Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

German student radicals in 1968 turned to violence far more than did contemporary American student radicals. Some of them went to Palestine for training as terrorists. The best known of those German terrorist groups called themselves the Rote Armee Fraktion = Red Army Faction (acronym RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang after two of its leaders (Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader) who became especially notorious. The terrorists began by carrying out arson attacks on stores, then proceeded to kidnappings, bombings, and killings. Over the years the victims whom they kidnapped or killed included leaders of the German “establishment,” such as the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court, a candidate for mayor of West Berlin, Germany’s federal prosecutor, the chief of Deutsche Bank, and the head of West Germany’s Employers’ Association.