West Germany was experiencing seasonally cool autumn weather in October 1984. It would

only be another four years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but for anyone living

at the time, this was still as inconceivable as a future of social media or New York without

the Twin Towers. On those many grey and gloomy days that signalled the approach of winter

that year, for citizens of both East and West Germany, the Cold War was very much in operation.

In West Germany, this could be seen most starkly in the numerous acts of domestic terror that

were perpetrated there in the decade leading up to the Berlin Walls demise. At the forefront of

this activity was the Red Army faction, also known as the Bardem-Mainhof gang, named after two

of the group's early leaders, Andreas Barder and Ulrika Mainhof. The faction was formed out of

radical elements from the 1960s German university protest movement as a reaction to the post-war

political landscape. Chief among their concerns was the failure of the West German political system

to completely expunge itself of former supporters of Adolf Hitler and what they viewed as the

ever-expanding and unchecked imperialist approach of the United States government.

Using funds gained from bank robberies, the group engaged in numerous violent activities

focused mainly on West German corporations and the people who worked for them,

as well as US military installations and personnel killing 30 people in the process.

Meanwhile in East Germany, it was the machinations of the Uber-Vigilant Ministry of State Security,

also known as the Stasi, who perhaps most struck fear into its citizens with its ceaseless and brutal

efforts to sniff out any opposition to the country's ostensibly communist government.

All in all, it was a dark and unsettling time for citizens of both Germany's

framed by an ever-present atmosphere of violence and paranoia.

And it was in the shadow of all that that one morning in October 1984, in Anzhausen,

...