Silke_Maier-Witt

Silke Maier-Witt is a German former German 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. In 1991 the high court in Stuttgart sentenced her to ten years' imprisonment, having convicted her on various charges that included participation in the murder of BDA president Hanns Martin Schleyer. She was conditionally released for good behaviour on 16 June 1995, but the "terrorist" label and accompanying psychological baggage were not so easy to shake off.