Baader-Meinhof gang

This isn't the phenomenon that I learned about last summer. The Baader-Meinhof gang, or the Red Army Faction as it was later known, was comprised of middle-class young people in the 1960s and '70s who rebeled against West German capitalism.

Andreas Baader, dismayed at a 1967 police slaying of an activist, detonated homemade bombs in two Frankfurt department stores. After he was imprisoned, he escaped and teamed up with a left-wing journalist named Ulrike Meinhof (a woman). They spent the next two years robbing banks and bombing buildings.

In 1972 the duo was caught and arrested. The trial, which started in 1975, was the longest and most expensive in German history. A second wave of young militants vowed to release their heroes. The ensuing battles were among the most publicized and bloodiest in the country. During the course of the trial Meinhof was found in her cell hanging from a rope made of towels. The obligatory conspiracy theories followed. A year later Baader and two cohorts were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

1977 proved to be the most trying year. Among the killed were the chief public prosecutor and the head of the Dresdner bank. Hanns Martin Schleyer, head of the German Association of Employers and a former Nazi party member, was abducted in September. This kicked off a series of events knows as the German Autumn.

Schleyer's captors were negotiating with authorities for the release of Baader (and nine others) in exchange for Schleyer. Even as this was happening, on October 13, Arab sympathizers hijacked a plane full of German tourists on their way to Frankfurt from Majorca, Spain. The plane flew over parts of the Middle East and the Mediterrenean Sea before landing in Mogadishu, Somalia. The hijackers shot the captain dead but German elite commandos killed three of the criminals and freed the hostages.

As news of this broke, Baader and two of his friends committed suicide in prison. The next day Schleyer's kidnappers announced that he was dead. On April 20, 1998, upon seeing that no one gave a damn about them anymore, the Baader-Meinhof gang announced its dissolution.

So why is the completely unrelated phenomenon named after the group? A reader of a Minnesota newspaper coined the term when he first heard about the terrorist group and then heard it again a while later from a different source.