It was part of the ideology of the Baader-Meinhof Gang to release a public communiqué after virtually every terrorist action. Invariably they would be sent to a press agency or an underground newspaper to guarantee publication. The purpose of the communiqué was to inform the proletariat of their reasons for their actions.
Occasionally the Baader-Meinhof Gang (which called itself the Red Army Faction) would release communiqués for other reasons. Their most famous communiqué, Das Konzept Stadtguerrilla (the Concept Urban Guerrilla), was written by Ulrike Meinhof early in the gang's history to explain the theory behind their praxis. The other critical source document is "The Urban Guerrilla and the Class Struggle," also mostly written by Meinhof, which was an internal history of the RAF.
Germany in the late 1960s was still a highly patrician society, and young leftists would rebel against this patricianism in any way available. The German language requires capitalization of all noun -- yet indignant leftists clearly found this practice merely another example of antiquated patricianism. Therefore they would rebel by not capitalizing anything, even the first letter in a sentence. Many ofall of these communiqués were written in this non-capitalized format. I have chosen to retain this format for ease of reading.
Most communiqués shared a few other commons traits as well. Invariably they would not be signed "Red Army Faction" but "Petra Schelm Kommando," or "Thomas Weissbecker Kommando," or some other fallen comrade. The theory was that it would appear as if dozens of autonomous urban guerrilla groups were springing up independently.
The communiqués would also commonly adopt a supposed self-critical style (but the self-criticism was generally self-serving as well).
There were dozens of post-1977 communiqués and statements released by the Red Army Faction, but we have only chosen to reprint the most historically significant communiqué here: the 20 April 1998 announcement of the disbanding of the RAF.
Most of these communiqués were obtained at the nadir.org site, which is an extensive German-language site devoted to radical causes.
