Well....to make this a simplified story, I'll try to limit it to 50 lines or less.
About 20 years after WW II, getting into the mid-1960s, there's this evolution going on with West German college students. You can say that it's left-overs of WW II....youth discovering perceived realities....even suggesting that a separation taking place between German parents and their teenagers. But this college kid group felt that the national authority of West Germany....was still tangled up in a Nationalist Socialist mentality.
Lets be honest of this period of the 1950s/1960s......a lot of the civic/political leadership....were still people who'd held some kind of position in the 1940s German government.
Around the edge of this whole evolution....there was also the feeling that most media instructions from public TV, to newspapers....were conservatives-slanted or biased. It doesn't matter if this were true or false.....they believed this.
In society of this era (mid-1960s).....you had a counter-culture brewing....in music, movies, TV, books, etc. These college student put their passion and belief into the counter-culture.
Behind all of the momentum....a case of anti-capitalism existing? Yes, and that was motivated by various elements. The people who fell into the RAF path didn't believe that life was fair.
Demonstrations were held, and the chief goal was to get the public's attention....believing that if they were motivated like the revolutionary students....great change would occur.
1967.....the arrival of the Shah of Iran occurred (cultural/shopping trip to Berlin), and this visit came to be worked up as a major protest of the poor Iranian people....attempting to get West Germans hyped up in this motivation. At the time, I think if you'd 'tested' most West Germans of the time....fewer than 5-percent knew the guy or could identify a picture of him. It's a silly thing to bring up.....but this was the motivation of the university students working the protest plans.
By 1969, federal feelings in Germany (particularly with the Constitutional Court) reached a level where the students detained and convicted, then released.....had gone in the opposite direction. The federal system wanted to put full-pressure on the college kids to quit the demonstrations and clean up their act. The college kids? They went into hiding.
Within months, the new strategy of the soon-to-be RAF members? Organize and commit to bold actions (including murder and bombs).
Start to finish? I'd give it a seven year period. They went from simple protest actions.....to your basic terror group....by 1970.
The fact that the RAF group was getting financial and instructional support from DDR (old East Germany)? It's an odd part of the story, and rarely told today. Without that support.....the terror organization would have easily collapsed and fallen apart.
The odds that the new 'Last Generation' environmental kids developing into a RAF model of sorts? I'd give it better than a 70-percent chance. They may not go into robbing banks or murdering people, but I would imagine shutting down airports, disrupting electrical production, hindering store operations, and preventing scheduled train schedules....all likely to be on some agenda within two years.
History repeats itself, and this appears to be a interesting 'copy'.
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