Ulrike Meinhof

The Red Army Faction (RAF) was a New Leftist group founded in 1968 by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in West Germany. Inspired by Che Guevara, Maoistsocialism, and the Vietcong, the group sought to raise awareness of the Vietnamese and Palestinian independence movements through kidnappings, taking embassies hostage, bank robberies, assassinations, bombings, and attacks on U.S. air bases. The group is best known for 1977's "German Autumn." The buildup leading to German Autumn began on April 7, when the RAF shot Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback. On July 30, it shot Jurgen Ponto, then head of the Dresdner Bank, in a failed kidnapping attempt; on September 5, the group kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer (a former SS officer and an important West German industrialist), executing him on October 19.^[151] The hijacking of the Lufthansa jetliner "Lufthansa Flight 181" by the PFLP, a Palestinian group, is also considered to be part of German Autumn.^{[citation needed]}

The Italian Red Brigade was a New Leftist group founded by Renato Curcio in 1970. With PLO support, the group sought to create a revolutionary state. The Brigade kidnapped former Prime Minister Aldo Moro on March 16, 1978, and killed him 56 days later. This inspired an all-out assault against the Brigade by Italian law enforcement and security forces and drew condemnation from Italian left-wing radicals and even from imprisoned ex-leaders of the Brigade. The Brigade lost most of its social support and public opinion turned strongly against it. In 1984, the Brigade split, the majority faction becoming the Communist Combatant Party (Red Brigades-PCC) and the minority faction reconstituting itself as the Union of Combatant Communists (Red Brigades-UCC). The members of these groups carried out a handful of assassinations before almost all were arrested in 1989.^[152]

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 734