The left-wing terrorist group, Red Army Faction, has left deep scars on the German psyche since the 1970s. Now investigators say they have arrested one of its members who has been on the run for decades.
An attack on a Frankfurt department store was one of the first violent crimes committed by the RAF in 1968Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/C. Hampel
Authorities have accused Klette of belonging to the left-wing terrorist organization in the 1990s, well after its heyday two decades earlier. The group dissolved in 1998. In the 20 years that followed, she is suspected of involvement in a series of robberies.
In all that time, Klette was nowhere to be found but on Germany's most-wanted list.
Police redoubled their efforts earlier this month to find Klette and two other "RAF retirees" — Burkhard Garweg, 55, and Ernst-Volker Staub, 69. The robberies allegedly served no political purpose but to finance their life in hiding. Germany's largest tabloid, Bild, was the first to report the arrest, which authorities later confirmed.
Germany confronts legacy of RAF attacks
While the RAF may have dissolved, Germany is still confronting its legacy. Between 1970 and 1998, the group killed, bombed and robbed — crimes that resulted in 30 deaths and over 200 injuries. Not all cases have been fully solved.
German terrorist Verena Becker breaks her silence (May 2012)
Future members of the Red Army Faction committed their first known attack on April 2, 1968, when two Frankfurt department stores were hit with arson.
1977 saw things come to a head with the so-called German Autumn: On September 5, with the founding members of the RAF already in prison, some of the younger generation abducted West German industrialist and former member of the Nazi SS Hanns Martin Schleyer in an attempt to force their cohorts' release.
On October 13, Palestinian terrorists sympathetic to the RAF cause hijacked a Lufthansa flight from Mallorca to Frankfurt, also calling for their release.
Terrorists Thorwald Proll, Horst Söhnlein, Andreas Baader und Gudrun Ensslin were charged with perpetrating the Frankfurt attack in 1968Image: picture-alliance/dpa
All attempts failed, and RAF members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe committed suicide in prison. Shortly after, on October 18, Schleyer was killed.
Agent provocateur Urbach 'played an important, albeit inconclusive, role'
It's as yet unclear what role Germany's intelligence services played when parts of the student protest movement radicalized in the late 1960s.
Peter Urbach, a former intelligence agent who died in 2011, was a central figure, the political scientist Wolfgang Kraushaar told DW in an interview a few years ago
"Urbach played an important, albeit inconclusive, role in the transformation of a small but hardcore part of the demonstration scene into militant groups," he said in 2018.
Urbach was involved in the angry reaction to the assassination attempt of student leader, Rudi Dutschke, who was critically injured by a right-wing extremist on April 11, 1968. The incident spurred 2,000 students to march on the Berlin headquarters of Axel Springer, the conservative German media conglomerate that owns Bild and carried divisive coverage of the Dutschke-led protests.
Urbach was there, Kraushaar said, handing out Molotov cocktails. He even showed them how to use them effectively.
"They first overturned these vehicles so that the gas tanks on the underside were more accessible and then ignited them there. Then they all went up in flames one after the other," said Kraushaar.
Films about far-left German terrorist group RAF
From bombings and kidnappings to murders, the far-left militant group Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorized West Germany in the 1970s. Learn more about the group and their acts from these films made about them.
Image: Axel Thünker, Haus der Geschichte, Bonn
The Baader-Meinhof Complex
Perhaps the best-known film about the RAF, "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" (2008) provides the terrorist group's back story and their actions based on a book of the same name written by Stefan Aust. The film received mixed reviews, with some critics claiming it mystified the RAF - in part due to a star cast including Moritz Bleibtreu as Andreas Baader and Martina Gedeck as Ulrike Meinhof.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Constantin Film
The harsh reality on the big screen
Whether it was the murder of business executive and industry representative Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the early RAF court trials or the hijacking of a Lufthansa airplane, the far-left militant group Red Army Faction (RAF) brought a wave of terror onto West Germany in the 1970s. Their actions have since inspired a number of filmmakers.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Collateral damage
In "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum," a young woman played by Angela Winkler has an affair with an alleged terrorist, drawing the attention of the police, the judiciary system and the press. The 1975 film by Volker Schlöndorrf, based on a book by Heinrich Böll, is a fictional story based on the left-wing terrorism that took place in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/H. Dürrwald
11-part reflection of the times
"'Germany in Autumn' is not a 'good' film, but an important one," wrote Die Zeit. The 1978 film, comprised of 11 episodes, brought together top German directors including Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. Reflecting the socio-political climate of West Germany in the 1970s, this film was also based on a work by Nobel Prize-winning author Heinrich Böll.
Image: Imago/United Archives
A question of violence
"Knife in the Head," starring Bruno Ganz as Dr. Hoffmann, was a 1978 blockbuster in West Germany. During a police raid, he is shot in the head but survives. But is he a victim of police brutality or terrorism? No one seems to know - not even Hoffmann, who loses his memory in the shooting.
Image: Filmfest München
Sisters on the front lines
Margarethe von Trotta's 1981 film "Marianne and Juliane" is a fictionalized account based on the biographies of two real-life sisters and pastor's daughters, Christiane and Gudrun Ensslin. Both are active in politics. While one is a quiet pragmatist, the other joins the RAF and is later found dead in her prison cell. The film helped von Trotta make her international breakthrough.
Image: Imago/United Archives
A 192-day trial
About 10 years after the Stammheim trial of RAF co-founders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, filmmaker Reinhard Hauff devoted a new film to the subject of RAF terrorism. Based on authentic protocols, "Stammheim" (1986) reconstructs the 192-day trial in 1975. The narrative is limited to the protocol reproduction and does not include any commentary.
Image: picture-alliance/BIOSKOP/Ronald Grant Archive
Life after RAF?
"The State I Am In" is a 2000 film by Christian Petzold about life after being part of the RAF. A couple who defied the German state in the 1970s lives underground with their daughter for years out of fear of being caught. While the parents are plagued by paranoia, the daughter decides to break out of hiding.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Pegasos
Crossing borders
Another story of life in hiding, this time in the former East Germany, is Volker Schlöndorff's "The Legend of Rita." In the film from 2000, left-wing terrorists go underground in East Germany in the 1970s with the help of the Stasi. After German reunification, their cover is blown and they are shot and killed while trying to escape. Several RAF members really did attempt to hide in East Germany.
Image: picture-alliance/Berliner Zeitung
A true story of two deaths
The documentary film released in 2001 by director Andres Veiel, "Black Box BRD" offers a counter-narrative in which surprising parallels open up. On the one side there is Alfred Herrhausen, spokesperson for Deutsche Bank's board of directors, who was murdered by the RAF. On the other side is RAF member Wolfgang Grams, whose violent death also raises questions.
Image: X Verleih
The lawyers behind the far-left
In "Die Anwälte - Eine deutsche Geschichte" (The Lawyers - A German Story) from 2009, the careers of Otto Schily, Hans-Christian Ströbele and Horst Mahler are traced from their days as attorneys for the left-wing political opposition in the 1970s to the present. Schily (right) became interior minister; Ströbele (left) joined the Greens party; Mahler is a right-wing extremist and Holocaust denier.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Kalaene
A complex love triangle
Andres Veiel made his feature film debut in 2011, in "If Not Us, Who?" The story of an emotional and sexual love triangle follows RAF co-founder Gudrun Ensslin and Bernward Vesper, son of a Nazi poet, as they fall in love, get married and have a child. But then Ensslin leaves the family and follows Andreas Baader into the RAF underground.
Image: Markus Jans/zero one film
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For him, Urbach was a provocateur who had significant influence and possibly had the implicit support of the Berlin state government and Western occupying powers.
"In encouraging the violence, they wanted to get particularly militant-minded demonstrators to discredit themselves and others, but ultimately the entire left-leaning movement."
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RAF then and now
Decades after the bloody peak of RAF terror, investigators hope Klette's arrest will reveal new clues and solve old mysteries. They have already shown how serious they are at working to keep the trail from going cold.
In February, a major police operation took place at the central train station in Wuppertal, in western Germany, after a passenger reported seeing Klette's accomplice, Staub.
It turned out to be a false alarm, but not before a person was detained and hundreds of special police officers were deployed.
Staub and Garweg remain at large. Klette was found to be in possession of an Italian passport, living a false identity. Investigators finally caught up to her, they said, with a fingerprint match. A search of her apartment yielded a collection of ammunition.
This article was originally written in German. An early version was first published in 2018.
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