The Baader-Meinhof group was a loose network of various West German student radicals in the late 1960s and early 70s that drifted from militant activism to terrorism and composed the first generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF). Their name derived from those the West German media described as the group's leadership, Andreas Baader and the journalist Ulrike Meinhof. The latter was actually somewhat peripheral to the group and although she was the RAF's public mouthpiece, the real driving force of the Baader-Meinhof group was Gudrun Ensslin, Baader's girlfriend.

The core belief of the Badder-Meinhof group was that West German politics was riven with unreformed Nazis and despite the seeming democratic character of the state, it was in reality little different than the Third Reich. This somewhat torturous logic involved a twisting of various elements of the Frankfurt school and adding a more sinister gloss to some of the real problems of West German society such as the West German establishment's staunch anticommunism or collective silence about the Nazi past that allowed former Nazis to assume positions of power. By taking to a more militant stand against the status quo, the Baader-Meinhof group sought to accomplish two things. Firstly, they felt they could radicalize the quiescent German working classes and achieve a true proletarian revolution in Germany. Secondly, they also saw themselves as a part of the vanguard of a global liberation movement that enfolded such diverse causes as Iranian dissidents against the Shah, the Palestinian Liberation Front, and the North Vietnamese/Viet Cong's struggle against the US. The name RAF itself is a reference to the Japanese Red Army, a group of Japanese student terrorists that in 1970 and 72, conducted a series of brazen terrorist attacks against Israel in the name of global revolution. As self-styled urban guerillas, they received training in Lebanon after escaping custody for bombing a Frankfurt department store and attacks on the conservative Axel-Springer media group.

By their own standards of global revolution and alighting the West German society aflame, the Baader-Meinhof group was a manifest failure. While receiving training in Lebanon, the group protested their hosts' conservative morals and found conditions too primitive for their West German sensibilities (Baader famously demanded that the terrorist training camp should install a Coke machine!). Provided with arms from both the loose networks of the left-wing terrorists and also bought from the German far-right, the self-described RAF began a campaign of terror in West Germany against what it saw as the pillars of the contemporary fascist state, the US military bases, Axel Springer concerns, and the banks.

The group had actually received a degree of public support initially when their actions only targeted buildings, but mass West German support plummeted when their actions started killing people. The capture of the Baader-Meinhof group by West German authorities led to a highly publicized trial in which various members went on hunger strikes (although the leadership covertly ate food) and tried to present themselves as victims of global imperialism. Despite their plummeting popularity among mainstream Germans, their capture inspired a second generation of the RAF which engaged in more violent actions like the storming of the German embassy in Stockholm, kidnappings of West German officials, and the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight. The actions of the second generation of the RAF though led to no real change in the status of the Baader-Meinhof prisoners, and the leadership made a collective suicide pact, although Meinhof had already committed suicide due to her deteriorating mental state and her hectoring by Ensslin, with weapons smuggled in by their lawyers.

The death of the group in 1977 aroused immediate suspicions in the German left about their murder by the West German state, but although it was fodder for conspiracy theorists, the suicides did not accomplish much beyond galvanizing a subsequent generation of RAF fighters. The RAF found itself in the 1970s and 80s increasingly marginalized from the West German scene and were used as low-level assets by the GDR and the Eastern bloc. Although some defenders of both the RAF and Baader-Meinhof group insist they prevented a fascist-style turn of West Germany and opened West Germany up to a more democratic form, such claims are highly tendentious. For the European right, left-wing terrorism was a gift that kept giving in that it discredited many of the wider politics of the left, many of which have nothing to do with the terrorism or wider revolution. The groundwork for Ostpolitik and a less strident anti-communist politics was already present in West Germany long before the Baader-Meinhoff group transitioned from destroying department stores to killing people. For all of the romantic militancy of the Baader-Meinhof group, it proved to be a cul-de-sac that accomplished little beyond murder and mayhem.

The best introductory book on this subject is Stefan Aust's Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F.