ULRIKE MARIE MEINHOF (1934–76) cofounded the organization that would later call itself the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) in 1970, after helping Andreas Baader (1943–77) to escape from a Berlin prison where he was serving a sentence for arson. Baader's girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin (1940–77), their lawyer Horst Mahler (b. 1936), medical student Ingrid Schubert (1944–77), and an inmate from a corrective home for girls whom Meinhof had befriended, called Irene Goergens (b. 1951), were among those involved in the founding “operation.”

Initial attempts by press and police to name the group led first to “Baader-Mahler-Meinhof,” then to “Baader-Meinhof” (Ensslin never got a mention); in 1971 the group christened itself the RAF collective, apparently oblivious to the overlap with the acronym used by the British air force. Its intention — following Bolivian revolutionary Che Guevara's (1928–67) “focus theory,” which said the preconditions for a revolution can be created by an armed avantgarde — was to provoke the West German state, through acts of terrorism, into a vicious response that would lead the German people to revolt against capitalism, globalization, and the war in Vietnam.

For the group's so-called first generation, who are the subject of this book, it was a short-lived endeavor. Following a brutal bombing campaign in which four American soldiers were killed and soldiers and civilians injured, all the core members were arrested during the summer of 1972. Efforts by a “second generation” to secure their release via hijacks and kidnappings led to further deaths, including that of the prominent Frankfurt banker Jürgen Ponto in July 1977, and of the driver and three bodyguards of industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, who was abducted by the RAF in September of the same year. In custody, group member Holger Meins (1941–74) died from malnutrition during a hunger strike. Meinhof was found hanged in her cell in Stuttgart-Stammheim's high-security prison on the morning of 9 May 1976. Following a failed hijack by Palestinian terrorists (intended, like the Schleyer kidnap, to force the release of the prisoners), Baader, Ensslin, and their associate Jan-Carl Raspe (1944–77) were found dead in their cells on 18 October 1977 — Ensslin by hanging, and the two men shot in the head.