A former member of the Baader-Meinhof group, also known as the Red Army Faction, has gone on trial in Germany for robberies she allegedly committed during three decades hiding in broad daylight.
Daniela Klette, the last female member of the far-left terror network still on the run before her arrest, appeared before a court in the north-central city of Celle on Tuesday charged with 14 criminal offences including armed robbery and attempted murder.
In her opening statement, Klette hit out at what she claimed was a politically-motivated trial, and vowed to stay true to the fight against “capitalism and the patriarchy”.
Police detained the 66-year-old last February in her flat in Berlin’s gentrified Kreuzberg district where, unsuspected by her neighbours, she had walked her dog, danced capoeira and reportedly tutored schoolchildren in maths. Investigators found an anti-tank grenade and a Kalashnikov in her flat.
The RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, was responsible for a campaign of domestic terror in the 1970s and 1980s that included dozens of murders.
With Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg, who are still on the run, Klette belonged to the so-called third generation of the group. It disbanded in the 1990s but the trio are alleged to have financed their lives in hiding through at least a dozen armed robberies in northern Germany.
The trial will cover Klette’s alleged involvement in the robberies but not the group’s terror-related activities, which are expected to be covered by a further indictment. Klette is suspected of being involved in terror attacks on Deutsche Bank in 1990, the US embassy in Bonn in 1991, and a prison in Hessen in 1993.
The trial is being held before Verden lower regional court, but because of security concerns the proceedings are taking place in the high-security building of Celle upper regional court.
Klette appeared relaxed as she entered the courtroom wearing a black sweater, her grey hair tied back in a bun, occasionally smiling and giving a thumbs-up sign, Agence France-Presse reported.
In her opening statement Klette told the court that the trial was not being conducted normally, German media reported. “The trial is being conducted with political calculation,” she said. “So what can I expect?”
“It’s about settling the history of the resistance,” she added, adding that she would not allow herself to be swayed in her rejection of “capitalism and the patriarchy”.
A protest of about 50 people from leftwing and far-left groups gathered outside the court in solidarity with Klette on Tuesday morning, the regional public broadcaster NDR reported.
Lawyers for Klette went on to call for the proceedings to be dismissed and the arrest warrant lifted, NDR reported, arguing that fair and due process was not possible.
Klette is alleged to have been a driver for a spate of armed robberies spanning three decades.
The Verden public prosecutor’s office has alleged that in 2015 the group drove to a supermarket car park near Bremen to rob an armoured car holding €1m (£835,000). Klette is said to have carried a “non-functional RPG-7 anti-tank gun and a submachine gun”, while Garweg is said to have shot an automatic rifle at the window of the passenger door of the vehicle from close range.
When Klette was arrested last year she allegedly texted Garweg, buying him time to run. He, too, is thought to have been living in Berlin under an alias.
One of Klette’s lawyers, Ulrich von Klinggräff, in an interview with the leftwing newspaper taz last week, criticised the trial for conflating Klette’s alleged involvement in the robberies with “completely arbitrary and unsubstantiated allegations about the RAF”. He cited the heavy security measures in the court and repeated references to the RAF in the indictment, which runs to 600 pages.
Von Klinggräff said Klette was “quite nervous” about the trial but would “approach it with a fighting spirit”.
The court has scheduled hearings until the end of the year.
“Yes, it’s likely that Ms Klette had something to do with the robberies,” said Undine Weyers, another of Klette’s lawyers, in the taz interview. “But there’s not a single piece of evidence that she was at any of the crime scenes or what role she played.”
