RAF Research

The Baader-Meinhof group also known as the RAF or Rote Armee Faction officially started as group in 1970 in Germany.  The killing of a young activist by the police in 1967 led Andreas Baader to form the group.  The groups founding members were Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler and Ulrike Meinhoff.  The groups cause was a fight against post-war authorities; they felt this new authority was no better than the fascist state under the Third Reich.  The groups used violent militant tactics to get their message across and beginning in 1968 they bombed two department stores in Frankfurt, Germany.  In 1970 several members of the groups went off to Jordan where they learned to use Kalashnikov s    Over the next two years they went back to Germany robbing banks and bombing buildings.  By the summer of 1972 all of the founding members had been captured.  The second generation of the RAF members fought for the sole purpose of having the founding members released from prison.  This led to some of the bloodiest and most high-profile attacks from the group.  In September of 1977 the groups capture Hans Martin Schleyer, the head of the German Association of Employers and a former SS Member.  This led to the crisis know as German Autumn.  After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet unions the group took a massive blow.  The third generation continued on still maintaining attacks and bombing but the main assessment of the groups of objectives was the releasing of former RAF members.  In 1992 the government offered to release members of the RAF if they refrained from violent attacks to which the RAF intended to follow.  The last action taken by the RAF was a bombing in 1993.  The group dissolved in 1998 releasing the statement “The revolution says: I was, I am, I will be again”.  Like the RAF many modern terrorists use weapon assaults and bombing as their way of committing acts of terror.  Unlike the RAF I think modern day terrorist attacks are on a grander scale such as the US 9/11 attacks.

Sources:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b1OWAYIebtl8kuTGTFnwjkvlROFDkbMDQldu-WXz66U/edit?pli=1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction