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. The prosecution had asked for 14 years, but Klein was given a lighter sentence because he provided authorities with information about other participants in the attack. In 2003, he was released on parole and returned to Normandy. == Personal life and death ==