In 1972, the great German novelist Heinrich Böll described the campaign of violence launched by the Red Army Faction (RAF) since its foundation two years earlier as a war of “six against 60 million”. The writer was vilified for the phrase, accused of sympathy for bombers and murderers. But Böll had highlighted the most important factor in the eventual defeat of the group, of whom one of the last surviving alleged members, a 67-year-old called Daniela Klette, was sentenced last week to 13 years in prison for armed robberies.

At the time Böll was writing, the RAF’s bombings, abductions and shootings had brought about the most acute crisis of West German democracy since the second world war. Dozens were killed, more injured, wanted posters and police checkpoints went up all over the country, huge state resources were devoted to counter-terrorism. Sporty small BMW cars were so favoured by the group that they were dubbed Baader-Meinhof Wagen, a reference to the RAF’s most famous founder leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.

Yet, less than a decade later, the Guardian’s correspondent in West Germany was writing of a new “atmosphere of peace and relaxation”. The RAF’s violent campaign to bring radical, revolutionary transformation to the country was over, they wrote. It was “the terror that died more with a whimper than a bang”.

This verdict was premature, but not by much. Meinhof had taken her own life in jail in 1976, Baader died similarly a year later. A “second generation” of the Red Army Faction committed ever more indiscriminate attacks that aimed more to free its members from prison than advance the global struggle against imperialism and capitalism. In the event, most joined their incarcerated comrades behind bars. A “third generation” would........

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