Last Stop Stammheim: the Trial of Five Pro-Palestinian Activists Who Attacked Elbit Systems in Germany

Seven o’clock in the morning Friday, 28 August 2026, in Stammheim, a suburb of Stuttgart. For many Germans of the older generation, Stammheim is a name that still resonates – as the place where members of the left-wing extremist terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF) were imprisoned and where they died in the 1970s. Many still recall the wanted posters and the special crime time television shows; many still shudder at the memory of the so-called Baader-Meinhof Gang, which was responsible for 33 murders. Their driving force was the ideology of “anti-imperialism”. The perpetrators received their basic military training in camps in Jordan, run by the Palestinian Fatah movement.

At this early hour it is still quiet, even in front of the fortress-like building of the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht), right next to the prison complex. It was erected, with its two high-security courtrooms, on precisely the site where the trials against the Baader-Meinhof Gang took place fifty years ago. In two hours, at nine o’clock, the trial is due to resume against a group of five defendants who, on September 8th 2025, forced their way into the premises of Elbit Systems Germany in the city of Ulm – a subsidiary of the Israeli arms manufacturers of the same name – and caused more than a million euros in damage. The defendants filmed their break-in and the devastation they caused. The recordings were intended to support the struggle for a “free Palestine” on social media. The intruders, however, are not members of Hamas or Fatah; not one of them is Palestinian. Who are they?

The Defendants

The oldest defendant is Leandra Rollo Valenzuela, born in Argentina and holding a Spanish passport. No trained profession is known. The 40-year-old states in a personal declaration that since October 2023 she has taken part in almost every legal protest in order to stop the “genocide” of the Palestinians. Busy woman. But without a steady job, this kind of activism might be just about feasible. On a support website for the defendants, Ulm5.info, it is said that before her arrest Rollo Valenzuela worked as a set designer and wrote poetry in her spare time. We also read: “She has attached feeders and water bowls to her bedroom window, where she talks to the pigeons.”

Daniel Tatlow-Devally is 33 years old. He comes from a middle-class family in Ireland; his father is a barrister, his mother a university lecturer. “My actions at the Elbit plant in Ulm were motivated solely by urgent humanitarian considerations,” the Irishman declares. Urgent considerations, not applying to his home country, Ireland, where the numbers of so-called “international protection applicants” went up by 1,200% between 2020 and 2024. Not applying to Germany, his residence of choice, where non-Germans now make up c. 15% of the population but account for c. 35% of all serious crime suspects. Tatlow-Devally’s dad was putting on the poor mouth on Irish state television, saying meekly that he was “fortunate enough to be able to afford to go” to Germany. Perhaps the financial support of his son prior to the latter’s arrest had been consuming too many resources. No publicly available concrete information exists about any regular employment on Tatlow-Devally’s part. What is known, however, are his pronouns: they/them. The support website states that before the arrest Tatlow-Devally was working on a podcast dealing with the connection between art and science, as well as “decolonial and ecological applications of AI”. The thirty-something also enjoys “skateboarding and roller-skating”.

The third defendant is the British subject Walter Tricks, 25-year-old. Like Tatlow-Devally, his preferred pronouns are “they/them”. In a Guardian article he is described as “sociable” and “bubbly”. No trained profession is known. About his pastimes Tricks himself states: “Until two years ago I spent a lot of time making music, then I became more interested in organised activism.” Whether he was legally in Germany at the time of the offence remains unclear. In a personal statement he reels off a long litany of alleged Israeli crimes and then summarises his motivation for the break-in at Elbit Systems as follows: “All of this pain and suffering was orchestrated, profited from, and lobbied into action by the Lockheed Martins, the Rheinmetalls and the Elbit Systems. They prevent our society from achieving real democracy. This action was a part of a global movement that aims to reduce violence at its source.” The global movement of ‘anti-imperialism’, no doubt.

Defendant Hannah Hailu is also 25 years old and British. In her personal statement in court she feels compelled to comment on her sexual orientation: “I am a trans non-binary person, pronouns he/they.” (sic) Trained profession? None. According to Ulm5.info she has at times worked as a babysitter and is famous for her “delicious dishes”. A press report says she is studying “Migration Studies”. Her statement is stuffed with ideology-saturated phrases. The word “settler” appears no fewer than 18 times, in the context of the postcolonial trope of “settler colonialism”, according to which Israel’s Jewish population are merely rightless, land-grabbing “settlers” whose expulsion is justified, “from the river to the sea”. But Israel is not the only eternal culprit. “Have you ever wondered,” Hailu asks, “how the cold miserable European states with little valuable natural resources and relatively small labour capacities are some of the richest, most powerful states globally? Surprise, colonialism.” Some of Hailu’s ancestors hail from Ethiopia; she describes herself as a “proud African”. She claims to have personally suffered under British imperialism. How exactly is not really clear, but at the beginning of her statement she complains about an allegedly “racist” attack on her by means of a rubber chicken: “An official of this court carried a rubber chicken in the pocket of his uniform, squeezing it to make noises. I had immediate fear that someone was making monkey noises in a racially-motivated hate crime.”

The only defendant with German citizenship is the 29-year-old Vivien Kovarbasic. She too identifies as non-binary. She is a trained dancer and appeared as a drag performer in Berlin’s ‘queer’ scene. In 2022 Kovarbasic’s dancing in Cologne was subsidised for two months with federal funds. In a personal statement in court Kovarbasic now complains that she and others lack these funds for their livelihood: “Artists have been defunded.”

Posh Protestors

The Red Army Faction of the 1970s committed murders, robbed banks and carried out kidnappings as part of their ‘anti-imperialist’ struggle, for which they had themselves been trained by Palestinian terrorists, and which ended ultimately in suicide. The defendants standing trial in Stammheim today were radicalised and motivated by the same ideology, but chose a milder form of struggle aimed at securing ‘likes’ on social media.

Both the five RAF perpetrators Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Jan-Carl Raspe, Holger Meins and Gudrun Ensslin and the Ulm 5 come from the educated middle class; at the time of the trials before the Higher Regional Court they were or are on average in their early thirties; they had or have no regular employment and did not or do not primarily earn their living through gainful employment. In contrast to the RAF ‘anti-imperialists’ of the 1970s, some of whom lived in steady relationships and had children, the Ulm 5 are all unmarried and childless and count themselves as part of the so-called ‘queer’ scene. This enables them to occupy one of the popular victim roles from the broad spectrum of the intersectional catalogue of discrimination – something the heterosexual RAF members could not claim. And defendant Hailu can play the trump card, since as a self-defined African she deems herself automatically a victim of colonialism and additionally perceives herself as racially oppressed.

While the Baader-Meinhof Gang was charged with murder and attempted murder, the Ulm 5 face only charges related to criminal damage, trespass and the formation of a criminal organisation. In addition, they are seen as in breach of a particular German law which prohibits the use of symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations, such as employing publicly the “From the River to the Sea” slogan. While the RAF defendants had to reckon with, and received, life sentences, Rollo Valenzuela, Tatlow-Devally, Tricks, Hailu and Kovarbasic face, at worst, some jail time. But in many of today’s German prisons it would certainly still be possible to feed pigeons, roller-skate, make music, cook and put on a drag performance or two. While doing time, the Elbit burglars would, however, have to learn not to be intimidated by the squeaking of a rubber chicken.

Welcome to Stammheim

The day before, I arrived in Stuttgart by train. My Intercity express train from Frankfurt was 40 minutes late – hardly worth mentioning in Germany these days. From the platform a covered footpath leads across the construction site of “Stuttgart 21”. The underground station was supposed to be finished in 2019 and should have cost just under three billion euros. Now the talk is of almost 15 billion and the targeted year of completion is 2031. I take the underground train 15 to Stammheim, which looks peaceful and ordinary. This is where Stuttgart ends and the countryside begins; this is the last stop on line 15. Only a few minutes’ walk from the notorious prison (Justizvollzugsanstalt, JVA), which today holds around 800 inmates. The main street is a mirror image of Germany in 2026. Two permanently closed German inns, one of them The Lion. Two supermarkets. A few snack bars, one of them Kurdish. A bistro called Dialog that advertises live sports broadcasts. Ethnic Germans are few and far between on the street; they are probably staying in Schloss (castle) Stammheim, now a retirement home. Or they are lying in the cemetery, on whose wall an inscription under a steel helmet and oak leaves commemorates the “hero sons of the municipality of Stammheim who fell for the fatherland”.

Two teenagers on a bench nearby eye me curiously. What would the hero sons – such as Friedrich Siegrist, who was killed in battle in Belgium on August 27th 1917, and whose death is marked for the 109th time on the day of my arrival in Stammheim – think of their hometown today? Would Friedrich order a pizza for seven euros from the Kurd and gaze admiringly at the blonde proprietress of the cosmetics studio across the street, Natalia Ginduzova? Would he notice that there are hardly any Friedrichs, Wilhelms and Alfreds left in Stammheim and that the German-sounding pub Asperg Stüble is run by a Greek? Would Friedrich Siegrist apply for the casual labourer’s job advertised in a shop window (15 euros an hour) and move into the one-bedroom flat advertised in the same place for a monthly rent of 550 euros plus utilities? A multi-storey corner house opposite Dialog appears unoccupied. The façade and roof are covered in broad red and blue lines; the shuttered windows are smeared in garish yellow and purple. The building has stood empty for years; according to locals it was once meant to become a business centre.

At the snack bar Davran I order the seven-euro pizza and a beer. In front of the snack bar is a white bench. A younger man with a glass of rum and coke joins me. We strike up a conversation. He is a Kurd by birth, unemployed, looking after his care-dependent mother. Everything except changing nappies – that is done by the care service. Another man arrives, of Russian descent, middle-aged. A mechanical engineer, unemployed for two years. He would like to emigrate to America. I tell the two of them about my plan to report on the Ulm 5. Yes, they have already noticed queer activists, some of whom arrive in coachloads. The engineer has observed two men dressed as women going into the ladies’ restroom of Asperg Stüble. No one said anything. After all, they were paying guests.

The Ulm 5

At 7.20am the first supporters of the Ulm 5 appear in the car park in front of the Higher Regional Court. It begins to rain. From an elegant, light-coloured Mercedes steps a textbook activist. Of pensionable age, tanned, five o’clock shadow, bare feet in sandals, a filterless cigarette casually dangling from his mouth. Together with younger comrades he begins unloading the equipment for their stand from his car. From a police vehicle parked less than five metres away the activity is briefly observed. Then the officers drive off; clearly there is nothing to object to. Two open tents are pitched exactly on the parking spaces marked off for the purpose; everything is in order. Several large Palestinian flags appear and are raised. Neither the immigrant workers on the construction site next door nor the uniformed prison staff, who park their cars nearby and go on duty, react to the activists. Only occasionally, when a prison van drives past, does the group of supporters – now grown to around 20 – begin chanting slogans and waving their flags. At around 8.30am a statement is read out over a megaphone. Again the construction workers are unimpressed. Perhaps they don’t understand German? At the same time admission begins. Apart from me, only one other member of the press is present at first, Janka Kluge. Kluge was born male in 1959 but has presented as a woman for many years. I learn that Kluge writes for left-wing extremist papers such as the German Communist Party paper Unsere Zeit and the hard-left Junge Welt, and also for Rote Hilfe, an association that already provided financial support to the Baader-Meinhof Gang and was classified by the domestic intelligence service (Verfassungsschutz) as left-wing extremist. Kluge is talkative and friendly, probably assuming that I too write for the activist press. The Daily Sceptic means nothing to Kluge. When I mention it to him, we are both already without our mobile phones, which are not allowed into the courtroom. A quick online search is therefore impossible for Kluge, who tells me of having reported on the 1970s RAF trial in Stammheim, an anecdote that is obviously very important to Kluge, since it is repeated a short time later to other journalists.

Gradually, the courtroom fills. Roughly 30 seats each are available for the press and the public. The representatives of the writing profession are almost without exception left-leaning. Apart from me, only a reporter from the public broadcaster SWR (Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk) with a cameraman in tow is at least outwardly neutral. Only we remain seated when, at 10 o’clock – an hour later than announced – the defendants are brought in. All the other spectators rise from their seats and begin to clap and chant excitedly: “Free Palestine.” The journalists present openly display their pro-Palestinian stance. Some through printed clothing. Others through stickers on their laptops. Fully accredited journalists are allowed to bring these devices into the courtroom. I am not one of them, reduced to pencil and notepad. Beside watermelon stickers and “Zionism? No thanks!” I also recognise “FCK MRZ” (Fuck Merz) and “Trans Rights are Human Rights”. Everyone wears their convictions proudly like war medals and can feel cosy and at ease among like-minded people. In the afternoon the SWR representative is no longer there; I am now the only one not clapping and chanting when the session is interrupted or resumed. In one of the breaks I am approached by an Irishman who says he writes for Prometheus, a far-left magazine that somewhat clunkily defines itself as “a regular physical magazine and online publication that draws on Marxist traditions that have been enriched by Black Radicalism, (Trans-)Feminism, Eco-Socialism, Abolitionist politics, and the theorisations of class consciousness and cultural hegemony to offer a revolutionary publication that facilitates strategic and programmatic development through analysis, critical reportage, and comradely debate”. The Irishman does not introduce himself by name, but later I am able to identify him as Seán Ó Maoilearna. A little small talk, then he wants to know who I write for. The Daily Sceptic does not ring a bell with him. But like Kluge before him, Ó Maoilearna cannot research for lack of internet access. Another person also finds my presence apparently suspicious. A smartly dressed gentleman in a suit jacket and gold-rimmed glasses suddenly addresses me in one of the breaks and wants to know for which medium I am attending the trial. He takes note of my answer that I write for the Daily Sceptic and then drifts away.

But of course I am curious too. So I listen in on a conversation between two English people. The old gentleman is apparently a retired geographer, full of love for the Palestinian cause, and he mentions his attempt to interest Jeremy Corbyn in the trial. The lady comes from Brighton, is a psychologist, concerned about the mental health of defendant Tatlow-Devally, whom she maternally and full of devotion calls Daniel. Admittedly, with his long, wavy hair and thick beard Tatlow-Devally looks a bit like the Messiah. The geographer and the psychologist both speak with posh, public school accents. Typical Green voters. I wonder: would they retain their tenured teaching posts in an Islamic state of the kind Hamas is striving for?

Indeed, how would the other spectators fare under sharia law? Like the man with grey-green shoulder-length hair, hiking boots, a sleeveless black top and a women’s skirt ending just above the knee. His red-and-white Palestinian scarf is, of course, an indispensable accessory for him, as for many others in the courtroom. And what about the numerous young, Caucasian women sporting bland short haircuts, partly dyed in bright colours, and clad in baggy trousers, who visibly present as gender-neutral? How would a “Free Palestine” they so ardently promote welcome them into its fold?

The young, wiry, bearded men of darker complexion and the headscarf-wearing women among the viewing public would probably feel far more at home in a Hamas state. Do they perhaps snigger, as do I, about the useful idiots, the representatives of the ‘queer’ movement and other wokerati present here?

The Trial

The applauded and celebrated defendants are led into the courtroom handcuffed. They laugh and joke and gesticulate. All look healthy, well-dressed and well-fed. Hardly have they sat down side by side when their handcuffs are removed. Sweets are passed round, notes are taken, fingernails inspected. They do not look intimidated, fearful or in the least remorseful. After the preliminaries, Tatlow-Devally reads out a statement in English in which he complains about the conditions on the day of his arrest. He claims to have spent 48 hours in his cell without toilet paper; the toilet in his cell was, as he elegantly puts it, only “a hole in the ground with a minuscule trickle of water”. He had no proper bedding, only a plastic mattress, and only a single, frosted window. I suspect that many Israeli hostages of Hamas would have been extremely content with such conditions. Funny, however, that the official court interpreter mistranslates “frosted” as “frozen” into German, which exacerbates the drama purportedly suffered by Tatlow-Devally.

The defendants are separated from their lawyers by a glass wall – in this case not frosted – so they can communicate without difficulty via an intercom from their seats or by approaching one of the “speech holes”. The lawyers are predominantly female: six out of 10. Each of the defendants has two defence counsel. All are entitled to publicly funded legal aid, yet the legal representation of the Ulm 5 is also financially supported by Rote Hilfe and 3ezwa, an association that according to its self-description stands “for justice in Germany and freedom in Palestine”. 3ezwa is funded in turn by the Bewegungsstiftung, an NGO which in its own words campaigns for “nature, peace and human rights”. Its funds come from 280 “donors”. One of them is the millionaire heiress Renée Horster, who also works for Correctiv, a research collective funded with public money and by the Soros Foundation that gained notoriety in 2024 by exposing an alleged “secret meeting” of right-wing conservatives with sinister intentions. Ironically, Horster is responsible at Correctiv for acquiring major donations. A publicly funded organisation thus employs a person who indirectly supports the defence of suspected terrorists.

The course of the hearing on August 28th 2026 shows that the defence has the upper hand. It attempts to prove that the defendants’ action against Elbit Systems Germany should be regarded as a “state of necessity” (Notstand) under Section 34 of the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch): “Whoever commits an act in order to avert an imminent danger to life, limb, freedom, honour, property or another legal interest that cannot otherwise be averted does not act unlawfully if, upon weighing the conflicting interests, in particular the legal interests concerned and the degree of the dangers threatening them, the protected interest substantially outweighs the impaired one. This applies, however, only insofar as the act is an appropriate means of averting the danger.”

The Defence

The 10 defence lawyers try to convince the court that the defendants had no choice but to devastate the business premises and laboratories of Elbit in Ulm in order to prevent the alleged “genocide” in Gaza. Thus, defence counsel Benjamin Düsberg seriously applies for former Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the current incumbent of that office, Friedrich Merz, to be subpoenaed so they can testify. Both are to give information about the weapons systems supplied by Elbit Systems Germany to its Israeli parent company. Most likely the judge will reject this application, yet it is typical of the attention-seeking and headline-hunting approach of the defence. Everything is done to politicise the proceedings. On this day, this includes the examination of witness Herold, an official of the Baden-Württemberg State Criminal Police Office (Landeskriminalamt), who had been commissioned to compile investigation results. A package containing 11 overalls sent to defendant Kovarbasic was seized. The overalls bear the imprint “Palestine Action” – an organisation banned in the United Kingdom – and show a male figure holding a bolt cutter. Herold himself also conducted financial investigations into Elbit Systems Germany, but did not arrive at the result the defence had hoped for. He is therefore put through the wringer, his credibility and expertise discredited, and finally Düsberg asks him questions requiring legal and technical knowledge that Herold neither possesses nor can be expected to possess. Does he know exactly how “Notstand” is defined in the law? Why did he not take an interest in laser target designators that, according to the defence, are being developed by Elbit in Ulm? The aim of this humiliating schoolboy examination for the gallery is simply to plant the defence’s buzzwords as often as possible in the public mind. Only very late in the proceedings does the presiding judge Lauchstädt intervene and adjourn the session because Düsberg keeps insisting on answers to his questions. After a 20-minute break the court rules that such detailed questions are inadmissible. That should, however, have been clear much earlier and would have spared the witness the embarrassment before a hostile public eyeing him mockingly. Defence counsel Mathes Breuer’s sarcastic remark that he knows “no pain threshold with summoned police officers” meets with general amusement. Time and again the prosecution fails to raise an objection. Eventually, public prosecutor Stengel comes to his senses and explodes, saying the defence should stop its unhelpful “knowledge interrogation”. At this point, at 4.30pm, Judge Lauchstädt ends the hearing for the day. The defendants are led away. Once again everyone, except for me, jumps up. Once again: “Free Palestine” and “Shut Elbit Down”. I leave the courtroom ahead of everyone else and hurry to the U-Bahn station.

Whither Germany?

There is no further opportunity to call on Friedrich Siegrist. As a German he gave his young life for his fatherland. His Stammheim was that of The Lion and of a castle that was a castle and not a retirement home – not the Stammheim of the Kurdish snack bar nor of Natalia Ginduzova the beautician, nor of the Justizvollzugsanstalt and certainly not that of the Stüble with its Greek proprietor allowing men identifying as women to use the ladies’ toilets.

Perhaps Friedrich would understand that 60 years after his death on the battlefield young Germans, obsessed by a political ideology, would commit multiple murders and later take their own lives. But would he also comprehend that a further half-century later coachloads of ‘queer’ activists would attend a trial of a bunch of Berlin-based, roller-skating and pigeon-feeding drifters with funny pronouns who descended on the town of Ulm to vandalise company premises, claiming thereby to be able to prevent an alleged genocide in the Middle East?

Before I leave Stammheim I catch another glimpse of the multi-coloured corner building, standing prominently visible in the centre. A taxpayer-financed erection, attracting attention whilst lacking any meaningful purpose. And probably completely empty.

Andreas Roth is a schoolteacher in Germany.