Hans-Joachim Klein

Hans-Joachim Klein (; 21 December 1947 – 9 November 2022) was a German left-wing militant and a member of the terrorist group Revolutionary Cells. His nom de guerre was "Angie". In 1975, Klein participated in an attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna organized by the international terrorist "Carlos the Jackal", in which he was seriously injured. He publicly renounced political violence two years later. After decades in hiding, he was arrested in 1998, prosecuted for his role in the OPEC attack, and sentenced to nine years of imprisonment. He was paroled in 2003.

Biography

Childhood Born on 21 December 1947, Klein came from a working-class background. His mother was imprisoned in Ravensbrück concentration camp for Rassenschande ("racial pollution") during World War II. She killed herself a few months after Klein was born and he spent some time in a foster home after her death. For most of his life Klein believed incorrectly that his father had been an SS member and his mother had been Jewish.

Activism and violence In the 1970s Klein worked for the legal Red Army Faction (RAF) prisoner support group Red Aid (Rote Hilfe) in Frankfurt and subsequently for the RAF lawyer Klaus Croissant in Stuttgart. Klein was member of the Frankfurt Cleaning Squad. He served as Jean-Paul Sartre's chauffeur when Sartre visited the imprisoned Andreas Baader in December 1974. He joined the Revolutionäre Zellen (RZ, "Revolutionary Cells") in 1975. Klein has described Holger Meins' death on hunger strike as inspiring his turn to violence; he carried a photo of Meins' emaciated body in his wallet.

Klein renounced terrorism in 1977, sending a letter to Der Spiegel (with his gun enclosed) in which he warned of planned RZ attacks on two leaders of the German Jewish community. He then went underground, hiding from his former comrades as well as the police.

Arrest and subsequent events After spending two decades in hiding, mostly in France, in September 1998 he was apprehended in the Normandy village of Sainte-Honorine-la-Guillaume, where he had been living for five years. After his arrest several German and French public figures, including Cohn-Bendit, Bouguereau, and André Glucksmann, stated publicly that they had been aware of Klein's location and had assisted him during his time in hiding. He also testified that Libya had assisted in the raid, giving the attackers weapons and information on the conference's security arrangements. In February 2001, after a four-month trial, Klein was convicted of murder, attempted murder, and hostage taking, and sentenced to nine years in prison.

In popular culture Klein was the subject of the 2006 documentary My Life as a Terrorist, directed by Alexander Oey. He also appeared in the 2007 documentaries Protagonist and Terror's Advocate. He was portrayed by Christoph Bach in the 2010 French television miniseries Carlos.