council estate and his captors say they're going to kill him if the German state doesn't release the founders. And there's a plane taking off in Mallorca that's got some unexpected cargo.

And first, it's probably a good idea to explain who Hans Martin Schleyer actually is and why his kidnapping is so important. His name just sounds important. And the title like industrialist, I don't think that exists anymore, but it just it conveys importance. It's like Robert Barron stuff, right? Yeah. Schleyer is head of the Federation of German Industries, which is a pressure group. But he's way more than that. Pressure group is like like lobbyists, like lobbyists. Yeah, yeah.

Born in 1915, Schleyer grew up an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth and he was an SS officer during the war.

Yeah, so not exactly the sympathetic business guy, huh? Not at all. And remember what we're saying about this failure to root out Nazis in post-war West Germany? This guy is the perfect example. And he's even known as a fierce critic of student movements, labor disputes, and yeah, of course, communism. And he appears on TV as a firebrand white winger.

I mean, the guy's literally a card-carrying Nazi, and folks are just like, yeah, we'll have him at the top of the game. I mean, come on, guys. And like we went over in the last episode, the RAF has already killed an Attorney General, and in July 30, 1977, just before the Schleyer attack, three members have walked into the Frankfurt home of Jürgen Ponto, head of the Dresdner Bank, and shot him in his living room.

Apparently they'd been trying to hold him hostage. But when he said, quote, you're truly insane. One of the three shot him before a second, just goes to town, shoots him half a dozen times and leaves him to bleed out on the floor. It's kind of an amateur move, right? To go through all that work to kidnap an important official and then just shoot him because he like is mean to you. The whole thing is clown show for a lot of it as well. The two shooters actually from that killing, they're arrested. But the third, a woman who actually knew Ponto and got them buzzed into his home. She,

She flees over to communist East Germany where she's sheltered by its secret police for almost a decade, which is crazy. And over 300 finance workers march through Frankfurt after that killing. So by the time of Schleyer's kidnapping, West Germany is kind of spiraling out of control over all this terror.

Folks are being rounded up by cops. Armoured cars patrol the streets. Academics are being denounced as enemies of the state. And young people are protesting this evil they see at the heart of German society. Their parents failing to take responsibility for the Holocaust, pretending Germany just kind of slept walked into all that horror. And when is this? This is the late 70s? Yeah, this is 77. This is the start of the German autumn.

And you've got politicians at this time, I mean, especially down in the super-rich South, Bavaria, Munich, that kind of area. They're saying that the RAF's lawyers have been handing them guns, radios, and all kinds of things in Stammheim prison. Others want a formal denunciation of the group or risk being blackmailed from jobs, which is kind of pretty extreme police day stuff. Politicians call for a raft of new anti-terror laws, and they're going to severely restrict the rights of all Germans.

Says British journalist Jonathan Dimbleby at the time, quote, So things are getting wild. And then on October 13, all hell breaks loose. Dale, let's have an aviation-based soundscape. Bro, just say airplane sounds. What is aviation-based soundscape? I reckon Dale is going to do something pretty fancy. I'm just teeing it up.

Remember that Lufthansa jet that I mentioned? Well, there's a group of beauty queens getting on it from a pageant and they're running late, like really late. Because of this, the airport lets them get onto the tarmac without going through security at all. And one of them noticed a guy she's never seen before and he slips by too. Pro tip, if there's some guy sneaking past security with a crowd of women he doesn't know, probably give him a pat down even if he's just some weird creep. Yeah, it's a bit much for airports, but for like douchey nightclubs, it's kind of a power move. Yeah.

Well, this guy, he actually turns out to be a 23-year-old Palestinian named Zahir Yusuf Akache. And he's got three accomplices on the plane, two women and a man. And they're all members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP, which is a secular Marxist terror cell.

Now, PFLP, these guys formed in the ashes of the Six-Day War, and they've got a lot of previous with planes and airports. And in fact, also palling up with leftist revolutionaries around the world. In 1972, the PFLP teamed up with Japan's Red Army and massacred 26 people at Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, carrying weapons in violin cases and opening fire on a rival in Israel.

Interestingly, in 2010, an Israeli group wins a case against the North Korean state for financing that attack. Obviously, North Korea doesn't respond, but still pretty crazy. And why Israel? Well, apart from the obvious, this is a really great bit by the historian Jeffrey Herff. Quote, for the West Berlin Tupper Maros, they're the Uruguayan guys, right?

A focus on the Nazi past and the fate of the Jews was an expression of neurosis, a kind of guilt complex that stood in the way of psychic health and clear thinking. The Israelis were the new Nazis, and the Palestinians anti-fascist heroes.

This line of reasoning lifted the burden of the Nazi past from its advocates and opened the way for West German radicals to attack Israelis and Jews with a clear conscience. Jesus. Yeah, that is wrong. Anyway, back to the jets. Do you know that the first plane hijacking was actually in 1931 in Peru? This is a pub quiz moment. When an American guy called Byron Richards, he was surrounded by revolutionaries and captured for two weeks.

Anyway, by the 1970s, hijacking's a old hat. I mean, it's pretty crazy how they just go nuts in that decade. Something must have happened. Anyone with any ideas, send us a message. The Underworld Podcast at gmail.com.

Dude, there's a whole book on this era. I think it's called The Skies Belong to Us. Oh man, I want to read that. Yeah, it goes through a couple of characters, but it kind of talks about this phenomenon that was just crazy in the 70s with hijackings happening like every other week. I haven't read it. I should, and we should also interview the guy who wrote it. Why did it take until 9-11 to bump up security at these places? Like people are hijacking planes every other day. There was security before 9-11. It just wasn't as crazy with taking off your shoes and stuff like that until...

Obviously that. Yeah. Please open your violin case, sir. Oh, there's an AK in it.

Actually, in other hijacking news, I particularly enjoyed reading about this Ethiopian guy. He hijacked a jet to New York in 1993 and appealed his conviction because, quote, I was forced to hijack the plane and I hijacked it politely, which, you know, it's probably worth a try, but I don't think it worked. Even the previous year before Lufthansa 181, in 1976, the PFLP and another German terror group called the Revolutionary Cells

they'd hooked up to hijack an Air France jet full of mostly Israelis and grounded it in Entebbe, Uganda, whose dictator Idi Amin supported them.

Now, our listeners have probably heard of this thing, but the ensuing Israeli military operation was led by Benjamin Netanyahu's brother, Yonatan. It saved 102 of 106 hostages and killed 45 Ugandan servicemen. Insane. I think it's said to be one of the most successful counter-terror raids of all time. Still studied by special forces and SWAT teams and all stuff like that. A couple of solid movies about it, too. Yeah, there's one with Daniel Brühl that I saw. It was pretty good, like a Netflix movie or something.

And then Amin actually retaliates by slaughtering 245 Kenyans living in Uganda because Kenya is West Allied. I mean...

Cold war, man. It's just awful. You think this failed attack deters the PFLP? Not a chance. And 45 minutes into the Lufthansa flight, Akache draws a gun and he rushes the cockpit, forcing out the captain. He pushes all the passengers to the back of the plane and the terrorists seal off the front, which is one way of getting a first class upgrade, I suppose. First, terrible joke. Thank you. Second...

If you hijack a plane like full of beauty queens, right? That's like the ultimate tabloid story. Like the New York Post would have dedicated an entire week's worth of issues to it. It probably did. Yeah. The PFLP, right? It radios its demands. The release of the 11 RAF members in Stuttgart plus two Palestinian militants in three days. Oh, and of course, some cash, 15 mil. No helicopter though, no escape route. Not sure they'd really thought it through, to be honest.

Back in Cologne, the guys who have Schleyer, they say they're going to kill him unless the hijackers get what they want. So the German government plays this canny game. It tells the RAF prisoners they'll be released, and gets them to write down a list of destination countries on a piece of paper.

Because the Germans know that these guys are all communicating behind bars using little circuit boards and Morse code, they know that they all pick a couple of Gulf states. And then the German Secretary of State actually flies out to all these countries and gets assurances from the Emirates that they won't take the terrorists in, which is pretty smart.

Then the Germans send a crack team of commandos called the Grenzschutzgruppe 9, or GSG 9, on a jet to tail the Lufthansa flight. And these guys, they're hardcore. They're formed in the wake of the Munich Olympics killings, and they've even got an SAS guy with them too, just for fun. It just becomes this gruelling trek across the world, getting moved on by governments too scared to deal with the hostages.

Wait, what's happening? Like the terrorists are flying but not being given permission to disembark and the commandos are just following them? Yeah, actually, that is exactly what's happening. So this guy, Kache, he's in the cockpit and the two pilots are flying this plane around the world. And they're like, we're going to run out of fuel soon. We're going to run out. They have to touch down in different countries.

So they go to Italy, Bahrain, Dubai, South Yemen, where Akache actually shoots the captain dead for taking too long to check landing gear. And then they finally get to Mogadishu, Somalia. So it's just this constant like cat and mouse thing where they keep trying to land and the governments are like, nah, we don't have a new move on.

And actually, Yemen is really significant too, because the Yemeni intelligence back then was trained by the East Germans. And East Germany always knew where RAF terrorists were, hand in glove.

Says an academic report I found, quote, the link between the RAF and the Arab Peninsula included weapons transfers, especially free international airports of Baghdad, Arden and Damascus. It's also noteworthy in that regard, since the airport security units were trained by the Stasi, which is accused of allowing RAF militants carry weapons freely through customs checkpoints.

So remember that cop who shot the Berlin protester that kicked off this entire thing was a Stasi agent? Yeah, it's all connected to the East Germans.

By the time the jet touches down in Mogadishu, it's October 17. The passengers are exhausted and the deadline's passed. Akache tells the tower they have until 3.30am the next morning to meet his demands. It's on. And that German state minister, he's out there in the tower already. And he says the RAF prisoners are on a flight there from Stuttgart and they'll be there in seven hours. So there's a timer on this now.

And then these GSG guys, they land further down the runway so the hijackers can't see them. The terrorists douse the passengers in duty-free booze and they hook up plastic explosives to the cabin. The commandos sneak up below the plane, they get on the wings with padded ladders and they get a sniper ready at the tower.

Then the Somali army blows up a truck down the runway, which distracts the hijackers for just a second. The GSG chuck in a bunch of flashbangs, charge the cabin, shoot three of the terrorists dead, including the fourth, Sohaila Sayah. No hostages die, and it's a massive success. Dude, these are the worst hijackers and terrorists of all time. Yeah, they actually are. Between this and Entebbe, they know how to start the hijack. They just don't know how to finish the hijacked.

If two of the most spectacular anti-terrorism raids of all time are carried out against you in like two years, maybe give up. Maybe you're not good at this. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe focus on like petitions or something. I don't know, but like it's not working for you. Yeah, just do a GoFundMe. It's probably going to do better, right? By the way...

The attacker, Saleh, the woman who got shot but survived, she's still alive. She was convicted in Somalia, but she wound up fleeing to Oslo, Norway, before German authorities tracked her down in 1995 and sentenced her to 12 years. Kill me, kill me, she told the court, adding later that she always thought of herself as a freedom fighter, never a criminal. There's a great Spiegel interview I've put with her on the reading list, well worth a Google Translate.

Back in Germany, news of this failed hijacking reaches the four RAF founders in Stammheim within hours. On October 18th, Baader, Ensslin, Jan Karl Rasper and Irmgard Müller all agreed to kill themselves. Baader and Rasper were gunshot.

endsling via hanging with speaker wire and mula she stabs herself four times in the chest sort of a modern seppuku and she survives in fact she's still around today i really want to get one of these old hoods on the show so stay tuned you're getting a little too thirsty right now be easy or just go knock on some doors tone it tone it down all right all right right and the final act of this particular bloody episode is being played out in cologne

Chancellor Schmidt has refused repeated demands for a ransom for Schleyer. The news out of Somalia and Stamheier has reached the gang. The game's up. The next day, cops find Schleyer's body in the trunk of a green Audi in Alsace, that's in France, just across the border, with his throat slashed. There's a message from the RAF too. They don't mourn Schleyer's death. Far from it. His, quote, miserable and corrupt existence was revenge for the deaths in Stuttgart and Somalia.

I mean, the terrorist hijackers get murked and so does the SS officer. So it's kind of like, you know, we try to keep our politics out of this, but it kind of seems like a win-win from where I'm standing. Yeah, you make a good point, to be fair. And they continue in this letter, quote, We will never forget the blood shed by Schmidt and the imperialists who support him. The fight has only just begun.

And I mean, I feel this moment needs a bit of a page break. That's like the main, this crazy act of this German autumn. So like, how was your little holiday, Danny? I don't know. I've been enjoying cricket in England, walking loads. Is that good? Yeah. Yeah, it's great. All right. Let's get on to the final part of our Bader Meinhof adventure.

With the freeing of the Lufthansa hostages and Schleyer's slaying, the German autumn is over. But the RAF lives on. There's massive controversy over the deaths of Bader and Vrasper in particular. The two guys had shot themselves.

The wounds themselves were both in the back of the neck, execution style, and their lawyers are saying it's not suicide. Says one of them, quote, I can't imagine how pistols were gotten to prisoners that the West German government calls the most dangerous in the world in a maximum security prison supervised in an incredible way every day.

Well, cops tell a Washington Post reporter on background that Baader had also fired his gun twice into the cell wall to make it look like a murder. Says Germany's interior minister, quote, some people will push their treachery so far as to make their own suicide look like an execution. And I mean, it's no jet fuel melting steel beams, but you can imagine pretty much no RAF sympathizers are going to believe their heroes aren't getting whacked by the government.

and leftists riot across Europe for their fallen comrades, especially in France and Italy where sympathy is really high. In December 1977, local media unearths a group in Gothenburg, Sweden, claiming to be the Red Army faction Sweden, which according to a US official, finances itself by robbing post offices at gunpoint. It quote...

aims at the overthrow of Swedish society, which I know we're going to do an episode of gangs in Sweden really soon. And it's pretty mad what's going on there, but I can't help, but feel like violently overthrowing Sweden just still sounds kind of quaint.

In 1978, US authorities believe RAF terrorists are taking refuge in Central and South America, which becomes a little clearer when they bomb a Lufthansa office in Bogota, claiming that it, quote, marks the beginning of a number of attacks against German and US monopolies that plunder and exploit the world's repressed people, according to a US cable.

In Germany, the RAF continues to carry out minor raids and sporadic murders, even attempting to assassinate NATO Supreme Commander Alexander Haig in Belgium in 1979. And it continues to rob and firebomb and do all of the stuff it had done before the German autumn.

But a lot of this thing has just been taken out of the gang. And in fact, the events of 1977 do end up having some positive effects. Here's a quote by filmmaker Andreas Weil, whose movie If Not Us Who gets into Germany's post-war chaos. Quote, Germany had to go through these events to come into its own. It became more democratic and made room for a new party, the Greens, and a newspaper, the Tats.

Suddenly a sort of democratisation movement arrived for the left side of the political spectrum, which has been good for the country as a whole. The political landscape changed. The possibility of having an influence on the political system, even from a left perspective, didn't exist before. And Weyer goes on, quote, The idea that someone like Schleyer or some other functionary is now solely responsible, and that by controlling him, threatening him, or even killing him, the world has become a better place? This idea has been disproven.

The battle for change no longer has a clear goal. So basically most of these guys are realizing that slashing the throats of former Nazis is probably not the best way to get what you want.

Still okay with that aspect of their methods. It really sounds like an Eli Roth film, doesn't it? And loads of later attacks by the RAF are basically pretty rubbish. There's failed shootings, botched robberies, bombs that don't go off. But they still do kill business leaders and army officials. In 1985, they murder a corporate fat cat called Ant Zimmerman, and they set off a bomb at a US airbase, killing two Americans. To date, the RAF has been accused of 34 killings.

as high profile though as the one it did in 1991. Oh, wow. So they kept going like even into the 90s. I thought they pretty much disappeared after the early 80s, but they're, you know, sticking it out even after like the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it's, I don't know, I think they probably should have given things up after that. It's a pretty big reminder that you're probably not on the path to getting that utopia you want. Anyway, in 1991, it's a year after the fall of East Germany. The Berlin Wall is rubble, the Soviet Union's collapsing, communism is lost, by and large.

Shout out to Albania, by the way. It keeps going in the middle of Europe for a whole other year. Listen to our shows on Albanian gangs for more of that insane stuff, guys. Yeah, every time we even mention Albania, our YouTube hits go through the roof. So, you know, always got to give them a shout out when you can. I think we just need to mention Albania every single time we do a show. But as you can imagine, reuniting Germany is an absolute headache. Not just because there's so much lawlessness, gang crime, violence.

but also because the government is now trying to weld a capitalist country onto a communist one, and it hasn't fully worked. I mean, even now the East is still way poorer, and most of the right-wing stuff is focused there for a very good reason. That's today. And at the centre of all this in 1991 is a guy called Detlev Karsten Rohveder, a typical Sioux, former business leader, and it's his job to privatise all the communist industry that had kept the GDR alive for so long.

This thing he leads is the pretty Orwellian sounding Treuhand Anstalt, which is the Truth Institute, and it's an absolute nightmare. By 1991, Treuhand becomes the world's largest holding company, which is pretty mad. But East Germany's economy is bunk, and it tanks after unification, leaving millions employed and leftists furious.

On April 1st 1991, almost midnight, a sharpshooter murders Rohrweder, hitting him through the window of his Dusseldorf home with a NATO-issue sniper rifle that had been used in an attack in the US embassy that February. Rohrweder is shot through his neck and dies. His wife tries to reach him, but the shooter hits her in the arm. A third shot misses them both and slams into a bookshelf. Rohrweder dies in his home, dressed in pyjamas.

200 feet from the scene, cops find a chair, three cartridge cases, a strand of hair and a letter by the RAF claiming responsibility.

There's actually a pretty nifty Netflix doco that came out recently about Roald Vedder's death called A Perfect Crime. One of those decent ones you can knock off in a couple of days. There's all kinds of fishy stuff about his security and other stuff. And the history itself is fascinating. But what do you mean his security? Like they were supposed to be in on it? What's the gist? There's stuff about them not protecting a certain floor of the home where he got shot and it was all a bit suspect. And there were people that...

They thought we're sympathizers to these hard leftists. So, yeah, I don't know. There's questions to be answered. But, you know, we all know what those Netflix shows are like. They're just like fast-paced and you can blow through them in a Sunday.

No one's arrested for the murder. But remember that strand of hair? In 2001, cops' DNA matched it to a guy called Wolfgang Grams, who's been dead since 1993 when he was shot up by the GSG-9. But what's also significant about Rohrwetter's death is how it exposed the RAF's deep ties with the Stasi, the Firdies German secret police, even into the 90s when the GDR itself was dead.

In fact, in 2018, the Handelsblatt, which is like Germany's Bloomberg, interviewed Rohwedder's widow, Herrgarde, quote, they claim the murder for themselves, but in previous attacks, the RAF never shot at the family of the victim. Never. She says Rohwedder was about to find evidence of massive corruption by leading Stasi figures, and that's why they had him off. Quote, politicians who had something to do with the former GDR believe it was the Stasi who planned the assassination.

So this is like leftover Stasi? Is it kind of like with Russia in the 90s where it was opening up and beset by crime and sort of well-connected KGB folks and other gangsters just claimed all the businesses? Like, is that what we're talking about? Yeah, a little bit of that. Yeah, it's just like showing how bent the whole system was during the communist years. And from what she says, some of the former leaders wanted him killed and they had him killed.

And this is really the last major attack for the RAF. Kimes himself, the shooter or suspected shooter, he's killed in 93 and the group officially disbands in 98. I'm quoting from the original letter here in German and my translation skills aren't great, but it says, quote,

The goals for which the fighters gave themselves are the goals of today and tomorrow until all the conditions are overthrown in which the human being is a belittled, servile, abandoned and despised beast. Say what you think, guys. Jesus. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, officially, that's the end of the Baader-Meinhof gang, the RAF. But actually, it's kind of not.

Firstly, remember in the last episode I told you about Horst Mahler, a former K1 communard in Berlin, cum leftist militant for the RAF? No, I don't. Ah, so he was one of the guys who came out of that commune who was doing some of the firebombing and stuff in the early years. Well, actually, he ends up going full horseshoe, and he joins the ultra-right MPD later on. That's the... I think it's the Nationalistisch Partei Deutschland. It's like, basically...

way way to the right of the alternative for Germany like they're super right and he even gets put in jail for Holocaust denial and he only got out of prison last year and in case anyone's wondering what ties in the far left and right yeah it's good old anti-semitism ah the one great uniter from warrants across the world the truest thing

And the modern history of the RAF goes from the comical to the downright weird. There's the fact that the gang have enjoyed a bit of a cultural comeback in the last 15 years, thanks to the movie The Baader-Meinhof Complex. Again, like I said in the last one, watch that. It's great. Also, Brian Eno, Marianne Faithfull and the mighty Chumba Wumba have written tunes about them, which I guess, given the fact they kept getting knocked down and getting back up, makes sense.

Jesus, Dale, put some like studio audience applause in the background. And there's also the completely bizarre fact that Ulrike Meinhof's brain was secretly preserved for experiments, leading her journalist daughter to declare, quote, You can only say there's been a proper funeral if the brain has been buried with the body. A dead terrorist has a right to be treated fairly and the right to a decent burial. Sure. Yeah, why not? Yeah.

It's pretty tough to believe, but the RAF actually continues committing gang-like crimes until 2015. Like, 2015. By this time, three of its so-called third-generation members are still on the run, and they're wanting for some of the crimes carried out in the late 80s and 90s, including Royal Vedder's death.

They're just going from safe house to safe house, keeping themselves afloat by robbing security vans and other people at gunpoint. It's all pretty sad and pathetic. Both attempts by the gang to rob vans fails in 2015, and they actually haven't been seen since. I'm kind of shocked that the modern German police can't even catch these guys. I mean, no wonder the Berlin Clans from episode two are doing whatever they want. They are. I mean, they're still on the ground. It's insane.

And the group keeps on making headlines over here. Even as late as this January, some foresters discovered a barrel full of documents and quote, unknown liquids relating to the RAF. I really hope that's like explosive liquid. By all accounts, they're pretty much dead today as a concept. I mean, yeah, like you were right. They totally should have given up after the wall came down. That should have been their signal to get out. But I guess the remnants were just kind of chancers, clowny gangsters. So...

So after all of this, what is the RAF's legacy? Well, it kind of depends who you are. Fylde, the filmmaker I mentioned earlier, he points to a conversation Gudrun Enslin had with her father as a young woman to show their flawed logic against the state. She asks him, quote, we don't want to be accused of having seen something and not done anything. And her father replies, quote, yes, but what does that mean? You long for fascism. What if it never materializes? I mean, that makes sense, but it is Germany.

Here's a good summary of the RAF's legacy I found in a paper. Quote, The RAF is a large piece of the German post-war puzzle. For some, Baader, Enslin, Meinhof, Basper, Mainz and other deceased RAF members will remain martyrs, or at least entrancing figures of German history. For others, the RAF was nothing more than a ruthless gang of selfish killers, victims of nothing, who were treated better than they should have been.

The truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. One person's accidental terrorist is another person's cold-blooded murderer. So yeah, that's the end of our two-parter on the RAF, guys. Let us know what you think. A two-parter's a goer from now on? I mean, we hope so, because you've basically written a book on Afghanistan, right? Yeah. As always, guys, like, subscribe, share, join the Patreon, email us if we got anything wrong. Always happy for a fact check.

Honestly, totally. I love reading out my own mistakes. But yeah, join us next week and we'll have loads more stuff from Afghanistan or Sweden or one of these crazy stories that we're working on. This Is Monsters is a true crime podcast and YouTube channel where I tell the stories of the worst people on the planet. Though the stories of the victims are told, we focus on the monster who carried out the evil act.

The show is split into seasons and each season has a theme. In season 1, we covered cases of filicide, which is the act of a parent killing their own child. In season 2, we covered cases of people killing for love. We recently finished up season 3 where we covered cases of parricide, which is the act of someone killing their parents.

Tune in now as we start Season 4, where we dive into the minds of family annihilators. Sick individuals who decided to destroy their entire families. Check us out anywhere that you listen to podcasts or on YouTube by searching this is monsters.