The jailing of Germany’s most wanted woman
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Who is Daniela Klette and what is her background?
This is The Guardian.
Today, on the run for 30 years, the long tale of Germany's most extreme militant group.
To her friends and neighbours, there was nothing extraordinary about Claudia Yvonne.
And many of them spoke about her quite fondly. I mean, they said that she was, you know, a bit reserved and taciturn.
The silver-haired 67-year-old had for years lived in the same apartment in a bohemian neighbourhood of West Berlin and had a normal, ordinary life. She had a dog. She went shopping. She even had an interesting hobby as an active member of a local capoeira dance group.
You know, there were these kind of touching stories of her tutoring kids in the neighborhood whose German might not have been so strong. So, you know, by many accounts, she was a quite good neighbor.
But Claudia was not who she seemed. In fact, that wasn't even her real name, which was Daniela Kletter.
I mean, I think they were able to evade police as long as they did, was that they kept their circle of people who were informed of who they were very, very small. They didn't trust a lot of people. So even, you know, her direct neighbors didn't have any indication that she was Germany's most wanted woman.
For 30 years, Daniela had been on the run from the authorities, escaping justice for violent crimes committed as a core member of West Germany's most infamous left-wing militant group, the Red Army Faction, or the RAF. They were anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and violent.
You have to try and understand the roots of German terrorism. And to understand that, you have to listen for the echoes of Germany's past.
She was one of the last to be found and has forced Germany to confront once again a painful era in its post-war history. And at a time when political extremism appears to be on the rise, what resonance does her story still have today? From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, wigs, guns and gold. How Germany's most wanted woman was finally brought to justice. Deborah Cole, you are The Guardian's Berlin correspondent. Welcome to Stay in Focus. So Daniela Kletter was finally sentenced just over a week ago. But first, I would like you to take us to Germany, to Berlin, back to that moment in 2024 when the news broke that she had been arrested. How big was that news for people in Berlin?
It was huge news for people in Berlin and in Germany. I mean, keep in mind, you know, she was Germany's most wanted woman for the better part of three decades. And she was probably the most recognizable face of this, you know, third generation of the Red Army faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. And so when she was captured after three decades on the run, it raised a lot of questions about, you know, the competence of the authorities, the fact that she was living in central Berlin and they didn't manage to find her. And it also revived a lot of painful and quite divisive feelings in German society about the legacy of the RAF.
And when she was arrested in her apartment, there were the kind of remnants of her time in that organization found as well. Can you tell us some of the details of where she was arrested and what they found?
So, I mean, Daniela Kletta managed to hide in plain sight for decades. And she lived in an apartment in Kreuzberg, in that sort of bohemian part of the capital, right near where the death strip of the Berlin Wall had been. And in this apartment, you know, a lot of times when people talk about the RAF, they talk about this sort of cinematic quality. And it really was like out of a Cold War thriller. The police burst into our apartment and they find everything that you would need for decades living underground in the heart of the German capital. So they found more than 240,000 euros in cash. They found a stash of gold. They found wigs and other disguises that presumably had been used during the armed robberies, but possibly in other circumstances when she was out in public.
They found a sort of fake bazooka-like gun that was also used in at least one of the armed robberies that she took part in.
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