Word: raf
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...Osama Bin Laden, it is easy to forget how a small group of young, middle-class Germans calling themselves the Red Army Faction (RAF) held postwar West Germany in its murderous thrall for more than two decades. In the late 1970s, at the zenith of the RAF's influence, the captains of Germany's Wirtschaftswunder traveled with armed bodyguards and avoided commercial airlines for fear of being blown out of the sky; police set aside civil liberties in a hunt for suspects that engendered something close to national hysteria. The RAF targeted and killed bankers, business titans, jurists, bureaucrats...
...echo of that trauma is sounding a generation later, in a very different Germany. In coming weeks, the last two major RAF terrorists still in prison could go free. One will become eligible for parole, and the second is appealing to the German President for early release. The prospect has stirred calls from some that Germany give no quarter to those who "mercilessly killed wives, men and fathers with the aim of destroying our democracy," as Volker Kauder, leader of the ruling Christian Democratic Union faction in the Bundestag, said recently. Others insist on a cooler approach. "Terrorism...
...terrorists now being considered for release were key, hard-core figures of the "second generation" of the RAF, those who succeeded the founding cadre around Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader. Brigitte Mohnhaupt, 57, a former journalism student, was appointed leader of the group in 1977; Christian Klar, 54, once deemed a "moralist" by his high school teacher, was among the last to insist that the group remain operative before it formally disbanded in 1998. In July 1977 - 14 months after Meinhof hanged herself in prison and three months after Baader and two other confederates were convicted of murder...
...Historians of the RAF say that by the time Klar and Mohnhaupt assumed their prominent roles in the group, the founders' ideals had become secondary to all-out war on the state. "Once [Klar] started shooting," recalled one acquaintance recently to the weekly Der Spiegel, "he couldn't stop until the magazine was empty." For a generation of Germans who survived World War II, the violence of those years awakened old traumas. "The RAF is history, thank God," says Butz Peters, a Berlin lawyer who has written several books on the group. "But the emotions associated with it - the powerlessness...
...Family members of the RAF's 34 victims, including Schleyer's widow, have joined conservative politicians in urging the President to reject Klar's application. Some want Mohnhaupt kept in jail, too. Markus Söder, general secretary of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Angela Merkel's ruling Christian Democrats, said that releasing the prisoners would be a "slap in the face" for the victims and their relatives. A recent poll conducted by the Bonn-based firm Omniquest found 65% of Germans against Klar being granted early parole; the proportion rose to 73% among Germans aged...