Process against ex-RAF terrorist Clette has started

A touch of Stammheim is in the air. Police officers with storm hoods and machine guns at the entrances of the court, emergency vehicles on every street corner and right next to it, right in front of the mighty Celler Castle, the usual banners. One quotes Bert Brecht: « What is the break -in into a bank against the establishment of a bank? » Another demands « freedom for all political prisoners. »

The should be processwho begins here, everything is just not political. « Only » is accused of a serial robber who, however, is a member in a previous life The left -wing extremist Red Army Group (RAF) It should have been: Daniela Klette, 66 years old, black sweater, jeans, the gray hair to a bun, no handcuffs.

Great crowds and high safety precautions in a trial against Daniela Klette

A lot of armored glass, only artificial light and an excruciatingly long inlet control: for a few weeks, the district court enjoys in the Higher Regional Court of Celle Justice-Asyl for a few weeks. For the large crowds and the high security precautions, the courthouse in Verden is too small – and in the old riding hall, which is currently being transformed into a high -security wing, the renovation work is still running.

If the impression is not deceptive, it will become a Lower Saxony trunk home – the judicial hall with the charm of a school gymnasium, which, in addition to the prison of the same name in Stuttgart, built in the 1970s especially for the processes against the RAF and in which a piece of German post -war history was then negotiated.

Daniela Klette is not charged because of several terrorist attacks

Diaglary, but Daniela Klette is This Tuesday not because of several terrorist attacks in which it is said to have been involved, but because of illegal gun ownership and 13 armed robberies in North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, with which they and their two accomplices Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker dust have financed their lives underground.

The proof of their participation in the terrorist attacks is more difficult to keep and should be tackled later in a second procedure. As of today, Daniela Klette was involved in a failed attack on a Deutsche Bank data center, a fire salve with at least 250 shots on the US embassy in Bonn and the last attack by the RAF in general. With 200 kilos of explosives, in 1993 she destroyed the new, but not yet received prison in further town in Hesse. Damage: the equivalent of a good 60 million euros. Dust and Garweg, both on the run, are said to have been there.

In Celle, Daniela Klette and her lawyers sit behind shot -proof glass and pursues the first day of the court without greater emotion. Smiling, she waves to the audience before the start of a friend, then briefly discusses with her defenders and follows attentively what two prosecutors present in monotonous professionalism. « Labor -part and extremely conspiratorial », their accomplices and they were doing in their raids, according to the more than 600 -page indictment. However, Daniela Klette denies the accusation that they had no scruples to use firearms and accept the death of innocent. Even as robberies, she does not want to know her deeds declared. For them, as she wrote from prison in Vechta in a greeting for a Marxist event in Berlin, « armed expropriation campaigns. » The confession letters with which the RAF terrorist commands justified their crimes sounded like this.

The long shadow of the RAF lies above the procedure

Ulrich von Klinggräff, one of Velcro’s defenders, made up the fact that the long shadow of the RAF lies above a « completely apolitical process » due to robbery and attempted murder of the long shadows as a wound point of the indictment. In the afternoon, he requested that the procedure and the release of his client request that his client no longer be possible. Even the excessive security measures showed all the signs of a terrorist process, he argues not to forget the place of the event – the particularly well -secured state protection hall. Court and the public prosecutor, then von Klinggräff still followed up, « only leads the will to the spectacle. »

The investigators of the State Criminal Police Office Lower Saxony Klette will track down an informant at the beginning of last year, whose identity should remain secret and who will receive 25,000 euros for his tip. The Canadian journalist Michael Colborne has recently proven how easy it would have been to find, who chases an old photo of her through a facial recognition with artificial intelligence and has a goal after half an hour – recordings of an older woman from a Brazilian cultural center in Berlin show a striking resemblance to the young burdock. However, the police in Germany are forbidden such search methods, so that the information about the fleeting RAF woman only achieves them in a detour. Colborne himself denies to be the informant.

Completion writes an SMS of their accomplices: « You have me »

On the evening of February 26, 2024, the investigators ring the doorbell on a door on the 5th floor of a dreary rental house in Sebastianstrasse in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. After a short change of words at the door, they ask the tenant to accompany her to the area – it is not yet clear whether she is actually the terrorist you are looking for. However, Daniela Klette still succeeds in withdrawing briefly to the toilet and warning her accomplice Burkhard Garweg via SMS, who is not far away in an old construction trailer: « You have me. » Later, the investigators find 239,000 euros in cash in their small apartment, several gold bars, pistols, a assault rifle, ammunition, but also wigs, adhesive hardships as well as ID cards and driving licenses with a variety of names. Under an alias, Claudia Ivone, she even created a Facebook profile. The photos there show colorful posters from the Brazilian association, in which she was committed, and a woman from behind, sitting on a river in the half -darkness. The last entry dates from November 3, 2021 – a look at an autumn forest.

Daniela Klette lived underground for almost 35 years, most of the time in Berlin – like Ulrike Meinhof, one of the terrorists of the first RAF generationit once recommended: « You have to live like fish in the water. So if possible in a big city, in high or multi-family houses, where it is easier to stay anonymous. » With the years, however, it seems, Daniela Klette becomes careless. She takes part in dance courses and the carnival of cultures, where there are also photos of her and find her way to the Internet, she travels to Brazil and South Africa with fake papers and tells friends and acquaintances that she works in care and is often on the move in southern Germany. In fact, the investigators suspect it, she spent out with her accomplices of supermarkets and the routes of money transporters, which they then attack. Your prey: all in all around 2.7 million euros.

Autumn 1977 burned down into the collective German memory

Lukas Theune, one of her three lawyers, was still a kindergarten child when Daniela Klette went under immersion. Nevertheless, he already has some experience with political clients: climate adhesive, home -occupied, activists of the forbidden Kurdish PKK. He is also involved in the red help that supports the accused and imprisoned people from the left spectrum. The association writes on its homepage that the specific evidence of Velcro’s participation in the raids is thin, should now be « made up for the mountains of files. » And in general: « Already in the first few days after Daniela’s arrest, the spirit of German autumn was caused by Berlin, as a martial, large -scale raids carried out brutal raids in apartments and wagons. »

The spirit of German autumn 1977when all of West Germany was in the state of emergency? Seriously? At that time, a command of the RAF employer President Hanns-Martin Schleyer kidnapped and murdered and with her allied Palestinian terrorists captured the Lufthansa machine « Landshut »-and in Stammheim the RAF members Andreas Bader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe took their lives in prison, after the « Landshut » was released in the Somali capital of Mogadischu was. They are days that have burned themselves into the collective memory of the country.

The third generation of the RAF is attributed

Daniele Marie-Luise Klette, the daughter of a dentist and a representative from Karlsruhe, is already active in left-wing extremist groups and later also in red help. When exactly she takes the step into terror, it cannot be reconstructed exactly as long as she is silent about her past. It is assigned to the third generation of the RAF, which is still planning its attacks more meticulously and leaves even fewer traces before it dissolves in 1998. Among other things, the last terrorists of the RAF are charged with the murders of the then head of Deutsche Bank, Alfred Herrhausen, and at the head of the trustee, Detlev Carsten Rohwedder. Overall, the Red Army faction killed 34 people between 1971 and 1993 – politicians, managers, a general prosecutor, several of its drivers, three US soldiers, Dutch customs officials, German police officers. Hardly any of the murders is really cleared up to this day

But that’s not the case in Celle. « We don’t have a terrorist procedure here, » says Undine Weyers, her third defender. The supporters of Daniela Klette outside, in front of the court, see it a little differently. On a third transparent, they call less than « freedom for Daniela. »