Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang
By Jillian Becker
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.
‘A first rate piece of journalism in the best sense of the word … Ms Becker is the only person who has managed in recent years to tell me something which I had not heard before about these desperate, hysterical, perverted idealists whose revolt against authoritarianism … made them indistinguishable from fascists’ The Times