The jailing of Germany’s most wanted woman

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, on the run for 30 years, the long tale of Germany's most extreme militant group.

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0:58To 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 neighbourhood whose German might not have been so strong.

1:33So, you know, by many accounts, she was a quite good neighbour. But Claudia was not who she seemed. In fact, that wasn't even her real name, which was Daniela Cleta. 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.

2:14For 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.

2:35They were anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and violent.

2:46You 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?

3:20From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus. Whigs, guns and gold. How Germany's most wanted woman was finally brought to justice.

3:37Deborah Cole, you are The Guardian's Berlin correspondent. Welcome to Today in Focus. So Daniela Cletter 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 third generation of the Red Army faction, also known as the Baden-Meinhof Gang.

4:16And so when she was captured after three decades on the run, it raised a lot of questions about 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 organisation found as well. Can you tell us some of the details of where she was arrested and what they found? So, I mean, Daniela Cletta managed to hide in plain sight for decades.

4:54And 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.

5:18The police burst into our apartment and they find everything that you would need for, you know, 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.

6:00Could you just tell us what she was charged with after she was arrested? Yeah, well, you know, the armed robberies that she was involved in over these last years were intended to fund her life underground, as well as the lives of two accomplices who are still on the run, who have still managed to evade capture by the police. I mean, I think it's important to say that for all the kind of cinematic qualities, and there was over the decades, the RAF also had this kind of glamorous quality that attracted a lot of people. But these were not, you know, victimless crimes. I mean, there were about 30 people who were killed by the RAF and more than 200 people were injured.

6:47And even in these actions that this group, this final corps of the three people, Daniela Cleta and her two accomplices, the crimes that they committed were not victimless either. I mean, they were armed robberies of, you know, armored trucks carrying cash and of supermarkets. And one of the security guards who was held at gunpoint apparently has not been able to work since that day and was so traumatized by what happened. So the group has blood on its hands.

7:27Jason Burke, not only are you the international security correspondent of The Guardian, but you're also the author of The Revolutionists, the story of the extremists who hijacked the 1970s, which delves into the fascinating but very shocking history of the Red Army faction. so I wanted to ask you first could you take me back to the era of the late 60s early 1970s Germany and West Berlin in particular what was the country going through at this time and how did that help shape this group's driving ideology? I think you have to go quite broad to start with and look at that moment in the late 1960s across the whole of the developed world in fact across much of the global south as well and this is a moment of real mobilization militancy activism radicalism and a revolutionary project that was really reaching many many millions of people tens of millions possibly hundreds of millions of people now in west germany you have a particular situation that leads to a particular form of violence if you like And to an extent, it's positioned on the front line of the Cold War, but very much it's more it's about the historical experience of Germany and about young West Germans now in their late teens or in their 20s, beginning to ask very serious, very difficult questions about the Nazi crimes.

9:02that, in fact, many of their teachers, judges, senior politicians, sometimes even parents may have been involved in. And tell me specifically about the Red Army faction. How did they form? Who were they? What did they want?

9:21So you have this wave of agitation in West Germany in the mid to late 60s.

9:30you have big protests on the streets what they would see is liberation struggles across the world so that would include the vietnamese against the americans the palestinians often causes in africa and out of all these protests came a radical fringe that decide that the rest haven't gone far enough and that the only answer is violence.

10:05Now in this case you had two young people, a 30 year old English literature graduate called Gudrun Enslin, quite impressive organiser and a really steely determined will you had her boyfriend who was none of the above a 24 year old called andreas barda who was a kind of art school dropout and never really done much in his life but was something of a a bragger and a charmer and good-looking the two fell in love and they decided they were going to commit a major arson attack on a department store really to sort of protest the American war in Vietnam they get caught almost immediately because they're not very good and they make a number of really basic errors they are sentenced to a three-year jail sentence on appeal they're released and they decide they're just going to go on the lam basically and they go on this big tour of France and Italy get back to West Germany.

11:18Barda gets caught again and this time they decide they're going to bust him out of prison or at least Enslin decides she's going to bust him out of prison and to do that she calls on a number of other activists and this is really the moment where what is to become the Red Army faction gels.

11:49So they sound kind of quite amateurish, really, don't they? But even though they're doing these, you know, extraordinary things, and they do manage to actually bust Bada out of prison with the help, I understand, of a journalist who joins them, Ulrika Meinhof. But when does that tip over? When do they kind of become more extreme? Well, the first thing that happens is they go off to Jordan to get, supposedly to get trained and to get a bit of a break, to get away after this moment of breaking Bada out of prison. And about a dozen very radical activists go out to Amman to find a Palestinian group called Fatah, which is Yasser Arafat's major organisation.

12:34And that kind of was this extraordinary episode where they thought they were going to get trained in urban guerrilla warfare. And it was a fiasco in the end because the cultural differences were just way too wide between their hosts and the visitors, the RAF. They want to sleep literally and figuratively together, women and men in the same tents, and their hosts are having none of this. There are arguments over how much ammunition they can use. Bader refuses to take his velvet trousers off on the assault course. I mean, you could not make it up. And in the end, they all end up back in West Germany.

13:12And what they can do is bank robberies. So they think they're going to get some funds through the bank robbers to launch their revolutionary war. They do the bank robberies and some of them go wrong. And policemen start dying. And then some of their own people start dying. And that moves everything into a new place. They bomb a right wing media organization, cause significant casualties. They're bombing US installations, military installations, similarly attacks on police. and the reaction is huge within West Germany, possibly too huge. I mean, it may have been a semi-hysterical reaction, but given the actual threat they posed.

13:53But, you know, you've got roadblocks going up everywhere. You've got police everywhere. You've got wanted posters. I mean, it is the biggest crisis in West German democracy since the war, really. The German police have launched a massive search for the terrorists. Each day, all over the country, there are hundreds of random checks and sudden raids. The police say that their operation will continue unabated until the suspects are caught. Today in Germany, if you don't call the Bader-Meinhof group a gang, you're easily marked down as a terrorist sympathiser. And some politicians even demand that those who fail to speak out against terror should not escape the state's censure.

14:29There's a lot of sympathy for these kind of activists at the beginning. It's when the RAF start using violence to kill people and people start dying, that a lot of formerly sympathetic people on the left decide they've gone way too far. And that happens quite fast. And how did this all end for them? It goes wrong after about a couple of years, and they get caught successively, the main three leaders. So Eurika Minov, very interestingly, is betrayed by a left-wing teacher who is asked to shelter a couple of unidentified individuals. He has a pretty good idea of who they will be and he makes that phone call that means that eventually the police turn up and they pick up Ulrike Meinhof.

15:17Gudrun Nslin is caught when she's trying to buy some new clothes for a disguise and leaves her handgun in her jacket pocket when she goes into a changing room and the shop assistant picks up the jacket and thinks that is heavy. and Bader is caught when he is driving the wrong way down a street at 4am in a stolen Porsche Targa gets noticed and that leads to shootout that he gets wounded and he gets picked up then

16:00and and that's the end of the active on the street outside prison role of the leadership the the main three leaders Ulrike Meinhof commits suicide in prison in 76 but what then happens is you have a four to five year period where you have a new generation, the second generation of the Red Army faction, who are basically dedicated to effectively the use of violence, terrorism, to get their leaders out of prison. In 77, after a spectacular few months, in one instance particularly extraordinary West Germans when a plane was hijacked. Which really shocked people. That all fails. The government don't make any concessions.

17:04And in 1977, Gudrun Ensslin and Andres Bader kill themselves. And the second generation then kind of fragments and splinters. In the days of the authorities, Andreas Bader shot himself in the early morning hours, and this was with a rifle of 7.65. Also Jan Karl Raspe had in his cellar... It is the day of the burial of three of the founders of German terrorism. In the coffins lie the bodies of Andreas Bader, Gudrun Enselin and Jan Karl Raspe, the first leaders of the Red Army faction, which seven years ago declared war on the state. But their deaths, pronounced as suicide by the government, declared a murder by their friends do not bring terrorism to an end and Germany knows it.

17:56So it's a tragic end for all of them then. I mean, fast forward to Danielle Klete is the Red Army faction member. She was considered part of the third generation of members. What was her generation up to? The third generation is really the kind of long, long, long tale of what the earlier generations were doing. I mean, it was much, much less effective for fewer people involved. By that stage, the struggle was over, in inverted commas. And most importantly, people had moved on. You know, nobody's calling for revolution any longer. It sounded like an anachronism, even by the early 80s. people have moved on to other causes, whether it was specific identity groups, asking for specific things, whether it was environmentalism, the campaign against nuclear weapons was very big, except for people like Daniel Kleta, who carried on, and there were a few of them.

18:56Again, the kind of extremist fringe of an extremist fringe of a broader movement.

19:13Now to an arrest here in Berlin that has sent shockwaves across Germany. Police have arrested a 65-year-old woman who has been on the run for more than 30 years as a suspected member of a far-left militant group that terrorised... Deborah, can you tell us how she was eventually discovered after all of this time? So Germany, with its legacy of the Nazi period and then also East Germany's communist period, has very strict regulations when it comes to data protection and any sort of overreach by the state, even when trying to tackle things like violent extremism and terrorism, the authorities are hemmed in by these restrictions.

19:57And so doing things like using facial recognition software to just sort of, you know, run wanted people through the system and try to match them up against any, for example, press photos, is not on in Germany. You would need a warrant, and you would need cause to assume that the person you're looking for, you know, had been, for example, at this event. She was hiding in plain sight. She was out at, every year in Kreuzberg, there's something called the Carnival of Cultures. And this was founded about 30 years ago to celebrate Berlin's diversity. So she joined that carnival almost every year. Now this year the carnival attracted 1.1 million people so she was out dancing in the streets and it also attracts a lot of press and so those press photographs might have been the thing that It actually sealed her fate.

21:00An investigative journalist from Bellingcat used this facial recognition software and used AI to do just a search like that and managed to find a press photo of her at this carnival of cultures. Now, German authorities have been a little bit cagey about acknowledging whether they would have, you know, used that research at all and getting on her trail. But the fact was that soon after this podcast came out, you know, months later, she was arrested. And Daniela was Germany's most wanted woman. But what about the other members of the RAF? What happened to them? One of her alleged accomplices, Burkhard Gawig, has apparently also been cited in Berlin.

21:50There have been all of these more or less dubious sightings of both him and this other accomplice of hers, Ernst Volker Staub. and when the police went into her apartment they found dna evidence of both of them including on an electric toothbrush so the three of them have apparently been in you know quite close contact over all these years too which of course would also be fraught with risk when there are three of you you're you're going to be that much more visible than if there's only one and there's another sort of, you know, cinematic wrinkle to all of this is apparently the police burst into her apartment and, you know, immediately begin finding some of the evidence that she is who they think she is.

22:37And then she asked them if before she's carted away, she could just, you know, go to the bathroom briefly. So she goes into her bathroom and what does she do? There's a cell phone in there and she manages to send a message to Bokad Gavig and warn him that she has been captured and that they need to know this. So this, you know, kind of solidarity, you know, held to the very end.

23:09And lots has been written about, as you said, that more politically motivated activities that Cletta and her accomplices carried out. But she wasn't actually charged with any crimes related to that, was she? It was more about recent activities after the dissolution of the RAF to do with aggravated robbery, kidnapping and possession of military weapons. So membership of a terrorist organization in Germany has a statute of limitations of 20 years. and because that time had ran out by the time she was captured, she was not charged with that. That has been slightly controversial among particularly conservative and more right-leaning media outlets.

23:54And then she's also facing charges. She could probably go on trial as early as later this year for a series of attacks in the 1990s. that this was while the RAF was still active. And there were attacks against a prison, against a bank. And also, they apparently strafed the US, then US embassy in Bonn with automatic gunfire. And so she could still have to answer to those charges as well, probably before a court in Frankfurt. Can you take us to the trial which began in March 2025? and tell us what were the arguments that were presented by the defense and prosecution in that case? Well, it was interesting, you know, she's, Daniela Cleta is a quite, you know, she's a slight figure.

24:47She's now got silver hair of, you know, a woman of 67. And yet she cut such a defiant figure in the dock in this high security courtroom. And so, you know, she was railing even, at the end against capitalism and the patriarchy and that she was going to stay true to the cause of fighting both. And both outside the court and then inside the courtroom, supporters stayed by her side. It was a few dozen people, but they were quite militant and vocal. And then when it came to her conviction, they were shouting and booing at the judges and pronouncing their solidarity with her. So, you know, she does still inspire within a, you know, maybe small but very vocal scene, a lot of allegiance and, you know, perhaps a romanticization of the life that she has led.

25:50Now, the prosecution, of course, said, you know, these were not victimless crimes. She She broke the law repeatedly and brazenly in an effort not to advance a political cause, but to avoid capture by the police for her and her accomplices. And so they pushed for the maximum 15 years in prison. The court ended up stopping short of that. They did not convict her of attempted murder. But, you know, she got a 13-year sentence, which, you know, as German sentences go, is quite high.