With support from the University of Richmond

New perspectives on how history is made

Fashion designer Lagerfeld was on Red Army Faction's list

German terrorists once planned to kidnap fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld as part of a scheme to free fellow guerrillas from jail.

A former member of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, which terrorised Germany throughout the 1970s and 80s with murders, kidnappings and bank robberies, said Lagerfeld was viewed as a perfect target because of his personal wealth.

Convicted terrorist Peter-Jürgen Boock, who is out of prison having served 17 years, said the designer was the most prominent of "an array of people with a large fortune on whom we collected information with a view to kidnapping them"...[and securing] a ransom, which it wanted to use to rent flats and obtain cars and weapons to free gang members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, who were standing trial, from jail.
Read entire article at Guardian