The political climate in Post-World War II Germany set the stage for a wide range of reactions and movements among the German people. The political thinkers of West Germany wanted to properly learn from the mistakes of their Nazi past. The guilt left over from the Nazi era caused the Federal Republic of Germany to become adamantly anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. Working closely with the United States, the Federal Republic adopted a similar capitalist system and ideology that completely discredited Marxism. This was justified by its relations to Stalinism and the police state in the Democratic Republic of Germany. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was losing its popularity and was forced to drop its nationalistic tendencies that opposed the free market economy and integration with the capitalist Western world. However, the party's student organization, the SDS, maintained its left wing ideals and began to radically criticize the West German government. After a failed attempt to get the SDS to adopt a more conservative ideology, the SDP cut funding to SDS and no longer claimed any connection with the organization.
During the beginning of the 1960s, the SDS was still trying to articulate a radical theory, and had not yet moved far outside its base at the Free University in West Berlin. However, the events of 2 June, 1967 would change all of that, taking the movement from West Berlin to West Germany, and catalyzing student groups and other radicals. On this day, the SDS in Berlin organized a protest upon the arrival of the Shah of Iran, who they saw as a brutal dictator who was being supported by the United States and the Federal Republic. Despite a state ban of the demonstration, thousands gathered in front of the opera where politicians were entertaining the dictator. When police were brought out to control the crowd, they began arresting resistant protestors. Many were beaten and arrested, and in the middle of the chaos, a police officer killed student protester, Benno Ohnesorg, shooting him in the head.
The students organized a congress in Hanover where 5000 students and academics met to discuss the course to be taken after this event. Rudi Dutschke, an SDS leader, advocated illegal action in order “to show openly [the government's] class character, its authoritarian nature, to force it to expose itself as a "dictatorship of force".” The Springer Press, which controlled 78 percent of the daily newspaper and magazine circulation in Berlin, began targeting "Red" Rudi Dutschke, creating an unfavorable public opinion of the student protest movement. Many students began to become frustrated with the apparent impossibility to change public opinion, causing many to drop out of the movement altogether, and leaving some to pursue more radical means of pursuing their goal, using “revolutionary violence against the system.”
This ideological violence manifested itself through the bombings of two Frankfurt department stores on 2 April, 1968. Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Sohnlein, and Thorwald Proll bombed these building as “protest against the indifference of the society toward the war in Veitnam.” Two days later, the group is picked up and are all convicted of arson. On 13 June, 1969, the four arsonists were given a temporary amnesty parole while their cases were under review. When they are told that they have to come back to prison, the only one to comply was Sohnlein, while the rest fled to Paris.7 This first bombing was the precursor to many more acts of terrorism by the Red Army Faction (RAF), which would become known to the public as the Baader-Meinhof Group.
Upon their return to Berlin, Baader and Ensslin sought refuge in the apartment of Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent left-wing journalist who often associated with radical activists. Soon the duo was approached by Dieter Kunzelmann, leader of the West Berlin Tupamaros who had been executing a series of pranks and bombings throughout the city. After a disagreement in how they thought things should be executed, they decline to join and are immediately approached by Horst Mahler who had overheard the disagreement. Mahler wanted to form his own urban guerilla group which would be somewhat modeled after the Tupamaros, but his vision was a group that had real “praxis.” Baader and Ensslin agreed to join the group, calling themselves The Red Army Faction, and moved out of Meinhof's apartment shortly thereafter.
In order to get Mahler's new revolutionary army off the ground, they began to stock up on guns and explosives. In April of 1970, Baader was picked up by police after he and Astrid Proll retrieved a buried stash of guns, striking a huge blow to the group by taking out Baader, one of the main leaders of the gang. Getting Baader out of jail became the group's main priority. A plan was formed which used Meinhof's journalistic prestige to grant her access to Baader, but first, they had to convince Meinhof to jump head first into direct subversive action against the government which would mean cutting off contact with her children as well as the rest of the outside world. Ensslin took up the task to convince her, and succeeded using her abrasive assertiveness.
