A regional court in Verden, Lower Saxony, has sentenced Daniela Klette, a woman synonymous with the last unaccounted-for generation of the Red Army Faction, to 13 years in prison. The verdict, delivered in a converted riding hall on Wednesday, found the 67-year-old guilty of eight aggravated robberies of supermarkets and cash-in-transit vehicles across northern and western Germany between 1999 and 2016. Klette was arrested in a Berlin flat in 2024 after more than three decades on the run, living under a false identity and, prosecutors said, financing her clandestine life with more than two million euros in stolen cash. Two alleged accomplices, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, remain fugitives.

Viewed from Berlin, the trial was always about more than a straightforward robbery case. Klette belonged to the RAF's so-called third generation, which inherited the violent mantle of the Baader-Meinhof gang after its core was imprisoned or dead. German investigators have long linked her to far more serious crimes: the 1990 explosives attack on a Deutsche Bank building near Frankfurt, the 1991 machine-gun assault on the US embassy in Bonn, and the 1993 bombing of a prison in Weiterstadt. Yet none of those acts featured in the Verden indictment. The prosecution limited itself to the post-1998 robbery spree, a pragmatic decision that, as commentators in Frankfurt noted, allowed the state to convict without reopening the highly charged question of what role, if any, the former East German Stasi played in shielding RAF fugitives.

From London to Paris and Stockholm, the sentence was registered as the closing of a grim chapter in European domestic militancy. The British press highlighted the extraordinary length of Klette's evasion and her eventual unmasking by modern forensic tracing. In Moscow, coverage underlined her status as a "terrorist pensioner" who had never been tried for the embassy shooting, while in France, Le Figaro recalled that the RAF's dissolution in 1998 did not extinguish its underground networks. Klette's own courtroom behaviour—waving to supporters from the far-left scene and, as journalists observed, smiling when the sentence was read—reinforced the impression that, for her, the struggle continued. Her defence team’s attempt to frame the robberies as a necessary act of resistance against a repressive state flopped; the judges saw only a calculated series of violent raids carried out over 17 years.

The broader significance of the Verden judgment lies in what it leaves unresolved. The two accomplices, Garweg and Staub, remain on Germany's most-wanted list, and police believe they may be embedded in sympathetic milieux abroad. Analysts in London note that as long as any RAF veteran walks free, the wounds of the federal republic's most bitter internal conflict cannot fully heal. For now, the Verden court has done what it could: it has removed one ghost from the landscape, while implicitly reminding Germans that the RAF, as an idea, endures in the heads of its ageing true believers.