Baader–Meinhof Group

The Red Army Faction (RAF, ; , ),See the section "Name" also known as the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang (, , active 1970–1998), was a West German far-left Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla group founded in 1970.

The RAF described itself as a communist, anti-imperialist, and urban guerrilla group engaged in armed resistance against what they deemed to be a ''fascist'' state. Members of the RAF generally used the Marxist–Leninist term ''faction'' when they wrote in English. Early leadership included Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Horst Mahler. The West German government considered the RAF to be a terrorist organization."24 June 1976: The West German parliament passed the German Emergency Acts, which criminalized 'supporting or participating in a terrorist organization,' into the Basic Law." ; "''Dümlein Christine'',... Joined the RAF in 1980,... the only crime she was guilty of was membership in a terrorist organization" .

The RAF engaged in a series of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, bank robberies, and shoot-outs with police over the course of three decades. Their activity 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, and the federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback, as well as many secondary targets, such as chauffeurs and bodyguards, with many others injured throughout its almost thirty years of activity; 26 RAF members or supporters were killed. 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. The group was motivated by leftist political concerns and the perceived failure of their parents' generation to confront Germany's Nazi past, and received support from Stasi and other Eastern Bloc security services.

Sometimes the group is talked about in terms of generations:
* the "first generation", which consisted of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and others;
* the "second generation", after the majority of the first generation was arrested in 1972; and
* the "third generation", which existed in the 1980s and 1990s up to 1998, after the first generation died in Stammheim maximum security prison in 1977.

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. 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.

Name

The usual translation into English is the "Red Army Faction"; however, the founders wanted it to reflect not a splinter group but rather an embryonic militant unit that was embedded, in or part of, a wider communist workers' movement,In Leninist terminology a "fraction" is a subset of a larger communist movement. For example, the 12 July 1921 "Theses on th
Structure of Communist Parties
, submitted to the Third Congress of the Comintern" states that "to carry out daily party work every member should as a rule belong to a small working group, a committee, a commission, a fraction, or a cell." Cited in Louis Proyect, "The Comintern and the German Communist Party;" or the description of the "Bolshevik-Leninist Fraction" in the article Communist League (UK, 1932). i.e., a ''fraction'' of a whole.

The group always called itself the , never the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang. The name refers to all incarnations of the organization: the "first generation" RAF, which consisted of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and others; the "second generation" RAF; and the "third generation" RAF, which existed in the 1980s and 90s. The terms "Baader–Meinhof Gang" and "Baader–Meinhof Group" were first used by the media and the government. The group never used these names to refer to itself, because it viewed itself as a co-founded group consisting of numerous members and not a group with two figureheads.

Background

The origins of the group can be traced back to the 1968 student protest movement in West Germany. Industrialised nations in the late 1960s experienced social upheavals related to the maturing of the " baby boomers", the Cold War, and the end of colonialism. Newly found youth identity and issues such as racism, women's liberation, and anti-imperialism were at the forefront of left-wing politics. Many young people were alienated from their parents and the institutions of the state. The historical legacy of Nazism drove a wedge between the generations and increased suspicion of authoritarian structures in society (some analysts see the same occurring in post-fascism Italy, giving rise to ).

In West Germany there was anger among leftist youth at the post-war denazification in West Germany and East Germany, which was perceived as a failure or as ineffective, as former (actual and supposed) Nazis held positions in government and the economy. The Communist Party of Germany had been outlawed since 1956. Elected and appointed government positions down to the local level were often occupied by ex-Nazis.Center for History
"Allianz in the Years 1933–1945 – Limits of denazification"
; Paddy Ashdown
"Winning the Peace"
''BBC World Service'', Konrad Adenauer, the first Federal Republic chancellor (in office 1949–1963), had even appointed former Nazi sympathiser Hans Globke as Director of the Federal Chancellery of West Germany (in office 1953–1963).

The radicals regarded the conservative media as biased—at the time conservatives such as Axel Springer, who was implacably opposed to student radicalism, owned and controlled the conservative media including all of the most influential mass-circulation tabloid newspapers. The emergence of the Grand Coalition between the two main parties, the SPD and CDU, with former Nazi Party member Kurt Georg Kiesinger as chancellor, occurred in 1966. This horrified many on the left and was viewed as a monolithic, political marriage of convenience with pro-NATO, pro-capitalist collusion on the part of the social democratic SPD. With about 90% of the Bundestag controlled by the coalition, an Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) was formed with the intent of generating protest and political activity outside of government. In 1972 a law was passed—the —that banned radicals or those with a "questionable" political persuasion from public sector jobs.

Some radicals used the supposed association of large parts of society with Nazism as an argument against any peaceful approaches:

The radicalized were, like many in the New Left, influenced by:
* Sociological developments, together with the background of counter-cultural movements.
* Post-war writings on class society and empire as well as contemporary Marxist critiques from many revolutionaries such as Frantz Fanon, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara, as well as early Autonomism.
* Philosophers associated with the Frankfurt school (Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, and Oskar Negt in particular) and associated Marxist philosophers.Peter-Erwin Jansen
"Student Movements in Germany, 1968–1984"
''Negations''
E-journal
, No. 3, Fall 1998. .

RAF founder Ulrike Meinhof had a long history in the Communist Party. Holger Meins had studied film and was a veteran of the Berlin revolt; his short feature ''How To Produce A Molotov Cocktail'' was seen by huge audiences. Jan Carl Raspe lived at the Kommune 2; Horst Mahler was an established lawyer but also at the center of the anti- Springer revolt from the beginning. From their own personal experiences and assessments of the socio-economic situation they soon became more specifically influenced by Leninism and Maoism, calling themselves "Marxist–Leninist" though they effectively added to or updated this ideological tradition. A contemporaneous critique of the Red Army Faction's view of the state, published in a pirate edition of , ascribed to it "state-fetishism"—an ideologically obsessive misreading of bourgeois dynamics and the nature and role of the state in post-WWII societies, including West Germany.

It is claimed that property destruction during the Watts riots in the United States in 1965 influenced the practical and ideological approach of the RAF founders, as well as some of those in Situationist circles. According to one former RAF member, in meetings with KGB in Dresden the group was also met by Vladimir Putin, then KGB resident in East Germany. In these meetings RAF members would discuss weapons that were needed for their activities, and pass a "shopping list" to the KGB.

The writings of Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse were drawn upon. Gramsci wrote on power, cultural, and ideological conflicts in society and institutions—real-time class struggles playing out in rapidly developing industrial nation states through interlinked areas of political behavior. Marcuse wrote on coercion and hegemony in that cultural indoctrination and ideological manipulation through the means of communication ("repressive tolerance") dispensed with the need for complete brute force in modern 'liberal democracies'. His ''One-Dimensional Man'' was addressed to the restive students of the sixties. Marcuse argued that only marginal groups of students and poor alienated workers could effectively resist the system. Both Gramsci and Marcuse came to the conclusion that the ideological underpinnings and the 'superstructure' of society was vitally important in the understanding of class control (and acquiescence). This could perhaps be seen as an extension of Marx's work as he did not cover this area in detail. , his mainly economic work, was meant to be one of a series of books which would have included one on society and one on the state, but his death prevented fulfillment of this.

Many of the radicals felt that Germany's lawmakers were continuing authoritarian policies and the public's apparent acquiescence was seen as a continuation of the indoctrination the Nazis had pioneered in society (). The Federal Republic was exporting arms to African dictatorships, which was seen as supporting the war in Southeast Asia and engineering the remilitarization of Germany with the U.S.-led entrenchment against the Warsaw Pact nations.

The ongoing events further catalyzed the situation. Protests turned into riots on 2 June 1967, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, visited West Berlin. There were protesters but also hundreds of supporters of the Shah, as well as a group of fake supporters armed with wooden staves, there to disturb the normal course of the visit. These extremists beat the protesters. After a day of angry protests by exiled Iranian radical Marxists, a group widely supported by German students, the Shah visited the Berlin Opera, where a crowd of German student protesters gathered. During the opera house demonstrations, German student Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the head by a police officer while attending his first protest rally. The officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was acquitted in a subsequent trial. It was later discovered that Kurras had been a member of the West Berlin communist party SEW and had also worked for the Stasi, though there is no indication that Kurras' killing of Ohnesorg was under anyone's, including the Stasi's, orders.

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. The Berlin 2 June Movement, a militant-Anarchist group, later took its name to honor the date of Ohnesorg's death.

On 2 April 1968, Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader, joined by Thorwald Proll and Horst Söhnlein, set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt as a protest against the Vietnam war. They were arrested two days later.

On 11 April 1968, Rudi Dutschke, a leading spokesman for protesting students, was shot in the head in an assassination attempt by the right-wing sympathizer Josef Bachmann. Although badly injured, Dutschke returned to political activism with the German Green Party before his death in a bathtub in 1979, as a consequence of his injuries.

Axel Springer's populist newspaper , which had run headlines such as "Stop Dutschke now!", was accused of being the chief culprit in inciting the shooting. 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."

Formation

All four of the defendants charged with arson and endangering human life were convicted, for which they were sentenced to three years in prison. In June 1969, however, they were temporarily paroled under an amnesty for political prisoners, but in November of that year, the Federal Constitutional Court () demanded that they return to custody. Only Horst Söhnlein complied with the order; the rest went underground and made their way to France, where they stayed for a time in a house owned by prominent French journalist and revolutionary Régis Debray, famous for his friendship with Che Guevara and the theory of guerrilla warfare. Eventually they made their way to Italy, where the lawyer Mahler visited them and encouraged them to return to Germany with him to form an underground guerrilla group.

The Red Army Faction was formed with the intention of complementing the plethora of revolutionary and radical groups across West Germany and Europe, as a more class conscious and determined force compared with some of its contemporaries. The members and supporters were already associated with the ' Revolutionary Cells' and 2 June Movement as well as radical currents and phenomena such as the Socialist Patients' Collective, , and the Situationists.

Baader was arrested again in April 1970, but on 14 May 1970 he was freed by Meinhof and others. Less than a month later, Gudrun Ensslin wrote an article in a West Berlin underground paper by the name of ''Agit883'' (''Magazine for Agitation and Social Practice''), demanding a call to arms and a building of the Red Army. The article ended with the words, "Develop the class struggles. Organize the proletariat. Start the armed resistance!" Baader, Ensslin, Mahler, and Meinhof then went to Jordan, where they trained with Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas and looked to the Palestinian cause for inspiration and guidance. But RAF organization and outlook were also partly modeled on the Uruguayan Tupamaros movement, which had developed as an urban resistance movement, effectively inverting Che Guevara's Mao-like concept of a peasant or rural-based guerrilla war and instead situating the struggle in the metropole or cities.

Many members of the RAF operated through a single contact or only knew others by their codenames. Actions were carried out by active units called ' commandos', with trained members being supplied by a quartermaster in order to carry out their mission. For more long-term or core cadre members, isolated cell-like organization was absent or took on a more flexible form.

In 1969 the Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella published his '' Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla''. He described the urban guerrilla as:

The importance of small arms training, sabotage, expropriation, and a substantial safehouse/support base among the urban population was stressed in Marighella's guide. This publication was an antecedent to Meinhof's ''The Urban Guerrilla Concept'' and has subsequently influenced many guerrilla and insurgent groups around the globe. Although some of the Red Army Faction's supporters and operatives could be described as having an anarchist or libertarian communist slant, the group's leading members professed a largely Marxist–Leninist ideology. That said, they shied away from overt collaboration with communist states, arguing along the lines of the Chinese side in the Sino-Soviet split that the Soviet Union and its European satellite states had become traitors to the communist cause by, in effect if not in rhetoric, giving the United States a free pass in their exploitation of Third World populations and support of "useful" Third World dictators. Nevertheless, RAF members did receive intermittent support and sanctuary over the border in East Germany during the 1980s.

Anti-imperialism and public support

When they returned to West Germany, they began what they called an " anti-imperialistic struggle", with bank robberies to raise money and bomb attacks against U.S. military facilities, German police stations, and buildings belonging to the Axel Springer press empire. In 1970, a manifesto authored by Meinhof used the name "RAF" and the red star logo with a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun for the first time.

After an intense manhunt, Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, Meins, and Raspe were eventually caught and arrested in June 1972.

Custody and the Stammheim trial

After the arrest of the protagonists of the first generation of the RAF, they were held in solitary confinement in the newly constructed high security Stammheim Prison north of Stuttgart. When Ensslin devised an "info system" using aliases for each member (names deemed to have allegorical significance from '' Moby Dick''), the four prisoners were able to communicate, circulating letters with the help of their defense counsel.

To protest against their treatment by authorities, they went on several coordinated hunger strikes; eventually, they were force-fed.
Holger Meins died of self-induced starvation on 9 November 1974. After public protests, their conditions were somewhat improved by the authorities.

The so-called second generation of the RAF emerged at that time, consisting of sympathizers independent of the inmates. This became clear when, on 27 February 1975, Peter Lorenz, the CDU candidate for mayor of Berlin, was kidnapped by the 2 June Movement (allied to the RAF) as part of pressure to secure the release of several other detainees. Since none of these were on trial for murder, the state agreed, and those inmates (and later Lorenz himself) were released.

On 24 April 1975, the West German embassy in Stockholm was seized 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. Two of the hostage-takers died from injuries they suffered when the explosives they planted detonated later that night.

On 21 May 1975, the Stammheim trial of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe began, named after the district in Stuttgart where it took place. 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 9 May 1976, Ulrike Meinhof was found dead in her prison cell, hanging from a rope made from jail towels. An investigation concluded that she had hanged herself, a result hotly contested at the time, triggering a plethora of conspiracy theories. Alternative theories suggest that she took her life because she was being ostracized by the rest of the group. Other evidence, however, contradicts this hypothesis.

During the trial, more attacks took place. One of these was on 7 April 1977, when Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback, his driver, and his bodyguard were shot and killed by two RAF members while waiting at a red traffic light. Buback, who had been a Nazi member during WWII, was considered by RAF as one of the key persons for their trial. Among other things, two years earlier, while being interviewed by ''Stern'' magazine, he stated that "Persons like Baader don't deserve a fair trial." In February 1976, when interviewed by he stated that "We do not need regulation of our jurisdiction, national security survives thanks to people like me and Herold BKA">Federal Criminal Police Office (Germany)">BKA who always find the right way".

Eventually, on 28 April 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.

Security measures

A new section of Stammheim Prison was built especially for the RAF and was considered one of the most secure prison blocks around the world at the time. The prisoners were transferred there in 1975 (three years after their arrest). The roof and the courtyard were covered with steel mesh. During the night, the precinct was illuminated by 54 spotlights and twenty-three neon bulbs. Special military forces, including snipers, guarded the roof. Four hundred police officers along with the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution patrolled the building. The mounted police officers rotated on a double shift. One hundred more GSG-9 tactical police officers reinforced the police during the trial while BKA detectives guarded the front of the court area. Finally, helicopters overflew the area.

During the trial, accredited media correspondents had to pass a police road block 400 meters from the court. The police noted their data and the number-plate and photographed their cars. After that they had to pass three verification audits, and finally they were undressed and two judicial officials thoroughly searched their bodies. They were allowed to keep only a pencil and a notepad inside the court. Their personal items including their identity papers were withheld by the authorities during the trial. Every journalist could attend the trial only twice (two days). ''The Times'' questioned the possibility whether a fair trial could be conducted under these circumstances which involved siege-like conditions. wondered whether that atmosphere anticipated "the condemnation of the defendants who were allegedly responsible for the emergency measures".

While the trial progressed, the prisoners received visits from lawyers (and on rare occasions relatives; friends were not allowed). For those visits, three jailers were always present to observe the conversations between prisoners and visitors. The prisoners were not allowed to meet each other inside the prison, until late 1975 when a regular meeting time was established (30 minutes, twice per day), during which they were guarded.

Trial

The judges and their pasts are considered important by supporters of the accused. Judge Weiss (Mahler's trial) had judged Joachim Raese (president of the Third Reich's court) as innocent seven times. When he threatened Meinhof that she would be put into a glass cage she answered caustically, "So you are threatening me with Eichmann's cage, fascist?" (Adolf Eichmann