Germany's RAF terror revisited

BERLIN, Oct. 2 (UPI) -- The Baader-Meinhof gang that caused havoc in 1970s Germany with its brutal terror campaign is the star of one of Germany's biggest movie productions ever.

The "Baader-Meinhof Complex," based upon a book by Stefan Aust, former editor in chief of the German magazine Der Spiegel, opened last week and aims to show Germans how the far-left terror group Red Army Faction "really was."

The 150-minute film is not a documentary, however, but a Hollywood-style action movie detailing a decade of terror -- from the RAF's launch, sparked by the killing of a student in the late 1960s, to the suicides of the gang's key members (Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof) in a high-security prison in Stammheim, near Stuttgart, in 1977.

Victims' family members and state officials have harshly criticized the film, which is replete with violence, for elevating the RAF terrorists to Bonny and Clyde-style movie stars.

Bettina Roehl, Meinhof's daughter, wrote in a blog, "The Baader-Meinhof Complex is the worst-case scenario -- it would not be possible to top its hero worship."

When the machismo ringleader Baader, played by hugely popular German actor Moritz Bleibtreu, drives through Frankfurt, firing his gun into the night sky, the car stereo blaring The Who's "My Generation," he comes pretty close to the Marlon Brando image he has always tried to portray.

Critics say the film, which includes the entire creme de la creme of German actors, follows a selective reality: Baader, it surfaced, suffered from a speech disorder that Bleibtreu didn't include in his acting. In a TV show, he argued that the disorder would have made the film unfittingly comical. What he didn't say was that it would have made Baader look a lot less cool.

Michael Buback, the son of Germany's chief prosecutor Siegfried Buback, who was gunned down by the RAF in 1977, complained that victims' families were kept in the dark over what they would have to relive in seeing the film: Buback, in his case, had to watch how a pair of terrorists on a motorcycle empty their Heckler & Koch machine guns into the bodies of his father and his bodyguards.

Yet these same gruesome scenes have also been praised: They show the RAF's 34 cold-blooded murders how they really were, down to the number of bullets fired, the camera shooting from the angle of the victims.

Moviegoers will see U.S. soldiers deprived of extremities after bombing attacks on U.S. military facilities in Frankfurt and Heidelberg (the RAF intended to protest the Vietnam War), and they will look into the terrified face of Hanns Martin Schleyer, the industry official who was kidnapped and executed by RAF terrorists trying to free their leaders from Stammheim prison.

They also can see some fine acting: Martina Gedeck, who starred in Germany's last Oscar hit, "The Lives of Others," is impressive as Ulrike Meinhof, the star journalist turned extremist. The real star emerging from the film, however, is the young Johanna Wokalek, with her powerful performance as Gudrun Ensslin, Baader's lover, who experts say was the fiercest of them all. That Ensslin was a breathtakingly attractive woman only underscores the RAF's post-terror chic that continues today, with "Prada Meinhof" T-shirts and accessories sporting the gang's infamous Heckler & Koch machine-gun logo.

The film has been nominated as Germany's entry for the foreign language Oscar, and it is the latest in a series that deals with the country's 20th-century past. Apart from "The Lives of Others," another huge German hit film was "The Downfall," about Hitler's final days hiding in a bunker in Berlin.

Yet it seems it is the RAF that still haunts Germans: A debate last year over whether to pardon some of its members still in prison got very emotional.

President Horst Koehler had to decide whether to grant clemency to Christian Klar, who was a key figure in the killings of Buback, Schleyer and Juergen Ponto, the Deutsche Bank chief who was murdered in his home. After significant pressure from victims' families and the conservatives, he decided not to do so.

Klar was also instrumental in the final grand coup of the German Autumn, as Germany's biggest security crisis since World War II is called: Together with a Palestinian group, the RAF in September 1977 hijacked a German Lufthansa passenger plane in order to blackmail the government into releasing Baader, Ensslin and nine other terrorists from prison.

When the plane landed in Mogadishu, Somalia, the German government in a high-risk mission sent an elite unit of the German federal police, the GSG9, to storm the aircraft. All four hijackers were shot; three of them died on the spot. Not one passenger was seriously hurt.

The remaining terrorists in prison, hearing of the failed kidnapping, committed suicide. It was the beginning of the end for the RAF.