Legislative responses to German terrorism, also known as anti -terrorism legislation (Berlit Dreier

Country Report on Germany Hans-Jörg Albrecht Max-Planck-Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law 1. Introduction into Experiences with Terrorism and the Development of Counterterrorism Strategies in Germany 1.1 Terrorist Phenomena in Germany Experiences with terrorism in Germany date back to the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s when the RAF or “Baader-Meinhof” group emerged as a terrorist organization. The RAF fell into the subcategory of social-revolutionary (left wing) terrorism guided by an explicit political programme and political goals as well as an evenly explicit appeal to international coordination and cooperation among (national) terrorist groups (Laqueur 1998). Terrorist violence has been directed against individuals representing political parties, the government, the capitalist economy or the US military (Peters 1991). Links between the RAF and Palestinian terror groups have been established already in the early 1970s. Such links resulted in the use of Palestinian training camps by several members of the RAF group and the launching of joint terrorist attacks (Entebbe, Vienna). RAF strategies included also acts of transnational terrorism (Stockholm embassy 1975; Wittke 1983). Beside the RAF, which after the arrest of its leading figures in the first half of the 1970s was succeeded by second and third generation terrorist groups (closely related to groups supporting detained RAF members ...