The Third Generation: Twenty Years of Attacks and Almost No Convictions

From 1984 the Red Army Faction killed bankers, industrialists and officials with military precision — and almost nobody was ever convicted for it. What the unsolved cases say about the group's last phase.

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

Between 1985 and 1991 the Rote Armee Fraktion shot or blew up a company chief executive, a research director, a senior diplomat, a banker and the head of the agency privatising East Germany's economy. Almost nobody was ever convicted for any of it. The German federal agency for civic education puts it plainly: despite an intensive search, most members of the third generation were never identified.

A different organisation wearing the same name

The group that carried out these attacks was not the one that had been tried at Stammheim. Its predecessors were dead or in prison; its cadre was small, technically capable, and — this is the point — invisible in a way the first generation never was.

The strategy changed with the personnel. From the early 1980s the RAF pursued what it called an internationalisation of the struggle, aiming at NATO and at the men who ran the West German economy rather than at the domestic security apparatus. The first attempt under that strategy failed: in December 1984 an attack on the NATO school at Oberammergau came to nothing.

What followed did not fail. On 1 February 1985 attackers entered the house of Ernst Zimmermann, chief executive of the engine builder MTU, at Gauting, tied up his wife, took him to the bedroom and shot him in the back of the head. On 8 August a car bomb at the Rhein-Main air base killed an American soldier, Frank Scarton, and a civilian employee, Becky Bristol, and injured twenty-three people; the identity card used to get onto the base had been taken the day before from a serviceman, Edward Pimental, who was shot for it in Wiesbaden.

On 9 July 1986 a charge left at the roadside at Straßlach killed the Siemens manager Karl-Heinz Beckurts and his driver, Eckhard Groppler. On 10 October Gerold von Braunmühl, a department head at the Foreign Office, was shot outside his house in Bonn — with a weapon that, in all probability, had already been used to murder Hanns-Martin Schleyer nine years earlier. On 30 November 1989 a shaped charge at the roadside destroyed the armoured car of Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman of Deutsche Bank, and killed him instantly. On 1 April 1991 Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, president of the Treuhandanstalt, was shot through the window of his house: the last person the RAF murdered.

Attempts that failed, and one that succeeded spectacularly

Two attacks on officials failed. A bomb intended for Hans Tietmeyer, then state secretary in the finance ministry, missed him in 1988; an attack on Hans Neusel, state secretary in the interior ministry, failed in 1990.

And in March 1993 the group destroyed a newly built prison at Weiterstadt that had not yet received a single inmate. The damage ran to more than a hundred million marks, and it was, as Christopher Daase puts it, the RAF's last spectacular action. Nobody was killed. Five years later the group dissolved itself.

Why so little was ever proved

Three things separate this period from the 1970s.

The group had learned. The first generation was caught because it lived in the open, kept documents and moved in a recognisable milieu of supporters. The third generation operated with far fewer people and far less paper.

The technique changed. Remotely triggered roadside charges and long-range shooting leave less behind than a bank robbery or a kidnapping. The attacks were described at the time as having military precision, and the description was accurate in the way that mattered forensically.

The evidence that did exist was contested. The Herrhausen and Rohwedder investigations both ran for years and produced no conviction for the killings themselves. Where our dataset records "no perpetrator was identified", it is recording an outcome, not a gap in the research.

What a register can honestly say

This is where a dataset earns its keep or fails. It would be easy to write "RAF" in an attribution column for all eight of these rows and move on. It would also be wrong: the attacks were claimed in the group's name, and the group's authorship is not seriously doubted, but that is a different claim from saying who did them.

Our register of RAF attacks therefore keeps three separate columns — what was claimed, whether the act was criminally attributed, and what the legal outcome was — and for this period the third column mostly says that no perpetrator was identified. That is the finding of the federal agency's own account, and it is stated affirmatively rather than as an absence, because it is the single most important fact about the group's last decade.

The register also does not name suspects. A number of individuals have been publicly linked to these attacks over the years without ever being convicted of them, and naming them in a table that exists precisely to separate accusation from proof would be a self-defeating thing to do.

The historians' disagreement

There is a live argument about whether the third generation was the same organisation at all. One reading treats it as continuous: the same name, the same commando convention, the same targets in a different register. Another reads it as a small successor group that inherited a brand and a set of contacts and had little organisational connection to what came before.

The evidence that would settle it is exactly the evidence that does not exist — the identities of the people who carried out the attacks. That is an unusual position for a subject so recent and so heavily documented, and it is the reason the third generation remains the part of the RAF's history that is argued about most and known least.

Sources and further reading

The attacks, the victims and the failure of the investigations here follow the RAF dossier of the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung — the article on the third generation (49299) and the roll of the dead (49319) — together with Christopher Daase's article in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (30202) for Weiterstadt and for the argument about why the group failed. The companion piece on the Kommando statement explains how the claims themselves work as evidence. Our dataset of RAF attacks records all twenty-seven incidents with the article that carries each one.

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