Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 272- The Red Army Faction Part 1: Coca Cola Blood

Episode Date: August 13, 2023

Tom takes the wheel for another series. This time the Red Army Faction, a German left wing terror group funded by bank robberies and fueled by chain smoking. Get the whole series now on the Lions Led by Donkeys Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys/ Sources: The Red Army Faction. A Documentary History. Volume I: Projectiles for the People. Margrit Schiller. Remembering The Armed Struggle. My Time With the Red Army Faction. Stefan Aust. The Baader Meinhof Complex

Hello, Lions Led by Donkeys listeners. Normally Joe does the Patreon plug, but it's me, Nate, and I'm here with a special announcement. This is the first installment of the four-part Red Army Faction series hosted by Tom and Joe, but the other three episodes are already available on the Patreon at the $5 tier. They'll all eventually come out on the free feed, but if you want to hear the entire series now, check the link in the show notes or go to patreon.com lions led by donkeys to sign up thanks and please enjoy this episode hello i hate this so much so if you are uh kind of shocked this is a not a joe series um if you can definitely read the title we are doing a series on the red army faction for some reason the irish man has

to do all the series on terrorism we all have our strengths how are you doing joe i uh i am currently melting um it is getting close to august well it will be august by the time this episode comes out here in armenia which means it is getting close to 100 degrees um and i am dying on top of that i finally went and got my hair cut yesterday uh and previously i've had the same barber for over a year now since I've lived here, right? But things in Armenia have a tendency, like business fronts, have a tendency to vanish overnight from time to time.

They'll just get closed down and the storefront will just be an empty shell. And you'll have no idea what happened, right? And that happened with my barber. So over the last several weeks, I've been trying desperately to find another one and you never do anything here without a recommendation like there's barbers everywhere don't walk into the one and get a haircut this goes for anything

um we are we are what is known as a low trust society where everything works on recommendations and and stuff like that so i have been trying to do this for a very long time. And finally, my hair was just getting so out of control. Because when my hair grows, it grows straight up into an afro-like mess of curls. Yeah, you are Armenian. Yeah. So it finally got to the point that I was like, I can't take it anymore. I have to go get a haircut.

So I found a place, which i will not name um that was just terrible uh my armenian is not great when it comes to describing certain things so like a baseline understanding of like being able to speak a mix between armenian and english to get my point across is kind of important to me when it comes to stuff like this and i found a place that uh that does that um like the the person at the front desk spoke english. I was like, oh, perfect. Her English is about as good as my Armenian, so we were able to talk. And so I get there. This haircut takes two hours. Now, most people don't know what I look like. That's fine. I keep my hair very short. This is a combination of having incredibly thick hair and being in the military for so long i can't do long hair right this somehow a simple fade haircut takes two hours and then because he does the

entire thing with scissors what yeah i've never seen that before in my life i've gotten haircuts in a lot of countries i have never once seen someone get a full fade using a comb and scissors so it takes it takes two hours and he fucking butchers it so insane my fade looks more akin to like a peaky blinders high and tight and i am fucking unhappy um killian murphy is now in oppenheimer and you're now playing thomas shelby from peaky blinders like it was so bad that like you know me and the the woman at the front desk were explaining to the barber, because obviously my Armenian is not great. Her English wasn't great.

So I resorted to showing pictures and stuff. It just happens. That's how things work. And I come up and she's like, oh, that is not what you asked for. I was like, no, it is not. And then it cost like 8,000 drams more than i'm used to paying for a haircut it was like the armenian version of that like lads barber shop where you can get like a whiskey at the same time oh god and so yeah it look i should have known better and it was made worse because the barber

himself had the most fucked up haircut i've ever seen yeah never trust a barber with a bad haircut yeah it's like uh i don't know like going to a mechanic who doesn't have a car yeah and like it's it's kind of like so anyone who has gotten their haircut in london or lives in london know that there is just millions of barber shops everywhere same here it's so weird it's yeah well like a lot of people say like oh it's easy to do like a money front thing but it's also like it's a decent business if you can get like the customers so it's like if you can get people to you know you think about it the average guy is getting his haircut maybe once a month yeah give or take if you have like a solid base of like a couple hundred customers like you're making decent money and like there is like

such a massive range in the uk of like you can pay anything from about like eight pounds for a haircut which i can do in my area versus like the guy across the street from the studio it's like 25 quid but he'll do my he'll do a haircut he'll do my beard he'll like get the thing the like wand out that's on fire and burn the hair off my ears i can do that for you in my kitchen i don't trust you with a big lighter in my ears to be honest but then he'll like he'd like washes your hair give you like a head massage give you like a hot towel and everything it's a whole like i shave my head and i like go and like once a month of this guy in between i just like shave my head with like a clippers every week but like this guy gives the full works and like i've shaved head it'll still take like maybe half an hour

45 minutes because all the other bits and it's like you you know you pay peanuts you get monkeys you get you pay cheap for a cheap haircut you're gonna look like you got a cheap haircut yeah i agree and like i would be fine paying you know whatever the equivalent pay here is for that for that experience and talent and skill and like you know most armenian men these days have beards it's actually kind of of a new thing from what i've been told i also have a beard and like so i i need to get my beard trimmed because my beard much like my the head of my uh my hair my head is very thick so he hit you know part of this two hours is also getting my beard trimmed not only did he absolutely butcher me with a fucking straight razor um but like he fucked up to the point that i had to fix it when i got home like i in short I look ridiculous and I am unhappy.

It's hot. It makes things worse. Speaking of bad haircuts, we are talking about the Red Army Faction, famous for their bad haircuts. I believe those dudes had some fucked up looking drip. I should start this by saying I don't know pretty much anything about the Red Army Faction other than they've kind of become ancillary characters in some episodes that is about all I know but when you explain to me like weird German

terrorist group from the what 60s to 80s I'm assuming we're talking 100% bowl cuts across the board bowl cuts, home cuts with scissors which we'll get to in a subsequent episode lots of hair dye when you're on the run you know you got to change your trim quite a lot but when you think about um left-wing violence in the like 20th century to early 21st

century you're really talking about people like etta you're talking about the plo you're talking about the red army faction also commonly referred to as the batter meinhof group my boys asala which we've talked about so like i should take that back they're not my boys they're in fact not my boys if you're listening uh nss you know so yeah in the of, particularly after the 60s, you had like a lot of these kind of revolutionary groups coming out in reaction to some things that we're going to talk about in a second. But really, when you talk about the, like, kind of not necessarily paramilitary, but left-wing terrorist organizations,

the Red Army Faction, which I will refer to going forward as the RAF, not to be confused with the raf knocked him confused with the british air force are also terrorists are the ones that immediately come to mind so we can't talk about the history of the red army faction without first taking a step back in time and talking about everyone's favorite topic do you want to have a guess, Joe? Nazis? Yeah, we're going to talk about World War II. So, not to retread some well-trodden ground, we've covered a lot of topics contained within World War II

pretty extensively in this show. But to fully understand the factors that led to the formation of the Red Army Faction and the inspiration of its politics, we need to talk about the end of the war and most importantly, the period directly preceding its end and its direct aftermath because it's kind of hard to talk about post-war germany without it oh boy we're talking

about denazification aren't we yeah a process that went swimmingly without any nazis getting into power in east or west germany so within the waning months of the war on all fronts it became more clear that the nazis were about to get their asses handed to them, and soon there would have to be some sort of plan of what to do with all the territories held by them. Now, this is not to say that discussions about what would be done had not been had before this, most of it occurred behind closed doors. The Soviets, for example, had already made speculative plans of what to do if the Nazis had been defeated as early as 1943. This included the absorption of the Eastern Front into a greater Soviet Union and the Allies of the East speculatively anticipating the reformation and re-administration of Western Europe in the model of quote-unquote Western democracy. Western democracy. But it was in February 1945 when the heads of the Soviet Union, United Kingdom and United States all first met to come to a consensus on what was to be done after the war. This came after the previous Moscow conference in October of the previous year where

Churchill and Stalin met to discuss the post-war division of Europe where their claims lay on the soon to be emerging spheres of influence on the continent. The Crimea Conference, also called the Yalta Conference, was held in Yalta between the 4th and 11th of February after the Germans had been successfully pushed back from Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. There was little doubt in anyone's mind as to what was about to happen in the coming months. Most notably, Charles de Gaulle was excluded from this conference because his beef with because of his beef with roosevelt and was subsequently excluded from the podstock

the potstamp conference good fuck him that's why you lanky bitch yeah um during the meeting they agreed on some key points and the ones most relevant to our story are the unconditional surrender of nazi germany division of of Germany into four separate administrative zones, split between Britain, the US, Soviets, and France. Britain taking the West, Soviets taking the East, the US taking the South, and France taking the wedge in between the Western Allies. Secondly, and I think most important to our story here today, was the agreement for the comprehensive and thorough denazification and demilitarization of the German state. So a second conference was held from July 17 to August 2nd, 1945 in Potsdam, Germany. Funnily

enough, I saw Oppenheimer last week and Potsdam conference plays a pretty big plot point in the development of the Trinity test. Who would have thought, you know? Don't ruin it for me. I don't know how Oppenheimer ends. I did not expect that Robert Oppenheimer was slinging so much pipe as he is in the movie. I mean, look, he likes to pretend to be like a tortured artist type. Those are always the ones that do that.

Oh, what have I done? my art has destroyed the world i have become death the slinger of penis um so this was nine weeks after the surrender of the nazis and mark the official defeat of nazi germany roosevelt had died in april r.i.p bitch uh so his successor of all the people that are taking part in this uh this conference he is the least worst yeah but still uh so his successor harry truman represented the united states churchill returned to present to represent great britain but his government had was defeated midway through the conference and the newly elected prime minister clement atlee took over stalin everyone's favorite stalin returned as well um but stalin's action in poland after the crimea conference and other parts of eastern germany had become known at the time and it was

the opinion of a lot of the other parties that he was not to be trusted to uphold his end of the bargain as agreed in the crimea conference oh man you're telling me stalin is an untrustworthy partner and things anyway let's look at my ongoing politics of armenians here that pans out for all of us oh don't worry it's going to uh stalin's actions are going to come up again um in light of this the new representatives from the united states and great britain were much more careful with their negotiations. Truman in particular believed Roosevelt had been too trusting of Stalin and became extremely suspicious of Soviet actions and Stalin's true intentions. So the final agreements at Potsdam concerned the decentralization, demilitarization and denazification and democratization of Germany.

The division of Germany and Berlin and Austria and Vienna into occupation zones, as outlined in Crimea, the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, the return of all annexed land to pre-war borders, shifting Germany's eastern border west to reduce its size, and the expulsion of German populations living outside this new border

in Czechoslovakia poland and hungary that is something that has had no repercussions at all i can't imagine i can't think of anything i've stopped my head and finally the transformation of germany's pre-war heavy industry economy which had been extremely important for the nazi military build-up during world war ii into a combination of agriculture and light domestic industry so with germany divided and a new post-war dawn cresting on the horizon, a new nation was born, and with it beginning the process of denazification. Now, it's well known that the Nazis loved paperwork. They went to painstaking lengths to codify and track every possible detail they could, many of which would lead to the subsequent trials of nazi war criminals but also the thing they loved as well was tracking nazi

party membership it was like the thing they loved the most was like rigid violent bureaucracy yeah it's it's a it's how um you know a lot of people on the far right tend to be STEM people. Who loves details? Nazis. I mean, and a lot of the Nazis were doctors. They're incredibly well-educated people who love themselves in depth and intricate filing systems. Once again, Joe, you are preceding something I'm about to talk about. God damn it. preceding something I'm about to talk about. God damn it.

So now almost the entire records of the Nazi Party membership were saved by a single man, which led to the almost complete membership dossier of the Nazi Party members being handed over to the Allies. The list generally broke down into who were active and who were passive members of the Nazi Party because during World War II

obviously there was conscription, there was forced membership for some people into the nazi party a lot of people this is something that we'll talk about with the legacy of fascism later in this episode where we've talked about this before like um you know during our episode on the white rose movement like they refused to go to university because in order to go to university you had to be a member of the Nazi party. Like something as simple as that. So each zone was given autonomy when it came to denazification and each had their own version of restorative justice for the crimes of the Nazi regime.

The Soviets interned over 120,000 people. and 20,000 people according to official records I'm using air quotes the British although particularly zealous during the beginning of the process

kind of gave up after a while and only required people filled out the frogambogan I hope I'm saying that right

flawless which was a questionnaire required for the disclosure of former Nazi party membership if former Nazi party members

were seeking an official or responsible position the French I'm going to give you do you want to guess of former Nazi party membership if former Nazi party members were seeking an official or responsible position. The French, I'm going to give you, do you want to guess what the French did? I'm assuming they were psychotic.

No, the French pretty much just fucking gave up. Oh, all right. Well, I mean, I guess that inside of every Frenchman there are two wolves. Yeah, the French pretty much

gave up because many of the French army command were collaborators with the Vichy regime and also found that too many people of operational importance to their zone were former Nazis and therefore instead retained French control of the ability to reverse any functional decision. well lazy about it when you saw it like especially when you see how the french treat like german pows which i mean look i'm not asking for sympathy for german pows by any stretch of the imagination however using them to like demine areas by stomping through them generally bad um this is something that we've talked about quite a lot on this show is that after any sort of like large scale conflict in a country where there has to be a reformation of power, what usually happens is you'll find that quite a lot of the people ruling party and then you have to have that question of do you completely get rid of everyone and then have to run the entire country with a much smaller team or do you kind of fudge the numbers a little bit and say like yeah just sign

that in pencil not pen you know just in case we need to change it yeah and not to mention run the country with a much smaller team who almost certainly are not either have any experience in that job because they weren't able to do it before or you know uh they're just some random new loyalists to the occupational regime cough debathification cough so uh you might have noticed there's one power that I haven't spoken about yet. And that's the Americans who decided to rejig the Froggenbogen and instead replaced it with the Meldbogen, which broke Nazi supporters into five different categories of punishment. order we have a grade five which is a person exonerated so no sanctions a grade four which was a follower possible restrictions on travel employment political rights and some fines then you have a grade three which is lesser offenders and they will be placed on probation for two to three years with with a list of restrictions but no internment then you had a

grade two which was an offender activist militant and profiteers or incriminated person now these were subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment for up to 10 years performing reparation or reconstruction work plus a list of other restrictions and then you have a grade one which was a major offender um they were probably supposed to be turned into wind chimes yeah so these were subject to immediate arrest death imprisonment with or without hard labor plus a list of lesser sanctions so even within these grades there's quite a lot of varying degrees like some people had like very severe sanctions some people were you know just fully executed um some people were just you know imprisoned

so this was all well and good but overwhelmed by the task of a massive judicial load the american administrative zone instead decided to intern nearly a,000 former Nazis and classify 1,900,000 as forbidden to work as anything other than manual labours. I hate being overwhelmed with a massive load. But this whole system was a failure and was almost completely abandoned by 1951. This is not even to touch on Operation Paperclip, where the US government granted amnesty

to 785 Nazi rocket scientists and many other German officials and others. The Soviet Union conveniently also did the same thing, although their numbers are a lot more vague and harder to pin down. So essentially, everyone just pick and choose who to punish and, hmm, let's get Werner von braun you know to develop

rockets in the u.s of course it's not surprising yeah by the time denazification was abandoned many of the high-ranking officials in the german state civil service as well as industry media etc etc were all former active nazi party members and the new spectre haunting Europe was the ghost of fascism. Thankfully we're not dealing with that anymore. Don't look up Operation Gladio. Don't look up most of the current governments of Europe. So, on May 6th, 1945, Mr. Andreas Bader was born in Munich to parents Anneliese and Bernd Philipp Bader.

Andreas' father had been taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1945 and was reported missing, so Andreas grew up surrounded by his mother, grandmother and aunt. with affection as a child, which he almost universally bristled against and from an early age proved to be difficult and stubborn, with teachers often remarking that although he was quite intelligent, he was lazy and volatile, often refusing to take orders from teachers and

figures of authority. How very un-German of him. This will have no relevance in the future. He had a quite generous streak in him and his remark that he would literally give someone the shirt off his back if he saw them cold while simultaneously becoming

a very good petty thief at the same time. His anti-authoritarian streak... I'll give you the shirt off of my back that I stole from someone else. His anti-authoritarian streak came at a very young age refusing to receive confirmation out of protest against organized religion, his anti-authoritarian streak came at a very young age refusing to receive confirmation out of protest

against organized religion would not celebrate his own birthday and tried to convince his mother to not celebrate Christmas he got in fights frequently at school and mostly as a physical end point of an argument that he refused to concede and people commented that

you either loved him or hate him. I don't see who could love him. He seems like a Reddit atheist in the fucking 40s. Andreas Batter, a, you know, very, very stubborn child who hated authority and

would refuse to concede arguments is going to have no relevance in part two. And, you know, next, the counterpoint to the name, the Badr-Meinhof group, although I argue it should be called the Badr-Enssling group, but anyway. Ulrike Meinhof was born on October 7th 1935 in Oldenburg Germany her father being a doctor of art history who became the head of the city of Jenna's museum where Ulrike when Ulrike was two years old both of her parents died of cancer her father in 1940 and her mother in 1948 Ulrike and

her older sister were then looked after by her mother's former border Renate Ramack people say border there is a lot of evidence no that this is kind of you know when historians say oh they were really good friends oh okay yeah so Ulrika Meinhof quickly began to learn the socialist views of her new carer. And in contrast to Andreas Bader, Ulrike was very well educated, studying sociology, philosophy and German studies at Marburg. And in 1957, she was studying at the university near Munster. Here she showed that radicalism showed the radicalism that would lead her on her future path,

joining the Socialist Student Union and getting involved in anti-rearmament protests and anti-nuclear protests. She also displayed her skill at writing and her eloquence when she began writing for the student newspaper Concrete. Once again, a thing that will be very relevant soon you're currently you're just explaining like i didn't know anything about these guys i now the one thing that i if i was to paint

what their childhood looked like in their upbringing like i assume they'd be slightly more fucked up but but so far everything's on cue like kid of an academic right being the the normal campus left-wing person who works for the student newspaper like all these things are kind of tracking yeah and like i'll talk a little bit about this after we talk about you know the third person here who is also like deeply important to this series and that is gudrun ensling so born in 1940 in bartholoma to a Protestant pastor father and the middle of seven children, Gudrun had a generally middle class

upbringing and inherited her parents' interest in politics as well as a distinctly Protestant view on the nature of right and wrong. In 1958 she spent a year studying in the Methodist community in Pennsylvania. While she was there she noted in her diary that she had a dislike for American Christians.

I mean, fair enough. She had a disdain for their jewels and diamonds and their hypocritical piety. Gudrun also internalized her family's religious and political outlook, combining the Christian belief of fellowship with political action, both faith and politics not ending at the door,

but believing and doing what is right extending to every aspect of life so she kind of she is like very interesting as a comparison to the other two because like like andreas badder's upbringing wasn't inherently political it was just you know he came from a working class family where you know he went to school he was argumentative and he just kind of became a little bit of a hellion it sounds like an abrasive dickhead while the other two seem very normal oh hold on to that thought we have four episodes of andreas botter being a fucking dickhead outstanding the weirdest part about insling is when she came back from pennsylvania she just worn eagles jersey everywhere but like the uh it's really interesting like here like reading how she viewed american christians and like the hypocrisy of you know they're almost kind of like

this is post-war so like creely kind of growing extravagant wealth obviously not on the same levels as there is today but like the kind of wealth enjoyed by americans after world war ii compared to germans and the combination of like because like european protestantism particularly german protestantism is like very austere as well like a lot of people kind of call it like the kind of cold christians where like american christianity is like no matter what denomination you're from it's all like seems to be based in calvinism yeah or like it's the the the doctrinal christian version of fuck you i got mine because god loves me yeah yeah pretty much pretty much yeah and what

was the dude who fucking died last week or the other month pat watts's face oh pat robertson yeah rest in peace bitch yep um when gudrun uh returned to germany while studying at tubingen there's so many germans they were going to be so mad at me direct all of your hatred of our pronunciation the German language to Nate yes please it was Nate's choice not to be on this series so blame him the one of us who speaks German

so while sitting there she met Bernward Vesper the son of poet Will Vesper a favorite of many Nazis Bernward hated his father and despite Gudrun's father's disapproval of his daughter's soon to be fiancée, the two

disillusioned would distance themselves from traditional German family life and disillusioned from German political life would soon become deeply immersed in the German student anti-authoritarian movement the hardest part of divorcing yourself from those movements is removing the lederhosen

you gotta get loads of like vaseline to like slide it off you gotta slip out of it like a slug it's like people who are like into latex you have to put like talcum powder on the inside so you can actually like get it on you see, that's what, like, of all of the various other reasons that I'm not into latex, I feel like me having to cover myself in a thin layer of lubricant to slide into anything.

Take that statement any way you want. I'm not a fan. So, an important note on Meinhof is that the student politics movement in post-war Germany was inherently radical due to the vast majority of students at the time were born either

during the war, directly preceding it, or directly in its aftermath. There was huge ill will during this period towards the state, mainly attributed to the failure of denazification and the lingering influence of fascism in daily life. The CDU, the Christian Democrats, the ruling party of West Germany,

had its legacy in the wartime period with its founding attracting conservatives, anti-communists and former Nazi collaborators into its highest offices. The CDU was decried as an apparatchik of Western powers and a buffer to the communist influence of the Eastern Bloc. Likewise, much of the media, both state and independent within Germany at the time, had a strong, socially conservative viewpoint,

which very much aligned with that of parties like the CDU. Bild or Bild Zetong, a daily newspaper from Axel Springer Media, was launched in 1952 and modelled itself on the British tabloid The Daily Mail. Oh God.

Yeah. It published sensational and often inflammatory articles aimed at riling up the blood of the German people. The blood of the German people does not need to be riled up. No, we've experienced that before. And its defender said

that it was simply an accurate measurement of the disjointed German people. It was extremely anti-communist, and there has been accusations that Springer was able to initially expand Jordanian industrial lean post-war years due to American funding. Axel Springer himself used the Kurt Schumacher line of calling communists red-painted Nazis. Oh boy. line of calling communists red painted Nazis. Oh boy. So

you have a government that is filled with former Nazis who is actively hostile to the eastern bloc and you have a news media that calls all communists red painted Nazis. I'm sure this can only go well.

Oh thankfully we don't go through that anymore. God. Right-wing reactionary media funded by the US government? I often say that time is a big, flat, dumb circle. Yeah. You need to be taking, like, a pull of your vape while you say that to do the real Rust Coal thing.

You need to be taking like a pull of your vape while you say that to do the real Rust Coal thing. So by the early 1960s, Ulrike Meinhof had suddenly sprung to fame due to her article in Concrete comparing the CSU party leader Franz Strauss to Hitler. Strauss tried unsuccessfully to sue Meinhof, but didn't even make it to court. But the prospective case immediately made Ulrike Meinhof a didn't even make it to court uh but the prospective case immediately made ulrika meinhof a household name overnight that's not what any student writer needs in their life yeah like you really don't need to be elevating a 20 year old to like national renown for calling the leader of a party a nazi look i'm i'm just saying these these guys would get along great in like modern posting

culture that's not a that's not a compliment or an insult it just seems to be a fact like the one thing i will concede to andreas botter is he would have been incredible on twitter like just like pure schizo brain like constantly posting through it one thing that we will talk about in the next episode is andreas barter's unique ability to just rant at people for hours at a time look we're talking about college-age leftists who work for student newspapers the fact that they could go on for hours about shit does not suppress me i was friends with those guys at university because you know i am vaguely leftist in a lot of ways but at the same time like it actually reminds me um have you ever seen the movie um munich no uh well without going into

details because it's not not exactly a great movie but there is a scene where um like these musad assassins are posing as uh like vague european leftists and they meet it's like a batter meinhalf uh safe house uh that they're staying in and there's just an incredibly stoned german woman in the corner just ranting like muttering uh about marxism and there's and one and like her boyfriend is like isn't it great she could go on for hours oh no joe way until part two like it will feature andreas barter going on so much and ranting at a plo commander about the fact he won't get any treats. Yes. So Meinhof fell pregnant in 1962 but soon

began to experience severe headaches and vision problems but due to the pregnancy she chose to forego the surgery as she would have to choose between her twins or the operation. She had to give birth seven weeks early and eventually had brain surgery where instead of a

suspected tumor they found an enormously enlarged blood vessel which could not be removed where hemorrhaging and instead they clamped it shut with a metal clip word of note everything that I have said over the past half an hour will be very relevant for the next three episodes. I can't imagine having a blood vessel clamped in your brain is great for you. Yeah. So, like, everything I have said about Gudrun Ensling, Ulrike Meinhof, and Andreas Bader will be very important. So, after three months recovering in hospital, she returned to work, diving even deeper into her political writing than before.

By the same time in 1963, a 20-year-old Andreas Bader would arrive in West Berlin. West Berlin at the time was cheap to live in due to a plethora of empty buildings after the war. And because of tax concessions, young Bohemians could easily find themselves somewhere to live. So you have... I have an idea how to lower all of our rents where we currently live, guys. Yeah, so West Berlin at this time,

a lot of wealthy families had abandoned Berlin and moved to West Germany where they could have know have access to a lot of things that you couldn't get in East Germany even in West Berlin so loads of empty houses lots of people squatting a lot of people renting out places

for like dirt cheap was like well either I can let it be empty and a lot of students can squat in my apartment or I can charge someone like 200 Deutschmarks a month and students can squat in my apartment or I can charge someone like 200 Deutschmarks a month and they can live in it. Every German listening who currently lives in Berlin or in the general area is smashing their head

against the wall logging for these moments. So by 1964, Meinhof was dedicating her time to either her political writing or raising her newborn daughters or Bettina and Regine. At the same time, concrete had its funding withdrawn by the KDP. This is the Communist Party in East Germany over Jurgen Holtt camps uh writing about the prague spring and demanding holt camp be dismissed as well as claustrole minoff's husband be removed from his editor's editorship so yeah we can see the kind of political alignment of the people we're dealing with

yeah yeah you can't criticize the Prague Spring. Who would have thought this is actually the origin story of Kindle Direct Publishing? All the KDP's demands were refused, and the 40,000 Deutschmark stipend which funded the periodical was ended. In order to keep the paper going without the financial support of the KDP, Roel began to mingle sex and politics with big-breasted women and political commentary now gracing the front page. I mean, we all knew this was coming, right? Who knew German Marxist-Leninists invented page three? Comrades, I have this idea to establish a new party headquarters we'll call it bergheim i mean any weird niche political ideology always ends up in a pile of sex yep so how well do you think this tactic went oh a paper editor fucking his way through everybody around him? No, no, no. The putting big tits on the front of the paper to increase sales.

Oh, it worked great. It worked great. Yeah. It was a resounding success with the paper circulation rocketing from 2,000 copies to almost 100,000 copies. I mean, people don't change. Like, there was even a thing that fucking Der Sturmer did. People don't change.

Like, there was even a thing that fucking Der Sturmer did. They talked about lurid things like, you know, sex and prostitution and, like, people bought it who weren't even Nazis because they're like, nah, I want to read about fucking. Like, people are simple animals, man.

So, at the same time, Ulrika also began working on television and radio while still writing her column for Concrete. She quickly became a well-respected journalist outside of her work in Concrete producing investigative documentaries for the likes of Panorama and was a regular on panel discussion shows talking about political issues. Her and Roel both bought an old house together and did it up they began to settle into a provocative but comfortable life you know they were agitators but enjoyed all the treats they were they were privileged agitators those are my favorite kind yeah we everybody loves the upper

middle class soldier for the working class you you know? Although she enjoyed this new life, she was still drawn to the radicalism of the student movement. In her diary, she wrote, and this is a quote, My relationship with Klaus, my acceptance by the establishment, my work with the students, three aspects of my life that seem irreconcilable are pulling and tearing at me.

At least she felt guilty about it. Yeah, you love petty bourgeois guilt. Our house, the parties, camping, all of that only partly enjoyable, but among other things, it is the basis from which I can be a subversive element. TV appearances, contacts, the attention I get, they're all part of my career as a journalist

and a socialist. They get me a hearing beyond concrete by way of radio and television. I even find it pleasant, but it doesn't satisfy my need for warmth, solidarity and belonging to a group. The part I play, the part which gets me entry to that society corresponds only very partially to my real nature and needs it involves me in adopting the attitude of a puppet forcing me to say things smilingly when to me to all of us they are deathly serious so i say them with a grin as if masked i mean if you eliminate what where this eventually leads and also the the the weird sex-infused political newsletter like i think this is kind of most people just living yeah like you can really see and it like this episode is like really important and i'm sure some people be like

oh you're diving like too much into like the personal lives of like Ulrika Meinhof and Badr and stuff but like this stuff becomes so important because as like a unit of like those three people their personalities and eventually people who will join them is so important because so much of their actions are informed by their own personal personalities and of course i think people who try to understand people from history like what we always do on the show their personalities are incredibly important their personalities is what drive them to do what they do they don't exist in a vacuum yeah and particularly like ulrika meinhof is like her personal feelings both about like the movement and what she will eventually get into and like the outside regular world is something

that causes her like so much conflict which actually like fuels a lot of things that happen so she feels conflicted and probably i have no idea where this story goes other than the obvious vastly over corrects yeah so um the year is 1963 joe what happens in 1963 i actually don't know that could mean a lot of things uh the americans start bombing campaigns in rural v. Ah, yeah. Yeah, that is true. And by, I shouldn't really be laughing about it, by August 1964,

B-52 bombers would regularly conduct bombing raids over cities, and by 1965, the actions of the US in North Vietnam would cause widespread condemnation worldwide and spark waves of protest and unrest. In April 1965, two and a half thousand students would march through the streets of West Berlin, 500 of which would detach from the group

and the pre-approved route to directly demonstrate in front of the America House, lowering the flag half-mast and someone even throwing five eggs at the building. What the fuck is the American House? it just sounds like a mcdonald's so it's an it's an administrative building in west berlin at the time uh okay so burgers are actually not involved somehow here well look americans can only conceptualize in things in terms of burgers so you're showing your american side i'm doing my best uh um the german public and more specifically the springer press like build were outraged willie

brand the mayor of west berlin even had to issue a formal apology for the actions of the protesters yeah because like the americans are confused like if this happens here we just shoot them so indignation turned to protest protest to resistance resistance to violence and from and from the first parallels with the third reich were drawn ulrika meinhof said in one of her one of her columns at the moment when solidarity with the vietnamese become a matter of serious concern when people want to weaken the american position all over the world as far as possible in the interests of the vietnamese then i really see no difference between the police terrorist methods that we have already seen in berlin that threaten us now and the terrorism of the sa in 90 in the 1930s man like like i i understand that she is young and radicalized,

but you also see these comparisons in a lot of things when there's generally democratic and generally free countries. They're like, oh, they're just like the Nazis. The Nazis literally guillotined people who protested against them. The White Rose Collective was all executed via guillotine because they were spreading a zine on a college campus like calm down yeah um honestly but i will

say to a counterpoint she's not necessarily like drawing a line from the current german government to the nazis i think it's more so she's drawing a comparison of germany and particularly west berlin and west germany be an extension of american imperialism and calling comparing american imperialism at the time to the nazis oh okay fair enough i mean quite literally west germany and east germany are all imperial extensions of their overlords. Like, I will give her that much. response upon his arrival and the students began commune one or commune with a k1 a community intended to revolutionize the bourgeois individual so here we're going to talk about sex i knew that's where this was going look look if you're a 20 year old dude you're starting a commune obviously you're going to want to fuck you want to bust one out you're just describing any commune, obviously you're going to want to fuck. You want to bust one out. You're just describing any commune ever made. It's eventually going to devolve into a

writhing pile of naked human bodies. I know, it smells wild in there. In this commune, this is a quote, sexual needs were to develop with less inhibition, isolation is to be eliminated, and the struggle for

liberation from the pressures of the capitalist society were more effectively carried on. Just political fucking butts. We get it. Dieter Kunzelmann, the brain behind Commune 1, appealed, you must uproot yourselves,

reject your grants, reject security, give up your studies, risk your personality. And I know it sounds like it does. But also, I think what he's doing is they're connecting like the continuity of, you know, the rejection of everything you have to say. everything you have to say someone like rosa luxembourg who is like the most classical example of an actual class trader of like literally throwing away every single thing you have in you know support of the struggle and you know rosa luxembourg gave her life for it right the students plan to throw balloons filled with do you want to have a guess uh piss custard i like mine better

how do you fill a balloon with custard that's actually like what a funnel it's a like but also my thing is that like since custard is a non-newtonian liquid so um it's liquid when it's in a non-impact state but then then when it impacts, it's solid. Ah, the dualities of custard. Yeah. Ketchup, also another non-Newtonian liquid. Does the custard hurt when it hits you because it's exerting force on the custard?

So is it going to burst like a water balloon or is it going to hit you like a rock and then explode? That's a good question. There's only one way to find this out yeah they plan to throw these custard filled balloons and they mixed up some of the balloons in an apartment and decided to test them in a park throwing them at trees this do you want to know what the springer tabloid build uh headline this as oh something about terrorism i'm sure yeah so the springer tabloid build spun the weaponized dessert into a full bomb threat what if clowns got radicalized they

couldn't throw pies anymore clown isis clowns um on the basis of this inflated piece and bogus reporting, the paper commented on its inside pages, we shall know how to deal with these bombers. The majority of the German people feel understanding for the American struggle in Asia. What? The conspirators. Custard, it's the new WMDs.

Custard is getting slapped in the face of the balloon of custard is literally the same as getting napalmed wmc's weapons of mass custard uh wmds mass weapons of mass deliciousness everybody loves a good custard the conspirators were arrested only briefly since very soon they could be no denying that their explosives had consisted of nothing but custard, pudding, and curd cheese. Yeah, they're just trying to, it's just, you know, the

German version of food, not bombs. But it was a fire in a Brussels department store that would give the commune their next idea. 300 people died in an accidental fire in the Belgian department store that would give the commune their next idea. 300 people died in an accidental fire in the Belgian department store at Le Innovation

on the 22nd of May 1967. Oh man, this shouldn't give anybody ideas. The commune members saw the tragedy as a sort of poetic resemblance to the suffering of the North Vietnamese under the napalm bombs of the Americans and the burning of the department store as a symbolic

effigy of bourgeois capital they wrote they wrote a series of leaflets and distributed them at the free university the first leaflet was headlined new kinds of demonstration tied out for tried out for the first time in brussels the second leaflet bore the title Why Do You Burn, Consumer? For the first time in any big European city, a burning store full of burning people gives that crackling Vietnam feeling of being there and

burning too. Something previously This was an accident, I assume. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something previously unavailable here in Berlin. Sympathetic as we feel towards the pain of the bereaved in Brussels, yet being receptive to new ideas, we cannot help admiring the bold and unconventional character of the Brussels department store fire,

despite all the human tragedy involved. So, like, they're calling what, like, was an accidental electrical fire of some kind, like some kind of political triumph i'm so confused here so they then went even further in their third leaflet when the when will the department stores in of berlin burn it went on hither oh the yankees have been dying for berlin and vietnam we were sorry to see our the poor souls obliged to shed their Coca-Cola blood in the Vietnamese jungle. So we started by marching through empty streets with placards, throwing the occasional egg at America House,

and we would have liked to finish by seeing Hubert Horatio Humphrey die smothered in pudding. Our Belgian friends have at last found the knack of really involving the population and all the fun of Vietnam to set fire

to a department store 300 complacent citizens end their exciting lives and Brussels becomes Hanoi none of us need to shed

any more tears for the poor Vietnamese over our morning paper at breakfast now you can just go to the clothing department at Kha De Wey Hurti Woolworths Bilk or

Neckerman and light a discreet cigarette in the changing room. If there is a fire somewhere in the near future if the barracks happens to blow up if a stand happens to collapse in some stadium then please don't be surprised any more than you are surprised by the bombing of the city center of Hanoi. Brussels has given us the only answer.

Burn, warehouse, burn. Look, as ridiculous as this entire thing is, that thing is full of bangers. Coca-Cola blood, classic. Hoping that the vice president dies in a vat of pudding amazing yeah honestly they really popped off with that yeah do you know what the response to these leaflets were were they arrested yeah uh seven of the commune members were charged with incitement of criminal acts i mean yeah i look as as obviously the the freedom of speech is very important as is the freedom of press but like

when you're writing about how you should set things on fire and you know hypothetically kill hundreds of people because they're championing a supermarket or department store fire they killed 300 people like you shouldn't do that yeah so this is where things stop being kind of jokey well we had one episode so also in the summer of 1967 a visit from another

foreign dignitary would happen in Berlin and history would be changed irrevocably because in early well in mid 1967 the shah of iran reza palevi would visit the federal republic much to the outcry of the german left oh i can't think of anything horrible he was doing at the time smash cut to savak headquarters yeah so oh VAC headquarters. Yeah. So, oh, they're going to come up. Oh, god damn it. So, Ulrika Meinhof wrote

an open letter to Faradiba for Concrete. You tell us, the summer is very hot in Iran, and like most Persians, I went to the Persian Riviera on the Caspian Sea with my family. Like most Persians, you say? Aren't you exaggerating?

Most Persians are peasants with an annual income of less than $100. Most Persian women see every other child 50 out of 100 die of starvation, poverty and disease. And do most of those children who work 14 hours a day making rugs go to the Persian Riviera on the Caspian Sea in summer too? We do not want to insult you, but nor do we want to see the German public insulted by articles such as yours in Neue Review. So this is kind of the tone at the time. The preparations for the visit were reminiscent of the police state of the not so distant past. Large groups of students protested the Shah's arrival on the 2nd of June. Immediately upon his arrival at Schoenberg City Hall in that afternoon, protesters began to chant, throw bags of paint and push past security barriers.

The Iranian secret police immediately started beating the shit out of people. Yeah, that's what they're used to. While the German police just looked on, unmoved and passively watching while a foreign security force attacked german civilians it kind of reminds me like it was a couple years ago the turkish security service mit was doing that in dc uh like they just started beating the

ever-living shit out of protesters and nobody did anything to stop them that evening when the shah and his wife attended the opera, protesters threw bags of flour at him and then subsequently retreated to later regroup once the performance had included. Did they hit him? They landed close to the red carpet. I don't think they actually hit him.

Damn, boy should have stuck to the fucking custard. Yeah, should have. You got more splash damage with the custard. It's harder to get out of the clothes. Probably flies better, much more solid. Yeah. So upon their retreat, suddenly a number of ambulance drove up,

14 in all. The police who had stationed themselves in a line in front of the demonstrators took out truncheons. Some onlookers tried to get away from the barriers but were driven back. Then the police attacked, wielding their truncheons without giving the usual warning first. Many demonstrators collapsed. They were beaten, covered in blood.

A young housewife fell full length in the road under the blows and was carried out by the policeman and found her picture in the newspaper the next day with the caption to the effect that the brave police officers had saved her from a shower of stones flung by inhuman demonstrators Jesus Christ yeah so within a few minutes

the ambulances were full demonstrators ran away in a panic if the police would let them in the darkness the students could hardly make out which were the ununiformed police which were plainclothes men and which were agents of the shah one of the plainclothes men detective sergeant carl heinz couras aged 39 from department one of the political police he and his colleagues formed a snatch squad around 10 30 p.m these officers were near uh street 66 and 67 crum and strassa there was a line of policemen on one side and facing them by a last band of demonstrators shouting murders and

the demonstrators threw stones at them one of the officers thought he spotted the ringleader, a man with a moustache and a red shirt and bare sandaled feet. The officer made for him. Carl Hines Coras followed his colleague, seized the suspect and flung him to the ground. Uniformed men came to their aid. Demonstrators arrived to surround the policeman and there was a hand-to-hand fighting. The student who had been thrown to the ground tore himself free and tried to get away. The police gave chase, reached him and showered

him with blows. Carl Heinz Kuras was among those at the spot holding his 7.65mm pistol with the safety catch off. The muzzle was less than a half a meter away from the demonstrator's head, or that was how it looked to eyewitnesses. Suddenly, a shot rang out. The bullet hit the man above the right ear, entered his brain, and smashed his skull. One of the police officers heard the shot, turned, and saw Corras holding his gun. Are you crazy? Shooting around here, he shouted. And Corras just said, it just went off. shooting around here he shouted and chorus just said it just went off the dead man was benno osenberg 26 years old studying romance languages and literature a pacifist and an active member

of the protestant student community it was his first time he ever attended a demonstration christ well unfortunately cops seem to have never changed. Yeah, and also Heinz Kuras was likely a member or an agent of the Stasi. What? Yep. How the fuck does that come out of nowhere? It's like

there's been loads of inquiries since into the shooting and like papers that have been released, some of them have been redacted in the like 2010s suggest that he was actually like a east german agent i mean but would he i can think of nothing more agitate like that would be you know a source of agitation than a uniformed police officer of west Germany murdering a college student, uh,

during a, you know, vaguely left wing demonstration. However, I mean, this is where you tell me that, that Kuros gets away with it, but like,

I would say like why this would be like, you know, a kamikaze agitation run executing someone in the middle of the street. Like the cop is almost certainly going to be brought to justice right um we'll talk about that in part four god damn it fuck after the events of june 2nd that it propelled the student movement into further solidarity and contemplation of what was to be done to resist state violence and the oppression that had been on display that day. Students who had

already started reading in protest groups had begun to see simply civil unrest as insufficient forms of action and deemed more decisive and immediate acts of disruption. Of course, yep. I mean, violence begets violence.

Tale as old as time. On the 22nd of March 1968 Rainer Langhans And Fritz Tufel of Commu1 Were found not guilty of incitement Of arson The leaflets that they had distributed were deemed to be satire

But had already taken hold In the imagination of Berlin students They got away with it In Minecraft defense? Pretty much. There's a whole... So I will, as we are coming to the close of this episode,

I will say to people, there is a lot of like court cases and legal drama involved in this story. I really only, apart from the obvious one, I really only cover it in brief because I feel like you can get bogged down in it way too much. Law and order, special Mein, better Meinhof division. Thorwald Prohl, a Berlin student and the son of an architect, wrote a poem in his diary in reaction to the case when will the

brandenburg gates burn when will the berlin stores burn when will hamburg warehouses burn when will the writer of bamberg fall uh when will the sparrows of ulm twitter from their last holes when will the october fairgrounds of munich turn red i mean the answer that is like you mean again yeah so by this time prole was friends with gudrun ensling and andreas badder and uh one week after the arsonist's acquittal they visited commune one to announce that soon they would be waging their own war on the bourgeoisie and they solicited help from other commune members but nobody wanted to join so the guys guys we're gonna go do terrorism would you like to join us in our terrorism like i would immediately like this guy's a fucking agent like so the the three of them headed to

munich to visit bother's friend friend, Horst Sonlein. Together, they rented a Volkswagen and drove to Frankfurt, making a stop along the way to visit Gudrun's family in Bad Cannstatt. The car... What do you think was in the car? Bombs. I'm going to go with bombs. Yeah. The car was loaded with improvised incendiary explosives made out of plastic bottles petrol alarm clocks torch batteries and detonators all held together with plastic wrap and sellotape

all right you know you have to you have to kind of admire their gut their their stick-to-it-ness because this is before you could just look up on the internet how to build a bomb yeah so on tuesday the 2nd of april 1968 at about 5 30 a.m they reached frankfurt they were tired and set out to find a place to stay that afternoon they strolled through the city center taking in you know the sites you know the kind of lovely architecture and scoping out shopping centers um on the main street called the Zeal. Andreas Bader and Gudrun Ensling went into the Kaufhaus Schneider store, rode up to the furnishing department

on the third floor on the escalator and tried out, you know, a couple of beds they, you know, sat on them, lied on them, jumped on them, I don't know, wandered briefly around the other floors and left the store again. Slightly before closing time,

at around 6.30pm, they came back. The shop at this time was almost empty. The escalators had already stopped running and two late customers rushed hand in hand up the stairs. Their worn student-style clothing attracted attention. Some of the sales assistants watched in surprise as they passed. You know, they didn't seem like

the type to be shopping in this store. Man, these guys look like shit. The couple had a hold-all with them. When they felt they were unobserved,

they took an incendiary bomb out and left it on a shelving unit on the first floor in the ladies' clothing department. The second device was planted

in the furnishing department in a reproduction old german cupboard the time fuses were set for midnight at least they set them for a time where nobody should be there i'm looking i'm looking for small like brights of of positivity here yeah so just before the door the store closed the couple disappeared out into the street again a few minutes after the fire in the kaufhaus schneider began shortly before midnight the kaufhof store 2 was burning a member of the store staff was on his way to a group of decorators working the night shift on the fourth floor when he heard an explosion behind him turning around he saw a wall of flames reaching

the ceiling 5 or 7 meters away. The smoke was drifting towards him. He coughed his eyestream and he ran from the burning bedding department. Meanwhile the fire had broken out in the toys department too. The sprinkler system was automatically switched on and the firemen soon arrived.

Nobody was hurt and the insurance company bore the cost of 2800 and 2339 Nobody was hurt and the insurance company bore the cost of 2,802,339 Deutschmarks in the Käuferschneider and 390,865 in the Koffhof. Shortly before 10am, the Frankfurt police received a definitive tip-off, leading them to the arsonists. A few minutes later, Bauder, Ensling, and the other two were arrested. They and the car were searched.

The police officers found a screw in Gudrun Essling's handbag, which was a duplicate of a screw on one of the incendiary bombs. In the car, they found parts of clocks, a hot bulb section of a battery-powered detonator, bits of sticky tape that were wrapped around the bombs and other material suitable for the construction

of the explosive device. Guys you want to come search my car? I left all of the evidence in here for you. All four of them, true to their word in Commune 1 had started their own war on the bourgeois state and western imperialism and that morning as the

four of them sat in the back of a police van this will begin the journey that would lead to the eventual end of the baderminehoff group aka the red army faction let's see you all in part two man like these guys kind of suck at being criminals. They get a lot better at it, trust me. Oh, well, yeah, that does tend to happen when you get away with it, I suppose. But, I mean, I don't know what I expected from, again, I don't know anything about the Red Army faction. And I would say I would expect these missteps of a bunch of kids radicalizing themselves. I mean, and when you're on a commune like i know i i kind of sort of called it a cult because it kind of sounds like one um like they are you know in a self

radicalization like orboros you know they're separate from their families they're separate from any friends that aren't part of the commune i would assume and as one of them gets more radicalized they radicalize the other ones you know it is effectively a cult yeah like at this stage andreas badder is like a pretty seasoned like petty criminal like he like pickpocketing thieving motorbike theft car theft like he's he's already like pretty good at all of these things um even only at you know he's in his early 20s but you know this really this moment really solidifies okay they are willing to go further than anyone else before they're willing to you know put their money where their mouth is and that's what we're going to talk about in part two and three oh boy i am going to assume that this does not get worse i'm going to be proven wrong yes um and yeah that's the end of part one

awesome tom thank you uh it's always nice to occasionally take the back seat and be the one being surprised and angered by whatever topic we're talking about. Yeah, like the thing, like I've spent so long working on this series and it's kind of at points you will see a lot of sense in some of the stuff they're doing. you will see a lot of sense in some of the stuff they're doing but it is a lot of it is down to what i will call in part two the andrea's badder mind magic i mean that is not uncommon i mean most terror groups have like legitimate grievances at the base of everything before things quickly fly off the rails and you know some people might get mad we're using the term terrorism even but like definition wise they are absolutely terrorists um however like no matter how legitimate the grievances start as there's always a like a branching off point where someone just takes them into an absolutely wild direction yeah 100 100 well uh as we are drawing this episode to the close uh if you're new to the

show my name is tom i am one of the co-hosts of the show joe is usually the host and go back and listen to the back catalog if you want to hear more of me obviously listen to more of this show and also listen to my show beneath Beneath the Skin. It's about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. Me and Mike always talk about all wonderful history connected to tattooing and I'm going to stop talking now because my throat is really sore.

And I'm Joe. This is the only show that I host most of the time and if you like what we do here, consider supporting us on Patreon. You make everything we do here possible. You get bonus episodes, Discord access, episodes before everybody else.

And leave us a review on where it is to listen to podcasts. And if you enjoy reading, consider checking out my books, both about the war in Afghanistan and science fiction. And Tom, until next time,

something to do with Coca-Cola blood. I love that so much.