In the seventies, several leftwing terrorist groups emerged in the FRG. Their different statements and some of their concrete actions were indicative of their founders’ desire to put themselves in the wake of a deeper German tradition of the “Arbeiterradikalismus” (“workers’ radicalism”). But despite the attempts of these groups to ring up collectivities of workers, no real collaboration between the terrorists and the workers occurred. Building on a history of the origins of these attempts (in the extra-parliamentary opposition e.g.), this article challenges the idea, German leftwing terrorism should mainly be seen as a social revolutionary Marxist movement. Further on, it shows that these attempts were made to hide a real link of German leftwing terrorism to nationalist, communist and anti-Semitic ideas that first came up 1950-1953 in the GDR and which were partly adopted by some parts of the extra-parliamentary opposition in the FRG.