---
title: Red Army Faction:communiqués, hunger strikes and the 'isolation torture' campaign
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-army-faction-communiques/
description: a small clandestine group in West Germany used claim letters, a founding text and a red-star logo to present bombings as war against "imperialism", then…
section: Case studies
---

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[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# Red Army Faction:communiqués, hunger strikes and the 'isolation torture' campaign

At a glance

A small clandestine group in West Germany used claim letters, a founding text and a red-star logo to present bombings as war against "imperialism", then, once its leaders were in prison, turned hunger strikes…

- **When:** June 1970
- **Actor:** Red Army Faction…
- **Target:** The New Left milieu and sympathiser scene in West Germany…
- **Source:** Unidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) [Semantic hijacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/semantic-hijack/) [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/)

Full details

- **Actor:** Red Army Faction (RAF, West Germany), its imprisoned leadership, and supporter committees and lawyers
- **Target:** The New Left milieu and sympathiser scene in West Germany; the wider public and press; international anti-imperialist movements

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-army-faction-communiques/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-army-faction-communiques/#how-it-works)
- [How it was countered](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-army-faction-communiques/#how-it-was-countered)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-army-faction-communiques/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-army-faction-communiques/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-army-faction-communiques/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-army-faction-communiques/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-army-faction-communiques/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-army-faction-communiques/#sources)

On this page

> **Content note.** This case quotes RAF texts that call police "pigs" and "not human", and describes killings, kidnapping and a prisoner's death by hunger strike. The words are quoted short as evidence of the method. They are not this archive's description of anyone.

**In one line:** a small clandestine group in West Germany used claim letters, a founding text and a red-star logo to present bombings as war against "imperialism", then, once its leaders were in prison, turned hunger strikes, a dead prisoner's photograph and the phrase "isolation torture" into its most effective recruiting message.

![Diagram: founding texts set the frame; attacks are claimed by communiqués sent to news agencies; imprisoned leaders and supporter committees turn prison conditions into "isolation torture"; the Meins photograph and prominent visitors carry it to a wider public; the state answers with new laws, a news blackout and computer searches](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/red-army-faction-communiques-diagram.svg)

## What happened

- **June 1970.** A month after Andreas Baader was freed from custody, Der Spiegel prints a tape recorded by Ulrike Meinhof, now underground. It includes the lines "die Bullen sind Schweine ... der Typ in der Uniform ist ein Schwein, das ist kein Mensch" ("the cops are pigs ... the guy in uniform is a pig, not a human being") and "natürlich kann geschossen werden" ("of course there can be shooting").
- **April 1971.** *Das Konzept Stadtguerilla* ("The Urban Guerrilla Concept"), written by Meinhof, is the group's first long programmatic text and the first to use the name "Rote Armee Fraktion". According to the bpb, it argues that only violence can change society and that "US imperialism" must be fought militarily everywhere. The group's texts carry its emblem: a submachine gun over a red star.
- **May 1972.** The "May offensive": bombings against US Army sites, police, a judge and the Springer publishing house. A bomb at the US V Corps headquarters in Frankfurt kills an American officer; bombs at Springer in Hamburg injure 17 employees. The letter claiming the Frankfurt attack, signed "Kommando Petra Schelm" after a member shot dead by police in 1971, reached dpa and said that West Germany should no longer be a "safe rear area" for the "extermination strategists of Vietnam".
- **June 1972 onward.** The leadership is arrested. Supporters form "Komitees gegen Folter" (committees against torture) in several cities. In 1974 they publish the prisoners' court statements as *Der Kampf gegen die Vernichtungshaft* ("The Struggle Against Extermination Custody").
- **9 November 1974.** Holger Meins dies in Wittlich prison during a collective hunger strike. Stern prints a photograph of his emaciated body across two pages; a poster headed "Ein Genosse ist tot" ("A comrade is dead") circulates in universities, youth centres and bars.
- **4 December 1974.** Jean-Paul Sartre visits Baader in Stammheim at the request of the prisoners, arranged through lawyer Klaus Croissant. At a press conference he says the conditions are meant to break the prisoners, and he later repeats torture claims in Libération.
- **1975-1977.** A second generation takes the name "Kommando Holger Meins" for the 1975 Stockholm embassy siege. Meinhof is found hanged in her Stammheim cell in May 1976. The prisoners' 1977 hunger strike demands, among other things, treatment as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.
- **5 September-18 October 1977, the "German Autumn".** The RAF kidnaps employers' president Hanns Martin Schleyer in Cologne, killing his driver and three police officers. On 13 October a Palestinian (PFLP) commando hijacks the Lufthansa jet *Landshut* to press the same demands; West German GSG 9 police storm it in Mogadishu. Hours later Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe are found dead in Stammheim; Irmgard Möller survives with stab wounds. Schleyer is found shot dead in Mulhouse, France.
- **20 April 1998.** An eight-page letter to Reuters in Cologne states: "Die Stadtguerilla in Form der RAF ist nun Geschichte" ("The urban guerrilla in the form of the RAF is now history"). It ends with a list of 26 dead RAF members.

![Stammheim prison, Stuttgart, 1982](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/stammheim-prison-1982.jpg)

*Stuttgart-Stammheim prison in 1982, where the RAF's leaders were held and tried, and where Meinhof, Baader, Ensslin and Raspe died. Photo by Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 4.0.*

## How it works

- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/): the 1970 tape does not argue that particular officers did particular things. It sorts everyone "in uniform" into one class, "pigs", and adds "not a human being" before the line about shooting. The label comes first and the licence to harm follows from it.
- [Semantic hijacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/semantic-hijack/): "torture" and "extermination" (*Folter*, *Vernichtung*) carry the weight of the Nazi past in German. The prisoners and their committees applied them to solitary confinement and restricted contact, and "prisoners of war" to cover people convicted of bombings in a peacetime court. The bpb says the conditions should not be glossed over, but calls the blanket charge of "isolation torture" a product of "hysterical exaggeration" that conditions on Stammheim's seventh floor contradicted. Jeremy Varon's comparative study traces how the Nazi past shaped the West German conflict; RAF texts applied "fascist" to the Federal Republic itself.
- [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/): claim letters named whole categories as future targets. The Frankfurt letter warned there would be no place in the world where those responsible for the Vietnam war would be safe. In 1977 the Schleyer Polaroids showed him under a sign reading "prisoner of the RAF" for a stated number of days. According to the bpb, copies went constantly to the press, and one message demanded the Schleyer video run on every evening news programme. The image showed proof of life and the kidnappers' power over him in one frame.
- [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): the name "Red Army" and the red star borrowed the prestige of revolutionary armies for a small clandestine group. After Meins's death, the photograph of his body did the same with the imagery of martyrdom. The Visual History study says the image turned him, for much of the left-wing public, from perpetrator into victim and martyr, a view that spread to the RAF as a whole; sympathisers carried the picture at demonstrations "like a monstrance". Third-generation member Birgit Hogefeld later said the images led her to join.
- [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/): Sartre's visit gave the torture charge the name of one of Europe's best-known philosophers. The prisoners requested it, their lawyer brokered it, and a press conference followed at once. Baden-Württemberg's justice ministry rejected the torture claims.
- **Audience and spread.** The bpb says hardly any claim letter lacked a demand that it be printed, and that the RAF treated the established press as an enemy while depending on it to spread its messages. Research on the group's media strategy calls this *Propaganda der Tat* ("propaganda of the deed"). Texts aimed either at the broad public, through news agencies and newspapers, or at the sympathiser scene, through committee leaflets and lawyers. The bpb concludes that "isolation torture" became a tool for "building a legal sympathiser group" and that doubts about the rule of law became a means of recruiting later generations.

## How it was countered

- **New criminal law.** On 18 August 1976 the Bundestag added § 129a to the criminal code, making membership in, support of and recruiting for a "terrorist association" a crime. Critics said it could make an offender of someone who gave a member a bed for the night, and that it mainly opened the way to wiretaps and data collection. The bpb notes that its later use shifted from the far left to the far right.
- **Contact ban.** From 6 September 1977 the crisis staff cut RAF prisoners off from all contact, including their lawyers. The Kontaktsperregesetz that made this legal passed the Bundestag on 29 September, 371 votes to 4 with 17 abstentions, after three days of deliberation, and came into force on 2 October, covering the ban already in place.
- **News blackout.** From September 1977 Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's crisis staff asked media not to report on the kidnapping. Media complied voluntarily for about six weeks and handed the kidnappers' letters to the BKA unprinted. This denied the communiqués the publication they demanded.
- **Computer search.** Under Horst Herold, BKA president from 1971 to 1981, police used *Rasterfahndung* (dragnet data matching), for example comparing registration records with lists of people who paid electricity bills in cash. It helped find RAF member Rolf Heißler in 1979. Data-protection critics accused Herold of aiming at "transparent" citizens; the Federal Constitutional Court limited the method in 2006 to cases of concrete danger.
- **Radikalenerlass (1972).** The January 1972 decree on "radicals" in public service was not aimed at the RAF alone and had a much wider reach. According to the bpb, about 3.5 million applicants were checked between 1972 and 1991, about 11,000 cases were opened, and about 1,250 people were not hired, most of them teachers and most from the legal far left such as the DKP.
- **The "sympathiser" label.** In January 1972 Heinrich Böll wrote a Spiegel essay attacking Bild's coverage and asking for a fair trial for Meinhof. Spiegel changed his title to "Will Ulrike Gnade oder freies Geleit?" ("Does Ulrike want mercy or safe conduct?"), and he was attacked in politics and the press as a terrorism sympathiser. Hanno Balz's study of the 1970s debate argues that the press helped "make" the terrorism story and used such attacks to mark out a sympathiser milieu among left intellectuals. By this archive's definitions, the "sympathiser" label used against critics who had not supported violence is name-calling too.
- **Rivals on the left.** Rudi Dutschke, the best-known student leader, condemned the RAF. The bpb quotes him: "terrorism is pure murder" and against socialist ethics. After the Schleyer kidnapping he wrote in Die Zeit that calls to form revolutionary cells were the destruction of critical reason. The bpb records that he found it hard to be heard as a leftist without being grouped with the RAF.
- **Culture and memory.** The 1978 anthology film *Deutschland im Herbst* (Fassbinder, Kluge, Schlöndorff and others) mixed documentary and fiction to record the mood of that autumn. Stefan Aust's *Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex* (1985) became the standard account.
- **What worked.** The group killed people into the 1990s. The bpb says the prison campaign mobilised a broad public against harsh conditions but pulled the group away from its original international aims. It ended itself by letter in 1998.

## Then and now

![Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds (1918)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/beat-back-the-hun-1918.jpg)

*[Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/beat-back-the-hun-1918/), U.S. Treasury Liberty Loan campaign (artist Frederick Strothmann), 1918. Public domain.*

The 1918 poster puts one word, "the Hun", in place of any claim about what German soldiers had done, and draws the enemy as barely human. Meinhof's 1970 tape does the same with "pigs" and "not a human being" for police. In both the label comes before the evidence and makes harm easier to accept. The differences are large. The poster was a government campaign in a declared war between states, reaching millions to sell bonds. The tape came from a clandestine group of a few dozen people with no public mandate, and it was spoken as a licence for shooting at officers in a country at peace.

## Positions on the record

- **The RAF's stated position:** it was an urban guerrilla fighting "imperialism"; its jailed members were prisoners of war held under "isolation torture". The 1998 letter declares the project over.
- **Documented:** the texts and dates above; the deaths and injuries of the May 1972 offensive and the German Autumn; Meins's death during a hunger strike; the prisoners' long periods of separation from other inmates; the laws, the contact ban, the news blackout and the Radikalenerlass figures.
- **Contested:** how harsh the early isolation conditions were, and whether "torture" fits them; the bpb accepts the conditions were hard and rejects the blanket charge. The Stammheim deaths of 18 October 1977 were officially ruled suicide. The RAF's lawyers and the surviving prisoner Möller disputed this. The bpb records that suspicion of "state murder" persisted for years in support circles and parts of the critical public, and treats it as one of the group's myths.
- **Not shown:** that the RAF had broad public support. Its audience was a milieu, not a mass movement.

## Same-method test

A far-right cell that called police "not human", claimed bombings in letters demanding publication, and styled its jailed members as tortured "prisoners of war" would be scored the same way. The clearest parallel from a different ideology is Irish republican: after the UK phased out special category status for paramilitary prisoners from 1976, IRA prisoners and their supporters campaigned for recognition as political prisoners and prisoners of war, through the blanket protest and the 1981 hunger strikes (see [Walls, prisons and airwaves: republican and loyalist paramilitary propaganda in Northern Ireland](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/northern-ireland-paramilitary-murals/)). The Weather Underground, which Varon studies beside the RAF, also opened with a taped "declaration of a state of war" sent to the press in 1970.

## How to spot it

- When a group claims an attack, look at who it asks to print the claim. A demand for publication is part of the attack.
- Ask what a loaded word ("torture", "prisoner of war", "fascist") covers here, and compare it with independent reports.
- A famous visitor's short trip is testimony about what he was shown, not an inspection.
- Watch for the same method on the other side: "sympathiser" used against critics who have not supported violence is also a label in place of a charge.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sources below (`make_diagrams_extremist.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| Stammheim prison (1982) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stammheim_(1982).JPG) | CC BY-SA 4.0, Kim Traynor |
| *Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds* (1918) | FRAME gallery, from Wikimedia Commons (Library of Congress) | Public domain |

### Image gaps

- **RAF texts, claim letters and the red-star logo.** Not hosted: movement branding and texts are cited through secondary research, not reproduced.
- **The photograph of Holger Meins's body and the "Ein Genosse ist tot" poster.** Not hosted: the photograph is copyrighted press material and shows a dead person; the Visual History study discusses it.
- **The Schleyer Polaroids.** Not hosted: they show a kidnap victim under threat and were made by his killers.
- **The Bundestag vote of September 1977, or a portrait of Horst Herold.** A public-domain or openly licensed image of either could illustrate the counter-measures; none was found on Wikimedia Commons for this page. **This gap can be filled** if one turns up.

## Sources

- [Stadtlexikon Stuttgart: 4 December 1974, Jean-Paul Sartre visits Andreas Baader in Stammheim](https://www.stadtlexikon-stuttgart.de/article/3a52a0ef-7e06-4198-a410-50c3ca741ef4/4._Dezember_1974:_Jean-Paul.html)
- [bpb, Die Geschichte der RAF: Die erste Generation der RAF (1970-1975)](https://www.bpb.de/themen/linksextremismus/geschichte-der-raf/49256/die-erste-generation-der-raf-1970-1975/)
- [bpb, Die Geschichte der RAF: Die zweite Generation der RAF (1975-1981)](https://www.bpb.de/themen/linksextremismus/geschichte-der-raf/49268/die-zweite-generation-der-raf-1975-1981/)
- [bpb, Die Geschichte der RAF: Die RAF und die Medien](https://www.bpb.de/themen/linksextremismus/geschichte-der-raf/49235/die-raf-und-die-medien/)
- [bpb, Die Geschichte der RAF: Die Mythen der RAF](https://www.bpb.de/themen/linksextremismus/geschichte-der-raf/49223/die-mythen-der-raf/)
- [bpb, Die Geschichte der RAF: Rudi Dutschke und der bewaffnete Kampf](https://www.bpb.de/themen/linksextremismus/geschichte-der-raf/49209/rudi-dutschke-und-der-bewaffnete-kampf/)
- [bpb, Die Geschichte der RAF: Das Ende der RAF](https://www.bpb.de/themen/linksextremismus/geschichte-der-raf/49302/das-ende-der-raf/)
- [bpb, 2022: Vor 50 Jahren: "Radikalenerlass"](https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-aktuell/346271/vor-50-jahren-radikalenerlass/)
- [bpb, 2016: 1976: Anti-Terror-Paragraf wird eingeführt](https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-aktuell/232718/1976-anti-terror-paragraf-wird-eingefuehrt/)
- [Deutscher Bundestag: 29. September 1977, Bundestag verabschiedet das Kontaktsperregesetz](https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/1977-09-29-kontaktsperregesetz-209526)
- [Akademie für Politische Bildung Tutzing: Heißes Eisen Nachrichtensperre](https://www.apb-tutzing.de/60jahre/akademiemosaik/heisses-eisen-nachrichtensperre)
- [Visual History, 9 January 2017: "... und wenn Typen dabei kaputtgehen": the image icon of the dead Holger Meins](https://visual-history.de/en/2017/01/09/und-wenn-typen-dabei-kaputtgehen/)
- [Campus Verlag, 2008: Hanno Balz, Von Terroristen, Sympathisanten und dem starken Staat](https://campus.de/wissenschaft/geschichte/von-terroristen-sympathisanten-und-dem-starken-staat/CAM38723)
- [H-Net review: Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home (University of California Press, 2004)](https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45240/gerhardt-varon-bringing-war-home-weather-underground-red-army-faction)
- [netzpolitik.org, 2018: Horst Herold, inventor of the Rasterfahndung, has died](https://netzpolitik.org/2018/horst-herold-erfinder-der-rasterfahndung-gestorben/)