"Rote Armee Fraktion" A.K.A. RAF

2. Then reserach the "Rote Armee Fraktion" RAF and provide a second post with your findings of
- the causes
- the three generations of activists
- the end of the RAF
- the similarities between current day's terro attacks and the RAF (similarities and differences)

"World War 2 was only twenty years earlier. Those in charge of the police, the schools, the government — they were the same people who’d been in charge under Nazism. The chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, was a Nazi. People started discussing this only in the 60's. We were the first generation since the war, and we were asking our parents questions. Due to the Nazi past, everything bad was compared to the Third Reich. If you heard about police brutality, that was said to be just like the SS. The moment you see your own country as the continuation of a fascist state, you give yourself permission to do almost anything against it. You see your action as the resistance that your parents did not put up."

— Stefan Aust, author of Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex 

This quote clearly states the cause of the formation of the group. The government was still being run by the same people who ran it under the Nazi regime. This was just an uprising waiting to happen.

There were three successive incarnations of the organization, the "first generation" which consisted of Baader and his associates, the "second generation" RAF, which operated in the mid to late 1970s after several former members of the Socialist Patients' Collective joined, and the "third generation" RAF, which existed in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Three generations of the RAF came over time, each one larger than the last. This only shows that the ideas held by the first generation were growing. The first's ideas spread, and grew, and infected more and more with passing time. 

On April 20th, 1998, an eight-page typewritten letter in German was faxed to the Reuters news agency, signed "RAF" with the machine-gun red star, declaring that the group had dissolved, even though they had not made any actions for a few years prior to this letter.

The actions the RAF took against the government and other agencies are extremely similar to modern terrorist attacks. The RAF did everything from car bombings to hijacking planes, same as terrorists today. The RAF may have paved the path for todays modern terrorists.