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Red Army Faction |
Baader Meinhof Gang
| The RAF was born out of the student protest movement in the 1960s. It
emerged from the Baader-Meinhof Gang, founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike
Meinhof. Its ideological basis was a commitment to violence in the service
of the class struggle. It developed an extensive network of underground
guerrillas and left-wing sympathizers who claimed to be motivated by disgust
with what they saw as the mindless materialism and fascist tendencies of
German society.
The Red Army Faction eventually became one of Europe's most feared terrorist organizations. Its ideology was an obscure mix of Marxism and Maoism, with a committment to armed struggle as such. The group was organized into hardcore cadres, which carried out terrorist attacks with the aid of a network of supporters who provided logistic and propaganda support. The RAF survived into the mid nineties despite numerous arrests of top leaders over the years. |
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At the height of its notoriety in the 1970s, the Red Army Faction was seen as
Europe's most deadly urban terror group. Its small and disciplined cells made it
a streamlined and effective organization. It attacked not just Germany's rich
and powerful, but also U.S. military installations which current left-wing
ideology saw as emblems of American imperialism.
The RAF apparently also harbored ambitious plans of achieving deadlier attacks through use of biological weapons. In 1984, a safehouse belonging to the group was reportedly uncovered in Paris, France. Inside the safehouse an improvised laboratory was found containing flasks of deadly botulism toxin.
Although they apparently never had more than 20 - 40 hardcore members, the RAF is thought to have had several hundred supporters. The group was self-sustaining, but during the Baader-Meinhof period they received support from Middle Eastern terrorists. East Germany gave logistic support, sanctuary, and training during the 1980s.
In 1997 German authorities said that the Red Army Faction was no longer a serious terrorist threat. Most of its leaders were dead or in jail, while many of the group's onetime sympathizers had become disillusioned with its brutal methods.
In April, 1998 the RAF announced that it was disbanding. It sent an eight-page typewritten statement to Reuters news agency, which ended with the guerrillas' emblem of five-pointed star, a stylized machine-pistol and the letters RAF. The statement said: "Today we are ending this project. The urban guerrilla group in the form of the RAF is now history."
Officials at the federal Criminal Office in Wiesbaden said the document had
been certified as genuine in part because a watermark on one page was the same
as that in earlier statements from the group. "We are stuck in a dead end," the
statement said, acknowledging that the group had made strategic errors, but
expressing no contrition or regret toward the more than 30 people who died as
its victims.
The RAF is believed responsible for killing from 30 to 50 people, including
high-ranking German politicians, business executives and U.S. military
personnel. Its terrorist actions were intended to paralyze and topple the
post-World War II democratic order in West Germany. The group's members carried
out several terrorist attacks against US and NATO targets, including bombings,
assassinations, kidnappings and robberies. With the decline of world communism,
they had trouble recruiting replacements for jailed members.
The group's last terrorist operations were against domestic targets, particularly officials involved in German or European unification and German security and justice officials. The last assassination for which it claimed responsibility was the 1991 murder of Detlev Rohwedder, who headed the agency charged with privatizing the state holdings of the former East Germany.
The RAF carried out one operation in 1993, destroying a new prison with several hundred kilos of commercial explosives. A police shootout with two members ended in death of GSG-9 officer and group member Wolfgang Grams. This incident temporarily galvanized the group.
During the Gulf war, the RAF attacked the US Embassy in Bonn, firing assault
rifles at the building. There were no casualties.
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