The Red Army Faction (or Red Army Fraction; also commonly known as Baader-Meinhof Group; in German: Rote Armee Fraktion or simply RAF), was postwar Western Germany's most active and prominent left-wing terrorism organization; it described itself as an "urban guerrilla". The RAF operated from the 1970s to 1998, causing great civil unrest, especially in the autumn of 1977, which lead to a national crisis that became known as "German Autumn". It is responsible for 34 deaths—including many secondary targets such as chauffeurs and bodyguards– and many injured in its almost 30 years of existence.
Background
The origins of the group can be traced back to the West German student protest movement in the late 1960s. Peaceful protests turned into riots on June 2, 1967, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, visited West Berlin. After a day of violent protests by exiled Iranians, a group widely supported by German students, the Shah visited the Berlin Opera, where a crowd of student protesters gathered. During the opera house demonstrations, a German student Benno Ohnesorg—who was attending his first protest—was fatally shot by West German police.
Along with perceptions of state and police brutality, and widespread opposition to the Vietnam War, Ohnesorg's death galvanized many young Germans, and became a rallying point for the West German New Left. It influenced the creation of the Movement 2 June, a militant-Anarchist group which took its name after the date of Ohnesorg's death. It also brought Thorwald Proll, Horst Söhnlein, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader together, in a loose group which decided to set fire to several German department stores. They were arrested in Frankfurt on April 2, 1968; while the four defendants were on trial, the journalist Ulrike Meinhof published several sympathetic articles in the political magazine konkret.
Meanwhile, on April 11, 1968, Rudi Dutschke, the leading intellect and spokesman for the student protests, was shot in the head. Although badly injured, he was able to return to political activism until his death in 1979, a late consequence of his injuries. The attacker was Josef Bachmann, a conservative, German unskilled laborer.
The student New Left considered the tabloid newspaper Bild-Zeitung, which had headlines like "Stop Dutschke now!", the chief culprit for inciting the shooting. Due to this, the Axel Springer corporation, publisher of Bild-Zeitung, as well as the rest of the conservative press, became the new targets of the leftist protesters. 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."
Custody and the Stammheim trial
The RAF members were jailed individually in solitary confinement, and allowed visits with relatives only every two weeks. When Ensslin devised an "info system" using aliases for each member, the four prisoners were able to communicate again, circulating letters with the help of their defence counsels.
To protest against their treatment by authorities, they went on several coordinated hunger strikes; eventually, they were force-fed. Holger Meins died, on November 9, 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 February 27, 1975, Peter Lorenz, the CDU candidate for mayor of Berlin, was kidnapped to force the release of several other detainees (Lorenz was kidnapped by a related Urban Guerrilla band known as the June 2nd Movement). Since none of the detainees were on trial for murder, the state agreed, and those inmates (and therefore later Lorenz) were released. This gave compelling inspiration to the second generation of the RAF. On April 24, 1975, the German embassy in Stockholm was occuppied 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. More people died when the explosives deployed by the terrorists were triggered later that night.
On May 21, 1975, the Stammheim trial of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe began, named after a city district of Stuttgart where it took place. Possibly the most tense and controversial German criminal trial ever, the Bundestag had earlier changed the Code of Criminal Procedure so that several of the attorneys who were accused of serving as links between the inmates and the RAF's second generation could be excluded.
On May 9, 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, spurring a plethora of conspiracy theories. Other theories suggest that she took her life because of being ostracized by the rest of the group.
During the trial, more attacks took place; among them, on April 7, 1977, Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback his driver and bodyguard were shot and killed by two RAF members while waiting at a red traffic light.
Eventually, on April 28, 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.
On July 30, 1977, Jürgen Ponto, then head of Dresdner Bank, was shot and killed in front of his house in Oberursel in a kidnapping that went wrong. Those involved were Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Christian Klar, and Susanne Albrecht, the last being Ponto's goddaughter.
Following the convictions, Hanns Martin Schleyer, a former officer of the SS and NSDAP member who was then President of the German Employers' Association (and thus one of the most powerful industrialists in West Germany) was abducted in a violent kidnapping. On September 5, 1977, his driver was forced to brake when a baby carriage suddenly appeared in the street in front of them. The police escort vehicle behind them was unable to stop in time, and crashed into Schleyer's car. Five masked assailants immediately killed the three policemen and the driver and took Schleyer hostage.
A letter then arrived at the Federal Government, demanding the release of eleven detainees, including those from Stammheim. A crisis squad was formed in Bonn under the lead of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, which, instead of acceding, resolved to employ delaying tactics to give the police time to figure out Schleyer's location. At the same time, a total communication ban was imposed on the prison inmates, who were only allowed visits from government officials and the prison chaplain.
The state crisis dragged on for more than a month, while the Bundeskriminalamt carried out its biggest manhunt to date. Matters escalated when, on October 13, 1977, Lufthansa flight LH 181 from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt was hijacked (Landshut Hijacking). A group of four Arabs took control of the plane (named Landshut). The leader introduced himself to the passengers as "Captain Mahmud" who would be later identified as Zohair Youssef Akache. When the plane landed in Rome for refuelling, he issued the same demands as the Schleyer kidnappers, plus the release of two Palestinians held in Turkey and payment of USD $15 million.
The Bonn crisis squad 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 fully cooperative, was brought before an improvised "revolutionary tribunal" and murdered on October 16. The aircraft again took off, flown by the remaining co-pilot Jürgen Vietor, this time headed for Mogadishu, Somalia.
A high-risk rescue operation was led by Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, then stateminister in the federal-chancellery, who had secretly been flown in from Bonn. At five past midnight (CET) on October 18, 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 squad 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 hidden radio. In the course of the night, Baader was found dead with a gunshot wound in his head and Ensslin hanged in her cell; Raspe died in hospital the next day. Irmgard Möller, who was wounded, survived and was released from prison in 1994.
The official inquiry concluded that this was a collective suicide, but again conspiracy theories abounded. It is not clear, for example, how Baader managed to obtain a gun in the high-security prison wing specially constructed for the first generation RAF members. Also, it would have been difficult if not impossible for Möller to have herself inflicted the four stab wounds found near her heart. However, independent investigations have shown that the inmates' lawyers were able to smuggle in weapons and equipment in spite of the high security.
The next day, on October 19, 1977, Schleyer's kidnappers announced that he had been "executed".
The events in the autumn of 1977, possibly the biggest criminal and political showdown that Germany has experienced since the end of World War II, are frequently referred to as Der Deutsche Herbst ("German Autumn"). A two-part 1997 television mini-series by Heinrich Breloer called Todesspiel ("Death Game") gives a good account of the events, as far as they can be reconstructed today.
The RAF in the 1980s and 1990s
The collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union was a serious blow to left-wing groups, but well into the 1990s attacks were still being committed under the name "RAF". Among these were the killing of industrialist Ernst Zimmermann; another bombing at the US Air Force's Ramstein Air Base (near Kaiserslautern), which killed three; the death in a car-bombing of Siemens executive Karl-Heinz Beckurts; and the shooting of Gerold von Braunmühl, a leading official at Germany's foreign ministry.
There were several other attacks which the government blamed on the RAF; despite these accusations, its responsibility for those attacks has never been proven. On November 30, 1989, Deutsche Bank chief Alfred Herrhausen was killed with a highly complex bomb when his car triggered a photo sensor, in Bad Homburg. On April 1, 1991, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, leader of the government Treuhand organization responsible for the privatization of the East German state economy, was shot dead.
After German reunification in 1990, it was discovered 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, although this was already generally suspected at the time.
The last big action against the RAF took place on June 27, 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 Policeman Rüdiger Newrzella died during the mission. The official investigation concluded that Grams committed suicide, others claim his death was in revenge for Newrzella's.
In 1992 the German government assessed that the RAF's main field of engagement now were extrication missions of 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. Hereafter the RAF announced their intentions to "take back the escalation" and stop their attacks on people. The last action took place in 1993 with a bombing of a newly built prison in Weiterstadt by subdueing the officers on duty and planting explosives afterwards. Although no one was seriously injured this action caused property damage comprising 123 million Deutsche Marks (over 50 million euro).
On April 20, 1998 an eight-page typewritten letter in German was faxed to the Reuters news agency, signed "RAF" with the machine-gun red star, declaring the group dissolved:
"Vor fast 28 Jahren, am 14. Mai 1970, entstand in einer Befreiungsaktion die RAF. Heute beenden wir dieses Projekt. Die Stadtguerilla in Form der RAF ist nun Geschichte."
("Almost 28 years ago, on May 14, 1970, the RAF arose in a campaign of liberation. Today we end this project. The urban guerrilla in the shape of the RAF is now history.")
Australian/UK playwright Van Badham's play "Black Hands / Dead Section" provides a fictionalised account of the actions and lives of key members of the RAF. It won the Queensland premier's award for literature in 2005.
Origins of the name
The name was inspired by that of the Japanese Red Army, a Japanese leftist paramilitary group. The usual translation into English is the Red Army Faction although the original is actually a fraction, an old word for a unit under Communist party discipline. The word is rarely used in English today except in mathematics, whereas the word Fraktion is still used in German, to mean any parliamentary subgroup - dictionaries normally translate this meaning as faction. Fraktion was thrown in to illustrate the connection leftist organisations felt with a large, international Marxist struggle.
List of assaults attributed to the RAF
| Date |
Place |
Action |
Remarks |
| 11 May 1972 |
Frankfurt am Main |
Bombing of US barracks |
1 dead, 13 wounded |
| 12 May 1972 |
Augsburg and München |
Bombing of a police station in Augsburg and the Bavarian State Criminal Investigations Agency in München |
5 police-officers wounded |
| 16 May 1972 |
Karlsruhe |
Bombing of the car of the Federal Judge Buddenberg |
His wife was driving the car and was wounded |
| 19 May 1972 |
Hamburg |
Bombing of the Axel Springer Verlag |
17 wounded |
| 24 May 1972 |
Heidelberg |
Bombing outside of Military Intelligence (G-2), Headquarters, U.S. Army in Europe (HQ USAREUR) at Campbell Barracks |
3 dead, 5 wounded |
| 24 April 1975 |
Stockholm |
Occupation of the German embassy, murder of Andreas von Mirbach and Dr. Heinz Hillegaart |
4 dead, of whom 2 were RAF members |
| 7 April 1977 |
Karlsruhe |
Assasination of the federal prosecuter-general Siegfried Buback |
The driver and another passenger were also killed. |
| 30 July 1977 |
Oberursel (Taunus) |
The director of Dresdner Bank, Jürgen Ponto, is shot in his home during an attempted kidnappping. |
|
| 5 September 1977
18 October 1977
|
Köln resp.
Mulhouse
|
Kidnapping of the chairman of the German Employers' Organisation Hanns-Martin Schleyer, who is later shot |
3 police-officers and the driver are killed during the kidnapping |
| 9 July 1986 |
Straßlach (near München) |
Shooting of Siemens-manager Karl Heinz Beckurts and driver Eckhard Groppler |
|
| 30 November 1989 |
Bad Homburg v. d. Höhe |
Bombing of banker Alfred Herrhausen |
Case unsolved |
| 1 April 1991 |
Düsseldorf |
Shooting of Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, chief of the Treuhandanstalt, in his house in Düsseldorf |
Case unsolved |
| 27 March 1993 |
Weiterstadt |
Attacks with explosives at the construction site of a new prison |
Case unsolved. No casualties. Damage 123 million DM (over 50 million euro) |
See also
External links
