Today, May 27, 2026, Daniela Klette was sentenced to 13 years in prison at her first trial. She was charged with various acts of expropriation to finance her nearly 30-year life in hiding.
Daniela was arrested in Berlin in February 2024 following a tip-off in exchange for a reward of 25,564.60 euros, and her first trial began in March 2025, which has now concluded after over a year and more than 100 witness testimonies.
She was convicted, among other things, of six counts of aggravated robbery, attempted aggravated robbery, violations of gun laws, and kidnapping for ransom.
The fact that the trials against her were separated is a possible attempt to depoliticize life in hiding and the expropriation actions.
Daniela Klette, Burkhard Garweg, and Ernst-Volker Staub were the last individuals publicly sought for membership in the Red Army Faction (RAF) who managed to evade capture by the state for several decades. Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub have not been apprehended to this day.
Remaining undetected for such a long time is a major success, as are the successful heists that netted over a million euros.
Expropriations are political actions that must be defended politically. They are part of the revolutionary struggle, and the trial against Daniela has once again shown how little a human life is worth compared to money in the capitalist system.
In her closing statement, Daniela reports on the operational guidelines for money couriers, who are supposed to protect their cargo rather than one another.
Following the conclusion of this trial, the next one is scheduled in Frankfurt am Main. In March, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office filed charges of attempted murder in two cases, as well as attempted and completed causing an explosion, kidnapping for ransom, and aggravated robbery as an accomplice.
These charges relate to acts committed by the RAF between 1990 and 1993, including the successful bombing of the prison under construction in Weiterstadt in March 1993. Additionally, charges include a failed attack on the administrative building of Deutsche Bank AG in Eschborn in 1990 and an attack with long guns on the U.S. Embassy in Bonn in 1991.
Solidarity with Daniela Klette, Burkhard Garweg, and Ernst-Volker Staub
Daniela’s Closing Statement of May 12, 2026
Now this first lengthy trial against me is coming to an end. Over the course of the trial, the assessment that existed from the very beginning has been confirmed, and it has become abundantly clear: the investigation and the proceedings are politically motivated. The aim here is to enforce domination and subjugation at all costs. The prosecution underlined this once again in its closing statement. This is not about individual acts, nor is it so much about me, but rather about delegitimizing a history of radical left-wing resistance and punishing it as a deterrent.
I thank everyone who has stood in solidarity with me—here in the courtroom, from outside, in front of the prison walls, with letters, cards, and thoughts. And also my lawyer, Ulrich von Klinggräff, who has unfortunately become very ill and therefore can no longer be here.
What I am about to say today is directed at all of you, as well as to the part of the public that is interested in this.
I would like to say a few words about my story, which is also the story of many other comrades. Many who have written to me are so young that they did not experience the period from the early 1970s through the 1990s in West Germany. Or they grew up in East Germany or in other parts of the world. I have written this without claiming to be exhaustive, but I hope that what I have said makes it clear why I seek a better world in which capitalism, racism, and patriarchy have been overcome, and why I defend the struggle for it.
And why I also defend here the right to build and maintain a life in illegality, even if it is “only” a matter of evading state repression. This is entirely independent of the fact that the latter has been over for me for more than two years. That is why it is my business to do all of this from here as far as possible.
As a teenager, I sensed that a life governed by capitalist rules is destructive. People are social beings and oriented toward cooperation. But submission to the constraints of isolation produced by competition under capitalism undermines this and creates alienation and distance between us. Having to function without asking why, and the pursuit of conforming to whatever images and norms this system produces, creates distance from oneself.
Of course, I didn’t yet have a concept for this or a precise explanation. But I felt crushed by the pressure and despondency that all this generated, and my resistance to it grew. That is why, from an early age, I was moved by questions about a different life, which surely had to be possible.
This was the case even though I was very fortunate at home. My parents were open-minded people. My mother had probably always been that way. My father, who joined the Hitler Youth (HJ) as a boy and fought on the side of the Nazis as a teenager during the war, grappled intensively with the crimes of National Socialism after 1945 and drew his own conclusions from them. Both wanted to instill human values in their children. So I was allowed to have friends from all over, regardless of their country of origin, skin color, or social status. In the early days of labor migration, some of them were from Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Through my interactions with these friends, I had the opportunity to gain insight into very different ways of life. That was truly something special. Only one of my school friends was allowed to hang out with us on the street. As everywhere else, racist attitudes toward migrants were widespread in our neighborhood too. So my parents had to stand up to criticism from teachers who watched my “associations” with concern. I also noticed how hostile and exclusionary the behavior toward migrant workers was. I saw containers where Turkish construction workers had to live crammed together in groups, only to then break their backs doing hard labor. They were supposed to be squeezed for every last drop of effort at work, but under no circumstances were they to become equal members of this society. These injustices also upset me. School wasn’t about cooperation; no, we were supposed to be drilled into believing that it was always about “being better”—better than even your best friend. And about keeping up in order to achieve a career that would allow us to participate in the consumption touted as desirable. A form of consumption that isn’t geared toward real needs, but rather one in which needs are artificially created to boost corporate profits. It’s still the same today: we’re led to believe that what matters isn’t who you are, but what you have, how you look, and what you achieve.
It’s the growing profits of capital that determine your worth here. Back then, I often asked myself what was wrong with me, because I felt no desire whatsoever to keep up. On the contrary, every attempt to submit to it sapped every ounce of energy from my very being. The weight of that feeling only lifted when I got together with friends from the “Sponti”- or undogmatic left. We engaged with texts by the Socialist Patients’ Collective, such as the book *Turning Illness into a Weapon*, which made a deep impression on me.
Through these discussions, I learned that my sense of being lost was not rooted in an individual problem, but was grounded in social conditions. Understanding this opened my eyes even further to the injustice around us—the brutal imperialist exploitation and oppression in many parts of the world, and the wars instigated by the rich capitalist countries. Under no circumstances did I want to become an accomplice to this. I became convinced that overcoming these conditions holds the key to a free and dignified life for all—a life that we must strive to achieve.
This conviction has never left me since. For every decade, every single year, and every day brings new evidence that humanity’s problems cannot be solved within capitalism. On the contrary: they continue to escalate.
Together with many others, I did not want to submit to this system that alienates people from themselves. We wanted to be seen for who we are, without conforming to the lies and images imposed by consumerist and meritocratic society. We did not want to remain trapped in that and sought to change ourselves and the society shaped by capitalism.
That was around the mid-1970s. There was still a whiff of the 1968 movement of rebellion against institutions and political posts still—or newly—infiltrated by Nazis, and against the fascist-influenced ways of thinking in society.
There had been the emergence of an internationalist, revolutionary Left, with massive demonstrations in solidarity with the Vietnamese liberation struggle against U.S. aggression and with the struggle against the fascist Shah regime in Iran, which was strongly supported at the time by the revolutionary Iranian Left.
But there had also been the first demonstrator murdered by the police during this upheaval. On June 2, 1967, the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed by a police officer during a demonstration against the Federal Republic of Germany’s complicity with the fascist Shah regime.
The RAF had already carried out attacks against the U.S. headquarters in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, from which the U.S. Army’s airstrikes in Vietnam were coordinated. The 2nd of June Movement and the revolutionary cells had also been founded at that time. And later, the women-led Rote Zora joined them.
At school, remnants of the 1968 upheaval were still palpable. Despite the professional bans, there were some teachers who practiced different forms of teaching with us, focused on learning together rather than on competition. We read books such as those by B. Traven on stories of resistance from Latin America or *Katharina Blum* by Heinrich Böll. In religion class, we learned about liberation theology in Latin America and about priests who had joined the struggle for liberation there. Like Don Helder Camara in Brazil and Camilo Torres in Colombia.
All of this, but also the fact that these teachers were disciplined and transferred right before our eyes, taught me more about global conditions and the role and reality of the Federal Republic of Germany. We were also outraged that, at that time, a comprehensive examination of Nazi fascism was not part of the curriculum. Let alone the consequences that had to be drawn from it. In hindsight, no wonder, since no fundamental ones were planned.
We acquired our knowledge of this outside of school. I remember a ring binder compiled by left-wing female students. “Learning from the bottom up,” I believe it was called. Through this, we learned about the role of capital in the rise of fascism and the full scale of the human catastrophe—the brutal persecution of the left-wing labor movement and left-wing intellectuals, the cruel policy of extermination against the Jewish population, the Roma, and the Sinti, the concentration camps and euthanasia, the eradication of all opposition, the repelled war of annihilation against the Soviet Union that cost the lives of more than 25 million Soviet citizens, the invasions and occupation of Eastern and Western Europe, but also the Europe-wide antifascist and communist resistance against them.
During this time, older students also organized film screenings and discussions on the Vietnamese struggle for liberation. We formed a school collective to push through demands in our daily school life. Until the age of 15, I had resisted the idea that people who want to fight for a better world must enforce and defend it through violence. My dream was nonviolent change. Looking at history and the world brought into sharper focus the fact that the powerful beneficiaries most entangled in the capitalist system would fight any fundamental change with the most brutal violence. The example of the U.S.-backed fascist military coup and the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 had shown that the possibilities and very existence of any elected socialist government would be crushed if it could not defend itself with arms.
“You’ll realize that you have to fight back if you don’t want to go under,” was a slogan on many leaflets and walls back then.
During the years of my political awakening in Karlsruhe, I kept catching glimpses of the Red Army Fraction (RAF) through slogans or posters on the walls. I also learned about the political prisoners’ struggle against solitary confinement and the solidarity with them. Soon I was consciously following all of this, including their hunger strikes. I was deeply drawn to the fact that there were people who fought so resolutely against this system, by which I, like so many others, felt oppressed.
I was 16 when I learned that a person in custody had been murdered while on a hunger strike against the torture of solitary confinement. It was Holger Meins, who had stood up against the system and was killed in prison through deliberate malnutrition during state-mandated force-feeding and through the denial of medical care.
I was 17 when the Vietnamese liberation struggle defeated U.S.-led imperialism. That incredible victory was also won through global solidarity. Despite napalm, despite the enormous military machine that stood against the liberation movement, and despite the massacres of the Vietnamese population perpetrated by the U.S. military with the aid and complicity of the West, led by Germany.
It was a time of liberation struggles and anti-colonial battles in many countries: for example, the Black Panthers against racist oppression and for revolution in the U.S., the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, or the FSLN in Nicaragua against the dictatorship. I began to understand what humanity has to expect from capitalism and imperialism. Yes, I saw myself as part of the global movements fighting for liberation from exploitation and oppression, against capitalism and patriarchy, and against war and militarism.
In 1976–77, I began visiting political prisoners. The first of them was Johannes Thimme, who was in prison for alleged support of the RAF and was immediately placed in solitary confinement there. I wanted to express my solidarity against this and do something to counter the isolation. In response, they began terrorizing me with surveillance. In 1977, plainclothes police officers were waiting in a car outside my front door early in the morning and followed me at a walking pace all the way to school.
After 1977, when the attempt to free 11 RAF prisoners had failed, and of the Stammheim prisoners only Irmgard Möller had survived the night of October 18, 1977, seriously injured, I decided to move to Wiesbaden. There I had met comrades with whom I wanted to continue the solidarity with political prisoners. We saw this as an important and urgently necessary part of the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist struggle.
It became a life full of resistance activities against isolation and for the consolidation of the prisoners, of solidarity with the liberation struggles in Palestine, South Africa, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and with Turkish comrades against the NATO coup in Turkey.
Through our struggle in solidarity with political prisoners, we developed broader discussions and friendships with other comrades from Ireland, the Basque Country, Italy, Spain, and France. We also established contacts with the Iranian leftist resistance.
For us, the international liberation movements also represented the global struggle for women’s liberation. Leyla Khaled of the PFLP in Palestine, Assata Shakur and Angela Davis from the Black liberation movement in the U.S., and the comrades from the armed groups in Western Europe were role models for us. They stood for millions of women worldwide.
In recent decades, the example of the Kurdish liberation movement, especially in Rojava, has shown how much strength is generated for everyone when women’s liberation is a defining part of the struggle.
We lived and organized our daily lives together. There were squats and the struggle against the Startbahn West runway, against the deforestation of the forest, and against the expansion of Frankfurt Airport’s capacity and thus the US Air Base. We went there for the partly peaceful, partly militant Sunday walks to the runway wall, staged political theater, held many resistance meetings, and organized events directed against imperialist US and NATO policies. Together we attended demonstrations in solidarity with the liberation movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, against the state visits of Reagan, then U.S. president, and Haig, then U.S. NATO Supreme Commander, and in solidarity with political prisoners. We viewed the RAF’s attacks at that time against Haig and Kroesen, as well as on the U.S. military airbase in Ramstein—which served as a base for their wars around the world—and the attempt in Oberammergau, during the period of major mobilizations against the deployment of U.S. intermediate-range missiles and the U.S. counter-wars against liberation movements, as a strengthening of our resistance and vice versa.
It was also during this period that the RAF and action directe proposed the formation of a united front of resistance in the struggle against the transformation of Western Europe into an imperialist bloc and in solidarity with the liberation movements.
The national security agency struck hard with intensified repression. Several anti-imperialist comrades known to the security agency were arrested. By fabricating a so-called “legal RAF,” the Federal Prosecutor’s Office created the instrument that made it possible to imprison comrades for many years through convictions without evidence of their alleged participation in militant actions.
Ever since our visits to political prisoners—and by “we” I mean many comrades—we were monitored almost every step of the way back then. They terrorized us with blatant surveillance, with checks sometimes several times a day, during which we were addressed by name and asked to show ID. On the street where we lived, they often set up checkpoints so that no visitors could reach us without being registered. The other tactic was covert surveillance, which we were not supposed to notice.
This surveillance was like a contagious disease spreading from person to person. In any case, we always had to assume that the “Lords of Dawn” were lurking somewhere. It took a great deal of effort to evade this surveillance, at least for a few hours—whether to have a conversation without the fear of being bugged, or to spray a few slogans or put up posters. It goes without saying that resistance could never be confined to such chains, which would mean having every activity monitored by state security. And of course, we didn’t want to lay our emotional lives bare before our watchers either.
Even back in the ’70s and ’80s, there were comrades who repeatedly noticed the net closing in around them and who, out of fear of arrest, went into hiding, vanished from the scene, and lived abroad—some for years at a time.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was clear that a redefinition and fundamental rethinking of revolutionary politics was necessary. For on the one hand, the international conditions had changed profoundly; on the other, it was a matter of coming to terms with past experiences. At the time, I was one of many for whom it never occurred to withdraw in the face of this epochal rupture. We did not want to accept the collapse of the Soviet Union as a definitive victory for capitalism. It was clear that this weakening of the global socialist movement would have catastrophic consequences. In West Germany, it led to the return of the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) as an openly belligerent army and immediately to the war against Yugoslavia, which violated international law. It led to the incorporation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a move that was imposed even on those who had embarked on their journey in the GDR with the aim of bringing about positive change there and beyond the capitalist system and West German reality, and it brought with it a neoliberal assault on hard-won social gains. And a racist mobilization fueled by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU – The party also currently in power and sister party of New Democracy) as a diversion from any anger that might have been triggered and the emerging resistance. At the same time, nationalist jubilation was celebrated. This was eagerly seized upon by the far right and led, in a unified Germany in both the West and the East, to deadly arson attacks such as those in Solingen and Mölln, as well as assaults on migrants, refugees, and leftists and their organizations. I need only recall Rostock-Lichtenhagen and Hoyerswerda, and the testimonies of those currently on trial as “Antifa” members who were exposed to this atmosphere in East Germany during their youth.
Of course, we recognized this bitter weakness of the Left worldwide, and that is also why we were driven by the desire to make every effort to find answers to the questions before us and to continue to exist as a radical left-wing force. The debates surrounding this took place alongside illegals. In the long run, it was too dangerous to repeatedly break away from surveillance and then return.
I decided not to subject myself to these conditions any longer and so stayed away. That was the decision to make resistance the very center of my life, and the contacts and discussions with other comrades who were grappling with the same questions about how to move forward and the redefinition of revolutionary politics had become a priority for me.
The RAF has not existed for 28 years. That the RAF played an important role in my life is evident from what I have written here. For me, these comrades represented the possibility of breaking with this system and fighting for liberation through fundamental resistance.
Through the debate about the RAF’s first actions during the Vietnam War, we gained a deeper understanding of the role of the Federal Republic of Germany and global power dynamics, and how struggles can support one another internationally.
Even from within the prisons, the prisoners’ struggle against solitary confinement and for collectivity—being able to be together and act with those who wanted that for themselves—conveyed a glimpse of what the struggle for liberation is really about. Namely, a society in which “for all” is at the center, not profit, money, or power—not having, but being, and being together.
For a long time, this remained true for me regardless of the criticism I already had back then regarding some actions and the underlying principles behind them. And regardless of the realization of the necessity to grapple with the mistakes in the history of the radical and militant left, including those within the RAF.
The idea arose that armed struggle would have to be politically integrated into a counter-power from below.
But the overall political situation did not allow for that. I found the dissolution of the RAF and its rationale to be entirely correct.
As radical or militant leftists, we certainly made many mistakes, but certainly not that of shrugging off shrugging the misery of our time.
Of course, I would love to participate in a discussion—and preferably in conversations—about this era of resistance. Burkhard Garweg was absolutely right when he wrote this at the end of his letter to Caroline Braunmühl.
A discussion with those who were part of this history of resistance at some point and all those who wish to draw on these experiences for the future of resistance.
I do not consider the courtroom to be the right place for a substantive contribution to this discussion.
This makes a discussion difficult for me from the very start. Visits from former prisoners of the RAF and the 2nd of June Movement were rejected on the most absurd grounds… moreover, during the visits, every sentence is recorded by the State Security Agency before I could even exchange a single thought with the visitors.
The Federal Prosecutor’s Office seizes every one of my statements—even the most general ones—regarding the history of the resistance as “evidence” of involvement in the RAF, and they in turn interpret this as proof of my participation in the actions they attribute to me.
I see this, as well as the rampant subpoenas with which more and more comrades from the 1970s and 1980s are being harassed, as a threat not only to me. Of course, the armed leftist groups of that time did not operate in a vacuum.
Like me, many comrades who engaged in their own forms of resistance have been touched and influenced by them, and have been challenged to offer their political and/or practical support, solidarity, and criticism. But now, even after 40 or 50 years, to impose heavy fines on people and threaten them with coercive detention if they are unwilling to tell the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office about their lives and name additional individuals who are then to be summoned—while completely disregarding the health conditions of individual comrades during these summonses—reveals the intent to punish these comrades even today as a deterrent, representing the history of resistance.
In the early 1990s, on April 10, 1992, the RAF declared that it would cease its deadly attacks on representatives of the state and the economy in order to facilitate the necessary process of discussion and would de-escalate the situation on its part.
At the same time, solidarity with the struggle of political prisoners grew, as did the need to include them in the discussions of the radical left. It appeared as though the state was moving in a positive direction regarding demands for improved prison conditions and the release of sick prisoners. But as soon as the state security apparatus at the highest level learned that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Internal Security) had an informant in Klaus Steinmetz who was in contact with underground activists, it immediately resorted to escalation again. The authorities once again shut the door on the prisoners’ demands. In March 1993, the RAF blew up the new prison building in Weiterstadt, which was nearing completion. At the same time, the state was preparing a major wave of arrests. Then they cracked down in Bad Kleinen. Wolfgang Grams was murdered and Birgit Hogefeld was arrested. The prisoners from the RAF and the resistance were hit with new trials and long prison sentences.
In 1998, the RAF disbanded of its own accord. Both the State Security Service and its much-cited experts, such as Butz Peters or Alexander Strassner, spoke of up to 30 people who might have made up the RAF in the final years of its existence. They often stated quite openly that they basically had no idea. That is how it is meant to remain. A serious societal reappraisal and engagement with history is not about individual persons, but about the political substance of the debate.
After 1998, the only people publicly sought were Burkhard Garweg, Volker Staub, and me. For no one—whether hunted down via wanted lists or not—was surrendering an option. The state had made it abundantly clear what would await us if they got their hands on any of us. They would have liked to use us to celebrate their triumph over the RAF and, with it, an important part of the fundamental resistance in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. This became evident even nearly 30 years later after my arrest, both in the way I was treated, paraded in public, and in the media coverage of the whole affair.
We didn’t want to expose ourselves to that. So it was practically imperative that we not get caught under any circumstances. We didn’t want to subject ourselves to the rituals of condemnation that had been practiced for years. Nor did we want to face long prison sentences for all sorts of RAF and resistance actions that hadn’t yet been adjudicated, or run the risk of being shot upon arrest.
Living in illegality gave us, as radical leftists, the opportunity to continue living in freedom—albeit within limits and in seclusion. Here we could live in self-determined, solidarity-based relationships with comrades and friends and decide on our path forward.
This state is no friend of political solutions, but a friend of capital. Everyone must submit to it.
Such a long life in illegality has emerged from this history. Not out of a spirit of adventure, and certainly not for personal gain. It has been, in recent decades and remains today, a defensive position of resistance. Even though the life from which I was torn meant so much to me, there was no plan to try to free myself from the situation through violence and gunfire. That is why nothing of the sort happened.
When I heard the prosecution’s closing argument, I thought to myself, how many somersaults did they have to perform to lie their way out of all this? In the trial, they are nevertheless clinging to an alleged willingness to kill in order to come down hard on me. Here, all manner of intentions—some vengeful, but above all aimed at asserting power—are being carried out. This contradiction shows: It is about demonization intended to further legitimize the manhunt for allegedly dangerous criminals and to make an example of them.
I counter this with the demand: Stop the manhunt for Burkhard Garweg and Volker Straub!
With regard to the psychological consequences for some of the victims of the robberies discussed in this trial, I fully agree with the statement made by Burkhard Garweg in his “Greetings from Illegality” in October 2024:
“The trauma suffered by cashiers and money couriers is regrettable.”
Having witnessed during the trial how badly some of those affected are still suffering today—such as driver Mirko Kramer from Wolfsburg or Ms. Ulmer from Bochum, a cashier—I must say that I feel deeply sorry for them because of the serious psychological injuries described in the trial.
Before I had read the trial records, I would have imagined that cashiers were more likely to be traumatized by robberies than an armed cash courier. It is surprising that cash couriers do not receive training that enables them to act calmly and rationally in such a situation, rather than being left completely shocked. Especially since the job exists solely because of the real danger of robberies. And it is remarkable that, in the event of a robbery, they first have to wait for hours alone or in pairs in the car—still to protect the money, even though the area is already swarming with police—instead of receiving initial psychological care. It was in connection with this trial that I was first confronted with the fact that armored car drivers and money couriers speak of trauma.
When I decided, together with my lawyers, not to question the psychological consequences for the witnesses during the trial, there were two reasons for this. The main reason was that nothing should be done that could contribute to retraumatization or a worsening of their condition. This also involves very personal matters, especially regarding pre-existing psychological burdens stemming from the life histories of the individual victims. We did not consider it appropriate to probe into this publicly.
The second reason was that I consider it possible and generally justified for those affected to have taken the right to extended paid leave in this manner following such a robbery or attempted robbery. That such a thing occurs was evidenced by the testimony of driver Whitley, whose boss intervened immediately after the robbery in Duisburg to put a stop to it. I am not mentioning this here because I would be accusing any of the people affected here of doing so. My sole aim is to clarify a point: both cashiers and cash-in-transit employees are working-class people, not enemies.
It is well known that working conditions in the cash-in-transit industry are poor and the work is not well paid. This is consistent with the statement by driver Immes that, after the robbery in Stuhr, management’s first concern was the condition of the car, not the well-being of the people. It is astonishing that some cash-in-transit crews still risk so much for “their” company. Especially since there is a directive not to risk their lives for the money.
The former soldier and driver Whitley testified that he might even have started a shootout if he had had his gun with him. I had already read in an article following the incident in Wolfsburg that there is an operational directive to leave the courier behind with the robbers if the driver can drive away. However, I didn’t take that at face value, but rather as a claim by the company boss to publicly defend his driver, who had, after all, saved the company a lot of money. Because the fact that he had abandoned his colleague was initially met with moral skepticism in the regional press. It wasn’t until the suspicion was raised that the attempted robbery had been carried out by the much-discussed former RAF members that the press ramped up its coverage and began writing about ruthless and brutal robbers.
When I read in the files about the post-traumatic stress disorder of driver Immes from Stuhr, it made sense to me from the very beginning. Although my lawyers have made it clear on numerous occasions that he was not the target and that it was even part of his therapy to realize that no one wanted to kill him, the fact remains that he felt that way and was deeply shocked, especially since he found himself in a situation that, for someone who had problems in small enclosed spaces, must have been a horror simply because of being trapped. Mirko Kramer, the driver in Wolfsburg—at first, when reading the files, I didn’t believe a word he said.
He was directly involved in the robbery situation for only a few seconds. He had even outwitted the robbers and had quickly gotten out of the immediate danger zone. It wasn’t until shortly before his testimony at the trial that I realized something had actually thrown him completely off balance.
The trigger was the robbery, because that’s what put him in the position of having to make a decision. To protect his bosses’ money, he chose to follow protocol and leave his colleague with the robbers. He said that Mr. Kramer had acted correctly according to protocol, but also noted that, from a human perspective, that protocol is wrong. That’s exactly what I think, too. It’s pure capitalism. He himself said: “I had to hear that money is more important than the person.” That sums it up.
From the statements of the driver in Cremlingen, Michael Sohn, I gathered that Kramer wasn’t approached by his colleagues after the robbery. Even in the press, his actions were questioned. I think he had his own doubts about it. After seeing the robbers’ car drive away, he drove back to check on his colleague. It’s easy to imagine how terrified he must have been when he couldn’t find him at first. As I said before, I felt very sorry for him when I saw and heard how badly he’d been doing since then. I hope he’ll start feeling better soon. I also felt very sorry for the driver Immes from Stuhr. Because he felt his life was in danger and suffered from that shock for a very long time.
Under capitalism, the property and money of the rich are protected from the public at great expense. Conversely, in cases of “white-collar crime”—such as the Cum-Ex scandal, where a haul of 30 billion Euros was made to make the rich even richer—the state and the judicial system protect the criminals by obstructing effective investigations.
Certainly, there will always be situations in which people, due to persecution or a lack of other means of survival, will be forced to steal money as those who possess nothing. In the history of the Left, this necessity has often arisen. It has nothing to do with frivolity or adventure. In any case, all means of obtaining money are preferable if they minimize the risk to people as much as possible. Ultimately, however, the goal is to create conditions in which people no longer have to resort to any means of obtaining money to survive. Whether through allowing oneself to be exploited in wage labor, through illegal work, self-exploitation, or through robbery and theft. Rather than having to concern ourselves with securing our survival as the dispossessed, we would have much preferred to invest our energy at any time in something meaningful, in constructive endeavors, in political struggles, in learning useful things together in friendships. We all have many interests and abilities that, among other things, can be related to seeking answers to the questions of our time: how to stop the frenzy of destruction and wars, and how to build a different reality in their place.
Some time after this attack in Stuhr took place, Volker, Burkhard, and I were publicly prosecuted for attempted murder.
For several years, the public prosecutor’s office and the Lower Saxony State Criminal Police Office apparently found no useful leads, which is why they ramped up their efforts again in earnest after 2023. They interrogated countless old friends and acquaintances, conducted searches at the homes of parents and other relatives, issued appeals on Aktenzeichen XY and in other reports, and sent their teams after every lead. Unfortunately, they stumbled upon me in the process. Since then, the prosecution has brought terror into the lives of friends and, once again, siblings, parents in neighborhoods, and the construction trailer park with veritable marches, without any regard for the trauma they cause. But these are legal raids, intended by class-based justice and, of course, not prosecuted. The prosecutors have no moral qualms about this. Over the course of the trial, the prosecution has clearly shown that it is by no means concerned with the well-being of the witnesses or the victims of the raids. Why else did they repeatedly press the issue during questioning when witnesses stated that they weren’t feeling too bad after the respective attacks? That they got over it relatively quickly—they even followed up rather rudely when someone said, “It was clear, it wasn’t directed at me.” The prosecution would have liked to hear something different in every case. How great must their disappointment have been that the seating reserved specifically for many joint plaintiffs was not fully occupied? For them, the victims are merely a means to an end—to secure the harshest possible sentence against me and to continue the manhunt for Burkhard and Volker. It seems she would have clearly preferred to see several retraumatized, severely traumatized victims instead.
This is consistent with the fact that, in this trial, the prosecution acts as if it doesn’t matter at all how the robbers behaved; in fact, it seems to upset them even more when it is mentioned that their behavior toward the victims was polite and reassuring. I find this appalling, because it goes without saying that it is not easy for either the victims or the robbers, regardless of how they behave. In line with the prosecution’s argument, the court intervened a few weeks ago when it rejected a motion by my defense team, arguing that anyone who commits robberies calculates for severe retraumatization, since it is well known that traumatized people can be found everywhere—from money couriers, armored car drivers, and cashiers to special forces and all bystanders, of course.
It is also known that soldiers and police officers have already experienced trauma. I was actually already aware of the latter—namely, when they had found themselves in situations where people, including colleagues, had been killed during operations, or when they themselves had been involved in massacres or witnessed them.
I would not expect such traumatized individuals to be serving in the police force or working as armed money couriers, but rather to be undergoing psychological treatment or in positions conducive to recovery. But what is actually being implied here? There is also this fatal assertion resonating here: that it doesn’t matter whether people act brutally violent and aggressive during such attacks or not, because if they encounter traumatized individuals, it’s the same thing anyway? How irresponsible and wrong such statements are! But beyond that: What does this say about the state of this society when we encounter traumatized and psychologically wounded people at every turn today—not as a rare exception, but as an increasing rule? The constant promotion of war preparedness and militarization—upholding the right of the militarily stronger in international conflicts over power and access to raw materials and land—goes hand in hand with the rise of the far right and the spread of fascist-like thinking. Ideas that glorify violence and patriarchal notions are being reinforced.
Since the turn of the century, femicide, rape, and sexualized violence—including during police operations—have been ubiquitous.
During the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, outbreaks of patriarchal violence within families increased.
These are very obvious sources of trauma. Beyond that, so much is happening that fills more and more people with great uncertainty and growing fear of the future. Every day, the mainstream media—and certainly the internet on a massive scale—spread the message that the money that should actually be spent on social and environmental issues, on health, education, and culture, is now being funneled into military buildup. This cold-hearted weeding out is becoming increasingly dominant in mainstream media discussions—the right to assistance and care is to cease to exist for ever-larger segments of society. Those who cannot afford private insurance face the threat of increasingly limited medical care—and, after all, expensive treatment for Grandpa isn’t worth it anymore!
Refugees are to be deported elsewhere or kept out—even by force—unless they are currently needed somewhere in the economy.
In the crisis, capitalist Western states are relying on aggression outwardly and, inwardly, on the social brutalization of societies to be subjugated. To this end, contempt for a growing segment of the population—which is defamed as useless—is being propagated.
Social demands, social interaction, inclusion, and welfare are attacked as a threat to the economy—which in reality means a threat to profit growth. Today, the word “reform” stands for state measures aimed at dismantling the welfare state.
Today, the state oppresses through division, repression, and fear. This works in a time when thousands are threatened with the loss of their relative prosperity, meaning they must fear finding themselves soon on the side of those denounced as “parasites” and dependent on support that is already being cut back.
The question is whether this will lead many to allow themselves to be blackmailed or lured into producing every kind of filth for the war machine, or whether, in the debates surrounding this, those who have long since developed proposals for a different, civil, and ecological mode of production will finally be recognized, and whether these proposals can be collectively organized and implemented.
Young people are expected to resign themselves to a future as cannon fodder.
Although peace researchers have refuted Russia’s alleged intent or capability to wage war against NATO countless times, these claims continue to be used as justification for the focus on militarization, the massive increase in spending on the military and the arms industry, and the continued fueling of the war in Ukraine through NATO’s immense arms deliveries.
The feeling of having no say in decisions is taking hold. When the only prospect is a “yes” to war and impoverishment, a “business as usual” with environmental destruction and climate catastrophe, it breeds despair. For two and a half years, the brutal treatment of people who stand in the way of imperialist and capitalist interests has been on full display worldwide—perpetrated by representatives of Western governments that until recently called themselves a “society of values” — namely, the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza, as well as ethnic cleansing through sheer terror in the West Bank and now also in Lebanon and Iran, with the most brutal destruction caused by the war waged by Israel and the U.S. It is the German government that is known to support this through arms deliveries, business ties, and political kowtowing, while persecuting those who oppose it. With a chancellor who, even before the latest expansion of the war—which violates international law—remarked that Israel’s aggressive warfare was “dirty work that Israel does for us.”
So it is true when the court states that the streets are full of traumatized people—they are traumatized by poverty, racism, patriarchy, police violence, and imperialist wars. To accuse me of this is to exploit that misery and is intended to a long prison sentence.
Overcoming mass trauma requires immediate, but also profound changes—and on an international scale. For it is obvious that the extent of trauma in countries that have been ravaged by war for years, such as Sudan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Ukraine, or those subjected to strangulation by sanctions like Cuba, must be unimaginably more severe.
Surely everyone can see and understand this! Deep down, most people know it.
But unfortunately, many are more afraid of taking steps toward a different kind of society—one that would be unknown—than of the comprehensive destruction of living conditions clearly looming on the horizon if we simply “carry on as usual!” A “system change” is urgently needed, for capitalism inherently embodies not only competition, exploitation, and oppression, but also fascism, racism, war, violent displays of power within the political system and between people, patriarchal violence against women and queer people, against people with disabilities, as well as the destruction of nature.
Depending on the state of the capitalist crisis, all of this recedes into the background or comes to the forefront. That is why we will only leave this history of suffering behind us once we have overcome this system. At the moment, we find ourselves at an extremely destructive point in this crisis. The old, false world order is losing its hegemony—finally—because it is absolutely unjust toward the vast majority of humanity. But that is why it is lashing out wildly. For us, the immediate priority must be a shift away from war preparation and militarization, away from external aggression and internal repression and humiliation, social indifference, and complicity in global capitalist and imperialist crimes.
Stop wars that violate international law and imperial violence! Stop the oppressive sanctions that are causing hunger, devastation, and millions of deaths!
Instead, the focus must be on ecologically reasonable production that is not geared toward profit for the few, but toward the well-being of all and the transformation of society in a way that allows people to live with international social security and a sense of security.
“The alternative is our global mission, and it is a form of socialism that could draw on a wealth of historical experience—including the lessons learned from overcoming the major and minor mistakes of history, of the major and minor revolutionary attempts, of the urban guerrilla warfare, of the anarchists, of the communists, of the Social Revolutionaries, and of the anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial struggles and movements. Achieving this will ultimately determine whether life on this planet will continue to be possible and under what conditions. …The question facing all of us worldwide regarding the alternative to capitalism and the systemic as well as our own processes toward it is existential and cannot be postponed.” Burkhard Garweg in his opening remarks at the Rosa Luxemburg Conference in January 2026.
Traces of this spirit live on in all the various acts of resistance carried out by those,
who know that young people and those who are not among the rich and powerful are the ones destined to serve as cannon fodder in wars fought for power and raw materials, and who therefore oppose militarization, conscription, and arms buildup—in short, they oppose war— ,
who refuse to give their lives or take the lives of others for the interests of capital, and who do not accept that resources should be used for weapons, the military, the police, and corporate profits instead of for the population,
who do not accept militarization because they are aware that in a militarized society, violence against women, queer people, trans people, and people with disabilities will inevitably continue to increase,
who, as students, are directly fighting back against a future as cannon fodder through school strikes,
who oppose imperialist politics and crimes with their solidarity and internationalism, and who refuse to accept the state violence required by the capitalist struggle for power and raw materials—a violence that the powerful are increasingly openly advocating and ruthlessly deploying,
who do not bow down, even though, as Jews, they are massively attacked—above all by the German state and media—as allegedly anti-Semitic, because in times of international resistance against the extreme violence against Palestinians, they are to be deprived of the right to reject Israeli settler colonialism and the apartheid policies against the Palestinian population, or even to question Zionism, as well as to name Germany’s complicity in war crimes and genocide,
who, as activists, demonstrators, journalists, artists, and scholars, insist on their opposition to this, even though German state policy has established unwavering support for every Israeli policy, no matter how terrorist, and all who oppose this face the threat of exclusion and criminalization,
who combat anti-Semitism and naturally assume that this is inextricably linked to the fight against racism,
who, in the face of growing inequality, poverty, exploitation, unaffordable rents, mass homelessness, and unemployment, are calling the capitalist system into question and demanding the immediate abolition of the profit-driven economy and the system of home ownership
who counter the politics of relentlessly promoted racism, nationalism, and the exclusion of people already left behind by social security with a politics of solidarity and the fight against social cuts; for the only way to prevent ever-larger segments of the population from shifting to the right and to halt the fascistization of the declining old colonial states and the U.S. is to counter racist agitation and a politics based generally on division and the call to save oneself by kicking those further down in society, rather than fighting back against power from below, to counter with a radical left-wing perspective that brings tangible positive changes in the lives of the many,
who organize to halt the gradual destruction and militarization of healthcare,
who stand directly against Nazis and organize protection, and who at the same time say that this is not enough, because fascism is rooted in capitalism,
who oppose the ecological destruction of the world that is inevitable under capitalism and advocate for an organization of humanity that aims to enable sustainable ecological production and thus the survival of humanity and nature,
who, in the face of systems of repression and prisons, stand by our side, by the side of the prisoners, and demand with us a vision of freedom and ultimately the abolition of prisons,
who, after decades of struggle to protect the life of Mumia Abu-Jamal—who has been a political prisoner in the U.S. for 48 years—refuse to give up and, in full solidarity, are doing everything in their power to fight for his freedom.
These are by no means all of the diverse forms of resistance that have emerged in recent years—and continue to emerge today—in response to so many contradictions, or that have in some cases existed for a long time — such as feminist and, today, queer-feminist organizing against patriarchal violence; the many initiatives against the increasingly sophisticated repressive border system designed to keep out refugees in urgent need of aid; the flotillas to Gaza and Cuba to break through the starvation and isolation; the port blockades against arms shipments to Gaza and against militarization, and the solidarity strikes by Italian and Greek workers with the Palestinian people and their struggle against occupation and displacement; the protests against the rising number of police fatal shootings of Black people, non-German people, or those who appear non-conformist.
Even though I—fortunately—cannot list everything that is being done, I wanted to mention at least some of it, because it is so important to remember to stay committed to the goals and ideas of liberation and not to let ourselves be silenced by the openly displayed brutality of those in power. Just as all the various initiatives are concerned with concrete action against the respective crimes and with the defense of “oases of human cooperation”—while simultaneously expanding and developing them within their own initiatives—it is equally crucial how we will all come together to form a collective force capable of halting the slide toward World War III and everything it already brings in its wake. For through this war, all positive approaches and ideas are under a fundamental threat on an international scale.
Even if this force does not yet exist, it is all these struggles that at least make its development possible and that give me hope.
This is also the hope for my freedom and ours, and ultimately for the freedom of all, and for a world that leaves every form of oppression behind.
A world in which no prisons remain, neither in the form of diverse and intertwined power relations, nor in the form of concrete, stone, and steel, where people are simply locked away behind walls and barbed wire.
A world in which people can live in harmony with one another and with all other living beings in nature.
We can only be truly free when everyone is free.