Ulrike Meinhof

Ulrike Marie Meinhof (7 October 1934 – 9 May 1976) was a German left-wing journalist and founding member of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany, commonly referred to in the press as the "Baader-Meinhof gang". She is the reputed author of The Urban Guerilla Concept (1971). The manifesto acknowledges the RAF's "roots in the history of the student movement"; condemns "reformism" as "a brake on the anti-capitalist struggle"; and invokes Mao Zedong to define "armed struggle" as "the highest form of Marxism-Leninism". Meinhof, who took part in the RAF's May Offensive in 1972, was arrested in June of that year and spent the rest of her life in custody, largely isolated from outside contact. In November 1974, she was sentenced to 8 years in prison for an attempted murder that had taken place during the RAF's successful jailbreak operation of Andreas Baader. From 1975, she stood trial on multiple charges of murder and attempted murder, with the three other RAF leaders: Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe. Before the end of the trial, she was found hanged in her cell in the Stammheim Prison. The official finding of suicide sparked controversy. One year later, on , two members of the RAF assassinated the Federal Attorney-General Siegfried Buback as revenge for her alleged murder. Early life Meinhof was born in 1934 in Oldenburg. Her father Werner Meinhof, a curator of Jena Museum, died of cancer in 1940, causing her mother to take in a boarder, Renate Riemeck, to make money. In 1946, the family moved back to Oldenburg after Jena fell under Soviet occupation as a result of the Yalta agreement. Meinhof's mother, Ingeborg Meinhof, an art historian, began to work as a teacher and died from cancer in 1949. Riemeck took on the role of guardian of Meinhof and her elder sister, Wienke.