This could very well be one of the last major trials involving former German left-wing terrorists from the "Red Army Faction" (RAF). The trial of alleged former terrorist Daniela Klete begins this Tuesday (March 25) in the town of Cele in the German state of Lower Saxony – with a lot of media attention, as always when the RAF is involved.
The RAF has long kept the former West Germany in fear, since the 1970s, and according to investigative authorities, they are responsible for more than 30 murders.
During the RAF era, Klete may have been involved in the prison bombings in the state of Hesse and the attacks on the US embassy in Bonn in the 1980s and 1990s – but that will have to be clarified in another proceeding. The crimes committed during the RAF era are not the subject of this trial.
They robbed to support themselves
Together with her friends and associates Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garveg, Daniela Klete, now 66, allegedly participated in attacks on armored cash vehicles and supermarket robberies between 1999 and 2016, primarily in northern Germany. That is why she is now on trial there. And since firearms were used during the robberies, Klete is also charged with attempted murder.
Staub and Garveg remain at large, and Klete was arrested in Berlin in February last year, after living quietly under a false identity in the Kreuzberg district for years.
The RAF was officially disbanded in 1998 after a letter they sent with such an announcement was deemed authentic by the authorities. The thirteen robberies that the trio of which Klete was a member committed after that were no longer intended to finance the preparations for terrorist attacks, according to the indictment, but were clearly intended to provide the three elderly revolutionaries with something to support themselves. However, when it comes to the RAF, German investigative and judicial authorities remain very cautious.
The trial was originally scheduled to take place in the town of Verden in Lower Saxony, but the district court there was deemed too small and unsafe. A former equestrian hall is being adapted for the trial, and the trial will be held in Cele until its conclusion.
Murders of politicians, judges, businessmen
All this is reminiscent of the time when the RAF shocked the former West Germany, especially in 1977. At that time, a courtroom was built in Stuttgart-Stamheim specifically for the trial of the leaders of that group. The hall was located in the prison compound where the accused were held.
The RAF described itself as a communist and anti-imperialist urban guerrilla. It had openly attacked leading representatives of the state, business, and judiciary since the early 1970s. They had assassinated, for example, the Attorney General Siegfried Bubak, as well as the director of the Dresdner Bank, Jürgen Pont. A total of 27 RAF members were sentenced to life imprisonment over several decades.
"German Autumn"
The conflicts with the state reached their peak in the fall of 1977, during the so-called "German Autumn." It was then that the group first kidnapped the then head of the German Employers' Association, Hans-Martin Schleyer, in order to force the release of arrested RAF members.
When the German government, headed by then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD), refused, Palestinian RAF sympathizers hijacked a German passenger plane in Majorca. After several days of wandering through the Middle East, it finally landed in Mogadishu, Somalia. There, the anti-terrorist unit of the German Federal Border Police managed to rescue all the tourists, but the pilot of the plane was first killed by terrorists.
Afterwards, imprisoned RAF members in the Stuttgart-Stamheim prison committed suicide, including one of the group's founders, Andreas Bader. Schleyer was later found murdered.
However, the state won the battle against the RAF, using extremely harsh measures. Although the RAF continued to kill, it never regained its former strength.
However, a considerable number of young West Germans in the 1970s sympathized with the group – openly or secretly. At the same time, the public, especially through the media, created an image of a threat that perhaps did not exist to such a large extent. For example, Nobel Prize winner for literature Heinrich Böll spoke of "a fight of six against 60 million".
During all those years, there were actually only about eighty die-hard and active members of the RAF.
The RAF still has many sympathizers
Danijela Klete has clearly not changed her views and has not in any way renounced the revolutionary struggle. She is not expected to make any statements or confessions at the trial. Shortly before her arrest, she even managed to warn one of her friends. Despite intensive searches, there has been no trace of Garveg and Staub since.
On the left-wing extremist scene in Germany, there is still sympathy for the RAF, whose surviving members are glorified as a myth. Small protests of support are occasionally organized outside the prison in Wechta, Lower Saxony, where Klete has been imprisoned for more than a year – even though the RAF has long since disappeared and certainly no longer poses a threat.
The trial against Danijela Kleta is expected to last about two years.
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