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 eight years in prison for attempted murder in the May 1970 liberation from prison 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 7 April 1977, two members of the RAF assassinated the Federal Attorney-General Siegfried Buback as revenge for her alleged murder.

The Red Army Faction (RAF, German: [ɛʁʔaːˈʔɛf] (listen); German: Rote Armee Fraktion, pronounced [ˌʁoː.tə aʁˈmeː fʁakˌt͡si̯oːn] (listen)), also known as the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang (German: Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe, Baader-Meinhof-Bande, German: [ˈbaːdɐ ˈmaɪ̯nˌhɔf ˈɡʁʊpə] (listen), active 1970–1998), was a West German far-left militant organization founded in 1970. Key early figures included Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Horst Mahler, among others. The government of the Federal Republic of Germany considered the Red Army Faction to be a terrorist organization. The group was motivated by leftist political concerns and the perceived failure of their parents' generation to confront Germany's Nazi past, and received support from Stasi and other Eastern Bloc security services.The Red Army Faction engaged in a series of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, bank robberies, and shoot-outs with police over the course of three decades. Their activity peaked in late 1977, which led to a national crisis that became known as the "German Autumn". The RAF has been held responsible for 34 deaths, including industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, the Dresdner Bank head Jurgen Ponto, and the federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback, as well as many secondary targets, such as chauffeurs and bodyguards, with many others injured throughout its almost thirty years of activity; 26 RAF members or supporters were killed. Although better-known, the RAF conducted fewer attacks than the Revolutionary Cells, which is held responsible for 296 bomb attacks, arson and other attacks between 1973 and 1995.Sometimes the group is talked about in terms of generations:

the "first generation", which consisted of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and others;

the "second generation", after the majority of the first generation was arrested in 1972; and

the "third generation" RAF, which existed in the 1980s and 1990s up to 1998, after the first generation died in Stammheim maximum security prison in 1977.On 20 April 1998, an eight-page typewritten letter in German was faxed to the Reuters news agency, signed "RAF" with the submachine-gun red star, declaring that the group had dissolved. In 1999, after a robbery in Duisburg, evidence pointing to Ernst-Volker Staub and Daniela Klette was found, causing an official investigation into a re-founding.