The Baader-Meinhof gang

What kind of gang was it?

A violent, leftist collective consisting of some 60 people with roots in the revolutionary student movement that swept Europe and the US in 1967-8. Its legacy of self-styled "armed resistance" - assassinations, kidnaps and bombings of the German establishment - has been argued over ever since. The Red Army Faction (RAF), as it formally called itself, was founded in 1970 by Andreas Baader, his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin (pictured) and Ulrike Meinhof, a left-wing journalist. It started by burning down department stores, then moved on to full-scale terrorism. In ever more brutal attacks, the group killed a total of 34 people, mainly bankers, government officials, their chauffeurs and bodyguards. Thirteen gang members also died. Baader, Meinhof and Ensslin, were arrested in 1972 and prosecuted in 1975. Meinhof killed herself during the gang's three-year, chaotic trial.

And did that put an end to the violence?

No. With the leaders locked in a specially-built prison wing, a second wave of RAF militants launched a campaign of violence to force their release. For a few months in 1977, in what is known as the 'German Autumn', the gang posed the most serious internal threat to Germany since WWII. They murdered the chief federal prosecutor, kidnapped the country's leading industrialist, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, and, with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, hijacked a Lufthansa airliner, flying the plane to Somalia and demanding the release of their comrades. When news broke that German commandos had stormed the jet, killing three hijackers and freeing the hostages, Baader, Ensslin and another gang member committed suicide. The next day, Schleyer was shot in a forest on the Dutch border - his body was found in the boot of a car in Mulhouse - and a letter was sent to the French paper, Liberation: "After 43 days we have ended Hanns-Martin Schleyer's pitiful and corrupt existence... His death is meaningless to our pain and our rage."

And what were they so enraged about?

Like Italy's Red Brigades and other 'revolutionary' groups of the late 1960s, Baader-Meinhof railed against what it saw as capitalist authoritarianism, best exemplified by the US government and its invasion of Vietnam. In Germany, that rage was mainly directed against the country's failure to exorcise its Nazi past: in 1966, for instance, Kurt Kiesinger, an ex-Nazi Party member, became West German chancellor. By contrast, left-wing radicalism was suppressed and the Communist Party banned. The RAF's founding myth was the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg, a bystander killed by police in 1967 at a mass student protest against the Shah of Iran, who was visiting Berlin. "They'll kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're up against. This is the Auschwitz generation," said Ensslin. "We must arm ourselves!" In 1970, several members of the group went to the Middle East to be trained by the PFLP.

What does the film aim to do?

Like two previous German films, The Lives of Others and Downfall, The Baader Meinhof Complex, which opens in the UK on 14 November, is an attempt to demystify a traumatic period in German history. "We tried in this film to show what the RAF really were," says Stefan Aust, former editor of Der Spiegel, on whose bestselling book the film is based. "They felt themselves being revolutionary [but] in the end it was a group of people killing others and in the end themselves."

Then why is it so controversial?

Many have condemned it for its exciting, Bonnie-and-Clyde depiction of the gang members. The widow of Jurgen Ponto, a banker killed by the group, has returned the Federal Cross of Merit, Germany's highest civilian honour, in protest. Bettina Rohl, the daughter of Ulrike Meinhof, has slated it for its "hero worship". This movie, says the film critic for Berliner Zeitung, has given Andreas Baader the cult status he always craved: "Posthumously he has become the hero of a real action film."

But what could be considered chic about these killers?

Baader was the handsome, dissolute son of a history professor; Ensslin the daughter of a respected vicar; and Meinhof a pacifist gone AWOL: a shy journalist who forsook her children for terrorism. The gang drove Mercedes and BMWs, dubbed 'Baader-Meinhof Wagons'. At their most fashionable, the group had a broad network of sympathisers: radical, usually bourgeois, Germans who saw them as leather-jacketed rebels enacting their own frustrations. One in four West Germans under thirty felt "a certain sympathy" with them. Later, the suicides of Baader and Ennslin made them martyrs to hard-core leftists, some of whom still insist they were murdered. Even now, their mystique endures: you can buy RAF T-shirts with the group's machine-gun logo; a few years ago a fashion designer adopted the slogan "Prada-Meinhof". In 2002, the ICA had a month of shows and talks called 'Red Army Friction'. They belong, albeit awkwardly, wrote the journalist and historian Neal Ascherson, to an historic German "tradition of doomed struggle, fighting to the end in order to leave a message for the future".

What effect did the RAF have on German politics?

Most historians agree that all it achieved was to make West Germany a more paranoid, repressive place than before. In the security clampdown, the BKA (the German equivalent of the FBI) became a hugely powerful institution and hasty laws banned all so-called 'radicals' from public service. Peaceful leftwing groups that had been inspired to join mainstream politics were weakened by the group's example. And if the Baader-Meinhof gang wanted to provoke a violent response from the state that would encourage more 'revolutionaries' to take up arms, that failed, too. Most Germans welcomed the strong response of the state and the end of the violence. "It was really a threat to the stability of this country," says Aust. "And actually it was the only threat after the War that this country ever had from the inside."

Where are they now?

Although the RAF did not formally disband until 1998, it was hugely discredited after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the group was shown to have been supported by the East German Stasi. Its last attack was the bombing of a prison in 1993, in which no one was seriously injured. Some of its members remain in jail; others have attempted to lead quiet, post-terrorist lives. Astrid Proll, for instance, who drove a getaway car for the gang and insists she left the RAF "before it got really cruel", worked in London as a park attendant and mechanic before being discovered in 1999 working as a picture editor at The Independent. Ulrich Scholze, who stole cars for the RAF, is reported to be working as a teacher of textile and design in north Germany, while Irmgard Moller, who killed three people at a US Army base and tried to stab herself to death, is living in anonymity in Hamburg. Horst Mahler, a radical lawyer who defended Baader and Ensslin in court and later joined the gang, organising training trips to the Middle East, is now an ideologue for the German neo-Nazi movement. ·