Andreas Baader
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Image:Andreas baader.JPG Andreas Baader (May 6, 1943 – October 18, 1977) was the first leader of the German revolutionary organization Red Army Faction, commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang.
Born in Munich, Baader was a high school dropout and petty criminal before his RAF involvement, and was one of the few members of the terrorist movement who did not attend a university.
In 1968, Baader and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin were convicted of the arson bombing of a department store in Frankfurt, Germany. Two years later he escaped from custody, aided by journalist Ulrike Meinhof, giving rise to the term Baader-Meinhof Group.
Baader, Meinhof and other gang members were expelled from a Fedayeen training camp in Jordan in 1970.
From 1970 to 1972, Baader robbed banks and bombed buildings.
On June 1, 1972, he and fellow RAF members Jan-Carl Raspe and Holger Meins were apprehended in a lengthy shootout in Frankfurt.
Baader was then convicted in what was the longest and most expensive trial in German history.
To pressure German authorities into releasing Baader and other imprisoned members, on September 5, 1977, the RAF abducted then German employers' association president and former SS officer Hanns Martin Schleyer. When the authorities refused to comply with their demands, the RAF tried to exert additional pressure by hijacking the Lufthansa plane Landshut. On October 18 1977, the day after the GSG 9 raided Landshut in Mogadishu, Somalia, and ended the hijacking, Andreas Baader died in his prison cell from a gunshot wound. The same day, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were also found dead in their prison cells at Stammheim. RAF member Irmgard Möller was found wounded in her cell after supposedly stabbing herself in the chest, but survived. Though all official inquiries on the matter concluded that Baader and his two accomplices committed suicide, sympathizers and Irmgard Möller persist that the deaths had been extrajudicial executions.
In 2002, director Christopher Roth released a film about Baader titled Baader.
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