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Red Army Faction
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The Red Army Faction or RAF (German Rote Armee Fraktion) (in its early stages commonly known as Baader-Meinhof Group [or Gang]), was postwar West Germany's most violent and prominent militant left-wing terrorist group. It described itself as a communist "urban guerrilla" group engaged in armed resistance. The RAF was formally founded in 1970 by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, Ulrike Meinhof, Irmgard Möller, and others.
The Red Army Faction operated from the late 1960s to 1998, committing numerous operations, especially in the autumn of 1977, which led to a national crisis that became known as "German Autumn".
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Timeline
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1972 Three out of six bombs explode in the Springer Press building in Hamburg, Germany - 17 are injured. The Red Army Faction claims responsibility.
1972 A RAF bomb explodes in the Campbell Barracks of the U.S. Army Supreme European Command in Heidelberg, West Germany. Three U.S. soldiers Clyde Bonner, Ronald Woodard and Charles Peck are killed.
1972 Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe, Holger Meins and some other members of Red Army Faction are arrested in Frankfurt am Main after a shootout.
1972 Ulrike Meinhof and Gerhard Müller of Red Army Faction are arrested in a teacher's apartment in Langenhagen, West Germany.
1975 A bomb explodes in the Paris offices of the Springer Press. The 6 March Group (connected to the Red Army Faction) demands amnesty for the Baader-Meinhof Group.
1975 Six Red Army Faction terrorists take over West German embassy in Stockholm, take 11 hostages and demand the release of the group's jailed members; shortly after, they are captured by Swedish poli
1976 The trial against jailed members of the Red Army Faction begins in Stuttgart, West Germany.
1976 Ulrike Meinhof of RAF is found hanging in an apparent suicide, in her cell in Stuttgart-Stannheim prison.
1977 German Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback and his driver are shot by two Red Army Faction members while waiting at a red light near his home in Karlsruhe. "The Ulrike Meinhof Commando" later claims responsibility.
1977 A Stuttgart court sentences RAF members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe to life imprisonment.
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Encyclopedia
The Red Army Faction or RAF (German Rote Armee Fraktion) (in its early stages commonly known as Baader-Meinhof Group [or Gang]), was postwar West Germany's most violent and prominent militant left-wing terrorist group. It described itself as a communist "urban guerrilla" group engaged in armed resistance. The RAF was formally founded in 1970 by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, Ulrike Meinhof, Irmgard Möller, and others.
The Red Army Faction operated from the late 1960s to 1998, committing numerous operations, especially in the autumn of 1977, which led to a national crisis that became known as "German Autumn". It was responsible for 34 deaths, including many secondary targets—such as chauffeurs and bodyguards—and many injuries in its almost 30 years of activity.
In 2007, amidst widespread media controversy, the German president Horst Köhler had considered pardoning RAF member Christian Klar, who filed a pardon application several years ago, but on 7 May 2007 this was denied. However, on 24 November, 2008, parole was granted. RAF member Brigitte Mohnhaupt was granted a release on a five year parole by a German court on 12 February 2007 and Eva Haule was released 17 August 2007.
Horst Mahler has since crossed the lines to the far right and became a militant antisemite and Holocaust denier. In November 1999 he said that his beliefs had not basically changed, since the enemy remained the same.
Although more well-known, the RAF conducted fewer attacks than the Revolutionary Cells (RZ) (296 bomb, arson and other attacks 1973 - 1995).
Background
The origins of the group can be traced back to the student protest movement in West Germany. Industrialised nations in late 1960s experienced massive social upheavals stemming from dissatisfaction with capitalist society among both workers and students. Newly-found youth identity and issues such as racism, women's liberation and anti-imperialism were at the forefront of radical politics. Algeria and Cuba were still consolidating their revolutions and socialist-infused national liberation movements were engaging colonial and post-colonial regimes across the globe.
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. There was anger at the varying levels of post-war denazification in West and East Germany, which was seen by some as ineffective (Konrad Adenauer, the first Federal Republic chancellor had even kept on the Nazi chancellery secretary, Hans Globke).
The conservative media were considered biased by the radicals as they were owned and controlled by conservatives such as Axel Springer, who was implacably opposed to student radicalism. 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. With 95% of the Bundestag controlled by the coalition, the APO or 'Extra-Parliamentary Opposition' was formed with the intent of generating protest and political activity outside of government. In 1972 a law was passed—the Berufsverbot, which banned radicals or those with a 'questionable' political persuasion from public sector jobs.
"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.
Young people were alienated from both their parents and the institutions of state. The historical legacy of fascism 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).
The radicalized took the view that West Germany did not need to be an out-and-out totalitarian state and 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.
- 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
- Schools of philosophy such as the Frankfurt school, Critical theorists and associated Marxian philosophers.
Some of the RAF founders such as Meinhof were already scholars in their own right and also took inspiration from their own personal experiences and assessments of the socio-economic situation.
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..
Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse were very influential. 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"—expended 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 'superstructure' of society was vitally important in the understanding of class control (and acquiescence) in society. 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 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. Peaceful protests turned into riots on 2 June 1967, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, visited West Berlin. The Shah's security were armed with wooden staves and were free to beat protesters. After a day of angry protests by exiled Persians, a group widely supported by German students, the Shah visited the Berlin Opera, where a crowd of student protesters gathered. During the opera house demonstrations, a German student Benno Ohnesorg—who was attending his first protest rally—was shot in the head by a police officer. The officer was acquitted in a subsequent trial.
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. It influenced the creation of the Movement 2 June, a militant-Anarchist group which took its name from the date of Ohnesorg's death.
Before that the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force had never been put into question by German oppositionists after 1945. In the spring of 1968 Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader, who were joined by Thorwald Proll, Horst Söhnlein decided to set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt as a protest against the Vietnam war. Two days later, on 2 April 1968, they were arrested.
While the four defendants were on trial, the journalist Ulrike Meinhof published several sympathetic articles in the political magazine konkret.
Meanwhile, on 11 April 1968, Rudi Dutschke, a leading intellectual and spokesman for the 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 until his death in 1979, which was a late consequence of his injuries.
Axel Springer's populist newspaper Bild-Zeitung, which had 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
All four of the defendants were convicted of arson and endangering human life 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. Eventually, they made their way to Italy, where 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 and was to be a more class conscious and determined force compared with some of its immediate 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. The main R.A.F protagonists trained in the West Bank and Gaza with the PFLP guerrillas and looked to the Palestinian cause for inspiration and guidance. The organisation and outlook was partly modelled 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 R.A.F 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, the big businesses and the foreign imperialists."
The importance of small arms training, sabotage, expropriation, and a substantial safehouse/support base among the urban population was exhorted 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' although R.A.F members did receive intermittent support and sanctuary over the Berlin Wall in the German Democratic Republic/East Germany.
After their trial for the department store arsons, Baader and Ensslin went into hiding, but Baader was caught again in April 1970. On 14 May 1970, Baader was freed from custody by Meinhof and others. Baader, Ensslin, Mahler, and Meinhof then went to Jordan for their brief guerrilla warfare training with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
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. 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. After an intense manhunt, Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe were caught in June 1972.
Custody and the Stammheim trial
After the arrest of the main 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 Jan-Carl Raspe began, named after the district in Stuttgart where it took place. Possibly the most tense and controversial German criminal trial ever, 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.
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.
Autumn 1977 (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 kidnapping that went wrong. 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, his driver was forced to brake when a baby carriage suddenly appeared in the street in front of them. The police escort vehicle behind them was unable to stop in time, and crashed into Schleyer's car. Five masked assailants immediately shot and killed the three policemen and the driver and took Schleyer hostage.
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 only allowed visits 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 (Landshut Hijacking). 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. Not one passenger was 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 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.
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. Möller claims that it was actually an extrajudicial killing, orchestrated by the German government, in response to Red Army 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"). A two-part 1997 television mini-series by Heinrich Breloer called Todesspiel ("Death Game") gives a good account of the events, as far as they can be reconstructed today.
The RAF in the 1980s and 1990s
The collapse 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, a German engineering company, Ernst Zimmermann; another bombing at the U.S. 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.")
Name
Faction versus Fraktion
The name was inspired by that of the Japanese Red Army, a Japanese leftist paramilitary group. The usual translation into English is the Red Army Faction, however, the founders wanted it to reflect what they saw as not so much an orthodox political faction or splinter group but an embryonic militant unit or set of "groupuscules" that was embedded in or part of a wider communist workers' movement. The abbreviation RAF was also a gibe at the Royal Air Force, a major contributor to the huge NATO presence in West Germany.
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, which operated in the late 1970s after the group Socialist Patients' Collective was absorbed by it, 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
| Date | Place | Action | Remarks | Photo | 22 October 1971 | Hamburg | Police officer murdered | 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 murdered | German Police officer Herbert Schoner, 32, was shot by members of the RAF in a bank robbery. The four terrorists escaped with 134,000 Deutsche Marks. | 11 May 1972 | Frankfurt am Main | Bombing of US barracks | US Officer Paul A. Bloomquist dead, 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 | 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 the 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 murdered. | 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. | | 1977 | Palma de Mallorca resp. Mogadishu, Somalia | Landshut (hijacking), Lufthansa aircraft that was hijacked as part of the events in the German Autumn of 1977 . | 3 hijackers killed, hijacking was ended by German GSG 9 commandos in an operation called Operation Feuerzauber | | 5 September 1977
18 October 1977 | Cologne resp.
Mulhouse | Hanns-Martin Schleyer, chairman of the German Employers' Organisation, is kidnapped and later shot | 3 police-officers and the driver are killed during the kidnapping | | 22 September 1977 | Utrecht The Netherlands | Shooting in a bar | Arie Kranenburg (46), Dutch policeman, shot 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 | | 31 August 1981 | Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany | Large carbomb explodes 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. | | 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. | 8 August 1985 | Rhein-Main Air Base (near Frankfurt) | A Volkswagen Mini-Bus exploded in the parking lot across from the base commander's building. | Two people are 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 are 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 Stasis. | 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 a shoot-out three months later at a train station, between two RAF members, and law enforcement. RAF member Wolfgang Grams and a GSG 9 officer, Michael Newrzella, were killed. Birgit Hogefeld was arrested. Damage 123 million DM (over 50 million euro) |
For a full list of members see: Members of the Red Army Faction
In fiction and art
- The Baader Meinhof Complex, a 2008 movie based on Stefan Aust's book
- Australian/UK 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.
- The RAF's philosophies feature heavily in a comedy directed by Bruce LaBruce called The Raspberry Reich.
- 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.
- Heinrich Böll's book The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum describes the political climate in West Germany during the active phase of the RAF in the seventies.
- The Mossad agents, tasked with tracing and assassinating Black September members, as depicted in the film Munich, pass themselves off to the Palestinian terrorists in a "safe-house" in Athens as the RAF. At another point in the film, the team leader visits an old friend, named Andreas, in Frankfurt and asks him if he's Baader-Meinhof. Andreas was played by Moritz Bleibtreu, who would play Andreas Baader in The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008).
- 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 Rainbow six, the Baader-Meinhof Group survivors are used as expendable red herring terrorists by Demitry Popov, in order to scare up the contract for Global Security at the Olympics.
- 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.
- The Brazilian rock band Legião Urbana has a track called Baader-Meinhof Blues in Música P/ Acampamentos album.
- The feature film SEE YOU AT REGIS DEBRAY written and directed by CS Leigh tells the story of the time Andreas Baader spent hiding in the apartment of Regis Debray in Paris in 1969.
- The Leonard Cohen song First We Take Manhattan is about the Faction.
Further reading
- Aust, Stefan. The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, The Bodley Head Ltd 1987 , ISBN 0370310314
- Baumann, Bommi. How It All Began: Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla, Arsenal Pulp Press 1981, ISBN 0889780455
- Becker, Jillian. Hitler's Children: Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang, DIANE Publishing Company 1998, ISBN 0788154729 or Panther edition 1978, ISBN 0586046658
- Hyams, Edward. Dictionary of Modern Revolution, A Lane, 1973 ISBN 0713904763
- RAF. The Urban Guerilla Concept, Kersplebedeb pamphlet edition 2005 ISBN 1894946162; online at
- Author unknown (assumed to be Meinhof) , 883 Magazine, 5 June 1970
- Usselmann, Rainer. , College Art Association, Art Journal, Spring 2002
- 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 0520241193
- Vague, Tom. Televisionaries: The Red Army Faction Story, AK Press, 1994 ISBN 1873176473
- Wright, Joanne. Terrorist Propaganda: The Red Army Faction and the Provisional IRA, 1968-86, Palgrave Macmillan 1991, ISBN 0312047614
- Author unknown. , published by Autonomedia (Victoria, BC, Canada).
External links
- , official site of The Gun Speaks, a future book on the Red Army Faction. (accessed 2008-06-21)
- Picture essay of Red Army Faction at The First Post website. (accessed 2008-06-21)
- - detailed, sympathetic account - article commissioned in 1994 by Arm the Spirit, Toronto, Canada. (accessed 2008-06-21)
- - an English-language collection of all communiques and statements by the RAF at GermanGuerilla.com. (accessed 2008-06-21)
- Andrew Stevens, - Interview with creator of Baader-Meinhof.com in 3am Magazine. (accessed 2008-06-21)
- English translation of 1970 manifesto from the Red Army Faction. (accessed 2008-06-21)
- , Web resource on the RAF . (accessed 2008-06-21)
- Patrick Donahue, , Bloomberg article about the latest development in the murder case Siegfried Buback. (accessed 2008-06-21)
- Denise Noe, , at tru Crime Library website. (accessed 2008-06-21)
- Labourhistory.net/raf, , Bi-lingual site including a collection of original Red Army Faction statements, texts and discussions as well as a Chronology, Bibliography and supporting Documentation.
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