Jan-Carl Raspe
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Jan-Carl Raspe (July 24, 1944 - October 18, 1977) was a member of the German militant group, the Red Army Faction.
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[edit] Early life
Raspe was born in Berlin. He was described as gentle but had difficulty communicating with people. His father had said that he couldn't stand violence. Although living in East Berlin, he was in West Berlin when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, and stayed there, living with his uncle and aunt. He co-founded Kommune II in 1967 and joined the Red Army Faction, also known as the "Baader-Meinhof Gang", in 1970. He once said to fellow gang-member Beate Sturm that he joined the Gang because he wanted to overcome his difficulty in relating to and making contact with people.
[edit] As a Terrorist
On 1 June 1972, Raspe along with Andreas Baader and Holger Meins had gone to check on a garage in Frankfurt where they had been storing materials used to make incendiary devices. Raspe had gone along as the driver (they were driving a Porsche Targa). However as soon as they arrived at the garage, police began to swarm around the scene. Meins and Baader had already entered the garage and were surrounded but Raspe, who had remained by the car, fired a shot from his gun and tried to run away when he was rushed by police, but to no avail; he was caught and arrested in a nearby garden. Meins and Baader were arrested soon after.
Raspe was convicted on 28 April 1977 and sentenced to life imprisonment. On 18 October 1977, Raspe was found with a gunshot wound in his cell in Stammheim Prison, Stuttgart. He died shortly after being admitted to a hospital. Fellow RAF members and inmates, Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, were found dead in their cells the same morning. Irmgard Möller was found in her cell, wounded after supposedly stabbing herself in the chest, but survived. Though all official inquiries on the matter concluded that Baader, Raspe and Ensslin had all committed suicide, sympathizers and Irmgard Möller persist that the deaths had been extrajudicial executions.
