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Siegfried Haag | |
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| Born | 13 March 1945 Aurich, Germany |
| Organization | Red Army Faction |
Siegfried Haag (born 13 March 1945) was a member of the West German Red Army Faction (RAF). He became a leading figure of the second generation of the group.
After qualifying in 1973, Haag worked as a lawyer in Heidelberg and briefly defended Holger Meins in 1974 and Andreas Baader in 1975 during his trial at Stammheim. [1]
Haag was known to be a leftist terrorist sympathizer, and supposedly while he was working as a defence lawyer, he would act as a messenger, passing on information, between different members of the RAF. His crimes became more substantial however and in 1975 he was arrested for smuggling weapons through Switzerland (with the help of Elisabeth Von Dyck) and served six months in a detention centre. He was released and immediately went underground. [2]
Haag became an important member of the second generation of the RAF and recruited many new members. He was once quoted as saying; [3]
"If I am a general in the Red Army Faction, Baader is a mere corporal."
He took part in a number of bank robberies, was involved in logistics and weapons procurement. It is thought that he was crucial in planning the West German embassy siege in Stockholm, though he himself did not take part. For a period between 1975 and 1976, Haag underwent guerilla warfare training in a Southern Yemen camp, before returning to West Germany. [4]
In November 1976 Haag was arrested in Hanover when police stopped a stolen car that he was driving. In the vehicle they found weapons and cryptic documents that revealed details of the Hanns Martin Schleyer kidnapping, which were deciphered at a later time, only in hindsight. With Haag in prison, leadership of the group was assumed by Brigitte Mohnhaupt, though authorities suspected for a while that somehow Haag was still issuing commands from prison. [5]
In 1979 Haag was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a Stuttgart court. He was released in 1987 on account of ailing health and apparently regretted his previous life of terrorism.
The Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang, was a West German far-left militant organization founded in 1970. Key early figures included Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Horst Mahler, among others. The government of the Federal Republic of Germany considered the Red Army Faction to be a terrorist organization. The group was motivated by leftist political concerns and the perceived failure of their parents' generation to confront Germany's Nazi past, and received support from Stasi and other Eastern Bloc security services.
Ulrike Marie Meinhof was a German left-wing journalist and founding member of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany, commonly referred to in the press as the "Baader-Meinhof gang". She is the reputed author of The Urban Guerilla Concept (1971). The manifesto acknowledges the RAF's "roots in the history of the student movement"; condemns "reformism" as "a brake on the anti-capitalist struggle"; and invokes Mao Zedong to define "armed struggle" as "the highest form of Marxism-Leninism".
Gudrun Ensslin was a German far-left terrorist and founder of the West German far-left militant group Red Army Faction. After becoming involved with co-founder Andreas Baader, Ensslin was influential in the politicization of his anarchist beliefs. Ensslin was perhaps the intellectual head of the RAF. She was involved in five bomb attacks, with four deaths, was arrested in 1972 and died on 18 October 1977 in what has been called Stammheim Prison's "Death Night."
Berndt Andreas Baader was one of the first leaders of the West German left-wing militant organization Red Army Faction (RAF), also commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Group.
Brigitte Margret Ida Mohnhaupt is a German convicted former terrorist associated with the second generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF) members. She was also part of the Socialist Patients' Collective (SPK). From 1971 until 1982 she was active within the RAF.
The Raspberry Reich is a 2004 film by director Bruce LaBruce which explores what LaBruce calls "terrorist chic", cult dynamics, and the "innate radical potential of homosexual expression". It is about a contemporary terrorist group who set out to continue the work of the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The group consists of several young men and a female leader named Gudrun. All of the characters are named after either original members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang or revolutionaries such as Che Guevara.
Sieglinde Hofmann was a German militant and member of both the Socialist Patients' Collective and the Red Army Faction.
The Red Army Faction (RAF) existed in West Germany from 1970 to 1998, committing numerous crimes, especially in the autumn of 1977, which led to a national crisis that became known as the "German Autumn". The RAF was founded in 1970 by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Horst Mahler, and others. The first generation of the organization was commonly referred to by the press and the government as the "Baader-Meinhof Gang", a name the group did not use to refer to itself.
The Socialist Patients' Collective is a patients' collective founded in Heidelberg, West Germany, in February 1970, by Wolfgang Huber. The kernel of the SPK's ideological program is summated in the slogan, "Turn illness into a weapon", which is representative of an ethos that is continually and actively practiced under the new title, Patients' Front/Socialist Patients' Collective, PF/SPK(H). The first collective, SPK, declared its self-dissolution in July 1971 as a strategic withdrawal but in 1973 Huber proclaimed the continuity of SPK as Patients' Front.
Siegfried Hausner was a student member of the German Socialist Patients' Collective who was sentenced to three years imprisonment in 1972 for terrorist related crimes. When he was released in 1974, like many other former members of the SPK, he joined the Red Army Faction.
Margrit Schiller was a German militant leftist associated with the Socialist Patients' Collective and later the Red Army Faction.
Susanne Albrecht is a former member of the Red Army Faction.
Christian Klar is a former leading member of the second generation Red Army Faction (RAF), active between the 1970s and 1980s. Imprisoned in 1982 in Bruchsal Prison, he was released on 19 December 2008, after serving over 26 years of his life sentence.
Jillian Becker is a South African-born British author, journalist, and lecturer. She specialises in research about terrorism, having written Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (1977), among other works.
Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang is a 1977 book about the West German militant left-wing group, the Red Army Faction, by the British author Jillian Becker.
Horst Mahler is a German former lawyer and political activist. He once was an far-left militant and a founding member of the Red Army Faction who later became a Maoist, before switching to neo-Nazism. Between 2000 and 2003, he was a member of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany. Since 2003, he has repeatedly been convicted of Volksverhetzung and Holocaust denial, and he served much of a twelve-year prison sentence.
The Baader Meinhof Complex is a 2008 German drama film directed by Uli Edel. Written and produced by Bernd Eichinger, it stars Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck, and Johanna Wokalek. The film is based on the 1985 German best selling non-fiction book of the same name by Stefan Aust. It retells the story of the early years of the West German far-left terrorist organisation the Rote Armee Fraktion from 1967 to 1977.
Verena Becker is a former West German member of the Movement 2 June and later the Red Army Faction.
Adelheid Schulz is a former member of the West German terrorist Red Army Faction.
Hitler's Children may refer to:
| First generation |  | |
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| Second generation | ||
| Third generation | ||