Red Army Faction

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,[lower-alpha 3] i.e., a fraction of a whole.

The group always called itself the Rote Armee Fraktion, 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.

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 "Brigate Rosse").[7]

In West Germany there was anger among leftist youth at the post-war denazification in West Germany and East Germany, a process which these leftists perceived as a failure or as ineffective,[8][9] as former (actual and supposed) Nazis held positions in government and the economy.[10] The Communist Party of Germany had been outlawed since 1956.[11] Elected and appointed government positions down to the local level were often occupied by ex-Nazis.[10] 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.[12] In 1972 a law was passed – the Radikalenerlass – that banned radicals or those with a "questionable" political persuasion from public sector jobs.[13]

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

They'll kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're up against. This is the Auschwitz generation. You can't argue with people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we haven't. [sic?] We must arm ourselves!

— Gudrun Ensslin speaking after the death of Benno Ohnesorg.[14]

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[15]) and associated Marxist philosophers.[16]

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 Le Monde Diplomatique, 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.[17]

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.[18] 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.[4]

The writings of Antonio Gramsci[19] and Herbert Marcuse[20][16] 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 analyzing the ideological underpinnings and the 'superstructure' of society was vitally important to understanding class control (and acquiescence). This Gramscian and Marcusian contribution could perhaps be seen as an extension of Marx's work, as he did not cover this area in detail. Das Kapital, 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,[21] but his death prevented fulfillment of this.

Benno Ohnesorg shot outside the Berlin Opera during a protest of the state visit of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

Many of the radicals felt that Germany's lawmakers were continuing authoritarian policies from the country’s past and that the public's apparent acquiescence to these policies was a consequence of the indoctrination that the Nazis had pioneered and implemented in German society (Volksgemeinschaft). The Federal Republic was exporting arms to African dictatorships, which the radicals viewed 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,[22] 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,[23] 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.[24]

Axel Springer's populist newspaper Bild-Zeitung, 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."[25]

Ulrike Meinhof, 1964

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 (Bundesverfassungsgericht) 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 foco 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, Kommune 1, 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!"[27] 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[7] 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.[28][29]

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.[30] He described the urban guerrilla as:

... a person who fights the military dictatorship with weapons, using unconventional methods. ... The urban guerrilla follows a political goal, and only attacks the government, big businesses, and foreign imperialists.

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.[31] 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.[32]

Stammheim Prison

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),[34] 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. On 27 February 1975, Peter Lorenz, the CDU candidate for mayor of Berlin, was kidnapped by the 2 June Movement as part of pressure to secure the release of several non-RAF detainees, alongside estranged member Horst Mahler (who declined to be freed). Since none of these were on trial for murder, the state agreed, and those inmates (and later Lorenz himself) were released.

According to Aust, the success of this operation led to the RAF themselves to attempt their own exchange: 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. Her comrades consistently denied this hypothesis, repudiating alleged jailhouse recordings cited as evidence. [35]

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."[36] In February 1976, when interviewed by Der Spiegel he stated that "We do not need regulation of our jurisdiction, national security survives thanks to people like me and Herold [chief of BKA], who always find the right way".[37]

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.[38][39]

The RAF has been associated with various serious criminal acts (including bombings, kidnappings and murder) since their founding. The first criminal act attributed to the group after the student Benno Ohnesorg had been killed by a policeman in 1967 was the bombing of the Kaufhaus Schneider department store. On 2 April 1968, affiliates of the group firebombed the store and caused an estimated US$200,000 in property damage. Prominent members of the bombing included Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, two of the founders of the RAF. The bombs detonated at midnight when no one was in the store and no one was injured. As the bombs ignited, Gudrun Ensslin was at a nearby payphone, yelling to the German Press Agency, "This is a political act of revenge."

On 11 May 1972, the RAF placed three pipe bombs at a United States headquarters in Frankfurt. The bombing resulted in the death of a US officer and the injury of 13 other people. The stated reason for the bombing was a political statement in protest of US imperialism, specifically, a protest of US mining of North Vietnam harbours.[45]

On 19 May 1972, members of the RAF armed six bombs in the Springer publishing house in Hamburg. Only three of the five bombs exploded, but 36 people were injured.[46]

On 24 May 1972, two weeks after the bombing of the United States headquarters in Frankfurt, the group set off a car bomb at the IDHS (Intelligence Data Handling Service) Building at Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg. The bombing resulted in the deaths of three soldiers and the injury of five others.[47]

On 10 November 1974, the group killed Günter von Drenkmann, the president of Germany's superior court of justice. The killing occurred after a string of events that led to a failed kidnapping by the 2 June Movement, a group that splintered off the RAF after the death of Holger Meins by hunger strike in prison.[48]

Starting in February 1975 and continuing through March 1975, the 2 June Movement kidnapped Peter Lorenz, who at the time was the Christian Democratic candidate in the race for the mayor of West Berlin. In exchange for the release of Lorenz, the group demanded that several RAF and 2 June Movement members that were imprisoned for reasons other than violence be released from jail. The government obliged and released several of these members for the safe release of Lorenz.[49]

On 24 April 1975, six members affiliated with the RAF seized the West German Embassy in Stockholm. The group took hostages and set the building to explode. They demanded the release of several imprisoned members of the RAF. The government refused the request, which led to the murder of two of the hostages. A few of the bombs that were intended to blow up the embassy prematurely detonated, which resulted in the death of two of the six RAF affiliates. The other four members eventually surrendered to the authorities.

In May 1975, several British intelligence reports circulated that stated that the RAF had stolen mustard gas from a joint U.S. and British storage facility. The reports also indicated that the RAF had intended to use the stolen gas in German cities. It eventually turned out that the mustard gas canisters were merely misplaced; however, the RAF still successfully capitalized on the news by frightening several different agencies.[50]

In the 1970's, the RAF was involved in several raids, taking advantage of Switzerland’s loosely guarded military armories. According to the source, the group was involved in the theft of 200 Swiss rifles, 500 revolvers, and 400 large grenades.[51]

During the early 1980s, German and French newspapers reported that the police had raided an RAF safe house in Paris and had found a makeshift laboratory that contained flasks full of Clostridium botulinum, which makes botulinum toxin. These reports were later found to be incorrect; no such lab was ever found.[52]

On 30 July 1977, Jürgen Ponto, the head of Dresdner Bank, was shot and killed in front of his house in Oberursel in a botched kidnapping.[53] Those involved were Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Christian Klar, and Susanne Albrecht, the sister of Ponto's goddaughter.

Following the convictions, Hanns Martin Schleyer, a former officer of the SS who was then President of the German Employers' Association (and thus one of the most powerful industrialists in West Germany), was abducted in a violent kidnapping. On 5 September 1977, Schleyer's convoy was stopped by the kidnappers reversing a car into the path of Schleyer's vehicle, causing the Mercedes in which he was being driven to crash. Once the convoy was stopped, five masked assailants immediately shot and killed three policemen and the driver and took Schleyer hostage. One of the group (Sieglinde Hofmann) produced her weapon from a pram she was pushing down the road.[54]

A letter was then received by the federal government, demanding the release of eleven detainees, including those in Stammheim. A crisis committee was formed in Bonn, headed by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, which, instead of acceding, resolved to employ delaying tactics to give the police time to discover Schleyer's location. At the same time, a total communication ban was imposed on the prison inmates, who were now allowed visits only from government officials and the prison chaplain.

The crisis dragged on for more than a month, while the Federal Criminal Police Office carried out its biggest investigation to date. Matters escalated when, on 13 October 1977, Lufthansa Flight 181 from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt was hijacked. A group of four PFLP members took control of the plane (which was named Landshut). The leader introduced himself to the passengers as "Captain Mahmud", who was later identified as Zohair Youssef Akache. When the plane landed in Rome for refueling, he issued the same demands as the Schleyer kidnappers, plus the release of two Palestinians held in Turkey and payment of US$15 million.

The Bonn crisis team again decided not to give in. The plane flew on via Larnaca, then Dubai, and then to Aden, where flight captain Jürgen Schumann, whom the hijackers deemed not cooperative enough, was brought before an improvised "revolutionary tribunal" and murdered on 16 October. His body was dumped on the runway. The aircraft again took off, flown by the co-pilot Jürgen Vietor, this time headed for Mogadishu, Somalia.

A high-risk rescue operation was led by Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, then undersecretary in the chancellor's office, who had been secretly flown in from Bonn. At five past midnight CET on 18 October, the plane was stormed in a seven-minute assault by GSG 9, an elite unit of the German federal police. All four hijackers were shot; three of them died on the spot. None of the passengers were seriously hurt and Wischnewski was able to phone Schmidt and tell the Bonn crisis team that the operation had been a success.

"Stammheim Death Night"

Burial site of Baader, Raspe and Ensslin

After the conclusion of the Landshut hostage crisis was announced in the late evening of 17 October, all the RAF members incarcerated in Stammheim committed suicide during the following night. Their lawyer, Arndt Müller, had smuggled pistols into the prison. Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe shot themselves with these weapons – Baader in the back of his head[55] – while Gudrun Ensslin hanged herself. Irmgard Möller tried to kill herself with a knife, but survived severely injured. The suicides went unnoticed until early next morning. Doctors were rushed in. Baader and Ensslin were already dead when found. Raspe was still alive and moved to the hospital where he died soon after. Möller recovered after being brought to a hospital.[56] Authorities claimed that the prisoners – who had been held in isolation for weeks[57] – learned of the failure of the hijacking through smuggled radio equipment, and coordinated the group suicide over an improvised electronic communication system between their maximum-security cells, which had been under surveillance during previous hostage crises.[58]

The coordinated attempt sparked numerous conspiracy theories. It was alleged that the RAF members did not kill themselves, but instead were killed by the German authorities, the BND, CIA, the United States and NATO. These theories were spread by RAF supporters and sympathizers, and some were taken up by the mainstream press. Available evidence shows that these suicides were planned and prepared for a long time by the RAF members.[59][60]

On the very same day, Hanns-Martin Schleyer was shot to death by his captors en route to Mulhouse, France. On 19 October, Schleyer's kidnappers announced that he had been "executed" and pinpointed his location. His body was recovered later that day in the trunk of a green Audi 100 on Rue Charles Péguy. The French newspaper Libération received a letter declaring:

After 43 days we have ended Hanns-Martin Schleyer's pitiful and corrupt existence ... His death is meaningless to our pain and our rage ... The struggle has only begun. Freedom through armed, anti-imperialist struggle.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in late December 1991 was a serious blow to Leninist groups, but well into the 1990s attacks were still being committed under the name RAF. Among these were the killing of Ernst Zimmermann, CEO of MTU Aero Engines, a German engineering company; another bombing at the US Air Force's Rhein-Main Air Base (near Frankfurt), which targeted the base commander and killed two bystanders; a car bomb attack that killed Siemens executive Karl-Heinz Beckurts and his driver; and the shooting of Gerold von Braunmühl, a leading official at Germany's foreign ministry. On 30 November 1989, Deutsche Bank chairman Alfred Herrhausen was killed with a highly complex bomb when his car triggered a photo sensor in Bad Homburg. On 1 April 1991, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, leader of the government Treuhand organization responsible for the privatization of the East German state economy, was shot and killed. The assassins of Zimmermann, von Braunmühl, Herrhausen, and Rohwedder were never reliably identified.

After German reunification in 1990, it was confirmed that the Stasi, the security and intelligence organization of East Germany, had been monitoring the RAF, and in the 1980s had provided ten ex-members shelter and new identities.[61] This was already generally suspected at the time.[62][63] In 1978 part of the group was exfiltrated through Yugoslavia to communist Poland to avoid a manhunt in Germany. Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Peter Boock, Rolf Wagner, and Sieglinde Hoffmann spent most of the year in facilities of the Polish Ministry of Public Security in Masuria, northeastern Poland, where they were also going through series of training programs along with others from Arab countries.[64]

In 1992, the German government assessed that the RAF's main field of engagement now was missions to release imprisoned RAF members. To weaken the organization further the government declared that some RAF inmates would be released if the RAF refrained from violent attacks in the future. Subsequently, the RAF announced their intention to "de-escalate" and refrain from significant activity.

The last action taken by the RAF took place in 1993 with a bombing of a newly-built prison in Weiterstadt by overcoming the officers on duty and planting explosives. Although no one was seriously injured, this operation caused property damage amounting to 123 million Deutsche Marks (over 50 million euros).

The last big action against the RAF took place on 27 June 1993. An agent of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the West German domestic intelligence agency) named Klaus Steinmetz had infiltrated the RAF. As a result, Birgit Hogefeld and Wolfgang Grams were arrested in Bad Kleinen. Grams and GSG 9 officer Michael Newrzella died during the mission. Due to a number of operational mistakes involving the various police services, German Minister of the Interior Rudolf Seiters took responsibility and resigned from his post.

The following is a list of all known RAF Commando Units.[95] Most RAF units were named after deceased RAF members, while others were named after deceased members of international militant left-wing groups such as the Black Panthers, Irish National Liberation Army, and the Red Brigades.

• Revolutionary Cells (German group)
• Trial of Lina E.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Red Army Faction.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Red Army Faction.

• Red Army Faction – Communiqués and Statements Archived 2 May 2013 at the Wayback Machine – an English-language collection of all communiques and statements by the RAF
• Red Army Faction – Communiqués, Statements, Chronology – the most comprehensive collection of RAF statements and internal documents
• "Build Up the Red Army" English translation of 1970 founding manifesto from the Red Army Faction
• Patrick Donahue, "German Red Army Faction Victim's Son May Back Pardon" by Bloomberg News
• Denise Noe, "The Baader Meinhof Gang", at Crime Library website
• Social History Portal (formerly Labour History Net) a collection of original Red Army Faction statements and texts
• Baader Meinhof, the First Celebrity Terrorists – slideshow by The First Post
• Terrorist chic or debunking of a myth? Baader Meinhof film splits Germany
• Heroic Impatience Archived 20 August 2015 at the Wayback Machine By Diego Gambetta, The Nation, 4 March 2010
• Weiterstadt Prison Germany (after attack 1993) Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine
• Questions on the Stammheim Death Night
• The Stammheim Deaths
• Giovanni Di Stefano about the death night
• Ryan, Mike: "The Stammheim Model – Judicial Counter-Insurgency", published in New Studies on the Left, Vol. XIV, Nos. 1 & 2 (1989), available on germanguerilla.com
• Review of "A German Youth", a found footage film about the Red Army Faction