Germany's far-left terrorist Red Army Faction in court
This may well be the last major trial involving the former terrorists of the far-left "Red Army Faction" (RAF). The trial of alleged former terrorist Daniela Klette will begin this Tuesday in Celle, a city in the northern German state of Lower Saxony.
The terrorist group kept West Germany on tenterhooks from the 1970s and, according to investigating authorities, was responsible for more than 30 murders.
Klette, now 66, is not being charged with murder. However, together with her accomplices Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg, the defendant is alleged to have robbed armored cars and supermarkets between 1999 and 2016, primarily in northern Germany.
Because shots were fired during the robberies, Klette is also charged with attempted murder.
Staub and Garweg are still at large, and Klette was arrested in Berlin in February 2024 after living for years under a false identity in the German capital's Kreuzberg district.
Robbery for a living
The RAF was disbanded in 1998, which was announced in a letter that the authorities deemed authentic. The 13 attacks committed by Klette's trio after that, according to the indictment, were no longer intended to finance terrorist acts but apparently only served to support the three aging revolutionaries.
However, when it comes to the RAF, German investigative and judicial authorities are still on high alert. The trial was initially meant to take place in a courthouse in the city of Verden, but it was considered not large or secure enough. A former riding arena is being converted there especially for the proceedings. The trial will occur in Celle until that venue is ready.
These security concerns recall the RAF's shock-inducing attack on the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1977, a courtroom was explicitly built in Stuttgart-Stammheim for the trial of the group's leaders, right on the prison grounds where the defendants were being held.
Murdered politicians, judges and business representatives
The RAF, which described itself as a communist and anti-imperialist urban guerrilla group, openly attacked leading representatives of government, business, and the judiciary from the early 1970s onward. Those it murdered included Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback, as well as the head of Dresdner Bank, Jürgen Ponto. A total of 27 RAF members have been sentenced to life imprisonment over the decades.
The confrontation with the German state reached its peak in the fall of 1977, when the group initially kidnapped Hanns-Martin Schleyer, then head of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations, demanding the release of imprisoned RAF members. When the German government, led by then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), refused, Palestinian sympathizers hijacked a German vacation plane, which, after a stray flight through the Middle East, eventually landed in Mogadishu, Somalia. There, an anti-terror unit of the then Federal Border Guard rescued all passengers. The terrorists had previously murdered the pilot.
Following news of the failed hijacking, the RAF prisoners held in Stuttgart-Stammheim committed suicide. Schleyer was later found murdered. Nevertheless, the German state had won the war against the RAF with all its might. Although the RAF continued to murder, it never regained its former strength.
The RAF still has sympathizers
Quite a few young West Germans sympathized with the group, either secretly or openly, in the 1970s. German media reports suggested a threat, which critics claimed was blown out of proportion. Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll, for example, spoke of a lonely "battle of the 6 against 60 million." Throughout the years, the hardcore group only had around 80 active members.
Klette has never renounced the revolutionary struggle.
Small protest demonstrations have repeatedly been held in front of the prison in Vechta, Lower Saxony, where Klette has been held for more than a year. That is despite the fact that the RAF has long disbanded. The trial is expected to last around two years.
This article was originally written in German.
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