Friday history lesson!

50 years ago, in April 1971, the Red Army Faction wrote its first major theoretical text: Das Konzept Stadtguerilla.

At this point, the RAF founding members had been living in the illegal underground for roughly a year - since Ulrike Meinhof and others broke Andreas Baader out of prison in May 1970. Meinhof, the most prominent member, was wanted for attempted murder afterwards.

Baader and some friends, including Gudrun Ensslin, were sentenced to three years in prison after fire-bombing a shopping centre in Frankfurt in 1968.

The Kaufhaus-Akion was supposed to bring attention to the suffering of people in Vietnam: after a shopping centre burned down in Brussels in 1967, student activists wrote pamphlets linking the fire to what it must be like to have your cities bombed with napalm.

Student activists of the Kommune I published two leaflets claiming that "a burning shopping centre in Europe for the first time gave us this Vietnam-feeling, to be part of it, that we so far missed out on" and that there should be "no surprise" if warehouses will burn

The Kommune members Fritz Teufel and Reiner Langhans were put on trial for incitment of arson but were aquitted in March 1968.

In her Konkret column following the warehouse fires, Meinhof wrote that the radical act of the action was not the distruction of commodities on their own, but the illegal act - of breaking a law that exists to protect property, rather than the people.