Daniela Klette, formerly a third-generation member of the Baader-Meinhof-group, would very much like to see all prisons abolished. It’s not an entirely selfless ambition: after all, her own address changed from Berlin-Kreuzberg to JVA Vechta. That’s Justizvollzugsanstalt, the women’s prison in Lower Saxony, where she was taken after her arrest in March 2024.
The 67-year-old stands accused of attempted murder, aggravated gang robbery and firearms offences. Together with Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, two other terrorist-turned-cons still on the run, she allegedly made off with a combined haul of €2.7m.
None of it is technically terrorism-related – it’s about the Red Army Faction’s side hustle of armed robbery. Yet Klette and her legal team have framed proceedings as a “political trial”, pointing to the heavy security and the special courtroom. “This has nothing to do with a normal robbery case,” one of her lawyers declared.
Quite right. “Normal” doesn’t really cover an ageing revolutionary, lounging with her shoes off, forming heart shapes with her hands for the cheering supporters from the alt-left nostalgia circuit who crowd the front rows.
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In her 80-minute closing statement last week, Klette spoke of the “urgent need” for “systemic change”. “We can only truly be free once everyone is free,” she proclaimed. That makes for great fridge-magnet philosophy. Other philosophers have occasionally linked freedom to responsibility. Klette seems more interested in locating moral virtue somewhere between armed robbery and weapons maintenance.
Reading from handwritten pages, she didn’t admit guilt, while simultaneously explaining that such crimes had been necessary to survive underground. Which, in fairness, is relatable: maintaining your lifestyle with an assault rifle – haven’t we all been there?
Klette insisted she was “truly very sorry” about the victims’ lasting suffering. There are 20 still traumatised by the robberies. Yet, according to Klette, cashiers and security couriers are “Proletarier, keine FeindInnen”. Proletarians, not enemies – rendered in gender-inclusive German. Etiquette matters.
The real villains, apparently, are elsewhere. Klette expressed surprise that cash couriers receive no special training “to remain calm in such situations” – ie being shot at. She also said she had not realised supermarket workers and cash-in-transit staff were denied adequate psychological support by employers. In other words: capitalism’s fault, really.
And indeed, she implied, who can say whether victims’ trauma even stemmed from the robberies? Modern society is traumatised anyway – by poverty, wars, racism, oppression.
So perhaps we should avoid rushing to judgment about the – alleged – woman with the machine gun. In Klette’s storyline, she isn’t a perpetrator but “a victim of the political system”, while the trial merely seeks “to delegitimise the history of left wing resistance”. A relic fighting the revolution long after the revolution packed up and moved on.
Naturally, the defence insists there is no evidence linking her to the eight robberies. The only clearly demonstrable offence, they argue, concerns weapons possession. Police searching her flat found a Polish assault rifle resembling an AK-47, a Czech submachine gun, several pistols, €240,000 in cash and a kilogram of gold. So much for “eat the rich”.
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After complaining that investigators had used AI software developed by an Israeli company to analyse evidence, the defence suggested that a suspended sentence would be entirely sufficient and demanded Klette’s release from custody. Her lawyer admitted, however, that he had “no illusions” about the court granting this request. Addressing the three professional judges, he said: “We know that you are under some pressure here.” He therefore expected Klette to be convicted on the basis of “collective guilt”.
Leaving aside the masterclass in revolutionary victimhood, there are actual victims: one man is still unable to work. He had to endure shots being fired into his vehicle,” his lawyer explained in court, and he is, apparently, “in a shit state”.
Klette is facing up to 15 years in prison. And then there’s a second trial in the making: prosecutors accuse her of helping to prepare a car bomb outside a Deutsche Bank building and of firing shots at the US embassy in Bonn in the early 1990s. Real “revolutionary” activities, this time.
