Ulrike Meinhof

Born in 1934, Ulrike Meinhof worked as a left-wing journalist and author before co-founding the Red Army Faction in West Germany - the militant group the press called the "Baader-Meinhof gang." She is credited with writing The Urban Guerilla Concept in 1971, a manifesto that condemned reformism and invoked Mao to frame armed struggle as the highest form of Marxism-Leninism. Her first RAF operation was the 1970 jailbreak of Andreas Baader; she was sentenced to eight years for her role in the near-fatal shooting during that escape. After participating in the RAF's May Offensive in 1972, she was arrested that June and spent the remainder of her life in custody, largely isolated. From 1975, she stood trial alongside Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe on charges of murder and attempted murder. On 9 May 1976, before the trial concluded, she was found hanged in her Stammheim Prison cell - officially ruled a suicide, though her sister insisted Meinhof had said days earlier, "If they say I committed suicide, be sure that it was murder."