Red Army Faction (RAF) was formed in the early 1970s as a self-declared urban guerrilla. Its founding largely goes back to Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof and today's right-wing extremist Horst Mahler.
The peak of the violence was in 1977: within a few months, the RAF first murdered Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback and the head of the Dresdner Bank, Jürgen Ponto. The RAF was not officially over until 1998: on April 20, the group announced its dissolution.