Hogefeld is the daughter of Marianne and Josef Hogefeld. Her father had been close to the
communists during the
National Socialist era and felt "used" by the Nazi regime, though he did not engage in
resistance. Her therapist,
Horst-Eberhard Richter, saw in this a "motivating factor" for her later RAF career, as Anne‑Kathrin Griese put it. described her life path as "exemplary of many young
leftists" in the early Federal Republic of Germany (
West Germany). In retrospective reflections, Hogefeld herself wrote that since childhood she had felt a "sense of emptiness" in the face of the dominance of "material values and consumption" in the post‑war economic‑miracle (
Wirtschaftswunder) society, and that "something unspoken was meant to be concealed" — namely
Germany's Nazi past. This, she said, had produced a "bell of dullness, narrowness and silence," a
generational "distancing from our parents" and an "experience of powerlessness and the feeling that nothing could be changed". Hogefeld began, in what
Jan Philipp Reemtsma called "a diffuse attitude of 'just doing something'", to involve herself in
student councils, autonomous
youth centres,
social hotspots with
Turkish‑German youths, and in
fare strike‑protest actions. After taking part in protests against the
Vietnam War, the death of RAF member
Holger Meins during a
hunger strike in prison in 1974, when Hogefeld was eighteen, became, in her words, "one of the decisive turning points of my life". She abandoned all her activities in social projects and began to concern herself with "isolation torture (
solitary confinement), isolation wings (, dead wings), and the systematic destruction of
political prisoners". Reemtsma described this parallelisation in his analysis as "clichéd" and by no means self‑evident, while
Gerd Koenen characterised it as the "replacement of all empirical reality by conjured‑up images ... a model of the peculiar idealism/irrealism of the RAF". For Hogefeld, however, this reflection became, in retrospect, a "question of my own identity, credibility and responsibility". In 1975, she therefore began studying
legal science in
Frankfurt am Main, intending to work as a
lawyer against such prison conditions, but abandoned her studies in 1977 due to the increasingly restrictive treatment of RAF
defence lawyers by the authorities.
Musically gifted — she had originally wanted to study music or become an
organ builder — she then gave organ lessons. From that point on, she became active in supporting imprisoned RAF members through the Wiesbaden branch of the association
Red Aid (Rote Hilfe), which had been co‑founded by her later partner
Wolfgang Grams and which has described as a "recruitment pool for RAF
cadres". The
Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (
Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV) describes the Red Aid as a support organisation that stabilises and legitimises left‑wing extremist milieus.
Member of the RAF Very few details are known about Hogefeld's career within the RAF; in 1984, she went underground together with her partner Grams, and for the following nine years, until her arrest in 1993, she was counted among the so‑called command level of the RAF. In doing so, according to Reemtsma, she chose "a way of life that brought experiences of power like no other". Far less is known about the RAF's third generation — of which Hogefeld was considered one of the "leading figures" — than about its predecessors active in the 1970s. The apparently small command unit left no fingerprints, drove no conspicuous cars, kept their apartments strictly separate from weapons depots, and isolated themselves from the support scene, which meant that hardly any information reached the outside world. The extent of Hogefeld's involvement is also unclear. In an open letter to
Eva Haule, she wrote that Grams "was among those who, after the arrests of seven comrades in the summer of 1984, when the RAF was effectively smashed, rebuilt it". According to her own account to
Andres Veiel, life underground was harder for Hogefeld than for Grams, who supported her as a calm counterbalance; they remained undetected by avoiding eye contact and dressing as inconspicuously and conventionally as possible. In August 1985, Hogefeld was a co‑perpetrator in the murder of U.S. soldier
Edward Pimental and in the bombing of
Rhein-Main Air Base, and in the years that followed, she took part in several further attacks (see the section
Trial and conviction for details). In February 1987, Hogefeld and Grams were first sought publicly through a
Tagesschau broadcast, after posters with the images of suspected RAF members had already been displayed nationwide since 1985. Even while underground, Hogefeld and Grams continued to engage with Germany's Nazi past; for example, they spent an entire day at the memorial site of the
Hadamar killing centre. Such experiences, Hogefeld later said, "ultimately gave us the strength to continue". They had no positive vision of a future society; instead, they were driven by "disruption/destruction, attack, and the undermining of the pig‑system (the RAF's term for the despised state apparatus)". From the late 1980s onward, and especially after the
collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, discussions began within the RAF — according to Hogefeld — about reorientation and a "rapprochement with the legal left", which culminated in April 1992 in a renunciation of violence against persons, a statement for which Hogefeld is considered a co‑author. In the months that followed, Hogefeld and Grams sought contact with people who had nothing to do with the RAF to gain distance from their own worldview, including approaching the actor . During this period, they considered exit scenarios and the possibility of returning to a normal life with a family. ==Arrest==