The Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang, was a West German far-left Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla group founded in 1970.
The 2 June Movement was a West German anarchist militant group based in West Berlin. Active from January 1972 to 1980, the anarchist group was one of the few militant groups at the time in Germany. Although the 2 June Movement did not share the same ideology as the Red Army Faction, these organizations were allies. The 2 June Movement did not establish as much influence in Germany as their Marxist counterparts, and is best known for kidnapping West Berlin mayoral candidate Peter Lorenz.
9 November has been the date of several important events in German history. The term Schicksalstag has been occasionally used by historians and journalists since shortly after World War II, but its current widespread use started with the events of 1989 when virtually all German media picked up the term.
The West German student movement or sometimes called the 1968 movement in West Germany was a social movement that consisted of mass student protests in West Germany in 1968; participants in the movement would later come to be known as 68ers. The movement was characterized by the protesting students' rejection of traditionalism and of German political authority which included many former Nazi officials. Student unrest had started in 1967 when student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a policeman during a protest against the visit of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. The movement is considered to have formally started after the attempted assassination of student activist leader Rudi Dutschke, which sparked various protests across West Germany and gave rise to the public opposition. The movement would create lasting changes in German culture.
The New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße in Berlin is a mid-19th century synagogue built as the main place of worship for Berlin's Jewish community, succeeding the Old Synagogue which the community outgrew. Because of its eastern Moorish style and resemblance to the Alhambra, the New Synagogue is an important architectural monument in Germany.
Georg von Rauch (1947–1971) was a radical activist in West Berlin at the end of the 1960s German student movement.
Kommune 1 or K1 was a politically motivated commune in Germany. It was created on 12 January 1967, in West Berlin and finally dissolved in November 1969. Kommune 1 developed from the extraparliamentary opposition of the German student movement of the 1960s. It was intended as a counter-model against the small middle-class family, as a reaction against a society that the commune thought was very conservative.
The Fasanenstrasse Synagogue was a liberal Jewish synagogue in Berlin, Germany opened on 26 August 1912. It was located in an affluent neighbourhood of Charlottenburg on Fasanenstrasse off Kurfürstendamm at numbers 79–80, close to the Berlin Stadtbahn and Zoo Station.
The Außerparlamentarische Opposition, was a political protest movement in West Germany during the latter half of the 1960s and early 1970s, forming a central part of the German student movement. Its membership consisted mostly of young people disillusioned with the grand coalition of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Since the coalition controlled 95 percent of the Bundestag, the APO provided a more effective outlet for student dissent. Its most prominent member and unofficial spokesman was Rudi Dutschke.
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.
Peter Lorenz was a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Michael "Bommi" Baumann was a German author and former militant. After growing up in Berlin, he was radicalised by the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg and founded the Movement 2 June with his best friend Georg von Rauch. After von Rauch was shot dead by the police and a bomb planted by Baumann killed a builder, Baumann fled abroad. Whilst on the run he wrote the memoir Wie alles anfing and renounced political violence. The book sold 100,000 copies. Baumann was arrested in London in 1981 and following a prison term lived in Berlin.
The Rauch-Haus-Song is a track performed by West Berlin band Ton Steine Scherben on their second studio album Keine Macht für Niemand. It has become famous in leftwing circles in Germany.
Dieter Kunzelmann was a German left-wing terrorist. In the early 1960s he was a member of the Situationist-inspired artists' group Gruppe SPUR. He was one of the founders of Kommune 1 in 1967. At the end of the 1960s he was one of the leaders of the Tupamaros West-Berlin, which carried out bombings and arsons. He was arrested in July 1970 and served five years in prison for those activities. From 1983 to 1985 he served in the Berlin state parliament as a member of the Alternative List. In 1997 he was sentenced to a year in prison for throwing an egg at the mayor of Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen. He went into hiding for two years, reappearing to serve his sentence in 1999.
Fritz Teufel was a prominent figure in the West German political left of the 1960s. One of the founders of Kommune 1, Teufel cultivated a theatrical, humorous public image—encapsulated in his idea of the "Spaßguerilla". In the 1970s he rejected this image and became involved with the violent Movement 2 June. He was jailed several times in the 1960s and 1970s.
Karl Heinz Beckurts was a German physicist and research manager.
Peter Urbach was an informant and agent provocateur of the West Berlin domestic intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He had contacts with the Kommune 1 and with several people who would go on to form the German terrorist organization, Rote Armee Fraktion. He supplied the scene with weapons, Molotov cocktails and bombs.
Franz Josef Huber was an SS functionary who was a police and security service official in both the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Huber joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and worked closely with Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller. After the German annexation of Austria in 1938, Huber was posted to Vienna, where he was appointed chief of the Security Police (SiPo) and Gestapo for Vienna, the "Lower Danube" and "Upper Danube" regions. He was responsible for mass deportations of Jews from the area. After the war ended, Huber never served any prison time. He was employed by the West German Federal Intelligence Service from 1955–64. He died in Munich in 1975.
Germany has experienced significant terrorism in its history, particularly during the Weimar Republic and during the Cold War, carried out by far-left and far-right German groups as well as by foreign terrorist organisations.
From 1933 to 1945, the Nazi regime ruled Germany and controlled almost all of Europe. During this time, Nazi Germany shifted from the post-World War I society which characterized the Weimar Republic and introduced an ideology of "biological racism" into the country's legal and justicial systems. The shift from the traditional legal system to the Nazis' ideological mission enabled all of the subsequent acts of the Hitler regime to be performed "legally". For this to succeed, the normative judicial system needed to be reworked; judges, lawyers and other civil servants acclimatized themselves to the new Nazi laws and personnel.
