In the Crosshairs: Germany and the RAF

It is the story of young Germans who grew up in the post-war fog of the 1950s, who absorbed the spirit of optimism of the 1960s and who, in the 1970s, lived out to the bitter end the spirit of resistance, violent fantasies, lust for power, fear of the future and lust for life that was buzzing around in the heads of the 1968ers. The terrorists around Meinhof and Baader felt themselves to be the military executors of a mass movement that had begun as a merry uprising against the authoritarian state and as a moral outcry against the American Vietnam War and the suppression of German war crimes. There were two types of terrorists in the RAF, the moralists and the anarchists: the one gave themselves license to kill out of a self-destructive moralism; the other acted out of deep hatred for the state, the police, and any kind of authority. Meinhof stands for the one, Baader for the other. This film documents their slow descent into the underground.

Germany in the fall of 1977. Hanns-Martin Schleyer is dead. "Urban guerrilla aims to suspend the state's apparatus of rule ... to put the state apparatus of rule ... out of action, to destroy the myth of the omnipresence of the system and its invulnerability." This is what the RAF had written in its "Concept of Urban Guerrilla." The result after seven years of underground struggle was frightening: 28 people died in attacks or gun battles, 17 members of the "urban guerrillas" were killed. Two completely uninvolved people were accidentally shot by the police during manhunts. 47 dead - 47 names - 47 fates: Jürgen Ponto, Siegfried Buback, Hans-Martin Schleyer ... - Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin ... The RAF had become a monster, unpredictable and deadly.

In everyday life, the only reminders of terrorists are the wanted posters in offices and authorities. The assassinations by the RAF and the June 2 Movement in the so-called "German Autumn" 20 years ago seem to be a thing of the past. But the victims of that time had families - and so did the perpetrators. For these relatives, what changed their lives forever, often from one day to the next, never becomes "history." Nothing has softened the helpless anger at the perpetrators, who instead of the death penalty, were sentenced to "golden cage". But even the perpetrators had or have relatives - Wienke Zitzlaff, now a retired school principal, talks about her younger sister Ulrike Meinhof. For the families on the victims' side, any political discussion sounds cynical. They did not lose their common father, husband or brother as "representatives of the system"; for them, common life was torn down by political murder, they themselves were thrown off track for decades.

Their faces could be seen on countless wanted posters. The terrorists Susanne Albrecht, Silke Maier-Witt, Inge Viett and others were feverishly searched for, while only a few kilometers away they were leading a second life that could not have been more modest and inconspicuous. Eight former RAF terrorists had become well-behaved GDR citizens. The Stasi provided them with a new identity and thus protected them from the grasp of the FRG. "It was a culture shock," recalls Ralf Friedrich, for example, on his first day of work as a forklift driver at the Schwedt paper factory. The self-proclaimed guerrilla fighters found it difficult to transform themselves into inconspicuous comrades in the "workers' and farmers' state. In the early summer of 1990 - after the fall of the Wall - they were arrested.

In 1972, Heinrich Böll spoke of the absurd war of six terrorists against 60 million Germans. Although the FRG as a state was at no time threatened by RAF terrorism, a dull feeling of fear and terror arose in the public. However, the public did not come into "contact" with the RAF through their own experiences, but exclusively through the mass media. The fifth part of the ARD series traces the development of this mass hysteria. Berlin in the 1960s: students took to the streets against the "mustiness under the robes"; the Springer press countered with "chaotic student hordes"; the CSU, FDP and SPD condemned the APO; Strauß and Geisler polarized against left-wing terrorism; Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Günter Wallraff and many others were publicly defamed as RAF sympathizers. Political scientist Iring Fetscher believes that the "pathological overreaction of part of the press virtually encouraged terrorism. The RAF needed publicity to draw attention to itself.