Red Army Faction
Overview
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
, 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 ZedongMao ZedongMao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
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 MinhHo Chi MinhHồ Chí Minh , born Nguyễn Sinh Cung and also known as Nguyễn Ái Quốc, was a Vietnamese Marxist-Leninist revolutionary leader who was prime minister and president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam...
and Che GuevaraChe GuevaraErnesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
as well as early AutonomismAutonomismAutonomism refers to a set of left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the socialist movement. As an identifiable theoretical system it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist communism...
. - Philosophers associated with the Frankfurt schoolFrankfurt SchoolThe Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
(Jürgen HabermasJürgen HabermasJürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
, Herbert MarcuseHerbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
, and Oskar NegtOskar NegtOskar Negt is a philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory. He is Professor of Sociology at the Universität Hannover....
in particular) and associated Marxian philosophers.
RAF founder Ulrike Meinhof
Ulrike Meinhof
Ulrike Marie Meinhof was a German left-wing militant. She co-founded the Red Army Faction in 1970 after having previously worked as a journalist for the monthly left-wing magazine Konkret. She was arrested in 1972, and eventually charged with numerous murders and the formation of a criminal...
had a long history in the Communist Party.
Timeline
1970 The Red Army Faction is established in Germany.thumb|right|Launch of the [[Saturn INT-21]], carrying the [[Skylab]] space station.
1972 Red Army Faction member Ulrike Meinhof is captured by police in Langenhagen.
1977 German Federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback and his driver are shot by two Red Army Faction members while waiting at a red light.
1977 The Red Army Faction trial ends, with Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe found guilty of four counts of murder and more than 30 counts of attempted murder.
1977 Hanns Martin Schleyer, is kidnapped in Cologne, West Germany by the Red Army Faction and is later murdered.
1977 Four Palestinians hijack ''Lufthansa Flight 181'' to Somalia and demand release of 11 members of the Red Army Faction.
1977 German Autumn: a set of events revolving around the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight by the Red Army Faction (RAF) comes to an end when Schleyer is murdered and various RAF members allegedly commit suicide.
1989 Deutsche Bank board member Alfred Herrhausen is killed by a Red Army Faction terrorist bomb.
1998 German terrorist group Red Army Faction announces their dissolution after 28 years.
Encyclopedia
The radicalized were, like many in the New Left
, influenced by:
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") 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 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
. To hundreds of supporters of the Shah joined a group of fake supporters armed with wooden staves, to disturb the normal course of the visit of the Shah of Iran in West Berlin. These extremists were left to 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 students 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
, who were joined by Thorwald Proll
and Horst Söhnlein
, decided to set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt
as a protest against the Vietnam war, and carried out the arson attack on 2 April 1968. Two days later, on 4 April 1968, they were arrested.
Meanwhile, on 11 April 1968, Rudi Dutschke
, a leading 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 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 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."
for political prisoner
s, 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 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 RAF protagonists trained in the West Bank
and Gaza
with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP) guerrillas and looked to the Palestinian cause for inspiration and guidance. The organisation and outlook was partly modelled on the Uruguay
an 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 'commando
s', 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:
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 state
s although RAF members did receive intermittent support and sanctuary over the border in East Germany.
After their trial for the department store arson attacks, 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 PFLP and Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO).
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. 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. Baader-Meinhof seized on this sentiment and carefully cultivated an outlaw image, wholesaling the ideal of authenticity of 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 America 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.
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 counsel
s.
To protest against their treatment by authorities, they went on several coordinated hunger strike
s; 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.
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.
, 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. It has been said often that Schleyer's convoy was stopped by one of the group (Sieglinde Hofmann) pushing a pram into the road where it was to pass by. However, on 5 September 1977, Schleyer's car was in fact 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.
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 Arab
s 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 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.
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 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:
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").
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:
Horst Mahler
has crossed the lines to the far right and is 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
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.
, 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 fascists and at the right, intended to recall the aerial bombing of Germany by the Royal Air Force
.
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.
'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 Hauuf's Stammheim
(1986); Christian Petzold
's Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In
) (2000); Christopher Roth's Baader (2002); Uli Edel
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.
and the Red Brigades
.
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
, 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 ZedongMao ZedongMao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
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 MinhHo Chi MinhHồ Chí Minh , born Nguyễn Sinh Cung and also known as Nguyễn Ái Quốc, was a Vietnamese Marxist-Leninist revolutionary leader who was prime minister and president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam...
and Che GuevaraChe GuevaraErnesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
as well as early AutonomismAutonomismAutonomism refers to a set of left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the socialist movement. As an identifiable theoretical system it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist communism...
. - Philosophers associated with the Frankfurt schoolFrankfurt SchoolThe Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
(Jürgen HabermasJürgen HabermasJürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
, Herbert MarcuseHerbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
, and Oskar NegtOskar NegtOskar Negt is a philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory. He is Professor of Sociology at the Universität Hannover....
in particular) and associated Marxian philosophers.
RAF founder Ulrike Meinhof
Ulrike Meinhof
Ulrike Marie Meinhof was a German left-wing militant. She co-founded the Red Army Faction in 1970 after having previously worked as a journalist for the monthly left-wing magazine Konkret. She was arrested in 1972, and eventually charged with numerous murders and the formation of a criminal...
had a long history in the Communist Party. Holger Meins
Holger Meins
Holger Klaus Meins was a German cinematography student who joined the Red Army Faction in the early 1970s and died on hunger strike in prison.-As a Revolutionary:...
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
Horst Mahler
Horst Mahler is a former German lawyer and advocate of radical ideologies. He once was an extreme-left militant, a founding member of the Red Army Faction. Subsequently he became a Maoist and later shifted to the extreme-right. He was for a time a member of the National Democratic Party of Germany...
had been an established lawyer, but was also at the center of the anti-Springer
Axel Springer AG
Axel Springer AG is one of the largest multimedia companies in Europe, with more than 11,500 employees and with annual revenues of about €2.9 billion. The Company is active in a total of 36 countries, including Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia and Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland...
revolt from the beginning. From their own personal experiences and assessments of the socio-economic situation they soon became more specifically influenced by Leninism
Leninism
In Marxist philosophy, Leninism is the body of political theory for the democratic organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party, and the achievement of a direct-democracy dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of socialism...
and Maoism
Maoism
Maoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought , is claimed by Maoists as an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong . Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely applied as the political and military guiding...
, 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
Le Monde diplomatique
Le Monde diplomatique is a monthly newspaper offering analysis and opinion on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first created mainly for a diplomatic audience as its name implies...
, 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
Watts Riots
The Watts Riots or the Watts Rebellion was a civil disturbance in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California from August 11 to August 15, 1965. The 5-day riot resulted in 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, and 3,438 arrests...
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
Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian writer, politician, political philosopher, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime...
and Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
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
Coercion
Coercion is the practice of forcing another party to behave in an involuntary manner by use of threats or intimidation or some other form of pressure or force. In law, coercion is codified as the duress crime. Such actions are used as leverage, to force the victim to act in the desired way...
and hegemony
Hegemony
Hegemony is an indirect form of imperial dominance in which the hegemon rules sub-ordinate states by the implied means of power rather than direct military force. In Ancient Greece , hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states...
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
Liberal democracy
Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...
'. His One-Dimensional Man
One-Dimensional Man
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society is a book written by philosopher Herbert Marcuse, first published in 1964....
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
Base and superstructure
In Marxist theory, human society consists of two parts: the base and superstructure; the base comprehends the forces and relations of production — employer-employee work conditions, the technical division of labour, and property relations — into which people enter to produce the necessities and...
' 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
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
, 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
Sovereign state
A sovereign state, or simply, state, is a state with a defined territory on which it exercises internal and external sovereignty, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. It is also normally understood to be a state which is neither...
, but his death prevented fulfilment of this.
Many of the radicals felt that Germany's lawmakers
Legislator
A legislator is a person who writes and passes laws, especially someone who is a member of a legislature. Legislators are usually politicians and are often elected by the people...
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
Volksgemeinschaft
Volksgemeinschaft is a German expression meaning "people's community". Originally appearing during World War I as Germans rallied behind the war, it derived its popularity as a means to break down elitism and class divides...
). The Federal Republic was exporting arms to African dictatorships, which was seen as supporting the war in Southeast Asia
Indochina Wars
The Indochina Wars were a series of wars fought in Southeast Asia from 1947 until 1979, between nationalist Vietnamese against French, American, and Chinese forces. The term "Indochina" originally referred to French Indochina, which included the current states of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In...
and engineering the remilitarization of Germany with the U.S.-led entrenchment against the Warsaw Pact
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance , or more commonly referred to as the Warsaw Pact, was a mutual defense treaty subscribed to by eight communist states in Eastern Europe...
nations.
Ongoing events further catalyzed the situation. Protests turned into riots on 2 June 1967, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, Shah of Persia , ruled Iran from 16 September 1941 until his overthrow by the Iranian Revolution on 11 February 1979...
, the Shah of Iran, visited West Berlin
West Berlin
West Berlin was a political exclave that existed between 1949 and 1990. It comprised the western regions of Berlin, which were bordered by East Berlin and parts of East Germany. West Berlin consisted of the American, British, and French occupation sectors, which had been established in 1945...
. To hundreds of supporters of the Shah joined a group of fake supporters armed with wooden staves, to disturb the normal course of the visit of the Shah of Iran in West Berlin. These extremists were left to 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
Deutsche Oper Berlin
The Deutsche Oper Berlin is an opera company located in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, Germany. The resident building is also home to the Berlin State Ballet.-History:...
, where a crowd of German students protesters gathered. During the opera house demonstrations, German student Benno Ohnesorg
Benno Ohnesorg
Benno Ohnesorg was a German university student killed by a policeman during a demonstration in West Berlin.- Death :On June 2, 1967, Ohnesorg participated in a protest held near the Deutsche Oper, aimed against the state visit of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was attending a...
was shot in the head by a police officer while attending his first protest rally. The officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras
Karl-Heinz Kurras
Karl-Heinz Kurras is a former German police officer who served in the police force of West Berlin, and a former agent of the East German secret service Stasi....
, 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
Stasi
The Ministry for State Security The Ministry for State Security The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), commonly known as the Stasi (abbreviation , literally State Security), was the official state security service of East Germany. The MfS was headquartered...
.
Along with perceptions of state and police brutality
Police brutality
Police brutality is the intentional use of excessive force, usually physical, but potentially also in the form of verbal attacks and psychological intimidation, by a police officer....
, and widespread opposition to the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, Ohnesorg's death galvanised many young Germans, and became a rallying point for the West German New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
. The Berlin Movement 2 June
Movement 2 June
Movement 2 June was a West German terrorist organization that was based out of West Berlin. Active only from 1971–1980, the anarchist group was one of the few violent groups at the time in West Germany. Although Movement 2 June did not share the same ideology as the Red Army Faction , these...
, a militant-Anarchist group later took its name to honour the date of Ohnesorg's death.
In the spring of 1968 Gudrun Ensslin
Gudrun Ensslin
Gudrun Ensslin was a founder of the German militant group Red Army Faction . After becoming involved with co-founder Andreas Baader, Ensslin was influential in the politicization of Baader's voluntaristic anarchistic beliefs. Ensslin was perhaps the intellectual head of the RAF...
and Andreas Baader
Andreas Baader
Andreas Bernd Baader was one of the first leaders of the German left-wing militant organization Red Army Faction, also commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.- Life :...
, who were joined by Thorwald Proll
Thorwald Proll
Thorwald Proll is a writer and was active in the German student movement in the 1960s.On 2 April 1968, along with Andreas Baader, Horst Söhnlein and Gudrun Ensslin, he set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt as a protest against the Vietnam War...
and Horst Söhnlein
Horst Söhnlein
Horst Söhnlein is a German activist and former member of the Baader-Meinhof Group who was convicted of arson in 1968.On 2 April 1968, along with Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Thorwald Proll, he set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt as a protest against "the genocide in Vietnam"...
, decided to set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
as a protest against the Vietnam war, and carried out the arson attack on 2 April 1968. Two days later, on 4 April 1968, they were arrested.
Meanwhile, on 11 April 1968, Rudi Dutschke
Rudi Dutschke
Alfred Willi Rudi Dutschke was the most prominent spokesperson of the German student movement of the 1960s. He advocated 'a long march through the institutions' of power to create radical change from within government and society by becoming an integral part of the machinery...
, a leading spokesman for the protesting students, was shot in the head in an assassination attempt by the right-wing extremist
Far right
Far-right, extreme right, hard right, radical right, and ultra-right are terms used to discuss the qualitative or quantitative position a group or person occupies within right-wing politics. Far-right politics may involve anti-immigration and anti-integration stances towards groups that are...
Josef Bachmann
Josef Bachmann
Josef Erwin Bachmann became widely known in Germany for his assassination attempt on the leader of the German student movement, Rudi Dutschke, firing three bullets at him, on April 11, 1968. He was convicted of the attack and sentenced to a seven-year prison sentence...
. 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
Populism
Populism can be defined as an ideology, political philosophy, or type of discourse. Generally, a common theme compares "the people" against "the elite", and urges social and political system changes. It can also be defined as a rhetorical style employed by members of various political or social...
newspaper Bild-Zeitung
Bild-Zeitung
The Bild is a German tabloid published by Axel Springer AG. The paper is published from Monday to Saturday, while on Sundays, Bild am Sonntag is published instead, which has a different style and its own editors...
, 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 amnestyAmnesty
Amnesty is a legislative or executive act by which a state restores those who may have been guilty of an offense against it to the positions of innocent people, without changing the laws defining the offense. It includes more than pardon, in as much as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the...
for political prisoner
Political prisoner
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....
s, 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
Régis Debray
Jules Régis Debray is a French intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society; and for having fought in 1967 with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in...
, famous for his friendship with Che Guevara
Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
and the focus theory of guerrilla warfare. Eventually, they made their way to Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, 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
Class consciousness
Class consciousness is consciousness of one's social class or economic rank in society. From the perspective of Marxist theory, it refers to the self-awareness, or lack thereof, of a particular class; its capacity to act in its own rational interests; or its awareness of the historical tasks...
and determined force compared with some of its immediate contemporaries. The members and supporters were already associated with the 'Revolutionary Cells
Revolutionary Cells
The Revolutionary Cells – Animal Liberation Brigade , known simply as Animal Liberation Brigade, is a name used by animal liberationists who advocate the use of freedom and a diversity of tactics within the animal liberation movement, whether non-violent or not...
' and Movement 2 June
Movement 2 June
Movement 2 June was a West German terrorist organization that was based out of West Berlin. Active only from 1971–1980, the anarchist group was one of the few violent groups at the time in West Germany. Although Movement 2 June did not share the same ideology as the Red Army Faction , these...
as well as radical currents and phenomena such as the Socialist Patients' Collective
Socialist Patients' Collective
The Socialist Patients' Collective was a patients' collective founded in Heidelberg in February 1970, by Wolfgang Huber. The kernel of the SPK's ideological program is summated in the slogan Turn Illness into a weapon, which remains actively practiced...
, Kommune 1
Kommune 1
Kommune 1 or K1 was the first politically-motivated commune in Germany. It was created on January 12, 1967, in West Berlin and finally dissolved in November 1969....
and the Situationists. The main RAF protagonists trained in the West Bank
West Bank
The West Bank ) of the Jordan River is the landlocked geographical eastern part of the Palestinian territories located in Western Asia. To the west, north, and south, the West Bank shares borders with the state of Israel. To the east, across the Jordan River, lies the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan...
and Gaza
Gaza
Gaza , also referred to as Gaza City, is a Palestinian city in the Gaza Strip, with a population of about 450,000, making it the largest city in the Palestinian territories.Inhabited since at least the 15th century BC,...
with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a Palestinian Marxist-Leninist organisation founded in 1967. It has consistently been the second-largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization , the largest being Fatah...
(PFLP) guerrillas and looked to the Palestinian cause for inspiration and guidance. The organisation and outlook was partly modelled on the Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
an Tupamaros
Tupamaros
Tupamaros, also known as the MLN-T , was an urban guerrilla organization in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s. The MLN-T is inextricably linked to its most important leader, Raúl Sendic, and his brand of social politics...
movement, which had developed as an urban resistance movement—effectively inverting Che Guevara
Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
's Mao-like concept of a peasant or rural-based guerrilla war
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
and instead situating the struggle in the metropole
Metropole
The metropole, from the Greek Metropolis 'mother city' was the name given to the British metropolitan centre of the British Empire, i.e. the United Kingdom itself...
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 'commando
Commando
In English, the term commando means a specific kind of individual soldier or military unit. In contemporary usage, commando usually means elite light infantry and/or special operations forces units, specializing in amphibious landings, parachuting, rappelling and similar techniques, to conduct and...
s', with trained members being supplied by a quartermaster
Quartermaster
Quartermaster refers to two different military occupations depending on if the assigned unit is land based or naval.In land armies, especially US units, it is a term referring to either an individual soldier or a unit who specializes in distributing supplies and provisions to troops. The senior...
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
Carlos Marighella
Carlos Marighella , was a Brazilian Marxist revolutionary and writer.Marighella's most famous contribution to guerrilla literature was the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, consisting of advice on how to disrupt and overthrow an authoritarian regime aiming a revolution. He also wrote For the...
published his Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla
Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla
Minimanual Of The Urban Guerrilla is a book written by Brazilian guerrilla fighter Carlos Marighella in June 1969. It consists of advices on how to disrupt and overthrow an authoritarian regime aiming a revolution...
. He described the urban guerrilla as:
The importance of small arms
Small arms
Small arms is a term of art used by armed forces to denote infantry weapons an individual soldier may carry. The description is usually limited to revolvers, pistols, submachine guns, carbines, assault rifles, battle rifles, multiple barrel firearms, sniper rifles, squad automatic weapons, light...
training, sabotage
Sabotage
Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening another entity through subversion, obstruction, disruption, or destruction. In a workplace setting, sabotage is the conscious withdrawal of efficiency generally directed at causing some change in workplace conditions. One who engages in sabotage is...
, expropriation
Confiscation
Confiscation, from the Latin confiscatio 'joining to the fiscus, i.e. transfer to the treasury' is a legal seizure without compensation by a government or other public authority...
, 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
Insurgency
An insurgency is an armed rebellion against a constituted authority when those taking part in the rebellion are not recognized as belligerents...
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 state
Communist state
A communist state is a state with a form of government characterized by single-party rule or dominant-party rule of a communist party and a professed allegiance to a Leninist or Marxist-Leninist communist ideology as the guiding principle of the state...
s although RAF members did receive intermittent support and sanctuary over the border in East Germany.
After their trial for the department store arson attacks, 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
Jordan
Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...
for their brief guerrilla warfare training with the PFLP and Palestine Liberation Organization
Palestine Liberation Organization
The Palestine Liberation Organization is a political and paramilitary organization which was created in 1964. It is recognized as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" by the United Nations and over 100 states with which it holds diplomatic relations, and has enjoyed...
(PLO).
Anti-imperialism and public support
When they returned to West Germany, they began what they called an "anti-imperialisticAnti-imperialism
Anti-imperialism, strictly speaking, is a term that may be applied to a movement opposed to any form of colonialism or imperialism. Anti-imperialism includes opposition to wars of conquest, particularly of non-contiguous territory or people with a different language or culture; it also includes...
struggle", with bank robberies
Bank robbery
Bank robbery is the crime of stealing from a bank during opening hours. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, robbery is "the taking or attempting to take anything of value from the care, custody, or control of a person or persons by force or threat of...
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
Red star
A red star, five-pointed and filled, is an important ideological and religious symbol which has been used for various purposes, such as: state emblems, flags, monuments, ornaments, and logos.- Symbol of communism :...
logo with a Heckler & Koch MP5
Heckler & Koch MP5
The Heckler & Koch MP5 is a 9mm submachine gun of German design, developed in the 1960s by a team of engineers from the German small arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch GmbH of Oberndorf am Neckar....
submachine gun
Submachine gun
A submachine gun is an automatic carbine, designed to fire pistol cartridges. It combines the automatic fire of a machine gun with the cartridge of a pistol. The submachine gun was invented during World War I , but the apex of its use was during World War II when millions of the weapon type were...
for the first time.
Despite killing 34 people, Baader-Meinhof garnered a degree of support from the West German population. The group of militants began to be accepted if not always admired by "guilt-ridden liberals", who saw its panache
Panache
Panache is a word of French origin that carries the connotation of a flamboyant manner and reckless courage.The literal translation is a plume, such as is worn on a hat or a helmet, but the reference is to King Henry IV of France...
as a countercultural critique of West Germany’s "boring bourgeois life" and who resented their nation's association with the American war in Vietnam. Baader-Meinhof seized on this sentiment and carefully cultivated an outlaw image, wholesaling the ideal of authenticity of acting out one’s impulses, in order to break through "the fascism of convention", just as its heroes abroad like Che Guevara
Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
supposedly "broke through the iron wall of America imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
." Drawing on its New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
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
Holger Meins
Holger Klaus Meins was a German cinematography student who joined the Red Army Faction in the early 1970s and died on hunger strike in prison.-As a Revolutionary:...
, and Jan-Carl Raspe
Jan-Carl Raspe
Jan-Carl Raspe was a member of the German militant group, the Red Army Faction.- Young life :Raspe was born in Seefeld in Tirol. He was described as gentle but had difficulty communicating with other people. His father had said that he couldn't stand violence...
were eventually caught and arrested in June 1972.
Custody and the Stammheim trial
Solitary confinement
Solitary confinement is a special form of imprisonment in which a prisoner is isolated from any human contact, though often with the exception of members of prison staff. It is sometimes employed as a form of punishment beyond incarceration for a prisoner, and has been cited as an additional...
in the newly-constructed high security Stammheim Prison
Stammheim Prison
Stammheim Prison is a prison in Stuttgart, Baden Württemberg, Germany. It is situated on the northern boundaries of Stuttgart in the city district of Stuttgart-Stammheim — right between fields and apartment blocks on the fringes of Stammheim...
in the north of Stuttgart
Stuttgart
Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....
. When Ensslin devised an "info system" using aliases
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
for each member, the four prisoners were able to communicate again, circulating letters with the help of their defence counsel
Counsel
A counsel or a counselor gives advice, more particularly in legal matters.-U.K. and Ireland:The legal system in England uses the term counsel as an approximate synonym for a barrister-at-law, and may apply it to mean either a single person who pleads a cause, or collectively, the body of barristers...
s.
To protest against their treatment by authorities, they went on several coordinated hunger strike
Hunger strike
A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance or pressure in which participants fast as an act of political protest, or to provoke feelings of guilt in others, usually with the objective to achieve a specific goal, such as a policy change. Most hunger strikers will take liquids but not...
s; 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
Peter Lorenz
Peter Lorenz was a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union .In 1975 Lorenz was a candidate for mayor of West Berlin. He was kidnapped by the militant Movement 2 June group three days before the elections on 27 February...
, the CDU
Christian Democratic Union (Germany)
The Christian Democratic Union of Germany is a Christian democratic and conservative political party in Germany. It is regarded as on the centre-right of the German political spectrum...
candidate for mayor of Berlin, was kidnapped by the Movement 2 June
Movement 2 June
Movement 2 June was a West German terrorist organization that was based out of West Berlin. Active only from 1971–1980, the anarchist group was one of the few violent groups at the time in West Germany. Although Movement 2 June did not share the same ideology as the Red Army Faction , these...
(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
Helmut Schmidt
Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt is a German Social Democratic politician who served as Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982. Prior to becoming chancellor, he had served as Minister of Defence and Minister of Finance. He had also served briefly as Minister of Economics and as acting...
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
Andreas Baader
Andreas Bernd Baader was one of the first leaders of the German left-wing militant organization Red Army Faction, also commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.- Life :...
, Ensslin
Gudrun Ensslin
Gudrun Ensslin was a founder of the German militant group Red Army Faction . After becoming involved with co-founder Andreas Baader, Ensslin was influential in the politicization of Baader's voluntaristic anarchistic beliefs. Ensslin was perhaps the intellectual head of the RAF...
, Meinhof
Ulrike Meinhof
Ulrike Marie Meinhof was a German left-wing militant. She co-founded the Red Army Faction in 1970 after having previously worked as a journalist for the monthly left-wing magazine Konkret. She was arrested in 1972, and eventually charged with numerous murders and the formation of a criminal...
, and Raspe
Jan-Carl Raspe
Jan-Carl Raspe was a member of the German militant group, the Red Army Faction.- Young life :Raspe was born in Seefeld in Tirol. He was described as gentle but had difficulty communicating with other people. His father had said that he couldn't stand violence...
began, named after the district in Stuttgart
Stuttgart
Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....
where it took place. The Bundestag
Bundestag
The Bundestag is a federal legislative body in Germany. In practice Germany is governed by a bicameral legislature, of which the Bundestag serves as the lower house and the Bundesrat the upper house. The Bundestag is established by the German Basic Law of 1949, as the successor to the earlier...
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
Ulrike Meinhof
Ulrike Marie Meinhof was a German left-wing militant. She co-founded the Red Army Faction in 1970 after having previously worked as a journalist for the monthly left-wing magazine Konkret. She was arrested in 1972, and eventually charged with numerous murders and the formation of a criminal...
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
Conspiracy theory
A conspiracy theory explains an event as being the result of an alleged plot by a covert group or organization or, more broadly, the idea that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.-Usage:The term "conspiracy...
. 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
Siegfried Buback
Siegfried Buback was the Attorney General of Germany from 1974-1977.Buback studied at the University of Leipzig. From 1940 to 1945 he was a member of the Nazi Party. From 1945 to 1947 he was a POW...
, 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.
German Autumn
On 30 July 1977, Jürgen PontoJürgen Ponto
Jürgen Ponto, was a German banker and chairman of the Dresdner Bank board of directors. Previously, he had worked as a lawyer...
, the head of Dresdner Bank
Dresdner Bank
Dresdner Bank AG was one of Germany's largest banking corporations and was based in Frankfurt. It was acquired by competitor Commerzbank in December 2009.- 19th century :...
, was shot and killed in front of his house in Oberursel
Oberursel
Oberursel is a town in Germany. It is located to the north west of Frankfurt, and is the second largest town in the county of Hochtaunuskreis and the 14th largest town in Hessen.-Extent of municipal area:...
in a botched kidnapping. Those involved were Brigitte Mohnhaupt
Brigitte Mohnhaupt
Brigitte Margret Ida Mohnhaupt is a German militant associated with the second generation of the Red Army Faction members. She was also part of the Socialist Patients' Collective...
, Christian Klar
Christian Klar
Christian Klar was a leading member of the second generation Red Army Faction between the 1970s and 80s...
, and Susanne Albrecht
Susanne Albrecht
Susanne Albrecht is a former member of the Red Army Faction.-Early life:Albrecht was the daughter of a successful maritime lawyer, and spent her childhood living in a wealthy suburb of Hamburg. She did not fit in well in public school, and was later sent to a private school in Holzminden...
, the last being the sister of Ponto's goddaughter.
Following the convictions, Hanns Martin Schleyer
Hanns Martin Schleyer
Hanns-Martin Schleyer was an SS officer, a German business executive and employer and industry representative, serving as President of the two influential organizations Confederation of German Employers' Associations and Federation of German Industries...
, a former officer of the SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
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. It has been said often that Schleyer's convoy was stopped by one of the group (Sieglinde Hofmann) pushing a pram into the road where it was to pass by. However, on 5 September 1977, Schleyer's car was in fact 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.
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
Bonn
Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....
, headed by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt
Helmut Schmidt
Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt is a German Social Democratic politician who served as Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982. Prior to becoming chancellor, he had served as Minister of Defence and Minister of Finance. He had also served briefly as Minister of Economics and as acting...
, 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
Federal Criminal Police Office (Germany)
The Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany is a national investigative police agency in Germany and falls directly under the Federal Ministry of the Interior...
carried out its biggest investigation to date. Matters escalated when, on 13 October 1977, Lufthansa Flight 181
Lufthansa Flight 181
Lufthansa Flight 181 was a Lufthansa Boeing 737-230 Adv aircraft named Landshut that was hijacked on October 13, 1977 by four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine...
from Palma de Mallorca
Palma de Mallorca
Palma is the major city and port on the island of Majorca and capital city of the autonomous community of the Balearic Islands in Spain. The names Ciutat de Mallorca and Ciutat were used before the War of the Spanish Succession and are still used by people in Majorca. However, the official name...
to Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
was hijacked
Aircraft hijacking
Aircraft hijacking is the unlawful seizure of an aircraft by an individual or a group. In most cases, the pilot is forced to fly according to the orders of the hijackers. Occasionally, however, the hijackers have flown the aircraft themselves, such as the September 11 attacks of 2001...
. A group of four Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...
s 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
Larnaca
Larnaca, is the third largest city on the southern coast of Cyprus after Nicosia and Limassol. It has a population of 72,000 and is the island's second largest commercial port and an important tourist resort...
to Dubai
Dubai
Dubai is a city and emirate in the United Arab Emirates . The emirate is located south of the Persian Gulf on the Arabian Peninsula and has the largest population with the second-largest land territory by area of all the emirates, after Abu Dhabi...
, and then to Aden
Aden
Aden is a seaport city in Yemen, located by the eastern approach to the Red Sea , some 170 kilometres east of Bab-el-Mandeb. Its population is approximately 800,000. Aden's ancient, natural harbour lies in the crater of an extinct volcano which now forms a peninsula, joined to the mainland by a...
, 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
Mogadishu
Mogadishu , popularly known as Xamar, is the largest city in Somalia and the nation's capital. Located in the coastal Benadir region on the Indian Ocean, the city has served as an important port for centuries....
, Somalia
Somalia
Somalia , officially the Somali Republic and formerly known as the Somali Democratic Republic under Socialist rule, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. Since the outbreak of the Somali Civil War in 1991 there has been no central government control over most of the country's territory...
.
A high-risk rescue operation was led by Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski
Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski
Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski was a German Social Democrat politician....
, then undersecretary in the chancellor's office, who had secretly been flown in from Bonn. At five past midnight (CET
Central European Time
Central European Time , used in most parts of the European Union, is a standard time that is 1 hour ahead of Coordinated Universal Time . The time offset from UTC can be written as +01:00...
) on 18 October, the plane was stormed in a seven-minute assault by the GSG 9
GSG 9
The GSG 9 der Bundespolizei , is the elite counter-terrorism and special operations unit of the German Federal Police.-History and name:...
, 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 the hospital the next day from a gunshot wound to the head. Irmgard Möller
Irmgard Möller
Irmgard Möller is a German militant and a former member of the Red Army Faction...
, 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 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
Mulhouse
Mulhouse |mill]] hamlet) is a city and commune in eastern France, close to the Swiss and German borders. With a population of 110,514 and 278,206 inhabitants in the metropolitan area in 2006, it is the largest city in the Haut-Rhin département, and the second largest in the Alsace region after...
, 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
Audi 100
The restyled C2 Audi 100 was launched in 1976, with an in-line five-cylinder engine...
on the rue Charles Péguy
Charles Péguy
Charles Péguy was a noted French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism, but by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a devout but non-practicing Roman Catholic.From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his...
. The French newspaper Libération
Libération
Libération is a French daily newspaper founded in Paris by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July in 1973 in the wake of the protest movements of May 1968. Originally a leftist newspaper, it has undergone a number of shifts during the 1980s and 1990s...
received a letter declaring:
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 UnionDissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , resulting in the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991...
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
MTU Aero Engines
MTU Aero Engines GmbH is Germany's leading aircraft engine manufacturer. MTU develops, manufactures and provides service support for military and civil aircraft engines...
, a German engineering company, Ernst Zimmermann; another bombing at the US Air Force's
United States Air Force
The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...
Rhein-Main Air Base
Rhein-Main Air Base
Rhein-Main Air Base was a U.S. Air Force / NATO military airbase near the city of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It occupied the south side of Frankfurt International Airport. Its airport codes are discontinued....
(near Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
), which targeted the base commander and killed two bystanders; the car bomb
Car bomb
A car bomb, or truck bomb also known as a Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device , is an improvised explosive device placed in a car or other vehicle and then detonated. It is commonly used as a weapon of assassination, terrorism, or guerrilla warfare, to kill the occupants of the vehicle,...
attack that killed Siemens
Siemens
Siemens may refer toSiemens, a German family name carried by generations of telecommunications industrialists, including:* Werner von Siemens , inventor, founder of Siemens AG...
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
Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank AG is a global financial service company with its headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. It employs more than 100,000 people in over 70 countries, and has a large presence in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific and the emerging markets...
chairman Alfred Herrhausen
Alfred Herrhausen
Alfred Herrhausen was a German banker and Chairman of Deutsche Bank. From 1971 onwards he was a member of the bank's board of directors....
was killed with a highly complex bomb when his car triggered a photo sensor, in Bad Homburg
Bad Homburg
Bad Homburg vor der Höhe is the district town of the Hochtaunuskreis, Hesse, Germany, on the southern slope of the Taunus, bordering among others Frankfurt am Main and Oberursel...
. On 1 April 1991, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder
Detlev Karsten Rohwedder
Detlev Karsten Rohwedder was a German manager and politician, as member of the Social Democratic Party. He was manager of the Treuhandanstalt....
, leader of the government Treuhand
Treuhand
The Treuhandanstalt was the agency that privatized the East German enterprises, Volkseigener Betrieb , owned as public property. Created by the Volkskammer on June 17, 1990, it oversaw the restructuring and selling of about 8,500 firms with initially over 4 million employees...
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
German reunification
German reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...
in 1990, it was confirmed that the RAF had received financial and logistic support from the Stasi
Stasi
The Ministry for State Security The Ministry for State Security The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), commonly known as the Stasi (abbreviation , literally State Security), was the official state security service of East Germany. The MfS was headquartered...
, 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
Weiterstadt
Weiterstadt is a town in the Darmstadt-Dieburg district, in Hesse, Germany. It is situated approx. 6 km northwest of Darmstadt.....
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
Birgit Hogefeld
Birgit Hogefeld is a former member of the West German Red Army Faction .-Early life:Born in Wiesbaden, Hogefeld joined the RAF in the eighties long after its founding members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof were dead...
and Wolfgang Grams
Wolfgang Grams
Wolfgang Grams was a member of the Red Army Faction, a German far-left terrorist organisation.-Life:Wolfgang Grams was born in Wiesbaden, Germany. His parents, Werner and Ruth Grams, were expelled from the east. Werner Grams volunteered for service in the Waffen-SS...
were to be arrested in Bad Kleinen
Bad Kleinen
Bad Kleinen is a municipality in the Nordwestmecklenburg district, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. It is located on the north bank of the Schweriner See.-Geography:...
. Grams and GSG 9
GSG 9
The GSG 9 der Bundespolizei , is the elite counter-terrorism and special operations unit of the German Federal Police.-History and name:...
officer Michael Newrzella
Michael Newrzella
Michael Newrzella was a German police officer and member of the GSG 9, the counter-terrorism and special operations unit of the German Federal Police...
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
Rudolf Seiters
Rudolf Seiters is a German politician of the CDU party.From 1989-1991, he was Federal Minister for Special Affairs and the Head of the Office of the German Chancellery. From 1991-1993, he was the Minister of the Interior. From 1998-2002, he was the Vice President of the German Bundestag, or...
took responsibility and resigned from his post.
On 20 April 1998, an eight-page typewritten letter in German was faxed to the Reuters
Reuters
Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
news agency, signed "RAF" with the machine-gun red star, declaring the group dissolved:
Horst Mahler
Horst Mahler
Horst Mahler is a former German lawyer and advocate of radical ideologies. He once was an extreme-left militant, a founding member of the Red Army Faction. Subsequently he became a Maoist and later shifted to the extreme-right. He was for a time a member of the National Democratic Party of Germany...
has crossed the lines to the far right and is a Holocaust denier
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
. 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
President of Germany
The President of the Federal Republic of Germany is the country's head of state. His official title in German is Bundespräsident . Germany has a parliamentary system of government and so the position of President is largely ceremonial...
Horst Köhler
Horst Köhler
Horst Köhler is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union. He was President of Germany from 2004 to 2010. As the candidate of the two Christian Democratic sister parties, the CDU and the CSU, and the liberal FDP, Köhler was elected to his first five-year term by the Federal Assembly on...
had considered pardoning RAF member Christian Klar
Christian Klar
Christian Klar was a leading member of the second generation Red Army Faction between the 1970s and 80s...
, 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
Brigitte Mohnhaupt
Brigitte Margret Ida Mohnhaupt is a German militant associated with the second generation of the Red Army Faction members. She was also part of the Socialist Patients' Collective...
was granted a release on a five year parole by a German court on 12 February 2007 and Eva Haule
Eva Haule
Eva Sybille Haule-Frimpong was a terrorist associated with the third generation Red Army Faction. She took her abitur in Stuttgart before going underground in 1984.-Terrorist activities:...
was released 17 August 2007.
Faction versus Fraktion
The name was inspired by that of the Japanese Red ArmyJapanese Red Army
The was a Communist terrorist group founded by Fusako Shigenobu early in 1971 in Lebanon. It sometimes called itself Arab-JRA after the Lod airport massacre...
, 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
Political faction
A political faction is a grouping of individuals, such as a political party, a trade union, or other group with a political purpose. A faction or political party may include fragmented sub-factions, “parties within a party," which may be referred to as power blocs, or voting blocs. The individuals...
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
Abbreviation
An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase...
RAF was also a gibe at fascists and at the right, intended to recall the aerial bombing of Germany by the Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Formed on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world...
.
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
| Date | Place | Action | Remarks | Photo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 October 1971 | Hamburg Hamburg -History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808... |
Police officer killed | RAF members Irmgard Möller and Gerhard Müller attempted to rescue Margrit Schiller Margrit Schiller Margrit Schiller was a West German militant leftist associated with the Socialist Patients' Collective and later the second generation Red Army Faction.-Early life:Schiller was born in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia in March, 1948... 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 Kaiserslautern Kaiserslautern is a city in southwest Germany, located in the Bundesland of Rhineland-Palatinate at the edge of the Palatinate forest . The historic centre dates to the 9th century. It is from Paris, from Frankfurt am Main, and from Luxembourg.Kaiserslautern is home to 99,469 people... |
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 barracks | US Officer Paul A. Bloomquist dead, 13 wounded |
 |
| 12 May 1972 | Augsburg Augsburg Augsburg is a city in the south-west of Bavaria, Germany. It is a university town and home of the Regierungsbezirk Schwaben and the Bezirk Schwaben. Augsburg is an urban district and home to the institutions of the Landkreis Augsburg. It is, as of 2008, the third-largest city in Bavaria with a... and Munich Munich Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat... |
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 Karlsruhe The City of Karlsruhe is a city in the southwest of Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, located near the French-German border.Karlsruhe was founded in 1715 as Karlsruhe Palace, when Germany was a series of principalities and city states... |
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 Hamburg -History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808... |
Bombing of the Axel Springer Verlag | 17 wounded. Ilse Stachowiak was involved in the bombing. | |
| 24 May 1972 18:10CET | Heidelberg Heidelberg -Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of... |
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 Campbell Barracks Campbell Barracks, in Heidelberg, Germany, is the location of the Headquarters of the United States Army in Europe and Seventh Army Campbell Barracks, in Heidelberg, Germany, is the location of the Headquarters of the United States Army in Europe and Seventh Army Campbell Barracks, in Heidelberg,... . 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 Stockholm Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area... |
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 Dreieich Dreieich is a town in the Offenbach district in the Regierungsbezirk of Darmstadt in Hesse, Germany. It lies roughly 10 km south of Frankfurt am Main and with more than 40,000 inhabitants is the district’s second biggest town.- Location :... 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 Gießen Gießen, also spelt Giessen is a town in the German federal state of Hesse, capital of both the district of Gießen and the administrative region of 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 Karlsruhe The City of Karlsruhe is a city in the southwest of Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, located near the French-German border.Karlsruhe was founded in 1715 as Karlsruhe Palace, when Germany was a series of principalities and city states... |
Assassination of the federal prosecutor-general Siegfried Buback Siegfried Buback Siegfried Buback was the Attorney General of Germany from 1974-1977.Buback studied at the University of Leipzig. From 1940 to 1945 he was a member of the Nazi Party. From 1945 to 1947 he was a POW... |
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 Oberursel Oberursel is a town in Germany. It is located to the north west of Frankfurt, and is the second largest town in the county of Hochtaunuskreis and the 14th largest town in Hessen.-Extent of municipal area:... (Taunus) |
The director of Dresdner Bank Dresdner Bank Dresdner Bank AG was one of Germany's largest banking corporations and was based in Frankfurt. It was acquired by competitor Commerzbank in December 2009.- 19th century :... , Jürgen Ponto Jürgen Ponto Jürgen Ponto, was a German banker and chairman of the Dresdner Bank board of directors. Previously, he had worked as a lawyer... , is shot in his home during an attempted kidnapping. Ponto later dies from his injuries. |
||
| 5 September 1977 18 October 1977 |
Cologne Cologne Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the... resp. Mulhouse Mulhouse Mulhouse |mill]] hamlet) is a city and commune in eastern France, close to the Swiss and German borders. With a population of 110,514 and 278,206 inhabitants in the metropolitan area in 2006, it is the largest city in the Haut-Rhin département, and the second largest in the Alsace region after... |
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 Utrecht (city) Utrecht city and municipality is the capital and most populous city of the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, and is the fourth largest city of the Netherlands with a population of 312,634 on 1 Jan 2011.Utrecht's ancient city centre features... , Netherlands Netherlands The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders... |
Shooting outside a bar | Arie Kranenburg (46), Dutch policeman, shot and killed by RAF Knut Folkerts | |
| A forest near Dortmund Dortmund Dortmund is a city in Germany. It is located in the Bundesland of North Rhine-Westphalia, in the Ruhr area. Its population of 585,045 makes it the 7th largest city in Germany and the 34th largest in the European Union.... |
Murder of a police officer | Three RAF members (Angelika Speitel Angelika Speitel Angelika Speitel is a former member of the West German terrorist Red Army Faction.-Life:Speitel worked as a clerk in the office of lawyer Klaus Croissant, alongside her husband Volker Speitel . During this time she helped form an information system of communication between many imprisoned... , 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. |
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| 1 November 1978 | Kerkrade Kerkrade Kerkrade is a town and a municipality in the southeastern Netherlands.It is the western half of the divided region and de facto city, taken together with the eastern half, the German town of Herzogenrath... |
Gun-battle with four custom officials Customs Customs is an authority or agency in a country responsible for collecting and safeguarding customs duties and for controlling the flow of goods including animals, transports, personal effects and hazardous items in and out of a country... |
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 Adelheid Schulz Adelheid "Heidi" Schulz was a member of the West German terrorist Red Army Faction.-Early life:Having trained as a nurse, Schulz moved to Karlsruhe in the early 1970s and took up residence in a flat with Günter Sonnenberg, Knut Folkerts and her boyfriend Christian Klar – who would all at a later... and Rolf Heissler) who were trying to cross the Dutch border illegally. |
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| 25 June 1979 | Mons Mons Mons is a Walloon city and municipality located in the Belgian province of Hainaut, of which it is the capital. The Mons municipality includes the old communes of Cuesmes, Flénu, Ghlin, Hyon, Nimy, Obourg, Baudour , Jemappes, Ciply, Harmignies, Harveng, Havré, Maisières, Mesvin, Nouvelles,... , Belgium Belgium Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many... |
Alexander Haig Alexander Haig Alexander Meigs Haig, Jr. was a United States Army general who served as the United States Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan and White House Chief of Staff under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford... , Supreme Allied Commander Supreme Allied Commander Supreme Allied Commander is the title held by the most senior commander within certain multinational military alliances. It originated as a term used by the Western Allies during World War II, and is currently used only within NATO. Dwight Eisenhower served as Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary... 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 Rolf Clemens Wagner Rolf Clemens Wagner is a former member of the Red Army Faction .-Terrorism:Wagner carried out most of his terrorists actions in the 70s, and became an active member of the second generation RAF... , a former RAF member, to life imprisonment for the assassination attempt. |
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| 7 August 1981 | Kaiserslautern, Germany | USAF Security Police Officer attacked in Kaiserslautern by Christian Klar and Brigitte Mohnhaupt and unknown third party. Security Police Officer on his way to work, riding a bicycle when he was attacked. | Security Police Officer survived the attack. Mohnhaupt and Klar fled the scene in a green VW. Unknown third party was injured or killed. He was never found. | |
| 31 August 1981 | Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany Rhineland-Palatinate Rhineland-Palatinate is one of the 16 states of the Federal Republic of Germany. It has an area of and about four million inhabitants. The capital is Mainz. English speakers also commonly refer to the state by its German name, Rheinland-Pfalz .... |
Large car-bomb explodes in the parking lot of Ramstein Air Base Ramstein Air Base Ramstein Air Base is a United States Air Force base in the German state of Rheinland-Pfalz. It serves as headquarters for the United States Air Forces in Europe and is also a North Atlantic Treaty Organization installation... |
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| 15 September 1981 | Heidelberg Heidelberg -Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of... |
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. 4 Civilians died the next day due to High alert of American troops / accidental shooting.(2 Adults / 2 Children) 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. 2 Soldiers were slightly wounded. | |
| 18 December 1984 | Oberammergau Oberammergau Oberammergau is a municipality in the district of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in Bavaria, Germany. The town is famous for its production of a Passion Play, its woodcarvers, and the NATO School.-Passion Play:... , West Germany West Germany West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990.... |
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 Gauting Gauting is a municipality in the district of Starnberg, in Bavaria, Germany with a population of approximately 20,000. It is situated on the river Würm, southwest of Munich and is a part of the Munich metropolitan area.- Geography :... |
Shooting | Ernst Zimmerman, head of the MTU MTU Aero Engines MTU Aero Engines GmbH is Germany's leading aircraft engine manufacturer. MTU develops, manufactures and provides service support for military and civil aircraft engines... is shot in the head in his home. Zimmermann died twelve hours later. The assassination was claimed by the Patsy O'Hara Patsy O'Hara Patsy O'Hara was an Irish republican hunger striker and member of the Irish National Liberation Army .He was born in Bishop Street, Derry, Northern Ireland. O'Hara joined Na Fianna Éireann in 1970, and in 1971 his brother Sean was interned in Long Kesh. In late 1971, he was shot and wounded by a... Commando. |
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| 8 August 1985 | Rhein-Main Air Base Rhein-Main Air Base Rhein-Main Air Base was a U.S. Air Force / NATO military airbase near the city of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It occupied the south side of Frankfurt International Airport. Its airport codes are discontinued.... (near Frankfurt Frankfurt Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010... ) |
A Volkswagen Passat 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 Edward Pimental Edward F. Pimental was an United States Army specialist murdered in Germany by members of the Red Army Faction in 1985.Pimental was from New York City. Stationed with the U.S... 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 Birgit Hogefeld Birgit Hogefeld is a former member of the West German Red Army Faction .-Early life:Born in Wiesbaden, Hogefeld joined the RAF in the eighties long after its founding members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof were dead... and Eva Haule Eva Haule Eva Sybille Haule-Frimpong was a terrorist associated with the third generation Red Army Faction. She took her abitur in Stuttgart before going underground in 1984.-Terrorist activities:... have been convicted for their involvement in this event. |
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| 9 July 1986 | Straßlach (near Munich Munich Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat... ) |
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 Alfred Herrhausen Alfred Herrhausen was a German banker and Chairman of Deutsche Bank. From 1971 onwards he was a member of the bank's board of directors.... |
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 Düsseldorf Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the... |
Assassination of Detlev Karsten Rohwedder Detlev Karsten Rohwedder Detlev Karsten Rohwedder was a German manager and politician, as member of the Social Democratic Party. He was manager of the Treuhandanstalt.... , at his house in Düsseldorf Düsseldorf Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the... |
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 Weiterstadt Weiterstadt is a town in the Darmstadt-Dieburg district, in Hesse, Germany. It is situated approx. 6 km northwest of Darmstadt..... |
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 Wolfgang Grams Wolfgang Grams was a member of the Red Army Faction, a German far-left terrorist organisation.-Life:Wolfgang Grams was born in Wiesbaden, Germany. His parents, Werner and Ruth Grams, were expelled from the east. Werner Grams volunteered for service in the Waffen-SS... and a GSG 9 GSG 9 The GSG 9 der Bundespolizei , is the elite counter-terrorism and special operations unit of the German Federal Police.-History and name:... squad; GSG9 officer Michael Newrzella Michael Newrzella Michael Newrzella was a German police officer and member of the GSG 9, the counter-terrorism and special operations unit of the German Federal Police... was killed before Grams shot himself, while Birgit Hogefeld Birgit Hogefeld Birgit Hogefeld is a former member of the West German Red Army Faction .-Early life:Born in Wiesbaden, Hogefeld joined the RAF in the eighties long after its founding members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof were dead... 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. |
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 BöllHeinrich Böll
Heinrich Theodor Böll was one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers. Böll was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.- Biography :...
's novel Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum) (1975); Germany in Autumn
Germany in Autumn
Germany in Autumn is a 1978 West German omnibus film about the German Autumn. The film is composed of contributions from different filmmakers, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz and Volker Schlöndorff. It was entered into the 28th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won a...
(1978), codirected by Alexander Kluge
Alexander Kluge
Alexander Kluge is an author and film director.-Early life, education and early career:Kluge was born in Halberstadt, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany....
, Volker Schloendorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Rainer Werner Maria Fassbinder was a German movie director, screenwriter and actor. He is considered one of the most important representatives of the New German Cinema.He maintained a frenetic pace in film-making...
and Edgar Reitz
Edgar Reitz
Edgar Reitz is a German filmmaker and Professor of Film at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe.- Early life and education :...
; Fassbinder's Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation
The Third Generation
The Third Generation is a 1979 West German film, a black comedy about terrorism, written, directed and cinematographed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The plot follows an ineffectual cell of underground terrorist who plan to kidnap an industrialist.-Plot:...
) (1979); Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (The German Sisters) (1981); Reinhard Hauuf's Stammheim
Stammheim (film)
Stammheim - Die Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe vor Gericht is a 1986 West German film directed by Reinhard Hauff...
(1986); Christian Petzold
Christian Petzold (director)
- Biography :Raised in Haan, after his high-school graduation in 1979 he fulfilled his military civil service in a small cineclub of local YMCA...
's Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In
The State I Am In (film)
The State I Am In is a 2000 German drama film directed by Christian Petzold....
) (2000); Christopher Roth's Baader (2002); Uli Edel
Uli Edel
Uli Edel is a German film director.-Work:After studying theatre science in Munich, he was accepted into Munich Film School alongside Bernd Eichinger. Uli befriended him and they started working together on their exercise movies, sharing a love for the nouvelle vague and Italian neorealism as well...
adaptation of Stefan Aust
Stefan Aust
Stefan Aust is a German journalist and was the editor-in-chief of the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel from 1994 to February 2008...
's Der Baader Meinhof Komplex
Der Baader Meinhof Komplex
The Baader Meinhof Complex is a 2008 German film by Uli Edel. Written and produced by Bernd Eichinger, it stars Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck and Johanna Wokalek. The film is based on the 1985 German best selling non-fiction book of the same name by Stefan Aust...
(2008).
Outside Germany, films include Swiss director Markus Imhoof
Markus Imhoof
Markus Imhoof is a Swiss screenwriter and film director. He won a Silver Bear at the 31st Berlin International Film Festival for his film The Boat Is Full , which was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film...
'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
Andres Veiel
Andres Veiel is a German film director and screenwriter. His 2011 film If Not Us, Who? was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival. Veiel won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlinale....
's Black Box BRD
Black Box BRD
Black Box BRD is a 2001 German documentary film written and directed by Andres Veiel. The film deals with West German politics of the 1970s and 1980s, a period marked by turmoil and the highly publicized activities of the left-wing terrorist group known as the Red Army Faction .The film focuses on...
(2001); Klaus Stern's Andreas Baader – Der Staatsfeind (Enemy of the State) (2003); Ben Lewis's In Love With Terror, for BBC Four
BBC Four
BBC Four is a British television network operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation and available to digital television viewers on Freeview, IPTV, satellite and cable....
(2003); and Ulrike Meinhof – Wege in den Terror (Ways into Terror) (2006).
The 2010 feature documentary Children of the Revolution
Children of the Revolution (2010 film)
Children of the Revolution is a 2010 documentary by Irish filmmaker Shane O'Sullivan about Ulrike Meinhof and Fusako Shigenobu, leaders of the German Red Army Faction and the Japanese Red Army....
tells Ulrike Meinhof's story from the perspective of her daughter, journalist and historian Bettina Röhl.
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 ArmyIrish National Liberation Army
The Irish National Liberation Army or INLA is an Irish republican socialist paramilitary group that was formed on 8 December 1974. Its goal is to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and create a socialist united Ireland....
and the Red Brigades
Red Brigades
The Red Brigades was a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organisation, based in Italy, which was responsible for numerous violent incidents, assassinations, and robberies during the so-called "Years of Lead"...
.
- 15 July Commando
- 2 June Commando
- Andreas BaaderAndreas BaaderAndreas Bernd Baader was one of the first leaders of the German left-wing militant organization Red Army Faction, also commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.- Life :...
Commando - Ciro Rizzato Commando
- George JacksonGeorge Jackson (Black Panther)George Lester Jackson was an American convict who became a left-wing activist, Marxist, author, a member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang...
Commando - Gudrun EnsslinGudrun EnsslinGudrun Ensslin was a founder of the German militant group Red Army Faction . After becoming involved with co-founder Andreas Baader, Ensslin was influential in the politicization of Baader's voluntaristic anarchistic beliefs. Ensslin was perhaps the intellectual head of the RAF...
Commando - Holger MeinsHolger MeinsHolger Klaus Meins was a German cinematography student who joined the Red Army Faction in the early 1970s and died on hunger strike in prison.-As a Revolutionary:...
Commando - Ingrid Schubert Commando
- Jan-Carl RaspeJan-Carl RaspeJan-Carl Raspe was a member of the German militant group, the Red Army Faction.- Young life :Raspe was born in Seefeld in Tirol. He was described as gentle but had difficulty communicating with other people. His father had said that he couldn't stand violence...
Commando - José Manuel SevillanoAntifascist Resistance Groups October FirstThe First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups is the armed wing of the Partido Comunista de España-reconstitutido , a Spanish clandestine Maoist group aiming for the formation of a Spanish Republican state, based on the model of Maoist China....
Commando - Katharina Hammerschmidt Commando
- Khaled Aker Commando
- Manfred Grashof Commando
- Mara Cagol Commando
- Patsy O'HaraPatsy O'HaraPatsy O'Hara was an Irish republican hunger striker and member of the Irish National Liberation Army .He was born in Bishop Street, Derry, Northern Ireland. O'Hara joined Na Fianna Éireann in 1970, and in 1971 his brother Sean was interned in Long Kesh. In late 1971, he was shot and wounded by a...
Commando - Petra Schelm Commando
- Siegfried HausnerSiegfried HausnerSiegfried Hausner was a student member of the German Socialist Patients' Collective and later the Red Army Faction.-As a Terrorist:...
Commando - Sigurd Debus Commando
- Thomas Weissbecker Commando
- Ulrich Wessel Commando
- Ulrike MeinhofUlrike MeinhofUlrike Marie Meinhof was a German left-wing militant. She co-founded the Red Army Faction in 1970 after having previously worked as a journalist for the monthly left-wing magazine Konkret. She was arrested in 1972, and eventually charged with numerous murders and the formation of a criminal...
Commando - Vincenzo Spano Commando
- Wolfgang Beer Commando
Fiction and art
- Australian-British playwright Van BadhamVan BadhamVan Badham is an Australian writer. A playwright and novelist, she writes dramas and comedies.-Early life:Van Badham was born Vanessa Badham in Sydney in 1978 . Her mother and father worked in the New South Wales gaming and track industry, with her father eventually working for the registered club...
'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 RichterGerhard RichterGerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.- Biography :Gerhard Richter was born in...
, 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 ŽáčekJosef ŽáčekJosef Žáček is a Czech painter. He graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1983.Josef Žáček's own visual language was based on geometric signs and later figural symbols through which he came to address universal issues of cultural identity and memory as well as wholly concrete phenomena...
, 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 KleinenBad KleinenBad Kleinen is a municipality in the Nordwestmecklenburg district, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. It is located on the north bank of the Schweriner See.-Geography:...
. - Heinrich BöllHeinrich BöllHeinrich Theodor Böll was one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers. Böll was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.- Biography :...
's book The Lost Honour of Katharina BlumThe Lost Honour of Katharina BlumThe Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: how violence develops and where it can lead is a 1974 novel by Heinrich Böll....
, 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 VoltaireCabaret Voltaire (band)Cabaret Voltaire were a British music group from Sheffield, England.Initially composed of Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson, the group was named after the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland that was a centre for the early Dada movement.Their earliest performances...
, 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 AbishWalter AbishWalter Abish is an Austrian-American author of experimental novels and short stories.-Biography:Abish was born in Vienna, Austria to Adolph and Frieda . At a young age, his family fled from the Nazis, traveling first to Italy and Nice before settling in Shanghai from 1940 to 1949...
, 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 HeinChristoph HeinChristoph Hein is a German author and translator.He grew up in the village Bad Düben near Leipzig. Being a clergyman's son and thus not allowed to attend the Erweiterte Oberschule, he received secondary education at a gymnasium in the western part of Berlin. After his Abitur he jobbed inter alia...
'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 HainesLuke HainesLuke Haines is an English musician, songwriter and author, who has recorded music under various names and with various bands, including The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof and Black Box Recorder.-'New Wave':...
released a 9-track album under the Baader MeinhofBaader Meinhof (album)Baader Meinhof is a 1996 album by Luke Haines, under the pseudonym Baader Meinhof. The name was given after two of the main members of the Red Army Faction, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, and the album, composed of 10 tracks, tells the history of group, since the ideas that might have inspired...
moniker. In this concept album, all songs are a romanticized retelling of the RAF actions. - In 2004, Canadian singer songwriter Neil LeytonNeil LeytonNeil Leyton is a Portuguese-Canadian singer and guitarist born in Lisbon. He has lived and played music in Toronto, London, and Stockholm.He was a founding member and songwriter in Canadian art-glam indie project The Conscience Pilate from 1995–1998, beginning a solo career in 1999. He is also the...
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 MunichMunich (film)Munich is a 2005 historical fiction film about the Israeli government's secret retaliation attacks after the massacre of Israeli athletes by the Black September terrorist group during the 1972 Summer Olympics. The film stars Eric Bana and was produced and directed by Steven Spielberg...
, Mossad agents pose as members of the Red Army Faction when they inadvertently share a safehouse with members of the PLOPalestine Liberation OrganizationThe Palestine Liberation Organization is a political and paramilitary organization which was created in 1964. It is recognized as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" by the United Nations and over 100 states with which it holds diplomatic relations, and has enjoyed...
. - In the upcoming video game, BioShock InfiniteBioShock InfiniteBioShock Infinite is an upcoming first-person shooter video game, and the third game in the BioShock series. Previously known as "Project Icarus", it is being developed by Irrational Games for a 2012 release on the Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms...
, there is a faction called the Vox Populi (Voice of the People) who are in many ways similar to the Red Army Faction in that they are a violent, radical left-wing organization with socialist ideals. - The Baader Meinhof ComplexDer Baader Meinhof KomplexThe Baader Meinhof Complex is a 2008 German film by Uli Edel. Written and produced by Bernd Eichinger, it stars Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck and Johanna Wokalek. The film is based on the 1985 German best selling non-fiction book of the same name by Stefan Aust...
, a 2008 movie based on Stefan AustStefan AustStefan Aust is a German journalist and was the editor-in-chief of the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel from 1994 to February 2008...
's book which was nominated in the 81st Academy Awards81st Academy AwardsThe 81st Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 2008 and took place February 22, 2009, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST...
for Best Foreign Language Film.
Further reading
- Aust, StefanStefan AustStefan Aust is a German journalist and was the editor-in-chief of the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel from 1994 to February 2008...
. The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, The Bodley Head Ltd 1987, ISBN 978-0-370-31031-2 - Baumann, BommiMichael BaumannMichael "Bommi" Baumann was one of the founders of the German organization Movement 2 June, author of a memoir, and a former militant.-Biography:Baumann was a construction worker...
. How It All Began: Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla, Arsenal Pulp PressArsenal Pulp PressArsenal Pulp Press is a Canadian independent book publishing company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. The company publishes a broad range of titles in both fiction and non-fiction, and is noted for founding the annual Three-Day Novel Contest .Authors who have been published by Arsenal Pulp ...
1981, ISBN 978-0-88978-045-3 - Becker, JillianJillian BeckerJillian Becker is a novelist, prize-winning story-writer, critic, journalist, lecturer, best known internationally as a writer, researcher, and authority on the subject of terrorism.-Life:...
. Hitler's Children: Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist GangHitler's ChildrenHitler's Children is a 1977 biography of the West German militant left-wing group, the Red Army Faction , by South African author Jillian Becker....
, 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 PressUniversity of California PressUniversity of California Press, also known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish books and papers for the faculty of the University of California, established 25 years earlier in 1868...
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).
External links
- "The media’s first celebrity terrorists" Picture essay of Red Army Faction
- "History of the RAF" – detailed, sympathetic account – by Arm the Spirit, Toronto, Canada
- 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 PostThe First PostThe First Post is a British daily online news magazine based in London. It was launched in August 2005. It publishes news, current affairs, lifestyle, opinion, arts and sports pages, and it features an online games arcade and a cinema featuring short films, virals, trailers and eyewitness news...
- Terrorist chic or debunking of a myth? Baader Meinhof film splits Germany
- Heroic Impatience By Diego Gambetta, The NationThe NationThe Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
, 4 March 2010 - Weiterstadt Prison Germany (after attack 1993)
