Berndt Andreas Baader (6 May 1943 – 18 October 1977), was a West German communist and leader of the left-wing militant organization Red Army Faction (RAF) also commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Group.

In 1968, Baader and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin were convicted of the arson bombing of a department store in Frankfurt,[6] to protest what they described as the public's "indifference to the genocide in Vietnam".

A few weeks later, in May 1970, he was allowed to meet her at the library of the Berlin Zentralinstitut outside the prison, without handcuffs but escorted by two armed guards.

Baader and others then spent some time in a Fatah military training camp in Jordan before being expelled due to "differences in attitudes".

He regularly stole expensive sports cars for use by the gang and was arrested driving an Iso Rivolta IR 300.

[20] On 1 June 1972, Baader and fellow RAF members Jan-Carl Raspe and Holger Meins were apprehended after a lengthy shootout in Frankfurt.

[22] During a collective hunger strike in 1974, which led to the death of Meins, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre visited Baader in Stammheim where he was being held.

[28][29] Militants tried to force the release of Baader and ten other imprisoned RAF members by kidnapping businessman Hanns Martin Schleyer in Cologne on 5 September 1977, as part of the sequence of events known as the "German Autumn", which began on 30 July 1977 with the murder of banker Jürgen Ponto.

The passengers of the Boeing 737 were freed in an assault carried out by German GSG 9 special forces in the early hours of 18 October 1977 which saw the death of three of the militants.

[33][34] According to official accounts of his death, Raspe learned about GSG 9's success on a smuggled transistor radio and spent the next few hours talking to Baader, Ensslin, and Möller, who agreed to a suicide pact.

[37] Aspects of the deaths have been debated: Baader was supposed to have shot himself in the base of the neck so that the bullet exited through his forehead; repeated tests indicated that it was virtually impossible for a person to hold and fire a gun in such a way.

Both had been arrested on 2 October 1977, and charged with belonging to a criminal association; under pressure from the police, they subsequently became crown witnesses and admitted to acting as couriers and testified that they were aware of lawyers smuggling items to the prisoners during the trial.

[22] Following their apparent suicides, the German government had the brains of Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin and Raspe removed for study at the Neurological Research Institute at the University of Tübingen.

[40][41] Meinhof's brain contained scar tissue, the result of surgery to remove a benign tumor in 1962, that could have affected her behavior.