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. 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.
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. Her father remarried within a year and took his family north to live in Hamburg, where she lived first with her grandmother and later with an aunt. 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. When she was 12 she and her sister investigated the attic where they found a box containing some of her father's mementos: these included clear evidence that the girls' father had belonged to the SS, a paramilitary organisation close to the heart of the Nazi Party. At the time she understood little of what that meant. Four years later, having learned about the Holocaust, she asked her father about the millions of Jews killed in the concentration camps: he reacted aggressively and refused to discuss the matter, so she ignored him for the next two months. Maier-Witt remains haunted by the memory of her father's reaction. It was only several decades later, long after her father had died, that she pieced together the elements she had discovered and completed for herself a deeply disturbing appreciation of what must have been her father's wartime involvements.
Education In 1960 she enrolled at the "Heilwig Gymnasium" (secondary school) in Hamburg. This is where she was later taught about the Holocaust. 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. Maier-Witt studied Medicine and Psychology. Her studies included work on dysfunctional adolescent behaviour. From 1973 she was sharing a Hamburg apartment with Susanne Albrecht and Sigrid Sternebeck. Among their radicalised student comrades they became known at this time as the three "Hamburg aunties". Outside the lecture halls Maier-Witt joined in demonstrations against the Vietnam war with the others. They also demonstrated in support of better conditions for imprisoned members of the Baader–Meinhof Group which had emerged as a militant left-wing faction from the German student movement, and which was by now becoming known as the "Red Army Faction" (RAF). For Maier-Witt, a turning point was the death in November 1974 of Holger Meins, almost certainly as a result of a hunger strike in pursuit of improved prison conditions. Many of her friends were sympathetic to the RAF and some were members of it; so she was predisposed to react strongly over the death. "Meins had risked his life while I was holidaying in Greece. That felt very wrong", she told an interviewer much later. She joined the "committee against torture" and supported the prisoners. "I could not think of anything else, and gave up my studies". When she was 26 she became pregnant. The father was another left-wing activist. Having a baby was not part of the fight for "the cause" in which they were all engaged and she had an abortion.
Red Army Faction In a variation of the infamous "he who is not for us is against us" mantra, Andreas Baader, the RAF founder had issued his "human or swine?" challenge. Maier-Witt, who much later completed her psychological studies, recalled in 2002 that as a confused student drop-out lacking in self-confidence, she was desperately vulnerable to a slogan offering this type of binary choice. She certainly did not wish to be thought a bourgeois swine from a small-town Black Forest environment. She began to undertake missions for the RAF, travelling across Europe providing "courier services" for her comrades. What amounted to her formal recruitment took place in an apartment in Amsterdam on 7 April 1977, just a few hours after the killing in Karlsruhe of Public Prosecutor Siegfried Buback. Jürgen Boock handed over a Colt pistol to the new recruit. It was both a crossing into illegality and the "passport to a new identity". Looking back on that moment she resists the temptation to blame anyone else: "No one talked me into it, I came across of my own accord. Of course I knew we were criminals ... I could not step back, wanted to belong, there was no alternative. I have always been quicker to say 'yes' than 'no'. ... Till now [in 2002] I still cannot understand that decision". 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.
Hanns-Martin Schleyer RAF members used cover names, just as members of the (at the time, and again in West Germany after 1953, illegal) German Communist Party had done during (and before) the Hitler years. Silke Maier-Witt chose the cover name "Sonja", a name popular in the Soviet Union where it also identifies the Dormouse. Although she accepts "collective guilt" for the murders committed by the group, she asserts that she never personally killed anyone, and indeed after two and a half years, troubled by a conflicted conscience, she handed back her gun. Her contribution was more logistical, as part of a support group. She would rent cars, gather intelligence and scope out locations. She would use the rented cars to take guns across borders or simply to carry messages that were unsuitable for safe transmission through the public telephone or mail services. She was trained in the art of forging passport stamps. As regards the kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, her role is described in various sources as that of a "Späherin" (loosely, "scout" or "look-out"). 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.
According to one estimate RAF terrorism killed 33 people and injured around 200, 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. Shortly after the killing she found herself sitting having her hair cut with her face on a "wanted" poster looking out at her, hanging in front of the hairdresser's mirror. Whether because of her "terrorist training" or a natural ability to go unnoticed, she nevertheless this time avoided being spotted.
In 1978 her father suffered a heart attack and died. Maier-Witt was by now keen to avoid arrest and estranged from her family. She did not re-establish contact with her stepmother and siblings to attend the funeral.
Zürich bank raid Funding was a constant preoccupation for the RAF. One solution was bank raids. On 18 November 1979, as a gang of RAF bank robbers fled after a bank robbery in Zürich, three of them, including Christian Klar, opened fire at a pursuing policeman. A ricocheting bullet hit a passer-by looking at the displays in the window of a fashion store. The woman later died. (Maier-Witt would find out only in 1990 that she had been Jewish.) Silke Maier-Witt had been involved in planning the Zürich bank raid. A part of her consciousness that had been closed off since the killing of Hanns-Martin Schleyer suddenly clicked open. The woman had died not because of some high political objective, but simply as part of a funding operation so that the RAF could carry on renting apartments, pay for food and car-hire. It was now that she, and several comrades, handed back their weapons after taking the decision to quit active involvement and to disappear. With several others she took a trip to Paris, and from there they moved on to Prague, out of reach of western law enforcement agencies.
Retirement from active RAF participation During the later 1970s, the tactics of the RAF became more extreme, and the idealism that had motivated its members earlier in the decade was becoming harder to sustain. By the end of 1979, Silke Maier-Witt was one of eight "drop out" RAF members who no longer wished to participate in the group's violent activities. The police had become more determined to catch them. The "wanted" posters were harder to avoid, and successful bank raids became impossible. Endless discussions took place over what to do about so-called drop-outs, whose recruitment the leaders were now inclined to view as "mistakes". There seems to have been no willingness from anyone for the drop-outs to simply "hand themselves in", and no appetite for simply identifying them as security risks and shooting them. The RAF managed to transfer their retirees abroad, however, albeit without credible identity papers, first to Paris and from there to Prague. 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.