What will the future bring? What are the next big steps in one’s life?

A 1959 Warren High School student, Gudrun Ensslin, must have been asking similar questions as commencement approached.

The German foreign exchange student would graduate with honors before returning home where she enrolled in college like many of the other 1959 WHS graduates.

The late 1960s were a politically explosive time. Civil Rights. The Cold War. Counterculture. Vietnam.

Photo courtesy of the Warren County Historical Society The 1959 Warren High School Orchestra. Ensslin is seated in the front row, fourth from the right.

Ensslin fell on the political left during that season and became a founder of what the German government would call a terrorist organization.

Called the Red Army Faction, the group is “credited” with bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and other violent acts. Ensslin was considered responsible for five bombings causing four deaths.

The RAF secured support from the Soviet Bloc.

And there’s reason to believe that the group worked with a young KGB officer stationed in Germany – Vladimir Putin.

“Gudrun came to Warren as an International Christian Youth Exchange students for the 1958-1959 school year,” Mary Lynn Brown Lawerence told the Times Observer for a story in 2018. “I now know that she was at the time already 18-years-old, a year older than her classmates. I was 15. I knew her well only because she was placed in the home of one of my classmates.”

Anne Creal told us in 2018 that she was best friends with Linda Elliott, whose parents, Nell and Glenn, took in Ensslin for the 1958-1959 school year.

“She came to the states as far as I know through the First United Methodist Church. Her father was a minister in Germany. The methodist church here sponsored her coming here.

“The Elliotts were absolutely wonderful people,” Creal said, noting that they lived at 805 Pleasant Drive.

“She was very, very intelligent,” Creal said of Ensslin. “Very, very attractive. Tallish and blond. (She) was very serious though (and) thought that I was sort of a flighty person because she was very, very serious.”

Ensslin’s first activism was in opposition to the Vietnam War. That escalated until she became a founding member of the Red Army Faction.

According to the BBC, “the RAF comprised mainly middle-class youngsters who saw themselves as fighting a West German capitalist establishment which they apparently believed was little more than a reincarnation of the Third Reich. At the height of its popularity, around a quarter of young West Germans expressed some sympathy for the group. Many condemned their tactics but understood their disgust with the new order, particularly one where former Nazis enjoyed prominent roles.”

Ensslin’s first major crime involved improvised explosive devices at two Munich department stores.

Lawerence noted that Ensslin was found guilty “of four murders and 34 attempted murders and remanded to life in prison.”

Ensslin hung herself in prison in 1977.

But the militant terror group that she helped to create – she’s considered part of the “first generation” – continued to operate into the 1990s.

And that’s where Putin may have come in.

He had been posted to Dresden in 1985 as a KGB, the main Soviet security agency.

“Most of what Putin did during the Dresden years remains shrouded in mystery, in part because the KGB was so effective at destroying and transferring documents before the collapse of East Germany,” a Politico article explains.

“But conversations with Stasi and KGB colleagues at the time belie the officially sanctioned claims Putin played only a marginal role.

From Politico: “This account suggests that Putin was stationed there precisely because it was a backwater, far from the spying eyes in East Berlin, where the French, the Americans and the West Germans all kept a close watch. According to a former member of the Red Army Faction, the far-left terrorist group in West Germany, who claimed to have met him in Dresden, Putin had worked in support of members of the group, which sowed terror across West Germany in the seventies and eighties.”

Those accounts “suggest that Putin’s years in Dresden might have been invaluable training in his work sowing chaos in Western politics today.”

Unsurprisingly, the reaction locally to Ensslin’s involvement in the RAF was almost beyond belief.

“The Elliots were heartbroken that this had happened, embarrassed and horrified,” Creal said. “I couldn’t believe it…. There weren’t people that violent in that day and age… from Warren, Pennsylvania, (We were) all totally shocked.”