RAF suspects arrested
The last desperadoes
The 1989 assassination attempt on the head of Deutsche Bank, Alfred Herrhausen, is attributed to the third generation of the RAF
© Sepp Spiegl / Imago Images
Decades after the self-dissolution of the Red Army Faction, Daniela Klette, who is said to have belonged to the third and last generation of the RAF, was arrested in Berlin. With this force the terror was naked. It was about murder and not about a better world
67 people died and over 200 were injured. What began with the dream of a better world ended with a long trail of blood. The relatives of the victims are still suffering to this day. What remained was a series of unsolved criminal cases, including the murders of Deutsche Bank boss Alfred Herrhausen and Treuhand manager Detlev Karsten Rohwedder. Klette and her comrades from the last RAF contingent, only a few of whom are known by name, hid from investigators for many years. And they probably used robberies to get the money for a fairly middle-class life.
It was about murder and manslaughter
When Herrhausen’s car was torn apart by a bomb in 1989, senior security officials speculated that the RAF wanted to show that it could kill anyone, no matter how well they were protected. But the murder actually demonstrated something else: the group had lost the strength to challenge the state. She never had a chance – but now she was finally beaten. Because there was no one left who was willing to recognize them as a warring party. It is a “tiny and isolated group of guerrilla fighters without a war,” wrote linguist Andreas Musolff. The ancestors distanced themselves from their successors, who, although they carried out their actions more and more perfectly, had finally lost any resonance among the population. “The actions became harder and harder, the reflections became weaker and weaker,” said former RAF man Lutz Taufer, who joined the RAF in 1974 when the founders around Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were already in prison for the most serious crimes.
At no time did the RAF have more than a few dozen fighters. It could only be a threat to the state if it found support among the population. For a while at least – in the early 1970s – she seemed to succeed. But then it became increasingly clear to veterans of the ’68 movement who were enthusiastic about the revolution that it was ultimately not about noble goals, but about murder and manslaughter.
1977 was the high point and turning point. It was the year in which the RAF wanted to free its leaders from prison – at any cost. In the spring, the terrorists shot Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback. They murdered his companions at the same time. In the summer, Jürgen Ponto, the head of the Dresdner Bank, had to die because he had resisted his kidnapping.
Only a handful of desperadoes left
Then came the autumn that would soon be called the “German Autumn”. The kidnapping of employer president Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the Lufthansa Landshut plane brought the state to the brink of a state of emergency. But the federal government remained adamant; sacrificed Schleyer’s life and freed the hostages on the vacation plane. When the RAF leaders committed suicide the following night in the Stuttgart-Stammheim prison, their group was also finished.
The myth that it was the state that killed Andreas Baader and the others allowed the remnants of the RAF to live on for a while. But after the collapse of the GDR, this myth no longer worked. Because the terrorist pensioners who were tracked down there revealed the suicide plans of their predecessors.
What remained was a handful of desperadoes who killed with increasing technical perfection. And it was so isolated that most of the perpetrators from the 1980s and early 1990s have remained unidentified to this day. At the end of 1992 they announced that they would stop the killing. It sounded more like desperation than strategy or better judgment. The announcement of the self-dissolution was then only the late admission that the path of terror had led to a dead end from which there was no escape.