The 1998 RAF Dissolution Letter, Read as a Document

On 20 April 1998 a short typed letter ended the Red Army Faction after 28 years. What it says, what it leaves out, and how to read it as evidence.

30 October 2026 · Part of Cold War — a guide to 23 articles →

On 20 April 1998 a typed letter of about eight pages reached the news agency Reuters in Cologne. Its best-known sentence is short: the urban guerrilla in the form of the RAF is now history. It ended, on paper, an organisation that had existed for 28 years, and it is the closing document of the whole record of the Red Army Faction.

It is also a strange document. It is not an attack and not a claim of responsibility, and it does not look like the long Kommando statements that came before. It is a group writing its own epitaph. Read as evidence, it tells us less about the group's past than about how the group wished that past to be filed.

What reached Reuters

The basic facts are agreed. The letter arrived at Reuters in Cologne on 20 April 1998, and the federal agency for civic education records it in its chronology of the group. It carried the organisation's emblem, a star with a submachine gun, and was signed "RAF". Investigators judged it genuine.

How it arrived is less settled. Some accounts describe a fax; another says it was posted from Chemnitz. The sources we could check do not agree, and we do not choose between them. It does not change what the letter says, but it is a reminder that even the physical history of the document is thinner than its fame suggests.

In its own words, the group dates its beginning to 14 May 1970, and says that with this letter it ends "this project". The count of 28 years comes from that opening date. The central sentence is quoted by the federal agency as "Die Stadtguerilla in Form der RAF ist nun Geschichte". The wording matters: it is the urban guerrilla in the form of the RAF that is over, not a political goal and not necessarily a way of thinking.

The road to the letter

The letter closes a long decline, and the previous steps are documented.

The 1992 declaration followed a public initiative by the then justice minister, Klaus Kinkel, early that year, who said the state should be ready to rethink its relationship to the group and, where appropriate, to reconciliation. His own later account says the move met fierce resistance, above all from the states governed by the Christian Democrats. The group answered with its April declaration. Historians point out that this was not a full renunciation of violence, and the Weiterstadt bombing eleven months later confirms it.

After 1993 there was a long silence. For five years the organisation did nothing that could be attributed to it. The letter of 1998 therefore did not stop a campaign. It gave a name to a stop that had already happened. Our companion piece on the third generation explains why, by that point, almost none of the people responsible had been identified.

What the letter says, and how

The tone is analytical rather than defiant. The sources agree on several points about the content:

• It begins with the group's founding and states that the project is being ended.
• It lists members who died during the 28 years, a roll of the group's own dead.
• It thanks helpers and sympathisers.
• It is generally read as conceding that the effect of political-military action had been overestimated.

That last point is a reading by commentators, not a quotation, and it should be held as an interpretation. A group that had spent decades writing in an elevated revolutionary register ended with something closer to a balance sheet, and critics noticed which column was missing.

What it leaves out

The silence is the most important feature of the document.

The victims. The letter, as commentators describe it, expresses no sympathy for the people the group killed, and no regret. The dead of the group's attacks are officially listed elsewhere: the federal agency keeps a roll of them, organised around the victims rather than the perpetrators. Reading the letter beside that roll is the quickest way to see what the letter does not do.

Responsibility. The letter does not say who did what. It is signed with the organisation's name, as were its attacks. Where a case is unsolved, the letter does not solve it, and it should not be used as if it did. For the cases our record lists as unsolved, the dissolution letter adds no evidence that would change that.

A final account. It does not name those responsible for individual attacks in a way that could be tested, and no court has treated it as a confession. That is why the register of attacks gives the letter no row of its own: it is a document about the end of the group, not an act the group carried out.

How to use it as evidence

Three cautions help.

First, it is self-description. It shows how the group's last members wished to be understood, which is itself a historical fact, but not one that confirms their account of themselves.

Second, it is a text with a particular shape. The earlier Kommando statements, which we examined here, were written to claim an act and to carry a political message, and they are a source for what the group wanted to be seen doing. The dissolution letter has the same structure in reverse: it claims an ending.

Third, a document of this kind says nothing about what the state did or did not establish. Courts, not letters, produced the legal findings, and they did so unevenly, as the story of the Stammheim proceedings and the surveillance measures of the era show. Our record of these operations keeps the two things apart on purpose, and the letter sits outside it for the same reason.

Why 1998 matters

The date has a context that the letter does not mention. The Cold War had been over for years, the Berlin Wall had fallen and Germany had been reunified, and the world in which the group had imagined itself, an anti-imperialist front against NATO and its bases, was gone. Earlier targets such as the American bases in Germany belonged to a different political geography. The group's own history is tied to the German Autumn of 1977, a crisis it never again approached.

The dissolution letter is best read as the last act of an organisation that had outlived its argument. It records the ending, and it leaves the harder questions to the courts, the archives and the dead whose names the state keeps.

Frequently asked questions

When did the RAF dissolve? The dissolution letter reached the news agency Reuters in Cologne on 20 April 1998. The group dated its own beginning to 14 May 1970, which is where the figure of 28 years comes from.

Was the letter faxed or posted? The sources disagree. Some describe a fax; another account says it was posted from Chemnitz. We do not choose between them, and the difference does not affect what the text says.

Did the letter apologise to the victims? According to commentators who read it at the time, it expressed neither sympathy for the victims nor regret. That is a description of its content by others, and the text itself should be read for the answer.

Did the letter solve any of the unsolved cases? No. It names no individual perpetrators and no court has treated it as a confession, so the legal outcome of each attack remains what the proceedings, or their absence, established.

Conclusion

Twenty-eight years of violence ended with a few typed pages and a single quotable sentence. As evidence, the letter is valuable for what it shows about a group's self-image and for what it omits. It confirms that the organisation was over. It does not tell us who carried out the attacks that were never solved, and a careful account says so rather than choosing a reading.

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