Red Army Faction

"Baader-Meinhof" redirects here. For other uses, see Baader-Meinhof (disambiguation).

This article is about the German militant group. For Japanese Red Army/Anti-Imperialist International Brigade, see Japanese Red Army.

Red Army Faction
Later design of the RAF's insignia showing a red star and an MP5
Dates of operation	1970–1998
Motives	Armed resistance and proletarian revolution
Active regions	West Germany
Ideology	Marxism–Leninism
Major actions	Numerous bombings and assassinations
Notable attacks	West German embassy siege, German Autumn
Status	Final action and confrontations in 1993. Apparently officially disbanded on 20 April 1998.

The Red Army Faction or Red Army Fraction (RAF; German: Rote Armee Fraktion), in its early stages commonly known as Baader-Meinhof Group (or Baader-Meinhof Gang), was post–World War II Germany's most prominent left-wing militant group. The RAF was founded in 1970 by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, and Ulrike Meinhof. The RAF described itself as a communist and anti-imperialist "urban guerrilla" group engaged in armed resistance against what they deemed to be a fascist state. As such, members of the RAF generally used the Marxist-Leninist term "Faction" when they wrote in English.

The Red Army Faction existed from 1970 to 1998, committing numerous operations, especially in late 1977, which led to a national crisis that became known as "German Autumn". It was held responsible for thirty-four deaths, including many secondary targets, such as chauffeurs and bodyguards, and many injuries in its almost thirty years of activity. Although better-known, the RAF conducted fewer attacks than the Revolutionary Cells (German: Revolutionäre Zellen, RZ), which is held responsible for 296 bomb attacks, arson and other attacks between 1973 and 1995.

Although Meinhof was not considered to be a leader of the RAF at any time, her involvement in Baader's escape from jail in 1970 and her well-known status as a German journalist led to her name becoming attached to it.
There were three successive incarnations of the organization,

• the "first generation" which consisted of Baader and his associates,
• the "second generation" RAF, which operated in the mid to late 1970s after several former members of the Socialist Patients' Collective joined, and
• the "third generation" RAF, which existed in the 1980s and 1990s.

On 20 April 1998, an eight-page typewritten letter in German was faxed to the Reuters news agency, signed "RAF" with the submachine-gun red star, declaring that the group had dissolved.

Background

The Red Army Faction's Urban Guerrilla Concept is not based on an optimistic view of the prevailing circumstances in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

— The Urban Guerrilla Concept authored by RAF co-founder Ulrike Meinhof (April 1971)

The origins of the group can be traced back to the student protest movement in West Germany. Industrialised nations in late 1960s experienced social upheavals related to the maturing of the baby boomers born after World War II, the Cold War, and the end of colonialism. Newly-found youth identity and issues such as racism, women's liberation and anti-imperialism were at the forefront of left-wing politics.

In West Germany, 1966 saw the emergence of the first Grand Coalition between the two main parties, the SPD and CDU, under chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger. With ninety-five percent of the Bundestag controlled by the coalition, an Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) was formed with the intent of generating protest and political activity outside of government.

Many young people were alienated from both their parents and the institutions of state. The historical legacy of Nazism drove a wedge between the generations and increased suspicion of authoritarian structures in society (some analysts see the same occurring in Italy, giving rise to "Brigate Rosse" or Red Brigades).

In West Germany there was anger among leftist youth at the post-war denazification in West and East Germany, which was perceived as a failure or as ineffective, as former (actual and supposed) Nazis held positions in government and economy. The Communist Party of Germany had been outlawed since 1956. Elected and unelected government positions down to the local level were often occupied by ex-Nazis. Konrad Adenauer, the first Federal Republic chancellor (in office 1949–1963), had even appointed the former Nazi-sympathiser Hans Globke as Director of the Federal Chancellery of West Germany (in office 1953–1963).

The radicals regarded the conservative media as biased - at the time conservatives such as Axel Springer, who was implacably opposed to student radicalism, owned and controlled the conservative media including all of the most influential mass-circulation tabloid newspapers. The late 1960s saw the emergence of the Grand Coalition between the two main parties, the SPD and CDU with Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former Nazi Party member as chancellor. This horrified many on the left and was viewed as monolithic, political marriage of convenience with pro-NATO, pro-capitalist collusion on the part of the social democratic SPD. In 1972 a law was passed, the Radikalenerlass, which banned radicals or those with a 'questionable' political persuasion from public sector jobs.

Some used the supposed association of society with Nazism as an argument against any peaceful approaches:

They'll kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're up against. This is the Auschwitz generation. You can't argue with people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we haven't. We must arm ourselves!

— Gudrun Ensslin speaking after the death of Benno Ohnesorg.

The radicalized were, like many in the New Left, influenced by:

• Sociological developments, pressure within the educational system in and outside Europe and the U.S. together with the background of counter-cultural movements.
• The writings of Mao Zedong adapted to Western European conditions.
• Post-war writings on class society and empire as well as contemporary Marxist critiques from many revolutionaries such as Franz Fanon, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara as well as early Autonomism.
• Philosophers associated with the Frankfurt school (Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, and Oskar Negt in particular) and associated Marxian philosophers.

RAF founder Ulrike Meinhof had a long history in the Communist Party. Holger Meins had studied film and was a veteran of the Berlin revolt; his short feature How To Produce A Molotov Cocktail had been seen by huge audiences. Jan Carl Raspe had lived at the Kommune 2; Horst Mahler had been an established lawyer, but was also at the center of the anti-Springer revolt from the beginning. From their own personal experiences and assessments of the socio-economic situation they soon became more specifically influenced by Leninism and Maoism, calling themselves 'Marxist-Leninist' though they effectively added to or updated this ideological tradition. A contemporaneous critique of the Red Army Faction's view of the state, published in a pirate edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, ascribed to it 'state-fetishism' – an ideologically obsessive misreading of bourgeois dynamics and the nature and role of the state in post-WWII societies, including West Germany.

It is claimed that property destruction during the Watts Riots in the United States in 1965 influenced the practical and ideological approach of the RAF founders as well as some of those in Situationist circles.

The writings of Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse were drawn upon. Gramsci wrote on power, cultural and ideological conflicts in society and institutions—real-time class struggles playing out in rapidly developing industrial nation states through interlinked areas of political behaviour, Marcuse on coercion and hegemony in that cultural indoctrination and ideological manipulation through the means of communication ("repressive tolerance") dispensed with the need for complete brute force in modern 'liberal democracies'. His One-Dimensional Man was addressed to the restive students of the sixties. Marcuse argued that only marginal groups of students and poor alienated workers could effectively resist the system. Both Gramsci and Marcuse came to the conclusion that the ideological underpinnings and the 'superstructure' of society was vitally important in the understanding of class control (and acquiescence). This could perhaps be seen as an extension of Marx's work as he did not cover this area in detail. Das Kapital, his mainly economic work, was meant to be one of a series of books which would have included one on society and one on the state, but his death prevented fulfilment of this.

Many of the radicals felt that Germany's lawmakers were continuing authoritarian policies and the public's apparent acquiescence was seen as a continuation of the indoctrination the Nazis had pioneered in society (Volksgemeinschaft). The Federal Republic was exporting arms to African dictatorships, which was seen as supporting the war in Southeast Asia and engineering the remilitarization of Germany with the U.S.-led entrenchment against the Warsaw Pact nations.

Ongoing events further catalyzed the situation. Protests turned into riots on 2 June 1967, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, visited West Berlin. There were protesters but also hundreds of supporters of the Shah, as well as a group of fake supporters armed with wooden staves, there to disturb the normal course of the visit. These extremists beat the protesters. After a day of angry protests by exiled Iranian radical marxists, a group widely supported by German students, the Shah visited the Berlin Opera, where a crowd of German student protesters gathered. During the opera house demonstrations, German student Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the head by a police officer while attending his first protest rally. The officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was acquitted in a subsequent trial. It has now been discovered that this officer had been a member of the West Berlin communist party SEW and had also worked for the Stasi.

Along with perceptions of state and police brutality, and widespread opposition to the Vietnam War, Ohnesorg's death galvanised many young Germans, and became a rallying point for the West German New Left. The Berlin Movement 2 June, a militant-Anarchist group, later took its name to honour the date of Ohnesorg's death.

In the spring of 1968 Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader, joined by Thorwald Proll and Horst Söhnlein, set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt on 2 April as a protest against the Vietnam war. They were arrested two days later.

On 11 April 1968 Rudi Dutschke, a leading spokesman for protesting students, was shot in the head in an assassination attempt by the right-wing extremist Josef Bachmann. Although badly injured, Dutschke returned to political activism with the German Green Party before his death in a bathtub in 1979, as a consequence of his injuries.

Axel Springer's populist newspaper Bild-Zeitung, which had run headlines such as "Stop Dutschke now!", was accused of being the chief culprit for inciting the shooting. Meinhof commented: "If one sets a car on fire, that is a criminal offence. If one sets hundreds of cars on fire, that is political action."

Formation of the RAF

World War II was only twenty years earlier. Those in charge of the police, the schools, the government — they were the same people who'd been in charge under Nazism. The chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, had been a Nazi. People started discussing this only in the 60's. We were the first generation since the war, and we were asking our parents questions. Due to the Nazi past, everything bad was compared to the Third Reich. If you heard about police brutality, that was said to be just like the SS. The moment you see your own country as the continuation of a fascist state, you give yourself permission to do almost anything against it. You see your action as the resistance that your parents did not put up.

— Stefan Aust, author of Der Baader Meinhof Komplex

All four of the defendants charged with arson and endangering human life were convicted, for which they were sentenced to three years in prison. In June 1969, however, they were temporarily paroled under an amnesty for political prisoners, but in November of that year, the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) demanded that they return to custody. Only Horst Söhnlein complied with the order; the rest went underground and made their way to France, where they stayed for a time in a house owned by prominent French journalist and revolutionary, Régis Debray, famous for his friendship with Che Guevara and the focus theory of guerrilla warfare. Eventually they made their way to Italy, where the lawyer Mahler visited them and encouraged them to return to Germany with him to form an underground guerilla group.

The Red Army Faction was formed with the intention of complementing the plethora of revolutionary and radical groups across West Germany and Europe, as a more class conscious and determined force compared with some of its contemporaries. The members and supporters were already associated with the 'Revolutionary Cells' and Movement 2 June as well as radical currents and phenomena such as the Socialist Patients' Collective, Kommune 1 and the Situationists.

Baader was arrested again in April 1970, but on 14 May 1970 he was freed by Meinhof and others. Baader, Ensslin, Mahler, and Meinhof then went to Jordan, where they trained in the West Bank and Gaza with Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas and looked to the Palestinian cause for inspiration and guidance. But RAF organisation and outlook were also partly modeled on the Uruguayan Tupamaros movement, which had developed as an urban resistance movement, effectively inverting Che Guevara's Mao-like concept of a peasant or rural-based guerrilla war and instead situating the struggle in the metropole or cities.

Many members of the RAF operated through a single contact or only knew others by their codenames. Actions were carried out by active units called 'commandos', with trained members being supplied by a quartermaster in order to carry out their mission. For more long-term or core cadre members, isolated cell-like organisation was absent or took on a more flexible form.

In 1969 the Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella published his Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. He described the urban guerrilla as:

...a person who fights the military dictatorship with weapons, using unconventional methods. ... The urban guerrilla follows a political goal, and only attacks the government, big businesses, and foreign imperialists.

The importance of small arms training, sabotage, expropriation, and a substantial safehouse/support base among the urban population was stressed in Marighella's guide. This publication was an antecedent to Meinhof's 'The Urban Guerrilla Concept' and has subsequently influenced many guerrilla and insurgent groups around the globe. Although some of the Red Army Faction's supporters and operatives could be described as having an anarchist or libertarian communist slant, the group's leading members professed a largely Marxist-Leninist ideology. That said, they shied away from overt collaboration with communist states, arguing along the lines of the Chinese side in the Sino-Soviet split that the Soviet Union and its European satellite states had become traitors to the communist cause by, in effect if not in rhetoric, giving the United States a free pass in their exploitation of Third World populations and support of "useful" Third World dictators. Nevertheless, RAF members did receive intermittent support and sanctuary over the border in East Germany during the 1980s.

Anti-imperialism and public support

The Baader-Meinhof Gang drew a measure of support that violent leftists in the United States, like the Weather Underground, never enjoyed. A poll at the time showed that a quarter of West Germans under forty felt sympathy for the gang and one-tenth said they would hide a gang member from the police. Prominent intellectuals spoke up for the gang's righteousness (as) Germany even into the 1970s was still a guilt-ridden society. When the gang started robbing banks, newscasts compared its members to Bonnie and Clyde. (Andreas) Baader, a charismatic, spoiled psychopath, indulged in the imagery, telling people that his favourite movies were Bonnie and Clyde, which had recently come out, and The Battle of Algiers. The pop poster of Che Guevara hung on his wall, (while) he paid a designer to make a Red Army Faction logo, a drawing of a machine gun against a red star.

— Stefan Aust, author of Der Baader Meinhof Komplex

When they returned to West Germany, they began what they called an "anti-imperialistic struggle", with bank robberies to raise money and bomb attacks against U.S. military facilities, German police stations, and buildings belonging to the Axel Springer press empire. In 1970, a manifesto authored by Meinhof used the name "RAF" and the red star logo with a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun for the first time.

Despite killing 34 people, Baader-Meinhof garnered a degree of support from the West German population. According to Fred Siegel, the group of militants began to be accepted, if not always admired, by "guilt-ridden liberals", who saw its panache as a countercultural critique of West Germany's "boring bourgeois life" and who resented their nation's association with the American war in Vietnam. Siegel asserts that Baader-Meinhof seized on this sentiment and carefully cultivated an outlaw image, wholesaling the ideal of authentically acting out one's impulses, in order to break through "the fascism of convention", just as its heroes abroad like Che Guevara supposedly "broke through the iron wall of American imperialism." Drawing on its New Left counterparts in the United States, the group even began to borrow such phrases as "burn baby burn," "right on", and "off the pigs".

After an intense manhunt, Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe were eventually caught and arrested in June 1972.

Custody and the Stammheim trial

Stammheim Prison

After the arrest of the protagonists of the first generation of the RAF, they were held in solitary confinement in the newly-constructed high security Stammheim Prison in the north of Stuttgart. When Ensslin devised an "info system" using aliases for each member, the four prisoners were able to communicate again, circulating letters with the help of their defence counsels.

To protest against their treatment by authorities, they went on several coordinated hunger strikes; eventually, they were force-fed. Holger Meins died of self-induced starvation on 9 November 1974. After public protests, their conditions were somewhat improved by the authorities.

The so-called second generation of the RAF emerged at the time, consisting of sympathizers independent of the inmates. This became clear when, on 27 February 1975, Peter Lorenz, the CDU candidate for mayor of Berlin, was kidnapped by the Movement 2 June (allied to the RAF) as part of pressure to secure the release of several other detainees. Since none of these were on trial for murder, the state agreed, and those inmates (and later Lorenz himself) were released.

On 24 April 1975, the West German embassy in Stockholm was seized by members of the RAF; two of the hostages were murdered as the German government under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt refused to give in to their demands. Two of the hostage-takers died from injuries they suffered when the explosives they planted detonated later that night.

On 21 May 1975, the Stammheim trial of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe began, named after the district in Stuttgart where it took place. The Bundestag had earlier changed the Code of Criminal Procedure so that several of the attorneys who were accused of serving as links between the inmates and the RAF's second generation could be excluded.

On 9 May 1976, Ulrike Meinhof was found dead in her cell, hanging from a rope made from jail towels. An investigation concluded that she had hanged herself, a result hotly contested at the time, triggering a plethora of conspiracy theories. Other theories suggest that she took her life because she was being ostracized by the rest of the group.

During the trial, more attacks took place. One of these was on 7 April 1977, when Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback, his driver, and his bodyguard were shot and killed by two RAF members while waiting at a red traffic light. Buback was considered by RAF as one of the key persons for their trial-parody. Among other things, two years earlier, while being interviewed by Stern magazine, he stated that "Persons like Baader don't deserve a fair trial".

Eventually, on 28 April 1977, the trial's 192nd day, the three remaining defendants were convicted of several murders, more attempted murders, and of forming a terrorist organization; they were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Trial Manipulation and False witnesses

There are a lot of accusations against the court, claiming that the trial was actually a trial-parody. A key-point is considered to be the judges themselves and their past. Judge Weiss (Mahler's trial) had judged Joachim Raese (president of third Reich’s court) as innocent seven times. When he threatened Meinhof that she would be put into a glass cage she answered caustically "So you are threaten me with Eichmann's cage fascist?" (Adolf Eichmann who was a SS-colonel, was held inside a glass cage during his trial in Israel). Siegfried Buback who was the RAF's main(Stammheim) trial judge, had been a Nazi member. During the Stammheim trial a lot of times the microphones were turned off while defendants were speaking, they were often expelled from the hall, and so. It was also reported by defendants' attorneys that the physical and psychological state of the prisoners held in solidarity and white cells was such that they couldn't defense themselves.

Two former members of RAF, Karl-Heinz Ruhland, and Gerhard Müller, testified under BKA's orders as revealed later. Their statements were often contradictory, something that was also commented in the newspapers. Ruhland himself later reported to Stern that his deposition was prepared in cooperation with police. Müller was considered to "break" during the third hunger strike in the winter 1974/75 which lasted 145 days. Prosecution offered him immunity for the murder of officer Norbert Schmidt in Hamburg(1971), and blamed Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin and Raspe instead. He was eventually freed and relocated to USA after getting a new identity and 500,000 DM.

Defense strategy on trial

The general approach by defendants and their attorneys was to highlight the political purpose and characteristics of RAF.

On 13rd and 14th January 1976 the defendants readied their testimony (about 200 pages) where they were analyzing the role of imperialism and its furious struggle against the revolutionary movements in the countries of the “third world”. They also expounded the fascistization of West Germany and its role as an imperialistic state(alliance with USA over Vietnam). Finally they talked about the task of urban guerilla and they undertook the political responsibility for the bombing attacks. Finally their lawyers (after Ulrike Meinhof's proposal) requested the direct affiliation of the accused in the state of prisoners of war.

On May 4th (5 days before Meinhof's death) the four defendants requested to provide data about Vietnam war. They claimed that since the military intervention in Vietnam by U.S (and indirectly FRG), had violated international law, the U.S. military bases in FRG were justifiably targets of international retaliation. They requested several politicians (like R. Nixon and H. Schmidt) as well as some former US agents(that were willing to testify) to be called as witnesses.

Later when their requests were totally rejected, US agents Barton Osbourne(ex-CIA, ex-member of the Phoenix Program), G. Peck(NSA), and Gary Thomas gave an extensive interview (organized by defense lawyers) on 23rd June 1976 where they explained by which ways FRG support was crucial for US operations at Vietnam. Peck concluded that RAF “was the response to criminal aggression of the U.S. government in Indochina and the assistance of the German government. The real terrorist was my government.”. Thomas presented data about the joint operations of FRG and US secret services in Eastern Europe. He was also observing Stammheim trial and referred to a CIA instructor teaching them how to make a murder look like a suicide.

The above statements were confirmed by the well-known CIA case officer Philip Agee

German Autumn

Main article: German Autumn

On 30 July 1977, Jürgen Ponto, the head of Dresdner Bank, was shot and killed in front of his house in Oberursel in a botched kidnapping. Those involved were Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Christian Klar, and Susanne Albrecht, the last being the sister of Ponto's goddaughter.

Following the convictions, Hanns Martin Schleyer, a former officer of the SS and NSDAP member who was then President of the German Employers' Association (and thus one of the most powerful industrialists in West Germany) was abducted in a violent kidnapping. On 5 September 1977, Schleyer's convoy was stopped by the kidnappers reversing a car into the path of Schleyer's vehicle, causing the Mercedes he was being driven in to crash. Once the convoy was stopped, five masked assailants immediately shot and killed the three policemen and the driver and took Schleyer hostage. One of the group (Sieglinde Hofmann) produced her weapon from a pram she was pushing down the road.

A letter then arrived with the Federal Government, demanding the release of eleven detainees, including those from Stammheim. A crisis committee was formed in Bonn, headed by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, which, instead of acceding, resolved to employ delaying tactics to give the police time to discover Schleyer's location. At the same time, a total communication ban was imposed on the prison inmates, who were now allowed visits only from government officials and the prison chaplain.

The crisis dragged on for more than a month, while the Bundeskriminalamt carried out its biggest investigation to date. Matters escalated when, on 13 October 1977, Lufthansa Flight 181 from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt was hijacked. A group of four Arabs took control of the plane (named Landshut). The leader introduced himself to the passengers as "Captain Mahmud" who would be later identified as Zohair Youssef Akache. When the plane landed in Rome for refuelling, he issued the same demands as the Schleyer kidnappers, plus the release of two Palestinians held in Turkey and payment of US$15 million.

The Bonn crisis team again decided not to give in. The plane flew on via Larnaca to Dubai, and then to Aden, where flight captain Jürgen Schumann, whom the hijackers deemed not cooperative enough, was brought before an improvised "revolutionary tribunal" and executed on 16 October. His body was dumped on the runway. The aircraft again took off, flown by the co-pilot Jürgen Vietor, this time headed for Mogadishu, Somalia.

A high-risk rescue operation was led by Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, then undersecretary in the chancellor's office, who had secretly been flown in from Bonn. At five past midnight (CET) on 18 October, the plane was stormed in a seven-minute assault by the GSG 9, an elite unit of the German federal police. All four hijackers were shot; three of them died on the spot. None of the passengers were seriously hurt and Wischnewski was able to phone Schmidt and tell the Bonn crisis team that the operation had been a success.

Half an hour later, German radio broadcast the news of the rescue, to which the Stammheim inmates listened on their radios. In the course of the night, Baader was found dead with a gunshot wound in the back of his head and Ensslin was found hanged in her cell; Raspe died in the hospital the next day from a gunshot wound to the head. Irmgard Möller, who had several stab wounds in the chest, survived and was released from prison in 1994.

Burial site of Baader, Raspe and Ensslin.

The official inquiry concluded that this was a collective suicide, but again conspiracy theories abounded. However, none of these theories were ever brought forward by the RAF itself. Some have questioned how Baader managed to obtain a gun in the high-security prison wing specially constructed for the first generation RAF members. Also, only a total commitment to her cause could have allowed Möller to have herself inflicted the four stab wounds found near her heart. However, independent investigations showed that the inmates' lawyers were able to smuggle in weapons and equipment in spite of the high security, something that the lawyers themselves denied, arguing that every meeting with their clients was observed by jailors. Möller claims that it was actually an extrajudicial killing, orchestrated by the German government, in response to Red Army Faction demands that the prisoners be released.

On 18 October 1977, Hanns-Martin Schleyer was shot to death by his captors en route to Mulhouse, France. The next day, on 19 October, Schleyer's kidnappers announced that he had been "executed" and pinpointed his location. His body was recovered later that day in the trunk of a green Audi 100 on the rue Charles Péguy. The French newspaper Libération received a letter declaring:

After 43 days we have ended Hanns-Martin Schleyer's pitiful and corrupt existence... His death is meaningless to our pain and our rage... The struggle has only begun. Freedom through armed, anti-imperialist struggle.

The events in the autumn of 1977, possibly the biggest criminal and political showdown that Germany has experienced since the end of World War II, are frequently referred to as Der Deutsche Herbst ("German Autumn").

The RAF since the 1980s

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was a serious blow to left-wing groups, but well into the 1990s attacks were still being committed under the name "RAF". Among these were the killing of CEO of MTU Aero Engines, a German engineering company, Ernst Zimmermann; another bombing at the US Air Force's Rhein-Main Air Base (near Frankfurt), which targeted the base commander and killed two bystanders; the car bomb attack that killed Siemens executive Karl-Heinz Beckurts and his driver; and the shooting of Gerold von Braunmühl, a leading official at Germany's foreign ministry. On 30 November 1989, Deutsche Bank chairman Alfred Herrhausen was killed with a highly complex bomb when his car triggered a photo sensor, in Bad Homburg. On 1 April 1991, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, leader of the government Treuhand organization responsible for the privatization of the East German state economy, was shot dead. The assassins of Zimmermann, von Braunmühl, Herrhausen and Rohwedder were never reliably identified .

After German reunification in 1990, it was confirmed that the RAF had received financial and logistic support from the Stasi, the security and intelligence organization of East Germany, which had given several members shelter and new identities. This was already generally suspected at the time.

In 1992, the German government assessed that the RAF's main field of engagement now was missions to release former RAF-members. To weaken the organization further the government declared that some RAF inmates would be released if the RAF refrained from violent attacks in the future. Subsequently the RAF announced their intention to "de-escalate" and refrain from significant activity.

The last action taken by the RAF took place in 1993 with a bombing of a newly built prison in Weiterstadt by overcoming the officers on duty and planting explosives. Although no one was seriously injured this operation caused property damage amounting to 123 million German Marks (over 50 million euros).

The last big action against the RAF took place on 27 June 1993. A Verfassungsschutz (internal secret service) agent named Klaus Steinmetz had infiltrated the RAF. As a result Birgit Hogefeld and Wolfgang Grams were to be arrested in Bad Kleinen. Grams and GSG 9 officer Michael Newrzella died during the mission. While it was initially concluded that Grams committed suicide, others claimed his death was in revenge for Newrzella's. Two eyewitness accounts supported the claims of an execution-style murder. However, an investigation headed by the Attorney General failed to substantiate such claims. Due to a number of operational mistakes involving the various police services, German Minister of the Interior Rudolf Seiters took responsibility and resigned from his post.

On 20 April 1998, an eight-page typewritten letter in German was faxed to the Reuters news agency, signed "RAF" with the machine-gun red star, declaring the group dissolved:

Vor fast 28 Jahren, am 14. Mai 1970, entstand in einer Befreiungsaktion die RAF. Heute beenden wir dieses Projekt. Die Stadtguerilla in Form der RAF ist nun Geschichte. (Almost 28 years ago, on 14 May 1970, the RAF arose in a campaign of liberation. Today we end this project. The urban guerrilla in the shape of the RAF is now history).

Horst Mahler, a founding RAF member, has crossed the lines to the far right and is now a Holocaust denier. He is an anti-semite and in 2005 was sentenced to 6 years in prison for incitement to racial hatred. He is on record as saying that his beliefs have not changed: Der Feind ist der Gleiche (The enemy is the same).

In 2007, amidst widespread media controversy, the German president Horst Köhler considered pardoning RAF member Christian Klar, who had filed a pardon application several years before. On May 7, 2007, pardon was denied; regular parole was later granted on November 24, 2008. RAF member Brigitte Mohnhaupt was granted release on five-year parole by a German court on 12 February 2007 and Eva Haule was released 17 August 2007.

Name

Faction versus Fraktion

The usual translation into English is the Red Army Faction; however, the founders wanted it not to reflect a splinter group but rather an embryonic militant unit that was embedded in or part of a wider communist workers' movement.

RAF versus Baader-Meinhof

The group always called itself the Rote Armee Fraktion, never the Baader-Meinhof Group or Gang. The name correctly refers to all incarnations of the organization: the "first generation" RAF, which consisted of Baader and his associates, the "second generation" RAF, and the "third generation" RAF, which existed in the 1980s and 90s.

The terms "Baader-Meinhof Gang" and "Baader-Meinhof Group" were first used by the media and the organization was generally known by these during its first generation, and applies only until Baader's death in 1977. The organization never used these terms for themselves, but the German media used them to avoid legitimizing the movement. Although Meinhof was not considered to be a leader of the gang at any time, her involvement in Baader's escape from jail in 1970 led to her name becoming attached to it.

List of assaults attributed to the RAF

See also: Members of the Red Army Faction

Date	Place	Action	Remarks	Photo
22 October 1971	Hamburg	Police officer killed	RAF members Irmgard Möller and Gerhard Müller attempted to rescue Margrit Schiller who was being arrested by the police by engaging in a shootout. Police sergeant Heinz Lemke was shot in the foot, while Sergeant Norbert Schmid, 33, was killed, becoming the first murder to be attributed to the RAF.
22 December 1971	Kaiserslautern	Police officer killed	German Police officer Herbert Schoner, 32, was shot by members of the RAF in a bank robbery. The four militants escaped with 134,000 Deutsche Marks.
11 May 1972	Frankfurt am Main	Bombing of US Army V Corps headquarters and the Terrace Club	US Army LTC Paul A. Bloomquist killed, 13 wounded
12 May 1972	Augsburg and Munich	Bombing of a police station in Augsburg and the Bavarian State Criminal Investigations Agency in Munich	5 police-officers wounded. Claimed by the Tommy Weissbecker Commando.
16 May 1972	Karlsruhe	Bombing of the car of the Federal Judge Buddenberg	His wife was driving the car and was wounded. Claimed by the Manfred Grashof commando.
19 May 1972	Hamburg	Bombing of the Axel Springer Verlag. The building was not evacuated even though warnings about the bombing were made by the RAF.	17 wounded. Ilse Stachowiak was involved in the bombing.
24 May 1972 18:10CET	Heidelberg	Bombing outside of Officers Club followed by a second bomb moments later in front of Army Security Agency (ASA), U.S. Army in Europe (HQ USAREUR) at Campbell Barracks. Known involved RAF members: Irmgard Möller and Angela Luther, Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe.	3 dead (Ronald A. Woodward, Charles L. Peck and Captain Clyde R. Bonner), 5 wounded. Claimed by 15 July Commando (in honour of Petra Schelm). Executed by Irmgard Moeller.
24 April 1975	Stockholm	West German embassy siege, murder of Andreas von Mirbach and Dr. Heinz Hillegaart	4 dead, of whom 2 were RAF members
7 May 1976	Sprendlingen near Offenbach	Police officer killed	22 year old Fritz Sippel was shot in the head when checking an RAF member's identity papers.
4 January 1977	Giessen	Attack against US 42nd Field Artillery Brigade at Gießen.	In a failed attack against the Gießen army base, the RAF sought to capture or destroy nuclear weapons present. A diversionary bomb attack on a fuel tank failed to fully ignite the fuel, and the assault on the armory was then repulsed, with several RAF members killed in the ensuing firefight. The presence of U.S. warheads on German soil was classified and officially denied at the time, and the incident received little publicity. General William Burns, who commanded the base in 1977, detailed the attack in a 1996 interview.
7 April 1977	Karlsruhe	Assassination of the federal prosecutor-general Siegfried Buback	The driver and another passenger were also killed. Claimed by the Ulrike Meinhof Commando. This murder case was brought up again after the 30 year commemoration in April 2007 when information from former RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock surfaced in media reports.
30 July 1977	Oberursel (Taunus)		The director of Dresdner Bank, Jürgen Ponto, is shot in his home during an attempted kidnapping. Ponto later dies from his injuries.
5 September 1977 18 October 1977	Cologne resp. Mulhouse	Hanns-Martin Schleyer, chairman of the German Employers' Association, is kidnapped and later shot	3 police-officers and the driver are killed during the kidnapping
22 September 1977	Utrecht, Netherlands	Shooting outside a bar	Arie Kranenburg (46), Dutch policeman, shot and killed by RAF Knut Folkerts
24 September 1978	A forest near Dortmund	Murder of a police officer	Three RAF members (Angelika Speitel, Werner Lotze, Michael Knoll) were engaged in target-practice when they were confronted by police. A shoot-out followed where one police-man (Hans-Wilhelm Hans, 26) was shot dead, and one of the RAF terrorists (Knoll) was wounded so badly that he would later die from his injuries.
1 November 1978	Kerkrade	Gun-battle with four custom officials	Dionysius de Jong (19) was shot to death, and Johannes Goemanns (24) later died of his wounds, when they were involved in a gun-fight with RAF members (Adelheid Schulz and Rolf Heissler) who were trying to cross the Dutch border illegally.
25 June 1979	Mons, Belgium	Alexander Haig, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO escapes an assassination attempt	A land mine blew up under the bridge on which Haig's car was traveling, narrowly missing Haig's car and wounding three of his bodyguards in a following car. In 1993 a German Court sentenced Rolf Clemens Wagner, a former RAF member, to life imprisonment for the assassination attempt.
7 August 1981	Kaiserslautern, Germany	USAF Security Police Officer Sgt. John Toffton was attacked in Kaiserslautern by Christian Klar and Brigitte Mohnhaupt and unknown third party. Security Police Officer USAF on his way to work from his residence on Stadion Strasse near Eisenbahn Strasse and Mozart Strasse riding a yellow Ross Grand Tour bicycle when he was attacked. Security Police Officer survived the attack with little injury. Mohnhaupt the driver and Klar fled the scene in a green VW Fast Back with German Plates. Unknown third party swinging a club was injured or killed. A large amount of blood and broken eye glasses was found at the scene, none of the blood was from the victim.
31 August 1981		Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany	Large car-bomb exploded in the parking lot of Ramstein Air Base
15 September 1981		Heidelberg	Unsuccessful rocket propelled grenade attack against the car carrying the US Army's West German Commander Frederick J. Kroesen. Known involved RAF members: Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Christian Klar.
2 July 1982	Nurnberg	Unsuccessful sniper attack against US Army Nuclear Storage Site NATO-23. Four civilians (two adults and two children) were killed the next day in an accidental shooting by American troops who had been placed on high alert after the attack. Known involved RAF members: Christian Klar.	A family of 4 hunting mushrooms came through a fence downed by storms the day after the sniper incident and were killed by members of the 3/17th Field Artillery Battalion after being shot at just hours before. The 3/17 FA Battalion were guarding the NATO 2-3 Nuclear storage site at the time. The unit was fired upon several times the night before by Christian Klar. Two US soldiers were slightly wounded and one was killed.
18 December 1984	Oberammergau, West Germany	Unsuccessful attempt to bomb a school for NATO officers. The car bomb was discovered and defused.	A total of ten incidents followed over the next month, against US, British, and French targets.
1 February 1985	Gauting	Shooting	Ernst Zimmerman, head of the MTU is shot in the head in his home. Zimmermann died twelve hours later. The assassination was claimed by the Patsy O'Hara Commando.
8 August 1985	Rhein-Main Air Base (near Frankfurt)	A Volkswagen Passat exploded in the parking lot across from the base commander's building.	Two people killed: Airman First Class Frank Scarton and Becky Bristol, a U.S. civilian employee who also was the spouse of a U.S. Air Force enlisted man. A granite monument marks the spot where they died. Twenty people were also injured. Army Spec. Edward Pimental was kidnapped and killed the night before for his military ID card which was used to gain access to the base. The French terrorist organization Action Directe is suspected to have collaborated with the RAF on this attack. Birgit Hogefeld and Eva Haule have been convicted for their involvement in this event.
9 July 1986	Straßlach (near Munich)		Shooting of Siemens manager Karl Heinz Beckurts and driver Eckhard Groppler
30 November 1989	Bad Homburg v. d. Höhe	Bombing of the car carrying the chairman of Deutsche Bank Alfred Herrhausen	The case remained open for a long time, as the delicate method employed baffled the German prosecutors, as it could not come from guerillas like the RAF. Also, all suspects of the RAF were not charged due to alibis. However, The case is receiving new light in late 2007 by the German authorities that Stasi, the East German secret police, played a role in the assassination of Mr. Herrhausen, as the bombing method was the exactly the same one that had been developed by the StaSi.
13 February 1991	Bonn	Sniper attack on U.S. embassy	Three Red Army Faction members fired automatic rifles from across the Rhine River at the U.S. Embassy Chancery. No one was hurt.
1 April 1991	Düsseldorf	Assassination of Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, at his house in Düsseldorf	As the chief of the Treuhandanstalt, a powerful trust that controlled most state-owned assets in the former East Germany, Mr. Rohwedder was in charge of privatizing the assets of the former German Democratic Republic.
27 March 1993	Weiterstadt	Attacks with explosives at the construction site of a new prison.	Led to the capture of two RAF members three months later at a train station, and a shoot-out between RAF member Wolfgang Grams and a GSG 9 squad; GSG9 officer Michael Newrzella was killed before Grams allegedly was shot, while Birgit Hogefeld was arrested. Damage 123 million DM (over 50 million euro). The attack caused a four year delay in the completion of the site, that had been short before commissioning in 1993.

RAF Commandos

The following is a list of all known RAF Commando Units – Most RAF units were named after deceased RAF members, others were named after deceased members of international militant left-wing groups such as the Black Panthers, Irish National Liberation Army and the Red Brigades.

• 15 July Commando
• 2 June Commando
• Andreas Baader Commando
• Ciro Rizzato Commando
• George Jackson Commando
• Gudrun Ensslin Commando
• Holger Meins Commando
• Ingrid Schubert Commando
• Jan-Carl Raspe Commando
• José Manuel Sevillano Commando
• Katharina Hammerschmidt Commando
• Khaled Aker Commando
• Manfred Grashof Commando
• Mara Cagol Commando
• Patsy O'Hara Commando
• Petra Schelm Commando
• Siegfried Hausner Commando
• Sigurd Debus Commando
• Thomas Weissbecker Commando
• Ulrich Wessel Commando
• Ulrike Meinhof Commando
• Vincenzo Spano Commando
• Wolfgang Beer Commando

Films

Several German film and TV productions were made about the RAF. These include Klaus Lemke's telefeature Brandstifter (Arsonists) (1969); the Volker Schloendorff adaptation of Heinrich Böll's novel Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum) (1975); Germany in Autumn (1978), codirected by Alexander Kluge, Volker Schloendorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Edgar Reitz; Fassbinder's Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation) (1979); Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (The German Sisters) (1981); Reinhard Hauff's Stammheim (1986); Christian Petzold's Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In) (2000); Christopher Roth's Baader (2002); Uli Edel's adaptation of Stefan Aust's Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008).

Outside Germany, films include Swiss director Markus Imhoof's Die Reise (The Journey) (1986). On TV, there was Heinrich Breloer's Todesspiel (Death Game) (1997), a two-part docu-drama, and Volker Schloendorff's Die Stille nach dem Schuss (Rita's Legends) (2000).

There have been several documentaries: Im Fadenkreuz – Deutschland & die RAF (1997, several directors); Gerd Conradt's Starbuck Holger Meins (2001); Andres Veiel's Black Box BRD (2001); Klaus Stern's Andreas Baader – Der Staatsfeind (Enemy of the State) (2003); Ben Lewis's In Love With Terror, for BBC Four (2003); and Ulrike Meinhof – Wege in den Terror (Ways into Terror) (2006).

The 2010 feature documentary Children of the Revolution tells Ulrike Meinhof's story from the perspective of her daughter, journalist and historian Bettina Röhl, while Andres Veiel's 2011 feature film If Not Us, Who? provides a context for the RAF's origins through the perspective of Gudrun Ensslin's partner Bernward Vesper.

Fiction and art

• Australian-British playwright Van Badham's play Black Hands/Dead Section provides a fictionalised account of the actions and lives of key members of the RAF. It won the Queensland premier's award for literature in 2005.
• Gerhard Richter, a German painter whose series of works titled 18 October 1977 repainted photographs of the Faction members and their deaths.
• The Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum made a painting called The murder of Andreas Baader in 1977–1978, that shows Nerdrum's personal commentary to the events in the Stammheim prison.
• Josef Žáček, a Czech painter created a series of paintings entitled Searching in Lost Space (1993) - evocative portraits of wanted members of the Red Army Faction - that were inspired by events that had occurred in 1993 in Bad Kleinen.
• Heinrich Böll's book The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, 1974, describes the political climate in West Germany during the active phase of the RAF in the seventies. Schlöndorff and Trotta (who knew the leading RAF cadre) filmed the book in 1975.
• Cabaret Voltaire, the influential industrial band from Sheffield, England, recorded a song called "Baader-Meinhof" that pondered the group's importance in history and their motivations. There are at least two different released mixes of the recording.
• Walter Abish, How German Is It, 1980. A book about the German essence of German things like terrorism and Heidegger. Published in Germany by Günter Maschke.
• Christoph Hein's novel In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten (In His Early Childhood, a Garden) deals with a fictionalized aftermath of the Grams shooting in 1993.
• In 1996, British singer songwriter Luke Haines released a 9-track album under the Baader Meinhof moniker. In this concept album, all songs are a romanticized retelling of the RAF actions.
• In 2004, Canadian singer songwriter Neil Leyton composed and released a song titled "Ingrid Schubert".
• The feature film See You at Régis Debray, written and directed by CS Leigh tells the story of the time Andreas Baader spent hiding in the apartment of Régis Debray in Paris in 1969.
• In the 2005 film Munich, Mossad agents pose as members of the Red Army Faction when they inadvertently share a safehouse with members of the PLO.
• The Baader Meinhof Complex, a 2008 movie based on Stefan Aust's book which was nominated in the 81st Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.
• The novel "Red Army Faction Blues" by Ada Wilson examines the early years of the RAF through the eyes of agent provocateur Peter Urbach.

Further reading

• J. Smith, A. Moncourt. The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 1: Projectiles for the people, PM Press(2009) ISBN 978-1604860290
• J. Smith, A. Moncourt. The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 2: Dancing with Imperialism, PM Press(2009) ISBN 978-1604860306
• Aust, Stefan. The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, The Bodley Head Ltd 1987, ISBN 978-0-370-31031-2
• Aust, Stefan. Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (translated from the German by Anthea Bell), Oxford University Press (USA) 2009, ISBN 978-0-19-537275-5
• Baumann, Bommi. How It All Began: Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla, Arsenal Pulp Press 1981, ISBN 978-0-88978-045-3
• Becker, Jillian. Hitler's Children: Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang, DIANE Publishing Company 1998, ISBN 978-0-7881-5472-0 or Panther edition 1978, ISBN 978-0-586-04665-4
• Hyams, Edward. Dictionary of Modern Revolution, A Lane, 1973 ISBN 978-0-7139-0476-5
• RAF. The Urban Guerilla Concept, Kersplebedeb pamphlet edition 2005 ISBN 978-1-894946-16-2; online at germanguerilla.com
• Author unknown (assumed to be Meinhof) "Berlin 1970—Manifesto for Armed Action—Build Up the Red Army!", 883 Magazine, 5 June 1970
• Usselmann, Rainer. "18. Oktober 1977: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning and Its New Audience", College Art Association, Art Journal, Spring 2002. Usselmann sees Richter's large cycle of grey paintings as a work of mourning.
• Varon, Jeremy. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies, University of California Press 2004, ISBN 978-0-520-24119-0
• Vague, Tom. Televisionaries: The Red Army Faction Story, AK Press, 1994 ISBN 978-1-873176-47-4
• Wright, Joanne. Terrorist Propaganda: The Red Army Faction and the Provisional IRA, 1968–86, Palgrave Macmillan 1991, ISBN 978-0-312-04761-0
• Author unknown. A Herstory of the Revolutionary Cells and Rote Zora: Armed Resistance in West Germany, published by Autonomedia (Victoria, BC, Canada).
• Andre Moncourt. Daring To Struggle, Failing To Win: The Red Army Factions 1977 Campaign Of Desperation, PM Press(2008) ISBN 978-1604860283
• Jeremy Varon. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventie. University of California Press (2004) ISBN 978-0520241190

External links

• Red Army Faction – Communiqués and Statements – an English-language collection of all communiques and statements by the RAF
• Andrew Stevens, Red Army Fiction – An Interview With Richard Huffman – Interview with creator of Baader-Meinhof.com
• "Build Up the Red Army" English translation of 1970 manifesto from the Red Army Faction
• This is Baader-Meinhof, official site of The Gun Speaks, a future book on the Red Army Faction
• Patrick Donahue, "German Red Army Faction Victim's Son May Back Pardon" by Bloomberg News
• Denise Noe, "The Baader Meinhof Gang", at tru Crime Library website
• LabourHistory.net a collection of original Red Army Faction statements and texts
• Baader Meinhof, the First Celebrity Terrorists – slideshow by The First Post
• Terrorist chic or debunking of a myth? Baader Meinhof film splits Germany
• Heroic Impatience By Diego Gambetta, The Nation, 4 March 2010
• Weiterstadt Prison Germany (after attack 1993)
• Questions on the Stammheim Death Night