Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang

The Baader-Meinhof Gang. Throughout the 1970s, there was no more feared group of terrorists. On the surface, they were militant revolutionaries. But in reality they were 'Hitler's Children' - both in the sense that most of them were born during the Nazi regime, and in the sense that they were fiercely opposed to individual freedom and liberal democracy. In this ground-breaking book, Jillian Becker examines the roots of the Gang. The terrorists in the Federal Republic of Germany came out of the pacifist ‘new left’ student protest movement of the late 1960s. Few in number, almost all of them came from prosperous, educated families. Unaware how closely they resembled their Nazi predecessors, they described themselves as ‘anti-fascist’. ‘Fascism’, they claimed, lay just under the surface of liberal democracy and would be called into the open by the use of terrorist violence. In the name of ‘peace’, ‘national liberation’, ‘anti-imperialism’, and ‘anti-capitalism’, they killed Germans, Americans, Jews and others with bullets and bombs. Detailed biographical portraits, especially of Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, reveal how they laid waste their own lives, and drove themselves furiously to their own destruction. Praise for Hitler's Children: ''An important and highly readable book, thoroughly researched and written with the pace and excitement of a crime thriller' - TLS 'A serious and readable study of events which few people in Britain have seriously tried to understand' - The Observer 'Superbly researched . . . Mrs Becker has performed a great service with this book' - Sunday Telegraph Read more