ABSTRACT
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 highsecurity 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. Further generations of anti-capitalist radicals continued the terrorist project in Germany, until the RAF finally disbanded with an official statement to the press in 1998.
