Word: baader
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...familiar Red Army Faction, which had killed both Buback and Ponto. The kidnapers' message warned that Schleyer would be killed unless eleven terrorists were released from German prisons, each given 100,000 deutsche marks (about $43,000), and flown out of the country. Among the eleven: Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin, the top members of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, who are serving life sentences for the 1972 bombing murders of four U.S. servicemen and 34 attempted killings...
...radical group known as Roter Morgen (Red Morning). The caller threatened more executions unless "political prisoners" held by the "exploiting class" were freed. Police scarcely needed to be told that radicals were responsible. So many killings have been carried out by terrorist organizations spawned from West Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang -17 since 1969-that the file on these radicals has been computerized...
Even at its zenith in the early 1970s, the Baader-Meinhof gang never numbered more than about 25. Yet they frightened West Germany into a state of paranoia. Financing operations through frequent bank robberies, the gang set up bomb factories and, through their contacts with international terrorist groups, bought arsenals of weapons and ammunition. Suitably armed, the German terrorists embarked on a killing and bombing spree. They vented their rage on "consumer capitalism" by placing bombs in Frankfurt department stores. They struck at the hated Ami (unflattering German slang for "American") by setting bombs in U.S. Army headquarters in Heidelberg...
...actions as justified retaliations against the excesses of capitalism. The praise increased the gang's arrogance-and may have contributed to its fatal carelessness. Once the West German federal police set up special squads to cope with the terrorists. they found their quarries easy prey. In 1972 Baader blundered into police hands by racing up to a clandestine bomb factory in a flashy purple Porsche (the gang had a capitalist weakness for luxurious cars). Meinhof naively fell into a police trap in a village near Hannover...
Within a year most of the gang were rounded up. Andreas Baader is serving a life term in a West German prison. Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself in her cell with a noose fashioned from a torn sheet...