Correspondent in Berlin,
A new part of the veil has been opened on the leaden years of the former West Germany with the arrest, Monday evening, of one of the last members of the Red Army Faction on the run.
Daniela Klette, 66, who had fled into hiding after the RAF self-disbanded in 1998, was arrested in Berlin, in the former alternative district of Kreuzberg, in the company of a man whose identity was n has not yet been revealed.
His two main acolytes at the time, Burkhard Garweg, 55, and Ernst-Volker Staub, 69, could fall in the process, investigators hope, and thus close the page on a decade of far-left terrorism that left 23 dead in its wake.
“The fact that a terrorist must now answer for her actions before a court is an important and clear sign of the rule of law,”
Kathrin Heike Wahlman, Minister of Justice, welcomed Tuesday at a press conference. the Interior of Lower Saxony, the state which is co-investigating the file.
A highly publicized dragnet, made possible by a few diffuse traces left by Daniela Klette during her last years on the run.
A wanted notice launched 10 days ago
Tuesday evening, only the portrait of a thirty-year-old brunette remained in circulation, dating from the end of the 1980s. We can see the face of an ultra-radical political activist before the latter transformed into an almost anonymous figure of organized crime. , forced into robberies and heists to ensure their livelihood.
The corresponding wanted notice including his two accomplices was launched only ten days ago for a reward of 150,000 euros relating to at least six crimes, including attempted murder, committed in particular in Lower Saxony between 1999 and 2016.
Undated photos of Burkhard Garweg, Ernst-Volker Staub and Daniela Klette, all former members of the Red Army Faction HANDOUT / AFP
“Over the past nine years, we have opened different doors, and not only in Germany. And we also suffered setbacks until our colleagues, after receiving information, showed up at his door on Monday and verified his identity. She did not put up any resistance,”
summarized the head of the Verden public prosecutor’s office, Clemens Eimterbäumer.
Prosecuted for these six offenses, Daniela Klette faces a maximum sentence of fifteen years in detention.
Bombings and assassinations
His terrorist past could be more difficult to investigate.
The person concerned is accused of a bomb attack perpetrated in 1993 against the Weiterstadt detention center, which did not cause any casualties.
She is also wanted for a failed bombing of a Deutsche Bank building in 1990 and an automatic weapons attack a year later on the US embassy in Bonn.
With Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof as its main founders, the Red Army Faction carried out the first bombings in the early 1970s, at the time of the Vietnam War, directed in particular against American military buildings.
Visiting them in 1974 at the high-security Stammheim district, near Stuttgart, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre sympathized with Baader's fate.
And drew a parallel, considered outrageous across the Rhine, between the Nazi tortures and those inflicted on the group.
Their members were found dead in their cells in 1976 and 1977, triggering a new cycle of reprisals, called the German Autumn, whose protagonists were able to shelter under the umbrella of the GDR.
Significantly, the president of German employers, Hans-Martin Schleyer, was kidnapped and then assassinated in 1977. For their part, Daniela Klette and her two comrades belong to the third and last generation of the RAF, during which the boss of Deutsche Bank, Alfred Herrhausen was assassinated on November 30, 1989, three weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“This generation committed several assassinations, but many of them remain unsolved to this day, because their perpetrators tried so hard to cover up all traces. Their predecessors, on the other hand, had left fingerprints, stamps, signs of typewriters,”
explains
Klaus Pflieger, former Württemberg prosecutor and RAF specialist, to
Figaro .
Gray areas to clarify
Among these assassinations was probably that of Carsten Rohwedder in 1991, the boss of the Treuhand.
This organization responsible for the liquidation of industrial assets of the former GDR was reviled in East Germany.
“These were simple punitive actions against leaders and representatives of the German economy.
Then their members understood that all this no longer made any sense and they proclaimed the dissolution,”
continues Klaus Pflieger.
The probable leader of the group, Wolfgang Grams, committed suicide in 1993 to escape arrest.
His close comrade Birgit Hogefeld served an 18-year prison sentence before retraining in publishing, living since then in Germany in complete discretion.
In the fog surrounding reunification, Daniela Klette, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, on the other hand, disappeared, living off robberies and complicity, until Monday evening.
It is this episode and the one which preceded it that the investigators will try to clarify.
On condition that those concerned agree to violate the law of silence, which has always been supposed to prevail within the RAF.