Obviously, many of the challenges in working on this book have stemmed from the nature of the organization we have chosen to study.
The Red Army Faction was not just a clandestine organization, but also a revolutionary communist one. As such, it faced not just state repression, but also actual historical suppression, not merely through “regular” police and paramilitary action, but also more subtly, through ideological attrition. The latter has sometimes taken the form of outright lies with their origin in psychological warfare, but just as insidious has been the unanimous, unexamined rejection of the group’s core beliefs on the part of all those who have studied it. As to those authors writing from an explicitly anti-left perspective, they have often been skeptical about the group’s political beliefs even being germane to its activities or history; for them the political verbiage simply provided cover for deranged crimes.
All works must at times rely on unverifiable assumptions or guesses. This is especially so when studying a clandestine organization, and some authors have clearly felt entitled to make a virtue of necessity, crafting the RAF’s narrative to suit their own political bias, which is more often than not the bias of those who pretend to have no bias at all.
Of course, we too have been forced to make guesses where there is no way of knowing for sure. We have tried, however, to always indicate where we are unsure, and our somewhat excessive use of footnotes is intended to give the reader an opportunity to see on what we are basing our assertions.
A further, at times bewildering, challenge in recovering the RAF’s history has been the fact that many authors seem to feel entitled to play very loose with facts both critical and incidental to this story. This kind of shoddy scholarship is a defining feature of the “real crime” and espionage genres, and in the case of a revolutionary organization, it is often compounded by fabrications planted by the state, which liberal scholars often seem unwilling to subject to the same hermeneutic of suspicion as claims made by the movement. We have found almost all of the state’s psychological warfare stories repeated in some place or another as if they were fact. In some cases, “plans” the state accused the RAF of having actually get promoted to actual events, i.e. we found one mention of a RAF commando attacking a nuclear power plant in 1977—despite the fact that no such attack ever took place, as should be easy to verify from available public sources.
This basic intellectual corruption seems to come with a free pass to be less than rigorous regarding other facts as well; on several occasions, we found that authors would get people’s names wrong, dates wrong, and the basic facts about various actions wrong. Siegfried Hausner becomes “Wolfgang Hausner”, Andreas Baader dies on a hunger strike, supporters become members, the RZ and 2JM become the RAF … these are just some of the “facts” we have found in various “reputable” works.
In fairness, some authors seem to have sincerely tried to do their best. Others have done very well in general, only to falter when certain subjects are broached. And while almost all works we consulted start from assumptions that we eventually rejected, we nevertheless continued to consult, and to rely on, these works. That is to say, one or many errors, or an open right-wing bias, have not been enough to rule out our consulting a book or article, providing we could not find any other source contradicting it.
The internet is widely considered an unreliable source of information, and yet we have found it to be an excellent tool with which to cross-reference the various “facts” found in most accounts of the RAF story. Even such inherently problematic sources as Wikipedia have served as a crucial warning system to indicate where the extant narrative is missing information, or is in error. In many such cases, we would later find authoritative material indicating that the “unreliable” internet had in fact been correct where some “reputable” work had erred.
Finally, while we have been open about our bias, we should also admit that there are most likely errors and omissions in our work. We have tried our hardest to weed them out, but both as a result of the murky and often contradictory existing record, and as a result of our own inevitable mistakes, chances are, some have snuck in.
We hope, however, to have succeeded in providing a fair and accurate representation of the first part of the RAF saga.
Any note on sources would be remiss without pointing all readers to the incredible Rote Armee Fraktion Collection of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, maintained as an online archive by former RAF member Ronald Augustin. The collection includes tens of thousands of pages related to the RAF, including several books; while most of the documents are in German, some are in other languages, including English:
http://www.labourhistory.net/raf/index.php
A far more modest collection of RAF-related documents in English is available on the German Guerilla website: