Editing Red Army Faction (section)

== Name ==
The usual translation into English is the "Red Army Faction"; however, the founders wanted it to reflect not a [[splinter group]] but rather an embryonic militant unit that was embedded, in or part of, a wider communist workers' movement,<ref group=lower-alpha>In Leninist terminology a "fraction" is a subset of a larger communist movement. For example, the 12 July 1921 "Theses on the [http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization/comintern_and_germany.htm Structure of Communist Parties] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120415134451/http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization/comintern_and_germany.htm |date=15 April 2012 }}, submitted to the Third Congress of the Comintern" states that "to carry out daily party work every member should as a rule belong to a small working group, a committee, a commission, a fraction, or a cell." Cited in Louis Proyect, "The Comintern and the German Communist Party;" or the description of the "Bolshevik-Leninist Fraction" in the article [[Communist League (UK, 1932)]].</ref> i.e., a ''fraction'' of a whole.

The group always called itself the {{lang|de|Rote Armee Fraktion}}, never the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang. The name refers to all incarnations of the organization: the "first generation" RAF, which consisted of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and others; the "second generation" RAF; and the "third generation" RAF, which existed in the 1980s and 90s. The terms "Baader–Meinhof Gang" and "Baader–Meinhof Group" were first used by the media and the government. The group never used these names to refer to itself, because it viewed itself as a co-founded group consisting of numerous members and not a group with two figureheads.