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The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex)
In 1967, a visit by the Shah of Iran to West Berlin leads to a clash between the West German student movement and German police. In the chaos, unarmed protestor Benno Ohnesorg is fatally shot by policeman Karl-Heinz Kurras, outraging the West German public, including left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof, who claims in a televised debate that West Germany is a fascist police state. Inspired by Meinhof's rhetoric, radical communists Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader mastermind the Frankfurt department store firebombings of 1968. While covering their trial, Meinhof is moved by the radicals' commitment and befriends Ensslin during a prison interview before leaving her husband for radical-linked journalist Peter Homann. Left-wing activist Rudi Dutschke is injured in an assassination attempt by neo-nazi Josef Bachmann, further radicalizing the Left.
Ensslin and Baader are released pending an appeal and recruit youths, including Astrid Proll and Peter-Jurgen Boock, to their cause. After spending some time abroad, Baader, Ensslin, and Proll move in with Meinhof, who begins advocating violent action but does not wish to leave her two children. When Baader is arrested again, Meinhof arranges an "interview" off prison grounds, which Ensslin and the others use to break him out; though the plan called for Meinhof to appear innocent and stay behind, she flees with the radicals, incriminating herself. Meinhof sends her children to Sicily and the group receives guerilla training from Fatah in Jordan. Homann, overhearing the others asking Fatah to kill him and Meinhof planning to recruit her children as suicide bombers, leaves the group and arranges for his colleague Stefan Aust to return Meinhof's children to their father.
The radicals, now calling themselves the Red Army Faction (RAF), return to Germany and begin robbing banks. In response, German Federal Police chief Horst Herold orders all municipal police to be put under federal command for one day. During that day, RAF member Petra Schelm is pursued by police and killed in a shootout; viewing her death as murder rather than resisting arrest, Baader and Ensslin overrule Meinhof's objections and launch a deadly bombing campaign against police stations and United States military bases. However, under Herold's command, the police respond in force to the RAF's activities and many members, including Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Holger Meins, are arrested and imprisoned. They stage a hunger strike in separate prisons that results in Meins' death, while the authorities move Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Jan-Carl Raspe to Stammheim Prison, where they work on their defense for their trial and smuggle orders outside. In 1975, a group of younger RAF recruits acting on these orders seize the West German embassy in Stockholm, where they kill two hostages and threaten to blow up the embassy if the prisoners are not released, but their bombs accidentally detonate, wounding everyone inside and killing RAF members Ulrich Wessel and Siegfried Hausner. The prisoners are appalled by the poor execution of their orders. Meinhof, suffering from depression and remorse over the deaths caused by the RAF's bombings, is subjected to sadistic emotional abuse by Baader and Ensslin, leading her to hang herself; the others falsely claim she was killed by the government.
Upon completing her sentence in 1977, Brigitte Mohnhaupt takes over command of the RAF and organizes the assassination of Attorney General Siegfried Buback as revenge for Meins and Meinhof's "murders". Mohnhaupt, Christian Klar, and Susanne Albrecht also attempt to kidnap Dresdner Bank president Jürgen Ponto, but they kill him when he fights back. Aware the imprisoned RAF members ordered both murders, the authorities place them in solitary confinement, but Ensslin and Baader obtain radios to continue smuggling orders. Launching a new campaign of terror, Mohnhaupt abducts industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer while the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacks Lufthansa Flight 181, again with the goal of securing the prisoners' release, but the West German government refuses to negotiate for Schleyer, while the PFLP hijackers are defeated by GSG 9. Baader and Ensslin tauntingly warn a negotiator and a prison chaplain respectively that the violence will continue; however, the latter also confides that she fears she will be killed soon.
The next morning, Baader and Raspe are found dead from gunshot wounds next to smuggled handguns, while Ensslin is found having been hung from her cell's barred window; Irmgard Möller is also found stabbed four times in the chest, but she survives. The news devastates the RAF, who insist they were murdered, but Mohnhaupt explains that they, like Meinhof, were "in control of the outcome until the very end". The RAF then murders Schleyer, signifying the continuation of RAF terrorism past the original members.