Red Army Faction
Not to be confused with the Royal Air Force, which is also abbreviated RAF.
The Red Army Faction (RAF), also called Red Army Fraction, byname Baader-Meinhof Gang (German: Rote Armee Fraktion and Baader-Meinhof Gruppe), was a West German radical leftist group formed in 1968 and popularly named after two of its early leaders, Andreas Baader (1943–77) and Ulrike Meinhof (1934–76).[1]
Contents
Background
The RAF formed with the student protest of time as the background.[2]
The German student movement did not cohesively pick up until June 1967, however, when the Shah of Iran visited the Federal Republic of Germany. On 2 June, the SDS [Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund] organized a march in Berlin in front of the opera, where the Shah was attending a performance, to protest the hypocrisy of the democratic German Federal Republic supporting a brutal dictator. Police, confronting the banned march, violently engaged the protesters, beating them. In the struggle, a police officer killed twenty-six year old student Benno Ohnesorg, who died from a shot to the head. A general outrage erupted at universities across the country. Nationwide, students protested police brutality, including 10,000 in Frankfurt, who organized a silent funeral march on 8 June, and another funeral procession in Berlin, where students created a convention on “Conditions and Organizations of Resistance.” On 13 June, 5,000 protesters gathered in Berlin. They walked in formation so that one protester was followed by fifty students, parodying a suggestion by the police department that there should be one officer for every fifty protesters to maintain order. By August, after months of protest, and under the duress of domestic and foreign pressure, the mayor of Berlin and the police chief resigned.[3]
And they [1st generation RAF] radicalized during the student-revolts. They could see how the "fascistic" authorities treated their fellow students during their riots. And now imagine that the people in leading positions at the police had been nazis during The Third Reich. If you had been in their position, what would you have thought? If the judge and the state attorney at court had been nazis, too? RAF rejected the theory that nazis could revolve back to nice and just democrats. From their point of view, there is no ex-nazi same as there is no ex-CIA-agent nor an ex-catholic.[4]
Generations
It is said there are three generations of the RAF,[5] while the third has the most professionality and therefore likely has received training by some state actor (MfS), or, is in part a cover and killings like that of Alfred Herrhausen were done by foreign intelligence.
- 1970 to 1972: Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin und Ulrike Meinhof
- 1975 to 1982: Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Stefan Wisniewski, Peter-Jürgen Boock und Christian Klar
- 1983 to ????: Ernst-Volker Staub, Burkhard Garweg, Daniela Klette
Victims
Victims include (incomplete list)
- Siegfried Buback, Attorney General of Germany, investigation hindered/hampered indicated by his son's book on the topic[citation needed]
- Alfred Herrhausen, CEO of Deutsche Bank advocating debt reliefs for third world countries
Connections
Gladio
Researchers, namely Regine Igel, Gerhard_Wisnewski, Wolfgang Kraushaar and Michael Buback[citation needed] uncovered ties to the Germany/Deep state: Verena Becker, Horst Mahler and Peter Urbach (among others) were agents provocateurs of German secret services, both East (Stasi) and West (BND). [6]
Stasi
The MfS regulation stipulated that any internationally wanted terrorist could find shelter in the DDR if SED officials believed that "social progress" justified the criminal activities or if it was in the "interest of other socialist states". The procedure was executed by a special unit of the highest level of secrecy within the MfS.[7]
External links
- Collection of more than 1,200 digitized documents by and on the Red Army Faction.
- Thread at Quora about the years after WW2 that touches on the RAF and their motivations
Examples
| Page name | Description |
|---|---|
| Japanese Red Army Faction | |
| Red Brigades |
Known member
1 of the 28 of the members already have pages here:
| Member |
|---|
| Ulrike Meinhof |
References
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Red-Army-Faction
- ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20190728183317/https://www.planet-wissen.de/geschichte/deutsche_geschichte/studentenbewegung/index.html (in German)
- ↑ https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/german-students-campaign-democracy-1966-68
- ↑ https://archive.ph/2021.03.31-221121/https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-the-Nazis-after-WWII-ended
- ↑ https://www.welt.de/geschichte/raf/article224348902/Fahndung-An-diesen-Anschlaegen-waren-die-RAF-Rentner-beteiligt.html
- ↑ https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Von-heimlichen-und-unheimlichen-Kooperationen-3384162.html?view=print (Ger)
- ↑ https://paz.de/artikel/das-geheimste-des-geheimen-bei-der-stasi-a5944.html
