Claudia was not much of a dancer, by all accounts, but she loved Brazilian music and was a regular at the samba class in Berlin’s alternative Kreuzberg district.
Now absent for 13 months, Claudia won’t return to samba class any time soon. After almost 35 years living under a false identity, Germany’s most sought-after woman goes on trial on Tuesday under her real name: Daniela Marie-Luise Klette.
The 66-year-old is charged with attempted murder, theft and breaches of the war weapons control Act. Later she will face charges of being one of the last members of the left-wing Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist organisation, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, which was behind high-profile hijacks and killings in 1970s West Germany that triggered a state of emergency.
The RAF was a radical offshoot of the 1968 student revolution and its members kidnapped public figures to highlight, in their eyes, an uneasy continuity of West German elites with the Nazi era.
In total the RAF killed 34 people but no one knows for sure when Klette joined: before or after the RAF ringleaders had killed themselves in prison in 1977.
The RAF disbanded officially in 1998 but Kletta and two RAF accomplices remained on the run. Prosecutors accuse them of 13 violent armed holdups of supermarkets and cash transporter vans, allegedly to finance their lives under the radar in Berlin.
After three decades in the German capital hiding in plain sight, it was not police but journalists using facial-recognition software that found the sweaty face of Claudia/Daniela in Facebook posts from her samba class.
In the early evening of February 26th last year, the net closed. Two police officers followed up a tip-off that the RAF terrorist was living in a squalid social housing block near the former Berlin Wall death strip.
They rang the doorbell and the woman who answered produced a passport with the identity “Claudia Bernardi”. “Claudia” was allowed a moment to use the bathroom. There she is believed to have written a warning text message to a co-conspirator, Burkhard Garweg, in effect saying: “they have me”.
As she was led away to a nearby police station, she shouted loudly on the street: “I am Daniela Klette from the RAF and I have been arrested.”
Prosecutors view this as a further attempt to have any RAF sympathisers within earshot warn her accomplices. Over a year on, the arrest has caused shock waves in Kreuzberg’s alternative scene and Klette’s small circle of friends.
“I don’t know Daniela Klette, I know Claudia, she was like a sister to me,” said Ermeson Gomes da Silva, a Brazilian man who met Klette at a Berlin samba class in 2001. They became friends and often sat in her kitchen smoking, drinking and laughing.
He remembers her helping him through several relationship break-ups, telling Germany’s BZ tabloid: “She listened, gave me a shoulder to cry on. She was a German but relaxed, basically a hippy.”
Friends such as da Silva struggle to believe that “Claudia” was part of a trio that stole an estimated €2.8 million over 17 years, beginning in 1999 with the first cash transporter holdup in the western city of Duisburg.
The RAF trio were sloppy back then, police say, leaving DNA traces in the van they emptied of at least one million deutschemarks. The trace went cold until the same DNA turned up in June 2015 in a cash transporter van stopped near Bremen by three masked figures, armed with machine guns and a fake bazooka. Eventually police connected a series of robberies allegedly carried out by what the tabloids dubbed the “RAF pensioner gang”.
Police who searched Klette’s Berlin apartment found quite a haul: an eclectic collection of weapons, wigs, stick-on beards and balaclavas as well as ID cards and driver’s licences in 17 identities, €239,000 in cash and 1.2kg of gold.
In a Hello Kitty notebook, police found times, staff names and other details from two supermarkets robbed by masked gangs, raids in which Klette is accused of driving the getaway car.
They also found the beginnings of a memoir, allegedly written by Klette, about her childhood in the West German boom years as the daughter of a sales rep father and dentist mother. It was Klette’s interest in the Vietnam war that apparently drew her further and further into left-alternative – and, later, radical – circles.
Klette is expected to deliver a statement to the court on Tuesday, disputing the image depiction of her as a dangerous member of a terrorist organisation.
In an open letter from prison she wrote the “struggle for liberation is also about a world without greed for money, free from exploitation and all forms of oppression”, accusing the German state of “escalation and denunciation” and “brazen media agitation”.
Her defence team says their client is not a dangerous terrorist but someone who “sits completely inconspicuously in prison, teaches other prisoners German and has a cookery group”.
Among Klette’s friends watching closely on Tuesday will be Ermeson Gomes da Silva, who returned to Brazil in 2006. Even at the time, he noticed how his friend never mentioned her past.
“I just let it go,” he said. “Everyone has their secrets.”
