Red Army Faction | |
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Rote Armee Fraktion | |
![]() Later design of the RAF's insignia showing a red star and a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun | |
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Political position | Far-left |
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The Red Army Faction (RAF, German: [ɛʁʔaːˈʔɛf] ; German: Rote Armee Fraktion, pronounced [ˌʁoː.tə aʁˈmeː fʁakˌt͡si̯oːn] ),[a] also known as the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang (German: Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe, Baader-Meinhof-Bande, German: [ˈbaːdɐ ˈmaɪ̯nˌhɔf ˈɡʁʊpə] ), was a West German far-left militant group founded in 1970 and active until 1998. The RAF described itself as a communist and anti-imperialist urban guerrilla group. It was engaged in armed resistance against what it considered a fascist state. Members of the RAF generally used the Marxist–Leninist term "faction" when they wrote in English.[3] Early leadership included Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Horst Mahler. The West German government considered the RAF a terrorist organization.[b]
The RAF engaged in a series of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, bank robberies, and shootouts with police over the course of three decades. Its activities peaked in late 1977, which led to a national crisis that became known as the "German Autumn". The RAF has been held responsible for 34 deaths, including industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, the Dresdner Bank head Jürgen Ponto, federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback, police officers, American servicemen stationed in Germany,[4] as well as many cases of collateral damage, such as chauffeurs and bodyguards, with many others injured throughout its almost thirty years of activity; 26 RAF members or supporters were killed.[4] Although better-known, the RAF conducted fewer attacks than the Revolutionary Cells, which is held responsible for 296 bomb attacks, arson and other attacks between 1973 and 1995.[5] The group was motivated by leftist political concerns and the perceived failure of their parents' generation to confront Germany's Nazi past,[4] and received support from Stasi and other Eastern Bloc security services.[6][dubious – discuss]
Sometimes, the group is talked about in terms of generations:
On 20 April 1998, an eight-page typewritten letter in German was faxed to the Reuters news agency, signed "RAF" with the submachine-gun red star, declaring that the group had dissolved.[7] In 1999, after a robbery in Duisburg, evidence pointing to Ernst-Volker Staub and Daniela Klette was found, causing an official investigation into a re-founding.[8]
The legitimacy of violent and political resistance was also stressed by Mao Zedong, who was widely cited by the RAF in its first public statements. In contrast to the violent resistance of terrorist factions, political Maoists stressed the importance of political resistance to the bourgeois society.
Acting on Carlos Marighella's influential Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla and the Maoist tenet that bringing the armed struggle from the fringes of society to the center of the metropole is the necessary precondition for meaningfully altering the superstructure, the RAF attempted to aggravate the Federal Republic into overreacting, thus exposing the unrelenting and unsympathetic mechanisms of the state.
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