RED ARMY FACTION

byname Baader-meinhof Gang, German Rote Armee Fraktion, or Baader-meinhof Gruppe, West German leftist terrorist group formed in 1968 and popularly named after two of its early leaders, Andreas Baader (194377) and Ulrike Meinhof (193476). From its early years, the members supported themselves by robberies of banks and other businesses and engaged in terrorist bombings and arson, especially of West German corporations and businesses and of West German and U.S. military installations in West Germany. They also engaged in kidnappings and assassinations of prominent political and business figures. By the mid-1970s they had become internationalist and occasionally allied with Palestinian terrorist groups; two Baader-Meinhof guerrillas took part in a Palestinian hijacking of an Air France jetliner in 1976, which led to the Israeli raid on the Entebbe airport in Uganda; the Germans were killed. The groups included at least 22 core members in the early 1970s, most of whom, including Meinhof, had been jailed by the summer of 1972; Baader, escaping one imprisonment in 1970, was arrested again in 1976. Meinhof hanged herself in her cell in 1976. Three others, including Baader, were found shot in their cells on Oct. 18, 1977, presumably suicides; their deaths came a day after West German commandos stormed a hijacked Lufthansa plane in Mogadishu, Somalia, and blocked a ransom attempt to free the terrorists. The Red Army Faction thereafter continued its terrorist activities and bore a number of splinter groups. After the collapse of communism in East Germany in 198990, it was discovered that the Stasi, the secret police of the old communist regime, had provided training, shelter, and supplies to the Red Army Faction during its heyday. Greatly weakened by the collapse of East Germany, the group announced an end to its terrorist campaign in 1992.