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Paramilitary | The Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Group) was a West German far-left terrorist organization active 1970-1998, responsible for the 1972 bombings, the 1977 Schleyer kidnapping and the 1989 Herrhausen assassination. | 1970 | 1998 | West Germany |
The Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, RAF), commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Group after its founding figures, was a West Germany far-left terrorist organization that operated from 1970 to 1998. Founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof along with Gudrun Ensslin and others, the RAF drew its ideology from Marxist-Leninist and anti-imperialist frameworks, targeting what it characterized as the fascist continuities of West German capitalism and the American military occupation of German territory.1
Foundation and First Generation
The RAF's origins lay in the student protest movements of the late 1960s and the radicalization of a faction that concluded electoral and protest politics were insufficient. On April 2, 1968, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Thorwald Proll and Horst Söhnlein set fires in two Frankfurt department stores, the Kaufhof on the Zeil and the M. Schneider store, causing considerable property damage and no injuries.2 Ulrike Meinhof was not among the four defendants. She reported on the trial for konkret and criticized the arson in her column, arguing that an attack of this kind on the capitalist consumer world does "not lift that consumer world off its hinges, does not even injure it."23 After Baader's arrest and escape from custody in 1970 - an escape in which Meinhof, then a prominent left-wing journalist, participated - the group formally constituted itself. Meinhof authored the RAF's founding manifesto.1
The group trained in Jordan with Palestinian fedayeen organizations in 1970 before returning to West Germany to begin operations. Its first major campaign in May 1972 involved coordinated bombings against U.S. Army headquarters in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, the Hamburg police headquarters, and the Springer newspaper building in Hamburg, resulting in several deaths and dozens of injuries.1
The 1977 German Autumn
The most significant RAF operations occurred in the autumn of 1977, in what German media called the "German Autumn" (Deutscher Herbst). On September 5, 1977, RAF members kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations and a former SS officer, killing his four bodyguards and driver in the ambush. On October 13, a Palestinian commando - coordinating with the RAF - hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181 from Mallorca, eventually diverting it to Mogadishu, Somalia.
The West German government under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt refused to release imprisoned RAF members in response to both the Schleyer kidnapping and the hijacking. The GSG 9 (GSG 9), the federal counterterrorism unit created following the Munich Olympic Massacre failure, stormed the hijacked aircraft at Mogadishu on October 18, 1977, killing three of four hijackers and freeing all hostages. Hours after the rescue, Baader, Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their Stammheim Prison cells - officially ruled suicides, though the precise circumstances remained contested. Schleyer was subsequently murdered by his RAF captors.1
Second and Third Generation
Following the deaths of its founding leadership in 1977, the RAF reorganized with new recruits. The second and third generation RAF conducted further operations through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, including the 1977-era aftermath, the 1985 bombing of Rhein-Main Air Base, and the April 5, 1986 La Belle discotheque bombing in West Berlin (attributed to Libya, not RAF). The RAF's most significant later operation was the November 30, 1989, assassination of Deutsche Bank chief executive Alfred Herrhausen, killed by an anti-tank mine triggered by a tripwire as his car passed.1
Entebbe Connection
On June 27, 1976, two members of the RAF - Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann - participated in the hijacking of Air France Flight 139 from Tel Aviv to Paris, diverting it ultimately to Entebbe Airport in Uganda under Idi Amin's government. The operation was jointly conducted with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and organized by Wadie Haddad's PFLP-EO. On July 4, 1976, Israeli special forces conducted Operation Entebbe, killing the hijackers, including Böse and Kuhlmann, and rescuing 102 of the 106 hostages.4
Dissolution
The RAF officially announced the end of its armed struggle in a statement released in April 1998, citing the changed political circumstances following the end of the Cold War and German reunification. By this point the organization had been effectively inactive for several years. The total death toll from RAF operations over its existence was approximately thirty-four people.
Footnotes
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Aust, Stefan. The Baader Meinhof Complex. Translated by Anthea Bell. Bodley Head, 2008. Originally published in German as Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Hoffmann und Campe, 1985). This is the authoritative account of the RAF's history by a journalist who knew several of its members. ↩︎
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Urteil des Oberlandesgerichts Stuttgart vom 28. April 1977, Az. 2 StE (OLG Stgt) 1/74, in: Das Stammheim-Protokoll. Die Gesamtedition (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2021), https://www.stammheim-prozess.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/OLG-Stuttgart-Urteil-vom-28.4.1977-2-StE-174-Text.pdf, p. 137, footnote 200. ↩︎
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Ulrike Meinhof, Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar (1980), p. 153, as quoted in the judgment, footnote 200. German: "Gegen Warenhausbrandstiftung im besonderen spricht, daß dieser Angriff auf die kapitalistische Konsumwelt [...] eben diese Konsumwelt nicht aus den Angeln hebt, sie nicht einmal verletzt [...]." ↩︎
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Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network. Sheridan Square Press, 1992 (TrineDay reprint, 2015). Netanyahu, Iddo. Entebbe: A Defining Moment in the War on Terrorism. Balfour Books, 2003. ↩︎