Ulrike Meinhof was a mother of two twin girls, a wife, a journalist, a communist activist, and a criminal. She was found hanging from the window of her prison cell in 1976, and her death was officially deemed a suicide.
00:00:00.000She was 41 years old, a mother of two twin girls, and the West German guards had just
00:00:17.900found her hanging from the window of her prison cell.
00:00:21.560The 1976 death of one of the most notorious leftists, agitators, and terrorists in Germany
00:00:30.140was officially deemed a suicide. Some called the group she ran the Badr-Meinhof Gang,
00:00:38.520though she personally preferred the name Red Army Faction. Ulrich Meinhof looked the part
00:00:45.900of an anarcho-communist gangster, and the pictures that we have of her that survive today
00:00:51.500She has an open, honest, plain face, staring directly and immodestly at the camera. She
00:00:57.900often smokes a cigarette wearing stylish, if simplistic, clothing. Her hair is usually
00:01:02.580unapologetically short, and she's typically in men's trousers, flouting what was still
00:01:07.200a strong social convention in Germany during the 60s and 70s. Her expression is strong,
00:01:12.120fierce, unapologetic. Defiance on the way to the gallows.
00:01:17.380So who was Ulrich Meinhof? Well, believe it or not, she had been a left-wing journalist.
00:01:25.720A left-wing journalist who was brought up in a family of academics, strong Protestant background,
00:01:32.240family opposed to the Nazis, deeply opposed to the Nazis. Yet she joined a socialist group,
00:01:39.200even in West Germany, back in the 1950s, was completely against them. However, the Communist
00:01:47.980Party in West Germany had been banned, but by 1959, Ulrich Meinhof had been a member.
00:01:55.280Interestingly enough, and this comes up as a potential question as to her behavior later,
00:02:01.420in 1960, Ulrich Meinhof received surgery for a brain tumor. And she received a silver clamp in her
00:02:13.240skull. And so many people believe that her later behavior and her membership in a communist terrorist
00:02:26.700organization, leaving behind two twin girls, going on to perform acts of violence, acts of murder,
00:02:37.220robberies, terrorism, that all of this, potentially this behavior could have been because
00:02:45.600that brain tumor, that brain tumor, and that surgery. So she works, she takes a job with a leftist
00:02:52.560newspaper, Concrete. And in 1941, or excuse me, 1961, she ends up marrying the co-founder of that paper.
00:03:00.180And they have their two twin girls, Regine and Bettina. Today, by the way, Bettina is still around.
00:03:08.780She is herself a journalist and a researcher on anarchist terrorism and communist violence and
00:03:15.520is unabashedly critical of her own mother and her own mother's agenda and methods. So the Red Army
00:03:21.500faction, Ulrich joins probably a few years after it first gets started because she was somebody who early
00:03:32.960on was simply a fellow traveler. She wasn't necessarily a member, she was a supporter and was
00:03:39.920writing about them positively for her newspaper. However, as more and more actions, revolutionary
00:03:50.080attacks took place, she got divorced. Her own colleague, Rudy Deutsch, survived an assassination attempt.
00:04:00.180And now, now, the leader of the Badr-Meinhof gang, aka the Red Army faction, ends up getting
00:04:10.200imprisoned. Listen to this. He was permitted to conduct an interview with a young and up-and-coming
00:04:16.780journalist, Ulrich Meinhof herself. Yet instead of an interview, Andreas Badr was sprung from jail
00:04:25.360in one of the most daring and dramatic episodes in their history. During the jailbreak, a librarian
00:04:31.380was shot and killed by one member of the Red Army faction. And in the chaos that followed, Ulrich,
00:04:37.380who had been sent there to interview him, makes a split second decision to join the group and go
00:04:44.300underground with them. Originally, she just wanted to work with them and do her writings and describe
00:04:50.000them. No. She makes the decision to leave her life behind, leave her daughters behind. She's already
00:04:56.160divorced her husband and to fully join the Red Army faction. Where does she end up? Well, just like they
00:05:04.440do today, anarchists travel to the Middle East to receive training in guerrilla tactics, terrorism,
00:05:10.520and she ends up joining and going to the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They then,
00:05:17.960with their Jordanian handlers, clash over food and living quarters and creature comforts, you know,
00:05:23.760kind of similar to the millennial teenagers that went over to the PKK. Now, she becomes estranged from
00:05:29.840her children, those daughters, the ones that are still around today. But in one incident,
00:05:36.120she returns to Germany and attempts to kidnap her own daughters and have them brought to the Middle
00:05:45.260East and trained and indoctrinated by terrorists in order for them to come up and join in the
00:05:52.880revolution with her. However, this attempt was thwarted in Sicily. They were found out and the girls
00:05:58.740were returned to her father. In Germany, Meinhof, she was a wanted woman. With a reward on her
00:06:06.000head of no less than 850,000 Deutschmarks. Now, this group, the Red Army Faction, and we'll talk more
00:06:15.980about this as we go through, assassinations, car bombs, bank robberies, many of which were funded
00:06:25.660and financed and armed by the KGB themselves. That this was Red Army directed, trained, and funded
00:06:36.980activity that was going on in West Germany during the Cold War. And we're not talking about a long,
00:06:44.680long time ago here. This was not the 1930s. This was actual communist paramilitary operations that were
00:06:53.860going on in Western Germany. And why was this being done? Because they were looking to destabilize
00:06:59.840West Germany and possibly to build up or form public opinion for communists there as well. This is in
00:07:07.720the midst of the Cold War. So what happens to Ulrich Meinhof? What happens to the Red Army Faction?
00:07:17.260What attacks did they play? We're going to talk about that. And we're also going to talk about the
00:07:24.340way that they directly targeted U.S. forces and American troops stationed in West Germany,
00:07:31.960stationed in Stuttgart that had been there since the end of World War II.
00:07:37.480And you have to look at it from a psychological angle as well.
00:07:40.560What drives? Was it really the brain tumor? Or was it a desire for access, action, and revolution
00:07:50.220that drove this young woman to be involved in a domestic terrorist communist plot?
00:07:59.660So people need to understand that the Red Army was no joke. This was not the Antifa of today that runs
00:08:05.500around and attacks businesses for pleasure and gets off on threatening people in their homes.
00:08:12.340This was a serious terrorist organization. On the 11th of May in 1972, the Red Army Faction placed three
00:08:21.300pipe bombs at the United States Army headquarters in Frankfurt. This bombing resulted in the death of a
00:08:27.780U.S. officer and the injury of 13 people. There was another one in Hamburg. Members of the Red Army
00:08:34.560faction, six bombs at a publishing house. Only three of the five bombs exploded, but 36 people
00:08:43.160were injured. Then again, May of 1972, just two weeks after, a car bomb that killed three soldiers
00:08:50.640and injured five more right at the intelligence headquarters at Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg.
00:08:55.940In 1974, the group murdered Gunther von Dreckmann, the president of Germany's Superior Court of Justice.
00:09:05.620So again and again, this organization committed horrific murders, horrific killings. 1975, the Red Army
00:09:15.840Faction seized the West German Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden. They took hostages. They set the building to explode.
00:09:22.940They demanded the release of their own imprisoned members. Remember, this is before Ulrich Meinhof is
00:09:29.600still in prison at this point. The government, of course, refused to request the request. The Red Army
00:09:35.460Faction murders two of the hostages. Then one of the bombs goes off inadvertently. Several other members
00:09:43.780finally surrender. In 1975, it was actually reported, because people didn't know what was going on, it was
00:09:54.720reported that the Red Army Faction tried to steal mustard gas from a joint facility in West Germany.
00:10:01.260However, it turns out that it wasn't them. They merely misplaced.
00:10:04.820But then in 1977, the German autumn took place. This is after Ulrich has died, one year later, possibly even
00:10:18.540in retaliation for her death in prison, which of course had been ruled a suicide, but many questions still
00:10:25.480remained. The head of Dredsden Bank was shot and killed in front of his house in Germany. It was a botched
00:10:34.460kidnapping. But his own family was involved in terms of this. You had government informants, you had
00:10:44.420hostages, prisoners. Again and again in German autumn, these events keep taking place. An industrial
00:10:55.320list was kidnapped. The president of the German Employers Association, the Federation of German
00:11:02.660Industries. Then of course, the hijacking. Because keep in mind, so people have to go back in terms of
00:11:13.900this, that the PLO also frequently targeted Germany. And we talked before about how the PLO had provided
00:11:22.180some of the early training to the Red Army faction. Of course, the PLO conducted what? The Munich Massacre
00:11:28.400in 1972 at the Summer Olympics where? In Munich, West Germany. What was the Munich Massacre? Eight members
00:11:37.040of Black September infiltrated the Olympic Village and murdered two Israeli Olympic team members and took
00:11:44.660the other nine hostage. Did they receive support on the Red Army faction? What do you think? So you have to
00:11:53.780understand that these were communist groups working with the Palestinians inside Germany, provided that
00:11:58.980fertile ground for all of this to take place. And in fact, at one point in the Munich Massacre, prior to the
00:12:09.540Munich Massacre, this is when some of the people that were asked to be released included the founders of the
00:12:17.040Red Army faction, Andreas Bader and Ulreich Meinhof. So they're involved in the Munich Massacre right there.
00:12:24.260Then you have the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181. Again, the popular front for the liberation of Palestine.
00:12:31.900This was conducted in that same German autumn of 1977. Conducted in October. Eighty-six passengers.
00:12:43.580Finally, the West German counterterrorism group, backed by the Somalis, stormed the aircraft where? Mogadishu, Somalia.
00:12:51.460During the Cold War, the Red Army faction continued attacks, continued terrorism, all the way up there. By the way, this inspires, this is the group in Die Hard, right? This is exactly what they're based on, was the Red Army faction. So when you're thinking of Hans Gruber, and you're having the debate on whether or not it's a Christmas movie, I personally don't think it is,
00:13:17.880that these guys are based on the Red Army faction. There would be no Nakatomi Plaza and no John McClane if not for the Red Army faction.
00:13:29.900And so this group, even after the death of Ulreich, even after the death of all the original founders, not only does it continue throughout the 1970s, it continues throughout the 1980s.
00:13:47.260There's even a third generation of the Red Army faction that goes all the way up to 1998, potentially even 99. They're linked to some robberies.
00:14:01.680Ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union, this group is still around. Now, there are some movies that are made about this, but they're like made for TV movies in Germany.
00:14:12.600They've never come out in the United States. They've never been released. There's no English language movies about this. And with the exception of Die Hard, which you wouldn't know unless you understood the entire background of the context.
00:14:25.760So when, you know, when people want to come to me and say, is Die Hard a movie, is it a Christmas movie or an anti-Christmas movie, or excuse me, a Christmas movie or just an action movie, I say, no, it's an anti-communist movie.
00:14:39.200That's what it is. You need to actually understand the underpinnings of what the group that Hans Gruber is a member of is supposed to be,
00:14:48.720why they're conducting these actions, and the idea that they're tied in real life to the USSR and international communism.
00:14:57.760I feel like the world was a little bit better, a little bit easier to understand when things were black and white, or should we say blue and red,
00:15:03.940because we knew who the enemy was, and we were more than willing to target them and say who they were.
00:15:11.400But you don't get that today. Today you get lied about.
00:15:14.300So this group, all the way up through the 80s, all the way up through the 90s, conducting these attacks.
00:15:20.280In Germany they're known about, and certainly in West Germany they're known about.
00:15:23.380But in the United States, you don't hear very much about the story of Ulreich Meinhof.
00:15:29.760When we come back in our very last segment, I want to go back to her.
00:15:33.540I want to go back to the trial and understand, in her own words,
00:15:38.620and I will tell you, the things that she said, the reasons behind her actions,
00:15:45.080what happened to her, the sentencing, the investigation, and her death,
00:15:52.920very suspicious death, in prison, behind bars.