Silke Maier-Witt

Silke Maier-Witt (born 21 January 1950) is a German former member of the Red Army Faction who later became a trauma psychologist and welfare organiser. During 2000 she was recruited to work in Kosovo by Germany's Civil Peace Service in the aftermath of the Kosovo War. She subsequently settled in North Macedonia.

She is most notable for her role as a member of the Red Army Faction. She was involved in the kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer. On 17 October 1977 it was Silke Maier-Witt who sent a letter to the left-leaning Paris newspaper Libération announcing that after 43 days [of captivity] the terrorists had "ended the miserable and corrupt existence of Hanns-Martin Schleyer". "Mr. Schmidt" (the Federal Chancellor), was invited to collect the body of the former hostage from the boot a green Audi 100 with a Bad Homburg license plate that had been left parked in the Rue Charles Peguy in Mulhouse. The letter, which she followed up with a telephone call from Frankfurt (Main) station delivering the same message on 19 October 1977, also hinted strongly at a connection between the Schleyer killing and the "massacres in Mogadishu and Stammheim".

Maier-Witt evaded the West German police until 1980, when she was slipped across to the German Democratic Republic (via Prague) with help from the East German homeland security services (Stasi), and became one of ten former RAF activists who lived hidden across the "internal German border" under a succession of false identities created for them by the East German Ministry of State Security. However, during the months of change that followed the breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Ministry of State Security was dissolved: suddenly East and West German police services began to work together. During the summer of 1990 the ten RAF fugitives were unmasked. Maier-Witt was arrested on 18 June. but the "terrorist" label and accompanying psychological baggage were not so easy to shake off.

Life Family background Silke Maier-Witt was born in Nagold in the Black Forest, near Stuttgart, the younger of her parents' two daughters. In 1956, when she was six, her mother died of cancer. In 1959 her father took a third wife but her relationship to her latest stepmother was never a relaxed one. Her father had qualified as a shipbuilding engineer. She moved on to the University of Hamburg in 1969 at a time when the spirit of '68 was still very much alive. "Repressive" domestic legislation and escalating US involvement in the Vietnam War were feeding a student agenda of political resistance. Outside the lecture halls Maier-Witt joined in demonstrations against the Vietnam war with the others. Later she would identify a parallel between her own actions in joining the RAF and her father's motives when, aged just 19, he joined the "SS". The overwhelming urge to be part of something larger than oneself was something that she and her father, at least when young adults, seemed to have shared. Also, after the kidnapping it was Maier-Witt who typed up the transcriptions from the lengthy tapes of interrogation sessions that her comrades had conducted with Schleyer. but it was the kidnap and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer that most grabbed the headlines, both at the time and subsequently. A poster showing the faces of 16 "urgently sought terrorists" was widely distributed. From Prague, there was talk of transferring to safety in "Black Africa", where several Marxist governments would, it was assumed, view the ex-terrorists with sympathy. Expecting to settle in Angola or Mozambique, Maier-Witt was one of several who started to study Portuguese as they waited in Prague. the eight were invited to relocate to East Germany where they were issued with new identities and coached until they had mastered their cover stories, before being distributed across the remoter corners of East Germany and permitted to start new lives, albeit under surveillance, and without being permitted to contact one another.

Maier-Witt was allowed to choose her own name. Soon afterwards, she applied successfully for party membership.

Despite the care taken over preparing her for her new life, Silke-Maier Witt herself later recalled one incident early on during her time in the little town which demonstrated that even the Stasi had not thought of everything. She visited a local bank and asked to exchange her West German Deutschmarks for East German Ostmarks at a 1:1 exchange rate. At the end of 1983, she had to be withdrawn from Hoyerswerda on account of unspecified "security concerns". One source indicates that in a small town such as Hoyerswerda, she was more likely to get caught up in personal conversation with nosey neighbours which gave rise to a heightened risk of her true identity being inadvertently suspected or disclosed. She became a trainee nurse in a local hospital. During this period, "Angelika Gerlach" also studied at the Fachhochschule Walter Krämer in Weimar and successfully completed her nursing exams at the medical faculty in Erfurt.

The end of "Angelika Gerlach" On 20 March 1986, the Ministry for State Security received information from the vast KGB "Residentur" (establishment) in Berlin-Karlshorst that the "authorities in West Germany" had received "anonymous information according to which the wanted terrorist Silke Maier-Witt appeared to be identical with an East German citizen who had studied at Fachhochschule Walter Krämer in Weimar and completed exams at the medical faculty in Erfurt". The "red hot tip-off" had actually been received nine months earlier by the West German intelligence, probably from an East German escapee. The informant had studied with "Ms. Gerlach" at the Fachhochschule Walter Krämer in Weimar. He been astonished, on reaching the West, to see his fellow student looking out at him from "wanted" posters on public noticeboards. It is not immediately clear how the KGB got hold of the information. Researchers at the Stasi Records Agency suggest that the most likely explanation would be that it came from an unidentified Soviet mole working inside German intelligence.

Once that decision had been taken, "Angelika Gerlach" was hastily moved, initially to Cottbus and then to a Stasi apartment in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, where work commenced on a new identity for her. Her sudden disappearance from Erfurt was explained by a slightly vague story involving a rather complicated fictitious love affair in Cottbus. Systematically, all trace of "Angelika Gerlach" was scrubbed from the records at the college where she had been studying and from the local police residency records. "Gerlach" herself, working with Gerd Zaumseil, her principal Stasi minder ("Führungsoffizier"), cleared the apartment, taking care, once it was empty, to clean every surface thoroughly so that no residual finger prints could ever be found. It was virtually the same procedure that six years earlier she would have undertaken when cleaning out an apartment that RAF terrorists had been using to hide a hostage in or to prepare for a bank raid. A few days later she booked a holiday, handed in her notice at work, and disappeared. As a further precaution, intended to make it harder for a future investogator to check out her background, the new identity provided by the Stasi stated that she had been born on 18 October 1948 in Moscow.

In October 1986, "Sylvia Beyer" turned up as the new boss of the documentation and information centre at the VEB- Pharma factory in Neubrandenburg, far to the north of the city of Erfurt from which "Angelika Gerlach" had disappeared six months earlier. Despite her shock over the loss of "Angelika Gerlach", she evidently settled with her new identity well enough. Beyer contributed several pro-government "Agitprop" articles to the staff journal at VEB-Pharma.

"IM Anja Weber" During her time in East Germany, Maier-Witt met up regularly with her Stasi confidants. A more significant meeting took place on 24 March 1984 when she took a trip to East Berlin. Her principal interlocutor was Günter Jäckel, who later became a colonel and deputy head of department within the State Security Ministry.

Arrest Even after the denial from the East German authorities received in 1988, the Federal Criminal Police ("Bundeskriminalamt") never closed their file on Silke Maier-Witt alias Angelika Gerlach. As the "Peaceful Revolution" ran its course, in February 1990 an East German Volkspolizei delegation visited the headquarters of the West German Criminal Police department at Wiesbaden and the Westerners took the opportunity to resubmit their request for administrative assistance with the case. It was a Monday afternoon. She was the last of ten former RAF operatives to have been sought out and arrested in East Germany over the space of a few days.

Trial Maier-Witt was now taken to West Germany. (Slightly less than four months later, East Germany and West Germany ceased to exist when they were replaced by one reunified Germany.) On 8 October 1991, the high court in Stuttgart found her guilty of hostage taking, extortion-based robbery, and other charges connected with murder, attempted murder and theft. Three linked cases were cited. Silke Maier-Witt was sentenced to ten years imprisonment.

Psychiatry and peace work While in prison, she resumed her Psychology studies at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. Released early in 1995, she was finally able to complete her course, after which she went on to work in the fields of child and adolescent psychiatry, counseling and communication.

Silke Maier-Witt worked for the "ForumZVD" (hands-on peace organisation) in Prizren (Kosovo) between 2000 and 2005, attempting to "reconcile the irreconcilable, the perpetrators with their victims". In 2006, the German Committee for Fundamental Rights and Democracy placed her in charge of a holidays project in Ulcinj. This was part of the broader internationally backed Holidays from war project for Albanian and Serbian young people from Kosovo.

Jörg Schleyer In November 2017, slightly more than forty years after the murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, Silke Maier-Witt met Jörg Schleyer, his youngest son, at the Marriott Hotel in her home town of Skopje. Their meeting, set up by reporters working for the tabloid newspaper Bild, lasted for more than seven hours. Reporting on the meeting, the commentator Jan Feddersen wrote a thoughtful piece in the left-leaning Tageszeitung (daily newspaper). In it, he offered his judgment that Silke Maier-Witt had become "the first former RAF member who had "seriously engaged with matters such as reconciliation, explanations, grief and a request for forgiveness".

Afterwards, Jörg Schleyer told reporters that for the first time, after forty years, he now knew, from the mouth of one of the convicted terrorists involved, the identities of the three terrorists who had been with his father when the fatal shots were fired. He expressed the hope that other criminals would follow Maier-Witt's example. In various interviews since her conviction and release Maier-Witt has drawn a connection between her own membership of a terror group and her father's of the Nazi-paramilitary "SS".