Germany's RAF Terrorism — Many Unanswered Questions
The names of the RAF’s prominent victims are well known in Germany, but the lesser-known victims include company car drivers, bodyguards and ordinary police officers. Germany was in a state of near paralysis in the autumn of 1977. Frequent vehicle inspections at highway exits and heavily armed police officers at key locations were commonplace. As in several other European countries, a growing fear of terrorism was sweeping the country.
RAF members of the second and third generation continued carrying out crimes until the end of the 1990s. They repeatedly targeted US troop facilities in Germany. Then, in the spring of 1998, the RAF announced in a lengthy letter that it was disbanding.
The Manhunt Continues, Questions Remain Unanswered
The search for the perpetrators went on, though. Most of the crimes committed between 1970 and 1998 have still not been solved. This is also due to the fact that those RAF members who were arrested and stood trial have, for the most part, not made any incriminating statements about accomplices or connections within the organization. One thing is clear: the RAF and the trail of blood it left across the Federal Republic of Germany are still not a thing of the past.
One of the unanswered questions is the role played by the domestic secret service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, in the student protest movement’s descent into terror in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
According to the Hamburg political scientist Wolfgang Kraushaar, the secret service agent Peter Urbach (1941-2011) is a key figure here. In an interview with DW in 2018, Kraushaar explained: “Urbach played an important — though still inconclusive — role in the transformation of that small but hardened nucleus of the protest scene into militant groups and ultimately into networks, out of which terrorism then took shape.”
In Kraushaar’s eyes, Urbach was an agent provocateur who supplied left-wing extremist protesters with Molotov cocktails and firearms and incited the extra-parliamentary opposition. Speculation about the role of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution looms in the background of each new arrest and search for clues.
This is what is behind Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser’s statement following the arrest of suspected “third-generation RAF” terrorist Daniela Klette at the end of February. She said that a further criminal investigation into the crimes was now possible. “We also owe it to the relatives of the RAF victims to provide answers.”
As head of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, which oversees Germany’s security agencies, Faeser is the 15th politician to have had more or less frequent dealings with the RAF. When the 53-year-old SPD politician was born, the Federal Criminal Police Office was already searching for the Baader-Meinhof group. It is quite likely that Faeser will not be the last minister tasked with investigating past and future left-wing terrorism.
Christoph Strack is a DW reporter. This article is published courtesy of Deutsche Welle (DW).
