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[7] 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".
[11] 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.
[11] 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.
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,[18] so she ignored him for the next two months.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Inge Viett, who had joined the RAF as a result of a merger with the 2 June [West German terrorist] Movement, had already conducted exploratory discussions on the possibilities with her contact, Stasi officer Colonel Harry Dahl.
[23] The Stasi helped her to relaunch herself as "Angelika Gerlach" in Hoyerswerda, a small manufacturing town, for most purposes well off the beaten track, south of Cottbus and east of Dresden.
[14] 20 Stasi "informal co-workers" were tasked with looking after the eight former RAF operatives as a full-time assignment so that the authorities would be confident that their guests were integrating satisfactorily into East German society.
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.
[28] It was presumably a reflection on Maier-Witt's unfinished medical studies in Hamburg that "Angelika Gerlach's" back story also included time as a trainee physician who had never qualified.
Apparently, she struggled to lose her Western accent which led her to regularly needing to explain that she had relocated to the German Democratic Republic from "West Germany" out of political conviction.
[31] 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.
"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.
Stasi Deputy General Lieutenant Gerhard Neiber personally took responsibility for overseeing the creation of a new destiny for "Angelika Gerlach" that might take off at the point where she had disappeared.
Renger explained that he knew that the terrorist Silke Maier-Witt was living under the name Gerlach in East Germany and he asked, confidentially, for help in finding her.
[26] 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.
[36][37] 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.
Towards the end of 1989, as East Germany moved towards democracy, many Stasi officials hastened to destroy the huge repositories of files on their fellow-citizens that had accumulated over the previous forty years.
When this became apparent, protestors broke into the Stasi buildings around the country, in order to preserve the files as evidence for individuals who suspected they had been disadvantaged as a result of surveillance reports and for other future researchers.
[25][36][39] 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.
Despite her qualification as a psychologist and therapist, it was proving hard to find work as a freelancer once people recognised her name and recalled her face from the old "wanted" posters.
He advised the Ministry for Justice that there were "no reservations" ("keine Bedenken") over employing Maier-Witt as a peace worker and he personally wished the ex-terrorist "every success with her future plans" ("... viel Erfolg für Ihr Vorhaben").
[43] Armed with Kay Nehm's letter of recommendation, she applied successfully to the Cologne-based "ForumZVD" ("Forum Ziviler Friedensdienst ") for training in peace work.
[3] In March 2003, Silke Maier-Witt made an extended appearance on the British television programme After Dark, discussing terrorism with Albie Sachs, Mohammad al-Massari, Jim Swire and David Shayler, among others.