Hitler?s Children

Book excerpt: First published in 1977 in the US and Britain to universal critical acclaim, Hitler's Children quickly became a world-wide best seller, translated into many other languages, including Japanese. It tells the story of the West German terrorists who emerged out of the 'New Left' student protest movement of the late 1960s. With bombs and bullets they started killing in the name of 'peace'. Almost all of them came from prosperous, educated families. They were 'Hitler's children' not only in that they had been born in or immediately after the Nazi period - some of their parents having been members of the Nazi party - but also because they were as fiercely against individual freedom as the Nazis were. Their declared ideology was Communism. They were beneficiaries of both American aid and the West German economic miracle. Despising their immeasurable gifts of prosperity and freedom, they 'identified' themselves with Third World victims of wars, poverty and oppression, whose plight they blamed on 'Western imperialism'. In reality, their terrorist activity was for no better cause than self-expression. Their dreams of leading a revolution were ended when one after another of them died in shoot-outs with the police, or was blown up with his own bomb, or was arrested, tried, and condemned to long terms of imprisonment. All four leaders of the Red Army Faction (dubbed 'the Baader-Meinhof gang' by journalists) committed suicide in prison.