Red Army Faction

10 Key excerpts on "Red Army Faction"

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  eBook - ePub

  The SAGE Encyclopedia of Terrorism, Second Edition

  • Gus Martin(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  The Communist group known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang (aka Red Army Faction), which was named for Andreas Baader and the leftist journalist Ulrike Meinhof, terrorized West Germany in the 1970s. The gang, which called itself the Red Army Faction (RAF), engaged in bombing campaigns and assassinations, including attacks against U.S. Army bases.

  The Baader-Meinhof Gang emerged from the German student protest movement of the late 1960s. Originally focused on university reform, the student movement soon took on distinct leftist characteristics as it agitated against the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism. Students were also highly critical of German society’s reluctance to confront its Nazi past, with those on the radical fringe contending that the West German government was merely a continuation of that fascist state. It was this radical fringe that supplied most of the Baader-Meinhof Gang’s members, most prominently Gudrun Ensslin, a former graduate student and longtime activist.

  In April 1968, Ensslin, her lover Baader, and two accomplices, Horst Söhnlein and Thorwald Proll, moved from protest to active violence, fire-bombing two Frankfurt department stores. Although property was damaged, no one was hurt. Quickly arrested and convicted in October 1968, the four were released pending appeal. When the appeal was denied in November, Baader, Ensslin, and Proll jumped bail and fled to Switzerland.

  Within a few months, they returned to Germany, and Baader was recaptured in April and imprisoned. On May 15, 1970, six members of the group, with the help of Meinhof, freed Baader in a daring jailbreak. After Baader’s escape the group became known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang (or Group). However, they called themselves the Red Army Faction in imitation of a Japanese terrorist group, the Japanese Red Army.

  Once Baader was freed, the group commenced terrorist activities in earnest, traveling to a Palestinian training camp in Lebanon for instruction in bomb making and other guerrilla skills. They returned to Germany in August 1970 and, in need of funds, began a series of bank robberies and attracted new recruits. By then the group had become the target of a massive manhunt. Three police officers were killed in a series of shootouts during 1971, and several gang members were arrested. In May 1972, they began a bombing campaign against German and American targets, setting off six bombs that killed four people and injured more than 40.

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  Europe's Red Terrorists

  The Fighting Communist Organizations

  • Yonah Alexander, Dennis A. Pluchinsky(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3

  Red Army Faction

  Original Language (German) Rote Armee Faktion

  The Red Army Faction (RAF) is a small Marxist-Leninist terrorist group that has been operating in Germany since 1970. The roots of this urban guerrilla group, often referred to as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, go back to the violent student protests in West Germany during the late 1960s which were triggered by the Vietnam War. The goal of the RAF is to destroy the current German state and replace it with a vaguely ‘proletarian dictatorship’. The RAF considers itself to be part of the international revolutionary movement and therefore counts as its ‘enemies’ imperialism, capitalism and fascism, in all their various forms. All RAF terrorist attacks are directed at symbolic targets that represent one or more of these ‘enemies’. Over the past 22 years, the RAF has targeted German businessmen, politicians, government officials and American military officers and installations. It is the longest surviving FCO operating in Europe today. The RAF has demonstrated its operational resilience by surviving the arrests and/or deaths of three successive leadership cadres and the arrests of over 150 of its hard-core members. It is one of the few European Marxist-Leninist groups that has developed over the years a strong and active ‘prison front’ of imprisoned RAF members who continue their agitation and propaganda activities from within the prisons.

  TACTICS

  The RAF has carried out assassinations, car bombings, a rocket attack, remote-detonated roadside bombings, kidnappings, bank robberies, weapons and explosives thefts, and sniping attacks. The RAF unit that is responsible for the more tactically complicated, lethal terrorist operations is called the ‘commando’ or ‘guerrilla’. The RAF commando level has carried out 24 operations between 1972 and 1991. Over the past five years, it has averaged two attacks per year. This low rate of operations has been offset by the prominence of the group’s targets, mostly high-level German government and economic figures. Some of the more notorious RAF commando attacks are listed in the chronology below.

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  Baader-Meinhof and the Novel

  Narratives of the Nation / Fantasies of the Revolution, 1970–2010

  • J. Preece(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: The Baader-Meinhof Myth Machine The idea of armed urban guerillas waging an underground war against the state has fascinated many of Germany’s leading contemporary writers. The original leadership trio of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, or RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group) have consequently been depicted in more novels than any other Germans from the second half of the twentieth century. Why this should be so is at second glance puzzling. The outline history of German left-wing terrorism is undoubtedly exciting, but Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Gudrun Ensslin exerted no real influence on German politics. They left behind no great works. The RAF, which was their creation, enjoyed no mass support and never posed a great danger either to the state or to the public. The total number of fatalities in the 28 years of the RAF’s existence is little more than the number that can die on the roads in Germany in a bad week. 1 Over roughly the same period more than 3500 people lost their lives in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In Italy between 1969 and 1983, five times as many are estimated to have died in unrest involving extreme right-wing and left-wing “terrorists.” 2 The leading historian of the German Student Movement, Wolfgang Kraushaaar, has called the RAF “in their basic characteristics autistic and thus at their core unpolitical.” 3 In the showdown with the West German state, which lasted for 44 anxious days in September and October 1977, the release of their own prisoners was the sole issue at stake. Another leading critic, Klaus Theweleit, has argued that the RAF’s lack of a political standpoint was precisely how and why they enjoyed support: The abstract identification of so many who had “radical feelings” with the RAF could only function as well as it did because there was, especially on the RAF’s side, zero politics.

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  After the Red Army Faction

  Gender, Culture, and Militancy

  • Charity Scribner(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  introduction Beyond Militancy

  Shortly After September 11, when Berlin curators announced plans for a blockbuster exhibition of art about the Red Army Faction, or RAF, alarms went off across Germany. Masterminded by women, the Rote Armee Fraktion had splintered off from the New Left in 1970, turning from protest to armed resistance. The group’s misguided take on Marxism and its flawed efforts to redress Nazi crimes devolved into a campaign of terror in the German Autumn of 1977. This season was darkened by hijackings and suicides, the proliferation of wanted posters, and the reinforcement of state surveillance. More than thirty years later, many asked whether the public was ready to revisit this explosive period. Memories of these events still trigger powerful reactions. Whereas the broadcast media first answered to the demand that the RAF “revolution” be televised, artists and writers from around the world have recoded this past episode and raised urgent questions about agency and art in a time of political violence. Many of these questions are inflected by gender.

  The Red Army Faction rose up in the middle of the Cold War and fell soon After its end. Renouncing both parliamentary procedure and public protest, the RAF’s women and men wanted to advance social justice by any means necessary. They saw their interventions as acts of “emancipation and defense” against corrupt state powers.1 At the start, the group was led by Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader. Two more “generations” of militants succeeded them, and many Germans—from both sides of the formerly divided country—assented to their ideals, if not their methods. Baader-Meinhof militancy veered into terrorism in the early 1970s. By 1998, when the group formally disbanded, they had killed thirty-four people.2

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  The Arts of Imprisonment

  Control, Resistance and Empowerment

  • Leonidas K. Cheliotis(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 11 Resistance or Propaganda, Self-Expression or Solipsism?: Prison Writing and the Red Army Faction Prisoners in West Germany, 1973–77 Sarah Colvin 1 The organization that would later call itself the Red Army Faction was founded in 1970, when political journalist Ulrike Meinhof (1934–76) helped student activist Gudrun Ensslin (1940–77) and lawyer Horst Mahler (b. 1936) carry out an armed operation to free Ensslin’s boyfriend Andreas Baader (1943–77) from a Berlin prison, where he was serving a sentence for arson. Initial attempts by the press and the police to name the group led first to ‘Baader-Mahler-Meinhof’, then to ‘Baader-Meinhof’ (Ensslin never got a mention). In 1971, the group christened itself Rote Armee Fraktion or RAF, apparently oblivious to the overlap with the acronym used by the British air force. Its intention – following Che Guevara’s ‘focus theory’, which said the preconditions for a revolution can be created by an armed avantgarde – was to provoke the West German state, through acts of terrorism, into a vicious response that would lead the German people to revolt against capitalism, globalization, and the war in Vietnam. For the group’s founder members it was a short-lived endeavor. Following a brutal bombing campaign in which four American soldiers were killed, all were arrested during the summer of 1972. Meinhof was found hanged in her cell in Stuttgart-Stammheim’s high-security prison on the morning of 9 May 1976. After a failed hijack by Palestinian terrorists (intended to force the release of the prisoners), Baader, Ensslin, and their associate Jan-Carl Raspe (1944–77) were found dead in their cells on 18 October 1977 – Ensslin by hanging, and the two men shot in the head; the autopsy verdict was suicide

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  Red Army Faction, A Documentary History

  Volume 2: Dancing with Imperialism

  • J. Smith, André Moncourt, J. Smith, André Moncourt(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • PM Press

    (Publisher)

  1

  Previously on Red Army Faction

  F ORTY YEARS AGO, THE WORLD was a very different place.

  The division between “Communism” and “The Free West”—détente notwithstanding—marked each and every political conflict, as did the anticolonial revolutions, which had by no means run their course.

  Millions of people around the world felt that it was reasonable and worthwhile to risk their lives fighting for liberation from capitalism and imperialism, joining movements with these stated goals. This global upheaval found its epicenter in the Third World, and yet its effects left no nation unchanged. While in the wealthy imperialist countries these revolutionary movements were most evident in the 1960s, there remained pockets of resistance, subcultural remnants, people who persisted in putting their lives on the line, carrying the struggle forward through the 1970s and beyond.

  This is the story of one such group, the Red Army Faction (RAF).

  West Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), was an anticommunist state set up after World War II to threaten the Soviet bloc, around which imperialism hoped to and succeeded in rebuilding Western Europe’s economy. As part of this process, immediately after the war the capitalist Allies decided to make peace with former Nazis and their supporters, so long as they were willing to play ball with the new “democratic” masters. Throughout the late 1940s, the ‘50s, and the ‘60s, many of the key positions of power in the FRG were occupied by men who had played similarly important roles in Hitler’s Third Reich.

  As a substitute for any real denazification, religious and civil leaders simply repeated the mantra that the best way to make sure the crimes of the Nazi period were never repeated was for all Germans to concentrate on living “decent, law-abiding” lives. A message that would often be repeated by parents—not a few of whom had sieg-heiling skeletons in their closets—to their children.

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  Why Terrorist Groups Form International Alliances

  • Tricia Bacon(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3

  The Red Army Faction

  Pursuing Palestinian Partners

  There is a close and special cooperation between the two regimes in Bonn and Tel-Aviv in the military and economic fields, as well as in the area of shared political positions. The two enemy regimes work together against patriotic and revolutionary liberation movements in the world in general and in Arab, African, and Latin American regions in particular.

  —Struggle Against World Imperialism Organization, October 13, 1977

  During the 1970s, the West German Red Army Faction (RAF) arguably achieved the most notoriety of all the New Left organizations. Its iconic leaders were a media sensation, with a movie depicting their activities appearing thirty years after their deaths. During the founding members’ terrorist spree, they conducted arson attacks and bombings, orchestrated a jail break, engaged in deadly shootouts with police, robbed banks, and stole BMW getaway cars, which were nicknamed “Baader-Meinhof wagons” after two of the group’s prominent members. After the West German government caught up with them, the campaign to free the group’s leaders from prison was no less dramatic. RAF members went on high-profile hunger strikes—one resulted in the death of a senior member—to draw attention to their plight. They succeeded in spawning a following; sympathizers formed “torture committees” to protest their imprisonment conditions. These committees provided a pool of recruits ready to go to extreme lengths to secure the prisoners’ freedom. Their followers unleashed a reign of violence that rocked West Germany. The saga ended when the imprisoned leaders committed suicide, orchestrating their deaths to sow doubt about whether they had taken their own lives or whether the “fascist” West German government had murdered them.

  The RAF would have been unable to wreak such havoc were it not for its Palestinian allies. As two sympathizers summed it up, the RAF made “extensive use of various Arab countries as rear base areas throughout their existence, places where one could go not only for training, but also to hide when Europe got too ‘hot.’”1 Some have concluded that these relationships were based “on a sense of ideological solidarity, the RAF’s internationalist worldview, and their conclusion that the capitalist West and Israel were common foes.”2

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  Screening the Red Army Faction

  Historical and Cultural Memory

  • Christina Gerhardt(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The texts examined are organized chronologically, so that, as one moves through the analyses, one sees the shifts in debates about the group and in discourses of terrorism. In this manner, the study offers a chronological account of the cultural memory of the Red Army Faction from texts produced concurrent to the group’s founding in 1970 to the 2008 Oscar-nominated Baader Meinhof Complex. Left-wing terrorism was arguably the most important political issue facing post-fascist West German y. The discourse surrounding terrorism touches upon vital questions, such as the rights, limits, and failures of liberal democracies; the points of relationship, overlap and difference in armed struggle groups operative in so-called First, Second, and Third World contexts; and the possibilities and limitations of solidarity alliances. Terrorism raised and raises questions and responses—across the political spectrum. Often these manifest in related terminology, such as terrorism and armed struggle; the role of trauma ; and concepts of violence, including Max Weber’s concept of Gewaltsmonopol (state’s monopoly of violence), laid out in his “Politics as a Vocation” (1918), Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921), and Judith Butler’s critique of ethical violence. Cultural texts, this book argues, played a decisive role in shaping this history, intervening in discourses concurrent to the attacks early on and more recently looking back at the Red Army Faction. Chapter 1, “Looking Back: The Political and Historical Context, 1945–70,” presents the historical and political context out of which the Red Army Faction grew. This chapter draws the history back to the long 1960s and considers not only domestic but also international events, since both impacted West Germany’s social, student, and armed struggle movements of the 1960s and 1970s

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  Bringing the War Home

  The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies

  • Jeremy Peter Varon(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  159 244 Deadly Abstraction Like other groups in the New Left, the RAF used the charge of fas-cism as a highly emotional language of condemnation announcing the need for greater militancy. References to fascism abounded in its state-ments. A communiqué from the 1972 “May Offensive” denounced the “SS-praxis” of the West German police. 160 That issued with the bomb-ing of the U.S. military base in Heidelberg claimed that the German people supported the action “because they have not forgotten Auschwitz, Dres-den, and Hamburg.” 161 The RAF likened the failure to clear the Springer building before its bomb went off to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, thereby suggesting that both were designed to promote social chaos con-ducive to an assertion of power by the far right. 162 At times, the RAF ex-plicitly equated imperialism with fascism. In a 1972 statement, Meinhof insisted that “National Socialism was only the political and military pre-cursor to the imperialist system of multinational corporations.” 163 In the mid 1970s, the RAF sharpened its comparisons of the West Ger-man state to the Nazi regime. Most provocatively, the RAF likened the treatment of its prisoners to the Nazis’ extermination policies. In 1973, Meinhof commented that “the political conception of the dead section at Cologne [prison] . . . is the gas chamber . . . . My ideas of Auschwitz became very clear in there.” 164 Baader went so far as to charge that the treatment of RAF prisoners was more brutal than the tactics used by the Gestapo. 165 Finally, guerrillas made reference to fascism in describing their victims, for instance, seeing von Drenkmann and Schleyer—both of whom had served under the Nazis and then rose to positions of promi-nence in the new Germany—as personifications of fascist continuity. In its mind, the RAF was fighting a new behemoth that bore traces of the old.

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  A Revolution of Perception?

  Consequences and Echoes of 1968

  • Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  15 It was the activities of left-wing opponents that made the term ‘ Berufsverbot ’ known all over Europe during the second half of the 1970s. Their greatest triumph in giving that topic a European dimension was reached when the leader of the French Socialists, François Mitterrand, joined an Anti-Berufsverbot committee. Transnational Communication Strategies of the Red Army Faction and its Sympathizers Not surprisingly, left-wing terrorists of the Red Army Faction and their sym-pathizers also started attempts to involve the non-German public in their propaganda efforts, not least due to their own political socialization within transnational contexts, including contacts with Dutschke, the radical Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and others. 16 It was the defence lawyer Klaus Croissant who proved himself best suited to the task; quite rightly he was called the best PR manager the RAF ever had. 17 Croissant’s strategy of letting his clients appear as innocent victims of political persecution, and reversing the rela-tion between perpetrators and victims as completely as possible, had a consider-able mobilizing effect. The message, spread in leaflets and books both in German and other languages and at press conferences in Germany and abroad, worked quite well, especially amongst those belonging to the recently emerging alterna-tive milieu with its pronounced distrust of the authorities. The situation of the RAF members held in solitary confinement was described in the most drastic terms, with conscious recourse to the language of National Socialist perpetrators to describe the discourse of the government (i.e. imputing that the state was Nazi in its methods).

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