The Rise and Fall of the Baader-Meinhof Group

The political climate in Post-World War II Germany set the stage for a wide range of reactions and movements among the German people. The political thinkers of West Germany wanted to properly learn from the mistakes of their Nazi past. The guilt left over from the Nazi era caused the Federal Republic of Germany to become adamantly anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. Working closely with the United States, the Federal Republic adopted a similar capitalist system and ideology that completely discredited Marxism. This was justified by its relations to Stalinism and the police state in the Democratic Republic of Germany. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was losing its popularity and was forced to drop its nationalistic tendencies that opposed the free market economy and integration with the capitalist Western world. However, the party’s student organization, the SDS, maintained its left wing ideals and began to radically criticize the West German government. After a failed attempt to get the SDS to adopt a more conservative ideology, the SDP cut funding to SDS and no longer claimed any connection with the organization.

During the beginning of the 1960s, the SDS was still trying to articulate a radical theory, and had not yet moved far outside its base at the Free University in West Berlin. However, the events of 2 June, 1967 would change all of that, taking the movement from West Berlin to West Germany, and catalyzing student groups and other radicals. On this day, the SDS in Berlin organized a protest upon the arrival of the Shah of Iran, who they saw as a brutal dictator who was being supported by the United States and the Federal Republic. Despite a state ban of the demonstration, thousands gathered in front of the opera where politicians were entertaining the dictator. When police were brought out to control the crowd, they began arresting resistant protestors. Many were beaten and arrested, and in the middle of the chaos, a police officer killed student protester, Benno Ohnesorg, shooting him in the head.

The students organized a congress in Hanover where 5000 students and academics met to discuss the course to be taken after this event. Rudi Dutschke, an SDS leader, advocated illegal action in order “to show openly [the government's] class character, its authoritarian nature, to force it to expose itself as a “dictatorship of force”.” The Springer Press, which controlled 78 percent of the daily newspaper and magazine circulation in Berlin, began targeting “Red” Rudi Dutschke, creating an unfavorable public opinion of the student protest movement. Many students began to become frustrated with the apparent impossibility to change public opinion, causing many to drop out of the movement altogether, and leaving some to pursue more radical means of pursuing their goal, using “revolutionary violence against the system.”