Attacks of the Rote Armee Fraktion, 1970–1998

How this record was compiled

An attack is included when it was claimed in a Kommando statement or attributed to the RAF in a criminal proceeding. Both grounds are documentary and both can be checked outside this site. They are recorded in separate columns rather than merged into one, because merging them would hide exactly the distinction the record exists to show.

Certainty applies to the attribution of the attack to the RAF, not to the details of the act. High means both grounds are met and the attribution is not contested. Medium means the attribution rests on the claim alone, or on a conviction for participation rather than for the act. Low means the attribution to the RAF as such is disputed in the literature.

Who is named here, and who is not

This record names no individual suspect. It does not name people who were investigated, charged and acquitted, and it does not name people whom the literature associates with an attack that never produced a conviction. Where a name appears in the perpetrator column, there is none: the column does not exist.

The reason is not squeamishness. Roughly a third of these attacks were never attributed to any person in court, and several remain formally unsolved. Putting a name next to an unsolved killing is an accusation that no proceeding supports, and a dataset that does it is not a record but a rumour with a header row.

Targets are named, because the target is the identity of the incident and is a matter of undisputed public record. Kommando names are given as published — they are the group's own designation of an operation and part of the claim, not an identification of any individual.

What was deliberately left out

• Actions of the Bewegung 2. Juni and the Revolutionäre Zellen. Contemporary reporting often merged them with the RAF. They were separate organisations with separate claims, and folding them in would inflate the record with attacks the RAF never claimed.
• Bank robberies and vehicle thefts. Logistical crimes, numerous, poorly documented individually, and not claimed. Two exceptions are included because a death resulted and the case was prosecuted as such.
• Deaths of RAF members. Members killed by police, and the deaths in Stammheim in 1976 and 1977, are not attacks by the group. They belong to a separate record, and the Stammheim deaths carry their own long dispute.
• The 1998 dissolution declaration. The letter that ended the organisation is the closing document of this period but not an attack, so it carries no row.
• Attacks abroad by allied groups. Joint operations with other organisations are included only where a Kommando statement claims them for the RAF.

Disputed entries

The unsolved attacks are the heart of this record, not its margin. Eight incidents here were never criminally attributed to anyone. The killings of Ernst Zimmermann in 1985, Karl Heinz Beckurts in 1986, Gerold von Braunmühl in 1986, Alfred Herrhausen in 1989 and Detlev Karsten Rohwedder in 1991 are all claimed in Kommando statements and none produced a conviction for the act. The Herrhausen and Rohwedder investigations were closed without one.

Third-generation attribution is contested as such. There is a scholarly and journalistic argument about whether the attacks from 1984 onwards were carried out by the organisation the Kommando statements claim, and it has not been settled. Rows from that period carry medium certainty for that reason, not because the attacks are in doubt.

The Buback killing of 1977 produced convictions for participation, but which person fired the shots has been reopened repeatedly, most recently on the basis of statements by former members. The row records what the proceedings established and does not resolve the question.

The 1979 Haig attempt is the weakest row in the record. It was not claimed at the time in a Kommando statement, and its attribution rests on later proceedings and on inference. It is marked low.

Sources

Every row cites the dossier of the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, the German federal agency for civic education, by article: Die erste Generation der RAF (49256), Der Prozess von Stammheim (49264), Die zweite Generation der RAF (49268), Die dritte Generation der RAF (49299), Die Namen der Toten (49319) and Gnade vor Recht? (49324), together with Christopher Daase's article on the causes and failure of RAF terrorism in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (30202). Those are the accounts a reader can open, and the row says which one carries it.

What the legal column does and does not claim. Where a court result is recorded here, it is the result an official account states: the life sentences pronounced on the three Stammheim defendants in April 1977 for the May offensive of 1972, and Brigitte Mohnhaupt's conviction as ringleader of nine murders and nine attempted murders — five life sentences and fifteen years — for the offensive of 1977. Where no perpetrator was ever identified, the row says that, because it is what the federal agency's account of the third generation says: despite an intensive search, most of its members were never identified. No row here reads a court's reasoning out of a judgment, and none pretends to: that would require the judgment itself, by Aktenzeichen, and this record does not have one.

Two rows were removed because no accessible authoritative account could carry them: the attempted rocket attack on the Federal Prosecutor's Office in August 1977 and the shots fired at the United States embassy in February 1991. Two attacks that could be verified took their place — the killing of a Dutch police officer at Utrecht in September 1977 and of a United States serviceman at Wiesbaden in August 1985, whose identity card was used to enter the Rhein-Main air base the following day.

Supporting reading on this site

• The Kommando Statement: How the RAF Wrote Its Own Record — what the claim column contains and why it is kept apart from the attribution column: the naming convention that ran unbroken from 1972 to the 1990s.
• The Third Generation: Twenty Years of Attacks and Almost No Convictions — the eight rows in which no perpetrator was ever identified, which are the core of this record rather than its remainder.