RAF

RAF is the abbreviation for Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), a West German far-left terrorist organisation that operated on German territory from 1970 until its self-dissolution in 1998. The organisation is not a public authority but a historical terrorist group that is central to German criminal, legal and contemporary history. The RAF's declared aim was armed struggle against the West German state and against persons and institutions the group regarded as representatives of capitalism and imperialism. In practice, the organisation was behind a long series of kidnappings, assassinations and bomb attacks directed at prominent figures in business, politics and the judiciary.

The organisation's most widely discussed actions include the kidnapping and killing of employers' association president Hanns Martin Schleyer in 1977 — an event that coincided with the hijacking of the Lufthansa aircraft Landshut and culminated in what became known as the German Autumn. That same year, the central RAF figures Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe died in Stammheim prison under circumstances that remain debated. In 1991, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, head of the East German privatisation agency Treuhandanstalt, was shot and killed at his home in Düsseldorf. The RAF claimed responsibility for the murder, but the case has never been fully solved and remains one of reunified Germany's best-known unsolved killings.

In German legal practice, the RAF cases have had far-reaching significance for legislation and case law on counter-terrorism, including questions concerning the role of defence counsel, pre-trial detention and the state's options for action during extraordinary security crises. The RAF is therefore not merely a true crime phenomenon but a key concept in German constitutional and criminal legal history.