Former Red Army Faction members linked to botched robbery
DNA of three members of disbanded leftwing German terror group found at scene of attempted armoured car heist

Three on-the-run militants from Germany’s far-left terrorist group Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, have been linked to two armed robberies by their DNA.

The genetic traces of ex-RAF militants Ernst-Volker Staub, 58, Daniela Klette, 57, and Burkhard Garweg, 47, were found in getaway cars used in two botched attempts to rob security vans in north Germany in June and December 2015, police said

The first attack took place on 6 June last year in the car park of a supermarket in Gross Mackenstedt near Bremen, when three masked people dressed in camouflage outfits and armed with two assault rifles and a grenade launcher brought a security van to a halt by blocking it with their car. But bullets they fired at the vehicle lodged in a tyre and the van’s armour as well as smashing a windscreen. The two security guards inside were uninjured and refused to move. Attempts by the trio to open the doors failed and they fled empty-handed.

On 28 December in Wolfsburg, once more in a supermarket carpark, the same trio tried and failed again to ambush a security van.

The three are among the so-called “third generation” of the RAF. The group was a byword for terror and violence in Germany in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s when it killed 30 people and injured many more as part of its anti-capitalist, anti-establishment campaign.

The third generation, which was behind the organisation’s final push before it announced its dissolution in 1998, is held responsible for the murders of German bank chief Alfred Herrhausen in 1989, Siemens manager Karl Heinz Beckurts in 1986, and the head of the Treuhandanstalt, the trust responsible for the privatisation of state-owned property from East Germany, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder in 1991.

Staub, Klette and Garweg are believed to have been directly involved in a 1993 bomb attack on a prison in Weiterstadt in Hesse after traces of their DNA were found on a scrap of carpet discovered there.

The June robbery attempt was featured in the popular TV programme Aktenzeichen XY Ungelöst (File Reference XY Unsolved) but until now police had failed to come up with any leads.

According to the broadcaster NDR, the breakthrough came when investigators discovered face masks in cars involved in both incidents on which they found the DNA traces of the gang.

Staub, Klette and Garweg’s DNA had previously been found at the scene of an armed hold-up in Duisburg in 1999, which was similar to the Gross Mackenstedt incident. On that occasion they were successful, managing to escape with more than 1m deutschmarks after holding up a security van with a rocket-propelled grenade, a submachine gun and an assault rifle. Helmets and balaclavas found at the scene provided police with DNA traces.

The RAF declared in a written statement in 1998 that it had disbanded. But several of its former members remain on the run and like Staub, Kette and Garweg, are still on the Federal Criminal Police’s wanted list.

Staub was convicted of membership of a terrorist organisation in 1986, but went underground soon after being released from a four year prison sentence. Police believe he and Daniela Klette were a couple. She was part of an RAF support group in 1978, and later joined the so-called third generation of the RAF. Garweg became radicalised in Hamburg in the 1980s and is often cited by RAF experts as proof of the cross-generational nature of the organisation, as at 47, he was not even alive when RAF founders Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin started their revolutionary campaign.

Tens of former terrorists have been on the run for decades and as well as being dependent on RAF sympathisers for hideaways and support, look to armed robberies as a vital source of income rather than as a continuation of their urban guerrilla activities, police say.

Experts say the two failed robberies in relatively close succession are a sign both of the fugitives’ growing desperation to obtain money, as well as of their waning abilities as a criminal force. Police insiders have told German media they believe they are close to capturing the trio.

The fascination in the phenomenon of ageing, on-the-run, former RAF terrorists, has spawned a number of novels, films and crime dramas in recent years in which typically their erstwhile romantic exploits disintegrate into hit and miss attempts at survival by ageing and crotchety pensioners whose dreams of revolution have long-since expired.

Appendix

Berlin, Germany: Message of Comrade Daniela Klette at the 30th International Rosa Luxemburg Conference

Date: 11th of January, 2025

Source: Dark Nights.
<darknights.noblogs.org/post/2025/01/30/berlin-germany-message-of-comrade-daniela-klette-at-the-30th-international-rosa-luxemburg-conference>

Political letter from RAF prisoner of war Daniela Klette from the Vechta Women’s Maximum Security Prison, at the 30th International Rosa Luxemburg Conference held on 11 January in Berlin on the topic: The last battle – how dangerous is capitalism in decline.

Dear participants of the Rosa Luxemburg conference,

Dear comrades,

I greet you today from the prison in Vechta. I was arrested almost a year ago after decades of living in illegality.

I am facing years of legal proceedings on charges of participation in armed expropriations. In addition, ‘justice’ is pursuing another trial against me on the charge of participating as a urban guerrilla fighter against capitalism and imperialism.

I was 17 years old when the Vietnamese liberation struggle crushed American imperialism. This incredible victory was achieved with worldwide solidarity – despite the napalm, despite the huge military machine that stood in the way of the liberation movement, and despite the massacres of the Vietnamese population perpetrated by the US army with the help and complicity of the West, especially Germany.

I was 16 years old when I was informed that a man on hunger strike against the torture of isolation had been murdered. It was Holger Meins who actively resisted the conditions of confinement and was murdered by the prison system, through deliberate malnutrition – during state forced feeding – and a complete refusal to provide medical assistance.

It was the era of liberation projects and anti-colonial struggles in many countries: like the Black Panthers against racist oppression rebelling in the USA, or the FSLN in Nicaragua against the dictatorship. I was already beginning to understand what humanity had to expect from capitalism and imperialism. Yes, I saw myself as part of the global movements fighting against exploitation and oppression, against capitalism and patriarchy, and against war and militarism.

Justice is now negotiating my guilt in the legal sense. For me, there is no question of guilt, but there is the following question, which has mobilised and continues to mobilise millions of people: how do we overturn the correlations that reproduce world war, displacement, exploitation, patriarchal and racist oppression, poverty and total ecological destruction?

The powerful of the world, struggling to maintain their power, are preparing for total war. Society is characterized by ever-increasing poverty, militarization and a growing shift to the right. Capitalism is heading towards ecological collapse: the state of the world today makes it abundantly clear that the questions about how to overcome these conditions were and remain legitimate and are now more necessary than ever to be answered. These questions concern us all and can only be answered collectively and by mass movements. I would love to be with you and work collectively on these issues, but state repression and the state’s will to condemn all resistance from below does not allow it.

No one who is imprisoned as a member of subversive and revolutionary movements is persecuted simply because of their alleged or actual actions. We are condemned to years of misery in prison because of the state’s insistence on delegitimizing the history of revolutionary struggles and preventing the struggles of the future. This happens to me, just as it happened to Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier in the US, to the captured anarchists in Greece – Marianna, Dimitris, Nikos, Dimitra – and many other political prisoners worldwide.

In this sense, the legal proceedings against me are proceedings against liberationist, radical and anti-capitalist resistance. My trial is about to begin shortly. I would be very happy if those of you who can attend it, so that it becomes clear that this trial is not a trial against me, but against all those who are engaged in the question of overthrowing capitalism. Every form of solidarity is welcome!

I wish you every success and, yes, I hope you have a lot of fun at this year’s Rosa Luxemburg conference!

Solidarity, fighting and warm greetings to all of you.

Daniela Klette

Women’s maximum security prison Vechta

Martin (Burkhard Garweg), Underground RAF Member: Greetings from Illegality

Date: 2024/12/22

Source: Translated by Abolition Media, original source:
<revlinkeaugsburg.noblogs.org/post/2024/12/21/leseempfehlung-gruesse-aus-der-illegalitaet>

To family, friends, comrades, allies, Wagenplatz residents. To all those who want to deal with my and our view.

Legal, illegal, don’t give a damn. On February 26 of this year, Daniela Klette was arrested in Berlin. Journalists, who had willingly offered themselves as auxiliary police officers and helped to supplement the increasingly authoritarian state with the state and social community of investigators and informers, had used AI technology to track down images of Daniela on the Internet. The historical merit of these podcast journalistic denunciators will have been to have provided proof at the right moment of the alleged necessity of biometric control through facial recognition on the way to a totalitarian control state.

Deception of the public

The subsequent police manhunt against Volker Staub and me has since been marked by lies and agitation. Police and bourgeois media say that we are violent criminals or terrorists who would not shy away from killing for money. The house in which Daniela had lived, like the neighboring houses, was evacuated because of allegedly dangerous explosives. Measures of mobilization of the population for search and psychological warfare operations began. It is now known that a grenade and a bazooka found were dummies. The police must have known that from the beginning. This whole action over several days was an operation to deceive and manipulate the public.

The continuous propagation of our violence and dangerousness, the searches of houses and Wagenplatz in martial form, armored vehicles and MP armed police officers as if war had broken out, controls and arrests are nothing more than the assertion of the necessity of police militarization and a staging to mobilize the population for the search.

Above all, however, they are concerned with depoliticizing and denouncing the history of the fundamental opposition – the history of the historical attempt to contribute to the liberation from the violence of capitalism, which emerged from the resistance of the (19)68 movement and was linked to the worldwide revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles.

26 years ago, the urban guerrilla project in the form of the RAF ended. However, for us, who were persecuted as militants of the RAF, life did not end in illegality. The image that they are trying to create describes a violently marauding band of robbers who are dangerous to the general public and also ready to kill – and only for money. For us, however, it is out of the question to use violence against people to kill or physically injure for money. Any traumatization of employees of cash offices or cash transporters is to be regretted. There is no reason to believe the police or judicial apparatus, because they are guided by delegitimizing the fundamental opposition and by creating a climate in which state violence and repression seem justified.

“Violence is the foundation of bourgeois society: in the misery of its penal system, in the ghettos below bourgeois everyday life, in the militarization of “internal security”, in its relationship of exploitation” (Peter Brückner 1976)

State violence affects many – the poor, the exploited, the marginalized. It is directed against those who protest or against those who defend themselves against this normal state of affairs and do not accept this state of affairs as a natural given. These are those who demonstrate against the genocide in Gaza and against a German government that supplies the weapons for it, and are exposed to the authoritarian-violent mixture of police truncheons, capture, threats from the judiciary, threats of deportation, loss of jobs and secret service surveillance, or whose demonstrations are banned altogether. It is those who occupy universities and are beaten down by police violence. From this perspective, the radicalization of state and society that is emerging with the crisis can only be countered by looking for ways to find an alternative to the system. The social question, the resistance to war and militarization at home and abroad, the resistance against the ecological destruction of the planet by capitalism and the organization of solidarity-based internationalism necessarily mark this path together.

In the West’s struggle against the imminent loss of its global hegemony, the rulers are relying on militarization and planning war up to the dimension of World War III.

We have arrived in the age of an increasingly authoritarian state. An undoubtedly threatening social situation. But it also speaks to an increased degree of instability of capitalism. In its greed for profit, it needs the possibilities of accumulation, which is becoming increasingly difficult to produce. It staggers from crisis to crisis. It is the age of wars, social upheavals and reactionary reflection on people and nation. But it also suggests that things could slip away from the rulers and that the question arises: What is to be done? Will class struggles develop in the future that question and combat the conditions of exploitation and oppression in collective processes? The questions of how a social transformation can be achieved are existential and more topical than ever in the age of social and economic erosion, increasing military renegotiation of power and ecological irreversible destruction of the planet.

The circle closes

The revolutionary concepts of history have not been able to provide the answers to overcoming capitalism. Nevertheless, we are fundamentally faced with the same questions under changed conditions.

The state relies on division

Illegality, solidarity and “terrorists”

We have met many people in decades of illegality. Friends, allies, neighbors, my Wagenplatz roommates and many more. For many years I lived with people who did not know what kind of history I came from. As an illegal, it is not possible to talk about one’s own illegality. Please forgive that.

With the end of this time together came repression for them. Wagenplatz and house searches: local war simulations – something I never wanted, but in the end was no longer in my hands. The revolutionary and emancipatory struggles are followed by repression – and so it will be until the struggle for emancipation triumphs over injustice. We are part of the history of worldwide rebellions that have existed since there has been domination and slaves. Which has existed since patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism have been the evil of humanity. From this perspective, the responsibility for repression lies with the rulers and no one else. Repression is an instrument of domination. From my point of view – and that would be our view – there is only one answer to this: solidarity.

Unite against today’s repression against Daniela!

Create (counter-) publicity! Show solidarity!

We are the way we were and are the way many have come to know us during the long period of illegality. Disputes about violent relations – patriarchal violence, poverty and racism – like many other things – found an echo in encounters and friendships with people during this time and are part of my and our lives. Much of what we have had to do with others in the decades of our illegality, paths we have taken with others, tell of the search for a reality of solidarity and emancipation beyond capitalist relations of violence. Connecting with others during this time is the mirror of our reality – of how and who we are.

In the historiography of the rulers, there is fundamental resistance to the capitalist system: crime, violence and terror. The image created is intended to replace reality and disguise the fact that it is the structural violence of the system that is the great problem of humanity. The image of the “terrorist” created is intended to depoliticize the history of resistance against capitalist relations of violence, to divide, to obscure the fact that state violence and the violent relations of the capitalist system are really only terror for many people in the world.

“Peace to the huts! War on the palaces!” (Georg Büchner – 1834)

Anyone who moves from protest to resistance can be stylized as a “terrorist”. The countless stories of rebellions and resistance tell of this: Klaus Störtebecker, Thomas Müntzer, Georg Büchner; the Social Revolutionary, anarchist and insurgent against the reactionary German Empire, August Reinsdorf, who was executed in 1885; the council communist, critic of the KPD, activist of the Red Aid, author of the first conception of an urban guerrilla and militant of the uprisings of the workers’ movement of the 1920s Karl Plättner; Olga Benario, Georg Elser, Phoolan Devi, Durruti, Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Ulrike Meinhof, Sigurd Debus, Patrice Lumumba, Nelson Mandela, Assata Shakur, Sakine Cansiz, Mumia Abu Jamal. Whether Paris Communue or black Jacobins – those people enslaved by European colonialism who fought for liberation in the anti-colonial revolution in today’s Haiti from 1791 onwards; whether partisans in many European countries against Nazi fascism or CNT – anarchists in Spain against the military dictatorship, whether the revolutionary struggle of the Black Panthers, the June 2 Movement, the Red Zora or the resistance of the ANC against apartheid – they were all “terrorists” in the propaganda of the rulers.

Terror has nothing to do with us, but a lot to do with the rulers and the capitalist system

The term terror has nothing to do with revolutionary counter-violence, which is revolutionary self-defense, of the emancipatory movements of history, which is directed exclusively and specifically against the rulers. Terror describes indiscriminate violence to enforce rule or to secure it. The term “terrorists” in bourgeois society would experience reality content as self-incrimination and description of the rulers, among other things, and would then be a meaningful term instead of a manipulative phrase. Today, the term “terrorist” is above all a means of rule, exploitation, repression, Frontex regime, class justice and prison system; Hunger, wars, coups and military dictatorships under the direction of the capitalist centers and with the historical responsibility of every German federal government: the millions of dead can no longer be counted – terror has nothing to do with us, but a lot to do with them and their system.

Solidarity has no borders

In a situation of weakness, it meant a lot and it gave courage: the solidarity demonstration in March in Berlin for the freedom of Daniela and solidarity with us illegals, against the Wagenplatz and house searches, against the agitation and the whole state terror; the solidarity rallies at the prison in Vechta, the wall slogans and the rallies of solidarity in various European countries.

For more than three decades, we were able to organize ourselves collectively outside the paths determined for this purpose by bourgeois society, which had planned nothing for us other than to be imprisoned or shot. We were able to find ways to lead a life in which, through all the ups and downs, a different social reality could emerge than that of the capitalist normality of alienation, isolation and valorization. Nobody can take that away from us. It will remain part of the historiography from below.

Solidarity among us – with those who rebelled, rebel or will rebel against this system yesterday, today or tomorrow

Daniela – locked in the prison cell day after day. And this despite the fact that the abysmal reality of the situation shows that they may have some of their laws on their side, but they do not have the legitimacy. The historical attempts of countless people over many centuries to overcome these conditions – against the violence of those who want everything to remain as it is, who declare human emancipation and liberation to be wrong and injustice to be right – were and are perfectly legitimate.

The judiciary of the Nazi successor state, which hardly ever condemned the Nazis of Nazi fascism, is now planning years of show trials against Daniela, in which she is to be convicted on behalf of the history of the fundamental opposition and locked away in prison for many years. The state relies on deterrence and thus targets not only Daniela, but all those who do not comply, who do not accept that humanity has no alternative to capitalism and thus to the destruction of the planet. A farce that affects everyone – regardless of their history or their point of view – for which capitalism should not remain the last word in history.

Solidarize yourselves!

Making the impossible possible, as Che Guevara said, has an existential meaning for humanity today: to learn to think about the alternative system again in collective processes against the abysses of the “turning point” age and to fight for it in the perspective together and internationally; break through the logic of the rulers that there is no alternative to capitalism – “there is no alternative” – in us and in all conditions. The historical window of epochal rupture – systemic and social erosion of capitalism – is currently opening wider and wider. In the continuing escalation of relations, a new age of barbarism lurks. Only struggles of a social revolutionary counter-movement could provide an alternative.

‘Socialism or barbarism ́ – as Rosa Luxemburg predicted in 1919 and thus aptly predicted the historical reality: after the First World War and the world economic crisis of the time, the window of eroding capitalism and revolution opened. From 1918 to 1923, the workers’ movement, the revolutionary feminists, anarchists and communists in Germany attempted to impose the socialist revolution. At the same time, a large part of humanity rose up in uprisings in 5 continents. In Germany, the attempt of the insurrectionary workers’ movement to overcome capitalism failed. It would have been the only way to avert the epoch of barbarism that followed. The socialist attempt at revolution was crushed, and capitalism remained, which took the form of Nazi fascism in Germany and culminated in the Second World War and Auschwitz.

With today’s profound crisis of capitalism and the epochal changes throughout the world, the historical moment of ‘either or ́ of ‘socialism or barbarism ́ could arise again with a clear tendency and at an increasing speed. The fixation on bourgeois-fascist-capitalist parties will not be able to prevent the development of the German crisis state and the EU in growing authoritarianism and war. There is nothing to save. Only an abolition of capitalism fought for from below in the process of transformation will be able to end this development.

Today, the socially revolutionary alternative to the progressive fascization of the capitalist system, poverty spreading even in the metropolis, the coming global war and the ecological destruction of the planet would be a socialism that learns from the mistakes of history and thus offers the possibility of building a liberated society – for a world of collectivity, freedom from patriarchy, exploitation, domination and nation, and the survival of nature.

This world will not be possible without a combative, creative and diverse movement that is present in the increasing crisis and in the rapidly growing social struggles of the future. This would be the reconstruction of the ability of an anti-capitalist, social-revolutionary and internationalist left to act, which has an impact beyond its own nose. The end of the Sleeping Beauty slumber: It’s time – it’s time – to move.

Solidarity with Daniela!

Solidarity with the comrades in exile, all those in hiding and the prisoners from the struggles of Antifa, the resistance, the Kurdish and Turkish comrades, the climate movement and all other emancipatory struggles of the world!

The demand for Daniela’s immediate release is justified.

Martin

(Burkhard Garweg)