The Kommando Statement: How the RAF Wrote Its Own Record

Almost every Red Army Faction attack came with a claim of responsibility signed with a dead comrade's name. What those statements were for, and why they make a dataset of the group's attacks possible at all.

4 September 2026 · Part of Cold War — a guide to 16 articles →

Almost every attack the Rote Armee Fraktion carried out arrived with a text. It named the operation after a dead member of the group, explained the target in the group's own vocabulary, and was sent to a news agency. Those statements are the reason a register of RAF attacks can be compiled at all — and the reason it has to be read with care.

A signature made of names

The convention was established early and kept for twenty years. A commando was named for someone the group counted as its own dead: Kommando Petra Schelm, after the first RAF member shot by police; Kommando Thomas Weisbecker; Kommando Holger Meins, after the prisoner who died on hunger strike in 1974; Kommando Ulrike Meinhof; Kommando Siegfried Hausner, after the man who died of injuries from the Stockholm embassy attack; later Kommando Mara Cagol for an Italian, Kommando Patsy O'Hara for an Irish hunger striker, Kommando George Jackson for an American.

Read as a series, the names are a claim about lineage and about internationalism, and they were meant to be read that way. Each attack was presented as an answer to a specific death, and the deaths chosen from outside Germany asserted that the group belonged to a worldwide movement rather than a West German one.

What the statements were for

Three things at once.

They were an attribution device. A bombing without a claim is an event; a bombing with a claim is a position. The May offensive of 1972 — the United States Army's V Corps headquarters in Frankfurt on 11 May, the police headquarters at Augsburg and the Bavarian criminal police office in Munich on 12 May, a federal judge's car on 15 May, the Springer building in Hamburg on 19 May, and the headquarters of the US forces in Europe at Heidelberg on 24 May — was a sequence, and the statements are what made it legible as one.

They were an argument. The texts explained targets in the group's own terms: American military installations as the war in Vietnam brought home, the Springer press as the manufacture of consent, a judge as the machinery of the state. Whether one finds the argument coherent is a separate question from whether it was made, and it was made every time.

They were a discipline. A group that names its operations after its dead is telling its own members what the operations are for. The naming survived every change of personnel, which is one of the few threads running unbroken from 1972 to the 1990s.

Why a dataset needs two columns

The statements create a specific problem for anyone trying to compile a record. A claim of responsibility is evidence that a claim was made. It is not evidence that the claim is true, and it is not a legal finding.

That is why our register of RAF attacks keeps claimed by and criminally attributed in separate columns, and why the second column has three values rather than two: yes, partly, and no. Partly is the interesting one. It covers the attacks where a court convicted people of membership or of participation without establishing who did the specific act — which is the ordinary condition of terrorism prosecutions, and which a single "solved / unsolved" column would erase.

The legal column, in turn, records only what an official account states. For the May 1972 offensive that is the Stammheim judgment: life sentences for the three surviving defendants, pronounced in April 1977. For the offensive of 1977 — the killing of the Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback and his companions in April, of the Dresdner Bank chairman Jürgen Ponto in July, and the kidnapping and murder of the employers' president Hanns-Martin Schleyer from September — it is Brigitte Mohnhaupt's conviction as ringleader for nine murders and nine attempted murders, five life sentences and fifteen years.

Where the convention breaks

Two kinds of row do not fit the pattern, and both are marked in the dataset.

The first is the attack that was never claimed. Some incidents were attributed to the group by investigators or by courts without any Kommando statement, and the claim column says so rather than inventing one.

The second is the reverse, and it belongs to the group's last decade: attacks that were claimed in the group's name and never attributed to anybody. From the mid-1980s the federal agency's own account is blunt about the result — despite an intensive search, most members of the third generation were never identified. A statement arrived; nobody was ever convicted for what it described. That is the subject of the companion article on the third generation.

Reading a claim without repeating it

There is an editorial line under all of this that is worth stating plainly. Quoting a terrorist group's justification at length gives it the platform it was written for; refusing to describe it at all makes the record incomprehensible. The dataset takes the narrow path: it names the commando, because that name is a fact about the attack and the way the group organised its own memory, and it does not reproduce the texts.

It also names no individual who was never convicted. Victims are named, because their identity is public and is the identity of the event. Suspects are not, because a register that distinguishes claims from findings would be a poor thing if it made an accusation of its own in the process.

Sources and further reading

The sequence of attacks and the legal outcomes here follow the RAF dossier of the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung: the articles on the first generation (49256), the Stammheim trial (49264), the second generation (49268) and the clemency debate (49324). Our dataset of RAF attacks records twenty-seven incidents on these terms, each with the article that carries it.

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