Schleyer became a target for radical elements of the West German student movement in the 1970s due to his roles in these business organisations, his positions in labour disputes, his aggressive television appearances, his conservative anti-communist views, his prominence as a member of the Christian Democratic Union, and his past as an enthusiastic member of the Nazi student movement.

[1][2][3] He was kidnapped on 5 September 1977 by the far left Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, RAF) and subsequently murdered; his driver and police escort of three policemen were also killed when his car was ambushed.

His father was a judge and his great-great uncle was Johann Martin Schleyer, a renowned Roman Catholic priest who invented the Volapük language.

Schleyer was raised Catholic by his paternal family, which went against the wishes of his irreligious father, who was described as "hot-tempered" and holding national conservative views.

[7] During World War II, Schleyer was drafted and served on the Western Front from 1939 to 1940 where he participated in the Invasion of France.

In 1944, they moved to a seized villa estate in Bubeneč, after the previous inhabitant, SA-Obersturmführer Friedrich Hermann Klausing [de], had committed suicide in wake of the revelation that his son had been an orchestrator in the 20 July assassination plot against Hitler.

In his denazification proceeding, Schleyer was initially charged as a Minderbelasteter, but he put in an appeal by falsely understating his rank as Oberscharführer so as to reduce his prospective punishment for which he was instead labelled a Mitläufer.

After working under the French occupation with Direction des Bases Aériennes in Lahr, he became secretary of the chamber of commerce of Baden-Baden shortly after the founding of West Germany.

By mid-1977, authorities identified Schleyer as a high risk target in wake of the RAF murders of federal attorney Siegfried Buback, another former Nazi, and bank director representative Jürgen Ponto earlier that year.

[13] In 1977 Schleyer debated with Heinz Oskar Vetter, chairman of the Confederation of German Trade Unions in a crosstalk at the 8.

[14] On 5 September 1977, a RAF unit "commando Siegfried Hausner", named after an RAF figure killed during the Stockholm embassy attack two years earlier, attacked the chauffeured car carrying Hanns Martin Schleyer, then president of the German employers' association, in Cologne, just after the car had turned right from Friedrich Schmidt Strasse into Vincenz-Statz Strasse.